Black Lament

by Christina Henry

  I flipped as quickly as I could through the binders, trying to find the most recent information. After several minutes I had compiled a stack of four binders that represented the last six months.

  Whatever Azazel was experimenting on, he’d spent a lot of time on it recently. Several of the notations were followed by cryptic comments like “Poor tolerance” and “Donors ill.” I wondered who the “donors” were, what they were donating, and whether the donation was voluntary. Somehow I doubted it.

  I carried the binders out into the hall. Jude and Nathaniel’s relationship had degraded further. Nathaniel’s right eye was bruising and his lip was bloody. He was sitting on the floor, sulking, near the entrance to the hallway. Jude stood by the door to the lab with a self-satisfied smile on his face despite the fact that the front of his vest was covered in nightfire burns.

  I raised an eyebrow at him.

  “You said you didn’t want to know,” he said, shrugging.

  I thrust the stack of binders at him. “Find some convenient way to carry these while I look in the next lab.”

  “Are we just going to stand around in the hallway while you explore?”

  “Yes, unless you can find a way to get into the labs without disintegrating,” I retorted.

  “The spell may not be on every door,” Jude pointed out.

  I held out my hand. “Give me some pocket change, then.”

  Jude fished out a couple of pennies and tossed one at the next door. The coin fell to the floor in one piece. The wolf gave me a pointed look.

  “Okay, okay,” I said. “So we just need to get through the padlock, then. Although whatever’s in there is probably not that important if Azazel didn’t bother to enspell the door.”

  Jude unceremoniously dropped the binders on the floor and waved me out of the way. I scooted away from the door as Jude turned his shoulder to one side and ran toward it.

  There was the sound of splintering wood as the door cracked and came off its hinges. An ordinary human would never have the strength to do that. I grinned at Jude.

  My smile faded almost immediately as we were hit by the smell. I gagged, bile rising in my throat. I tried to take deep breaths to calm down. If I puked in front of Jude and Nathaniel, they might suspect about the baby. I didn’t mind Jude knowing, but I wanted to keep it from Nathaniel for as long as possible.

  I covered my mouth and nose with my sleeve and went to stand behind Jude. Nathaniel had gotten up during the ruckus and joined us.

  The door hung lopsided, blocking most of the view but allowing that horrible rotting smell to leak into the hallway. Jude looked at me questioningly.

  “We’ve got to see,” I said, my voice muffled by my coat.

  He pushed the door and it fell through the opening and to the floor with a tremendous crash. And then I saw, and I wished I hadn’t.

  5

  THE THREE OF US FILED RELUCTANTLY INTO THE ROOM.

  “I guess these are the ‘donors,’” I said bitterly.

  The room stretched away before us, three times the length of the lab, and the remaining two doors that emptied into the hall were visible farther down along the wall.

  The rest of the room was filled with cages. The cages were stacked floor to ceiling, and each one had a person inside it. A dead person.

  “He treated them like lab monkeys,” Jude said, and I could hear the undercurrent of fury in his voice.

  I walked slowly down the aisle between the cages. Azazel hadn’t discriminated in his choice of donors. There were men and women, boys and girls. Some of them were very old, some middle-aged, some of them so young that I had to turn away, sick at heart.

  He’d left them here to die, slowly and painfully, while he’d fled. This was the work of the angel who had fathered me. This was the monster I had come from.

  I whirled on Nathaniel, tears blurring my eyes. “Did you know about this?”

  “No, I did not,” he said, his face troubled.

  “How could you not know?” I asked. “You lived here. Whatever Azazel was doing, he could hardly have hidden the presence of dozens of prisoners from his right-hand man.”

  “On my honor, I swear to you that I did not know,” Nathaniel insisted. “Whatever faults I may have, I would not have condoned this.”

  “Your honor doesn’t mean a whole lot,” Jude growled.

  “And you didn’t seem to mind when Azazel was capturing people to steal their memories,” I said. “How is this any different?”

