Black City bw-5

by Christina Henry

  I could feel them in my head, all of them, thousands upon thousands of vampires. They emerged from buildings and sewers. They abandoned their posts at the human encampment, released victims they had been in the midst of torturing. They surged toward me, like a great, black wave.

  There was one I searched for among the many, one that I did not feel.

  Therion. He was smart enough to have realized that any gift from a fallen angel came with a price. He hadn’t taken the serum.

  A moment later, I did feel his presence. But not the way I thought I would.

  Therion’s power snaked along the mindless rows of marching vampires, making them pause, making them turn back to their master.

  “No,” I said, and drew them toward me again, pushing more power into my spell.

  Therion tugged back, trying to re-exert his influence over the horde. I sensed some of them waking up from my compulsion, turning back to him.

  “No,” I snarled, and this time I really put some force into it. I sent a pulse of magic through the original spell, and shot it inside Therion’s.

  The vampire king faltered, choking on my magic. I sensed him drawing away. His minions continued on toward me.

  I smiled as the vampires marched as one body, without mind, toward me, toward their doom.

  16

  I OPENED MY EYES AS THE FIRST OF THE VAMPIRES came within reach of Soldier Field. I used my power to open all of the gates. The vampires spilled inside, moving inexorably toward me.

  They entered the stadium and filed into the seats in an orderly fashion, first filling up the bottom rows and gradually moving toward the top.

  “Are you making them do that?” Nathaniel asked.

  “Yes,” I said. I couldn’t have a long conversation at the moment. It was taking a lot of effort to hold on to so many vampires.

  “I cannot believe you have such a fine measure of control over them,” Nathaniel said. “You could make them do anything you wanted. You could make them your own army.”

  I didn’t care for the speculative tone in his voice, which sounded a little too much like the old Nathaniel for my liking.

  “I don’t want my own army,” I said. “And it’s not easy to do this, you know. It would be exhausting to keep them all under this kind of control forever.”

  “Mmm,” he said.

  I didn’t know whether to interpret his “mmm” as an “I understand, just a thought” kind of noise or an “I still think having a vampire army is a good idea and we’ll revisit this later” kind of noise. No matter what it meant, I wasn’t going to change my mind. Nothing on this earth would let me allow these vampires to live after what they had done to my city.

  I don’t know how long we stood there. The tide of vampires swelled, then trickled, and finally stopped.

  All of the vampires sat or stood inside Soldier Field. They had crowded into the aisles and spilled over onto the field. They had pushed within ten yards of where Nathaniel and I stood. Now they all waited, standing eerily still and watching me without blinking.

  It should have been noisy in my head, with so many minds connected to mine, but it wasn’t. In this state the vampires had no thoughts of their own. It was like being bound to thousands of empty balloons.

  “Let’s go up,” I said to Nathaniel.

  We rose above the field, and as we did the sun broke through the storm clouds for a moment. My wings were illuminated by the sun. All of the vampires followed me with their eyes, their heads tilting back in perfect unison.

  “Therion,” I called, feeling along the line of energy between us for the remnants of his magic.

  I gathered all my power to me. It felt endless, a vast reservoir that had always been there without my being able to access it. Until now.

  I sensed Therion turning toward me, his cautious attention.

  “You’d better run,” I said.

  I let the light of every sun in the universe shine through me. No serum of Azazel’s could withstand that kind of power.

  The vampires didn’t even throw up their arms to protect themselves. They just stood there, thousands and thousands of monsters of the night, entranced by the blaze of light that poured from me. Then they were gone. Just gone. No flaking bodies, no ash, not even a smudge of black where they had stood.

  They were gone. Forever. And Therion was afraid.

  “I’m coming for you next, rat,” I said.

  “Madeline,” Nathaniel said urgently.

  “What?” I said, lowering the blaze.

  I looked at the spot where Nathaniel was pointing. Several news helicopters hung in the air just past the Field Museum, far enough away to avoid getting blasted but close enough to have gotten quite the eyeful. I hadn’t even heard the sound of the rotors. I’d been so focused on maintaining control of the vampires that I hadn’t seen or heard anything except them.

  For a second, a very brief second, I considered just blasting the helicopters out of the air. That would take care of that problem.

  Then I remembered that I was not Lucifer or Puck or Therion. I did not swipe at humans just because they annoyed me. And it was very likely that the newscast had been a live feed anyway. So blowing up the helicopters wouldn’t solve anything. The video of me destroying the vampires would be all over the place anyway, no matter how much I would have preferred anonymity.

  And I wasn’t a monster. I wasn’t.

  “What do you think?” I said to Nathaniel. “Should we just make a run for it, or should I fly up and ask if they want an interview?”

  “They will probably try to knock you out of the sky with one of the helicopters if you approach them,” Nathaniel said.

  “Veil up, then,” I said, and winked out of sight.

  Nathaniel followed suit. Interestingly, I could now see a faint outline of him when he was under the veil. Handy. It meant that I wouldn’t lose him, even when we were both invisible. However, to the humans in the news copters it would seem as if we had disappeared in midair.

  He tilted his head to the side. “I can see you.”

