Black Howl

by Christina Henry

  I crossed the kitchen to him and kissed him, because I could. Because I loved him, and there was no one to tell us not to.

  Gabriel dropped the spatula on the counter so he could put his hands to better use. Things were just starting to get interesting again when someone cleared his throat behind me.

  “The pancakes are burning,” Beezle said.

  I leaned my forehead against Gabriel’s and rolled my eyes. “Why did I think you would give us a little privacy?”

  “You had privacy. Yesterday. Now there are pancakes,” Beezle said, flying to the cabinet and pulling out his favorite plate. It was a plastic child’s plate with a cartoon of an owl and the word “night” above it.

  He handed the plate to Gabriel, who shook his head at Beezle.

  “I don’t want any of those burned ones.”

  Gabriel obligingly loaded Beezle’s plate with unburned pancakes. The gargoyle flew to the table and sat down next to his plate.

  “Where’s the syrup?” he asked, looking up at me expectantly.

  I gave him an evil look, and he made a “pfft” noise at me. “What, did you think you were going to get some kind of honeymoon? You’ve got loads of stuff to do today. Does it really matter if I’m here right now?”

  There was a tentative knock at the back door and Samiel stuck his head in hopefully.

  I gave him a resigned wave. “Come on in. If you want pancakes, you’d better get them before Beezle eats them all.”

  An hour later Gabriel and I landed on the roof of the Agency. Since Beezle and Samiel had seen fit to break up our morning after, I decided it was best to just get on with my regularly scheduled business day. And that meant finding out what J.B. had wanted to show me the day before.

  We entered through the rooftop door after a biometric scan of my face and fingerprints. Security at the Agency had been considerably increased since Ramuell’s break-in a couple of months before.

  As soon as we exited the stairwell we were all sent through a scanner. This scanner looked and acted a lot like a metal detector, except that it detected magical weapons and methods of concealment. A lot of Agents had worked overtime developing it, and it was now being duplicated at Agencies across the country. No one wanted to risk another massacre.

  I had to turn in Lucifer’s sword at the checkpoint—no weapons were permitted past the entry, Agent or not—and I felt terribly vulnerable without it. The sword had saved me more times than I could count since Nathaniel had presented it to me.

  J.B.’s office had been moved to an upper floor to correspond with his rise in position to regional manager. His frizzy-haired secretary, Lizzie, typed away in the reception area with her usual look of long-suffering patience. She gave me a tight smile when she saw me.

  “He wanted to see you as soon as you arrived. Go on in.”

  Usually Lizzie fussed over me like a substitute mother, so I was a little curious as to why she was so short with me, but I went to J.B.’s door and knocked. Gabriel followed closely behind.

  “Come in,” he called.

  As usual, his desk looked like someone had blown up a bomb made of forms filled out in triplicate. J.B.’s eyes had bags underneath them and his hair stood up in every direction. He looked like he had gotten no sleep at all.

  “You look like shit,” I said baldly.

  “Yeah, well, staying up all night trying to figure out how to calm dozens of screaming people will do that to you. Not to mention attempting to identify all of them so that they can be returned to their families—eventually,” J.B. said with a touch of asperity.

  I felt a little jolt of guilt. I’d been having the night of my life with Gabriel while J.B. had gotten stuck cleaning up the mess with the warehouse. But it did not seem prudent to apologize for my wedding night—particularly to a man who had wanted to date me—so I covered the awkward moment by changing the subject.

  “So, what was it that you wanted to show me?”

  J.B. pushed to his feet. “You’ll have to come down to the basement. That’s where we’ve been working on it.”

  “On what?” I asked as Gabriel and I followed J.B. out of the office and into the hallway.

  “Not here,” J.B. said shortly, and pressed the button for the elevator.

  Agents bustled back and forth in the hall as we waited, most of them carrying piles of paper. The Agency was definitely stuck in the twentieth century, data-wise. A project had been undertaken to move all of our records to digital media but its importance had diminished after the attack.