  I turned away from him, not wanting to hear any more excuses. Even if he didn’t know what was in the lab, I wasn’t certain Nathaniel would have objected. No matter how morally repugnant Azazel’s actions, Nathaniel’s favorite person was Nathaniel. Defying Azazel would have put his favorite person at risk.

  I stared into the cage in front of me, automatically cataloging what I saw. The woman was in her mid-twenties, dressed for a night out at the clubs. Her makeup was smeared on her face and her once-neat manicure was torn. She had probably clawed at the bars of the cage, screaming until her voice was gone.

  She lay on her stomach, head turned to the side, and I noticed a large bruise at her neck. I stepped closer, heedless of the stink and the rot, to look more carefully. There were two little puncture wounds inside the bruise.

  “Vampires,” I breathed. “Check the others. See if they have bite marks.”

  Jude and Nathaniel moved closer to the cages. I walked down the row, searching the bodies for evidence of vampires. Almost every corpse had at least one bite mark.

  “They’ve all got them,” Jude said.

  “So whatever Azazel was experimenting with, it involved some kind of chemical mixture, human blood and vampires,” I said. I thought about the cryptic notes in the binder. “Maybe he was concocting something that the prisoners ingested and it was then passed to the vampires in human blood.”

  “Why?” Jude said. “And what?”

  “I don’t know,” I said helplessly. “I hope Chloe can figure out what Azazel was making from the notebooks.”

  Jude frowned. “That fruitcake who works at the Agency?”

  “She’s a little eccentric,” I admitted. “But she was the one who figured out how to restore the stolen memories.”

  Jude grunted, which was probably the highest praise Chloe would ever get from him. Jude was a man of few words.

  “I do not understand,” Nathaniel said.

  We both turned to look at him. He frowned at the body in the cage in front of him.

  “What’s not to understand?” I asked.

  “In order for these people to be so damaged, a vampire would have to be living on the premises. Lo… Azazel may have been able to explain away the presence of humans, but not vampires. Most angels cannot tolerate the presence of vampires.”

  “Is there someplace in the mansion that was off-limits to everyone? Besides the labs?” I asked.

  “The basement has long been guarded by Azazel’s soldiers,” Nathaniel said slowly. “But there are prisons down there, for Azazel’s enemies.”

  “And wouldn’t the soldiers have blabbed if Azazel was hiding vampires in the basement?”

  “Azazel’s special guard cannot speak. They have had their tongues cut out.”

  He said this very matter-of-factly, as if the soldiers’ disfigurement was of no note whatsoever.

  I sighed. “I guess we have to check the basement, then.”

  “To what end?” Jude said. “Surely the vampire will have moved on with Azazel.”

  “But if it hasn’t, we might be able to find out what Azazel was trying to accomplish. Wherever he’s gone, Azazel is going to try to finish what he started, and that can’t mean anything good.”

  “Madeline is correct. We should at least investigate before we leave this place,” Nathaniel said.

  Jude grumbled something under his breath but he went into the hall. Nathaniel and I followed. Jude collected the notebooks on the floor and slung them under his arm.

 
; “Which way?” he asked Nathaniel.

  “The best way is to return to the ballroom and then enter the basement stairs at the rear, behind Azazel’s throne.”

  We backtracked down the stairs toward the ballroom. Jude kept sneezing and blowing air out of his nose.

  “What’s the problem?” I asked.

  “There’s too much death in that room. I can still smell it. And if I can still smell the corpses, then I can’t smell anything else that might sneak up on us,” he said, exhaling air through his nose again.

  My own sense of smell had been almost completely deadened by the stench in that room, and my nose wasn’t even a fraction as sensitive as Jude’s. It must feel like being blind for a werewolf to be unable to smell.

  Jude and I walked side by side, Nathaniel trailing behind. We reached the ballroom, and the snake on my palm twitched just as I pushed the doors open.

  For the second time that day, I wished I had left a door closed.

  The room was filled with vampires.

  Not a few to help Azazel with his vile project. Hundreds.

  “Gods above and below,” Nathaniel said. “Where did they all come from?”

