I wanted to stay and check around the crime scene a little more, see if I could ferret anything out. I don’t claim to be any kind of great investigator, but there was something not right here.
“The gargoyle is correct. I believe I hear the sounds of sirens,” Gabriel said.
He extinguished the ball of nightfire, plunging the alley into darkness.
“Gabriel, I need to have a private word with you, from Lord Lucifer,” Baraqiel said. His pale eyes glowed in the faint light that trickled into the alley.
I could feel Gabriel’s reluctance. “I am charged with staying with Madeline. Can this not wait until we have safely returned her home?”
“My lord was most insistent that these words be for your ears alone,” Baraqiel said.
“It’s okay, Gabriel,” I said. “Maybe you can check around the area for some more clues.”
Gabriel shook his head. “I must stay with you. Azazel has entrusted me with your safety.”
“I think I can manage to watch her for a few minutes,” J.B. said, and he scooped me up and took to the sky before Gabriel could protest. He grinned down at me as we zipped upward, cleared the roofs and headed toward my house.
I felt a little flutter in the vicinity of my heart. J.B. could charm when he was so inclined. “You do know that you’re asking for it, right?”
He shrugged. “I’ve dealt with your Rottweiler before.”
“He’s supposed to keep me safe. He’s been ordered to do so by my father and by Lucifer. He takes that responsibility seriously.”
“If you think that’s all he’s interested in, I’ve got a Skyway to sell you,” J.B. said.
I worried in silence about my powers as we flew home. I’d really only just started to get a handle on them in the last month or so. Before I’d discovered that I was a fallen angel’s daughter I hadn’t even realized that I had powers beyond that of an Agent. Then I’d gained all those talents plus more—a little boost from Lucifer’s lost lover Evangeline, my many-greats grandmother, who had possessed me briefly during the Ramuell incident.
Once I’d cleared Evangeline out of my system, I’d discovered I wasn’t quite as powerful as I’d thought. Evangeline had given me some pretty nifty—albeit totally destructive—abilities that had disappeared when she had. I was learning what I could do, very slowly. I could sense that there was untapped magic inside me but I wasn’t yet capable of drawing it out.
We approached my house in the deepest part of the night, that time about an hour before the sun rises. I live in a rundown brick two-flat in the west Lakeview neighborhood. I had inherited the house from my mother when she died. The red paint on the front porch was peeling, the chimney was crumbling, and the heating system was in desperate need of an update. I was always broke or on the verge of it, so it seemed that repairs were something that were deferred to a day when food wasn’t a priority, or possibly that magical day when I won the lottery.
I was thinking idly about dinner as we descended in silence toward the house. We landed in the backyard and J.B. set me on my feet with a grin. That was when the blast hit him.
There was a bolt of blue lightning accompanied by the smell of ozone and sage. J.B. cried out and flew across the yard. I turned to face my attacker but before I could think, before I could breathe, his arms were around me.
Claws bit cruelly into my flesh as I was drawn close. I looked up into the red face of a half demon that I knew well.
“Hello, Antares,” I said, and resisted the urge to cry out as his claws drew blood.
“Hello, little sister,” he hissed.
Antares looks like a medieval priest’s idea of a demon. He’s got huge, curving black horns, oversized bat wings, curling ebony claws, slitted pupils, skin the color of raw meat and many pointy teeth. He’s also my father’s secondborn child, the issue of Azazel’s affair with a witch-demon.
Azazel is the most powerful of the fallen save the Morningstar himself, and the witch-demon was a practitioner of exceptional ability. Despite all of this, Antares had been born oddly powerless. This made him resentful of everything, particularly me, whose head he wanted on a spit.
He saw me as the usurper to his inheritance—Azazel’s throne. I would have happily gift wrapped the throne and all the bullshit that went with it, but Azazel had named me his heir and I hadn’t yet determined how to wriggle out of it.
“Actually, you’re my little brother. I’m Azazel’s firstborn, you know,” I said casually. The scent of sulfur filled my nostrils and I fought down nausea.
As I’d expected, that set him off. His lack of status in Azazel’s court was a major sore spot, especially since Azazel had put out a death warrant on Antares for trying to kill me. Normally Grigori were forbidden from harming members of one another’s courts, but Antares had killed a lot of innocents in his attack on the Agency, and even Lucifer couldn’t ignore that infraction.
“First born and first to die!” he hissed, his saliva splattering all over my face. My skin burned where it touched.
“If you say so,” I said, feigning boredom.
I’d never let Antares know, but I actually was afraid of him. He’d almost killed me once, and that kind of thing tends to leave psychological marks. Antares had no magic of his own, but he was fox-crafty and able to wield magical objects that had been created by his powerful mother.
I didn’t want to look around for fear of drawing Antares’s attention to J.B., and I was sure that Gabriel would be arriving any second now. He would never voluntarily leave me with J.B. for so long.
“Don’t expect your guard dog anytime soon,” Antares crooned in my ear. “My men had orders to take your companions as soon as I had you.”
I trembled involuntarily as his mouth touched my ear. The physical proximity to Antares was making me sick. I fought to control myself. I might be powerless at the moment, but I still had brains, and Antares was laughably easy to manipulate.
“Your men?” I asked, a faint note of contempt in my voice. “You mean that cowardly little blob demon and his friend who looks like a pile of walking snot?”
“Be careful, sister. Those demons that you hold in such contempt will be your masters soon enough.”
I tried not to imagine what he was talking about and failed. It is not pleasant to contemplate a future in which you will be raped and tortured by demons. I hoped that Antares could see none of this on my face, and kept my voice even.
