“Do not make promises you cannot keep,” Gabriel advised, and then he walked out of the kitchen.
I rubbed my eyes with my hand. “Really, how many problems can one girl have in a day?”
“Yeah, you totally made an enemy of Focalor and Amarantha, and you broke a bunch of rules by taking in Samiel like a stray dog,” Beezle said.
I turned to see him hanging in the hallway with the phone is his hand.
“Enjoy the show?” I said.
“Not particularly. Contrary to what you may think, I don’t enjoy seeing you hurt,” Beezle said, then he cleared his throat. “So are we having barbecue or what?”
I held my hand out for the phone.
The deliveryman had looked at me funny when he delivered the food, and I realized afterward that while I’d made sure Gabriel was healed by Nathaniel I hadn’t done the same for myself. Most of my aches and pains had cleared up while I slept, but my face was still bruised and my clothes still covered in blood. And my fingers were still missing. I wondered if anything could be done about that, or if I would be a three-fingered lefty for the rest of my life.
After dinner I settled Samiel in for the night on the pullout couch in my living room. He seemed completely overwhelmed by the trappings of civilization. The food—and its method of delivery—was amazing to him. The toilet got flushed about four hundred times in a row once he figured out what purpose the handle served.
He couldn’t stop touching the lightbulbs, the face of the microwave, lifting and lowering the phone from its cradle. His immense pleasure in the sheets and blankets that made up his bed was apparent. I wondered how long he had been living in that cave in the desert.
I turned out the light, resolving to devise some better method of communication with Samiel tomorrow. He could understand pretty much anything, but he had no way of telling me what he wanted. And I wanted to know more about him, about his life before.
Beezle fluttered up next to me. “I’m going to sleep in my nest tonight.”
“Okay,” I said, a little surprised. I’d thought that after my near-death experience he’d want to stay close to me.
He flew out the front window without another word, and I walked slowly down the hall to my own room. I shut the door in deference to Samiel and sat on my bed.
In the past week I’d lost Gabriel, lost Beezle, survived two attacks by Samiel, discovered the bodies of three wolves, found Beezle and Gabriel, killed a giant spider and a leviathan, lost my magic several times, totally screwed up my assignment as faerie ambassador but had averted an uprising in Lucifer’s kingdom, made a new enemy in Amarantha, been assaulted by my fiancé, lost part of my left hand, taken on the new responsibility of Samiel and defied all expectation and survived the horrors of the Maze.
I was tired.
I was also alone, and I hadn’t expected to be. I curled up on my bed in my bloodied and torn clothes and waited for the tears to come. But my eyes stayed dry all night long.
18
I MUST HAVE SLEPT FOR A WHILE, BECAUSE THE NEXT thing I knew my eyes were open and my heart was beating a thousand miles a minute. The digital clock on my bedside table showed me that it was past three in the morning.
I wondered if a nightmare had woken me from my sleep. I was sure that I would be carrying the events of the Maze around with me for quite a while.
But I didn’t remember a nightmare. Maybe a noise had woken me. Maybe Samiel had gotten up to use the bathroom and I’d registered the sound unconsciously. I wasn’t used to another living being besides Beezle in the house.
I listened for a moment, but didn’t hear anything. I tried to close my eyes again but now that I was awake my brain was whirling. I sat up and swung my legs over the edge of the bed. Lucifer’s sword winked at me. It was leaning in the corner of my bedroom next to my closet. I didn’t remember leaving it there, or in fact carrying it into the house at all.
A second later I saw a strange burst of green light outside. I stood up and went to the window. The light was coming from the alley behind my house. I couldn’t see its source from the angle that I stood at, but it flashed once, twice, three times. And it didn’t look like the kind of light that occurred naturally.
I didn’t relish the prospect of yet another paranormal encounter when I’d just gotten home from my big faerie adventure, but I needed to see what was going on in the alley. A lot of normal people lived in my neighborhood and as far as I knew I was the only person equipped to deal with supernatural weirdness.
