Black Night

Page 2

We were about ten minutes from home when I saw it. A flash of green light somewhere on the city streets below, a pulse so large I was surprised that it didn’t wake up everyone in a four-block radius. Then the shock wave hit us.
Gabriel and I were thrown upward by a wave of energy that emanated from the pulse. I decided to relax instead of struggling against it, but as the magical energy inside the shock wave reached me, I cried out. There was malice in that magic, a sense of wrongness that chilled my heart.
The wave passed through me, but I was frozen by fear. I had felt something like this before, when Ramuell the nephilim had been released from his prison to hunt and kill. It was a sense that the natural order had been upended, that death stalked without plan or mercy.
But Ramuell was dead. I had killed him myself. How could this be happening again?
I thought all of this in an instant, but an instant of immobility in the air can kill you. I heard Gabriel’s anguished voice calling my name. I shook my head, realized that I was free-falling, my face turned toward the sky. I tried to flap my wings, to turn over and right myself, but my wings had disappeared. They do that, so that I can look like a normal human most of the time. They only appear when I need them for a magical reason, like when I’m carrying out my Agent duties.
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?”
“I don’t know,” I said slowly. “It was like that pulse kind of short-circuited my magic, and when that happened my wings disappeared.”
“That is dangerous,” said Gabriel. “If your enemies were to learn that such a thing could disable your abilities, even temporarily . . .”
He trailed off. I didn’t need him to elaborate. My enemies, which are many and mostly inherited from conflicts that Lucifer and my father, Azazel, created, would turn me into Korean barbecue in the blink of an eye if they thought I had a weakness. I’d recently discovered I was descended from Lucifer through my mother’s line, and I was not enjoying having another potentially fatal familial relationship.
“Let’s not worry about that right now,” I said brightly, trying not to think of my half brother, Antares, and his personal vendetta against me. Antares would be more than delighted to short-circuit my powers.
The alley came to a T-junction just as we passed out of the light of a streetlamp. It was pitch-black in both directions, the only light coming from the streets beyond. I wondered what happened to the rest of the streetlights.
The smell was nearly overwhelming now. It was something rotted and metallic, and there was a distinct scent of burned fur. Underneath it all was a trace of scorched cinnamon and sulfur—the smell that I associated with Ramuell.
I opened my palm and tried to create the same blue ball of flame that had scared away the vampire earlier. All that came out were a few blue sparks.
“I guess I’m still broken,” I said, and tried not to panic. I had no idea if the effects of the pulse were permanent. “Gabriel, can you?”
A moment later the alley was illuminated by nightfire. Gabriel is a more skilled practitioner than I, and so was able to send the ball of flame ahead of him instead of holding it in his hand. The light danced along down the right turn of the T-junction until I gasped. Gabriel raised the light up higher and turned up the illumination with a murmured word. J.B. covered his mouth beside me and made a retching noise.
It was difficult to make sense of what my eyes were seeing. There was blood—lots of blood, more blood than I thought could possibly be inside one human. And there were parts that were recognizable as human—a tibia, an ulna, a femur—all skinned but with small bits of flesh clinging to the bone. There was a torso that looked as though it had been through a shredder, and some scraps of cloth that might have been a flannel shirt.
But there was no head. And there was a hand that looked almost completely human save the fact that it was covered in fur.
“It’s a werewolf,” I said, trying not to gag.
“What could have done that to a werewolf?” Beezle asked.
“Another wolf?” J.B. said, speaking through his hand.
I shook my head. “There’s not usually that much disparity in wolf strength. Sure, the alpha and his lieutenants will be stronger than the other wolves, but not so much that one wolf could tear apart another like this. And where is the head?”
“More importantly, where is the Agent? This death wasn’t in my paperwork for the week,” J.B. said.
The implications were clear. If the death was not on file, then it was not meant to be. It was a death outside the natural order. And the last time there had been a death outside the natural order was when Ramuell had cut a swath through the innocent of this city.