  The vampires had turned as one silent entity to face us when we’d opened the door. The majority of the creatures stood in shadow, but a few were touched by the weak beams of winter sun that came through the windows. Their dead flesh smoldered where the sun touched, but instead of fleeing from the solar rays, the creatures stood and burned.

  The vampires watched us, but made no move to approach. It was as if they waited for an order.

  Beside me Jude transformed into a wolf. The binders clattered to the floor.

  “We can’t fight them all,” I hissed. “So don’t do anything foolish.”

  Jude barked at me, but I couldn’t tell if his reply was agreement or argument. I hoped he would restrain his natural impulse toward aggression until we got free of this mess.

  The vampires stood silent and still. They were acting so weird, so un-vampire-like. I took a step backward, and Nathaniel mirrored me. I would have felt safer with my sword in my hand, but I didn’t want the vamps to construe that as aggression and attack us. Jude reluctantly followed Nathaniel and me while growling low in his throat.

  We had gone about five paces when the vampires suddenly surged forward as one body.

  “Run!” I said, but Jude leapt at the first vampire to approach him, tearing at its throat.

  The vamp fell to the ground, wounded but not terminated, and I cursed as I ran to help the stubborn wolf.

  “Get out of the way!” I shouted, and swung the sword to separate the fallen vamp’s head from its neck. It started flaking into dust immediately.

  Nathaniel blasted a vamp with nightfire and it burst into flame.

  There are three ways to kill a vampire—stake it, decapitate it or burn it. Anything else will slow the monster down but won’t kill it.

  Jude attacked another vampire and I swung the sword at any creature that came near me. I dusted quite a few of them, but they kept coming, endlessly, relentlessly, unconcerned about the possibility of damage or death. They weren’t behaving like vampires at all, but zombies.

  I don’t know how long we stood in front of those doors, hacking and burning, but there was suddenly a lull in the never-ending tide. My eyes were tearing from all the dust in the air, and it was hard to breathe without coughing. I wiped my eyes with my sleeve and saw several of the vampires were bottlenecked in the door.

  “Now’s our chance,” I shouted, backing down the hallway. Nathaniel threw one last ball of nightfire at the nearest vamp and joined me.

  “Jude!” I shouted. The wolf had taken down another vamp and was in the process of ripping its throat out. “Come on!”

  The vampires were stopped up in the doorway like a cork, but the pressure of the advancing horde behind would have them through in a moment. I wanted to get out before that happened.

  The wolf ignored me, ravaging the struggling vampire.

  “Jude!” I shouted again.

  He turned toward me, blood on his muzzle, just as the mindless vampires broke through.

  “Let’s get out of here!” I shouted, and ran toward the doorway at the end of the hall.

  I glanced back to see if Jude followed and saw he was a few feet behind me. Nathaniel brought up the rear, which was strange, as he’d been right beside me a moment before. There were a lot of vampires following but they were moving slowly, so we were able to outrun them to the foyer.

  I threw open the front door, Jude on my heels, and pounded out to the lawn. Nathaniel pulled the door closed behind him and joined us. We turned in unison to face the mansion, backing away slowly, our eyes on the door.

  “They can’t possibly come outside,” I said. “They’d burn up as soon as they stepped into the sun.”

  “They were not behaving like typical vampires,” Nathaniel pointed out.

  I was so focused on the possibility that the door might burst open at any moment that I’d forgotten about the thing that had chased us into the house. So when the whisper of breath brushed across my ear I was too strung out with tension to think properly.

  “Madeline,” it whispered.

  I turned, and in turning acknowledged the monster at my shoulder. And I saw it in all of its terror and glory, and knew that if I survived this, every I time I closed my eyes from now until the end of my life I would see this horror in my sleep.

  It wasn’t the biggest creature I’d ever seen—just about Nathaniel’s height—and it was vaguely humanoid in shape. Its hands and feet had elongated digits, twice as long as a normal person’s, and something about them put me in mind of tree branches.

  The eyes were oversized for its face, protruding like a frog’s, and its few long and wispy hairs trailed greasily from the top of its head.

