Black City bw-5 Read online

  “Help me up,” I said.

  Nathaniel rushed to help me but I gave him a pointed look. “I asked for Samiel.”

  My brother-in-law put the sandwich on the coffee table as Nathaniel backed away with a frozen look. I knew there was a reckoning coming with Nathaniel. Sooner or later I’d have to decide whether he was an ally or an enemy. I couldn’t keep him floating in the netherworld between forever.

  Don’t touch that sandwich, Samiel signed to Beezle.

  “I know how to get my own food,” Beezle said loftily.

  Don’t touch that sandwich, Samiel repeated.

  He came around to take my arm as I stood. Now that the adrenaline of the fight had worn off, my legs had turned to mush.

  “Bathroom,” I said, and Samiel helped me limp along while the other three silently watched us go.

  Samiel helped me as far as the tub, then looked at me expectantly, his face red.

  “Yes, you do need to help me get my clothes off,” I said. “I’m sorry. Chloe would be better for something like this.”

  Samiel’s face went tight at the mention of Chloe. The Agents we saved from Azazel were taken to Northwestern. I overheard Sokolov’s goons talking about it.

  Sokolov. The lapdog of the Agency administration who seemed to have devoted his life to making mine miserable. Just thinking about him made my fists curl.

  I knew what Samiel was worried about. Northwestern Memorial Hospital was downtown, just off Michigan Avenue. But it was several blocks north and west of Daley Plaza.

  “Don’t worry,” I said, and I was glad Samiel could only read lips. I didn’t sound very convincing. “The barriers were being set up south of the river. The hospital is well north of there.”

  You know and I know that if the vamps get inside the hospital, it will be a bloodbath, Samiel signed.

  “Chloe’s tough,” I said.

  She’s also recovering from major trauma.

  “All right. All right. We’ll go get her,” I said. “Just let me clean up first.”

  Thank you, Samiel signed, his face relieved.

  We managed to get me through the bathing process with a minimum of embarrassment on both sides, and Samiel helped me dress. As I pulled a tank top over my head he touched the long scabs on my back where my wings used to be.

  Do you miss them? he signed.

  I put a sweater over the tank top and nodded. “I never thought about how much I relied on them before they were gone.”

  I wonder if you’ll ever get them back.

  “I don’t think so,” I said. “They were part of my Agent’s powers, and I’m never going back to the Agency.”

  But you’re Lucifer’s granddaughter.

  “Much diluted by thousands of intervening generations.”

  Samiel shrugged. You’ve had other latent powers appear.

  “I suppose,” I said doubtfully, looking at the missing two fingers of my left hand. Lucifer had assured me some time ago that the digits would grow back, and they never had. So I wasn’t putting a lot of stock in the idea that I might regrow my wings.

  Samiel left the room for a few minutes. When he returned I’d managed to get my socks on. He carried a plate with a sandwich.

  “That doesn’t look like the same sandwich,” I observed.

  Can you guess what happened to the other one? Samiel signed. Now, eat up. I swear you are looking thinner by the minute.

  I’d thought they were all exaggerating about my appearance, but I’d noticed my jeans were looser than they were yesterday. This was probably a worrisome development, but given all the other worrisome developments in my life, losing a little weight ranked low on the priority list.

  I stuffed the sandwich in my mouth. I didn’t realize just how ravenous I was until I took the first bite.

  “There’s one thing I want to do before we go to the hospital,” I said after chewing the last bit of sandwich. “Call J.B.”

  He won’t be able to help us, Samiel signed. He’s on thin ice with the Agency as it is.

  I had a flash of J.B. spread-eagled on a table, tortured by Sokolov and his goons. “Yeah, you could say that. But he’ll be able to confirm the location of the hospitalized Agents for us.”

  I’ll get your phone, Samiel said, and went out again.

  I could hear raised voices coming from the living room, but I didn’t have the energy or inclination to intervene in yet another argument. Jude and Nathaniel probably needed to have it out once and for all anyway. I just hoped they didn’t destroy the living room in the process. My house had been trashed enough in the last month or so.

