Black Lament
Page 9
Nathaniel silently produced a quarter and handed it to me.
“You know, the two of you need some help in the playful banter department. The quality of the conversation really goes down when Beezle’s not around.”
“We should argue with you for no productive reason in order to make you more comfortable?” Nathaniel asked.
Jude looked at me impassively. No help there.
“It’s like being with two stone sentinels,” I muttered.
I tossed the coin at the door. It hit the spell that covered the entrance. For a second I thought the magic was just a warning, or that it wasn’t working properly. The coin dropped toward the floor, and then suddenly it crumbled into ash.
“That’s not good,” I said.
“Kicking the door in isn’t an option, then,” Jude said.
“That was almost a joke,” I said. “Your delivery needs some work, though.”
We all stared at the door as if a solution would suddenly present itself. And then one did.
“Why do I keep forgetting about that?” I murmured.
I stepped forward and put my hand on the wall beside the door.
“What are you doing?” Jude asked.
“I am the Hound of the Hunt,” I said quietly, “and no walls can hide my quarry.”
The wall became fluid beneath my touch, and my hand passed through it.
“I’ll see if I can get the door open from the other side,” I said, and disappeared into the wall.
I emerged in a clean, bright room that could have been a chem lab at a university. Beakers and tubes filled with various mixtures sat on shelves. There was a long counter with a microscope at one end. On the opposite wall were several black three-ring binders.
I checked the impulse to immediately start going through the binders and instead turned back to the door. There was no obvious sign of a spell on this side—no handy “off” switch, and I didn’t think I’d be able to turn the knob with the padlock on the other side, anyway.
I stuck my head back through the wall. Jude and Nathaniel stood with their arms crossed, scowling at each other.
They turned to me simultaneously, starting to speak.
“I don’t want to know,” I said, cutting them off. “There are some binders in here that I want to go through, and I can’t see any obvious way to open the door. I’ll look through them and be out shortly.”
I ducked back into the room before either of them tried to speak again. I was pretty sure I knew what they were arguing about. Jude had probably questioned Nathaniel’s loyalty/bravery/masculinity and Nathaniel had gotten angry. Cue downward spiral of civility from there.
I grabbed one of the binders off the shelf at random and opened it. The pages were filled with equations and chemical notations. Well, it wouldn’t do me any good to look these over. I’d barely gotten through high school. Chloe might know what it was all about, though. She seemed scientifically minded.
I put the binder on the floor next to me and flipped through another one. More chemical jibber-jabber. This time I noticed that the sections were dated, and the binder I held was from two years ago. That was unhelpful. I wanted to know what Azazel was up to now, and I didn’t want to carry every single binder with me. Besides, I could always come back and get the others if I needed them later.
I flipped as quickly as I could through the binders, trying to find the most recent information. After several minutes I had compiled a stack of four binders that represented the last six months.
Whatever Azazel was experimenting on, he’d spent a lot of time on it recently. Several of the notations were followed by cryptic comments like “Poor tolerance” and “Donors ill.” I wondered who the “donors” were, what they were donating, and whether the donation was voluntary. Somehow I doubted it.
I carried the binders out into the hall. Jude and Nathaniel’s relationship had degraded further. Nathaniel’s right eye was bruising and his lip was bloody. He was sitting on the floor, sulking, near the entrance to the hallway. Jude stood by the door to the lab with a self-satisfied smile on his face despite the fact that the front of his vest was covered in nightfire burns.
I raised an eyebrow at him.
“You said you didn’t want to know,” he said, shrugging.
I thrust the stack of binders at him. “Find some convenient way to carry these while I look in the next lab.”
“Are we just going to stand around in the hallway while you explore?”
“Yes, unless you can find a way to get into the labs without disintegrating,” I retorted.
“The spell may not be on every door,” Jude pointed out.
I held out my hand. “Give me some pocket change, then.”
Jude fished out a couple of pennies and tossed one at the next door. The coin fell to the floor in one piece. The wolf gave me a pointed look.
“Okay, okay,” I said. “So we just need to get through the padlock, then. Although whatever’s in there is probably not that important if Azazel didn’t bother to enspell the door.”
Jude unceremoniously dropped the binders on the floor and waved me out of the way. I scooted away from the door as Jude turned his shoulder to one side and ran toward it.