  The worst of it, though, was that the skin looked like it had been turned inside out, and it oozed with reddish brown fluid that might have been blood.

  Then the creature smiled at me, and every one of its teeth was a tiny, sharp triangle, like the gaping maw of a shark. It looked like a distorted goblin, a thing from a fairy tale with a bad ending.

  Jude barked in warning, and I glanced back at the front door. The vampires were pouring forth into the day despite the fact that they began to smolder almost immediately.

  “Madeline,” the goblin said again, and I turned in time to see its claws slashing at my throat.

  I jumped backward, but the tips of its fingers grazed my cheek. I felt the skin tear open, the hot blood run down my face. I smelled the ozone of nightfire, the burning undead flesh of the vampires, heard Jude’s growls as he attacked once more.

  But I couldn’t look, couldn’t help, for my death had come for me. I swung out blindly with the sword in my right hand, trying to keep the thing from me as I conjured nightfire with my left hand. The creature laughed, a horrible high-pitched cackle that chilled my blood, and then it disappeared just as I threw the spell at it.

  I stared dumbly at the spot where the goblin had stood, and then I felt its finger slide down my spine for the second time that day.

  Spinning around, I slashed with the sword. The monster laughed and disappeared again.

  It was playing with me. It was playing with me, and I was in no freaking mood for games.

  As seemed to happen to me so often, the rush of anger cleared my head, steadied my nerves. The blaze of Lucifer’s power lit in my blood, poured down my hand and into my sword. It didn’t burst mindlessly from the blade but lay charged and waiting for my call.

  The creature reappeared on my right, just in the corner of my eyesight. It stabbed at me with its claws again, tearing through the shoulder of my coat and drawing blood. Instead of darting away or spinning around to face it, I allowed the creature to injure me and then disappear again. I wasn’t going to jump around for this monster’s amusement.

  I felt the goblin’s fingers curl around the end of my braid and pull, hard
enough to hurt but not enough to knock me from my feet. The goblin giggled, but its laugh sounded confused. I wasn’t reacting the way it thought I should.

  Soon, I thought. The sounds of battle behind me receded as my head filled with the buzz of magic, an unnatural calm coming over me.

  The creature winked in and out of sight, slashing at my jeans, tearing through my right thigh. For a second I saw its hideous face twisted in malice, heard a growl instead of a laugh, and knew it was time.

  When the goblin appeared before me once more, I pushed the sword into its chest and let loose the magic I had stored there.

  The creature’s eyes widened for a moment, and then it just exploded in a confetti of flesh and flying droplets of blood. I was too close to avoid getting splashed, and I looked sadly at the new coat Lucifer had given me, now shredded and covered in gore.

  The sword still hummed with stored power. I turned to help Jude and Nathaniel. Both of them stood a few feet away, their backs to me, and I realized they’d kept the vampires from me while I fought the freaky thing from Faerie. Most of the vamps were blazing from the touch of the sun even as they staggered determinedly forward to destroy us.

  There wasn’t much point in expending more energy when the sun would eventually finish the vampires off for us, so I whistled to attract the attention of the other two. Jude glanced over his shoulder and I waved at him to join me. He barked at Nathaniel and the three of us ran down the hill in front of the mansion, crossed the road and stopped at the edge of the woods.

  Nathaniel murmured a few words, a portal appeared before us and I dove into it, the other two following close behind. A moment later I crashed face-first into the hard-packed snow of my backyard.

  Jude leapt lightly to his feet beside me and nudged me with his nose. I lifted my stinging face from the snow and gave him a weak smile. I heard Nathaniel’s uncertain footsteps crunching in the ice behind me.

  “Well, that was fun,” I said, pushing up to my knees.

  The back door burst open and Samiel clattered onto the wooden porch, followed by Beezle. Samiel’s face went white when he saw me. Beezle looked furious, and his face was covered in popcorn kernels, a sure sign that he’d been eating under stress. My gargoyle landed on the railing, his little hand balled in a fist on his chest.