Black City (A BLACK WINGS NOVEL)

by Christina Henry

  “Blood is cool and manly. Puke just makes you look like a loser,” J.B. said.

  It was astounding that we were this close to the creature’s head and that it wasn’t trying to swat us away. Or wrap us up in silk. Or gobble us in midair. It was really that absorbed with Nathaniel.

  My boots touched the monster’s head. J.B. stayed aloft, his hands under my shoulders ready to lift me away if the monster made any indication that it noticed I was there.

  It didn’t move.

  “Just stay right there,” I whispered to J.B.

  “I told you, I’m staying with you,” he said.

  “Then don’t put your feet down,” I said. “Just fly close to me so you can scoop me up if anything goes wrong.”

  J.B. had placed me on the broadest part of the creature’s diamond-shaped head. Its eyes were set on each side, close to its snout and under a prominent brow ridge like a snake’s. To sink the sword deep enough, I’d have to kneel close on the ridge and stick the sword into the eye with my arms over the edge.

  I proceeded carefully across toward the creature’s right eye. J.B.’s wings made a little current of air behind me.

  I knelt above the reptile-mammalian thing’s eye and drew my sword. I lowered it until the tip hovered above the slit pupil.

  Still the monster did not move.

  I plunged the sword into its eye with all the strength I had.

  Several things happened at once. The monster howled, thrashing its head, its cries so deep and strong that the cavern rumbled. Rock cracked and fell from the ceiling.

  Nathaniel shot toward the exit with Chloe in his arms.

  I held on tight to the hilt of the sword as the creature shook its head back and forth. My grip on the handle was the only thing keeping me from getting tossed into a wall as J.B had predicted.

  I pushed harder with the sword, trying to do as much damage as I could. Fluid gushed out of the monster’s eye and over my hands.

  And then I started to scream. And scream. And scream. The stuff that was pouring from the monster’s eye was burning my skin, burning through it, into the muscle and bone beneath.

  J.B. grabbed me, pulled me away. My hands were bound to the sword now, the acid melding my palms to the hilt. I couldn’t let it go even if I wanted to.

  The creature bellowed as the blade slid out of its eye, tearing nerves as it went. J.B. was forced to carry me in front of him, the sword still before me like I’d just drawn it from Arthur’s mystical stone.

  Nathaniel had deposited Chloe with Samiel and Jude and flown back to help J.B. The angel grabbed my legs and the two of them carried me through the air like I was on a stretcher. I barely registered Nathaniel’s presence or the screeching of the monster. The reptile-mammalian thing was now knocking over piles of bones as it tossed its head and lashed its tail.

  The crash of bones was tremendous, like a rock slide, and I had just enough sense left to realize that the bones were just as much of a danger.

  “Get everyone out of here,” I said through gritted teeth.

  “They are already moving down the passage,” Nathaniel said.

  “We will be right behind them.”

  Somehow the two of them got us out of the cave without being crushed by rocks, bones, or reptile-mammalian thrashing. The cries of the monster receded as they hurried down the passage to catch up to the others.

  My eyes were blurred with pain. The burning was going right down inside me, deeper and deeper, scorching every cell it touched. Nothing had ever hurt so much. I whimpered.

  “Gods above and below,” Beezle said, but his voice sounded like it was very far away. “What did you do to yourself now?”

  “I have no way of healing her until we get out of this thrice-forsaken cavern,” Nathaniel said.

  Chloe said something then, and Jude, but it was watery in my ears. They were conferring, trying to determine the best way to get out.

  “Just keep going forward,” I slurred, but none of them seemed to hear me.

  And then everything was quiet, and black.

  I woke to the feeling of cold rock beneath my cheek. I was curled like a baby on a wide flat stone, and the wind whipped my hair into my face. My sword was gone, and my hands no longer burned. I sat up and looked around.

  I was alone, and a vast expanse of white sand stretched in every direction. There was nothing for the eye to see except that unbreaking, unyielding ocean of white.

  “What now? Another trick?” I said. “J.B.? Nathaniel?”

