Black Heart (12 page)

My mouth dropped open. “Are you crazy? Lucifer will take our child from me. He’ll mold him in his own image, make our son a monster. I could never go to Lucifer. And I don’t know how up on current events you are here in dreamland, but Evangeline is back and she’s pregnant. She’s going to see any child of mine as a threat to her progeny. The first thing she would do is try to strangle our baby in his crib.”

“I am well versed in current events,” Gabriel said. “I know everything that has happened to you since my death.”

He looked pointedly at my wings. Only then did it occur to me that he had never asked why my wings were silver instead of black, and why they were visible instead of hidden.

“Oh,” I said, feeling small. “So you know . . .”

“About Nathaniel, yes,” Gabriel said.

There was nothing to say to that. We stared at each other, the silence between us lengthening. What do you say to the man that you married about the new man in your life? The fact that Gabriel had died seemed hardly relevant now that I was facing him.

“Gabriel, I—” I began, but he cut me off.

“I cannot be angry with you,” he said. “I would like to. I would like to rage, to say you betrayed me. But you are alive, and so is he. And I am not. I cannot blame you for wanting comfort.”

My whole body was filled with pain, the pain that only love can bring. Not only was I standing here about to lose Gabriel again, but he knew that I had been with another man. I scrubbed my hands over my face, but nothing could stop the tears now.

“Madeline,” he said gently, and enfolded me in his embrace. I felt his love and his forgiveness flow over me, and I wept into his shoulder.

Gabriel, always so patient, so gentle, so understanding. A better human than I could ever be, and he had only the smallest drop of human blood in him. How could I do this again? How could I leave him?

He kissed my cheeks and my lips, kissed me until my crying ceased. We stood with our arms around each other, holding on, neither of us speaking. There was nothing left to say, and we both knew we didn’t have much time.

Then the voice I’d expected to hear was behind me.

“Madeline,” Daharan said.

I clung more tightly to Gabriel, breathing him in, wanting a few more moments, wanting to keep him with me forever.

He pulled away first, always the stronger one, always more practical than I.

“It is time,” he said.

I nodded. I couldn’t speak. I couldn’t say good-bye.

“You must not return again,” Gabriel said, stroking his fingers over my cheek. “You must give up your dreams of death.”

“I don’t dream of death,” I said. “I dream of you.”

“Then you must let me go,” he said softly.

“I thought I did,” I said. “I tried to.”

“You must try harder,” he said. “When it is your time, I will be here.”

“And then we’ll have forever,” I said.

He smiled. “Yes.”

“Okay,” I said, backing away until I could no longer feel the warmth of his body against mine. “Okay.”

Gabriel didn’t say anything else. There was nothing else for us to say to each other.

I turned around and saw Daharan standing well away from us, giving us privacy in our good-byes. He could probably hear every word, but it was nice that he was willing to give us the illusion of being alone.

He rose into the air, beckoning me. I looked back one last time at Gabriel, and saw one tear on his cheek, glistening in the yellow sunlight. Gabriel never cried. That almost broke me, almost made me turn back, almost made me beg Daharan to leave me there.

Almost.

I knew that I didn’t belong in the land of the dead. I knew there was no one else to save my city except me. But as we flew away, it seemed that my body was rending in two, my heartbreak manifesting as physical pain. My breath was short; my chest hurt.

“Why did you take me there?” I asked Daharan. I think we were both surprised by the anger in my voice.

“I know Gabriel’s death was sudden, that you were unable to bid him good-bye. I believed it would give you peace if you were to do so.”

“All you did was rip the scab off a healing wound,” I said. Yes, I’d had time with Gabriel that I had not expected to ever have again. But it was almost worse now, knowing he was there and I was not, knowing that I had to leave him behind.

I was also more than a little conflicted by the discovery that he was watching over me like a guardian. I’d always thought his voice in my head was some figurative manifestation of my unconscious, not Gabriel
actually talking
to me from beyond the veil.

Part of me felt warm and comforted by the knowledge that he was making sure I was all right. But the other part of me felt like my privacy had been violated. How could I move on with my life, have a relationship with anyone else, knowing that Gabriel was watching me?

Of course, my illusions of privacy were probably just that. Daharan, Puck and Lucifer all seemed to have much more information about my daily doings than they ought to. Every second of my life was likely observed in somebody’s crystal ball.

It is very disheartening to think that your life is not your own. And my life had not been my own for a very long time now, no matter what notions I might have had otherwise.

Daharan and I did not speak again until we reached the portal. It was cut into the side of a tree, like a passage to another world in a fairy tale.

