Black Howl

Page 9

“We can’t let the demons chase us down when we have twenty incapacitated kids,” I snapped. “I promise you, we will come back for Wade. Let’s just get the cubs to safety.”
While I argued with Jude, Beezle had managed to carry several of the camera-things up to the mouth of the tunnel. He looked breathless and out of sorts as he turned back to get another load. I flew next to him for a moment as I crossed the cavern to the others.
“You’d better have a good reason for this,” he grumbled.
“Look at it this way—you might actually burn a calorie or two,” I said sweetly.
He dipped down to the cavern floor, cursing up a storm, and I continued on to the other entrance. The three angels stood shoulder to shoulder, and all of them looked beleaguered. When I stepped around Nathaniel and peered down the mouth of the tunnel, I could see why.
The tunnel was packed from floor to ceiling with the same kind of green demons that had been monitoring the cubs. They hung from the ceiling, crawled along the walls and ran over the floor of the cave. They were packed so densely that they appeared to be one giant pulsing mass, a many-tentacled monster with a thousand burning eyes.
Gabriel, Samiel and Nathaniel were blasting as many of the demons as they could, and it was keeping the horde back—for the moment. But for every demon that was nightfired into oblivion, it seemed there were three more.
I blasted a few of them myself from underneath Nathaniel’s shoulder and then went around to Gabriel.
His face was white with strain and his teeth gritted from the effort of trying to hold back the tide.
“Let’s close off the tunnel,” I shouted.
He didn’t look away from his task, but his left eyebrow quirked upward. I knew he was thinking of Wade. So was I.
“We have to get the cubs away,” I said, and threw some nightfire at the approaching horde. “You, Samiel and Nathaniel keep at it while I take down the wall.”
He nodded grimly and passed my message down the line. I had been practicing my spellcasting over the last month or so, since it seemed that every time I turned around I had a new enemy. The presence of Lucifer’s mark had also awakened some interesting new abilities, although those powers didn’t yet come easily to my call.
I took careful aim at a portion of the rock ceiling that was about four feet beyond the leading edge of the demon mass; then I reached inside, to the place where the source of my magic flickered, and pushed it through my heartstone.
There was a surge in my blood, a painful electricity running through my veins. My body went stiff and I threw my hands out in front of me.
Blue lightning shot from the tips of my fingers and crashed into the target I had aimed at. The effect was immediate. Huge chunks of rock rained down in front of the demons. Cracks spread from the point of impact and more debris fell. The demons hissed angrily and backed away from the falling stones. Several of them were crushed, and my companions continued to blast nightfire at any demons foolish enough or lucky enough to make it past the falling rocks.
The air quickly filled with dust but the fallen rocks only partially blocked the tunnel. I didn’t want the demons to come surging over a pile of rock, so I sent another lightning blast at a visible fault line.
The effort of pushing the spell through a second time brought me to my knees. This happens to me a lot. The angelic part of me controls powers that were normally wielded by immortals. The human part of me fatigues in the face of those powers. I could probably be one of the strongest creatures in Lucifer’s realm were it not for that tiny beating stain of mortality.
The second lightning blast did the trick. Bigger chunks of rock fell as the whole tunnel became unstable. Gabriel grabbed me under the shoulders and dragged me backward as giant boulders crashed into the mouth of the tunnel. The sight and sound of the demons were completely obscured by the crash of falling rock.
I pushed to my feet, shaking Gabriel away. The four of us stood watching the tunnel disappear. I hoped I’d done the right thing and that I hadn’t just buried Wade under a gigantic pile of rubble.
Huge clouds of dust billowed out of the hole where the exit used to be. I approached the rock pile, which still bore the sparkling remnants of electricity from my lightning bolts. Tiny blue arcs shot all over the surface, and far on the other side of the profusion of rock I heard the howls of demons. And I could hear the shifting of stone. I had blocked the tunnel, but it was a temporary measure. The demons would come for us as soon as they cleared the way.
5
“LET’S GET OUT OF HERE BEFORE THAT PILE COMES tumbling down,” I said.
I flew toward the upper cavern entrance, the other three following closely behind me. Beezle was huffing up there with the last couple machines. I caught up to him and took the objects out of his claws. He immediately flew up to my shoulder and landed with a grunt.
“You’d better have a realllly good reason for this,” he repeated. “And you owe me doughnuts, big-time.”
