Black City bw-5

by Christina Henry

  Therion continued speaking on the screen. “I understand if you think we, ahem, seemed aggressive when first we emerged. Many of us have not seen the sun for several centuries. It made us somewhat unrestrained.”

  He smiled again, and I said, “I want to hit that guy just on principle. He’s too smug to live.”

  Jude growled his assent. “I hate vampires anyway. It’s no skin off my back to kill as many of ’em as I can get.”

  Therion’s voice broke into our discussion. “However, we do not wish to live as monsters. We want to demonstrate that we can be reasonable. If you meet our demands, we will withdraw from the city and the citizenry may safely return. Then we can draw up a plan for a peaceful coexistence between vampires and humans.”

  “He’s lying,” I said. “If we give them what they want, they’ll have no motivation to withdraw. Why would they cede the city when they’ve already taken it?”

  Nobody answered me. Everyone knew the answer to that question.

  Therion spread his hands wide, and the camera panned backward, revealing the rest of the room. It was a cavernous stone hall, set with flickering torches. All around the room hung cages, and inside the cages were Agents. My heart stopped when I recognized them.

  “Oh, my god. J.B.,” I said, and fell to my knees. “J.B.”

  I crawled closer to the screen, searching the blur of faces for one face, the one person I needed to see. Therion spoke on, but nothing he said registered until I heard my name.

  “…Madeline Black, this message is for you. If you willingly give yourself in exchange, then all of these innocents,” Therion said, and the way he emphasized “innocents” let me know that the choice of Agents for this display was no accident, “will go free. If not, then I will slaughter all of them three days hence, at the hour of noon, and then my horde will move out of Chicago. Human authorities will not be able to stop us. We will spread like a cancer over this country, and every person will succumb. But if Madeline Black will voluntarily turn herself in at a Vampire Authority station before three days have passed, then all of these people will go free, and we will withdraw. This is Madeline Black.”

  Therion gestured, and an image appeared over the screen. It was a still image of me fighting the vampires in Daley Plaza. The photo had caught me in action, sword mid-swing, my other hand behind me, my overcoat billowing, my boots covered in blood.

  I touched my hair, which now brushed the tops of my shoulders. In the picture it was still cropped close to my head.

  “If you see this woman, or know her, I urge you to turn her in at your closest Vampire Authority station. Madeline Black, if you are listening, know that you can save millions of lives if you would simply come forward.”

  The camera focused on Therion’s face again, the humans in cages disappearing from the screen. “I’ll be waiting.”

  The picture went dark.

  8

  THE BROADCAST CUT BACK TO THE ANCHOR.

  “No!” I slammed my hand against the TV screen. “No! I didn’t see him. I couldn’t find him.”

  The news anchor started talking again. The still photo of me was up in the corner of the picture. Underneath the photo, in bright yellow letters, were the words, “Who is Madeline Black?”

  “Shut the TV off,” Jude said.

  “Maybe they’ll show the message again,” I said, my eyes glued to the screen, willing the newscaster to show me that precious few seconds again so that I could see whether J.B. was there, whether J.B. had been captured.

  “Shut it off,” Jude repeated.

  I felt his hands on my shoulders, prying me away from the screen. “J.B.,” I said.

  Jude turned me to face him. “You don’t know that he’s there.”

  “I can’t leave any of them there, but especially not him,” I said.

  “You cannot be considering acquiescing to Therion’s demands,” Nathaniel said. “You said yourself that if the vampires had what they wanted, then they would have no motivation to withdraw.”

  “That was before I found out they were holding Agents hostage,” I said. “And what in the name of the Morningstar is a Vampire Authority station?”

  Samiel reentered the room carrying a plate with scrambled eggs, bacon and toast. I sat on the couch next to Chloe, who looked at my plate and then at Samiel. She blinked her eyes once.

  I’ll make more, he signed, and went back to the kitchen.

  “So, yeah, Vampire Authority station,” Chloe said. “A lot has changed while you were passed out.”

  “Like what?” I said through a mouthful of eggs. “Has Therion established some kind of fascist vampire state?”

  “Actually, you’re not far off,” Chloe said. “The day you came home, all of the vampires suddenly stopped rampaging all over the place.”

  “Half of them disappeared off the streets altogether, and the other half started marching in the streets in military order,” Jude said. “Then they went building to building collecting human stragglers and rounding them up for containment.”

  “Containment?” I said, scraping my fork against my plate and realizing I’d already inhaled everything on it.

  “Camps,” Jude said. “They’ve got hundreds of people penned up just west of the Loop in the parking lots around the United Center.”

  “On the second day the flyers appeared,” Chloe said. She grabbed a piece of paper from the end table and handed it to me.

  It would have been comical if we weren’t in such deadly circumstance. The vamps had adopted the CTA’s “If you see something, say something” motto. It was emblazoned in large letters at the top of the page. Underneath the motto it read, “The time has come to restore civil order to this city. If you believe that you have seen a crime being committed, we urge you to report to your nearest Vampire Authority station. The personnel at these stations are there for you. The stations are conveniently located approximately every half mile throughout the city.”

