Black City bw-5

by Christina Henry

  He paused on the stairs, panting. “You ask the question in a way that expects an answer from me. I have no possible explanation for any of the strange things that humans do.”

  “If Beezle were here, he would have something snappy to say,” I said, putting my arm around him to help him to the top of the stairs.

  “If Beezle were here, he would have stopped at the nearest pastry shop for a snack during the attack by the Agents,” Nathaniel said.

  “That was pretty good,” I said. “A little more practice and you’ll be up to sparring with my gargoyle in no time.”

  “I cannot wait.”

  His face was so serious as he said this that I burst out laughing. He smiled at me, a little half smile of satisfaction, and it almost stopped my breath. Nathaniel never smiled. He scowled; he frowned; he contemplated life in great seriousness. But he didn’t smile, and I don’t think I’d ever heard him laugh. Seeing him smile was like looking on the face of a different person.

  We limped along until we found the mid-level concourse that housed the aid station. A large orange first aid sign hung above a glass door. I yanked on the handle and found it locked.

  “Wait here for a second,” I said, letting Nathaniel go.

  He leaned against the wall, his pale eyes rimmed by circles of black, his blond hair sweaty and hanging in his face.

  I put my hand on the door and spoke the words. “I am the Hound of the Hunt, and no walls shall hide my quarry.”

  The wall became fluid beneath my touch, and I slipped through it. I had a moment to wonder when Lucifer was going to make me pay for this ability. So far it had been pretty useful to me but he hadn’t called upon me to use it.

  I unlocked the door and Nathaniel stumbled inside. I indicated that he should sit on the handy cot while I rummaged around for the necessary supplies. I returned to him with an armload of tape, gauze, disinfectant and painkiller.

  “Take off your shirt and coat,” I said.

  “I have always wished you would say that, but I was hoping it would be under different circumstances,” he muttered.

  “Wow, two jokes in one day,” I said. “Someone call Guinness.”

  “Why would you call a beer company to tell them that I had said something humorous?” He looked genuinely puzzled.

  I laughed. “I guess angels don’t worry too much about world records.”

  “The only records that matter for the fallen are Lord Lucifer’s,” Nathaniel said.

  I touched the lapel of his coat. “I’ve got to see how bad the damage is.”

  He nodded, and we carefully pulled the coat down his arm on the uninjured side. Nathaniel paused, his face contorted in pain.

  “Perhaps you should cut it off,” he said.

  “But we have nothing else to cover you. And it’s January out there,” I said. “We’re not going to be able to take the El home, you know?”

  “I only need to wear clothing as a concession to humans. The cold does not bother me,” he said.

  “If you say so,” I said doubtfully.

  “I would prefer to endure the cold than the excruciating pain of attempting to carefully remove the coat.”

  “Okay,” I said, sitting on the cot beside him. “Turn toward the wall.”

  Nathaniel turned so his back faced me. The torn right wing was gruesome. I delicately cut from the hem of his coat up the middle of his back, through the space between his wings, and then pulled the two flaps of cloth away.

  His white dress shirt was stuck to the middle of his back. He’d bled profusely, and then the blood had dried. In some places there were scabs that would be torn open as soon as I removed the shirt.

  “Nathaniel,” I said.

  “I know. Do it quickly.”

  I made the cut with the scissors from the tail of the shirt through the collar. I grabbed the two pieces of the shirt at the top, bit my lip, and pulled.

  Nathaniel only grunted as his skin was torn away. He drew the sleeves over his arms and off his wrists, dropping the remains of his shirt on the floor.

  I wiped my eyes with the back of my hand, took a deep breath and opened the bottle of disinfectant. “This isn’t going to get any better.”

  “Do not weep for me,” he said quietly, then hissed as I poured the solution into his wounds. “After all the pain I have caused, I deserve whatever harm may befall me.”

  I paused. “What happened to, ‘I was under orders, I didn’t have a choice, and I didn’t mean any of it anyway’?”