  “Like a ghost, right? Sort of see-through?” I said. “I can see you, too.”

  “What is next on your checklist?” Nathaniel said as we glided over Columbus Drive and then continued north.

  “Therion,” I said. “I want to know who is working with him now.”

  I sent out a thread of power, looking for Therion’s signature. I noticed several creatures fleeing through the streets of Chicago as we flew over. Word got out fast when there was a bigger player in town.

  “Those are demons, right?” I said to Nathaniel.

  Nathaniel looked down. “Yes.”

  “Is there any such thing as a good demon?” I asked.

  “I have never met one,” Nathaniel said. “Why?”

  “I’ve got a lot of excess rage to get rid of,” I said, blasting one of the demons. It went up in flames in the middle of Michigan Avenue, right in front of the Art Institute. “It was a little anticlimactic, scorching all of the vampires in one shot.”

  The other demons tried scuttling out of sight, but they were too slow. A moment later they were ablaze.

  “Madeline,” Nathaniel said, grabbing my wrist before I set anything else on fire. “Stop. This is not like you. You do not burn ants with a magnifying glass.”

  “Why not?” I said. “I have the powers of a god, and nothing good has ever come from a demon. You said so yourself. I’m just saving myself the trouble of having to hunt them down at a later date.”

  “They were leaving Chicago,” Nathaniel said.

  “So that they can go and harm someone else in some other city,” I said fiercely, yanking my hand away. “When does it end, Nathaniel? When is it okay for us to take the fight to them? Why do we always have to be on the defensive, waiting for them to kill somebody, or hundreds of somebodies, first before we’ll do something about it?”

  “Do not start crossing those lines unless you want to live in Lucifer’s kingdom,” Nathaniel sai
d.

  I heard Gabriel’s voice in my ear, from long ago and far away, saying, Lord Lucifer has a way of making choices seem gray.

  And I heard Beezle, too, saying, Dark side.

  Was I crossing the line by taking out a few demons just because they’d never done anything to me directly? Or was I just ridding the world of some vermin?

  “I thought you wanted to find Therion,” Nathaniel said.

  “I do,” I said.

  “The longer you spend toying with these creatures, the more likely it is that he will escape, and then you will never discover the identity of his cohort,” Nathaniel said.

  “Fine,” I said. I felt like a chastised child, and I sulked as we flew along. I was still tracing the signature of Therion’s power through the city.

  As we passed over Daley Plaza I felt the tug of my trace pulling me downward. I should have known he would be here, where it had all started.

  I landed in front of the Picasso statue. The plaza looked like the war zone it had been a few days earlier. Everywhere I turned there were coffee cups, sandwich wrappers, coiled scarves and lost mittens, open briefcases. Blood. Lots and lots of blood.

  I stood still for a moment, sending my senses outward, looking for the source of the signature I had traced.

  “There,” I said, pointing toward the Washington Blue Line stop. “He’s underground, and moving fast. He’s using the subway tunnels.”

  Nathaniel looked at my shiny new wings. “Those won’t be of much used to us belowground. And fire in a close space is a dangerous prospect.”

  “I know,” I said, drawing my sword. “Don’t worry. I know how to behead a vampire.”

  We approached the stairs that led into the station. I sent out a little pulse to make sure that nothing waited for us at the bottom of the steps.

  There was nothing there. I stepped onto the first stair. Nathaniel tried to object, as usual.

  “Madeline, let me…”

  “I just barbecued a stadium full of vampires and you’re still trying to make me walk behind you? What’s next, foot binding?” I said, and jogged down the stairs before he could do anything about it.

  I heard him muttering something about chivalry and modern women but I didn’t ask for clarification.

  We entered the station. The vending box for fare cards had been knocked to the floor, and two of the turnstiles had been torn out.

  The splattered brains of the former attendant had dried on the window of the CTA personnel’s box.

  I moved cautiously through the station to the stairs that led down to the platform. I sent another pulse of power out, and this time I didn’t detect Therion at all.

  “He’s cloaking himself,” I murmured. “Even a vampire couldn’t have gotten out of range so quickly.”

  Nathaniel held his hand up so he could listen.

  “There are several creatures moving in the tunnel below,” he said.

  “They could be rats,” I said. “The regular Chicago kind.”

  “The ‘Chicago kind’ are far from regular,” Nathaniel said. “I have seen the size of those rodents, and there is nothing ordinary about them. However, I can tell the difference between a rat and a vampire.”

  “Can you tell how far away they are?” I asked.

  Nathaniel listened again. “Not precisely. The tunnel makes strange echoes.”

  “Yeah, it does,” I said, thinking of the way that the El sometimes sounded like it was coming from the south when it was actually coming from the north. “Let’s go down.”

  “No fire,” Nathaniel said. “Even if you are startled.”

  “I am not a pyromaniac,” I said. “I only set things on fire because it’s expedient.”

  Nathaniel gave me a look.

  “I already agreed, all right?” I waved my sword around. “I’ll only kill them with the pointy stick.”

  The steps to the platform were wide enough to walk side by side, so of course Nathaniel made sure we were joined at the hip. I fully expected to find a platoon of vamps waiting to leap upon us as soon as we got to the bottom of the stairs, and was a little disappointed to find the platform empty.