“Maybe it’s just some witch’s teenager playing at spellcasting,” I mumbled to myself, but I didn’t really believe it.
I pulled on my boots and a sweatshirt, then started for my bedroom door. The sword winked at me again, and I picked it up. As before in the Maze, the snake on the hilt writhed reassuringly under my palm.
I opened the bedroom door quietly and peeked down the hallway. Samiel was a motionless lump under the blankets in the living room. Beezle was outside. Gabriel was downstairs.
I thought briefly of waking Gabriel to come with me, but our recent conversation suddenly put any request that I might make of him in a mistress/thrall light. I didn’t want him to think he had to come at my beck and call. So I left him alone, and went down the back stairs by myself, wincing every time the wood squeaked. I felt like I was a kid sneaking out of the house while my parents slept.
The new door eased open without a sound—thank you, Nathaniel—and I stepped onto the porch. The light was concentrated directly behind an eight-foot-high wooden fence that surrounds my property, and it was almost blinding now that I was right in front of it. I am constantly surprised by the fact that my neighbors never notice all the really obvious signs of magic generated around my house. It just goes to show that people are adept at seeing only what they want to see.
I swung the sword up, both hands wrapped around the hilt, and crept forward carefully through the yard. The dried and frost-tipped grass crunched under the soles of my boots. I sidled up to the fence and peeked through the slats.
There was a . . . thing in the alley. I don’t know how else to describe it. It was a monster, for sure, but like no monster I’d ever seen before. Its skin was a translucent greenish blue. I could see the play of muscle and bone underneath, the pulse of blood as it rushed through its veins. Its face was turned away from me but large batlike ears protruded from the back of its bare, oblong skull.
It squatted on elongated, froglike legs that ended in slender primate feet tipped with sharp claws. The curve of its spine was long as it bent over something on the ground. Wings nestled against its ribs, and the skin stretched over the wings showed the joints of bone where they connected.
The green light was coming from the creature’s body. I shifted, trying to get a better look at what the creature was doing. It was then that I saw the body the monster was eating.
All I could see was the top of a head, a yellow ponytail with streaks of gray, and the motorcycle boots that protruded from the other side. But that was enough for me to know that this was the other member of Wade’s pack that had been in Amarantha’s court.
And that meant that this creature was the thing that had been killing the wolves all along.
I pushed out my wings and flew over the fence, holding the sword high. I descended on the monster in a silent rush, intending to behead it before it realized I attacked.
Something betrayed me—a whisper of breath, the night air moving over my wings, or maybe just the instinct of prey and predator. An instant before I landed the monster turned, saw me, and leapt away down the alley.
I felt the toes of my boots drag across the asphalt for an instant and then I swept after it. The creature turned to face me and I was nearly blinded by green light. I covered my eyes, squinting, and the monster bounded toward me.
I swung the sword down as the monster reached me and felt its reverberation all the way up to my shoulder. The blade sliced through one of the creature’s arms and it screeched a terrible noise
. My eyes were practically shut, squinting in the blazing light coming from the creature’s chest.
The creature lashed out with its other arm, knife-sharp claws slicing at my stomach. I sucked in my belly and danced backward, managing to get away with just a slender cut.
I tried to open my eyes a little more but it was impossible to be this close to the monster without sunglasses. I flew upward in a shot and turned back to blast the creature with nightfire. My spell bounced off the creature harmlessly.
Great. It was immune to nightfire and it was nearly impossible to fight the creature at close quarters without being dangerously blinded. What now? It wasn’t as though I had a whole ton of spells in my arsenal.
The creature flapped its giant wings and followed me into the air. I zipped away toward the lake, and it gave chase. I flew as hard and fast as I could, trying to think. Maybe I could knock the thing into Lake Michigan and drown it. At the very least I needed to lead it away from populated areas to reduce the risk of collateral damage.