  “I kissed you,” he said simply. “When our magic entwined, I saw your heart. And I finally understood how you saw me, and why you held me in such contempt.”

  I applied gauze to the worst of the open wounds. There were several bullet holes in addition to the broken wing. “That’s probably the first time a kiss from me has ever had such a transformative effect,” I muttered. “And I never held you in contempt.”

  “You did,” Nathaniel said. “Your feelings for me were stronger than dislike from the beginning.”

  I thought back to the first moment I’d seen Nathaniel in my father’s court, golden and glorious and full of disdain.

  “You looked like an arrogant jerk. And it doesn’t make a woman think well of you when you say, ‘Hello, we just met, we’re getting married.’”

  “I was doing as—”

  “Azazel told you, I know. Nathaniel, what happened to the bullets? Are they inside you? I don’t want to patch up these holes now only to have to cut the bullets out later.”

  “My body rejected the bullets as part of the healing process,” he said.

  “Like Wolverine,” I said, cleaning and covering the bullet holes.

  “Whom?”

  “I could explain, but you probably still wouldn’t get it,” I said. “Nathaniel, just what exactly did you do for my father?”

  There was a long pause, and I wondered whether he would answer. I finished bandaging the bullet wounds and then contemplated my final task. I had thus far avoided looking too much at the mess that was his wing. I’d have to find some way to immobilize it until we could get him healed the angelic way.

  “I am not certain that my status will improve with you if you know precisely what I did for Azazel,” Nathaniel said carefully.

  “I know that you didn’t do anything good,” I said.

  I carefully touched the top part of the wing root, the part that had torn away. “I’ve got to move this closer to your back. I’m going to put it more or less in its proper place and tape it there.”

  I cut several long strips of tape to have at the ready.

  Nathaniel nodded. I shifted the wing toward his spine. The exposed muscle and arteries squelched. I turned my head away, gagging.

  “This is not a task for a pregnant woman,” Nathaniel said.

  His body had stiffened as I moved the wing into place, and his fists were clenched so hard that the veins in his arms bulged.

  “The only person available is a pregnant woman,” I said, breathing in through my nose and out through my mouth until the nausea passed. “If you want to talk about things a pregnant woman should or should not be doing—I probably shouldn’t be fighting demons or killing vampires, either. But there’s no choice. There’s no one in this city besides me who both cares enough and has the ability to fight.”

  I packed gauze around the wings as best I could and then started tacking on tape to hold it in place. Once I’d managed to fix the wing into the position I wanted it, I took a roll of tape and wound it diagonally from Nathaniel’s shoulder, over his back, under his rib and back up his chest to his shoulder again so that the tape looked like a sling. I repeated the action a few times until I was pretty sure the wing would stay in place.

  “Done,” I said finally.

  Nathaniel tried to stand, trembled, and sat down on the cot again. “Now that you have mended me, you must get home. I am too weak to travel at this moment.”

  “Do we have to have this discussion again?” I said. “I’m
not going.”

  “Madeline, I must sleep,” he said. “My power can be restored if I can simply rest. But it is too risky for you to stay. If the vampires discover us here, we are, as you might say, sitting ducks.”

  “And what will you be if you’re found here alone and sleeping? We’ve been here for a while and haven’t been discovered. If the vampires were approaching as quickly as you thought they were, then surely they would have passed by the place where we landed already.”

  “It seems very unsafe to make such an assumption,” Nathaniel said, or rather, mumbled. He was so tired that his words slurred together. His eyelids were almost closed, and all I could see was a slit of pale blue rimmed by white.

  “Go to sleep,” I said, pushing him down. “I’ll keep watch.”

  He was too exhausted to argue any further. His eyes were closed and he was breathing deeply a moment later.

  5

  I WATCHED NATHANIEL FOR A MOMENT, MY THOUGHTS troubled.

  I’d never expected what had happened when we put the veil over the hospital. I’d never considered the possibility that I’d be kissing Nathaniel at all, much less kissing him like I wanted that kiss to go somewhere.