  At the bottom in bold letters it read, “TOGETHER WE CAN RESTORE ORDER TO CHICAGO.”

  “I notice that they have neglected to mention they were the ones to disrupt the peace in the first place,” I said, tossing the flyer to the side in disgust. “Do you know if people are buying this bullshit?”

  “I think some of them are,” Jude said. “People are scared. They don’t understand what’s going on. If they think that turning looters in will save their families, then they will do it.”

  “Stupid,” I said. “They need to get off the grid, not draw attention to themselves.”

  “Then today there was this message,” Chloe said, gesturing to the TV. “The major networks have been broadcasting it every hour or so. Along with plenty of speculation about who you are and why the vampires are so interested in you.”

  “They can speculate. I hope they enjoy themselves,” I said, thinking. “They laid the groundwork for that message pretty neatly. Everyone in Chicago is going to be looking for me to turn me in, especially if they think the vamps will leave once they have me.”

  I had a lot of problems to solve, but one that was more pressing than the others. “I need to get in touch with J.B. Are the phones working?”

  “No,” Beezle said. “The electricity only came back on yesterday. The vamps must have turned the power back on just to make sure Therion’s message was broadcast.”

  “I need to know if the vampires have him or not,” I said.

  “Why? You’re only going to do something foolish to save those Agents from Therion anyway,” Beezle said. “What difference does it make if J.B.’s there or not?”

  “Because I need to know if he’s safe,” I said.

  “I don’t think anybody is safe anymore. The rules have changed,” Beezle said.

  “This is not really the time for a philosophical discussion,” I said.

  “I’ll go,” Jude said. “I can check his home and the Agency and find out if he’s been taken or not.”

  “No,” I said. “We don’t need anyone else roaming th
e city out of communication.”

  “Yeah,” Beezle said, looking pointedly at me. “When members of the group get separated, bad things happen.”

  I knew what he was referring to, and was careful not to look at Nathaniel. I wasn’t going to rise to Beezle’s baiting.

  “I can move through the streets as a wolf much more quickly and quietly than the rest of you,” Jude argued. “If I find J.B., I’ll bring him back here. If I don’t, then I’ll see if I can discover what happened to him.”

  “I don’t like it,” I said. “If something happened to you, we’d have no way of knowing. If you want to go get J.B., then I’m going with you.”

  “No, you’re not,” said everyone in the room.

  “I’d like to see any of you stop me,” I said.

  “Shall we put it to the test?” Nathaniel asked. “Perhaps one of us would be unable to restrain you, but I think all of us could. You’ve been through an ordeal. You’re not to go haring off on another mission.”

  “I don’t know if you’ve looked at yourself in the mirror today, but you look like death warmed over,” Chloe said.

  “And you would only be an encumbrance,” Jude said brutally. “You can’t run as fast as I can. You can’t fly.”

  “I can blast a truckload of vampires from here to eternity,” I snapped.

  “Nobody is going to let you out that door,” Beezle said. “Besides, you need to stay home and figure out how to defeat the vampires so I can get takeout again.”

  “If the city is restored, I doubt that most people will consider delivery of hot wings to be a priority,” I said.

  “But the sooner the vampires are gone, the sooner food delivery can resume.”

  I put my knuckles to my forehead and rubbed the place between my eyes where a headache was forming. Samiel came out of the hallway carrying several dishes of food. He loaded them up on the dining room table and went back into the kitchen again.

  Beezle and Chloe sprang from their seats and settled in at the table before the rest of us could move an inch. Samiel reentered with a plate of bacon. He did not appear to be in the least surprised to see Chloe and Beezle shoveling food on their plates like they hadn’t eaten for twenty years.

  I figured it was easier to just make enough for everybody, Samiel signed. Plus, I never know how much she’s going to eat.

  “Where did all the food come from?” I asked. “I know my kitchen is not that well stocked.”

  “Sam and me went to Costco when we got back from the hospital,” Jude said.

  “It was open?” I asked in amazement.

  “No, it was locked up tight. But we broke in and got some stuff we needed,” Jude said, then saw the look on my face. “We left money by the register; don’t worry. And we made sure that no one else would be able to get in and loot the place.”

  “I don’t even want to know,” I said.

  Samiel was watching Chloe, who was hunched over her plate. I don’t know where she puts it, really.

  “It takes a lot of food to fuel this brain, pal,” Chloe said.

  She’d never looked up, so I have no idea how she knew what Samiel had said. From Samiel’s wide eyes I could tell he didn’t know how she did it, either.

  Jude and Nathaniel had joined the others at the table. They were both filling their plates rapidly, although with slightly more decorum than the other two.

  “Come on, eat,” Beezle said. “I think you lost another ten pounds on your little adventure. Plus, you’ve got the brain trust here—such as it is. You can pool your thoughts on the defeat of Therion the Smug.”

  I sat at the head of the table, pulled a plate over and started loading up before the food disappeared. “The first order of the day is to find out where J.B. is.”

  “I told you I could do that,” Jude said.

  “And I told you I’m not sold on that plan,” I said.

  “If you would think logically instead of emotionally, you would see that what he’s saying makes sense,” Chloe said.

