Black Howl

by Christina Henry

  “Zero,” Beezle said, coming in through the side window. “Let’s go.”

  So I left for the Agency with my entourage escorting me (because of course Samiel wouldn’t be left behind, either). When we landed on the roof, I got a terrible shock.

  Amarantha stood there.

  15

  AFTER A MOMENT I REALIZED IT WAS NOT AMARANTHA, but her ghost. She looked more than a little unhinged, and her appearance reflected her state of mind, as it often does with ghosts. If they remember themselves as young and beautiful, that’s how they will look in the afterlife, even if that person died in their dotage. If they pull at their hair and scratch things, then their ectoplasmic form will reflect the ghost’s perception of what they should look like after they’ve tugged their hair and broken their nails.

  Amarantha looked like she’d been doing both, and she looked a lot more like a wild bean sidhe than either her perfect faerie self or her freakish demonic form.

  “Somebody here needs a salon,” Beezle said. “You’ve looked better.”

  “You! YOU!” she screeched, and she pointed her finger dramatically at me. “You stole my life from me. I demand justice!”

  And then she flew at me with her arms outstretched, fingers bent into claws.

  I stood still and waited for her to pass through me. She did, and I shivered. Ghosts draw energy from the air around them, and it means that they make cold spots. When a ghost passes through you it’s a lot like having ice water poured down your spine.

  I waved to Gabriel and Samiel to follow me and walked toward the door. Amarantha flew after me, cursing.

  “This is not over, Lucifer’s spawn,” she hissed.

  “It is for you,” I said.

  “I will haunt you to the end of your days!” Amarantha vowed. “You will never be free of me.”

  “We’ll see about that,” I muttered.

  We went inside and down to Chloe’s secret lab. J.B. was waiting for us in the hallway.

  “Uh, why is your mom hanging around on the roof?” I asked.

  “Because she refused the Door,” J.B. said. “She’s been following me around for the last couple of days. I had to have a spell put up around my condo to keep her out.”

  “Can I get one, too?” I asked.

  “She threatened to haunt Madeline ‘until the end of her days,’” Gabriel said.

  J.B. rubbed his eyes. “I’ll see what I can do. Come on—Chloe is anxious to run the tests.”

  We crowded into the small room. Chloe’s worktable had been removed. In its place was a tripod with one of the machines on it, and a man tied to an office chair so that he faced the lens. He looked like he was in his mid-forties, paunchy and balding. He was dressed in a jumpsuit that looked a lot like the sort of thing that prisoners wore. He wasn’t screaming, but he kept rocking back and forth in the chair. Chloe was making some adjustments to the machine when we walked in.

  “We had to tie him; otherwise he kept trying to bang his head against the wall,” Chloe said apologetically.

  Her hair was pink today, and she wore a leather vest with a tiered black skirt. She gave Samiel a very suggestive smile.

  “Okay,” she said, clapping her hands together. “Let’s get this party started.”

  Nobody spoke as Chloe pushed a button to turn on the camera. Gabriel took my hand and squeezed it. My whole body was taut. The man in the chair went rigid as the scanner met his eyes.

  “We’ve attempted to speed up the reinsertion process,” Chloe said as the machine did its work. “It seems, from what we could determine in analyzing the spell, that the memory extraction takes a number of hours.”

  “And you think it’s safe to put the memories back in there faster than they were taken out?” I asked, skeptical. A human brain is a delicate and complicated organ. It didn’t seem that quickness was wanted here, but rather care.

  “We have no idea if this is safe at any speed,” Chloe said frankly. “I erred on the side of rapidity only because we have so many victims to restore.”

  “Plus, we don’t know how many more may be out there. Our resources are taxed as it is taking care of the ones that are already here,” J.B. said. “I’ve got special teams all over the city looking for warehouses like the one you found.”

  “I can help with that,” I said, surprised that he hadn’t asked me.

  “There’s no point in putting you in charge of a team,” J.B. said. “Chaos follows you everywhere you go, and I don’t need to deal with any more property damage.”

  “I don’t think you are taking the long view,” I said, my cheeks reddening. “The people in the warehouse were saved.”

