“Maybe we should quit the touching and the kissing for a while until we figure out what’s going on,” I said, and I felt a pang of loss. My words were sensible, but my body craved him. It was a little frightening.
“That seems wise,” Nathaniel agreed. “But it will be difficult.”
“We have to try,” I said.
“When I slept, I dreamed of you,” Nathaniel said. “I dreamed that you rose above the city on silver wings, and all below you fell to their knees in wonder and awe. The power of the universe burned within you, and as that power flowed, you shone brighter and brighter. As the light of your sun touched the faces of the vampires below, they were destroyed utterly. Even the ash of their remains was vaporized by your light.”
He’d said all of this as if he were in a trance. As he spoke a chill washed over me. I felt the cold hand of destiny draw a finger down my spine.
“Do you think it was a prophecy?” I asked quietly. I didn’t like prophecies. Most of my life had been ruled by prophecies, the deaths foreseen at the Agency. I liked to feel as though I was the mistress of my own fate.
“I believe you have the ability within you to end this war. That is what my dream revealed to me.”
“I don’t have powers like that,” I said. “I don’t even have wings anymore.”
“The potential is inside you. It just needs to be revealed.”
I rubbed my forehead tiredly. “I don’t know how to reveal it. Maybe Lucifer would know if he’d answer my damned phone calls.”
I gave the snake tattoo on my right palm an angry glare. It lay quiescent and unmoving, the way it did when Lucifer was out of touch.
There was a brief knock at the bedroom door and Jude came in. I took a moment to be grateful that the wolf hadn’t walked in while Nathaniel and I were embracing. Jude did not trust Nathaniel at all.
“You need to come out here,” Jude said. “There’s something on the television that you need to see.”
I followed Jude into the hallway and Nathaniel fell in behind me. Chloe, Samiel and Beezle waited in the living room. Beezle sat on the coffee table holding the remote. Samiel sat on the couch with Chloe in his lap. Beezle followed the direction of my gaze.
“Sickening, aren’t they?” he said. “Ever since she got out of the hospital they can’t keep their hands off each other.”
“Jealous, little gargoyle?” Chloe asked, resting her head on Samiel’s shoulder. She had dark circles under her eyes, and she didn’t look completely recovered from her ordeal in Azazel’s mansion. Her vivid purple hair was pushed away from her face with a headband that had little skulls printed all over it.
Beezle scrunched up his face. “Absolutely not. I just think there’s a little too much PDA going on around here. Human procreation is so gross.”
I’m not human, Samiel signed.
“Close enough,” Beezle said.
“How do gargoyles procreate?” Chloe asked.
“Nope, I’m drawing the line there,” I said before Beezle could respond. “I do not want to hear how you make baby gargoyles.”
“It’s quite a fascinating process, actually,” Beezle said.
I stuck my fingers in my ears. “Nope, not listening, la-la-la-la-la.”
“I thought you wanted her to see something on television,” Jude growled.
“I do,” Beezle said. “But there’s a commercial on. It will come up in a minute. The news anchor said the footage would be up after the break.”
“Footage of what?” I asked, a pit forming in my stomach. This couldn’t be anything good, and I’d had enough of bad news.
“Just wait,” Beezle said. “Although you wouldn’t have to wait if you’d gotten that DVR like I said you should.”
“You mean the DVR we can’t afford? You’re lucky we have cable.”
“If we had a DVR, I could have paused the program until you got your butt out of bed.”
“Oh, I’m sorry. I spent a day and a night running for my life while pregnant. For some strange reason I was exhausted.”
“Not exhausted enough,” Beezle muttered, and I understood from his tone that he was referring to the changes in me and Nathaniel.
Luckily, the news program came back on before we could pursue that line of conversation in the presence of an audience. Of course, a reckoning in front of my gang of misfits was probably as inevitable as what would happen between Nathaniel and me. Even now I was aware of him in a low-level way, a presence in the back of my mind.
The anchor—one of those plastic newscasters who look like they’ve been pressed in an attractive-but-not-in-a-threatening-way mold—was recapping the events of two days ago, even showing the same clip of the vampires in Daley Plaza that had sent us down there in such a hurry.
“Why did I get out of bed for this?” I asked.
“Just wait,” Beezle said.
My stomach rumbled audibly. Samiel patted Chloe’s shoulder and she slid off his lap onto the couch.
I’ll make you some breakfast. I’ve already seen it.
“I’m feeling a little peckish myself,” Beezle said.
“You already ate enough waffles to sink the Titanic,” Jude said.
“That was a long time ago,” Beezle whined.
“It was a half an hour ago,” Jude said through his teeth.
“Quiet,” Chloe said. “It’s coming on.”
I missed the anchor’s lead-in to the clip, but I didn’t need it. The meaning was clear enough.
A dark-haired, green-eyed vampire sat at the head of a long wooden table. Behind him was a wall of gray stone with no identifying characteristics. The vampire looked young, but that didn’t mean anything. He could have been turned hundreds of years before. The camera stayed close to the vampire so that the viewer could not see the rest of the room.
“Greetings, citizens of Chicago,” the vampire said, and there was a smugness in his silky voice that made me want to punch him in the face. “I am Therion, lord of the Fifth Court of the United States, headquartered here in your fair city. You may have noted the presence of my brethren.”
He smiled when he said this, and showed his fangs. “We have always lived among you, keeping to the shadows. However, recent advances in medical science, shall we say, have allowed us to now walk with you under the sun.”
“Medical advances, my ass. The blood of Agents,” Chloe said angrily. “That piece of garbage Azazel practically drained us dry in the name of his experiments.”
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 the 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.”
Black City (A BLACK WINGS NOVEL) Page 10