Some winters are built.
Three weeks after the Nexus collapse, Sofia Vega wakes to cold that is not coming from the room. Her Fire Amulet answers when she reaches for it, but barely, a pilot light where there should be a flame. Then the call comes from Navy Pier.The ice there is not weather. Crystalline towers rise forty yards past the natural freeze line in patterns nothing in nature would make, Coast Guard vessels are trapped in the southern formations, and ice elementals thought long gone are coming up out of Lake Michigan. Beneath all of it, the ley lines that carry Chicago's magic are running slow and wrong.
Every elemental court in the city is blaming the Winter Court. Sofia knows a frame when she sees one.
What she finds forty feet down on the lake bed took eight months of patient, invisible work to build, and it was never meant to destroy Chicago. It was meant to leave the city's most vulnerable magical communities unable to function without permission from whoever chooses to restore them. Her grandfather's journals have a name for the practitioner who works this way. They do not have a face.
And whoever it is has been sitting in the Accord sessions all along.
Meanwhile, in Back of the Yards and Bridgeport and Beverly, three twelve-year-old kids with abilities nobody has ever explained to them are holding the city's thin places shut on their own.
Winter's Return is the eighth book in the Chicago Underground series.
Genre: Urban Fantasy