  Improving security had been the priority, and anyway, most of the upper brass wasn’t completely sold on the necessity of moving to computers. I was sure that they’d felt this way when the Agency moved from papyrus to paper. There was definitely a culture of it’s-always-been-this-way-and- it’s-fine in my business.

  We loaded onto the elevator with J.B. and stood in silence as the doors opened and closed, loaded and unloaded. I had a sudden memory of one of the elevators propped open by a severed human leg, and wondered if it had been this one. It was really a wonder that any Agents had returned to work after the place had been overrun by demons.

  The elevator descended into the basement. The Hall of Records was down there, the place where every death in the Chicagoland area in history was recorded—even before there was a Chicagoland. The room was almost incomprehensibly big and filled with millions of index cards.

  J.B. led us past the Hall, past the offices where Agents labored over the much-maligned data conversion, and to a door at the very end of the hallway. It looked to be solid steel and it was armed with another biometric scanner. J.B. swiped his I.D. card and then had his eyeball and both hands scanned.

  The door clicked open, and we went inside.

  The room was so secure that I expected there to be some fabulous treasure inside, or at the very least dozens of Agents working on some top-secret weapon. But all there was was one female Agent with short purple hair and both arms covered in tattoos, and a large pile of the cameras that I’d found with the wolf cubs and in the warehouse.

  The Agent sat at a worktable with a lamp clipped to the edge. She hunched over one of the cameras, which had been disassembled into what looked like about eight million tiny pieces.

  “This is Chloe,” J.B. said. “Chloe, Madeline Black. And Gabriel.”

  Chloe gave us a little finger wave without looking up from her work.

  “Chloe,” J.B. said. “Can you show Agent Black what you showed me yesterday?”

  She held up a finger to indicate that we needed to wait. I wondered if she knew how to talk.

  J.B. tapped his foot impatiently while we waited for Chloe to finish whatever it was that she needed to finish. She seemed to be teasing apart the pieces of what looked like a circuit board. I am not technically minded in the least—I can barely operate my cell phone—but whatever she was doing was fascinating to me. I crept closer to get a better look.

  “You’re standing in my light,” Chloe said.

  Okay, I guess she could talk. I shuffled backward, cheeks reddening.

  After a few moments she looked up and pushed away from the table. She seemed to notice Gabriel for the first time.

  “Well, hello, gorgeous,” Chloe said.

  I felt strongly that it would not be good for me to act like an insanely jealous wife and rip her purple hair out at the roots, so I just said, “His name is Gabriel. And he’s married.”

  She looked from my right hand to his left, saw the matching rings, and shrugged. “Worth a try. So, you want to see what we found?”

  Chloe shot across the room on the casters of her chair and picked up one of the cameras from the pile. Then she used her feet to scoot back to the table.

  She arranged the camera so that the lens pointed at the wall to our right. Then she lowered her hand over the camera and muttered something I couldn’t catch.

  “There’s no on or off switch that we could find,” J.B. murmured. “Chloe figured out by trial and error tha
t you need magic to turn the machine on.”

  A second later the camera sprang to life and pictures were projected on the wall. Some of the pictures moved like video, and some were like camera images. All seemed random. There was a clip of a little boy catching soap bubbles, a gumball whirling down a ramp in one of those big gumball machines with the red top, a girl swinging on a piece of rope that dangled from a tree over a ravine, a half-eaten pepperoni pizza, a fragment of text that came and went too fast for me to read.

  “What is this?” I asked. “It all seems random.”

  “Memories,” Chloe said.

  “Memories?” I asked. “Are you sure?”

  “It’s our best guess,” J.B. said. “And it makes sense. The machine scans people’s brains and extracts their memories, and then when they die the ghost is damaged because most of what made up its identity is gone.”

  I watched a white cloud shaped like a turtle drift by, a large buck leaping in front of a car’s headlights, an older boy picking apples and laughing.

  “Okay, I guess it makes sense. But why take the memories in the first place?”