The monster gave another high, keening cry, almost like the scream of a raptor. I glanced behind me to see that it was terrifyingly close, and that its clawed fingers reached for my ankle. I could just barely see the glitter of the creature’s teeth as it smiled.
I sped up, my breath coming hard and my heart beating a thousand miles a minute. The lights of Lake Shore Drive glimmered below us, and beyond that Lake Michigan swirled and crashed in its winter fury.
I stopped abruptly and dropped several feet, leaving the creature confused for a moment. It continued forward for a few seconds, allowing me to dip underneath it and come up behind. I slashed out with the sword and sliced one of its wings from its back.
Bluish blood spurted from the wound and the monster howled in pain. It dropped abruptly, unable to compensate for the loss of the wing. It spun down toward the beach in the darkness, the light from its chest shining like a beacon.
I flew down after it, headfirst, legs tucked in behind me like a skydiver, and using the monster’s own light to follow. I was going to finish this thing off, then call Wade and tell him to come and get the monster’s head.
And then the green light abruptly winked out.
I slowed my furious descent and came upright, wings flapping behind me, toes pointed toward the ground. Had I killed it, or was this some sort of trick?
I flew cautiously down to the place where I thought the creature might have landed. My boots slid in the sand and the lake rolled and crashed against the shore. In late fall, city workers had rolled in with earth movers and created a kind of breakwater out of the beach, mounding up the sand in small dunes. The dunes cast strange moving shadows in the lamplight from the lakefront bike path. There was no sign of the monster anywhere.
I fluttered up again, just a few feet above the beach, and moved north slowly, following the line of the shore. I wondered if I dared risk a light. If the monster was lying in wait for me, then it could use the light to find me. Of course, without light, I wasn’t sure if I could find any evidence of it. And it really would not do if some sunrise dog walker came across the decomposing corpse of a hideous monster in a few hours.
I decided to try to make a small light and try to focus it like a slender beam of a flashlight. Like so many new spells, though, I required an extra dose of concentration to get it going.
That meant I was a little distracted when the creature came screaming out of the darkness of the dunes and crashed into me.
The sword was knocked from my hand and flew away. A hand came around my throat and squeezed. The creature stood, slowly crushing my windpipe. My legs kicked underneath me as I clawed at the fingers holding me up. Lamplight fell across the creature’s face, and my hands fell away in shock.
It was Baraqiel. One wing stood white and proud in the moonlight, and the other was just a few ragged shards of feather. He smiled at me, and his mouth was covered in wolf’s blood.
I felt my magic surge up in anger, and a blast of heat burst out of me. Baraqiel shouted and dropped me to the ground. I rolled over, gasping for air, and stood up, facing him.
“You?” I said in disbelief. “You?”
His silver blue eyes glittered in the light, and I realized I had seen those eyes before. They were the eyes of Wade’s most recent pack member, James.
“You’re a shapeshifter,” I said, astonished. I had never heard of such a thing—an angel that could shift its shape. And I had certainly never heard of a shapeshifter that had more than two shapes. Baraqiel could become James the human, James the wolf and the hideous blue monster in the alley. What other tricks did he have up his sleeve?
“Lucifer does enjoy seeing the results of his affairs,” Baraqiel said. “I am unique among all of his children.”
“Lucifer?” I said. I was starting to sound like an idiot.
But it made sense. When I’d felt the magical pulse of energy and found the body of the first wolf, I’d thought that it felt like Ramuell, a thing not meant to be. I’d been half right. Baraqiel wasn’t a nephilim, but he was, like Ramuell, a thing not meant to be. Was there nothing Lucifer wouldn’t copulate with? What was he trying to do, manufacture the perfect monster?
There were things I didn’t understand, though. “Why would you kill all these wolves? Why the pointless bloodshed?”
“Pointless?” Baraqiel growled. “The wolves have thwarted and defied my father at every turn. Tyrone Wade has been a sworn enemy of Lucifer for more than thirty years.”
“Yeah, well, I defy him at every turn, too,” I said.
