“No,” I repeated. “Just leave me with him.”
“Come on, Samiel,” Beezle said softly.
They went away, but I didn’t care. I just wanted to be alone with Gabriel. I crawled through the snow to him and laid my head on his back. I hardly felt the cold and the wet through my jeans.
He was still warm. His coat smelled of him, apple pie baking in the oven. Tears leaked from my eyes.
“Madeline,” a voice growled, and there was a gentle hand in my hair. Someone crouched beside me, someone who smelled of wolf.
“Go away,” I said. “Just leave me here.”
“Madeline,” Jude repeated. “You can’t stay here in the snow.”
“Why not?” I said.
I had seen an incomprehensible amount of death in my life. I had fought against Death with all the power I had within me, and still it had triumphed. It had taken the only person who made me want to keep living.
“Gabriel would not want to see you this way,” Jude said.
“Don’t tell me what Gabriel would want or not want,” I said furiously, raising my head to glare at him. “Gabriel’s not here, and you didn’t know him.”
“That’s the Madeline Black I know,” Jude said. “Stand up. Stand up and fight. If you stay here, you will fall into grief that you will never overcome.”
“I don’t care,” I said, the fire that had lit me momentarily going out. “I want him back. I want to be where he is.”
“I know,” Judas said.
The pain in his voice drew me back from the darkness that threatened to swallow me, a pain so old and so familiar to him that he hardly knew he carried it most of the time.
I came to my knees, my hands on my thighs, staring at Jude. His blue eyes shimmered with unshed tears in the streetlights.
“Samiel needs you,” he said. “And your gargoyle.”
“Yes,” I said. It was hard to keep my head above the blackness that rose up inside, the blackness that tried to pull me under again.
“And you have a promise to keep, Lucifer’s child,” Jude said, but there was a gentleness that had never been there before.
“Azazel,” I said, and inside me a shard of ice pierced the darkness.
“Azazel,” Jude agreed.
He held his hand out to me, and I took it, and we rose together. He gripped my fingers urgently.
“From this day henceforth, I am your ally. When you hunt for Azazel I will be by your side, and I will hold him to the ground as you swing the sword to take his life.”
“Jude,” I said uncertainly, looking at Wade, who looked unsurprised by this proclamation. The ways of the alpha are certainly mysterious.
“I swear,” he said, and energy passed between our hands. I knew then that we were bound in some magical way, and that Jude would keep his promise no matter what the cost.
“Let us take Gabriel’s body,” Wade said.
I looked down at the ground in panic. They couldn’t take him. I wasn’t ready to say good-bye.
“You cannot bury him here, not without attracting the attention of the authorities. We will take him to a place near where our pack summers. No one will find him there,” Wade said.
He lay in the snow, facedown, with the dark stain around him, and this would be the last time I saw him.
But I knew Jude was right. I couldn’t lie in the snow beside him forever. I had promises to keep.
“Okay,” I said.
I knelt beside him for the last time, and Jude and Wade helped me roll Gabriel to his back. I tenderly wiped the snow from his face with my sleeve and closed his eyes.
For the last time, I pressed my lips against his, and then I let them take him away.
I stood and watched Jude and Wade disappear into the alley with the body of my husband. I was still standing there, staring at the place they’d gone, when J.B. returned.
He landed a few feet away from me. We watched each other without speaking for a few moments.
“Did you know?” I asked.
“Maddy, I’m so sorry…” he began.
“Did you know?” I repeated. “You’re the regional supervisor. Every fated death in this city goes across your desk. Did you know that this was going to happen?”
He stared at me for a minute, then finally said, “Yes.”
It was like the blow had come down all over again, and for a few seconds I couldn’t breathe.
“How could you?” I shouted. “How could you not say anything, not do anything? You knew that Gabriel would die on this night, in my own backyard, and you stood by and let it happen?”
“You know the rules as well as I do,” J.B. said angrily. “We are duty bound not to interfere, no matter what the circumstances. What could you have done if I told you?”
“I wouldn’t have let Gabriel go through that thrice-bedamned portal first!” I screamed. “I would have gone through myself.”
“And left him grieving for you the way you’re grieving for him? Is that really a better option? Besides, there is nothing I can do once it was written down. You should know that better than anyone.”
“Always duty. Always Death,” I said, throwing Amarantha’s words back at him.
J.B.’s jaw tightened. “You should be grateful to me. I volunteered to take this one personally. Otherwise somebody else would have offered him the choice.”
“He didn’t need a choice!” I screamed. Everything that was holding me together was unraveling again. “He was supposed to stay with me! You shouldn’t have taken him to the Door at all!”
