Jude grumbled something under his breath but he went into the hall. Nathaniel and I followed. Jude collected the notebooks on the floor and slung them under his arm.
“Which way?” he asked Nathaniel.
“The best way is to return to the ballroom and then enter the basement stairs at the rear, behind Azazel’s throne.”
We backtracked down the stairs toward the ballroom. Jude kept sneezing and blowing air out of his nose.
“What’s the problem?” I asked.
“There’s too much death in that room. I can still smell it. And if I can still smell the corpses, then I can’t smell anything else that might sneak up on us,” he said, exhaling air through his nose again.
My own sense of smell had been almost completely deadened by the stench in that room, and my nose wasn’t even a fraction as sensitive as Jude’s. It must feel like being blind for a werewolf to be unable to smell.
Jude and I walked side by side, Nathaniel trailing behind. We reached the ballroom, and the snake on my palm twitched just as I pushed the doors open.
For the second time that day, I wished I had left a door closed.
The room was filled with vampires.
Not a few to help Azazel with his vile project. Hundreds.
“Gods above and below,” Nathaniel said. “Where did they all come from?”
The vampires had turned as one silent entity to face us when we’d opened the door. The majority of the creatures stood in shadow, but a few were touched by the weak beams of winter sun that came through the windows. Their dead flesh smoldered where the sun touched, but instead of fleeing from the solar rays, the creatures stood and burned.
The vampires watched us, but made no move to approach. It was as if they waited for an order.
Beside me Jude transformed into a wolf. The binders clattered to the floor.
“We can’t fight them all,” I hissed. “So don’t do anything foolish.”
Jude barked at me, but I couldn’t tell if his reply was agreement or argument. I hoped he would restrain his natural impulse toward aggression until we got free of this mess.
The vampires stood silent and still. They were acting so weird, so un-vampire-like. I took a step backward, and Nathaniel mirrored me. I would have felt safer with my sword in my hand, but I didn’t want the vamps to construe that as aggression and attack us. Jude reluctantly followed Nathaniel and me while growling low in his throat.
We had gone about five paces when the vampires suddenly surged forward as one body.
“Run!” I said, but Jude leapt at the first vampire to approach him, tearing at its throat.
The vamp fell to the ground, wounded but not terminated, and I cursed as I ran to help the stubborn wolf.
“Get out of the way!” I shouted, and swung the sword to separate the fallen vamp’s head from its neck. It started flaking into dust immediately.
Nathaniel blasted a vamp with nightfire and it burst into flame.
There are three ways to kill a vampire—stake it, decapitate it or burn it. Anything else will slow the monster down but won’t kill it.
Jude attacked another vampire and I swung the sword at any creature that came near me. I dusted quite a few of them, but they kept coming, endlessly, relentlessly, unconcerned about the possibility of damage or death. They weren’t behaving like vampires at all, but zombies.
I don’t know how long we stood in front of those doors, hacking and burning, but there was suddenly a lull in the never-ending tide. My eyes were tearing from all the dust in the air, and it was hard to breathe without coughing. I wiped my eyes with my sleeve and saw several of the vampires were bottlenecked in the door.
“Now’s our chance,” I shouted, backing down the hallway. Nathaniel threw one last ball of nightfire at the nearest vamp and joined me.
“Jude!” I shouted. The wolf had taken down another vamp and was in the process of ripping its throat out. “Come on!”
The vampires were stopped up in the doorway like a cork, but the pressure of the advancing horde behind would have them through in a moment. I wanted to get out before that happened.
The wolf ignored me, ravaging the struggling vampire.
“Jude!” I shouted again.
He turned toward me, blood on his muzzle, just as the mindless vampires broke through.
“Let’s get out of here!” I shouted, and ran toward the doorway at the end of the hall.
I glanced back to see if Jude followed and saw he was a few feet behind me. Nathaniel brought up the rear, which was strange, as he’d been right beside me a moment before. There were a lot of vampires following but they were moving slowly, so we were able to outrun them to the foyer.
I threw open the front door, Jude on my heels, and pounded out to the lawn. Nathaniel pulled the door closed behind him and joined us. We turned in unison to face the mansion, backing away slowly, our eyes on the door.