“Yeah, yeah,” I said, landing in the cave.
There was no sign of Jude or the cubs, but I could hear the echoes of the kids screaming from farther down the tunnel. The pile of cameras lay haphazardly stacked close to the place where the ramp tipped down.
I pulled off my overcoat and made a makeshift bag in which to carry the cameras. My entourage came through the entrance and crowded around me in curiosity.
“Madeline, why are you wasting your time with these devices?” Nathaniel asked.
There was a funny note in his voice, an emotion that I couldn’t place that made me glance up at him. I didn’t see anything unusual. He was scowling at me, but that was pretty much his default expression when he wasn’t trying to make amends with me.
“Whatever is in these cameras—or whatever they are—is behind those weird ghosts that keep popping up all over the city,” I said, stuffing the last of the devices in my coat and tying the sleeves together into a handle. I double-knotted it to make sure that it would stay and stood up. “Let’s go.”
“What ghosts?” Nathaniel asked.
“I’ll explain later,” I said.
“Yes, you had better,” Gabriel said, peering back the way we came from. “Some of the rocks are starting to shift.”
“The horde is coming through,” I said.
As I ran down the long passageway toward Jude and the cubs, I retracted my wings so that I could maneuver more easily in the narrow space. I glanced behind me to make sure the others followed. They did, but all three were hunched and grimacing. Unlike Agents, angels can’t make their wings disappear at will.
We caught up to Jude very quickly. He was red-faced and sweaty and quite obviously at the end of his rope. The cubs still screamed, endlessly. Some of them were getting hoarse.
“If we’re lucky, they’ll lose their voices,” Beezle muttered.
“Hush,” I said, though I privately agreed. Nothing seemed to stop the children from wailing. They were hurting themselves, and, even worse right now, they were broadcasting our location to any monster who cared to find us.
Jude gave me a look that spoke his frustration eloquently. The cubs would not move forward unless herded. If left to their own devices, they would either stand still and scream or else walk into the wall over and over again like malfunctioning wind-ups.
“There are five of you and twenty kids,” Beezle said. “What now, genius?”
“We’ll carry the littlest ones,” I said. “We can herd the older cubs.”
From far behind us I heard the ominous crashing of rock.
“Hurry, hurry,” I said, scooping up the two smallest cubs.
It wasn’t easy juggling the kids and my makeshift bag, especially with Beezle firmly planted on my shoulder. I nudged two kids who looked like first-graders with my knees.
“Walk forward,” I said.
Miraculously, they obeyed. They still screamed, but they marched through the tunnel like little automatons. I looked at Beezle, who shrugged.
“Stop screaming,” I said loudly.
The cubs stopped abruptly, as if a switch had been thrown. The silence was eerie.
They all looked at me expectantly, except for the ones I had already told to walk forward. They had disappeared into the shadows ahead.
“Jude, go after those other two. You lead the column,” I said.
I looked at the cubs, then pointed at five of them in turn. “Walk forward.”
They obeyed, proceeding after their companions.
“Gabriel, you stay with them,” I said.
I ordered the other cubs forward in small groups with an angel walking behind like a grade-school chaperone. I handed one of the toddlers to Samiel, who nodded gravely at the little boy in his arms.
I shifted the little girl I held to my other arm so that I could carry the bag of cameras with my right hand. It’s not comfortable to grip anything for any length of time when you have only three fingers.
Lucifer’s sword banged uncomfortably on my back as I took up the rear position behind Samiel. The cub stared off into the distance over my shoulder. The bag of cameras smacked into my thigh and swung out again, over and over. Beezle’s weight on my shoulder felt like an anvil, especially when he started to snore.
“Gods above and below,” I muttered.
A zillion demons were after us, we were crammed into a tiny space with limited options for defense, we were trying to protect a bunch of helpless children, and my gargoyle goes to sleep right on schedule. No amount of peril would jeopardize Beezle’s naptime.
“On the upside, I might have lost a pound or two, what with all the stress and the walking and the not eating for hours.” I needed to find an upside before I cracked up completely.
We had just reached the portal entry when we heard the distant whoop of the triumphant demon horde. I pushed to the front of the column to open the portal, only to discover that the cubs in front were still trying to walk forward into the wall.
“Stop walking,” I ordered, and they immediately stopped. I frowned at Jude.
“I tried doing what you did, but they wouldn’t listen to me,” he growled.