“I can’t understand you when your mouth is buried like that,” I said.
Beezle narrowed his cat eyes at me and commenced unwinding his muffler. He huffed melodramatically before speaking. “I said, have you got anything to eat?”
“How can you possibly be hungry? You ate a whole bowl of popcorn before we left the house.”
“But I am. And I’m cold. And I want a doughnut,” he whined.
“Stop wriggling. We’re supposed to be undercover here. In point of fact, you’re not supposed to be here at all. You’re supposed to be at home, being a
home guardian
, like all the other gargoyles.”
“Do you think I would trust your life to
him
?” Beezle snapped.
“
He
can hear you, gargoyle,” Gabriel said dryly.
My tenant and bodyguard, Gabriel, had been so quiet I’d almost forgotten he was there. Almost. He’s a little difficult to overlook—six foot plus, dark hair, dark eyes, the face of an angel. I mean that literally. Gabriel was half-angel.
Have I mentioned that I am in love with him and he with me, and that our love is doomed, in a really melodramatic we-will-both-be-killed-if-we-ever-act-on-our-feelings sort of way?
I’m a half angel, too. My father is Azazel, a fallen angel and a chief of the Grigori, a right-hand man of Lucifer himself. I’d discovered this tidbit only recently, having spent most of my life believing my father to be an ordinary deadbeat (or possibly dead) human dad.
Beezle had been a little unreasonable about my safety ever since I’d had my human heart torn out by a nephilim—long story—and now refused to let me leave the house without him. You’d think the fact that I’d managed to come back from the dead would count in my favor.
Azazel’s orders stated that Gabriel was not supposed to leave my side when I was out of the house. I had spent the last month with a beautiful bodyguard at my elbow and an overweight gargoyle hanging off me like a baby orangutan. It was making my job a little difficult—very difficult, in fact. It’s not easy being unobtrusive with those two around.
When I’m not Azazel’s daughter and Beezle’s doughnut enabler, I’m an Agent of death. It’s not as glamorous as it sounds. Every week I get a list of names, places and times. I go to the appointed place at the appointed time, pick up the soul and bring it to the Door. At the Door the soul chooses whether to pass on to whatever is behind the Door (don’t ask me; I’m not allowed to know) or to stay and haunt the earth forever.
Most of the time my job is as straightforward as it sounds. I’m kind of like a UPS delivery guy. I don’t know what’s in the boxes and I don’t care. It’s just my job to deliver them on time and to the correct location. I also have to file paperwork—lots and lots of paperwork, and the forms are annoying and redundant. Being an Agent of death isn’t such a great gig, really, but it’s an inherited job (I got mine when my mom died) and one that doesn’t go away until you take the trip to the Door yourself.
So there I was, a week before Thanksgiving, shivering in thirty-degree weather and thinking longingly of my crocheted blankets and a cup of hot chocolate, waiting to pick up a soul who was scheduled to die at 1:27 A.M. somewhere in this alley.
Beezle carefully rewrapped his scarf around his chubby neck. It draped over his wings in the back.
“I hope that this isn’t one of those disgusting alley murders,” he said conversationally. “The last one put me off my feed.”
“Is that even possible?” Gabriel murmured for my ears only, and I smiled. Then I straightened a little, pushing away from the wall. Gabriel came to attention beside me. “What is it?”
“I don’t think you have to worry about hacked-up body parts this time, Beezle,” I said.
“Why not?”
“Because I can see the vampire.” I nodded at the innocuous-looking man making his way across the parking lot.
He looked like any moderately successful single guy out on a Saturday night. His hair was blond and stylishly cut, his clothes were good without being flashy, and his face was sort of ordinary-handsome. You wouldn’t know he was a vampire, which is good for their kind. The most successful hunters are the ones with the best camouflage.
He crossed out of the lot and into the alley, his footsteps slowing as he approached us. We were tucked unobtrusively in a little four-foot depression in the building, one of those architectural oddities that seem to have no explanation. The building went straight across and then it dipped in, like someone had planned to put a closet there, and then resumed its normal course. It was just enough to keep us from being seen by anyone who passed by.
The vampire stopped dead, a few feet away. I saw his nostrils flare.
“I know you’re there, Agent,” he said.
I stepped out of the depression and into the light of the one yellow streetlamp that hung over the parking lot. Gabriel followed and stood behind my shoulder. I said nothing. The vampire’s eyes widened a little when he saw Gabriel.
He smirked. “You must be the famous Madeline Black, the only Agent with a guard dog.”
If the vampire thought he could make a little sport for himself by getting a rise out of Gabriel, he had another think coming. Gabriel is the type that burns slow—so slow, I wonder sometimes if he’s got a pulse.
“What is your business, vampire?” I asked.
“If you are here, then you know my business,” he said. He raised an eyebrow at me. “You will not interfere?”
“You know I am bound against it,” I said, and there was a little shivering of magic as I said it, as if the source of my power was affirming the truth of that statement.
That was one of the suck things about being an Agent. I saw a lot of death, and most of those deaths would break my heart if I let them. Stupid accidents, horrific murders, deaths of children and young mothers and college kids before their time. But it was not for me to judge which lives should be saved. If their name was on my list, then their death was fated and I was bound not to interfere. I’d learned early on to adopt a circle-of-life attitude for my own sanity. It didn’t mean that I liked it.
The vampire sidled a little closer to me, and I could almost feel Gabriel’s hackles rise. He loves me, he can’t have me, but he does not like other men coming near me. If Gabriel had his way, there would be a thirty-six-inch manfree radius around me at all times.
“I have heard stories of your beauty,” the vampire purred. His nostrils flared again. “I see that they are not exaggerated.”
I crossed my arms. My beauty is
so
not legendary. “Do I look like I just fell off the turnip truck? Get lost. I’m not the helpless victim you’re looking for.”