“They can’t possibly come outside,” I said. “They’d burn up as soon as they stepped into the sun.”
“They were not behaving like typical vampires,” Nathaniel pointed out.
I was so focused on the possibility that the door might burst open at any moment that I’d forgotten about the thing that had chased us into the house. So when the whisper of breath brushed across my ear I was too strung out with tension to think properly.
“Madeline,” it whispered.
I turned, and in turning acknowledged the monster at my shoulder. And I saw it in all of its terror and glory, and knew that if I survived this, every I time I closed my eyes from now until the end of my life I would see this horror in my sleep.
It wasn’t the biggest creature I’d ever seen—just about Nathaniel’s height—and it was vaguely humanoid in shape. Its hands and feet had elongated digits, twice as long as a normal person’s, and something about them put me in mind of tree branches.
The eyes were oversized for its face, protruding like a frog’s, and its few long and wispy hairs trailed greasily from the top of its head.
The worst of it, though, was that the skin looked like it had been turned inside out, and it oozed with reddish brown fluid that might have been blood.
Then the creature smiled at me, and every one of its teeth was a tiny, sharp triangle, like the gaping maw of a shark. It looked like a distorted goblin, a thing from a fairy tale with a bad ending.
Jude barked in warning, and I glanced back at the front door. The vampires were pouring forth into the day despite the fact that they began to smolder almost immediately.
“Madeline,” the goblin said again, and I turned in time to see its claws slashing at my throat.
I jumped backward, but the tips of its fingers grazed my cheek. I felt the skin tear open, the hot blood run down my face. I smelled the ozone of nightfire, the burning undead flesh of the vampires, heard Jude’s growls as he attacked once more.
But I couldn’t look, couldn’t help, for my death had come for me. I swung out blindly with the sword in my right hand, trying to keep the thing from me as I conjured nightfire with my left hand. The creature laughed, a horrible high-pitched cackle that chilled my blood, and then it disappeared just as I threw the spell at it.
I stared dumbly at the spot where the goblin had stood, and then I felt its finger slide down my spine for the second time that day.
Spinning around, I slashed with the sword. The monster laughed and disappeared again.
It was playing with me. It was
playing
with me, and I was in no freaking mood for games.
As seemed to happen to me so often, the rush of anger cleared my head, steadied my nerves. The blaze of Lucifer’s power lit in my blood, poured down my hand and into my sword. It didn’t burst mindlessly from the blade but lay charged and waiting for my call.
The creature reappeared on my right, just in the corner of my eyesight. It stabbed at me with its claws again, tearing through the shoulder of my coat and drawing blood. Instead of darting away or spinning around to face it, I allowed the creature to injure me and then disappear again. I wasn’t going to jump around for this monster’s amusement.
I felt the goblin’s fingers curl around the end of my braid and pull, hard enough to hurt but not enough to knock me from my feet. The goblin giggled, but its laugh sounded confused. I wasn’t reacting the way it thought I should.
Soon,
I thought. The sounds of battle behind me receded as my head filled with the buzz of magic, an unnatural calm coming over me.
The creature winked in and out of sight, slashing at my jeans, tearing through my right thigh. For a second I saw its hideous face twisted in malice, heard a growl instead of a laugh, and knew it was time.
When the goblin appeared before me once more, I pushed the sword into its chest and let loose the magic I had stored there.
The creature’s eyes widened for a moment, and then it just exploded in a confetti of flesh and flying droplets of blood. I was too close to avoid getting splashed, and I looked sadly at the new coat Lucifer had given me, now shredded and covered in gore.
The sword still hummed with stored power. I turned to help Jude and Nathaniel. Both of them stood a few feet away, their backs to me, and I realized they’d kept the vampires from me while I fought the freaky thing from Faerie. Most of the vamps were blazing from the touch of the sun even as they staggered determinedly forward to destroy us.
There wasn’t much point in expending more energy when the sun would eventually finish the vampires off for us, so I whistled to attract the attention of the other two. Jude glanced over his shoulder and I waved at him to join me. He barked at Nathaniel and the three of us ran down the hill in front of the mansion, crossed the road and stopped at the edge of the woods.
