Black Howl

Page 41

For the last time, I pressed my lips against his, and then I let them take him away.
I stood and watched Jude and Wade disappear into the alley with the body of my husband. I was still standing there, staring at the place they’d gone, when J.B. returned.
He landed a few feet away from me. We watched each other without speaking for a few moments.
“Did you know?” I asked.
“Maddy, I’m so sorry…” he began.
“Did you know?” I repeated. “You’re the regional supervisor. Every fated death in this city goes across your desk. Did you know that this was going to happen?”
He stared at me for a minute, then finally said, “Yes.”
It was like the blow had come down all over again, and for a few seconds I couldn’t breathe.
“How could you?” I shouted. “How could you not say anything, not do anything? You knew that Gabriel would die on this night, in my own backyard, and you stood by and let it happen?”
“You know the rules as well as I do,” J.B. said angrily. “We are duty bound not to interfere, no matter what the circumstances. What could you have done if I told you?”
“I wouldn’t have let Gabriel go through that thrice-bedamned portal first!” I screamed. “I would have gone through myself.”
“And left him grieving for you the way you’re grieving for him? Is that really a better option? Besides, there is nothing I can do once it was written down. You should know that better than anyone.”
“Always duty. Always Death,” I said, throwing Amarantha’s words back at him.
J.B.’s jaw tightened. “You should be grateful to me. I volunteered to take this one personally. Otherwise somebody else would have offered him the choice.”
“He didn’t need a choice!” I screamed. Everything that was holding me together was unraveling again. “He was supposed to stay with me! You shouldn’t have taken him to the Door at all!”
“Maddy,” J.B. said, his face shocked. “You can’t mean that. Every soul has the right to a choice.”
“He should have stayed with me,” I said, and my voice cracked. “He should have chosen me.”
J.B. closed the space between us, put his arms around me. All I could think was that there was something not quite right about his embrace. He wasn’t Gabriel.
After a few moments I pushed away. “Go home, J.B.”
“So that’s it?” he said. “After everything we’ve been through this week, all I get is a ‘go home, J.B.’?”
“I’m sorry I’m ungrateful,” I said dully. Ice was closing in on my heart, covering that beating sunstone, making it numb. “I’m sorry I killed your mother, and destroyed your family home. I’m sorry I made you risk your life in a fruitless venture in Azazel’s court that gained us nothing. I’m sorry.”
“Wade is going to bring the cubs in tomorrow,” J.B. said. “Will you be there?”
“Don’t count on me,” I said, and turned away.
He said nothing else. After a few moments I looked back. He was gone, and I was alone with a dark stain in the snow.
I went to bed, but I didn’t sleep. I couldn’t. The sheets smelled of Gabriel. His clothes were hanging in the closet. His spare dress shoes were underneath the chair in the hallway. There were two coffee cups drying in the dish rack.
I lay awake in bed, staring at the ceiling. I wanted to cry. Crying would be a release. But all I could think of was ice, and revenge.
When the sun came up Beezle appeared in the doorway. He hovered there, tentative, unsure of his welcome.
“J.B. called this morning,” Beezle said. “He said that Wade was bringing the cubs into the Agency.”
“Yeah, I know,” I said. I rolled to one side so that I wouldn’t have to see Beezle.
“Don’t you want to see if Chloe’s spell will restore their memories?” Beezle asked. “You were the one who found the cubs. You were the one who thought to bring the machines back. Without you, there would be no way to cure them.”
“Yeah,” I said. It was hard to remember why I had cared so much, why I had fought so hard for everything.
There was a flutter of wings and then I felt Beezle’s hands yanking me roughly to face him.
“Get up, Maddy,” Beezle said, and he smacked my cheek with his little hand.
I covered the place where he had hit, shocked.
“This is not you. You don’t lie down and go to sleep. You get up and fight.”
“That’s what Jude said, too.”
“Well, if that redneck werewolf can recognize it, then it must be true.”
I laughed involuntarily at his categorization of Jude as a “redneck werewolf”; then I stopped. It didn’t seem right to laugh.
Beezle looked at me tenderly. All the love that had bound us together for all the years of my life was there in his face. “Life goes on, Maddy. You know that better than anyone. It might be a cliché, but it’s true. You’re still alive. And Gabriel is alive inside you.”
