Black City bw-5 Read online

  I took a deep breath because it would not be productive for me to punch him in the face. Sometimes he surprised me with his humanity, but it was times like this I remembered Nathaniel was not human at all. He came from a world where death was meaningless, and the death of an innocent even more so.

  “We are here to find Chloe,” I said evenly. “But it’s not okay for us to let the patients get eaten by a demon when we’re the only ones who can stop it.”

  I’d been vaguely aware of Jude sniffing up and down the hallway as I argued with Nathaniel. He seemed frustrated, and I suspected that he couldn’t get a fix on the demon’s scent.

  “Too many people have passed through here,” I said to Jude, and he barked in acknowledgment.

  “And there is too much sickness in the air,” Nathaniel added.

  Jude barked again, shorter this time, as if he were only reluctantly acknowledging that Nathaniel might be correct about anything.

  “Samiel, why don’t you see if you can get into the computer on this floor and find out where Chloe is,” I said. “I don’t know where all the staff is, but we might as well use their absence to our advantage.”

  Samiel went down the hall to the empty reception area. Nathaniel gave me a look. “And the pix demon?”

  “We keep looking. I don’t care if it takes all day.”

  “It has probably already found another victim.”

  “Then we stop it from getting another one.”

  “What is the point?” Nathaniel said. “What do you think will happen to everyone in this building when the vampires cross the river? Isn’t that why you came for Chloe, why you were so eager to save your friend?”

  “Samiel wants Chloe with him,” I said, trying to ignore the nagging guilt that I’d been suppressing since we’d undertaken this task.

  “And it’s all right to leave everyone else to their fate,” Nathaniel said. “When the hospital is overrun by vampires and all of the helpless, ill and elderly are devoured in their beds, at least the person you care about will be home safe.”

  I did slap him then, my temper running over before I had the chance to stop it. “What would you have me do? I can’t save them all. I don’t even know how to try.”

  “You cannot,” Nathaniel said, grabbing my hand before I hauled off and hit him again. “And you know that I will stay with you, no matter what foolish enterprise you are engaged in. But do not deceive yourself. If you stop the pix demon, you are not saving innocents. You are merely prolonging the final moment of their death.”

  I stared at him, knowing what he said was true, but everything I was inside fought against it.

  “I can’t stand by,” I said, yanking my hand away. “I have to use my gifts to help those who have none.”

  “So you can make yourself feel better? So you can sleep at night?” Nathaniel asked. “So when you close your eyes you can see the grateful face of the person you rescued at the last moment from a demon, never wondering what became of them after you disappeared into a swirl of smoke?”

  “When I close my eyes I see Azazel’s sword cutting out Gabriel’s heart. I see Gabriel falling into the snow, surrounded by his own blood,” I said, my voice hard. “Don’t presume that you know me, or what drives me. If I save someone from a monster only to have them get hit by a bus fifteen minutes later, then at least I did the right thing when I had the opportunity. I wouldn’t walk by a pix demon eating someone just because a vampire might be right behind.”

  “Even if it means you risk your life for no purpose?” Nathaniel asked.

  “You’re not human. You wouldn’t understand.”

  “I have seen plenty of humanity. The vast majority would not help their fellow neighbor unless forced to do so at gunpoint,” Nathaniel said.

  Our argument was interrupted by Samiel’s return. She’s two floors below here.

  I rubbed my forehead, practicality warring with unfinished business. “Samiel, you and Jude go get Chloe and then get out of the building. Nathaniel and I will track down the pix.”

  Samiel looked doubtful. Every time we split up something bad happens.

  “I need to know that the three of you are safe,” I said.

  What about my need to know that you’re safe?

  “I’ll be fine,” I said. “I’ve survived worse than a pix.”

  You died once.

  “And I came back,” I said, giving him a half smile.

  I wouldn’t count on that happening a second time.

  Jude barked in agreement.

  “Please, just get Chloe out and get home. Trust that I can take care of myself.”

