Black City bw-5

by Christina Henry

  Nathaniel continued cycling through the channels. “Why do humans need so many useless programs?”

  “That’s a question I’ve been asking for years,” I said. “You should ask Beezle. This is his favorite time of day, programming-wise.”

  “Yes, I am familiar with the gargoyle’s junk TV obsession,” Nathaniel said dryly.

  “What did he make you watch?”

  “American Idol. I was unwilling to actually gouge my eyes out, but I strongly considered it many times.”

  I snorted. “You got off easy. You should see some of the other garbage he watches.”

  “No, thank you,” he replied, and then we both went silent as he finally found a channel with the words BREAKING NEWS in the top corner.

  As earlier, the shot was an aerial view of the Loop. Any smart reporters were staying away from on-the-ground coverage. This shot was better taken from above, in any case.

  It showed the Michigan Avenue bridge that ran over the Chicago River from East Wacker. The vampire horde, that ravenous seething mass, had pushed up to the river at all fronts. The Chicago River wrapped through the Loop in a lazy L curve from Lake Michigan and roughly followed the shape of Wacker Drive. The city authorities had set up sandbag walls on the northern and western sides of all the bridges. As an added precaution, the bridges had been raised.

  There was a female news anchor giving commentary, but I didn’t hear a word she said. Obviously the hope was to contain the vampires, but I wondered what was being done on the south side of the Loop. There was no natural geological feature at that end to keep the monsters in.

  It didn’t matter in any case. As we watched, the vampires drove a handful of human survivors before them. The people were screaming, desperate, and when they reached the bridges they howled for the police and soldiers on the other side to help them.

  Instead, the vampires surged from behind, overtaking them. And the soldiers fired into the crowd. I turned my head away.

  “They have no choice,” Nathaniel said. “Those people are all dead in any case, whether at the teeth of vampires or the bullets of humans.”

  “That doesn’t make it any easier for me to watch the government kill its own citizens,” I said.

  “You cannot save them,” he said.

  “Yeah, I know,” I said.

  “No,” he said, and turned me to face him. “I need you to understand this. You cannot save them, or most of the other people in the city, either. This is a hemorrhaging wound and you cannot staunch the bleeding.”

  I looked into his eyes, pale as winter, so very unlike Gabriel’s.

  “I can’t stand by. I have to do something,” I said.

  “Why not? Why do you need to sacrifice yourself in some Quixotic quest to save humanity?” He pointed to the TV. “This is what you want to preserve? Reality TV? Big Macs?”

  “It doesn’t matter if you hold us in contempt. It doesn’t matter if we eat junky food and watch junky TV. It doesn’t matter if we’re desperate, selfish or vain. It doesn’t matter if we’re loving, giving and modest. It doesn’t matter if we’re not perfect. Anyway, I’ve yet to meet an angel who is.”

  “You are talking as if you are one of them,” he said. “You are not. You are more than they are.”

  “No, I’m not,” I said. “I’m human. And I’m not going to stand by and watch my own kind be wiped from the planet.”

  Nathaniel turned back to the spectacle on the television screen. “You may not have a choice.”

  3

  THE NEWS HAD RETURNED FROM A COMMERCIAL break. Now the footage showed the surging vampires leaping over the raised bridges and assaulting the fortified roadblocks. The positions were quickly overwhelmed.

  Suddenly there was a massive explosion behind the sandbagged wall set up on Michigan Avenue. It wasn’t clear who had set the explosives but there was a tremendous ball of fire where the National Guard used to be.

  Flame whooshed through the crowd of vampires, and the eerie piercing wail that rose up was the sound of the death throes of monsters. The vamps that hadn’t yet leapt over the bridge paused for a moment as their brethren turned to ash.

  “Those soldiers sacrificed themselves for the greater good,” I said. “How can I do any less?”

  “Their sacrifice is meaningless,” Nathaniel snapped. “There are many more vampires than can be halted by a small explosion.”

