Black Night (5 page)
“Beezle, why don’t you make yourself useful and find some Band-Aids?” I said.
“And possibly some kind of burn cream,” added J.B.
Beezle flew around the house to the window that was always open on the east side. As he went, I was sure I heard him say something about needing a doughnut.
“No doughnuts until I stop bleeding!” I shouted after him.
J.B. snorted a laugh, then grabbed his side. “It hurts to laugh.”
I had enough sense to realize that J.B.’s injuries were worse than mine. He might be hemorrhaging internally or have a broken rib from when Antares blasted him across the yard. The burns on his back had to be causing him incredible pain. He needed medical attention, and I needed to get my bleeding self together and provide it.
I didn’t have the knack of healing that Gabriel and many other angels seemed to possess. Or if I did, I couldn’t yet access or control it.
But I could call an Agent Medi-Team. They were specially trained to deal with supernatural injuries that occurred on the job. If I had been thinking clearly, I would have called them already. I groped in my coat pocket for my cell phone and couldn’t find it. I patted all of the pockets in frustration and realized that it had probably fallen out during my skydiving attempt.
“Do you have your cell phone?” I asked J.B. as he watched me curiously.
He looked kind of glazed, like he was drunk. I probably looked the same way. I felt myself getting more lightheaded as the minutes passed, and it occurred to me that Antares must have some kind of anticoagulant in his claws. I was still bleeding as heavily as before and the wounds showed no signs of clotting.
J.B. was slow to respond, so I started patting him all over, looking for the telltale bulge of the phone.
“Is this really the time?” J.B. asked as he leaned against the wall and closed his eyes while I searched. “You haven’t even taken me to dinner yet.”
I checked the inside and outside of his ruined jacket, and even the pockets of his jeans, but there was no phone.
“Might have fallen out when I was blasted. Or before that. Who knows?” J.B. murmured. He sounded like he was falling asleep.
That was bad. I knew enough about medicine to know that if he went to sleep now, he might never wake up.
“Beezle!” I shouted, heedless of the hour and my sleeping neighbors. “Beezle, come here now!”
I heard the scrape of a window against its frame, and looked up to see Beezle shooting out of the kitchen with a small first aid kit clutched in his claws.
“What’s the fire?” he asked, tossing me the kit.
“Go and get the portable phone from the house. J.B.’s barely holding it together and I need to call a Medi-Team for him.” I patted J.B.’s cheek and he grunted. “Don’t go to sleep.”
“I don’t know if the portable phone will work out here,” Beezle said doubtfully.
“Just get it, Beezle!” I snapped. “I don’t have time to debate with you.”
“This wouldn’t be necessary if
he
were here to do his job,” Beezle grumbled as he flew back toward the kitchen window.
he
were here to do his job,” Beezle grumbled as he flew back toward the kitchen window.
I silently agreed with him. If Gabriel were here, he could have healed both me and J.B. without much effort. But unlike Beezle, I didn’t read any sinister implications in Gabriel’s absence. If he could be at my side, he would be. It was that simple. Never mind the bond between us; if Azazel found out that I came to harm because of Gabriel’s absence, he would grind Gabriel into small and bloody pieces.
Beezle came zooming out again with the phone. I snatched it from his hands and dialed the Medi-Team number. But when I held the receiver to my ears I heard nothing but the crackle of static.
“Dammit,” I muttered.
“I told you,” Beezle said.
It was hard to think. Blood flowed from the wounds at my back and arms, slow but unceasing. I tried to stand but found that I was too weak, and my knees slipped in the blood pooling on the peeling wood of the porch. My face slammed into the railing and I saw stars.
“Maddy, don’t try to move,” Beezle said, his voice alarmed. “I’ll get help.”
“From where?” I asked, holding my hand to the side of my face. I thought I’d heard something crack when my cheek hit the wood.
“I’ll get Azazel,” he said.
I had to think for a minute about why that was bad. “If you get Azazel and he comes here and finds Gabriel missing, he will kill him.”
