Black City (5 page)

“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 to 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.

Nathaniel continued cycling through the channels. “Why do humans need so many useless programs?”

“That’s a question I’ve been asking for years,” I said. “You should ask Beezle. This is his favorite time of day, programming-wise.”

“Yes, I am familiar with the gargoyle’s junk TV obsession,” Nathaniel said dryly.

“What did he make you watch?”

“
American Idol
. I was unwilling to actually gouge my eyes out, but I strongly considered it many times.”

I snorted. “You got off easy. You should see some of the other garbage he watches.”

“No, thank you,” he replied, and then we both went silent as he finally found a channel with the words BREAKING NEWS in the top corner.

As earlier, the shot was an aerial view of the Loop. Any smart reporters were staying away from on-the-ground coverage. This shot was better taken from above, in any case.

It showed the Michigan Avenue bridge that ran over the Chicago River from East Wacker. The vampire horde, that ravenous seething mass, had pushed up to the river at all fronts. The Chicago River wrapped through the Loop in a lazy L curve from Lake Michigan and roughly followed the shape of Wacker Drive. The city authorities had set up sandbag walls on the northern and western sides of all the bridges. As an added precaution, the bridges had been raised.

There was a female news anchor giving commentary, but I didn’t hear a word she said. Obviously the hope was to contain the vampires, but I wondered what was being
done on the south side of the Loop. There was no natural geological feature at that end to keep the monsters in.

It didn’t matter in any case. As we watched, the vampires drove a handful of human survivors before them. The people were screaming, desperate, and when they reached the bridges they howled for the police and soldiers on the other side to help them.

Instead, the vampires surged from behind, overtaking them. And the soldiers fired into the crowd. I turned my head away.

“They have no choice,” Nathaniel said. “Those people are all dead in any case, whether at the teeth of vampires or the bullets of humans.”

“That doesn’t make it any easier for me to watch the government kill its own citizens,” I said.

“You cannot save them,” he said.

“Yeah, I know,” I said.

“No,” he said, and turned me to face him. “I need you to understand this. You
cannot
save them, or most of the other people in the city, either. This is a hemorrhaging wound and you cannot staunch the bleeding.”

I looked into his eyes, pale as winter, so very unlike Gabriel’s.

“I can’t stand by. I have to do something,” I said.

“Why not? Why do you need to sacrifice yourself in some Quixotic quest to save humanity?” He pointed to the TV. “This is what you want to preserve? Reality TV? Big Macs?”

“It doesn’t matter if you hold us in contempt. It doesn’t matter if we eat junky food and watch junky TV. It doesn’t matter if we’re desperate, selfish or vain. It doesn’t matter if we’re loving, giving and modest. It doesn’t matter if we’re not perfect. Anyway, I’ve yet to meet an angel who is.”

“You are talking as if you are one of them,” he said. “You are not. You are more than they are.”

“No, I’m not,” I said. “I’m human. And I’m not going to stand by and watch my own kind be wiped from the planet.”

Nathaniel turned back to the spectacle on the television screen. “You may not have a choice.”

3

THE NEWS HAD RETURNED FROM A COMMERCIAL break. Now the footage showed the surging vampires leaping over the raised bridges and assaulting the fortified roadblocks. The positions were quickly overwhelmed.

Suddenly there was a massive explosion behind the sandbagged wall set up on Michigan Avenue. It wasn’t clear who had set the explosives but there was a tremendous ball of fire where the National Guard used to be.

Flame whooshed through the crowd of vampires, and the eerie piercing wail that rose up was the sound of the death throes of monsters. The vamps that hadn’t yet leapt over the bridge paused for a moment as their brethren turned to ash.

“Those soldiers sacrificed themselves for the greater good,” I said. “How can I do any less?”

“Their sacrifice is meaningless,” Nathaniel snapped.
“There are many more vampires than can be halted by a small explosion.”

“But they tried.”

“Is that what it is to be human? To try? To push, like Sisyphus, ever more fruitlessly at the boulder that will simply roll down the hill and over you again?”

“That is part of being human,” I said. “To struggle, to succeed.”

“What if you never succeed?”

“You still try. You have to.”

“I will never understand humans,” Nathaniel said. “It makes no sense to repeat the same behavior over and over when you know the outcome.”

“But you don’t know the outcome,” I replied. “It’s why people play the same lottery numbers week after week, year after year. They’re hoping their luck will change.”

“There is no such thing as luck. Only chance.”

“Most people would have said that there’s no such thing as vampires, either, and yet here we are,” I said, gesturing to the television.

“That is only because they did not know any better,” Nathaniel said.

“Who’s to say that you don’t know any better, either? I know luck has saved my life plenty of times.”

“You were saved by your own skills, your own wits, which are more prodigious than you give yourself credit for.”

“Don’t let Beezle hear you say that. He thinks I just stumble around setting things on fire.”

“Well, you do that as well,” Nathaniel allowed. “But stumbling around setting things on fire seems to be a key component of your skill set.”

I would have laughed, except that at that moment the pix demon crashed through the ceiling and landed on my head.

Its gelatinous body molded itself to my shoulders and head so that I couldn’t see. Clawed fingers raked up the side of my throat and blood spurted from the wounds.

I reached up and grabbed the monster’s ankles and blasted electricity through my palms. The demon growled but held on tight.

“Nathaniel,” I gurgled. I could feel the torn flaps of skin on my neck, could feel the hot flow of blood running under my shirt.

There were sounds of a struggle, and the smell of ozone filled the air.

“More,” Nathaniel grunted, and I knew I’d have to save myself. I was bleeding out too fast for Nathaniel to help.

Nightfire didn’t seem to bother the pix much, nor electricity. Which left the most destructive tool in my limited arsenal.

Everything burns.

I pushed my power through my blood, through my heartstone, where it was lit by the heat of the sun. That spell poured through my palms and through the skin of the pix demon. It screeched and released its grip on me, falling to the floor and writhing as it burned from the inside out.

I wasn’t that great at the healing spell, having performed it only once, so I slapped my burning hand on my own neck to cauterize the wound.

This time I screeched, because the pain was agonizing. Sometimes I really wonder about my ability to think things through to their logical conclusion. It hurt like nothing I’d ever felt before, and the wound probably looked horrific, but after a moment there was no more flowing blood. I lurched around to see Nathaniel battling three demons.