“Maddy,” J.B. said, his face shocked. “You can’t mean that. Every soul has the right to a choice.”
“He should have stayed with me,” I said, and my voice cracked. “He should have chosen me.”
J.B. closed the space between us, put his arms around me. All I could think was that there was something not quite right about his embrace. He wasn’t Gabriel.
After a few moments I pushed away. “Go home, J.B.”
“So that’s it?” he said. “After everything we’ve been through this week, all I get is a ‘go home, J.B.’?”
“I’m sorry I’m ungrateful,” I said dully. Ice was closing in on my heart, covering that beating sunstone, making it numb. “I’m sorry I killed your mother, and destroyed your family home. I’m sorry I made you risk your life in a fruitless venture in Azazel’s court that gained us nothing. I’m sorry.”
“Wade is going to bring the cubs in tomorrow,” J.B. said. “Will you be there?”
“Don’t count on me,” I said, and turned away.
He said nothing else. After a few moments I looked back. He was gone, and I was alone with a dark stain in the snow.
I went to bed, but I didn’t sleep. I couldn’t. The sheets smelled of Gabriel. His clothes were hanging in the closet. His spare dress shoes were underneath the chair in the hallway. There were two coffee cups drying in the dish rack.
I lay awake in bed, staring at the ceiling. I wanted to cry. Crying would be a release. But all I could think of was ice, and revenge.
When the sun came up Beezle appeared in the doorway. He hovered there, tentative, unsure of his welcome.
“J.B. called this morning,” Beezle said. “He said that Wade was bringing the cubs into the Agency.”
“Yeah, I know,” I said. I rolled to one side so that I wouldn’t have to see Beezle.
“Don’t you want to see if Chloe’s spell will restore their memories?” Beezle asked. “You were the one who found the cubs. You were the one who thought to bring the machines back. Without you, there would be no way to cure them.”
“Yeah,” I said. It was hard to remember why I had cared so much, why I had fought so hard for everything.
There was a flutter of wings and then I felt Beezle’s hands yanking me roughly to face him.
“Get up, Maddy,” Beezle said, and he smacked my cheek with his little hand.
I covered the place where he had hit, shocked.
“This is not yo
u. You don’t lie down and go to sleep. You get up and fight.”
“That’s what Jude said, too.”
“Well, if that redneck werewolf can recognize it, then it must be true.”
I laughed involuntarily at his categorization of Jude as a “redneck werewolf”; then I stopped. It didn’t seem right to laugh.
Beezle looked at me tenderly. All the love that had bound us together for all the years of my life was there in his face. “Life goes on, Maddy. You know that better than anyone. It might be a cliché, but it’s true. You’re still alive. And Gabriel is alive inside you.”
My cell phone rang. I looked at the caller ID. It was Jude, and I knew what he would want from me.
I clicked on and without saying hello I said, “I’ll be there.”
“I knew you would,” he growled.
* * *
Since there were so many cubs, we couldn’t meet in Chloe’s underground laboratory. J.B. made special arrangements for Wade, Jude, and the mothers of all of the children to enter the Agency through the loading dock. They still had to be checked by security, though. No one was taking chances.
I waited outside the large conference room where Chloe had arranged all of the machines in a long row. When the pack came trooping down the hall I caught my breath. I didn’t know what to say to these women, to these mothers.
I didn’t know how to tell them how sorry I was that it was my father, my kin, who had torn their children’s minds away from them and left them broken.
I didn’t know how to tell them that this might not work, despite the fact that progress with the restored adults had been positive. Children’s brains were different. They were still developing. There could be permanent damage, even if Chloe did manage to restore their memories.
I felt the weight of all my failings crushing me as Wade strode up to me. He held hands with a formidable-looking African American woman who wore a denim vest over jeans and a flannel shirt, much like her husband. In her arms I recognized the small toddler I’d carried through the caves—their daughter.
“Madeline Black, this is my wife, Roxie Wade. Roxie, this is Madeline Black.”
I held my hand out to her, unsure if she would take it.
Her face crumpled suddenly and she threw her arm around me. The toddler was crushed between us as Roxie sobbed into my shoulder. I looked at Wade in panic.
He gently extracted their daughter from between the two of us. Roxie put her other arm around me and tried to speak through her tears.
“Th-th-th-thank…you…so…much,” she managed. “Thank you for bringing my baby back to me.”
“Uh. Of course,” I said. I didn’t know what to do with this woman. She shouldn’t be thanking me. She should be hitting me for bringing her daughter back in such a state.
Chloe peeked her head out of the room. “I’m ready.”
I patted Roxie’s back awkwardly. “Ma’am? Mrs. Wade? They’re ready for us now.”
“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 h
is 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.”
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