Black Howl (23 page)

Agents are allowed to know the time and place of a death, but that’s about it. We’re not allowed to know what is going to happen or why or how. I’m pretty sure it’s a measure that’s been put in place to prevent us from trying to stop deaths. Like I’ve said before, it can be difficult to stand back sometimes, to let death happen even when you know that it should.

“I had to break the rules,” J.B. said. “We’ve got to find some way to cure these people. So I hid under a veil and followed a vampire after it killed a person.”

I shook my head. “You’re getting wild in your old age, J.B. One of these days you might forget to fill out a form.”

“That will never happen,” he assured me.

“What do we do if this nest doesn’t have any vampires that are using memories?” I asked.

“It had better,” J.B. said. “I’m not asking another seer for information. I could lose my position if anyone found out.”

“How do you know this particular seer will not betray you?” Gabriel asked.

J.B. was silent, and when I looked at him I saw a faint pink tinge on his cheeks. “She, um, likes me.”

I could think of a million things to say in response to that, but I didn’t. Gabriel turned his head away so J.B. wouldn’t see him smile.

We continued west and south until we hit the Ukrainian Village area. J.B. indicated that we should land, and we touched down on the sidewalk in front of a three-flat apartment building.

The snow was piled high in drifts and the sidewalk had been imperfectly shoveled, leaving lots of icy patches. And of course I promptly slipped on one and landed on my butt in a pile of snow. Since I was still wearing the peacoat, my jeans got soaked almost immediately. Luckily no one could see me except J.B. and Gabriel. As long as my wings were out I was still invisible. J.B. was snorting with laughter. Gabriel knew better.

I stood up, dusted snow off my bottom and gave J.B. an evil glare. “I thought that all the Agents were afraid of my wrath.”

“The Agents are. I’m not,” J.B. said. “I’ve seen you come to work in your slippers.”

“Anyway,” I said, not wanting to rehash one of my least favorite moments, “is this the place?”

“Yes,” J.B. said, sobering. “I didn’t have time to do a lot of reconnaissance, so I’m not certain exactly how many of them are in there.”

“But they are all, presumably, asleep,” Gabriel said. “The sun will not go down for at least two more hours.”

“Yeah, but they could have magical defenses in place in case their home is breached,” I said. “Any smart vampire
has them; otherwise their enemies could just waltz in the front door while they were sleeping.”

Vampires and goblins don’t have a protective threshold like other creatures. I’m not sure why. It probably had something to do with the concept of “home.” Humans, faeries, and a lot of other supernatural creatures made permanent homes, and a home is a lot more than a space to rest your head. It takes on the essence of the people who live there, who love and laugh and fight and make memories in that space.

Vampires don’t do that. They just…exist. As far as I can tell they pretty much eat and sleep and have sex. So in order for them to be protected during the day, they either needed magical defenses or hired humans to watch over them. The slightly run-down air of the three-flat told me that these vampires could probably not afford to hire help.

The windows were all blocked by blackout shades, so we weren’t going to get any information that way. There was nothing for it except to try to ease through the defenses and hope we didn’t set off any alarms, and I told the other two as much.

“Well, let’s try to find the defenses before we go rushing in,” J.B. said.

We all went silent, each of us drawing on our power. I’d done something like this before when I detected the presence of the portal in the alley that led to Amarantha’s kingdom. I pushed out my magic, spreading it away from me like a cloak of fine mesh, and watched it settle. There were several places where the cloak bulged, and I could see the little flares of magic set at regular intervals around the perimeter of the house.

“Do you see them?” I asked the other two.

They both nodded, frowning.

“But there’s nothing on the second floor,” I said. “Stupid.”

“We’d have to break a window to get in that way,” J.B. said.

I shrugged. “So?”

He sighed. “You’re right.”

“Wow, I never thought I’d hear those two words pass your lips,” I said.

“Let us enter from the back of the building,” Gabriel said. “A passerby may notice if one of the windows seems to be breaking open with no cause.”

We flew around to the back. I took one look at the wooden fire escapes and shook my head. “No way. They’re going to have this area covered.”