  Samiel returned and handed me the phone. I saw that there were four missed calls, all from J.B.

  I dialed his number and waited for him to pick up. There was barely half a ring before he barked into the receiver. “What’s the point of having a phone if you never pick it up?”

  “So sorry. I was busy battling the vampire menace taking over the city,” I said dryly.

  “I know where you were,” J.B. said. “I saw you, and so did everyone else in Chicago with a television set. You and Jude and Nathaniel and Samiel.”

  “We were on the news,” I said, dread filling me. This was not good.

  “Goddamn right you were on the news. And you’d better be more careful from now on. Half the reporters have decided you’ve been sent from heaven to save humanity from the plague of vampires, and the other half have declared you should be shot in the street with all the other monsters,” J.B. said. “I’ve got to go. It’s total chaos here. The whole Agency is in lockdown mode.”

  “Wait,” I said. “Can you tell me if Chloe and the other Agents we saved from Azazel are still at Northwestern?”

  “Yeah, the Agency hasn’t had time to move them with everything else going on. We can’t even come close to keeping up with the new souls. The board is diverting Agents from other regions to help. Wait—why do you want to know about Chloe?” J.B. asked warily.

  “Samiel wants her with us,” I said shortly. “Why doesn’t the Agency put together an army to fight the vamps instead of struggling to clean up the mess?”

  “You know the answer to that,” J.B. said.

  “If the Agency doesn’t get off their ass and do something, there won’t be any souls left to collect in this city.”

  “You don’t have to tell me that,” he said. “But I’m not exactly a trustworthy figure around here anymore. No one in upper management is going to listen to me.”

  “You spend too much time with me.”

  “That’s the way I like it,” he said. “I’ll call you later. My mother is outside the window doing her best banshee impression.”

  “I thought you had devised some spell to keep Amarantha away from you,” I said.

  J.B.’s mother had been a faerie queen of her own court before I’d killed her. Unlike most creatures, she had chosen not the Door but an existence as a ghost. I think she did it just to piss off me and J.B.

  “The spell will keep her out of the Agency and out of my home, but it won’t stop her from hanging around outside and driving me crazy. Try not to burn down the hospital.”

  He hung up before I could respond.

  “Why does everyone think I’m going to destroy a building as soon as I walk into it?” I asked Samiel.

  Your track record speaks for itself.

  “But those were accidents,” I protested.

  Most people don’t have those kinds of accidents more than once.

  “Most people don’t have supernatural enemies trying to kill them every second of the day, either,” I said, standing up cautiously.

  The shower and the food had gone a long way toward making me feel human. I felt better equipped to fight another horde of vampires, although with any luck I wouldn’t have to.

  The barricades were north of the bridges that crossed the Chicago River. I didn’t know how long city authorities would be able to contain the vamps in that area once the monsters ran through their food supply.r />
  Of course, they would likely be evacuating most of the Loop and Michigan Avenue soon. And if they moved the patients at the hospital, we would have a lot of trouble finding Chloe.

  “She’s probably safer away from me, anyway,” I muttered. The sad fact of my life was that the low mortality rate of my companions was more luck than anything else. Since Gabriel had died I’d been braced for impact, waiting for the next, inevitable loss.

  What was that? Samiel signed. You have to look at me when you’re talking or else I can’t read your lips.

  “Nothing,” I said. “Let’s go get Chloe.”

  2

  NATHANIEL HAD PREDICTABLY ARGUED AGAINST REMOVING Chloe from the hospital.

  “She’s safe enough there, and it’s an unnecessary risk for you,” he’d said.

  But Jude had come down firmly on my side, and that meant Nathaniel was outnumbered. A couple of weeks earlier all of the werewolf cubs of Jude’s pack had been kidnapped and their memories stolen as part of a plot of Azazel’s. Even though Jude thought Chloe was weird and unpredictable, he’d felt indebted to her since she’d found a way to restore the werewolf cubs’ memories.

