Not to mention Antares had managed to sneak up and take my gargoyle unawares, so who was to say that he couldn’t sneak up on me and yank my intestines through my nose?
My brain was tired; my body was tired. I just wanted to crawl into bed and pull the covers up and pretend that everything was normal, but my life was getting less normal every day.
“I need something to eat,” Beezle announced.
“Of course you do,” I replied. “Pizza all around, then.”
Beezle pumped his fist in the air. “Hawaiian?”
Not my favorite, but it was Beezle’s. And I had missed him. He’d only been gone for a few hours, but I had missed him.
“Hawaiian,” I said, and went inside to call for delivery, Nathaniel following silently behind.
9
A COUPLE OF HOURS LATER I WAS SHOWERED, FED and ensconced on the couch with Beezle watching one of our favorite movies—the one where the alien attaches itself to this guy’s face and then bursts out of his chest and eats everyone on the ship. You would think that, given the large quantities of actual monsters in my life, I would prefer preschool cartoons, but for some reason this film still entertained me. Maybe it was because Beezle felt free to comment on the total stupidity of the characters who got eaten.
“Move, lady, move!” he shouted at the television. “The big monster is standing right there. Don’t cry. Run!”
Nathaniel had gone downstairs to Gabriel’s apartment for the evening. I hoped that he wasn’t poking around in Gabriel’s private things. I felt bad about letting Nathaniel sleep in Gabriel’s space but I definitely didn’t want him up here, even on the couch bed. I did not want to get into an argument about husbandly rights.
I also felt more than a little guilty about being happy that Beezle was home when Gabriel wasn’t. The lack of his presence was starting to press on me, like a niggling headache. Even when I was engaged with something, I was always aware of the fact that Gabriel wasn’t with me.
The front doorbell rang just as the heroine of the film was making her escape from the ship that was about to self-destruct. Beezle and I glanced at each other, then at the clock. It was past ten.
“Who could it be?” I asked.
“J.B.?” Beezle guessed. “Gabriel, tied up in a burlap sack?”
“Antares, Samiel, an emissary from Amarantha come to take my mortal remains back to her . . .”
“Lucifer with a great big stick to beat you with for jeopardizing his negotiations . . .”
I stood up. I didn’t want to contemplate Lucifer being angry with me. For all of my bravado where he was concerned, he scared me. I generally tried not to think too intently about him or I would feel sick to my stomach. It seemed that he had far too much power to affect my fate.
“Okay, let’s not speculate and say we did.”
“Can I go out the front window and see who it is?” Beezle asked.
“Absolutely not,” I replied as I went down the front stairs. “What if it’s Antares again?”
“Are you going to keep me in the house forever?” he whined. “I’m a gargoyle. I have guardian duties.”
“Oh, excuse me. It must have been torture to sit on the couch and eat pizza and watch a movie. I’ll be sure to send you outside the next time I’m thinking of doing such a crazy thing.”
I peeked through the curtain on the door at the bottom of the stairs. J.B. stood in the foyer with his hair sticking up all over the place and a haggard look in his eyes.
“It’s really J.B.,” Beezle said.
“I know that. He wouldn’t be able to stand in the foyer otherwise,” I replied.
I swung the door open. “Can’t you ever show up during regular visiting hours?”
“Feeling better, I see,” J.B. said. “Well enough to burn down about forty acres of outland forest and kill two of my mother’s favorite pets.”
I rolled my eyes and turned around, indicating that he should follow. J.B. slammed the front door shut behind him.
“How many times do I have to say that those pets of hers were trying to eat me?”
“That’s what they’re there for,” J.B. said.
“Well, was I supposed to let them do their job?” I opened my front door and waved him inside ahead of me.
He turned on me, his face full of anger. “Of course not. But why the hell were you there in the first place? I thought that you were going tomorrow as part of an official envoy. You have no idea how bad this looks. The queen was ready to demand your head as compensation from Lucifer and call off the negotiations entirely. I’ve spent the last several hours trying to convince her not to do so and to let the negotiations proceed as planned.”
