Black Howl

by Christina Henry

  “Y-y-yes. Of course.” She lifted her head and wiped her face, and then she smiled brilliantly. “I know this is going to work. I feel it in my bones.”

  I wished I were as confident as she was, but I didn’t say so. I indicated that she should enter first, and I let everyone file in ahead of me. Jude and J.B. were last, at the end of the line. I tried to give them both a watery half smile but wasn’t sure I succeeded. They waited for me to go into the room before them. Jude squeezed my shoulder once before dropping his hand.

  Chloe was talking to the mothers, determining which child should be positioned in which chair. The children were the same perfect little automatons that they had been in the woods after I’d started ordering them around.

  “Wade has instructed the children to do exactly as their mothers say,” Jude whispered. “The power of the alpha.”

  I looked at Wade, so strong and compassionate and wise. His pack was lucky to have an alpha like him. What happened in packs where the alpha held so much power and used it cruelly, to subjugate those beneath him?

  I wondered briefly if that was the greater purpose for which Amarantha and Focalor had been holding Wade. They’d never tried to extract his memories. Perhaps Azazel had been working on a machine to draw on the power of the alpha, that all-powerful word. I regretted not destroying Azazel’s workshops when I’d had the chance.

  I had discovered that I regretted a lot of things.

  The children sat obediently in the chairs, and Chloe went down the line turning on the machines. As each cub’s eye was scanned by the laser, the child would go rigid. A few mothers stepped toward their children, as though wanting to pull them away.

  “You have to wait,” I said, and they turned to look at me. “I know it’s hard. I know they look like they’re suffering. But we can’t stop the process once it’s begun.”

  A couple of the mothers whimpered, but most of them took their cue from Roxie Wade, who nodded regally at me. She watched, unflinching, as her toddler stared into the eye of the camera.

  Since some of the children were so young and had correspondingly short memory lives, the cubs did not reach the crisis moment all at the same time.

  The first to cry out was Wade’s daughter, and that was the only time I thought Roxie would break.

  “Mama!” the little girl shouted, and her voice was so plaintive that I almost ran to her myself.

  “This is the hardest part,” I murmured like a mantra. “Don’t give in. Wait it out.”

  Some of the other children also cried out for their mothers, and Chloe had to restrain one woman who would not listen to admonitions to wait.

  It was unbearable, almost as bad as listening to the children scream when we’d taken them off the machines in the caves.

  One of them began to wail, a cry of pain so piercing that it broke the ice that encased my heart. All the grief I’d suppressed the night before rose up in my throat, and tears overflowed. Roxie took my hand and gripped it tight. And we waited.

  One by one, the cubs fainted in their chairs.

  “You can take them now,” Chloe said.

  Roxie and Wade rushed to their daughter. Wade scooped her up and rested her head on his shoulder.

  “Papa?” the little girl said sleepily.

  Someone had put a little pink barrette in her dark hair, and the barrette stood out in bright relief against Wade’s vest. She opened her eyes to half-mast, as if to affirm that it was indeed her father who held her. Then she laid her head back on his shoulder and began to snore.

  Roxie laughed and cried at the same time, her hand over her mouth. Wade just gave me a long look, and in that look was all the gratitude that he wanted to say but couldn’t speak because of the lump in his throat.

  I only nodded, and left the room. My work here was done. I had something else to do now. I was done with the living. Death was coming for Azazel, and I was going to deliver it.

  J.B. followed me into the hallway, grabbed my hand so I would face him.

  “Maddy,” he said. “If you need anything…”

  “I know,” I said. “And the same goes for you. I think I should try harder to be a better friend.”

  “I might need a shoulder to cry on,” J.B. said. “I’m king now, you know.”

  I stared at him. Somehow the implications of his mother’s death hadn’t really set in.

  “King of Amarantha’s court,” I said. “How are you going to manage that and your Agency duties?”

  “How are you going to be the Hound of the Hunt and an Agent?” J.B. shrugged. “I’ll manage. Same as you.”

  “I’ll have something else to do besides act as Hound of the Hunt, I’m sure,” I said. “If Lucifer ever returns my phone calls, he’ll probably want some assistance with quashing this rebellion of Azazel’s.”

  “I can help with that, too,” J.B. said. “My mother was a part of it. She was perfectly happy to enslave humans. I should do something to make up for that.”