  That might have been the aspect of the situation that bothered me the most. In that moment I had wanted Nathaniel so much I had forgotten about Gabriel entirely. I put my hand to my stomach, to the place where Gabriel’s child fluttered safe and sound inside me.

  Gabriel had been mine for such a brief time that it seemed like a dream, the dream of another woman in another life. Every day I woke up to a new reality, a new threat, a new enemy. It had not been long since Gabriel died, but it felt like eons had passed.

  I brushed Nathaniel’s sweaty hair out of his face. He was so deeply asleep that he didn’t even shift. I pulled my hand away, almost as disturbed by this newfound tenderness toward Nathaniel as I was by the lust I’d felt.

  I moved away from him and noticed a phone hanging on the wall. I eagerly picked up the handset, thinking to call in the cavalry, and found the line dead. Beezle had probably worn out his little thumbs trying to text my cell phone. I just prayed to the Morningstar that he hadn’t called J.B. My former boss tended to lose his mind when I was incommunicado.

  Thinking of J.B. made me feel almost as guilty as thinking about Gabriel. J.B. had offered to marry me, to make Gabriel’s son his own. J.B. had told me that he loved me, and I’d told him I would always love Gabriel.

  Which I would. But then I’d kissed Nathaniel, and everything had gotten mixed up in my head. Things were further complicated by the fact that whenever Nathaniel was kind to me, I saw Gabriel. Were my feelings for Nathaniel real, or was I projecting Gabriel on him?

  My baby moved around in my belly, and then my stomach growled. As usual, I was in the middle of a crisis with nothing to eat.

  Nathaniel slept soundly and the concourse was silent outside. I hunted around the aid station until I found a couple of energy bars that someone had stashed on a shelf. They had the approximate taste and consistency of chalk but I was too hungry to care.

  After I’d eaten I drew my sword and stood by the door. I passed the time by making a mental list of all the things I was going to eat when the vampire apocalypse was over and the restaurants reopened.

  A hamburger with blue cheese and mushrooms and a giant pile of waffle fries. Ann Sather cinnamon rolls. Pizza with peppers and mushrooms and onions and hot wings on the side. Toasted ravioli. Onion rings. Beezle would be in hog heaven. If I ate any kind of junk food, he interpreted that as default permission to gorge himself silly.

  The concourse got darker and darker as the afternoon passed. I wondered whether safety lights would automatically switch on at a certain time, or whether the convention center remained unlit when not in use. Out of curiosity I flicked the switch on the wall and realized the point was moot. The electricity didn’t seem to be working.

  Was the whole city out, or just this part of it? It was bad enough to contemplate vampires running loose in the daytime. The thought of a lightless night crawling with monsters was too horrible to think about.

  The day passed, and night fell, and Nathaniel slept on. I was half dozing on my feet, my shoulder leaning against the wall, when I saw something moving outside on the concourse. It was too dark and too far away for me to see clearly, but I could see enough to tell that it didn’t move like any human.

  I glanced back at Nathaniel. My first instinct was to investigate and possibly destroy without disturbing him. But if there was more than one creature or it was a protracted engagement, then we might end up separated. Nathaniel could die, sleeping and defenseless, while I was off playing Sherlock.

  So I backed slowly away from the door, praying my movement would not be detected by whatever was out there. I knelt at Nathaniel’s side and put my mouth close to his ear.

  “Nathaniel,” I whispered.

  His eyes opened immediately. “You have let me sleep too long. There is something near.”

  “Yes,” I said quietly.

  He sat up with much more vigor than he’d had before his nap and picked up his sword. In the darkness I noticed a phenomenon I had observed once before. Nathaniel was surrounded by a faint aura, a glow that I did not have because I was not a full-blood angel. He moved toward the door without making a sound.

  “Wait,” I said. “Can you hide your halo? Otherwise whatever is out there will see you as easily as they would a firefly.”

