Black City

“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.”