  “You won’t find them here,” a voice said behind me.

  I scrambled to my feet and spun around, wishing to all the gods that ever were or would be that I had my powers at that moment, because Evangeline stood there.

  Evangeline, my many-greats-grandmother, the consort of Lucifer, also known as the crazy bitch who’d possessed me and tried to use me as the instrument of her revenge.

  “What are you doing here?” I asked warily.

  “I should ask you that question,” Evangeline said, and her smile was crafty. Her black hair danced in the wind like contorting snakes. She wore a simple gown of gray, and she looked young and fresh again, the way she had when Lucifer had first fallen in love with her.

  “Death agrees with you,” I said, avoiding her leading comment.

  I quickly realized that I was not in Titania’s realm anymore. Or maybe my body was, but my mind and spirit had taken a walk. I wasn’t about to give Evangeline the advantage by letting her know that I had no idea how or where I was.

  “Yes, it does,” Evangeline said. “You could probably be improved by death.”

  “Death doesn’t seem to stick that well on me,” I said. “You should have thought of that before you let Ramuell tear out my heart.”

  “Like your grandfather,” she said. “Always thinking the rules don’t apply to you.”

  “So far, they don’t,” I said. “You seem to have suffered the fate of the ordinary, though.”

  Evangeline narrowed her green eyes at me. “I have never been ordinary to Lucifer. He has defied space and time for me, the most sacred laws of the universe.”

  I remembered something Puck had said when Lucifer and Puck had encountered each other on my front lawn. He’s been going someplace he shouldn’t. He’s been a naughty, naughty boy.

  “Lucifer’s been coming here, to see you,” I said. “This is where he’s been going when he’s out of touch.”

  “Yes,” Evangeline said. “That is how much I meant to him, that he has spurned death to be with me.”

  “But he’s not supposed to,” I said. “Death is final. Death is forever. I met Gabriel by accident, in a dream, and the Agency wanted my head for it. Lucifer can’t come here. He’s breaking the rules.”

  “As are you, by being here now,” Evangeline said.

  “I didn’t come here on purpose. I would rather eat a basket of wriggling spiders than spend five seconds with you,” I said. “Lucifer can’t keep doing this. He has to know that there will be a price to pay. There always is when you bend the laws of magic.”

  “Lucifer would gladly pay any price the universe asked of him, especially now,” she said, and she stroked her hand over her belly.

  I could see the taut roundness under her gown, the first budding of her pregnancy.

  “Are you kidding me?” I said. “Not only has Lucifer somehow found a way to cross into the land of the dead, but he’s managed to knock you up?”

  “Are you frightened, little granddaughter? Scared that you will no longer be Lucifer’s first and most precious once my son is born?” Evangeline sneered.

  “I’m scared, but not for the reasons you think,” I said, staring at her belly in horror. “You’ve got a child conceived in death growing inside you. How do you know it won’t be some abomination unleashed on the world?”

  Evangeline smiled, and my blood turned to ice.

  “I’m counting on it.”

  Then I woke again, to biting cold and to searing pain. My
head was in J.B.’s lap and Nathaniel’s face was over mine. He knelt beside me, his hands on my hands, and the light of the sun was healing the burns. It hurt almost as much getting damaged in the first place. I screamed again and again, tears running down my face. J.B.’s hands on my shoulders held me in place.

  Lucifer’s sword was still in my grasp. Jude, Samiel and Chloe crowded around. Beezle was on the ground next to my head, peering at me like I was something under a microscope.

  After a while Nathaniel finished, his face drawn and sweating. “I did the best I could, but they will always look a little damaged.”

  He pried my fingers off the sword one by one. “You can let it go now, Madeline.”

  I waited for the waves of pain to recede so that I could think. Then I held my hands up to my face. I expected to see ridges of deep scars, like the victim of a fire. Instead there was a fine webbing of shadows running from the tips of my fingers up to my wrists in all the places where the creature’s blood had touched.

  The result was like a faded tattoo. Well, it wasn’t any worse than the scars on my face from the Hob, or the mess on my neck from the pix demon. All things considered, it was pretty good, actually. I still had all my digits in working order, and in my book that was a win.