“Well, thanks for that,” I said grudgingly. “But how did she find out so quickly? Those faeries that we saw in the forest said it was a day’s walk from where we were.”
J.B. looked at me pityingly. “It was a day’s walk. But they have magic, you know. They were at the queen’s court a few minutes after they left you.”
“Those little bastards,” I said, and then I latched onto something that J.B. had said. “Yeah, wait a minute. They LEFT me. Us. Me and Beezle and Nathaniel. As soon as the spider showed up, they took off without a by-yourleave. So I didn’t see any reason why I should chase them down again.”
J.B. looked interested. “The guards abandoned you?”
I nodded. “Ran right through the woods without waiting to see if we were following.”
He ran his hands through his hair. “All right, we might be able to work with that. It was a breach of conduct for them to leave you to danger. But what were you doing there in the first place?”
I explained about Antares, the bomb, Beezle’s kidnapping and the invisible portal in the alley.
“I’m sure that my mother doesn’t know anything about an invisible portal,” he said, frowning. “I wonder who put it there. And why.”
“That’s just what we’ve been trying to figure out,” I said. “And I’m thinking it must have something to do with Gabriel’s disappearance.”
“Why would anyone take Gabriel through a portal to the queen’s lands?” J.B. asked.
“I’m not sure,” I said. “I keep feeling like I’m missing something. There are all these disparate factions floating around causing problems. Any one of them could have taken Gabriel.”
“I still think it was the wolves,” said Beezle.
“I still think you have wolf prejudice,” I replied.
“Why are you defending the wolves?” J.B. asked. “It’s not like you have a relationship with them.”
“Well, I do now, sort of. They said that I was a friend to them and vice versa. Plus, I don’t know—I’ve always kind of liked the wolves. They’re straightforward. They don’t play games like the courts of the vampires or the fallen. With the wolves, what you see is what you get.”
“That doesn’t mean that they weren’t involved in Gabriel’s disappearance,” J.B. said. “Don’t kid yourself. They have an agenda, too. They’re trying to negotiate with Amarantha right now for some ancient lands of theirs that currently belong to her, and they don’t want the faerie court to strike any new deal with Lucifer’s kingdom.”
“Why not?”
“The wolves have a long-standing argument with Lucifer. They don’t want Lucifer to gain any leverage with Amarantha that might affect their land claim.”
“Is there anyone not negotiating with Amarantha right now?” I said, annoyed. “Just how many players are in the pond here?”
“She just signed a new treaty with the vampires regarding right-of-way access, so they’re out of the picture right now,” J.B. said. “Other than that, pretty much everyone is in and out of the court for one reason or another.”
I blew out a breath. “Just why the hell did Lucifer think that I could handle this?”
Beezle and J.B. looked at each other.
“Yes, I know, that’s what you two know-it-alls tried to tell me yesterday. I’ll figure it out. J.B.,
go home and get some sleep. If you keep doing that to your hair, it’s going to fall out.”
“I’m overwhelmed by your gratitude. ‘Thanks, J.B., for making sure that your mom didn’t send her assassins to remove all my limbs one by one.’”
I kissed him on the cheek. “Thanks, J.B. Now, come back tomorrow morning around ten so you can escort me to the court. Surely she won’t chop off my head on sight if her son is part of my entourage.”
“Don’t count on it,” he said, and disappeared out the front door.
“Can I sleep in my nest?” Beezle asked.
“No,” I said. “You can set something up on my dresser.”
“Your dresser is hard,” he complained.
“So get a pillow,” I replied. “You’re the one who’s always going on about how cold it is outside.”
After about fifteen minutes of grumping and grumbling, I finally got Beezle settled. I collapsed on the bed and closed my eyes in an instant. And when I slept, I dreamed of Gabriel.