  “You can stay here if you prefer,” Jude sneered, the implications of Nathaniel’s cowardice clear.

  Nathaniel’s jaw tightened. “As if I would leave Madeline’s safety to you.”

  I could have pointed out that “Madeline’s safety” was not reliant on either of them, as I had saved my own self plenty of times, but I did not want to get embroiled in another of the stupid arguments that went around our group with annoying regularity. So I just said, “Let’s go,” and we did.

  Nathaniel carried me, and Samiel carried Jude in wolf form. Beezle, surprisingly, had opted to stay home.

  “I need a nap,” he said.

  I suspected that what he really wanted was time to brood over what he thought were negative changes in my personality, so I let him stay. I didn’t want to argue with Beezle about every decision I made.

  Nathaniel hid all of us under a veil. I knew how to do this, but it was difficult for me to hold such a delicate spell over four people for a prolonged period of time. And Nathaniel had pointed out that secrecy was vital now that we’d been exposed on television.

  As we flew above the city I could see the streets below were jammed with fleeing citizens. People tossed hastily packed suitcases into cars, collected their offspring from schools and hightailed it out of town. It looked like a scene from an end-of-the-world movie.

  Lake Shore Drive was bumper to bumper, cars and buses moving only by centimeters. Several hundred people who either lacked personal transportation or decided to abandon their cars streamed in crowds up the bike path that ran along the lakefront. Everyone was heading north. No one wanted to go through the Loop, even if you could stay outside the barricaded edges.

  The mass panic, the sheer numbers of vampires…The problem seemed overwhelming for one ex-Agent of death and her merry band of misfits.

  “Where the hell is Lucifer?” I asked. “He could do something about this.”

  “He could,” Nathaniel agreed. “If it suited him to do so.”

  “If he could find some personal advantage, you mean,” I said bitterly. “He won’t intervene unless the deck is stacked in his favor.”

  “You must stop attributing Lucifer with humanity,” Nathaniel said. “He is not human. He is not even a mere angel. He is more powerful than any of us can comprehend, and the problems of humans are small things to him.”

  “Yeah, that’s what everyone keeps saying. But he’s scared of Puck,” I said thoughtfully.

  “The faerie who assisted you in Titania and Oberon’s court? The one who came into the house through the jewel?” Nathaniel asked, surprise evident in his voice.

  “He’s no faerie. I don’t know what he is, but he definitely isn’t a faerie.”

  “Whatever he is, I don’t think you should embroil yourself any further into matters of the faerie court.”

  “I haven’t ‘embroiled’ myself in anything,” I said. “The faeries are the ones who came looking for me.”

  Nathaniel acknowledged this with a nod. “Still, curiosity about Puck’s origins is probably not wise.”

  “I know what happened to the cat,” I said.

  “What cat?” Nathaniel asked.

  “You know, curiosity killed the…Never mind. Anyway, I’ve got a feeling Puck’s not going to leave me alone.”

  Nathaniel shook his head. “What is it about you, Madeline? I have never met another creature with such a knack for attracting trouble.”

  “When I figure it out, I’ll let you know,” I said. “I’m really starting to see the attraction of a quiet life.”

  “You will never have a quiet life,” Nathaniel said. “Even if all your other troubles magically disappeared, you would still be Lucifer’s granddaughter. You are the last direct descendant of Evangeline. He will never let you go.”

  Especially now, I thought. Especially now that I was going to have Gabriel’s child. Lucifer would never let such a prize slip through his fingers. Gabriel had been half-angel and half-nephilim, Lucifer’s immediate grandson. I was also related to Lucifer, although more distantly. The Morningstar was not able to resist the call of his own bloodlines, particularly when combined in such an interesting way.

  Northwestern Memorial Hospital was a giant network of buildings just east of Michigan Avenue and south of the Water Tower. We’d decided the easiest way to find Chloe would be to check the computer in any one of the many reception areas throughout the complex. I’d devised a semi-sneaky plan for distracting anyone at the desk.