  “Where are we?” I croaked.

  “In the wastelands,” Nathaniel said. “I would not have been able to heal you otherwise.”

  “How did we get out?”

  “Unbelievably, your advice was sound,” Beezle said. “We just kept going forward. I guess Titania figured she didn’t need any more tricks with that monster in there.”

  “The quantity of bones would suggest that the monster had been a sufficient deterrent in the past,” Nathaniel said dryly.

  I sat up, rubbing my eyes. “Well, we escaped the faerie kingdom.”

  “For now,” Beezle said ominously. “But we’re still stuck in this netherworld until you can get your granddaddy on the line.”

  “And Titania can and will certainly send someone after you now that you’ve managed to get away again,” J.B. said.

  I touched my stomach, felt the reassuring flutter of little wings. This was going to be one hardy kid when he was finally born—if his mother survived that long.

  “That’s the least of my worries,” I said grimly, thinking of Lucifer and Evangeline. I didn’t say anything about my vision, though. I wanted to have a little talk with Lucifer first.

  The snake tattoo on my palm wriggled, as if it knew I was thinking about Lucifer.

  “Tell him I want to see him,” I said to my hand.

  “You know, you look insane when you do that,” Beezle said.

  My palm tingled, and then I felt Lucifer drawing near.

  “He’s coming,” I said, getting to my feet with J.B.’s assistance.

  “You should be quoting Macbeth, you know,” said Lucifer’s voice behind us. “I always liked that scene with the three witches.”

  “Nobody here needs reminding that you’re something wicked,” I said, turning around calmly to face him while everyone else jumped in surprise.

  Lucifer started to speak, caught sight of Nathaniel, and paused. His eyes narrowed as he stalked past me until he was face-to-face with Nathaniel. Nathaniel stared back at Lucifer with his brand-new eyes.

  “That little fuck,” Lucifer said.

  “I think you mean Puck,” Beezle said.

  “No, I meant what I said,” Lucifer replied, and there was a low current of anger mixed with amusement in his voice. “What did he intend? For you to kill me at the most opportune time?”

  Nathaniel nodded briefly. “But I was revealed too soon, he says, and the spell no longer will work correctly.”

  “I should kill you now, you know,” Lucifer said conversationally. “Eliminate the possibility that the spell might go off anyway.”

  “No, you really shouldn’t kill him now,” I said meaningfully. “Not until you and I have had a chat about a few things. In private.”

  Lucifer turned to me, raised one eyebrow. Everyone else looked at me in curiosity and astonishment, as if a private conversation was an exotic concept from a foreign country.

  “Very well,” Lucifer said. “I presume you called me here to get you home since Puck has neglected you.”

  I nodded.

  “Everyone hold hands, then,” Lucifer said. He watched carefully as both Nathaniel and J.B. lunged for me, and then he smiled like some private suspicion of his had been confirmed.

  Beezle settled in on my shoulder. “You need your coat back. This sexy-clubgoer look lacks comfortable pockets.”

  “Try not to fall off into another dimension while we’re crossing the universe,” I said.

  Everyone else linked up, Lucifer nudging J.B. aside to take my hand. “Grandfather’s privilege,” he said.

  J.B. crossly joined the end of the line, and then we were off. The wonders of the galaxy seemed a lot less wondrous to me this time around. Maybe I was getting jaded. Maybe I was too preoccupied with the new horror of Evangeline’s baby, the vampire invasion of Chicago, the threat of Lucifer’s brother rising from Lake Michigan, and the very high probability that Titania or Bendith or both was going to try to kill me in my sleep sometime soon.

  That didn’t even begin to cover the complexity of my relationship problems with Nathaniel and J.B., or the fact that Samiel had apparently been harboring a lot of unkind thoughts about me. All in all, I had more than enough to keep my mind busy as we passed through space and time.

  We were back in Chicago and standing on my front lawn before I knew it. The sky was gray and swirling, and lightning crackled to the east, above the lake.