  Samiel looked at me for a long moment. Finally, he nodded. I’ll text you when we’re home.

  “Okay,” I said. The world went wobbly for a second, and I realized my eyes were filling. I swallowed hard, willing the tears away. If Samiel thought I was worried, he wouldn’t leave. But I’d had a strange feeling for a moment, the feeling that one of us was not going to make it home.

  Jude nudged my leg with his nose. I kneeled down so I could look him in the eyes. I could see his reluctance as clearly as if he’d shouted it. Jude fancied himself my protector, and he’d never completely trusted Nathaniel.

  “Take care of Samiel and Chloe,” I whispered, and put my arms around his neck, burying my face in his fur. “I will be home soon.”

  He rubbed his nose across my cheek, and then the two of them disappeared into the stairwell. I knelt on the floor, staring after them, hoping I hadn’t made a mistake. Hoping I hadn’t sent them to their deaths.

  “You cannot be responsible for everyone’s lives,” Nathaniel said quietly from behind me.

  I stood and faced him. “That’s what love is. When you love someone you’re responsible for them, and they you. Until you understand that, I’ll never believe you when you say you care about me.”

  “I do understand it,” he said. “But you are the only one that has ever made me feel this way.”

  He seemed bewildered when he said this, like the feeling was some foreign disease that had invaded his body. I was all too aware of the fact that we were alone, and that he was not Gabriel.

  “Let’s kill that demon so we can go home,” I said abruptly. “Beezle will probably have eaten everything in the pantry by now.”

  Nathaniel didn’t say anything else as we silently agreed that further discussion on this topic was just going to make us both uncomfortable.

  We took the stairway to the next level, peering cautiously around the fire door. There was a little more activity here—a nurse moving from room to room, patients being pushed along the corridor by an orderly—but it wasn’t the panicked rushing of folks who’d just seen a vision from their nightmares. I looked at Nathaniel, and he shook his head.

  We skipped the next floor since Jude and Samiel were there, and presumably any monsters would be dispatched by them.

  Nathaniel had dropped the cloak that covered us when we entered the hospital. I understood why. It required a lot of energy to maintain a veil and stay on your guard against demonic attacks. It was doubly hard to keep four people covered.

  The thing was, Nathaniel’s wings were such an essential part of his appearance that I didn’t often think about them. Plus I was little preoccupied with finding the pix demon and not thinking too hard on what Nathaniel had said about my motivations.

  So when we came face-to-face with a security guard on the next floor, I wasn’t thinking about the vampires, or the fact that all the humans were on edge. I wasn’t thinking that Nathaniel would look extremely strange to a normal.

  We pushed through the door, and it was just unfortunate luck that the security guard stood there. And that his weapon was in his hand, and that he was ready to go off at the least provocation.

  I was in front of Nathaniel, and the guard was a few feet in front of me. He turned as soon as he heard activity behind him, and while he was definitely tense, he might not have fired if he hadn’t seen Nathaniel’s wings.

&
nbsp; “What the hell is that thing?” he shouted, and pulled the trigger. His hand was shaking, so his aim probably wasn’t as good as it normally would be. Likely it was the first time he had ever fired his weapon on the job.

  Which was why the bullet hit me instead of Nathaniel. And why Nathaniel blasted the guard with nightfire as I fell to the ground, the bullet tearing through the soft flesh just under the joint of my shoulder, just above my heart. I screamed, not because it hurt but because it was too late for the guard. Nathaniel had killed him before my eyes.

  I could feel the burning path where the bullet had torn through me, the wet stickiness of blood flowing from an open wound.

  “Madeline,” Nathaniel said, already turning to me, falling to his knees beside me, the guard forgotten.

  “What the hell did you do that for?” I shouted. Rather, I wanted to shout, but my voice barely rose above my normal speaking tone.

  Inside me, my baby gave a little flutter, but nothing more. I guess a little physical distress was old news at this point.