  “But they tried.”

  “Is that what it is to be human? To try? To push, like Sisyphus, ever more fruitlessly at the boulder that will simply roll down the hill and over you again?”

  “That is part of being human,” I said. “To struggle, to succeed.”

  “What if you never succeed?”

  “You still try. You have to.”

  “I will never understand humans,” Nathaniel said. “It makes no sense to repeat the same behavior over and over when you know the outcome.”

  “But you don’t know the outcome,” I replied. “It’s why people play the same lottery numbers week after week, year after year. They’re hoping their luck will change.”

  “There is no such thing as luck. Only chance.”

  “Most people would have said that there’s no such thing as vampires, either, and yet here we are,” I said, gesturing to the television.

  “That is only because they did not know any better,” Nathaniel said.

  “Who’s to say that you don’t know any better, either? I know luck has saved my life plenty of times.”

  “You were saved by your own skills, your own wits, which are more prodigious than you give yourself credit for.”

  “Don’t let Beezle hear you say that. He thinks I just stumble around setting things on fire.”

  “Well, you do that as well,” Nathaniel allowed. “But stumbling around setting things on fire seems to be a key component of your skill set.”

  I would have laughed, except that at that moment the pix demon crashed through the ceiling and landed on my head.

  Its gelatinous body molded itself to my shoulders and head so that I couldn’t see. Clawed fingers raked up the side of my throat and blood spurted from the wounds.

  I reached up and grabbed the monster’s ankles and blasted electricity through my palms. The demon growled but held on tight.

  “Nathaniel,” I gurgled. I could feel the torn flaps of skin on my neck, could feel the hot flow of blood running under my shirt.

  There were sounds of a struggle, and the smell of ozone filled the air.

  “More,” Nathaniel grunted, and I knew I’d have to save myself. I was bleeding out too fast for Nathaniel to help.

  Nightfire didn’t seem to bother the pix much, nor electricity. Which left the most destructive tool in my limited arsenal.

  Everything burns.

  I pushed my power through my blood, through my heartstone, where it was lit by the heat of the sun. That spell poured through my palms and through the skin of the pix demon. It screeched and released its grip on me, falling to the floor and writhing as it burned from the inside out.

  I wasn’t that great at the healing spell, having performed it only once, so I slapped my burning hand on my own neck to cauterize the wound.

  This time I screeched, because the pain was agonizing. Sometimes I really wonder about my ability to think things through to their logical conclusion. It hurt like nothing I’d ever felt before, and the wound probably looked horrific, but after a moment there was no more flowing blood. I lurched around to see Nathaniel battling three demons.

  I stumbled forward, dizzy and still in pain, and latched on to the neck of the nearest pix. My burning hands blasted magic through its skin. Smoke poured from its mouth. The pix tried to break away from my grip but I held fast, pouring fire inside until the air filled with the stench of burning.

  Nathaniel was fighting with two other demons. The bodies of three others lay at his feet, their heads missing. He slashed out with his sword, keeping them at arm’s length, but his blasts of nightfire didn�
�t seem to do much more than annoy them.

  I could fix that.

  I was tired and woozy from blood loss, but I had enough magic left for one last push. I grabbed the nearest pix demon’s head and sent fire through my palms. Freed of the necessity of fending off two attackers at once, Nathaniel stepped forward and beheaded the final creature just as I dropped the smoking body of the other to the floor.

  We stood, both panting from exertion, and looked around at the mess. The beheaded demons had some gloppy blue stuff pouring from their severed necks. The pix that I had barbecued were still smoking slightly.

  And still no one on the floor had come running at the sound of the struggle. No patients gaped in the doorway; no security personnel wondered what we were doing. There was something wrong here. Something bigger than the pix, or even the invading vampires.

  Nathaniel moved toward me, and put his hand on my neck. The healing light of the sun flowed through the cauterized wound. “What did you do to yourself?” he murmured.

  “It was a field dressing,” I said.