  Lucifer stared in the direction of the lightning, his face revealing nothing.

  “Let’s take a walk,” I said to him.

  Everyone protested in their predictable ways, but I silenced them with a look. Nathaniel and J.B. led the parade inside the house, and Lucifer and I were left alone in the snow. I led him onto the sidewalk, still unshoveled. The snow had been tamped down in a slippery path by dozens of feet. I wondered whether escaping humans had passed by here, or whether the path had been cut by Therion’s roaming vampire brigades.

  “Is Alerian causing the storm?” I asked.

  Lucifer seemed unsurprised that I knew about his brother. “What else did Puck tell you?”

  “More than I wanted to know, really,” I said. I watched his face for a reaction. “And so did Evangeline.”

  There was a tiny spark there in his endless eyes, nothing I would have noticed if I hadn’t been looking for it. And then it was gone.

  “I’m glad you brought up Evangeline, because I have a task for you,” Lucifer said.

  “I’m not interested in your tasks,” I said. “I want you to help me get rid of the vampires in Chicago.”

  “If you would ask a boon of me, then it is churlish to refuse one that I would ask of you,” Lucifer said.

  “You’re going to ask me to do something that’s disturbing, wrong and probably illegal,” I said. “You always do.”

  “Human laws don’t apply to me,” he said.

  “Magical ones do,” I said.

  “Which is why I need your assistance,” he said smoothly. “You can do that which I cannot.”

  “First help me get rid of the vampires,” I said. “You have the power to wipe them all out with one fell swoop.”

  “Yes, but I am not permitted to do such a thing. I can’t interfere in the doings of humans in such an obvious way,” Lucifer said.

  “You are not permitted to cross into the land of the dead and impregnate your dead lover, either,” I said angrily, stopping and turning toward him. “You don’t mind breaking the rules when it suits you to do so.”

  “I don’t break them, exactly. Just bend,” he said. “What did you do to Nathaniel that revealed Puck’s spell so soon?”

  “How do you know I had anything to do with it? And don’t change the damned subject,” I said, my face coloring. />
  “Ah,” Lucifer said. “And my grandson hardly cold in his grave.”

  “It’s not like that,” I said.

  “What’s it like, then?” he asked, his eyes dancing.

  “I don’t have the time or the inclination to explain it to you,” I said. I could hardly explain it to myself. “And you’re hardly in a position of moral authority.”

  “I had thought you would seek comfort from Amarantha’s son,” Lucifer mused. “You didn’t seem to like it very much when I sent Nathaniel to you as your bodyguard.”

  “I didn’t,” I said, feeling I was losing ground here. I’d meant to stand my ground until Lucifer agreed to help me, not become embroiled in a conversation about my not-a-romance with Nathaniel.

  “Still, this could be useful,” Lucifer said. “He obviously has affection for you, and Puck’s revelation could hardly have been welcome. It would certainly be handy to have Puck’s son on my side.”

  “I’m not going to help you manipulate Nathaniel so you can piss off Puck,” I said. “I don’t want to get in the middle of your sibling rivalry.”

  “My dear, you are already in the middle of it,” Lucifer said.

  I shook my head. “No. I’ve got enough to do. Now, if you won’t help me by blasting all the vampires into oblivion, will you at least tell me what I have to do to get rid of them, short of raising my own army?”

  Lucifer stroked his chin thoughtfully. “You did not completely unleash Nathaniel’s power, did you?”

  “I told you, I don’t want…”

  “This is relevant,” Lucifer cut in. “You want to know how to defeat the vampires, yes?”

  “Yes,” I said cautiously.

  “You need to finish what you began with Nathaniel, and the solution will be revealed,” Lucifer said.

  “I’m not going to bang Nathaniel for your amusement,” I said.

  “Nobody said anything about ‘banging,’” Lucifer said. “But if that’s your preferred method, then who am I to argue?”

  “I’m not discussing this with you anymore,” I muttered. “Are you saying that once Nathaniel comes fully into his power, he will be able to get rid of the vampires?”

  “No. I am saying the solution will be revealed to you,” Lucifer said.