  I indicated to Nathaniel that he should walk down one side while I took the other, so that we could see—or hear—whether there were any signs of which tunnel they might have taken.

  Nathaniel took the northbound side, and I the southbound. The platform stretched between the tracks, so Nathaniel and I were within sight of each other at all times. There was nothing between us except some empty customer benches.

  We walked slowly and carefully from the Dearborn end of the platform. Halfway down, Nathaniel waved his arm at me. I joined him and he pointed south.

  He hopped down to the tracks, holding his arms up for me. I let him swing me down.

  “Stay away from the third rail,” I whispered. “We don’t know if the electricity to the subway has been shut off.”

  He nodded, and we stared into the tunnel. Ahead of us there were no lights except the occasional service lamp for CTA workers. I could have lit a ball of nightfire, but that would have advertised our presence for miles. Once we went in there, the vampires would have the advantage. My new superpowers didn’t seem to have come with the ability to see in the dark.

  “Can you see in there?” I asked softly.

  Nathaniel shook his head. “Now would be a good time to have the werewolf with us.”

  Despite the fact that I had just burned thousands of vampires with one spell, I didn’t want to go into the tunnel. In the tunnel I would be a trapped rat, just like them. I could sense Nathaniel’s reluctance as well. We had so recently been in the pitch black of Titania’s cave, and I hadn’t forgotten how helpless I’d felt there. Gabriel had told me once that angels were born of the sun. Creatures of the sun do not like to scurry in the darkness.

  But our quarry was scurrying away, and I wasn’t going to let him escape.

  I stepped into the tunnel, and Nathaniel kept pace with me. The air felt close and damp. I focused on breathing steadily—and quietly. The scrape of our boots on the tracks sounded like gunfire in the silence.

  We crept along for a while, trying to be crafty, both of us tense. And as we crept along I started getting annoyed. And I went from annoyed to angry to insanely furious with no stops in between.

  “Why are we tiptoeing around in here?” I said loudly. “What freaking difference does it make?”

  “Madeline, shh,” Nathaniel said.

  “No, I will not be quiet,” I said. “They can see in the dark. They can hear better than we can. Why should we play by their rules?”

  I raised a ball of nightfire and launched it up so it would float ahead of us. “If they’re going to run, then they’ll run whether or not we’re scuttling in the dark. If they’re going to fight, then we should be able to see them as well as they can see us.”

  “Madeline, stop. Do not be impulsive,” Nathaniel said.

  “Who’s being impulsive?” I said as the ball of nightfire lit up the tunnel. “THERION!”

  Nathaniel stared at me like I’d lost my mind.

  “THERION! You COWARD!” I roared.

  There was no answer.

  “They are gone,” Nathaniel said angrily. “They were ahead of us. I could hear them, and now they are gone. As soon as you began yelling they disappeared.”

  This news just made me even angrier. Therion had escaped, and I wanted him to pay. Still, I wasn’t going to play the vampire king’s game.

  “Fine,” I said. “Let’s go home.”

  Nathaniel’s eyebrows went up to his hairline. “You are giving up?”

  “Hell, no,” I said. “I’m going to track him down and take out his intestines through his nostrils. But I’m not going to chase him through miles of tunnel to do it. I’ll find him later. I have something else I need to do, anyway.”

  “Deal with Alerian?” Nathaniel asked.

  “Alerian’s not even awake yet,” I said, trudging back in the direction of
the Washington stop. We hadn’t really walked that far. I could see the lights over the platform a short distance away. “I have something I need to do for Lucifer.”

  “Then I will accompany you,” Nathaniel said.

  “No,” I said shortly. “This is not optional. You’re staying home, and so is everyone else. This is for me to do.”

  “Have I not proven that I am trustworthy?” Nathaniel asked, an edge in his voice.

  “This isn’t about whether or not you are trustworthy,” I said. “This is about me and Lucifer and my duties as the Hound of the Hunt.”

  “What has he asked of you?” Nathaniel said.

  “I can’t tell you,” I said. “You may assume that the task sucks and that there are about ten million things I would rather do.”

  “Let me help you,” Nathaniel persisted as we reached the platform and clambered up from the track level.

  “Nathaniel, I am the Hound of the Hunt. Where I go, you cannot follow,” I said. “Besides, I need you to stay in Chicago. You’re the only one here who can deal with Alerian if he does rise. Or at least, you’re the only one who can contact Puck to come and deal with his brother.”

  We climbed the stairs back up to the station. Everything looked the same. When we reached the street I half expected Therion to be waiting there with another army of vampires to take me down, but he wasn’t. I guess the vampire king really was a coward, and the nightmare was over. For the moment.

  There were a few people on the streets, wandering in a daze, blinking at the sky like they’d never seen it before. News helicopters soared overhead. Nathaniel and I quickly cloaked ourselves and then took off flying. I wasn’t interested in being attacked by an angry mob just because I looked different, and I’d already had enough television exposure to last a lifetime.

  As we flew home I noticed that the clouds had stopped swirling over Lake Michigan, and much of the green fog had dissipated. I pointed toward the lake.