  “Don’t know. We’re trying to look into that now. Listen, Chloe, can you take a break?” J.B. asked.

  Her eyes slid from me to J.B. to Gabriel. “Top-secret information about to be discussed. Got it. I’m sure I can use a milk shake.”

  She left the room with one last covert glance at Gabriel. I couldn’t blame her for that. He was just about the prettiest thing you’ve ever seen.

  As soon as the door closed behind Chloe, J.B. spoke.

  “You were right—my mother is involved,” he said heavily.

  “How do you know?” I asked.

  “The spiders,” J.B. said. “My mother breeds them. No one else in the world has spiders like that. So either she’s directly involved in this or she sold the spiders to whoever is. Either way, this goes back to Amarantha’s court.”

  “And Beezle said that the charcarion demons are only present in two courts of the fallen. One of them sounded like a sneeze, and the other one was Focalor.”

  J.B.’s eyes glinted. “And we know that Amarantha and Focalor have worked together in the past.”

  “Yes, but how are they doing it?” Gabriel asked. “Lord Lucifer will surely be watching the two of them most closely to ensure that they do not continue their plans for sedition. They can hardly meet and plan, or even pass messages to one another without arousing suspicion.”

  “So, are we going to Amarantha’s court to confront her or what?” I asked J.B.

  “Well, you have a price on your head in the faerie kingdom…”

  “And that’s different from the regular world how? Lucifer’s enemies try to kill me every other day.”

  “And I’m forbidden from coming to court at this time, as my mother is displeased with me for openly allying myself with you. I haven’t been to court since I was there with you, and I have heard no communications since the edict to stay away.”

  “Come on, J.B., break the rules. Live a little. I’m forbidden from doing stuff that I do all the time,” I said.

  J.B. looked uncertain. It went deeply against the grain of his personality to even consider bending the law. J.B. is very devoted to order.

  “It is the best lead that we have,” Gabriel said.

  “Yeah.” I nodded. “This isn’t just about the ghosts. I still need to find Wade. We know that the kidnapping is tied to whoever is responsible for these machines. If Amarantha provided security in the form of spiders while the machines did their work, then she might know where Wade is being held.”

  J.B. still hesitated.

  “Look, I’m going whether you do or not. So you might as well come with me and try to mitigate the diplomatic damage that you know I’ll do.”

  J.B. and Gabriel shared a look of acknowledgment of the truth of this statement.

  “All right,” J.B. said. “But we can’t go now. I have things to finish here.”

  “Meetings to attend, paperwork to photocopy?” I said sweetly.

  “I know you don’t think much of bureaucracy, Black, but every cog needs to do their part for the machine to work,” J.B. said, annoyed.

  “People are being kidnapped and having their memories stolen. Many of them are dying. You really think the upper brass wouldn’t cut you a break on your cog work?”

  “No,” J.B. said grimly. “You think I’m obsessed with paperwork? You should meet the board members sometime. I’ll come by your house later with a car, around seven.”

  “Won’t it take us a few hours to get to court by car?” I asked.

  “More than a few,” J.B. said. “We’ll arrive in the early morning.”

  “That’ll take too long,” I said. “Let’s portal it.”

  “You can’t portal in and out of Amarantha’s kingdom.”

  “It breaks the rules, right?” I asked. “Who cares?”

  “No, I mean you literally can’t. It used to be possible, but since you and Nathaniel burned down half her forest she’s closed the magical loopholes that allow the creation of portals in her kingdom.”

  “Oh,” I said, and rocked back on my heels, thinking. “Wait. What about portals that already existed, like the one that we found in the alley? The one that led to the swamp?”

  The portal had been in the same alley where we’d found the body of a werewolf and later Gabriel had gone missing. It had been invisible, and I’d discovered it by throwing a magical net over the area.

  “What about it?” J.B. asked. “Surely it’s been closed by now.”

  “We might as well see,” I said. “It will be faster than a car. Once we portal through we can fly to the castle.”

  “Fine, look into it,” J.B. said impatiently. “And let me know what you find. I’ll be at your house later regardless.”