  He kept his hand where it was for a moment, staring at the place where his fingers brushed my skin. “You made a mess of this. There will be another scar.”

  I touched his wrist, pulled his hand away. “What’s another scar?”

  He stared at me for a moment. It was so hard for me to know what he was thinking, to read his eyes. Gabriel had been so open to me.

  I took a deep breath, because every time I thought of Gabriel I saw him falling in the snow, surrounded by pooling blood.

  “There’s something wrong in this hospital,” I said. “We’ve been raising a ruckus all over the place and there have only been a couple of people moving around.”

  “The doctor, the security guard,” Nathaniel said. “You are right. This is a large facility. There should be more activity.”

  “There should be staff running around, if nothing else. And the only patient we’ve seen was being eaten by the pix,” I said. “Let’s check some of the other rooms and see what’s going on.”

  I stepped carefully over the pile of demon bodies. They were decomposing quickly into a mass of goo that looked a lot like blue gelatin.

  There was nobody in the hallway, no sounds at all. Now that I was aware of it, the silence seemed heavy with menace.

  Nathaniel poked his head into the patient room across the hall and I crowded behind him. There was an elderly woman sleeping in the bed, seemingly peacefully. Her chest rose and fell with each breath. We looked at each other and shrugged.

  I led the way to the next room, where we found another patient in an identical state of slumber. Then we went into the next room. And so on, until we’d checked the whole floor and discovered that every patient was sleeping as soundly as Beauty after she’d pricked her finger on the spindle.

  Along the way we found several nurses, doctors and orderlies, lying peacefully on the floor.

  “Someone put a spell on the building,” I said.

  Nathaniel nodded. “But it did not affect everyone. A large spell like this would have to be extremely powerful to catch every individual in its net.”

  “It’s pretty powerful regardless,” I said. “But who could have done it?”

  Nathaniel shook his head. “There are several individuals that have the ability to do this. Certain faeries, for example. Or any of the Grigori.”

  “But what motivation would any of the Grigori have for doing this?”

  “Perhaps someone else is working with the vampires in the wake of Azazel’s death,” Nathaniel said grimly.

  I’d been so preoccupied with the strangeness of the spell that I hadn’t thought through the implications. “Everyone here has been prepped like a lamb for the slaughter. Whoever did this made the hospital a cafeteria for vampires.”

  Nathaniel nodded. “Once the horde gets here, none of these people will survive.”

  I had faced some impossible odds since I discovered I was Azazel’s daughter. I’d fought some of the worst monsters imaginable. But I had never felt so helpless in the face of a threat before.

  “What can we do?” I said.

  Nathaniel shook his head. “There is nothing we can do.”

  “That’s unacceptable,” I said angrily.

  “We cannot undo the spell without knowing who cast it, or even what exactly they cast. If we tried to pull apart the magic without knowing its provenance, we could kill everyone by accident.”

  “We can’t leave these people unprotected,” I said, thinking hard. “What if we cast a protective spell over the sleeping spell? Like a shield, or a veil?”

  “You are talking about magic that requires a tremendous amount of force. We would have to combine our abilities, and even then I am not certain we would be able to do it.”

  “We have to try,” I said. “I can’t leave them like this.”

  “Even if we succeeded, we would likely use up our magic for some time. We would be left vulnerable to attack.”

  “You have a sword. I have a sword. They don’t,” I said, pointing at the slumbering patient.

  Nathaniel looked doubtful. “Lord Lucifer would not condone any course of action that might lead you to harm.”

  “Lucifer can stick it,” I said. “I’m not kneeling to anyone. I don’t know why we keep having this discussion over and over.”

  “I have been alive for hundreds of years, and in all of that time I have had a master. First my father, then Azazel. And always Lord Lucifer ruled over all.”

  “I’ve only been alive for a few decades, but I have never had a master. And I’m not about to start now.”

  “You would not yield to Azazel, either,” Nathaniel murmured. “It angered him so.”