  “You already have,” I said quietly.

  He rubbed his hands through his hair, and the gesture was so familiar and so dear that I smiled.

  “I don’t think I’ll ever be able to do enough,” he said. “We found over eighty ghosts that had been damaged and killed by the machines. There may still be more out there that we never found.”

  Those lost souls would haunt him, as they would haunt me.

  “We can only do as much as we can,” I said. “We saved the cubs. We saved the people in the warehouse. We can’t save everyone.”

  “But we should be able to,” he said, brooding.

  I knew he was thinking of Gabriel, but I wasn’t ready to talk about that. Part of me resented J.B. for not warning me, for not helping me avert Gabriel’s death. I didn’t want that tiny part to fester and grow. I knew why J.B. had made his choices.

  I went home. I slept a lot more than I normally did for the next few days. I didn’t miss a soul pickup. I watched movies with Beezle and Samiel when they wanted to try to cheer me up, and sometimes I even allowed myself to be cheered for a moment.

  I cried when I thought they couldn’t see. I wouldn’t take the two coffee mugs out of the dish rack. At night I slept in Gabriel’s shirt so that it felt like I was sleeping in his embrace again.

  On the fifth day after Azazel had killed my first and only love, Lucifer rang my doorbell.

  I knew it was him at the bottom of the stairs. I can feel his presence, the call of blood to blood. Funny how I’d never felt that way about Azazel.

  I threw a sweater over my shirt and went down to answer the door. Lucifer stood on the porch, looking solemn. I’d never invited him inside.

  I opened the outside door and leaned in the jamb. “Back from Aruba, are you?”

  “Will you come out and speak with me?” he said.

  “Sorry—all my coats were destroyed suppressing the rebellion,” I said, anger rising up at the sight of him standing there. All this could be laid at his door, every bit of it.

  Lucifer sighed impatiently and snapped his fingers. A black wool overcoat appeared, much like the one that Gabriel used to wear except that it was smaller and cut for a woman. It was also a lot more expensive than anything I could have afforded for myself.

  “Will you come out, please? I would speak with you about Gabriel.”

  I stepped out of the doorway and took the coat. “What do you want to say?”

  “I am sorry,” he said. “I am sorry that you lost Gabriel. I am sorry that I was not there to assist you.”

  “I find that very hard to believe,” I said coldly. “The best chance you had of finding out who was plotting against you was to disappear.”

  “Yes,” he admitted.

  “So you did take yourself out on purpose. I thought as much,” I said. “Can you see the future?”

  Lucifer looked as though he wasn’t certain whether he should answer that question.

  “Can you?” I persisted.

  “I cannot see the future the way y
ou may imagine. I can see…possibilities. Implications.”

  “So you knew there was a possibility that Gabriel would die,” I said. “But you never thought it necessary to mention it to me. Why? Why did you give him to me only to take him away?”

  Lucifer put his arm around me. It felt like the comforting of a parent, a parent I’d always wanted—a father. The air filled with the scent of cinnamon. It reminded me so strongly of Gabriel that the tears that always hovered beneath the surface spilled over.

  Lucifer said nothing, only held me as I wept. After a long while, it felt like there were no more tears to be cried. I lifted my head and saw Lucifer watching me with great compassion in his eyes.

  “If there is one human emotion I truly comprehend, it is grief,” Lucifer said. “I lost Evangeline and my children so long ago, and I never stopped grieving for them.”

  “So it doesn’t stop hurting, then,” I said dully.

  “The pain becomes, perhaps, not quite so sharp. In the future, you may find that days may pass when you do not think of him at all, but when you do there will be a tenderness there, like a bruise that has never healed.”

  I didn’t need Lucifer to tell me that. A piece of me had been taken forever when Gabriel died. You can’t replace the missing parts of your heart.

  Lucifer released me. I felt lost again, empty, except for the flame that burned bright with anger at the thought of Azazel. He would not be able to run far enough.

  “Still, all is not lost. Gabriel lives on inside you,” Lucifer said.

  “Yes, I’ve heard all the clichés.” I sighed. Beezle and Samiel had been repeating them ad nauseam.

  “No, I mean Gabriel really does live on inside you,” Lucifer said. “Here.”

  He put his hand on my abdomen, and I looked up in shock.

  Far below, deep inside, I felt it.

  The beating of tiny wings.