Nathaniel murmured a few words, a portal appeared before us and I dove into it, the other two following close behind. A moment later I crashed face-first into the hard-packed snow of my backyard.
Jude leapt lightly to his feet beside me and nudged me with his nose. I lifted my stinging face from the snow and gave him a weak smile. I heard Nathaniel’s uncertain footsteps crunching in the ice behind me.
“Well, that was fun,” I said, pushing up to my knees.
The back door burst open and Samiel clattered onto the wooden porch, followed by Beezle. Samiel’s face went white when he saw me. Beezle looked furious, and his face was covered in popcorn kernels, a sure sign that he’d been eating under stress. My gargoyle landed on the railing, his little hand balled in a fist on his chest.
“Don’t you dare do that again,” he said. “I’m an old gargoyle. You could have given me a heart attack.”
“Do what?” I asked, still on my knees in the snow.
Samiel charged me, hauling me to my feet with his arms under my shoulders. His eyes scanned me anxiously, frowning at the claw marks at my cheek and shoulder and thigh.
How could you go out without telling one of us?
he signed angrily.
You were gone; Nathaniel was gone. We didn’t know what to think.
“We called J.B.,” Beezle said.
“What did you do that for?” I asked, annoyed. J.B. had probably raised the alarm. There would be Agents looking for me all over the place. “Why didn’t you try to call
me
?”
“We did. You didn’t answer your phone,” Beezle replied.
I patted my pockets for my cell, pulled it out. There were three missed calls from my house phone, and two from J.B. There was also an alert indicating that I had several voice mail messages. I was sure I didn’t want to listen to those. They probably involved yelling.
I called J.B. while Samiel glared at me.
“Black,” J.B. barked.
“Hello to you, too,” I said. “I’m not dead or in mortal peril, so you can call off the search party.”
“Where were you?”
“I’ll explain later. By the way, what do you know about a creepy goblin thing that looks like its skin is turned inside out?”
“Can this creature appear and disappear at will?” J.B. asked.
“Yes. And it has kind of popping frog’s eyes?”
“The Hob,” J.B. said, his tone alarmed. “Did it come after you?”
“Don’t worry. I killed it.”
There was a long silence at J.B.’s end.
“What?” I asked. “What now?
“I’m coming by the house later,” he said, and hung up.
I gave my phone a dirty look since I couldn’t give one to J.B., and then stuck it in my pocket.
“Let’s go inside,” I said to Samiel. “You can yell at me at your leisure while I drink something warm.”
We filed into the house, Nathaniel bringing up the rear. I was too tired to argue with him about staying outside so I let him join the throng trooping upstairs to my apartment.
Beezle landed on my unwounded shoulder. “I see you’ve managed to ruin another coat.”
“I see you’ve been in the popcorn stash while I was gone,” I said.
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” he said, wiping popcorn crumbs from his belly.
“You’re hardly surreptitious,” I said.
“What do you expect? It’s your fault if I’m bingeing. You shouldn’t have disappeared without a word.”
“I’m sorry I worried you,” I said.
“You should be,” he replied.
I pushed open the door and entered the kitchen. “This is your cue to apologize to me for being rude before I left.”
“For what?” Beezle asked. “Telling the truth?”
I shook my head. Beezle would never see that there was such a thing as being too blunt. And apologizing for hurting my feelings had never been very high on his priority list.
I looked at Jude, still in wolf form. “We need to get you a stash of clothes you can keep here.”
I can get something for him,
Samiel signed.
“I don’t think your clothes will fit,” I said.
Samiel was a few inches shorter and stockier than Jude, who was about as tall as Nathaniel but a lot more heavily muscled.
“Some of Gabriel’s things might fit,” I said reluctantly. “Come with me.”
Jude trotted after me. I could feel Samiel, Nathaniel and Beezle staring.
“Wait here,” I told Jude, and went into my bedroom.
I opened the closet. There was a row of neatly pressed white shirts. Beside it were several pairs of black dress pants. Gabriel never wore anything else.