“If I don’t get Azazel now and you bleed to death in your own backyard, he will kill
me
.”
me
.”
“Don’t get him. I’ll figure out something.” The last person I wanted to see at that moment was Daddy dearest.
The wind picked up, and I shivered inside my coat. Beezle was having trouble staying close, his wings buffeted by a breeze that was fast becoming a gale. I reached out and grabbed him, stuffing him inside my pocket before he blew away.
“What the . . . ?” I said, and crawled slowly toward J.B., who wasn’t moving at all. I felt for a pulse and found one, but he did not stir at my touch.
The wind racketed around us. My hair came free of the woolen hat I was wearing. I covered J.B.’s still body with my own, clinging to his shoulders.
A faint red light appeared just above my garden, and the light grew until it was a circle the size of a city Dumpster. Inside the circle, wind swirled and electricity pulsed.
Beezle poked his head out of my pocket.
“It’s a portal,” he shouted.
I knew that. I just didn’t know who was in it, and if they were friend or foe. My magic crackled feebly across my fingertips. I was too weak to do anything.
A figure emerged from the portal, tall and blond and radiantly beautiful. He brushed some imaginary lint from his white-feathered wings. The portal closed behind him and the wind died down. The angel looked up, and the natural arrogance on his face turned to surprise.
I had been wrong. There
was
one person that I wanted to see less than my father.
was
one person that I wanted to see less than my father.
“Hello, Nathaniel,” I said to my fiancé.
3
NATHANIEL HURRIED TOWARD THE PORCH, TAKING IN the situation in an instant.
“Madeline, what has happened?” he said, as he pulled me away from J.B., put me in his lap and checked my wounds. “Where is your bodyguard?”
Nathaniel never referred to Gabriel by his name, which was just one of many things that I disliked about the man whom my father had engaged me to against my will.
“Antares,” I said briefly. I felt dizzy, and Nathaniel wasn’t helping by shaking me around.
“How did you incur these injuries?” he said, covering each with his hands one after another. I felt a familiar heat, like the light of the sun was burning through my veins.
This kind of healing used to be very painful for me, when I was still mostly human. Now that I had acknowledged my heritage and my heart had been replaced by an angel’s heartstone, it was only slightly less painful. The half of me that would always be human knew that the sun was not supposed to run wild in your blood, nor was it supposed to heal you. The angelic half of me welcomed the heat and the burn like homecoming.
The blood ceased to flow, and I felt the skin knit together painfully. I didn’t feel like getting up and dancing around yet, though. The kind of healing that Nathaniel did could close up injuries but it didn’t help with recovery time.
“Thanks,” I said, and tried not to sound resentful as I did. It wasn’t Nathaniel’s fault that my father had affianced us without my permission, or that I wanted someone else. It was his fault, however, that he was totally unlikable in every way.
“What about J.B.?” I asked, squirming off his lap and onto the porch.
Too much proximity to Nathaniel made me uncomfortable. He is beautiful, and it is hard not to be drawn to beauty. But he is also a giant jerk, and no amount of attractiveness can make up for that. I did not want to think about our wedding night.
“J.B.?” he said, his eyebrows raised. “This human that you were . . .”
He trailed off, staring at J.B.’s limp form.
“Gods above and below,” he swore, and rushed to J.B.’s side. He lifted J.B.’s eyelids, checked his pulse, and then picked him up as if a six-foot-plus man weighed nothing. “What have you done with Amarantha’s son?”
I looked at Beezle, who was perched like a crow on the railing of the porch. He looked surprised.
“Who is Amarantha, and what does she have to do with J.B.?” I asked, pulling myself to my feet. The world wobbled in many directions.
Nathaniel kicked open the door and flew up the back stairs to my apartment without answering me. I heard a crash as he knocked out the door upstairs as well.
“Those locks cost money, you know!” I shouted, annoyed by both his high-handedness and his abandonment of me. Did he think I could walk or fly in this state? “What crawled up his ass?”