  “Yeah, well, you know what I did to Azazel,” I said.

  “You would not be able to do such a thing to Lord Lucifer, and I advise you not to even think of it,” Nathaniel said seriously.

  “I won’t go after Lucifer if he doesn’t give me a reason to,” I said.

  But I hoped he wouldn’t give me a reason, because despite my bravado even I knew that it was very, very stupid to go one-on-one with Lucifer. I’d felt his power and it was a thing of tremendous force. I also knew that he had shown me only the smallest fraction of it.

  “Sometimes I wonder if you are trying to commit suicide,” Nathaniel said.

  “Sometimes I wonder that myself,” I said.

  “I am not joking,” Nathaniel said.

  “Neither am I.”

  There was a long pause after this, as I contemplated the truth of my statement and Nathaniel watched me with his frozen blue gaze. I didn’t want my baby to die. I wanted to protect him. But sometimes, especially when a fight didn’t seem to be going my way, a fleeting thought would say, If you just let go, you can be with Gabriel. You and the baby.

  “We’re off topic,” I said, wanting to transition away from the awkward moment. “I want to protect the hospital.”

  Nathaniel rubbed his forehead. “I must consider how to do this.”

  While Nathaniel came up with a plan, I thought deep thoughts about who could have cast the sleeping spell in the first place and, more important, why.

  My first thought was that Titania was in league with the vampires. Amarantha had been colluding with Azazel before she died, so there was a very real possibly that the queen of Faerie had picked up where her subordinate had left off. And when I was in Titania and Oberon’s court I’d thought that they were deliberately trying to harm me in order to provoke Lucifer.

  At the time it seemed insane for them to try to tick off the Morningstar, but if they were working with this army of vampires, perhaps they thought they had an advantage.

  My second thought was that one of the Grigori had taken up Azazel’s personal mission. Certainly any of the Grigori would be powerful enough to cast the sleeping spell, and presumably they would also be able to control the army of vampires.

  “But who’s the contact?” I murmured.

 
“Pardon?” Nathaniel said, frowning. He looked like he was trying to do intense mathematical calculations in his head.

  “I was just thinking. There has to be a vampire overlord or whatever, right? They’ve got a pretty rigid court system, as far as I know.”

  “They do,” Nathaniel acknowledged. “And their heads of court are kings and queens, like the Faerie.”

  “So they have little courts that are overseen by one big court?”

  Nathaniel nodded. “You are thinking that the vampire king had to know about this prior to the attack.”

  “If he’s got a good grip on his kingdom, then he should definitely have known about this. Is his court in Chicago?”

  Nathaniel shook his head. “No. He is based in New York.”

  “Isn’t it interesting?” I mused. “Lucifer’s court is in Los Angeles. The vampire king’s court is on the opposite coast. The high court of Faerie is in some dimension all its own. And yet all this trouble is here at my door.”

  “Lord Lucifer has made it very clear through both word and deed that he would like you to be his heir.”

  “So you’re saying that as long as Lucifer keeps going around talking me up, the other courts will swipe at me?”

  Nathaniel’s eyes were troubled. “You would be safer if you would accept Lord Lucifer’s offer.”

  “I don’t want to be his heir,” I said. “More important, I don’t want my child to be his heir.”

  “I do not know if you can resist for much longer. Your life is becoming more dangerous by the moment. And Lord Lucifer has a way of boxing you in before you realize the walls are there.”

  Emotion flickered across his face.

  And what did he do to you? I wondered.

  “Look, let’s just get these people as safe as we can so we can go home. I need to figure out some way to eliminate these vampires.”

  “I believe that we can put some form of protection over the hospital,” Nathaniel said. “But in order to do it correctly we will need to leave the building, which will put us at risk.”

  “Why will we need to leave?”

  “Because the conditions of the enchantment will prevent creatures of supernatural origin from entering. If we are inside when the magic is settled, we would be forcibly ejected by the spell.”