It was dark where he was, so dark and cold, a pit of frozen stone. The stone was black as night and shone in the faint gleam that emitted from the top of the pit. Gabriel’s eyes gave off a slight glow from the shadows.
He was naked and shivering, and in the light I could see long welts clotted with blood on his back, his arms, his shoulders. He had only been gone for a little more than a day, but his face had a gaunt, haggard look, as if he hadn’t been eating. Since I couldn’t see any sign of food or water, he probably hadn’t been.
He hunched over his knees, arms wrapped around his legs, his wings enclosing his body in a makeshift blanket. Gabriel was always so calm, so self-assured, and it hurt my heart to see him trembling on the ground like a lost child.
I held my hand out to him, knowing that I could not touch him, that this was only a dream, when suddenly he looked up.
“Madeline?” he said. His face was alight with hope.
“Gabriel,” I replied, and I brushed my hand over his cheek, expecting to feel his skin beneath my fingertips, the dark stubble that grew there. But of course I couldn’t. I wasn’t really there.
“Madeline?” he asked again, and his eyes searched for some sign of me. Disappointment crept over his face.
“I’m here, Gabriel,” I said. “I’m here. I’m coming for you.”
But he dropped his head to his knees. He didn’t see me. He didn’t hear me. I felt a moment of despair. What good was I to him, or to anybody? How had I let this happen in the first place?
Then I realized I could at least try to find out where he was. I drifted upward through the pit. There was a long channel above the hole where Gabriel was held. The channel was far too narrow for Gabriel to fly through, and too smooth to climb. His captors must have found some way to suppress his magic as well, or no prison would be enough to keep him there.
I wondered if they’d simply dropped him into the hole or if they had cared enough about broken bones to lower him gently. Judging from the whip marks on his back, it was probably the former.
I floated through the open hole at the top of the pit and emerged in a cave. There was no sign of Gabriel’s captors, no sign of life of any kind. There was only black volcanic rock and gray sand. I couldn’t smell anything or feel heat or cold, so from my point of view it was a basically a non-descript cave. It could have been anywhere in the world.
I let myself drift along, toes just brushing the fine sand that covered the ground everywhere I looked. After a few minutes I came to the end of the cave. The tunnel turned abruptly and opened out over the edge of a cliff. I went right up to the edge and looked down.
Even though I was some kind of ghost or floating aspect here, I still had a moment of vertigo. The cliff dropped away to a sheer face that fell maybe two hundred feet to a thin creek bed, long empty of water. There was a wide expanse of open plain on the other side of the creek, gray sand and gray sky and clouds exploding with lightning.
I had a foreboding feeling as I looked around this dead place, gray as far as the eye could see. I looked and looked and finally found what I expected.
Far in the distance I could see the clawed outline of a tree, white as bone, scraping its branches like talons across the sky.
“The Forbidden Lands,” I said. It was a place that I had never wanted to see again, the place where Lucifer and the Grigori had imprisoned the nephilim. It was the place where Ramuell had torn out my heart, the place where I had died once—for a little while.
Who had brought Gabriel here and dropped him into that oubliette? If they wanted him for some purpose—as a ransom or a slave—then why leave him here to be forgotten?
Suddenly there was a movement on the plain below. From the right of the cliff that I stood upon came a single individual. At this distance I could detect only the gleam of golden hair and of white wings, marking him of angelic descent.
From the left came a small group, knotted tightly together and moving almost as one body except for the leader. He strode ahead to meet the individual coming from the other direction. All I could see of the leader was that he was tall and horned—that plus the multicolored glob of beings behind him told me that he was a demon.
I needed to get closer and find out who these characters were and if they had anything to do with Gabriel’s kidnapping. I knew that my physical body was not here, and that even if it were here, I could fly. But it still took everything I had to step off the edge of the cliff.