“A fact that I was attempting to remedy,” Baraqiel said, and his insane grin made me shudder. “I tried to plant evidence of your involvement at the sites of the killings, but Wade seemed to believe your innocence. I thought that if a body was found right on your doorstep, the wolves would demand your head as compensation and Wade’s hand would be forced.”
“Does Lucifer know that you’re doing this?” I asked.
“Who knows what my father does and does not know?” Baraqiel said craftily. “In any event, I do not think he would be bothered by a few dead wolves.”
“But he might be bothered that you’re trying to incriminate me,” I said. “He kind of likes me, you know, because of Evangeline.”
“Yes,” Baraqiel hissed, and for a moment his form shifted back to that of the blue monster before returning to his angelic one. “That is all I hear about, all anyone hears about. Madeline Black, his beloved granddaughter, last child of Evangeline’s line. No child of his own has ever been more adored than you.”
Well, that came as a surprise. I knew that Lucifer was partial to me because I was the last direct descendant of Evangeline, but he wasn’t exactly an affectionate relation. Most of our exchanges seemed to involve commands and threats.
“Whatever my relationship—or yours, for that matter—to Lucifer, these wolf killings end now. I’m going to make sure that you are brought to justice for this,” I said. “And if Lucifer won’t do it, then I’m sure the wolves will take care of you.”
Baraqiel stalked toward me. “What makes you think I am going to let you take me?”
I sighed. “I didn’t think you would make it easy for me.”
He reached for me again, and I flew upward, dodging away. His missing wing made it impossible for him to give chase once I was above the ground. I focused my power, pushed it through my heartstone, and let loose the blast of sunlight that I had used to kill Ramuell.
A blaze lit up the beach and for a moment it looked like a midsummer’s day. Then the blaze faded, and Baraqiel stood there, laughing at me, his missing wing magically regrown.
“Thank you, cousin,” he said. “That was exactly what I needed.”
Okay. So apparently the sun, which was fatal to Ramuell, made Baraqiel rejuvenate his powers like Superman. Wonderful. Nightfire didn’t work, sunlight didn’t work, and I’d lost the sword. What was I supposed to do, annoy him to death?
He launched from the beach and came aft
er me. I feinted to one side and then flew the other, swooping low over the sand and desperately searching for the sword.
It was then that Baraqiel let loose a magical pulse. As it rippled across me, my wings disappeared, my power flickered out and I fell to the ground.
I rolled over, my mouth and eyes full of sand. I scrabbled desperately at my face, trying to clear my vision. Baraqiel fell upon me, his hands closing around my throat again.
I kicked up and into his crotch with my boot. Yup, that works on pretty much any male, no matter what their species. He yelped and loosened his grip for a moment, which allowed me to push to my feet and sprint down the beach as fast as I could.
I had no magic, but it seemed that Baraqiel didn’t have much in the spell department except for the ability to shapeshift and knock out other creatures’ powers. So at least we were on even footing there.
Of course, he had wings again, and I didn’t, and he was about fifty times as strong as me. So big advantage to Baraqiel.
I heard his wings pulsing behind me, and I picked up speed. It wasn’t easy. Sand is not the fastest surface to run on, especially when you’re wearing combat boots and are totally out of shape.
I tripped over my own feet just as Baraqiel swooped in for the kill. Thank goodness I was the clumsiest thing going.
Lucifer’s sword glittered in the sand right under my nose.
I grabbed it and pushed up to my knees as Baraqiel made another turn. His silver blue eyes were alight with murder and madness. I let my sword hand hang at my side and allowed him to carry me into the air, his hands closing around my neck.
I didn’t struggle against him, but I lifted the sword and ran it through his chest. I felt his heartstone give under the blade, and for the second time that night there was a gigantic explosion of light.
I held tight to the sword as Baraqiel’s hands went limp and he dropped me into the sand again. I was lucky I didn’t land on the blade. I jumped to my feet immediately and ran back to where his body lay in the sand, bluish black blood pumping out from the hole in his chest.
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