There was the sound of splintering wood as the door cracked and came off its hinges. An ordinary human would never have the strength to do that. I grinned at Jude.
My smile faded almost immediately as we were hit by the smell. I gagged, bile rising in my throat. I tried to take deep breaths to calm down. If I puked in front of Jude and Nathaniel, they might suspect about the baby. I didn’t mind Jude knowing, but I wanted to keep it from Nathaniel for as long as possible.
I covered my mouth and nose with my sleeve and went to stand behind Jude. Nathaniel had gotten up during the ruckus and joined us.
The door hung lopsided, blocking most of the view but allowing that horrible rotting smell to leak into the hallway. Jude looked at me questioningly.
“We’ve got to see,” I said, my voice muffled by my coat.
He pushed the door and it fell through the opening and to the floor with a tremendous crash. And then I saw, and I wished I hadn’t.
5
THE THREE OF US FILED RELUCTANTLY INTO THE ROOM.
“I guess these are the ‘donors,’” I said bitterly.
The room stretched away before us, three times the length of the lab, and the remaining two doors that emptied into the hall were visible farther down along the wall.
The rest of the room was filled with cages. The cages were stacked floor to ceiling, and each one had a person inside it. A dead person.
“He treated them like lab monkeys,” Jude said, and I could hear the undercurrent of fury in his voice.
I walked slowly down the aisle between the cages. Azazel hadn’t discriminated in his choice of donors. There were men and women, boys and girls. Some of them were very old, some middle-aged, some of them so young that I had to turn away, sick at heart.
He’d left them here to die, slowly and painfully, while he’d fled. This was the work of the angel who had fathered me. This was the monster I had come from.
I whirled on Nathaniel, tears blurring my eyes. “Did you know about this?”
“No, I did not,” he said, his face troubled.
“How could you not know?” I asked. “You lived here. Whatever Azazel was doing, he could hardly have hidden the presence of dozens of prisoners from his right-hand man.”
“On my honor, I swear to you that I did not know,” Nathaniel insisted. “Whatever faults I may have, I would not have condoned this.”
“Your honor doesn’t mean a whole lot,” Jude growled.
“And you didn’t seem to mind when Azazel was capturing people to steal their memories,” I said. “How is this any different?”
I turned away from him, not wanting to hear any more excuses. Even if he didn’t know what was in the lab, I wasn’t certain Nathaniel would have objected. No matter how morally repugnant Azazel’s actions, Nathaniel’s favorite person was Nathaniel. Defying Azazel would have put his favorite person at risk.
I stared into the cage in front of me, automatically cataloging what I saw. The woman was in her mid-twenties, dressed for a night out at the clubs. Her makeup was smeared on her face and her once-neat manicure was torn. She had probably clawed at the bars of the cage, screaming until her voice was gone.
She lay on her stomach, head turned to the side, and I noticed a large bruise at her neck. I stepped closer, heedless of the stink and the rot, to look more carefully. There were two little puncture wounds inside the bruise.
“Vampires,” I breathed. “Check the others. See if they have bite marks.”
Jude and Nathaniel moved closer to the cages. I walked down the row, searching the bodies for evidence of vampires. Almost every corpse had at least one bite mark.
“They’ve all got them,” Jude said.
“So whatever Azazel was experimenting with, it involved some kind of chemical mixture, human blood and vampires,” I said. I thought about the cryptic notes in the binder. “Maybe he was concocting something that the prisoners ingested and it was then passed to the vampires in human blood.”
“Why?” Jude said. “And what?”
“I don’t know,” I said helplessly. “I hope Chloe can figure out what Azazel was making from the notebooks.”
Jude frowned. “That fruitcake who works at the Agency?”
“She’s a little eccentric,” I admitted. “But she was the one who figured out how to restore the stolen memories.”
Jude grunted, which was probably the highest praise Chloe would ever get from him. Jude was a man of few words.
“I do not understand,” Nathaniel said.
We both turned to look at him. He frowned at the body in the cage in front of him.
“What’s not to understand?” I asked.
“In order for these people to be so damaged, a vampire would have to be living on the premises. Lo… Azazel may have been able to explain away the presence of humans, but not vampires. Most angels cannot tolerate the presence of vampires.”