I performed the same spell again and noted that the defenses were significantly stronger back here.

“It’s the front or nothing,” I said.

We all looked at one another. Breaking a window in the front definitely increased the risk that attention might be drawn to the house. But it wasn’t as though we had a lot of choice.

Gabriel wouldn’t let me break the window. I let him do it because he was stronger than me and J.B. put together. He swung his arm back and blasted his gloved fist through the glass as if it were water.

The glass made an awful noise, and we all froze except for the slightest flapping of our wings. No one was walking down the street at the moment, so it was unlikely there were any witnesses.

Gabriel cleared the frame of the remaining shards so that we could climb in safely. He swung his leg over the sill and pushed the blackout shade to one side.

There was an inhuman hiss from inside the room and the blackout shade dropped back into place as Gabriel let go.

“Gabriel!” I whispered fiercely.

“It is all right,” he said calmly through the shade. “The
vampire that occupies this room is still asleep. His unconscious was simply responding to the touch of sunlight.”

He lifted the shade on the opposite side so that we could climb in without disturbing the vampire further. Although the daylight was not their natural time, a vampire could certainly rouse itself if it felt threatened in sleep. We didn’t want to antagonize the vampires any more than necessary.

J.B. climbed in and I followed, wrinkling my nose. The room smelled like decaying corpses. A single male vampire lay stretched out on a filthy bed splashed with blood. In the corner was a pile of rotting limbs and human skulls. My blood ran cold. Some of those bones were very small.

I covered my mouth and nose with my sleeve. “I thought most vampires don’t kill their food.”

“They don’t,” J.B. said thoughtfully. “But this is the vampire I followed home from the kill, so obviously he’s gotten a taste for it.”

“We should stake him,” I said fiercely. “He’s a serial killer.”

“That’s not what we’re here for,” J.B. said. “Look around for a headset.”

“It’s not going to be in this room,” I muttered angrily. “This asshole gets his memory high the natural way.”

As I predicted, there was no equipment in this particular vamp’s room.

We entered the hallway stealthily, still on the lookout for any humans that might be living in the building. We didn’t find any. We did find more sleeping vampires, although none of their rooms looked like the charnel house of the first one. Most of the vamps’ rooms looked like ordinary twentysomething bedrooms, with posters on the walls and clothes all over the floor. We split up to make the search go faster. There were a lot of vampires living here.

Finally, in the seventh room, I found it. It did look like a VR headset from that movie where Russell Crowe is a virtual killer and Denzel Washington hunts him down. The headset was casually tossed on a dressing table scattered with drugstore makeup.

I snatched it up, contemplating the sleeping female vampire on the bed. Was she any better than the killer upstairs? Her addiction had cost someone their life even if her own hands hadn’t been bloodied.

I walked toward the window.

“Madeline.” Gabriel’s voice in the doorway.

I turned around, and he could see the intent on my face. His eyes widened when he saw the headset in my hand.

“Do not do it,” he said. “We need to get that device to Chloe.”

I looked back at the window.

“What if she wakes while she is burning?” Gabriel said softly. “What if the others hear her distress and awaken as well? Would you risk our lives needlessly, possibly putting our mission in jeopardy?”

I tightened my grip on the headset. Should I help the living, or take revenge for the victims who had already fallen?

In the end, it wasn’t a difficult choice. But as we exited the window that we had entered I yanked on the blackout shade in the killer vamp’s room. And smiled in satisfaction as we flew away to the sound of a monster screaming as it burned to death.

After we delivered the headset to an ecstatic Chloe, there was nothing to do but wait. A couple of days passed in a relatively normal fashion. I picked up souls; Beezle ate;
Gabriel and I thoroughly explored all the benefits of marriage.

One thing I was not enjoying were the constant phone calls from Azazel. He would not accept my marriage to Gabriel, and he didn’t care in the least that Lucifer had willed it.

“Lord Lucifer would not override my wishes in this matter,” Azazel said angrily. “I have betrothed you to Nathaniel before the court. No daughter of mine will marry a thrall.”

“He’s not a thrall,” I said. “Lucifer freed him.”