“Amarantha is the queen of the local faerie court,” Beezle said. “I didn’t know J.B. was her son.”
Beezle was like a phone book of things that go bump in the night. He knew every species, every subspecies, every hierarchy and every rule. He could run the gamut from werewolf law to the vampire courts to the reigns of demons. There was very little that Beezle did not know. I wondered how J.B. had managed to conceal his status from my gargoyle.
“Well, presumably Amarantha is someone with a lot of influence or else Nathaniel wouldn’t have touched J.B. even if he were wearing gloves,” I said, staggering toward my back door. “On the upside, this means that he is probably healing J.B. as we speak, and I don’t have to threaten him to do it.”
I grabbed the doorframe and leaned on it for a minute, which gave me a good look at the damage Nathaniel had done to the lock by kicking it. The door normally locked with a dead bolt. The bolt had torn through the wooden frame and was now totally useless, which left my abode uncomfortably open to the aforementioned things that go bump.
A threshold, even without a door, is enough to stop most supernatural beings of power. Vampires, werewolves, fallen angels, demons . . . none of them could cross a threshold without an invitation. Nathaniel had been (reluctantly) invited inside by me before, so he was able to cross the threshold without penalty.
But there were plenty of lesser magical beings for whom the rules were a little more fuzzy. They could construe an unlocked or open door as an invitation. I didn’t fancy an infestation of gremlins eating all of Beezle’s precious popcorn stash or an imp whispering nasty things to me while I slept. And repairs cost money, money that I didn’t have. I usually generate some income by working as a freelance recipe developer, but since I’d been running around trying to keep up with my Agent duties and Azazel’s demands, I hadn’t had much time for that work lately. Although I supposed that since Nathaniel had done the kicking and the breaking I could get him to pay for the repairs.
I dragged myself up the back stairs, holding on to the railing as if it were a lifeline. Beezle fluttered around my head, cajoling me to keep moving forward when I wanted to stop and rest.
When I got to the top of the stairs, I saw that Nathaniel had repeated his destroying act on the upstairs door, which hung drunkenly from its hinges like a scene from a Bugs Bunny cartoon. I slumped on the landing, exhausted and annoyed.
“Come on, Maddy, get up,” Beezle said, pulling ineffectually at my collar.
I waved him away. “Leave me alone. I’ll get up and go inside when I’m ready.”
“I want to find out what Nathaniel’s doing to J.B.,” Beezle said, tugging at me again.
“So go,” I said, leaning my head against the wall and closing my eyes. I heard Beezle flap uncertainly for a moment, and then the sound of his wings receding as he went inside the apartment.
I want Gabriel,
I thought. I couldn’t help it. When he was away from me, I was like a planet without a sun. I wasn’t supposed to love him, and maybe if I could have had a normal relationship with him, I could have gotten him out of my system. But the longing . . . the longing . . .
I thought. I couldn’t help it. When he was away from me, I was like a planet without a sun. I wasn’t supposed to love him, and maybe if I could have had a normal relationship with him, I could have gotten him out of my system. But the longing . . . the longing . . .
“Madeline, wake up.”
Gabriel?
“Madeline, please. Madeline.”
I’m dreaming you. I need you.
“Madeline.”
Hands on my shoulders, on my face. Warmth like the light of the sun.
I opened my eyes. His face was so close to mine that I could see the stars deep in his black eyes, and as I watched I saw one of them burst and flare and fall away, and I knew that my eyes looked the same.
His breath was on my lips, a whisper away.
“Madeline, what has happened? Why are you sleeping on the stairs?”
His words reminded me of J.B. and Nathaniel only a few feet away inside the apartment. If I gave in to the impulse to kiss Gabriel and Nathaniel found us, Gabriel would be dead before you could say “Jack Robinson.”
I shook my head to clear away the cobwebs, and shifted away from the wall. Slowly I realized that Baraqiel stood a few feet behind Gabriel, watching us with an avid gaze. There was a knowledge in his eyes that I did not like, and I wondered how much of my need for Gabriel had been revealed to the messenger.
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