  “By J.B. and his team,” Beezle pointed out.

  “Who didn’t have to deal with the monster arachnids,” I said.

  “Enough,” Gabriel said.

  Beezle and I both subsided, glaring at each other.

  The man in the chair moaned. We all stared at him. I would have squashed Gabriel’s knuckles into powder if he hadn’t been supernatural. J.B.’s hands were balled into fists in his pockets. Chloe had her arms crossed, her mouth drawn in a straight line. On my other side Samiel slung a comforting arm around my shoulder. Beezle fluttered around the room nervously.

  The man moaned again, louder this time, and then he shouted, “Janie!”

  He began to thrash in his restraints. I released Gabriel’s hand and stepped forward, only to have Chloe cut me off.

  “Wait,” she said.

  The man tore back and forth, screaming now. It was a different kind of screaming than when we had removed the victims from the cameras. That screaming had a kind of dull, automaton quality to it. This screaming was a soul-deep cry of pain. Blood leaked from the corners of the man’s eyes.

  I started to move around Chloe, to go to the man who was screaming so hard and long it was breaking my heart.

  “Wait,” she repeated, her hand on my chest. “The process isn’t complete yet.”

  “His eyes are bleeding,” I said furiously. “You think that’s a good thing? He could be having a stroke.”

  “Trust me,” she said, her face desperate.

  I think she knew I could blast her out of the way if I wanted.

  “Wait, Maddy,” J.B. said. “Just wait.”

  He sounded as deeply unhappy as I felt. Beezle landed on Samiel’s shoulder and covered his little ears.

  Gabriel touched my shoulder, pulled me back to him. “Wait.”

  We all watched in various states of distress as the man howled, rocked, tried to tear at his bindings. But his eyes never moved from the camera.

  Suddenly the man went completely rigid and silent, and then he slumped forward, his eyes closed.

  I pulled away from Gabriel and ran to the man. Chloe was right next to me, untying the restraints. Together we eased him down to the floor and I checked for a heartbeat.

  “He’s still alive,” I said, lifting his eyelids. His pupils were normal, but there were streaks of blood on his cheeks.

  “Good,” Chloe said. “I think he’ll sleep for a while now.”

  “And when he wakes up he’ll be good as new?”

  “Well, sleeping helps memory function in normal people,” Chloe reasoned. “So we assumed that after the memories were restored, the victims would need to sleep for several hours. Their brains need to process the restored information.”

  “Don’t try this on anyone else yet,” I said.

  She shook her head. “We’ll wait and see if it takes.”

  Chloe stepped into the hall to find someone who could help her bring the man back to the rooms they had prepared for the victims.

  I stood, feeling drained, and looked at J.B. “Call me if you want me to help the special teams.”

  He nodded. “I think we have it under control, but you could help by trying to find out where Focalor is. We know from my mother that he’s part of this.”

  “He may just be in his court,” I said, thinking of Focalor’s appearance at Samiel’
s trial.

  “We’re not going to try to beard the lion in his den again, are we?” Beezle asked. “Because that didn’t go so well last time.”

  “No,” I said. “I think I’ll give Grandpa a call.”

  I dialed Lucifer’s number—yes, that really is as weird as it sounds, giving Satan a phone call—and waited for him to pick up. I got his voice mail.

  “Azazel said Lucifer hasn’t been answering his calls,” I said to Gabriel.

  “You think Lord Lucifer is in some kind of danger?” Gabriel asked.

  “More likely he’s on vacation in Aruba and has his phone shut off,” I said.

  “Or he’s decided to see if you can handle the pressure from your marriage yourself,” Beezle said.

  “What do you mean?” I asked.

  “He gave you what you wanted; now he wants to see if you deserved it,” he replied. “I could kill for a cupcake right about now.”

  “Forget it,” I said, thinking over the implications of what Beezle had just said. “You think Lucifer is purposely waiting to see what kind of fallout there is because I married Gabriel?”

  “It is an excellent way to see which of his courts would openly object, and which would fall in line,” Gabriel said. “Remember what we discussed this morning.”

  I believe, truly believe, that we are permitted to exist only at his sufferance, and because it does, as you say, amuse him to watch us.