My cell phone rang. I looked at the caller ID. It was Jude, and I knew what he would want from me.
I clicked on and without saying hello I said, “I’ll be there.”
“I knew you would,” he growled.
* * *
Since there were so many cubs, we couldn’t meet in Chloe’s underground laboratory. J.B. made special arrangements for Wade, Jude, and the mothers of all of the children to enter the Agency through the loading dock. They still had to be checked by security, though. No one was taking chances.
I waited outside the large conference room where Chloe had arranged all of the machines in a long row. When the pack came trooping down the hall I caught my breath. I didn’t know what to say to these women, to these mothers.
I didn’t know how to tell them how sorry I was that it was my father, my kin, who had torn their children’s minds away from them and left them broken.
I didn’t know how to tell them that this might not work, despite the fact that progress with the restored adults had been positive. Children’s brains were different. They were still developing. There could be permanent damage, even if Chloe did manage to restore their memories.
I felt the weight of all my failings crushing me as Wade strode up to me. He held hands with a formidable-looking African American woman who wore a denim vest over jeans and a flannel shirt, much like her husband. In her arms I recognized the small toddler I’d carried through the caves—their daughter.
“Madeline Black, this is my wife, Roxie Wade. Roxie, this is Madeline Black.”
I held my hand out to her, unsure if she would take it.
Her face crumpled suddenly and she threw her arm around me. The toddler was crushed between us as Roxie sobbed into my shoulder. I looked at Wade in panic.
He gently extracted their daughter from between the two of us. Roxie put her other arm around me and tried to speak through her tears.
“Th-th-th-thank…you…so…much,” she managed. “Thank you for bringing my baby back to me.”
“Uh. Of course,” I said. I didn’t know what to do with this woman. She shouldn’t be thanking me. She should be hitting me for bringing her daughter back in such a state.
Chloe peeked her head out of the room. “I’m ready.”
I patted Roxie’s back awkwardly. “Ma’am? Mrs. Wade? They’re ready for us now.”
“Y-y-yes. Of course.” She lifted her head and wiped her face, and then she smiled brilliantly. “I know this is going to work. I feel it in my bones.”
I wished I were as confident as she was, but I didn’t say so. I indicated that she should enter first, and I let everyone file in ahead of me. Jude and J.B. were last, at the end of the line. I tried to give them both a watery half smile but wasn’t sure I succeeded. They waited for me to go into the room before them. Jude squeezed my shoulder once before dropping his hand.
Chloe was talking to the mothers, determining which child should be positioned in which chair. The children were the same perfect little automatons that they had been in the woods after I’d started ordering them around.
“Wade has instructed the children to do exactly as their mothers say,” Jude whispered. “The power of the alpha.”
I looked at Wade, so strong and compassionate and wise. His pack was lucky to have an alpha like him. What happened in packs where the alpha held so much power and used it cruelly, to subjugate those beneath him?
I wondered briefly if that was the greater purpose for which Amarantha and Focalor had been holding Wade. They’d never tried to extract his memories. Perhaps Azazel had been working on a machine to draw on the power of the alpha, that all-powerful word. I regretted not destroying Azazel’s workshops when I’d had the chance.
I had discovered that I regretted a lot of things.
The children sat obediently in the chairs, and Chloe went down the line turning on the machines. As each cub’s eye was scanned by the laser, the child would go rigid. A few mothers stepped toward their children, as though wanting to pull them away.
“You have to wait,” I said, and they turned to look at me. “I know it’s hard. I know they look like they’re suffering. But we can’t stop the process once it’s begun.”
A couple of the mothers whimpered, but most of them took their cue from Roxie Wade, who nodded regally at me. She watched, unflinching, as her toddler stared into the eye of the camera.
Since some of the children were so young and had correspondingly short memory lives, the cubs did not reach the crisis moment all at the same time.
The first to cry out was Wade’s daughter, and that was the only time I thought Roxie would break.
“Mama!” the little girl shouted, and her voice was so plaintive that I almost ran to her myself.
“This is the hardest part,” I murmured like a mantra. “Don’t give in. Wait it out.”
Some of the other children also cried out for their mothers, and Chloe had to restrain one woman who would not listen to admonitions to wait.