Black Howl

Improving security had been the priority, and anyway, most of the upper brass wasn’t completely sold on the necessity of moving to computers. I was sure that they’d felt this way when the Agency moved from papyrus to paper. There was definitely a culture of it’s-always-been-this-way-and- it’s-fine in my business.

We loaded onto the elevator with J.B. and stood in silence as the doors opened and closed, loaded and unloaded. I had a sudden memory of one of the elevators propped open by a severed human leg, and wondered if it had been this one. It was really a wonder that any Agents had returned to work after the place had been overrun by demons.

The elevator descended into the basement. The Hall of Records was down there, the place where every death in the Chicagoland area in history was recorded—even before there was a Chicagoland. The room was almost incomprehensibly big and filled with millions of index cards.

J.B. led us past the Hall, past the offices where Agents labored over the much-maligned data conversion, and to a door at the very end of the hallway. It looked to be solid steel and it was armed with another biometric scanner. J.B. swiped his I.D. card and then had his eyeball and both hands scanned.

The door clicked open, and we went inside.

The room was so secure that I expected there to be some fabulous treasure inside, or at the very least dozens of Agents working on some top-secret weapon. But all there was was one female Agent with short purple hair and both arms covered in tattoos, and a large pile of the cameras that I’d found with the wolf cubs and in the warehouse.

The Agent sat at a worktable with a lamp clipped to the edge. She hunched over one of the cameras, which had been disassembled into what looked like about eight million tiny pieces.

“This is Chloe,” J.B. said. “Chloe, Madeline Black. And Gabriel.”

Chloe gave us a little finger wave without looking up from her work.

“Chloe,” J.B. said. “Can you show Agent Black what you showed me yesterday?”

She held up a finger to indicate that we needed to wait. I wondered if she knew how to talk.

J.B. tapped his foot impatiently while we waited for Chloe to finish whatever it was that she needed to finish. She seemed to be teasing apart the pieces of what looked like a circuit board. I am not technically minded in the least—I can barely operate my cell phone—but whatever she was doing was fascinating to me. I crept closer to get a better look.

“You’re standing in my light,” Chloe said.

Okay, I guess she could talk. I shuffled backward, cheeks reddening.

After a few moments she looked up and pushed away from the table. She seemed to notice Gabriel for the first time.

“Well, hello, gorgeous,” Chloe said.

I felt strongly that it would not be good for me to act like an insanely jealous wife and rip her purple hair out at the roots, so I just said, “His name is Gabriel. And he’s married.”

She looked from my right hand to his left, saw the matching rings, and shrugged. “Worth a try. So, you want to see what we found?”

Chloe shot across the room on the casters of her chair and picked up one of the cameras from the pile. Then she used her feet to scoot back to the table.

She arranged the camera so that the lens pointed at the wall to our right. Then she lowered her hand over the camera and muttered something I couldn’t catch.

“There’s no on or off switch that we could find,” J.B. murmured. “Chloe figured out by trial and error that you need magic to turn the machine on.”

A second later the camera sprang to life and pictures were projected on the wall. Some of the pictures moved like video, and some were like camera images. All seemed random. There was a clip of a little boy catching soap bubbles, a gumball whirling down a ramp in one of those big gumball machines with the red top, a girl swinging on a piece of rope that dangled from a tree over a ravine, a half-eaten pepperoni pizza, a fragment of text that came and went too fast for me to read.

“What is this?” I asked. “It all seems random.”

“Memories,” Chloe said.

“Memories?” I asked. “Are you sure?”

“It’s our best guess,” J.B. said. “And it makes sense. The machine scans people’s brains and extracts their memories, and then when they die the ghost is damaged because most of what made up its identity is gone.”

I watched a white cloud shaped like a turtle drift by, a large buck leaping in front of a car’s headlights, an older boy picking apples and laughing.

“Okay, I guess it makes sense. But why take the memories in the first place?”

“Don’t know. We’re trying to look into that now. Listen, Chloe, can you take a break?” J.B. asked.

Her eyes slid from me to J.B. to Gabriel. “Top-secret information about to be discussed. Got it. I’m sure I can use a milk shake.”

She left the room with one last covert glance at Gabriel. I couldn’t blame her for that. He was just about the prettiest thing you’ve ever seen.

As soon as the door closed behind Chloe, J.B. spoke.

“You were right—my mother is involved,” he said heavily.

“How do you know?” I asked.

“The spiders,” J.B. said. “My mother breeds them. No one else in the world has spiders like that. So either she’s directly involved in this or she sold the spiders to whoever is. Either way, this goes back to Amarantha’s court.”

“And Beezle said that the charcarion demons are only present in two courts of the fallen. One of them sounded like a sneeze, and the other one was Focalor.”