  Nathaniel paused for a moment. “It is likely that whatever is out there will be able to scent us, but you are correct. We should not advertise our presence. Do you feel that your power has returned to its former strength?”

  I shook my head. “I’ve probably got enough for a couple of nightfire blasts, but that’s about it. I need sleep and a lot more food before I’ll be back to normal.”

  Nathaniel nodded as if he’d expected this. “I will veil both of us; then we can investigate.”

  I felt the spell drop over me, and a moment later Nathaniel winked out of sight. The glass door to the aid station opened, and I eased out. The door closed behind me.

  I had no idea where Nathaniel was because of the veil, and the darkness was almost total. It belatedly occurred to me that this was a very stupid idea. I’d been worried about getting separated, and now we were.

  I slid as quietly as I could along the floor. Nathaniel could move as soundlessly as air when he chose, but I am not the ninja type. I gripped my sword in front of me, the blade raised high, ready to slash at anything that came near.

  I had only a second to swing when the monster came out of the darkness. There was a skittering noise, and then the gaping maw of the vampire appeared, grainy and blurred in the heavy darkness. I didn’t stop to think. I just let muscle memory do its job and take the vampire’s head off as it had so many times before.

  The whole episode lasted less than a minute, but my nerves were strung so tight that I stood there panting for a moment. Nathaniel spoke from behind me.

  “There are more in the building. I can hear them investigating.”

  “How many? Can you tell?” I whispered.

  “It seems like an exploratory party. Perhaps twenty. If they find anything of note, they will report back to the horde.”

  “Do you think they know this one is dead?” I asked.

  “Vampires generally cannot sense the death of one of their own unless there is a blood bond, such as that between a maker and his child. But we must assume that all of these vampires consumed Azazel’s serum, and we do not know what kind of effect that may have.”

  “Let’s just try to get out of here as quickly as we can,” I said. “And stay near me. I don’t want to lose you.”

  The aid station wasn’t far from the stairs at the entryway, so after a few moments of groping our way through the darkness we were back at the top of the escalators. I looked down the stairs.

  It was full dark, but we didn’t need light to detect the mass of vampires on the street out
side. Through the glass doors and high windows, we could see the horde moving almost as one giant animal, a tremendous shape writing in the darkness. We backed away from the stairs.

  “I don’t think we want to go that way,” I said.

  “Where are the other exits?” Nathaniel asked.

  “There’s another pedestrian walkway going over to the lakeside center,” I said. “Or we can try to get into the Metra tunnel and follow the tracks for a while, but the tracks terminate at Randolph and we’d be right in the epicenter of the horde. Plus, the tunnel goes away pretty quickly and we’d be out in the open.”

  “It does not seem wise to put ourselves in a position where we might be trapped in a tunnel,” Nathaniel said.

  “We have to take the same chance either way. If we go into the pedestrian bridge, we’ll have several feet where we have no way to escape if there are vamps ahead and behind. If we go into the Metra tunnel, we’ll be underground until it comes out of McCormick Place.”

  “And then we will be exposed.”

  I didn’t need to see Nathaniel’s face to know that he was brooding. I didn’t particularly like our choices—or our chances—either.

  I had no wings. Nathaniel’s wing was broken. My magic was burned out for the time being, and we had no way to call for help. Most annoyingly, I could sense that Lucifer was somewhere out of touch again. The snake tattoo on my right palm had been very quiet for some time now. I wondered, as always, where Lucifer went on these occasions. Puck had said that the Morningstar was going somewhere he should not. What secrets of the universe were closed off to a being as powerful as Lucifer?

  “It seems wisest to move toward the lake,” Nathaniel said finally, his quiet voice breaking my reverie. “The vampires appear to be avoiding the shoreline.”

  “Why?” I said. “Is there any truth to that old chestnut about vampires and running water?”

  “Obviously not, since they crossed the bridge over the Chicago River with ease,” he said. “But they do not like the lake, it seems. I observed that none of them came close to it as we flew over the city.”