  The guard was prone on the ground, a smoking hole where his chest used to be. Farther down the hall behind him, a male doctor in a white lab coat stood frozen in place, his eyes wide.

  Nathaniel scrabbled at my coat, pulled it away from my shoulder so that he could see the blood-soaked mess beneath. My sweater and shirt stuck to the open wound. He put his hand over the hole where the bullet had entered.

  The warmth of the sun lit my blood, flowed from his hand and through the heart of me, healing the bullet wound as if it had never been. I sat up, still a little woozy. Blood loss is blood loss, whether your wound heals immediately or not. It takes a while to get your strength back if you’ve got anything bigger than a shaving cut.

  The doctor watched us now with speculation instead of fear. Nathaniel had exposed his powers by healing me.

  “What did you kill the guard for?” I hissed as Nathaniel helped me to my feet. I don’t think he yet realized we had an audience.

  “He shot you,” Nathaniel said, frowning.

  “He was scared to death. He didn’t know what he was doing.”

  “He shot you,” Nathaniel repeated.

  I put my hands to my face for a moment. “In point of fact, he was trying to shoot you and got me by accident.”

  “That hardly recommends him,” Nathaniel said.

  “Couldn’t you have stunned him instead of killing him?”

  “I was not contemplating all the angles of the situation,” Nathaniel said, anger in his voice. “I saw someone threatening you and I eliminated the threat. I do not know why we are discussing this in any case. The man is dead. What is done is done.”

  “We’re discussing this,” I said through gritted teeth, “because I don’t want you to do it again.”

  “Duly noted,” Nathaniel said, and then he turned his body so that I was behind him. I stood on tiptoe and peered over his shoulder so I could see what was going on.

  The doctor approached us, his hands held high to show that he was no threat. He stared at Nathaniel in fascination. That fascination was almost as frightening as terror. The doctor looked like he wanted to whisk Nathaniel away and get the angel under a microscope as soon as possible.

  “Do not approach any further,” Nathaniel said, the old arrogance in his voice.

  The doctor stopped walking, dropped his hands to his side. “Who…who are you?”

  “That’s not what you want to know,” I said, moving a little so that the doctor could see me. My voice was hard. Nathaniel wasn’t my favorite person, but I didn’t want anybody getting ideas about turning him into a lab rat. “You want to know what he is.”

  “Yes,” the doctor said, barely giving me a glance.

  “It’s none of your damned business,” I said, and stunned him right between the eyes. The doctor crumpled to the floor.

  “I did not detect any threat from him,” Nathaniel said.

  “I did,” I said grimly. “Come on, let’s check this floor for the pix before someone finds us standing over two bodies.”

  “No,” Nathaniel said. “Let us wait.”

  “Why? Do you want to pick a fight with another security guard?”

  “You want to capture the demon, yes?”

  “Of course.”

  “The smell of the newly dead is irresistible to a pix,” Nathaniel said, gesturing to the guard’s body.

  “Don’t tell me you killed the guard to attract the pix,” I said, disgusted.

  “I told you, I killed the guard because he shot you,” Nathaniel said impatiently. “Think of this as an added bonus, as you would say.”

  “That right there is the difference between you and me,” I said. “I can’t think of anyone’s death in terms of a ‘bonus.’”

  “The world is changing,” Nathaniel said. “You may find soon that our perspectives are not so far apart.”

  He dropped a cloak over the two of us, and we settled back to wait.

  We didn’t have to wait long. A set of long fingers curled over the flaps of the air vents, and a moment later a vent popped free. The pix’s gelatinous blue body slithered from the air ducts.

  “Told you they were in the air ducts,” I murmured.

  Nathaniel moved his hand to shush me, but the pix hadn’t noticed us in the least. Every part of the demon focused on the body on the floor, every bit of it straining for what it wanted.

  There were no marks on the demon from the nightfire blast I’d shot at it earlier. That combined with the ease with which it had leapt away from my magic told me that no simple spell would take this thing down.