“A thing which he is not permitted to do,” Azazel replied.

“Just because he hasn’t done it before doesn’t mean he’s not permitted to do it. Is he your lord or is he not?” I asked.

There was a long silence at the other end of the line.

“Well?” For Azazel to say otherwise was treason. I knew it and so did he.

“Of course,” Azazel said. “But he has always respected the autonomy of each court.”

“Why don’t you just check with him if you don’t believe me?” I said.

“Lord Lucifer is not returning my messages to him,” Azazel said tightly.

“I wonder why,” I replied.

After a few of these calls in which we repeated the exact same conversation over and over I finally stopped answering when I saw my father’s name pop up on the caller ID. He filled my voice mail message box to the limit so often I couldn’t delete them fast enough.

“Not that I’m not insanely happy with you,” I said to Gabriel on the third morning after the meeting at the Agency. “But why do you think Lucifer freed you and let us marry? He’d been holding the risk to you over my head for the last two months. What made him change his mind all of a sudden?”

Gabriel sipped his coffee and looked thoughtful. “I
believe we can agree that Lord Lucifer’s motivations are often deep and mysterious.”

“You can say that again.”

“I also believe that Lord Lucifer has some limited ability to see the future,” Gabriel said. “If he perceived that it was a strategic advantage to him to have us married, then he would allow that to happen.”

“I’d rather not find out that we’re only married to assist Lucifer in his long-range plans for world domination.”

“For all your strengths, Madeline, you do not comprehend Lord Lucifer. He is a creature so old and powerful that your mind cannot fathom it. He was born at the same time as the stars in the galaxy. He has seen millions of days pass since his creation.”

“And in all that time the best he can do is think up ways to amuse himself by moving the rest of us around on the game board?”

“Lord Lucifer has never had an equal to him—in strength, in cunning, in magic. I believe, truly believe, that we are permitted to exist only at his sufferance, and because it does, as you say, amuse him to watch us.”

I felt a chill in my blood that had nothing to do with the temperature. If Lucifer really was that powerful, then he could wipe out everyone on Earth with one swipe of his hand.

Gabriel watched me, and something of my thoughts must have been in my eyes because he took my hand. “It is why we all fear him so absolutely, even those courts of creatures that are not of the fallen. It is why after Amarantha and Focalor’s rebellion so many of the smaller courts are banding together to protect themselves.”

“Banding together won’t help them if he’s as powerful as you say he is,” I said.

“He is,” Gabriel said grimly.

We both sat in silence, contemplating a world where Lucifer ruled absolutely. The ringing of my cell phone broke into our thoughts.

“We’re ready to test Chloe’s solution,” J.B. said.

“We’ll be there in half an hour,” I said and hung up, looking at Gabriel. “What are the chances that we can get out of the house without Beezle noticing?”

“Zero,” Beezle said, coming in through the side window. “Let’s go.”

So I left for the Agency with my entourage escorting me (because of course Samiel wouldn’t be left behind, either). When we landed on the roof, I got a terrible shock.

Amarantha stood there.

AFTER A MOMENT I REALIZED IT WAS NOT AMARANTHA, but her ghost. She looked more than a little unhinged, and her appearance reflected her state of mind, as it often does with ghosts. If they remember themselves as young and beautiful, that’s how they will look in the afterlife, even if that person died in their dotage. If they pull at their hair and scratch things, then their ectoplasmic form will reflect the ghost’s perception of what they should look like after they’ve tugged their hair and broken their nails.

Amarantha looked like she’d been doing both, and she looked a lot more like a wild bean sidhe than either her perfect faerie self or her freakish demonic form.

“Somebody here needs a salon,” Beezle said. “You’ve looked better.”

“You! YOU!” she screeched, and she pointed her finger
dramatically at me. “You stole my life from me. I demand justice!”

And then she flew at me with her arms outstretched, fingers bent into claws.

I stood still and waited for her to pass through me. She did, and I shivered. Ghosts draw energy from the air around them, and it means that they make cold spots. When a ghost passes through you it’s a lot like having ice water poured down your spine.