  “If you weren’t a chick, I’d punch you in the face for that. What, you think that just because I’m pregnant I’m all emotional?”

  “I didn’t say that,” Chloe said mildly. “I just said you were thinking emotionally. And if you hit me in the face, I’d hit you right back. Not that that it would do me any good, really. People who hit you tend to die screaming in little pieces.”

  All the men at the table watched this exchange with the uncomfortable expressions of males who do not want to get in between two women. Even Beezle kept his head down and his mouth shut, although that may have been because he’d put about six slices of bacon in his craw.

  “I wouldn’t kill you just because you punched me,” I said, insulted. “I’m not a monster.”

  “Are you sure about that?” Chloe said. “Because you seem to be a ‘smash first, ask questions later’ kind of person.”

  “Not everyone who has fought me has come to their mortal end.”

  “Oh, yeah? Name one.”

  “I have fought with Madeline and I’m not dead,” Nathaniel said.

  “From what I understand, that’s not for lack of trying.”

  Samiel rapped the table with his knuckles. She didn’t kill me even though I cut half of her hand off.

  His eyes automatically slid to the digits in question. I saw them register surprise. Your hand…

  “Just got around to that, did you?” Beezle muttered.

  “When did that happen?” Jude asked. “And how?”

  “It happened sometime after we put the veil over the hospital. As for how, I have no idea. They were just suddenly there again.”

  Jude looked from Nathaniel to me with suspicion. “Just what was involved with this spell, anyway? Because you’ve smelled different ever since you got back,” he said, addressing Nathaniel.

  I took a moment to be grateful for the fact that Jude had never met Puck; otherwise he would have made the connection immediately.

  “Can we refocus, please?” I said loudly. “Whether or not I am a monster can be debated at a different time, as can the consequences of the protective spell.”

  Although I hoped to never talk about the circumstances of the spell with anyone. It would do none of them good to know that I had tried to climb inside Nathaniel in midair.

  Jude pushed back from the table, his plate cleaned. “I will look for J.B. and return within a day.”

  “We didn’t settle that,” I said.

  “There is no point in going around in circles only to come to the same conclusion,” Jude said steadily.

  “Wade will kill me if anything happens to you.”

  “Wade knows well the risk I have taken in staying here.”

  “I wouldn’t be too happy, either.”

  “Madeline Black, I have been alive since the time of the Romans. I can handle a few vampires.”

  “Everything can die,” I said softly, and we all knew who I was thinking about.

  “But I won’t,” Jude said.

  You can’t make that promise. I took a deep breath, tried to think with my brain instead of my heart.

  “Okay,” I said, hoping I wasn’t making a decision I would regret. “Okay. But don’t bother checking his condo. I can guarantee that J.B.’s been sleeping at the office since all this started.”

  “That may have protected him, then,” Nathaniel said. “Does not the Agency have wards to keep out vampires?”

  “Yes,” I said. “But if he was out on a soul pickup, or if he decided to fight the vamps against orders…”

  “Or if the vampires brought in a witch to break the wards,” Beezle said.

  “A witch,” I said, looking at Nathaniel. “A witch could have put all the patients in the hospital under that sleeping spell.”

  “Another player?” Chloe said. “How big is this game?”

  “It’s not a game.”

  “It is to Therion,” Chloe said. “And probably to Lucifer, too.”

  She was right, but it
really went against the grain for me to admit anyone was right but me.

  “I’ll be back within a day,” Jude promised, and he transformed into a wolf, his clothing falling to the floor.

  I walked him to the front door, opened it, and followed him downstairs to do the same for the external doors. We emerged into the cold on the front porch.

  It had snowed again in the last couple of days. The streets were unplowed, the sidewalks unshoveled. Jude nudged the palm of my hand with his nose.

  I looked down at him steadily. “You come back in one piece, you understand?”

  Jude barked once. He took off running. A moment later all that was left of him was fresh paw prints in the snow. I stayed there for a minute, shivering in the cold. Then I went back upstairs, now wondering whether I would lose two friends to this folly.

  Beezle and Chloe had demolished pretty much every morsel on the table, and my plate was missing.

  I put yours in the kitchen, Samiel signed. It seemed safer. I’ll get it.

  He rose, clearing the empty plates away. Nathaniel helped Samiel carry the empty dishes, and I realized that Nathaniel really had changed. The old Nathaniel would never have done “the work of a servant.”

  Had he been changing all along, or was this another side effect of the spell? Or—and this was much more disturbing—was he just trying to be what he thought I wanted?

  Samiel returned with my plate, the food covered by another dish so it would stay warm. Chloe looked expectantly at me as I uncovered the meal.

  “Forget it,” I said.

  She looked slightly disappointed, but not surprised.

  Beezle had already retired to his favorite pillow on the couch. He sprawled on his back in a sunbeam, his belly at least two times its normal size. His eyes were closed.

  “You look like you swallowed a basketball,” I said.

  Beezle belched in response.

  There was nothing to do except wait. And wonder.

  So that was what we did. Chloe convinced me to play UNO with her, and Beezle and Samiel joined in. Nathaniel watched us like he was observing alien life on another planet.