“You know, the two of you need some help in the playful banter department. The quality of the conversation really goes down when Beezle’s not around.”
“We should argue with you for no productive reason in order to make you more comfortable?” Nathaniel asked.
Jude looked at me impassively. No help there.
“It’s like being with two stone sentinels,” I muttered.
I tossed the coin at the door. It hit the spell that covered the entrance. For a second I thought the magic was just a warning, or that it wasn’t working properly. The coin dropped toward the floor, and then suddenly it crumbled into ash.
“That’s not good,” I said.
“Kicking the door in isn’t an option, then,” Jude said.
“That was almost a joke,” I said. “Your delivery needs some work, though.”
We all stared at the door as if a solution would suddenly present itself. And then one did.
“Why do I keep forgetting about that?” I murmured.
I stepped forward and put my hand on the wall beside the door.
“What are you doing?” Jude asked.
“I am the Hound of the Hunt,” I said quietly, “and no walls can hide my quarry.”
The wall became fluid beneath my touch, and my hand passed through it.
“I’ll see if I can get the door open from the other side,” I said, and disappeared into the wall.
I emerged in a clean, bright room that could have been a chem lab at a university. Beakers and tubes filled with various mixtures sat on shelves. There was a long counter with a microscope at one end. On the opposite wall were several black three-ring binders.
I checked the impulse to immediately start going through the binders and instead turned back to the door. There was no obvious sign of a spell on this side—no handy “off” switch, and I didn’t think I’d be able to turn the knob with the padlock on the other side, anyway.
I stuck my head back through the wall. Jude and Nathaniel stood with their arms crossed, scowling at each other.
They turned to me simultaneously, starting to speak.
“I don’t want to know,” I said, cutting them off. “There are some binders in here that I want to go through, and I can’t see any obvious way to open the door. I’ll look through them and be out shortly.”
I ducked back into the room before either of them tried to speak again. I was pretty sure I knew what they were arguing about. Jude had probably questioned Nathaniel’s loyalty/bravery/masculinity and Nathaniel had gotten angry. Cue downward spiral of civility from there.
I grabbed one of the binders off the shelf at random and opened it. The pages were filled with equations and chemical notations. Well, it wouldn’t do me any good to look these over. I’d barely gotten through high school. Chloe might know what it was all about, though. She seemed scientifically minded.
I put the binder on the floor next to me and flipped through another one. More chemical jibber-jabber. This time I noticed that the sections were dated, and the binder I held was from two years ago. That was unhelpful. I wanted to know what Azazel was up to now, and I didn’t want to carry every single binder with me. Besides, I could always come back and get the others if I needed them later.
I flipped as quickly as I could through the binders, trying to find the most recent information. After several minutes I had compiled a stack of four binders that represented the last six months.
Whatever Azazel was experimenting on, he’d spent a lot of time on it recently. Several of the notations were followed by cryptic comments like “Poor tolerance” and “Donors ill.” I wondered who the “donors” were, what they were donating, and whether the donation was voluntary. Somehow I doubted it.
I carried the binders out into the hall. Jude and Nathaniel’s relationship had degraded further. Nathaniel’s right eye was bruising and his lip was bloody. He was sitting on the floor, sulking, near the entrance to the hallway. Jude stood by the door to the lab with a self-satisfied smile on his face despite the fact that the front of his vest was covered in nightfire burns.
I raised an eyebrow at him.
“You said you didn’t want to know,” he said, shrugging.
I thrust the stack of binders at him. “Find some convenient way to carry these while I look in the next lab.”
“Are we just going to stand around in the hallway while you explore?”
“Yes, unless you can find a way to get into the labs without disintegrating,” I retorted.
“The spell may not be on every door,” Jude pointed out.
I held out my hand. “Give me some pocket change, then.”
Jude fished out a couple of pennies and tossed one at the next door. The coin fell to the floor in one piece. The wolf gave me a pointed look.
“Okay, okay,” I said. “So we just need to get through the padlock, then. Although whatever’s in there is probably not that important if Azazel didn’t bother to enspell the door.”
Jude unceremoniously dropped the binders on the floor and waved me out of the way. I scooted away from the door as Jude turned his shoulder to one side and ran toward it.