  “Okay,” I said.

  We exited through the door and found Chloe sitting halfway down the hallway eating a gigantic burrito wrapped in foil. She gave the three of us a little finger salute and hopped to her feet, heading back to the room and her work.

  J.B. parted ways with us on the floor of his office. I retrieved the sword from security and Gabriel and I exited through the rooftop door.

  “Do you want to go to the alley now?” he asked.

  “Nah, we’ll wait and go with J.B. later,” I said.

  “Very well,” Gabriel said.

  He took my hand as we flew home. It was lovely just to be with him, not to hide my emotions, to know that I could touch him if I wanted and no one could take him away from me.

  We landed in the backyard, smiling at each other.

  “So I see that it is true,” said a strained voice from the porch, and we looked up.

  It was Nathaniel.

  12

  IF I’D THOUGHT NATHANIEL LOOKED MUSSED YESTERDAY at Samiel’s trial, it was nothing compared to the way he looked now. He was positively ragged. He looked like he hadn’t showered or combed his hair, there were huge bags under his eyes, his shirt had been buttoned incorrectly and the tails were left hanging out of his pants.

  Nathaniel stalked toward us, and I backed up half a step. He had a slightly crazed look in his eye, and I wasn’t sure what he would do.

  “I did not believe when I heard,” he said. “I did not believe that such a thing would be possible, would be allowed. I did not think you would defy your father and the laws of the kingdom so utterly by permitting this thrall to defile you.”

  Nathaniel raised his hand toward me but Gabriel stopped him with a hold on his wrist. Nathaniel wrenched his arm away.

  “Do not touch me, slave,” he spat. “You have already given me insult by touching my betrothed.”

  “She is not your betrothed,” Gabriel said softly, but there was an undercurrent of steel. “She is my wife.”

  I stepped between them before Gabriel lost his temper with Nathaniel and went all nephilim-power on his ass. I didn’t need another mess to clean up.

  “Leave Gabrie
l out of this,” I said. “And while you’re at it, leave Azazel out of this, too. This is about you and me. I told you I wouldn’t marry you. Repeatedly. I don’t love you. I never felt anything remotely resembling affection for you. You convinced yourself that I would have to follow Azazel’s word and marry you anyway, but I wasn’t going to do it.”

  “You must follow the accords of Lucifer’s kingdom!” Nathaniel shouted, and he looked totally unhinged now. “Even Lord Lucifer himself must cleave unto them!”

  “Yeah, about that…” I said. “I think he just plays along with the Grigori because it amuses him to do so. Don’t kid yourself that Lucifer has to follow anyone’s whim but his own.”

  “You are speaking blasphemy,” Nathaniel said, and his hand went around my wrist.

  I felt Gabriel move behind me but I put my other hand on his chest, holding him back.

  “Get your hand off me before I blow it off,” I said to Nathaniel. “You’d better remember what I did to you the last time you touched me without permission.”

  The memory hung in the air between us—Nathaniel holding me down, me blasting him with so much power that it left his muscles and bone exposed, unable to heal for weeks.

  He let go of me, his eyes narrowed. “You have done me an insult by treating me thus.”

  I resisted the impulse to rub the place where he had touched me, to wipe my skin clean.

  “You’re the one who’s always going on about Lucifer,” I said. “Fine. My marriage to Gabriel was Lucifer’s will. I’d like to see you try to cross him.”

  Nathaniel backed away from me, his wings spread wide. “You have laid me low publicly, to be humiliated before all the courts. Everyone knows that Lucifer indulges you, that you are permitted to run wild. I do not blame Lord Lucifer for his affection for you, for I, too, was guilty of this.”

  I gave him a look. “The only thing you cared about was the status you would get when I married you. Now you’ve lost that. Don’t act like it was love for me that’s breaking your heart now.”

  “It is all falling apart,” Nathaniel muttered. “I will not forget this.”

  He took flight in a whirl of anger, and we watched him go.