I saw a glint of fang as he stepped closer. He seemed hypnotized by some scent. “But the blood of angels . . . I have always wanted . . . and you are Lucifer’s own . . .”
I opened my palm in front of me, extended my will, and a little ball of blue flame about the size of a baseball hovered above my hand. “I understand that fire is unpleasant for vampires.”
The vampire hissed and backed away several feet. He shook his head, seeming to come out of a trance. For a moment I thought he would try again, but then he appeared to think better of it.
“Perhaps you are right,” he said, regaining his composure. “There must be easy prey awaiting me if you are here.”
I closed my fist and the ball of nightfire disappeared, leaving behind a lingering trace of sulfur. I flicked my fingers at the vampire. “Move along, then.”
He gave me a sarcastic bow and continued past us. Gabriel stared stonily at the vampire’s back as he went by. A few feet past us, the vampire stopped. I couldn’t see his face but I was sure he was scenting the air. I felt the thrum of magic that told me a soul was approaching that was marked for death. A moment later a too-skinny blonde came tottering into the alley on four-inch heels.
I sighed and slipped back into the shadows. I didn’t need to see what happened next. I just had to be there to pick up the pieces, like always.
About an hour later I was flying home. Gabriel met me in the air about half a mile away from the Door. For reasons that we don’t understand, Gabriel can’t come within a certain radius of the Door. This tends to make him annoyed, since he is charged with keeping me safe at all times. However, other non-Agents seem to be bound by the same restriction. None of my enemies have been able to cross the invisible line that keeps Gabriel from the Door. I know because I have seen some of them try.
We were about ten minutes from home when I saw it. A flash of green light somewhere on the city streets below, a pulse so large I was surprised that it didn’t wake up everyone in a four-block radius. Then the shock wave hit us.
Gabriel and I were thrown upward by a wave of energy that emanated from the pulse. I decided to relax instead of struggling against it, but as the magical energy inside the shock wave reached me, I cried out. There was malice in that magic, a sense of wrongness that chilled my heart.
The wave passed through me, but I was frozen by fear. I had felt something like this before, when Ramuell the nephilim had been released from his prison to hunt and kill. It was a sense that the natural order had been upended, that death stalked without plan or mercy.
But Ramuell was dead. I had killed him myself. How could this be happening again?
I thought all of this in an instant, but an instant of immobility in the air can kill you. I heard Gabriel’s anguished voice calling my name. I shook my head, realized that I was free-falling, my face turned toward the sky. I tried to flap my wings, to turn over and right myself, but my wings had disappeared. They do that, so that I can look like a normal human most of the time. They only appear when I need them for a magical reason, like when I’m carrying out my Agent duties.
But the shock wave had temporarily knocked out my magic, like an electrical surge will cause a fuse to blow. I tried to stay calm, to concentrate on the power inside me, but I was gathering speed. I could see Gabriel’s face, white and strained, as he arrowed toward me in the air, but I was falling too fast. He wasn’t going to make it. I closed my eyes.
And then I was plucked from the air by a pair of strong arms, and I heard a grunt as my speed was arrested. I opened my eyes to see a pair of bright green ones flashing at me through wire-rimmed glasses.
“Next time you might want to try a parachute,” J.B. said as he fluttered us slowly to the ground.
I opened my mouth to speak, to thank him, and was horrified to feel tears pricking my eyes.
“Hey,” J.B. said, and cuddled me closer. “Hey, it’s okay.”
I decided it was easier to cry it out than try to talk through suppressed tears. I buried my face in his T-shirt. He said nothing, only held me there until I lifted my face and sniffled.
“Better?” he asked.
I nodded.
“You can put her down now,” Gabriel said, and his voice had a note of steel.
I looked in the direction of his voice and saw him standing a few feet away, arms locked against his sides as if he were keeping himself from pummeling J.B.
J.B’s arms tightened around me. “Finders keepers. I didn’t see you keeping her from turning into scrambled eggs.”
Gabriel stepped forward. I could see stars blazing in his dark eyes, always a sign of trouble. Like I said, Gabriel is a slow burn. But when he explodes you’d better get the hell out of the way.
“Put her down, human. You’re squashing my ear,” a muffled voice said from inside my coat.
“Beezle!” I gasped. “I forgot he was in there.”
J.B. reluctantly released me, his hands lingering just a moment too long at my back. I would be flattered except that I knew at least part of the reason he did it was to piss off Gabriel.
A month ago J.B. was my boss, and we didn’t get along. At all. But J.B. had helped Gabriel and me get through a demon attack on the Agency, and in the process we’d developed a kind of friendship. The attack had taken out a lot of the upper management and J.B. had been promoted by virtue of being one of the few supervisors left standing. Demon encounters plus the promotion seemed to have removed the stick that had formerly been lodged up his ass. He was a lot nicer these days.
He’d also shocked me by asking me out on a date. I’d refused, but he’d taken my refusal with surprising grace. It’s not that I wasn’t attracted to J.B.—I was; anything human would be—it was just that my confusing relationship with Gabriel seemed to preclude the possibility of having a confusing relationship with J.B.
Beezle poked his head out, looking distinctly disgruntled. “What in the name of the four hells happened? What’s J.B. doing here? Why aren’t we at home?”
“You didn’t feel that electro-pulse thingy?” I asked. “You didn’t feel us falling out of the sky?”
“I was napping,” Beezle said.
“Napping,” J.B. said in disbelief.
“You can just keep that disrespectful tone out of your voice, Jacob Benjamin. I’m an old gargoyle. And what is that horrible smell?”
Now that Beezle mentioned it, I did notice a distinctly malodorous scent lingering in the alley. And something else. A trace of cinnamon.