There was the sound of splintering wood as the door cracked and came off its hinges. An ordinary human would never have the strength to do that. I grinned at Jude.
My smile faded almost immediately as we were hit by the smell. I gagged, bile rising in my throat. I tried to take deep breaths to calm down. If I puked in front of Jude and Nathaniel, they might suspect about the baby. I didn’t mind Jude knowing, but I wanted to keep it from Nathaniel for as long as possible.
I covered my mouth and nose with my sleeve and went to stand behind Jude. Nathaniel had gotten up during the ruckus and joined us.
The door hung lopsided, blocking most of the view but allowing that horrible rotting smell to leak into the hallway. Jude looked at me questioningly.
“We’ve got to see,” I said, my voice muffled by my coat.
He pushed the door and it fell through the opening and to the floor with a tremendous crash. And then I saw, and I wished I hadn’t.
5
THE THREE OF US FILED RELUCTANTLY INTO THE ROOM.
“I guess these are the ‘donors,’” I said bitterly.
The room stretched away before us, three times the length of the lab, and the remaining two doors that emptied into the hall were visible farther down along the wall.
The rest of the room was filled with cages. The cages were stacked floor to ceiling, and each one had a person inside it. A dead person.
“He treated them like lab monkeys,” Jude said, and I could hear the undercurrent of fury in his voice.
I walked slowly down the aisle between the cages. Azazel hadn’t discriminated in his choice of donors. There were men and women, boys and girls. Some of them were very old, some middle-aged, some of them so young that I had to turn away, sick at heart.
He’d left them here to die, slowly and painfully, while he’d fled. This was the work of the angel who had fathered me. This was the monster I had come from.
I whirled on Nathaniel, tears blurring my eyes. “Did you know about this?”
“No, I did not,” he said, his face troubled.
“How could you not know?” I asked. “You lived here. Whatever Azazel was doing, he could hardly have hidden the presence of dozens of prisoners from his right-hand man.”
“On my honor, I swear to you that I did not know,” Nathaniel insisted. “Whatever faults I may have, I would not have condoned this.”
“Your honor doesn’t mean a whole lot,” Jude growled.
“And you didn’t seem to mind when Azazel was capturing people to steal their memories,” I said. “How is this any different?”
I turned away from him, not wanting to hear any more excuses. Even if he didn’t know what was in the lab, I wasn’t certain Nathaniel would have objected. No matter how morally repugnant Azazel’s actions, Nathaniel’s favorite person was Nathaniel. Defying Azazel would have put his favorite person at risk.
I stared into the cage in front of me, automatically cataloging what I saw. The woman was in her mid-twenties, dressed for a night out at the clubs. Her makeup was smeared on her face and her once-neat manicure was torn. She had probably clawed at the bars of the cage, screaming until her voice was gone.
She lay on her stomach, head turned to the side, and I noticed a large bruise at her neck. I stepped closer, heedless of the stink and the rot, to look more carefully. There were two little puncture wounds inside the bruise.
“Vampires,” I breathed. “Check the others. See if they have bite marks.”
Jude and Nathaniel moved closer to the cages. I walked down the row, searching the bodies for evidence of vampires. Almost every corpse had at least one bite mark.
“They’ve all got them,” Jude said.
“So whatever Azazel was experimenting with, it involved some kind of chemical mixture, human blood and vampires,” I said. I thought about the cryptic notes in the binder. “Maybe he was concocting something that the prisoners ingested and it was then passed to the vampires in human blood.”
“Why?” Jude said. “And what?”
“I don’t know,” I said helplessly. “I hope Chloe can figure out what Azazel was making from the notebooks.”
Jude frowned. “That fruitcake who works at the Agency?”
“She’s a little eccentric,” I admitted. “But she was the one who figured out how to restore the stolen memories.”
Jude grunted, which was probably the highest praise Chloe would ever get from him. Jude was a man of few words.
“I do not understand,” Nathaniel said.
We both turned to look at him. He frowned at the body in the cage in front of him.
“What’s not to understand?” I asked.
“In order for these people to be so damaged, a vampire would have to be living on the premises. Lo… Azazel may have been able to explain away the presence of humans, but not vampires. Most angels cannot tolerate the presence of vampires.”
