Black City

“Samiel wants her with us,” I said shortly. “Why doesn’t the Agency put together an army to fight the vamps instead of struggling to clean up the mess?”

“You know the answer to that,” J.B. said.

“If the Agency doesn’t get off their ass and do something, there won’t be any souls left to collect in this city.”

“You don’t have to tell me that,” he said. “But I’m not exactly a trustworthy figure around here anymore. No one in upper management is going to listen to me.”

“You spend too much time with me.”

“That’s the way I like it,” he said. “I’ll call you later. My mother is outside the window doing her best banshee impression.”

“I thought you had devised some spell to keep Amarantha away from you,” I said.

J.B.’s mother had been a faerie queen of her own court before I’d killed her. Unlike most creatures, she had chosen not the Door but an existence as a ghost. I think she did it just to piss off me and J.B.

“The spell will keep her out of the Agency and out of my home, but it won’t stop her from hanging around outside and driving me crazy. Try not to burn down the hospital.”

He hung up before I could respond.

“Why does everyone think I’m going to destroy a building as soon as I walk into it?” I asked Samiel.

Your track record speaks for itself.

“But those were accidents,” I protested.

Most people don’t have those kinds of accidents more than once.

“Most people don’t have supernatural enemies trying to kill them every second of the day, either,” I said, standing up cautiously.

The shower and the food had gone a long way toward making me feel human. I felt better equipped to fight another horde of vampires, although with any luck I wouldn’t have to.

The barricades were north of the bridges that crossed the Chicago River. I didn’t know how long city authorities would be able to contain the vamps in that area once the monsters ran through their food supply.

Of course, they would likely be evacuating most of the Loop and Michigan Avenue soon. And if they moved the patients at the hospital, we would have a lot of trouble finding Chloe.

“She’s probably safer away from me, anyway,” I muttered. The sad fact of my life was that the low mortality rate of my companions was more luck than anything else. Since Gabriel had died I’d been braced for impact, waiting for the next, inevitable loss.

What was that? Samiel signed. You have to look at me when you’re talking or else I can’t read your lips.

“Nothing,” I said. “Let’s go get Chloe.”

2

NATHANIEL HAD PREDICTABLY ARGUED AGAINST REMOVING Chloe from the hospital.

“She’s safe enough there, and it’s an unnecessary risk for you,” he’d said.

But Jude had come down firmly on my side, and that meant Nathaniel was outnumbered. A couple of weeks earlier all of the werewolf cubs of Jude’s pack had been kidnapped and their memories stolen as part of a plot of Azazel’s. Even though Jude thought Chloe was weird and unpredictable, he’d felt indebted to her since she’d found a way to restore the werewolf cubs’ memories.

“You can stay here if you prefer,” Jude sneered, the implications of Nathaniel’s cowardice clear.

Nathaniel’s jaw tightened. “As if I would leave Madeline’s safety to you.”

I could have pointed out that “Madeline’s safety” was not reliant on either of them, as I had saved my own self plenty of times, but I did not want to get embroiled in another of the stupid arguments that went around our group with annoying regularity. So I just said, “Let’s go,” and we did.

Nathaniel carried me, and Samiel carried Jude in wolf form. Beezle, surprisingly, had opted to stay home.

“I need a nap,” he said.

I suspected that what he really wanted was time to brood over what he thought were negative changes in my personality, so I let him stay. I didn’t want to argue with Beezle about every decision I made.

Nathaniel hid all of us under a veil. I knew how to do this, but it was difficult for me to hold such a delicate spell over four people for a prolonged period of time. And Nathaniel had pointed out that secrecy was vital now that we’d been exposed on television.

As we flew above the city I could see the streets below were jammed with fleeing citizens. People tossed hastily packed suitcases into cars, collected their offspring from schools and hightailed it out of town. It looked like a scene from an end-of-the-world movie.

Lake Shore Drive was bumper to bumper, cars and buses moving only by centimeters. Several hundred people who either lacked personal transportation or decided to abandon their cars streamed in crowds up the bike path that ran along the lakefront. Everyone was heading north. No one wanted to go through the Loop, even if you could stay outside the barricaded edges.

The mass panic, the sheer numbers of vampires…The problem seemed overwhelming for one ex-Agent of death and her merry band of misfits.

“Where the hell is Lucifer?” I asked. “He could do something about this.”

“He could,” Nathaniel agreed. “If it suited him to do so.”

“If he could find some personal advantage, you mean,” I said bitterly. “He won’t intervene unless the deck is stacked in his favor.”

“You must stop attributing Lucifer with humanity,” Nathaniel said. “He is not human. He is not even a mere angel. He is more powerful than any of us can comprehend, and the problems of humans are small things to him.”