I turned to Daharan, trying to ignore the part of me that wanted to pick a fight with him. Daharan wasn’t really the type to rise to the bait.

“Will this bring me back to Chicago?” I asked.

Daharan nodded. “Not only to Chicago, but to your home, as long as you fix the place clearly in your mind before you go through.”

I took a deep breath, stepped forward. “See you on the other side, then.”

I disappeared into the tree before Daharan had a chance to say or do anything. This portal experience was more like the usual for me. My head felt like it was being smashed between two cast-iron pans.

I burst out of the portal and immediately fell onto the sidewalk, rolling to a stop on my side. I breathed in the smell of the city, that indefinable mixture of cooking food, car exhaust and . . . smoke?

Daharan came through the portal, materializing like a shimmering ghost, already on his feet. I sat up slowly, looking around. At first I didn’t realize where I was. Then I became aware of three things.

The first was that it was much, much warmer than it had been when I left Nathaniel. The trees on the street had leaves, and flowers had blossomed in front yards. The air had the scent of spring.

Second, my belly seemed to have grown exponentially while I passed through the portal. The minuscule bulge below my belly button had become a legitimate roundness. I could feel the heft and weight of my child in there, no longer just a tiny flutter. He was pushing and rolling inside me.

Third, I was standing on my street, in front of my house. Except that my house was no longer there.

THERE WAS A CHARRED RUIN WHERE MY HOUSE USED
to be. I walked forward slowly, as if in a dream, my hand on my belly. Under my fingers my child wiggled and stretched.

The two-flat that I had lived in since I was a child was nothing but a few blackened bits of rubble. The house had been so thoroughly destroyed that not even the foundation remained. There was a pit where my home used to be. The grass in the front and back was completely burned away, exposing the dirt beneath. Even the shed was gone. Every last shred, every physical remnant of my life, had been destroyed.

I had a moment where I was grateful that Beezle was no longer living in the house. He would have been inside when this . . . this . . . whatever it was had happened. But Nathaniel could have been inside, and my heart clenched in fear. Nathaniel. Where was he?

“What happened here?” I asked, and my voice sounded lonely in the night. “And how long were we gone?”

Daharan and I were the only two souls out on the street. The lamplights burned, and so did the lights inside other houses. Everything seemed like it had gone back to normal in Chicago. I could hear the sound of a sitcom on television drifting from the open window of my neighbor’s house. Farther down the block I could see traffic on Addison zipping back and forth. Somebody’s dog barked. It was like the vampires had never come, like everyone had returned to their normal lives and forgotten.

But my house was gone. It was
gone
. It was stupid, really, to cry over it. I was still alive, right? My baby was safe. And almost everyone I cared about had left the building long before this had happened. Samiel, Beezle, J.B., Chloe—none of them would have been here. I wasn’t certain about Nathaniel. I didn’t want to think about it. I didn’t want to think about losing someone else to death unless I was sure.

But my pictures of my mother, the blanket that Beezle slept in, my favorite sweaters and the brush that Gabriel had used on my hair on our wedding night . . . All those things were gone. The books I’d read as a child, Gabriel’s clothes hanging in the closet, any tangible proof that I had lived, that I had memories. It was all gone.

It seemed like too much on top of everything else. My home had always been my safe haven, the place where I could find refuge when everything else was falling apart. Now there was nowhere for me to go. I was breaking to pieces inside. Soon there would be nothing left of me.

I realized that this was what my enemies wanted. They wanted to break me, to make me helpless. Just the thought of it hardened me. I was not helpless. I would not break. My eyes were dry. I would find out who did this and they would pay.

“What happened here?” I asked Daharan again.

“I was with you, Madeline. I do not know,” he said. “But I can use a spell to discover the answer.”

“Then do it,” I said, and my voice was cold.

Daharan gave me a mildly reproving look, but said nothing. He raised his hands up. I went to stand beside him.

What happened next was a lot like watching a film in reverse. I saw everything that had happened on this spot from the moment we emerged from the portal backward. At first, there wasn’t much happening. People walked by; dogs peed on the remains of my lawn. Kids dared one another to climb down into the pit where my house used to be.

The leaves on the trees seemed to shrink down to buds, and then disappear altogether. Samiel and Chloe stood before the charred bits of the building. Beezle sat on Samiel’s shoulder. They were speaking, but I couldn’t hear what they said.

Then they were gone, and J.B. was there on the sidewalk with his hands in his pockets, tears running down his face.

And then I saw the house, surrounded by darkness and fury and covered in flame. The Retrievers were scorching the earth in their rage. They would make sure that I had no home to return to.