“I doubt that very much. Those two ran off as soon as Gabriel looked at them sternly, remember?” I said, referring to the time when Antares had tried taking J.B. hostage in order to draw me out. “He’s probably tying them in knots as we speak.”
Doubt flickered across Antares’s face for a moment. He tightened his embrace. We would look like lovers but for the blood running from my skin at his touch. I felt a wriggling around the vicinity of my ribs and I froze, remembering Beezle. He’d probably fallen asleep in my pocket again and was now trying to get out.
Stay down, Beezle,
I thought desperately. Antares had put Beezle in a gargoyle version of a coma once, and Beezle had taken it personally. I didn’t want him trying anything stupid in the name of revenge.
I put my hands on Antares’s chest and did my best to look threatening. It’s hard to look like a badass when you are very petite but I gave it my best.
“You’d better let me go or I’ll blast you from here to Gary, Indiana,” I said. The wriggling in my pocket grew more frantic and I could hear Beezle’s muffled, indignant cries.
Antares smiled, and his smile chilled me to the bone. “No, you will not do that, little sister. I understand that your powers have left you.”
How could he know that already?
I wondered.
Unless . . .
“Have you been following me?” I said, and my voice dripped with contempt. “Like some mangy sneak-thief?”
Antares’s grip tightened, and I realized I was growing faint from blood loss. I could feel it running in rivulets from my arms and back.
“This mangy sneak-thief managed to catch you and that foolish human unawares. You should show me more respect, sister. I know something that you do not.”
“I find that extremely difficult to believe.”
“I know what slaughtered the wolf. I know what hunts you. I know secrets that you cannot even begin to fathom.”
I tried not to show it, but I was definitely interested. I wanted to know what had happened to that wolf.
“If you’re talking about Samiel, you’re not telling me anything new.”
“There are things worse than a nephilim’s child. Horrors that you cannot comprehend. But I know. I know of matters that the lords of the Grigori themselves do not know.” The pupils of his eyes grew thinner in his excitement. “I will make you respect me before you die.”
I am not afraid of death. You can’t be afraid of death when you do my job. But I did not want to die screaming at the hands of a demon. And as I thought that, I felt something rise up inside of me, and I knew that my magic had only been sleeping awhile. Then I heard a gurgling yell.
Antares looked away from me for a moment, and I pushed that magic up, up to the tips of my fingers still planted on his chest. Electricity crackled where I touched.
He turned his face back to me. I smiled and said, “Boo.”
Then I let loose the magic, and it surged through me and into Antares, blue fire that blasted him away from me. I heard him screaming in pain as he was launched several blocks away.
My wings having reappeared along with my powers, I fluttered up from the ground and looked around. Antares had disappeared. This was not unusual. It was a neat little magic trick that he had inherited from his mother. It generally followed a battle in which he had a lot of woundlicking to do.
Beezle popped out of my pocket and glared up at me. “You kept me in there on purpose.”
“Absolutely. I didn’t want Antares to turn you into gargoyle bits.”
“I can handle that powerless fool,” he said indignantly.
I stroked his head soothingly. “Yes, I’m very unreasonable. I just don’t know what I would do without you.”
Beezle tried not to look pleased and failed.
There was a groan from nearby, and I looked around the backyard. J.B. was lying facedown in my fallow vegetable garden. He had been wearing a puffy green ski jacket, and the back of the jacket had been scorched away by the bolt. The garment hung in blackened ribbons from his shoulders. I could see long shiny welts on his back where the magic had burned through his clothing.
I rushed to his side as he attempted to turn over. Beezle emerged from my pocket and flapped around us like a bossy mosquito.
“Don’t turn him that way. You’ll get dirt on the burns,” he said.
“I think I can handle this without instruction,” I said, annoyed.
Kneeling in the dirt, I helped J.B. to sit up. His face was scraped and bruised from the impact with the ground.
“Was there a tornado?” he asked, wincing in pain as I helped him to his feet.
“A tornado named Antares,” I said grimly.
“Where are the others?”
“I don’t know,” I said, and tried not to worry about Gabriel. Surely he’d just been delayed at the crime scene with Baraqiel. Antares’s henchmen were no match for a half nephilim, whatever my deluded brother might think.
J.B. leaned heavily on my shoulders and we hobbled toward my back porch. He negotiated the three wooden steps very slowly.
“I don’t think we can get to the second floor like this,” I said, my head spinning. The loss of blood and the shock of my earlier fall from the sky finally caught up with me. I sat down on the top step and J.B. collapsed beside me. We leaned on each other like two drunks, both of us panting from exertion.
“You need an elevator,” J.B. said.
“She needs help from that useless devil, is what she needs,” Beezle said, fluttering around my head anxiously. “He could heal her in a trice if only he were where he was supposed to be.”
“You don’t think that Antares’s men really could have harmed him?” I asked.
Beezle scoffed. “Those two miscreants? Not a chance. And remember, Baraqiel was with him.”
“Baraqiel was injured,” I pointed out.
“And if it was so easy to handle Antares’s men, where are Gabriel and Baraqiel?” J.B. asked.
Once worry was given free rein, I could conjure any number of scenarios in which Gabriel and Baraqiel could disappear. They had been attacked by Samiel. They had been attacked by Focalor, one of the Grigori who hated Azazel. They had been attacked by some other horror that I hadn’t thought of yet.
Horrors that you cannot comprehend.
That was what Antares had said. He was a braggart, and most of the time I was inclined to ignore what came out of his mouth. But there had been truth in his voice. He knew something about what had happened in that alley. He knew, and he was obviously planning to use that information to his advantage. In the meantime, Gabriel was missing, J.B. was horribly burned, and I was bleeding out on my back porch. And Beezle was driving me crazy by fluttering around and muttering imprecations about Gabriel.