  The pix bounded atop the guard, making little clicking noises that sounded like glee. It buried its face in the guard’s chest, and I heard a slurping sound.

  Nathaniel tensed beside me, a sign that he was readying a spell. I decided to follow his lead since he knew more about the pix than I did. Then the doctor stirred, and the pix lifted its head.

  Nathaniel let loose his magic just as the pix leapt toward the doctor. The spell caught the demon behind its back leg, far off the kill shot that Nathaniel had no doubt intended. The blast was enough to knock the creature off its course, but now it was alerted to our presence.

  It jumped for the ceiling, skittering along upside down like a bug, seemingly unhampered by its injury. Nathaniel’s spell had taken a big chunk of flesh out of the pix’s leg, and little drops of a jelly-like substance dripped from the wound.

  I swore aloud, blasting electricity at the nasty thing. As with Nathaniel, my spell caught only a little of the demon. The electricity also didn’t slow it down a bit, even though I could smell barbecued demon in the air.

  I ran down the hall after the demon, which was wickedly quick. The doctor reached out and grabbed my ankle as I went by.

  The sudden halt in my momentum made me stumble, and my second blast went wild, spraying electricity into the wall. Smoke rose in the air, setting off the hallway sprinklers. The pix disappeared at the other end of the hall.

  “Dammit, dammit, dammit!” I said, stomping down on the doctor’s fingers with my other boot. The doc howled and released my ankle, and I took off down the hall after the pix, Nathaniel close behind me.

  “I thought we were not harming innocents?” he murmured.

  “Just stay focused on the task at hand,” I snapped.

  Nathaniel chuckled quietly.

  The demon, of course, was gone when we reached the end of the hallway. The sprinklers had obliterated any trail of goo that the pix might have left behind.

  I stopped in front of a bank of elevators, staring at Nathaniel with a mixture of annoyance and hopelessness, water pouring over us.

  “This is so freaking irritating,” I said. “Why can I take down a Grigori, a shapeshifter, and a nephilim on my own, but you and I together can’t defeat one scavenger demon?”

  “The difference is that the others wanted to defeat you, so they stood and fought. The pix wants to survive, so it is not foolish enough t
o face two creatures that it knows very well are more powerful than it is.”

  “Don’t try to be logical,” I said. “I’m ready to say to hell with it and go home.”

  “You are?” Nathaniel asked, tilting his head curiously.

  “Well, no,” I admitted. “At this point I just want to kill the stupid thing out of spite.”

  Then we heard a sound like a muffled explosion, and the building trembled beneath our feet.

  “What was that?” I asked, my eyes wide.

  We ran to the windows, but what we could see of the streets below did not appear any different than it had been when we arrived earlier.

  “Perhaps there is a television we can check,” Nathaniel said.

  “There will definitely be one in a patient’s room,” I said.

  We peeked into a room and found it empty. I wondered why more patients hadn’t come rushing to their doors when they heard the ruckus in the hallway. I supposed it meant that most of them were unable to get out of bed without assistance, and that probably meant almost everyone on the floor was elderly, terminally ill, or both. The thought made me very grim. If the vampires got into the building, these people had no chance at all.

  It was also more than a little strange that the hospital staff hadn’t rushed to the floor. Strange, and probably ominous. It meant there was something going on that was more pressing than a smoke alarm on a patient floor.

  Nathaniel found a remote and turned the television on. A daytime talk show was running, the host interviewing the starlet of the moment. He flipped through the channels—cartoons, reality TV, sports highlights.

  It seemed wrong that the rest of the world would go on as normal when it felt like we were in the middle of an apocalypse. But most programming was broadcast out of New York, and the stations wouldn’t interrupt their regular schedule even if the world was coming to an end.

  “Find a twenty-four-hour news network,” I said. “Or a local channel. They probably can’t get enough of this story.”

  The twenty-four-hour networks would be making hay out of this for weeks. There’s nothing a news channel likes better than a major tragedy and a big pile of bodies to go with it.