I fell slowly, floating downward like a dandelion seed drifting on the breeze. It seemed to take an eternity before I met the ground. I landed softly in the sand, and my bare feet made no impression. It was only then that I realized I wore nothing but my only white nightgown—a favorite of Gabriel’s—and it wasn’t even what I had actually put on to sleep in. I felt suddenly vulnerable, that if I presented myself like this in the sight of those demons, they would fall upon me and devour me.
But that was absurd. Gabriel couldn’t see me. I was dreaming, or having a vision, but I wasn’t really here. This might be my only chance to find out who took Gabriel, and why, and to try to figure out how to get him back.
I had landed several feet behind the angel. His wings were up and outspread and obscured his face from the angle at which I stood. I approached cautiously, hugging the cliff face even though one of the demon entourage would surely raise a cry if I could be seen.
The demon in charge, the one speaking with the angel, looked a lot like my half brother. He so resembled Antares that I had to do a double take to make sure that it wasn’t him. The leader was about nine feet tall, with red skin, oversized bat wings and gleaming black horns jutting from the top of his forehead. He had a strange sigil, almost like an ampersand with the bottom curl cut off, branded on his face.
The sight of that sigil gave me a flash of memory. Antares tossing me down the stairs, telling me that he would be honored above all others when he brought my heart to his master. He showed me the same sigil on his hand, the sign of Focalor. Focalor was one of Azazel’s enemies, but he could not openly declare war against Azazel because that would be tantamount to declaring open war on Lucifer. Was this creature Focalor, or another one of his toadies like Antares?
I crept carefully toward the angel and the demon, who were deep in conversation, in order to hear what they said. Unfortunately, I was doomed to disappointment. They seemed to be speaking some kind of language that involved a lot of grunting and gesturing. The demon was annoyed with the angel, and as they talked his face grew thunderous. The band of demons behind him moved restlessly as their leader became more fractious. I still could not see the face of the angel, but his body language was unyielding. There would obviously be no negotiations with him.
I studied the demons, looking for a familiar face. The only other demons that I had ever seen had been with Antares, and if I saw one of them in this group, then at least I would have some kind of lead to follow. Tracking down Antares wasn’t too hard. He showed up at my house every chance he got.
I moved a little closer, hoping to at least see the face of the angel dealing with a demon as if it were his equal. This was a big no-no in the courts of the fallen. There was a pretty strict caste system there, with the Grigori—the first fallen—at the top, then other angels, then demons, who acted almost as servants to the castes above.
Certain crossbreeds were tolerated at higher levels—like me, because I was pretty much descended from fallen royalty—but others like Gabriel ranked below the lowest demons. Within the general groups there were even stricter breakdowns of hierarchy, which had a lot to do with how much power you had, who was in your entourage, who your parents were, or all of the above. It was pretty extraordinary to see an angel treating a demon this way.
I drifted over the sand as the discussion grew more animated. Because of the position of the party I had to approach the angel almost directly from behind. As I drew within a few feet of him, he suddenly stopped speaking and turned around.
His eyes widened, green eyes filled with malice.
Samiel.
It was as if he saw me floating there when no one else could. I heard a voice in my head say, “Enemy.”
He reached for me, his fist uncurling to tear out my heart, just like his father had done.
“No,” I whispered, and my body filled with terror. How could he see me? How did he know that I was there?
“Madeline!”
Gabriel’s voice. Gabriel. I had to get away. I shot upward, away from Samiel’s clawing fingers, up the side of the cliff, back into the cave. Samiel came right behind me, a relentless machine, wanting only one thing—vengeance for the deaths of his mother and father.
I turned around and around in the cave, realizing I’d fallen into a trap. Now I would be torn to pieces by demons.
“Maddy!”
Samiel bore down on me, his face unyielding, his eyes furious.
“Enemy.”
“Maddy!” A gravelly voice, one that I knew very well.
“Madeline!” Gabriel calling from the oubliette.
Black Night Page 12