  We hadn’t anticipated that the hospital would be completely locked down. Security guards were posted at every entrance. All doors and windows were closed tight.

  The four of us stood on the sidewalk, staring through the glass doors. A few hospital personnel rushed back and forth. The guards at the doors appeared ready to snap.

  “Perhaps we can get in from an upper floor?” Nathaniel said.

  I shaded my eyes in the bright sunlight and peered up the face of the building. Movement caught my eye—something blue and gelatinous-looking darting between the windows, attached to the building like Spider-Man.

  “What is that?” I asked, pointing.

  “Gods above and below,” Nathaniel swore. “That is a pix demon. They are scavengers. They feed off the sick, the dying. And where there is one, there are always more. Like rats. They do not usually come out during the day, however.”

  “Must be trying to take advantage of the chaos,” I said.

  “They will not be the only ones,” Nathaniel said.

  I shuddered. Wasn’t it bad enough that vampires were running loose during the day? Did I also have to worry about other, unseen menaces crouching on the outskirts, waiting for things to really fall apart before they pounced? How was I supposed to keep my baby safe when all these thrice-bedamned things were invading my city?

  The pix demon slipped inside a window that looked like it might be cracked open half a centimeter.

  “We can’t let that demon run rampant inside the hospital,” I said.

  Nathaniel scooped me up and we flew to the pix’s point of entry, Samiel and Jude following. Urgency now trumped subtlety, so I blasted the window apart with nightfire and hoped that the falling shards of glass wouldn’t hit anyone below. Cold winter wind blasted into the room.

  The creature crouched over a young woman lying prone in bed. Her eyes were wide and staring. The IV hooked up to her arm dripped fluid into a body that didn’t need it anymore. The heart rate monitor flatlined, sounding an urgent alarm that no one answered.

  The demon looked up as we entered, its face covered in the flesh and blood of the dead girl. It hissed, displaying sharp predator teeth. I blasted it with nightfire before Nathaniel had finished setting me on my feet, but the monster had bounded from the room already.

  “Damn it all,” I swore, and chased it into the hall,
the other three following close behind.

  The hallway was empty.

  “Those things are fast,” I said.

  “Yes, and it is doubtless feeding on another victim,” Nathaniel said. “The fact that its own life is in peril will not override its instinct to eat.”

  “Split up and check the rooms,” I said, already moving down the hall.

  Jude barked behind me, and I didn’t need to speak wolf to know what he said.

  “I know; we shouldn’t separate. Nobody leaves this floor, all right? Check the rooms and then meet up by the stairwell.”

  We searched the floor, which seemed to be empty of nurses and doctors as well as pix demons. All the patients on the floor were soundly asleep. Everyone gathered near the stairwell and looked expectantly at me.

  “Is it more likely to go up or down?” I asked Nathaniel.

  “Down, I would think,” he said. “They usually prefer dark places.”

  I stared at the vents in the wall. “Like air ducts?”

  “You are not checking the air ducts,” Nathaniel said. “If you were caught in an enclosed space with more than one of those creatures, they would tear you apart like a pack of piranhas.”

  Yeah, I’m drawing a line there, too, Samiel signed.

  “I wasn’t suggesting I go into the air ducts,” I said, although I’d been thinking that very thing. “I’m just saying that maybe it’s using the air ducts to travel through the building. There would be a lot more screaming if it were running loose in the halls, don’t you think? Especially since everyone is already on edge because of the vampires.”

  “I suppose we could monitor the air ducts, but that seems inefficient,” Nathaniel said.

  “Yeah, it’s so much more efficient to find the pix when it’s already gnawing on someone’s guts,” I said.

  “It is simpler to find it by the suffering of its victims, yes,” Nathaniel acknowledged.

  “Don’t you care that someone has to die to make things easier for you?” I said angrily.

  “I am merely pointing out that this hospital is a warren of hallways and alcoves, and it is not in the least productive for us to hare up and down corridors in search of this demon,” Nathaniel said. “I thought we were here to find Chloe.”