Black City

“I’ve only been alive for a few decades, but I have never had a master. And I’m not about to start now.”

“You would not yield to Azazel, either,” Nathaniel murmured. “It angered him so.”

“Yeah, well, you know what I did to Azazel,” I said.

“You would not be able to do such a thing to Lord Lucifer, and I advise you not to even think of it,” Nathaniel said seriously.

“I won’t go after Lucifer if he doesn’t give me a reason to,” I said.

But I hoped he wouldn’t give me a reason, because despite my bravado even I knew that it was very, very stupid to go one-on-one with Lucifer. I’d felt his power and it was a thing of tremendous force. I also knew that he had shown me only the smallest fraction of it.

“Sometimes I wonder if you are trying to commit suicide,” Nathaniel said.

“Sometimes I wonder that myself,” I said.

“I am not joking,” Nathaniel said.

“Neither am I.”

There was a long pause after this, as I contemplated the truth of my statement and Nathaniel watched me with his frozen blue gaze. I didn’t want my baby to die. I wanted to protect him. But sometimes, especially when a fight didn’t seem to be going my way, a fleeting thought would say, If you just let go, you can be with Gabriel. You and the baby.

“We’re off topic,” I said, wanting to transition away from the awkward moment. “I want to protect the hospital.”

Nathaniel rubbed his forehead. “I must consider how to do this.”

While Nathaniel came up with a plan, I thought deep thoughts about who could have cast the sleeping spell in the first place and, more important, why.

My first thought was that Titania was in league with the vampires. Amarantha had been colluding with Azazel before she died, so there was a very real possibly that the queen of Faerie had picked up where her subordinate had left off. And when I was in Titania and Oberon’s court I’d thought that they were deliberately trying to harm me in order to provoke Lucifer.

At the time it seemed insane for them to try to tick off the Morningstar, but if they were working with this army of vampires, perhaps they thought they had an advantage.

My second thought was that one of the Grigori had taken up Azazel’s personal mission. Certainly any of the Grigori would be powerful enough to cast the sleeping spell, and presumably they would also be able to control the army of vampires.

“But who’s the contact?” I murmured.

“Pardon?” Nathaniel said, frowning. He looked like he was trying to do intense mathematical calculations in his head.

“I was just thinking. There has to be a vampire overlord or whatever, right? They’ve got a pretty rigid court system, as far as I know.”

“They do,” Nathaniel acknowledged. “And their heads of court are kings and queens, like the Faerie.”

“So they have little courts that are overseen by one big court?”

Nathaniel nodded. “You are thinking that the vampire king had to know about this prior to the attack.”

“If he’s got a good grip on his kingdom, then he should definitely have known about this. Is his court in Chicago?”

Nathaniel shook his head. “No. He is based in New York.”

“Isn’t it interesting?” I mused. “Lucifer’s court is in Los Angeles. The vampire king’s court is on the opposite coast. The high court of Faerie is in some dimension all its own. And yet all this trouble is here at my door.”

“Lord Lucifer has made it very clear through both word and deed that he would like you to be his heir.”

“So you’re saying that as long as Lucifer keeps going around talking me up, the other courts will swipe at me?”

Nathaniel’s eyes were troubled. “You would be safer if you would accept Lord Lucifer’s offer.”

“I don’t want to be his heir,” I said. “More important, I don’t want my child to be his heir.”

“I do not know if you can resist for much longer. Your life is becoming more dangerous by the moment. And Lord Lucifer has a way of boxing you in before you realize the walls are there.”

Emotion flickered across his face.

And what did he do to you? I wondered.

“Look, let’s just get these people as safe as we can so we can go home. I need to figure out some way to eliminate these vampires.”

“I believe that we can put some form of protection over the hospital,” Nathaniel said. “But in order to do it correctly we will need to leave the building, which will put us at risk.”

“Why will we need to leave?”

“Because the conditions of the enchantment will prevent creatures of supernatural origin from entering. If we are inside when the magic is settled, we would be forcibly ejected by the spell.”

“But what about the Agents that are still in the hospital? Samiel and Jude got Chloe out—at least I hope they did,” I said, fumbling for my cell phone so I could see whether Samiel had sent me a text. I patted all of my pockets and came up empty. “For the love of the Morningstar. I lost it again.”

“The Agents will be protected,” Nathaniel said. “Their magic is different from a supernatural creature’s.”

“How?”

“Agents are human,” Nathaniel said simply. “They may have magical abilities, but at the core of it they are human. Their essence is not born of the otherworld, but this one.”