Black Night

But the shock wave had temporarily knocked out my magic, like an electrical surge will cause a fuse to blow. I tried to stay calm, to concentrate on the power inside me, but I was gathering speed. I could see Gabriel’s face, white and strained, as he arrowed toward me in the air, but I was falling too fast. He wasn’t going to make it. I closed my eyes.

And then I was plucked from the air by a pair of strong arms, and I heard a grunt as my speed was arrested. I opened my eyes to see a pair of bright green ones flashing at me through wire-rimmed glasses.

“Next time you might want to try a parachute,” J.B. said as he fluttered us slowly to the ground.

I opened my mouth to speak, to thank him, and was horrified to feel tears pricking my eyes.

“Hey,” J.B. said, and cuddled me closer. “Hey, it’s okay.”

I decided it was easier to cry it out than try to talk through suppressed tears. I buried my face in his T-shirt. He said nothing, only held me there until I lifted my face and sniffled.

“Better?” he asked.

I nodded.

“You can put her down now,” Gabriel said, and his voice had a note of steel.

I looked in the direction of his voice and saw him standing a few feet away, arms locked against his sides as if he were keeping himself from pummeling J.B.

J.B’s arms tightened around me. “Finders keepers. I didn’t see you keeping her from turning into scrambled eggs.”

Gabriel stepped forward. I could see stars blazing in his dark eyes, always a sign of trouble. Like I said, Gabriel is a slow burn. But when he explodes you’d better get the hell out of the way.

“Put her down, human. You’re squashing my ear,” a muffled voice said from inside my coat.

“Beezle!” I gasped. “I forgot he was in there.”

J.B. reluctantly released me, his hands lingering just a moment too long at my back. I would be flattered except that I knew at least part of the reason he did it was to piss off Gabriel.

A month ago J.B. was my boss, and we didn’t get along. At all. But J.B. had helped Gabriel and me get through a demon attack on the Agency, and in the process we’d developed a kind of friendship. The attack had taken out a lot of the upper management and J.B. had been promoted by virtue of being one of the few supervisors left standing. Demon encounters plus the promotion seemed to have removed the stick that had formerly been lodged up his ass. He was a lot nicer these days.

He’d also shocked me by asking me out on a date. I’d refused, but he’d taken my refusal with surprising grace. It’s not that I wasn’t attracted to J.B.—I was; anything human would be—it was just that my confusing relationship with Gabriel seemed to preclude the possibility of having a confusing relationship with J.B.

Beezle poked his head out, looking distinctly disgruntled. “What in the name of the four hells happened? What’s J.B. doing here? Why aren’t we at home?”

“You didn’t feel that electro-pulse thingy?” I asked. “You didn’t feel us falling out of the sky?”

“I was napping,” Beezle said.

“Napping,” J.B. said in disbelief.

“You can just keep that disrespectful tone out of your voice, Jacob Benjamin. I’m an old gargoyle. And what is that horrible smell?”

Now that Beezle mentioned it, I did notice a distinctly malodorous scent lingering in the alley. And something else. A trace of cinnamon.

“Something angelic was here,” I said.

“How do you know?” J.B. asked.

“Whenever something of an angelic bloodline uses its powers, I always smell cinnamon.”

I started to move cautiously in Gabriel’s direction. It seemed the smell was coming from just beyond him. J.B. followed.

“And there was something else, when the pulse happened. Did you feel it?” I looked questioningly at Gabriel, who was still giving J.B. the hairy eyeball. I saw him take a deep breath and refocus his attention on me.

“Yes. A sense of evil. It felt like . . .”

“. . . Ramuell,” we said at the same time.

I felt J.B. start next to me. “Ramuell? That nephilim that you killed?”

Gabriel nodded. “I do not know how it could be. Another nephilim could not have broken free from the Forbidden Lands. Lucifer persuaded all of the fallen to give some of their power to redouble the creatures’ bindings. It would take more than the power of a single angel or demon to free one of them. Even I could not do it now, despite my bloodline.”

“And it can’t be Ramuell. He’s dead.”

“Are you sure?” J.B. asked.

I thought of Ramuell burning, molecule by molecule, dissolving before my eyes until the last of his essence was gone and the souls that were bound within him were released.

“I’m sure,” I replied grimly.

We crept carefully through the alley. I wasn’t sure where we were—Chicago looks pretty much the same when all you see are Dumpsters and the back sides of brick buildings. We had been flying over the north side but the fall had disoriented me.

“Where were you coming from, J.B.?” I whispered as we crept closer to the source of the smell. The odor had to be amazingly powerful to cut through the cold air.

“Drop-off, same as you,” he replied.

“I thought that a regional supervisor would get to delegate the scut work,” I teased.

J.B. shrugged. “The new midwestern supervisor wants us to do fieldwork. He wants us to stay in touch with our roots or something. Anyway, I saw you flying back and was trying to catch up when that . . . thing happened. How come you fell out of the sky? What happened to your wings?”