Because I was watching time run in reverse, it seemed that Nathaniel stumbled toward the Retrievers, then knelt on the sidewalk on his hands and knees, coughing up smoke. Nathaniel staggered back into the burning building.

I knew now that he’d escaped, and I was grateful. And I knew that the Agency had caused this. I had given most of my life to them, to a job that I’d hated and never asked for. When I had broken their laws through no fault of my own, they had sent the Retrievers to take me. When the Retrievers couldn’t find me, they’d destroyed everything they could in my stead. I’d had
enough
.

“You don’t need to show me any more,” I said.

Daharan dropped his hands, and the vision of the house burning, surrounded by furious Retrievers, disappeared.

“What will you do now, Madeline?” he asked.

Part of me wanted to go downtown to the Agency and burn the whole thing to the ground. The other part of me recognized that this was a dark-side thought, and that my argument was not with the Agency but with a select few members of it. So I reined in my impulse to destroy things.

The world was getting more dangerous by the minute, especially for me and for my child. Emotion wasn’t enough to carry me through anymore. I had to think, to use my brain.

It was a lot harder to think when my home was gone. I’d always perceived that I was safe there. Supernatural creatures could not cross a threshold without an invitation, and that was powerful magic.

Without a threshold I was vulnerable to more than Retrievers. I could get a hotel room, but the threshold just wasn’t as strong. So many people moving in and out of the same space didn’t create the same sense of home. And if I was in a hotel, you could bet that some freaky thing would come looking for me there, and that would mean that ordinary people would wind up as collateral damage. I had no idea where Nathaniel was staying. I didn’t think that Chloe and Samiel would let me bunk with them, since Samiel had moved out of my place because it was unsafe. There was nowhere for me to go, unless . . .

I looked sharply at Daharan. “Do you think Lucifer knew this would happen? He can see the future, right?”

“He can see aspects of it, yes,” Daharan said. “So can we all.”

“So he knew—you all knew—that I would wind up homeless?” I asked.

“I did not know this,” Daharan said. “Your future is a gray thing to me, despite the familial bond that I feel with you. But soothsaying is not my best skill in any case. That is what Alerian excels at.”

“Alerian knew for sure,” I said, thinking hard. “Possibly Puck. And almost definitely Lucifer.”

“What are you thinking, Madeline?” Daharan asked.

“I’m thinking that it would suit Lucifer very well if I had nowhere to go and no safe place to be, and therefore was forced to come knocking at his door, seeking shelter,” I said.

“Well, what do you know? She can use her brain every once in a while,” said a familiar voice behind me.

I turned slowly, disbelievingly. Beezle was there, a few feet away, flapping his wings so that he was eye level with me in midair. It hurt to see him, to remember the way he’d left when I’d needed him.

“What are you doing here?” I asked, and my voice was hard and cold.

I expected a smart remark, some typical Beezle offhandedness. Instead his face was grave as he said, “I’ve been checking back here off and on, looking for you. Everyone thought you were dead. But I knew you’d be here, sooner or later.”

“J.B. would know that I wasn’t dead,” I said, fighting the emotion that had surged with Beezle’s sudden appearance. He was the first creature I wanted to see, but the very last one that I’d expected. “He would have seen the order for my soul to be collected if I was.”

“Sokolov did show him an order, one that said Bryson collected your soul after you fought the Retrievers and lost,” Beezle said.

“But you didn’t believe it,” I said.

“Pfft. I’d never believe you were dead if I didn’t see the body myself,” Beezle said. “Are you my girl or not? I made you too stubborn to die.”

“Am I your girl?” I asked, very quietly, afraid of the answer.

“You know you are,” Beezle said.

He flew to me then, put his little arms around my neck, and the tears were back. “I’m sorry. I’m sorry I left you. If you ever tell anyone I said this, I will deny it to my stone-turning.”

I laughed then, and patted his back, and kissed his head in between his horns. “I missed you.”

He pulled away, wiping his eyes. “Yeah, yeah. Enough with the waterworks. The Retrievers are going to be back for you as soon as Sokolov realizes you’ve returned.”

“I will take care of the Retrievers,” Daharan said.

Beezle flew up to my shoulder. It was comforting to feel his weight there again. He stared at Daharan for a long time, then said, “So, another of Lucifer’s brothers, eh? What do you want from Maddy?”

Daharan spread his hands. “Nothing. I have come only to assist my niece in her struggles, which are primarily the fault of Lucifer.”

“Just trying to clear the family name?” Beezle asked skeptically.

Daharan nodded. “I can arrange for the Agency to call off the Retrievers.”