  “If that’s the case, then Beezle’s probably right—”

  “I usually am.”

  “—and Focalor probably will send someone to kill me.”

  J.B. looked troubled. “Should I assign a team to you for protection?”

  I shook my head. “I can handle whatever Focalor’s got.”

  And I don’t want any more blood on my hands than I have already, I thought. Most Agents, even highly trained ones, were not even remotely prepared for the kinds of horrors that lurked in a demon court.

  “Make sure she doesn’t get hurt,” J.B. said to Gabriel, and they shared a long look.

  “Why is it that when you two decide to be manly men you act like I’m not in the room?” I said crossly. “Come on, I’m sure we need to feed Beezle something healthy.”

  “Carrot cake has carrots in it,” Beezle said hopefully.

  “Yeah, and cream cheese frosting has calcium, too, I suppose,” I replied.

  “I think the food pyramid is really about interpretation,” Beezle said.

  We retrieved our weapons from security and went out onto the roof. Amarantha was missing, thank goodness.

  “I forgot to apologize to J.B. for setting his mother on him full-time. He can’t be happy about that,” I said as we took flight. It was starting to snow lightly—like we needed more snow. It had taken me, Gabriel and Samiel hours to shovel the walk and the gangway.

  Samiel tapped my shoulder. Do you think that Amarantha would try to stay in touch with her cohorts, even though she’s a ghost? We still don’t know who the third party is, the one who provided the technology to extract memories.

  “You think we should track her?” I asked, intrigued. “That’s a good idea. She may try to get in touch with Focalor or with this other character. I’ll ask J.B. about it. We can probably take turns keeping an eye on her.”

  “I wonder what happened to Violet?” Beezle said.

  I shrugged. “She must have chosen the Door. Otherwise she’d be hanging around Amarantha, I’m sure.”

  Beezle climbed inside my (dry-cleaned) jacket for warmth. I wiped snow out of my eyes, thinking it would be a good idea to get some goggles for this time of year. We landed in the front yard, shaking snow out of our hair.

  Samiel scooped up a snowball and threw it at Gabriel’s face.

  My exceedingly dour husband gave his half brother the evil eye. It was slightly less effective with snow and ice dripping off the end of his nose.

  Samiel gave Gabriel a taunting look and scooped up another handful of snow. Gabriel raised his eyebrow at Samiel but made no move to defend himself. Samiel tossed the snowball toward him and Gabriel blasted it out of the air with nightfire so that it backfired all over Samiel.

  “That’s not conspicuous or anything,” Beezle said, peeking out of my jacket.

  “Yeah, guys,” I said, laughing at the outraged expression on Samiel’s face. “No magic…”

  Samiel threw a bolt of nightfire at Gabriel’s feet and made the snow fly up underneath Gabriel’s overcoat. Gabriel narrowed his eyes.

  “Uh-oh,” I said. “Whatever you’re thinking, I don’t think it’s a good…”

  Gabriel sent out a bunch of tiny nightfire pulses, almost like an automatic weapon. They surrounded Samiel’s feet and sent high shooting sprays of snow and ice onto his face and coat.

  Samiel must have decided that it wasn’t worth it to try to beat Gabriel magically, so he dove for his brother and tackled him. Gabriel landed on his back in the snow and Samiel smashed a handful of it in Gabriel’s face.

  I was now laughing so hard I could barely breathe.

  “You think this is funny, do you?” Gabriel said menacingly.

  Samiel turned and gave me an appraising look.

  “Don’t even think about it,” I said, holding my hands up and backing toward the porch.

  Gabriel rolled lightly to his feet and stalked toward me.

  Beezle flew out of my jacket. “I’m not playing this game.”

  Samiel snatched Beezle by the ankle out of the air and buried him in a pile of snow. Beezle came out spluttering and glaring.

  “That’s it, nephilim boy,” Beezle snarled.

  Bring it on, gargoyle.

  I turned to run up the porch steps as Gabriel reached me. He grabbed me around the waist as I laughed and screamed. “No, don’t, no, don’t!”

