Black Night

Beezle fluttered up next to me. “I’m going to sleep in my nest tonight.”

“Okay,” I said, a little surprised. I’d thought that after my near-death experience he’d want to stay close to me.

He flew out the front window without another word, and I walked slowly down the hall to my own room. I shut the door in deference to Samiel and sat on my bed.

In the past week I’d lost Gabriel, lost Beezle, survived two attacks by Samiel, discovered the bodies of three wolves, found Beezle and Gabriel, killed a giant spider and a leviathan, lost my magic several times, totally screwed up my assignment as faerie ambassador but had averted an uprising in Lucifer’s kingdom, made a new enemy in Amarantha, been assaulted by my fiancé, lost part of my left hand, taken on the new responsibility of Samiel and defied all expectation and survived the horrors of the Maze.

I was tired.

I was also alone, and I hadn’t expected to be. I curled up on my bed in my bloodied and torn clothes and waited for the tears to come. But my eyes stayed dry all night long.

18

I MUST HAVE SLEPT FOR A WHILE, BECAUSE THE NEXT thing I knew my eyes were open and my heart was beating a thousand miles a minute. The digital clock on my bedside table showed me that it was past three in the morning.

I wondered if a nightmare had woken me from my sleep. I was sure that I would be carrying the events of the Maze around with me for quite a while.

But I didn’t remember a nightmare. Maybe a noise had woken me. Maybe Samiel had gotten up to use the bathroom and I’d registered the sound unconsciously. I wasn’t used to another living being besides Beezle in the house.

I listened for a moment, but didn’t hear anything. I tried to close my eyes again but now that I was awake my brain was whirling. I sat up and swung my legs over the edge of the bed. Lucifer’s sword winked at me. It was leaning in the corner of my bedroom next to my closet. I didn’t remember leaving it there, or in fact carrying it into the house at all.

A second later I saw a strange burst of green light outside. I stood up and went to the window. The light was coming from the alley behind my house. I couldn’t see its source from the angle that I stood at, but it flashed once, twice, three times. And it didn’t look like the kind of light that occurred naturally.

I didn’t relish the prospect of yet another paranormal encounter when I’d just gotten home from my big faerie adventure, but I needed to see what was going on in the alley. A lot of normal people lived in my neighborhood and as far as I knew I was the only person equipped to deal with supernatural weirdness.

“Maybe it’s just some witch’s teenager playing at spellcasting,” I mumbled to myself, but I didn’t really believe it.

I pulled on my boots and a sweatshirt, then started for my bedroom door. The sword winked at me again, and I picked it up. As before in the Maze, the snake on the hilt writhed reassuringly under my palm.

I opened the bedroom door quietly and peeked down the hallway. Samiel was a motionless lump under the blankets in the living room. Beezle was outside. Gabriel was downstairs.

I thought briefly of waking Gabriel to come with me, but our recent conversation suddenly put any request that I might make of him in a mistress/thrall light. I didn’t want him to think he had to come at my beck and call. So I left him alone, and went down the back stairs by myself, wincing every time the wood squeaked. I felt like I was a kid sneaking out of the house while my parents slept.

The new door eased open without a sound—thank you, Nathaniel—and I stepped onto the porch. The light was concentrated directly behind an eight-foot-high wooden fence that surrounds my property, and it was almost blinding now that I was right in front of it. I am constantly surprised by the fact that my neighbors never notice all the really obvious signs of magic generated around my house. It just goes to show that people are adept at seeing only what they want to see.

I swung the sword up, both hands wrapped around the hilt, and crept forward carefully through the yard. The dried and frost-tipped grass crunched under the soles of my boots. I sidled up to the fence and peeked through the slats.

There was a . . . thing in the alley. I don’t know how else to describe it. It was a monster, for sure, but like no monster I’d ever seen before. Its skin was a translucent greenish blue. I could see the play of muscle and bone underneath, the pulse of blood as it rushed through its veins. Its face was turned away from me but large batlike ears protruded from the back of its bare, oblong skull.

It squatted on elongated, froglike legs that ended in slender primate feet tipped with sharp claws. The curve of its spine was long as it bent over something on the ground. Wings nestled against its ribs, and the skin stretched over the wings showed the joints of bone where they connected.

The green light was coming from the creature’s body. I shifted, trying to get a better look at what the creature was doing. It was then that I saw the body the monster was eating.

All I could see was the top of a head, a yellow ponytail with streaks of gray, and the motorcycle boots that protruded from the other side. But that was enough for me to know that this was the other member of Wade’s pack that had been in Amarantha’s court.

And that meant that this creature was the thing that had been killing the wolves all along.

I pushed out my wings and flew over the fence, holding the sword high. I descended on the monster in a silent rush, intending to behead it before it realized I attacked.

Something betrayed me—a whisper of breath, the night air moving over my wings, or maybe just the instinct of prey and predator. An instant before I landed the monster turned, saw me, and leapt away down the alley.