“And how will you do that?” I asked. “The Agency is pretty convinced that they are a law unto themselves. Puck and Lucifer have both indicated to me that even they don’t mess with the soul collectors. And the Agency likes to take a hands-off approach with the other supernatural courts. I learned that from J.B. Basically, the Agency’s got a you-don’t-bother-us-and-we-won’t-bother-you attitude.”

“Except where you’re concerned,” Beezle said.

“Yeah, I don’t know what makes me so special,” I said.

“You’re special because you have managed to piss off an incredibly diverse collection of powerful beings,” Beezle said.

“Through no fault of my own,” I said.

“Fault doesn’t come into it,” Beezle said. “The fact remains that you attract attention, and a lot of it. And the Agency doesn’t like that.”

“I do not like it, either,” Daharan said. “I will be having words with my brother on the subject.”

“Oh, to be a fly on the wall when
that
conversation happens,” Beezle whispered.

“And won’t it attract more attention if you go storming in to the Agency and ask them to leave me alone?” I said to Daharan.

“I will not ask,” he said.

Daharan smiled, and for the first time I realized why his brothers were afraid of him. He exuded a tangible sense of menace, of power, that would not yield to any persuasion. He was the strongest of them all, and the most implacable. His magic was born in fire, and fire was the most pitiless force in the universe. Fire did not discriminate. It could not create. It could only destroy.

I looked into his eyes and I knew that if Sokolov and the Agency did not give him what he wanted, they would burn.

Beezle knew it, too. “Are we okay with this?” he asked in a way that let me know he was
not
okay with this.

“Don’t harm the Agents,” I said. “They’re just foot soldiers. But Sokolov, and Bryson . . .”

“You can feel free to grind them into little pieces if you like,” Beezle said. “Even I don’t see any point in trying to redeem the two of them.”

“I will find you again, Madeline,” Daharan said.

Then he took to the air. I watched him go until the night covered him and I could see him no longer.

“So,” Beezle said. “Do you think the manager at Dunkin’ Donuts would let us sleep in the back room if we paid her enough?”

“We are not living anywhere you would have twenty-four-hour access to doughnuts,” I said. “You’re heavy enough as it is. What’s Samiel been feeding you?”

Beezle shrugged. “Whatever Chloe eats, mostly. She’s an eating machine. You wouldn’t think that a person that little could eat so much, but she can give me a run for my money. I’ve never seen anyone eat so many tacos in one sitting.”

“So you’ve been gorging yourself while I was half-starved on a distant planet?” I said. “Nice. Very nice.”

Beezle flew off my shoulder so he could look critically at my figure. “It doesn’t look like you haven’t been eating.”

“That’s the baby, you idiot,” I said.

He grinned. “I know, I know. Actually, you do look kind of thin—other than the basketball hanging off the front of you, that is.”

I rubbed the new roundness in my tummy. “It’s not basketball-sized yet. It’s more like softball-sized.”

“That’s not a slow-pitch ball,” Beezle said. “That’s a Chicago sixteen-incher.”

“Enough about my belly,” I said. “Don’t you want to hear what I’ve been up to?”

“Only if you feed me first,” Beezle said. “I haven’t eaten in at least a half an hour.”

“I don’t think these pants came with a platinum card,” I said, digging into my pockets. To my great surprise, I found a twenty-dollar bill in one of them.

“Neat-o,” Beezle said. “Do you think it will do that every time?”

“Probably not,” I said. “I can get you a slice of pizza.”

“One slice?” Beezle whined. “You have twenty whole dollars. You can do better than one slice.”

“That’s my offer. Take it or leave it,” I said.

“Oh, fine,” Beezle grumbled. “But it better be deepdish.”

“Let’s walk to Art of Pizza,” I said.

“Walk?” Beezle said dubiously.

“You’re going to be carried no matter what, so I don’t know why you’re complaining already.”

“No, it’s not that,” Beezle said. “Well, of course I will be carried regardless. But I meant that you would be pretty conspicuous walking around with those wings. People are very curious around here about creatures that look different. Some of them are kind of on edge. So you might want to veil those things.”

“I keep forgetting. I’m still not used to having them,” I admitted as I dropped a veil over my wings. I started down the street, Beezle nestling more comfortably into my shoulder. “Wait a second. If people are still on edge, what are you doing flying around in public?”

“Oh, nobody thinks I’m a threat,” Beezle said with a touch of smugness. “In fact, most children and adults find me adorable, and they’re thrilled to know that cute little fantasy animals actually exist.”

“Cute little fantasy animals,” I repeated. “So they haven’t actually taken the time to get to know you, then.”

“A lot has changed here,” Beezle said soberly.