  He tossed me into the snow face-first and I got a mouthful. I rolled over as he landed on top of me.

  “Well, this is nice,” I said, and kissed him.

  I vaguely heard the sounds of Beezle and Samiel’s continued battle.

  “We should go inside and leave them to it,” Gabriel murmured.

  “Good idea,” I said.

  Then a familiar voice broke into our reverie.

  “Gabriel ap Ramuell, you are under arrest for defiling my daughter.”

  Gabriel lifted his head, a shocked expression on his face. I twisted around in the snow.

  Azazel and two of his flunkies stood in the front walk. Samiel and Beezle were frozen in place, staring.

  “Let me up,” I said to Gabriel urgently.

  He stood, pulling me to my feet.

  “Get off my property,” I said to Azazel.

  “I am here to take this thrall into custody so that he can be tried before the court of the Grigori for his crimes,” Azazel said coldly.

  “Not this again,” I said, rolling my eyes. “You’re not taking him. He’s not a thrall anymore and he’s not defiling me—at least, not against my will.”

  Beezle snorted.

  “I have had quite enough of your insolence, daughter,” Azazel said. He waved to the two foot soldiers that stood behind him. “Take him.”

  I pulled Lucifer’s sword from its sheath. “If you take one more step toward my husband, I will make sure you don’t leave here with all your limbs.”

  They stopped, uncertain, and looked at Azazel.

  “You cannot defy the will of the Grigori!” Azazel shouted.

  “And you cannot defy the will of your lord,” I replied steadily, keeping my eyes on the two flunkies. “Lucifer freed him, Lucifer married us, Lucifer is not going to be happy that you’re still annoying me about this.”

  “You are my daughter. It is my will you obey. I have betrothed you to Nathaniel ap Zerachiel, and you will marry him. The thrall will be killed for his insolence,” Azazel said. “I will take him myself if I have to.”

  “No…you…will…not,” I said, and I felt the power of the Morningstar flowing through me.

  I was puttin
g on another light show for the benefit of my normal neighbors. One of these days video of me acting like a freak was going to wind up on the Internet, and then the government would be knocking at my door asking if they could use me as a weapon. I wondered if Lucifer would help me then, or if it would suit him to see me get carried away to some top-secret bunker.

  “For the last time, I am your father.”

  “In name only,” I spat.

  “In the only way that matters. You will do as I say, or you will be punished.”

  “No,” I said.

  One of the foot soldiers made a sudden move toward me, but I was ready for him. I kept my right hand on the sword, and with my left I blasted him with regular fire. His designer trench was set ablaze immediately and he ran screaming for the nearest snowbank.

  “Anyone else want to try?” I said innocently.

  “Do you truly think your powers are superior to my own?” Azazel said softly. “I am the right hand of Lucifer, and have been for ages untold. Do you believe that you could defeat me in a fight?”

  “Try me,” I said, and then, in an undertone to Gabriel, “Take out the other one before he gets any stupid ideas.”

  Gabriel blasted the second soldier with nightfire. This one was a little more savvy than his friend and so managed to dodge out of the way. He threw his own spells—some kind of purple sparks—at Gabriel and the two of them dueled their way across the tiny front lawn and onto the sidewalk. I really hoped that no one decided to walk down our street at just this second.

  Samiel and Beezle dodged out of the way of the other two.

  “Sam, take Beezle inside,” I said.

  “Why should I miss all the fun?” Beezle complained.

  “You can watch from the window,” I said, keeping my eyes on Azazel.

  My father looked cool and stone-faced and not at all scared of me. I, on the other hand, was terrified. Not of defying Azazel—that had been a long time coming—but of the consequences if I lost. Azazel might lose status among the Grigori. I would lose the love of my life. I had to win.

  Maybe some of this was on my face. Maybe Azazel saw me waver for a moment. He struck before I had time to prepare.

  A bolt of lightning shot across the space between us and hit me square in the chest. Electricity sizzled all over my body and my teeth rattled in my jaw. I kept a tight grip on the sword and slashed up with it as Azazel leapt to me, another lightning bolt ready at his fingertips. The bolt bounced off the sword and into a nearby tree, which gave an ominous crack.