Black City (2 page)

“That was a little conspicuous,” I said. “I wonder what the neighbors will make of two angels taking off from my front lawn.”

“Given all the weird shit that occurs in the nexus in and around our house, they probably won’t be surprised in the least,” Beezle said. “Besides, vampires are eating up all the nice little commuters in the middle of the day. I don’t think the regular rules are going to apply from now on.”

As we sped downtown as fast as Nathaniel and Samiel could fly, I knew Beezle was right. In a single instant everything had changed. The world that had been hidden from normal people, a world of creatures they’d seen only in their dreams and nightmares, had been split wide-open. Nothing would ever be the same again.

The news report had come from Daley Plaza, the distinctive figure of the Picasso statue looming in the background of the shot. Nathaniel angled a little west from the lake and headed toward the plaza.

As we got closer I could see traffic snarled on the surrounding streets, buses and taxis at a standstill, drivers abandoning their vehicles to run. People crammed on the stairwell to the El, pushing, shoving, stepping on anyone who tripped and fell. The vampires were monsters to be feared, but people didn’t exactly show the best face of humanity at times like this.

Then we were over the plaza, and it was worse, far worse, than I’d imagined.

I’d thought that Azazel’s potion had to be limited, that there couldn’t possibly be that many vamps colluding with
him. And even if there were, I’d assumed his death would have cut off the production of the serum that allowed the vamps to walk in sunlight without turning to flames.

After all, Jude, Nathaniel and I had fought several perfectly ordinary vampires at Azazel’s mansion only a couple of weeks before.

But there were hundreds, maybe thousands, of vampires on the streets below. They poured from the blue line subway station, emerged from the sewers through manhole covers, an endless seething mass of bloodthirsty insects falling upon any human they could find.

I’ve never liked vampires, even when they’ve kept a low profile. I’d always suspected their veneer of civility was just that, and I’ve never bought into the notion that it’s romantic to have your blood drained by a vamp.

This was one occasion when I would have been happy to be proven wrong. It was pretty clear from the carnage going on below us that vampires didn’t entertain any romantic notions about humans. To them, we were nothing more than walking, talking bags of meat.

Beezle poked his head out of the lapel of my coat and looked down. “Gods above and below. Where do you even start?” For once there was no sarcasm in his voice.

“We just have to do what we can,” I said, and tried to sound confident. “Let’s go, Nathaniel.”

He brought us down to the platform that the Picasso statue rested upon, which gave us a slightly elevated view of the plaza. On any given day you can see a few brave kids climbing the tilted platform and sliding, whooping and hollering, to the ground below.

Today it was covered with the spattered blood of dozens of victims.

I leapt from the top, swinging my sword to slice the
head from the nearest vampire I could find. When that one was dust, I moved to the next one. I was vaguely aware of Nathaniel and Samiel fighting around me, and of Jude joining the fray, snarling and barking as he tore the vamps’ throats out.

I don’t know how long we fought. I punched, kicked, hacked, slashed and watched heads roll away, disintegrating into dust as they went. And I kept doing it, over and over and over again.

Still the vampires came.

Still more of them poured from the ground like cicadas emerging from hibernation. And nobody showed up to help us.

The Agency was a short walk from where we fought the tide. I imagined large numbers of Agents were engaged with trying to keep up with the souls pouring from the bodies of the dead, but why not send the rest of the Agents to fight the vampires? The Agency’s willfully blind attitude about not getting involved in the actions of other supernatural courts surely couldn’t extend to ignoring a massacre under their noses.

Or maybe it could, since the cavalry never arrived.

After several hours of killing vampires, I slipped.

I was tired, hungry and pregnant, and I wasn’t completely on my game after a week spent fighting battle after battle.

My boot heel skidded in a pool of blood, and so I was just a little shy of complete decapitation on the vamp I battled. I landed backward, banged the back of my head against the sidewalk, and saw stars for a moment.

My field of vision was filled with the slavering jaws of the vampire I hadn’t quite killed, ready to eat my face off. There was no time to think, no time to perform a spell.

Then the vampire was gone, and Nathaniel picked me up from the ground and carried me away.

“What are you doing?” I screamed. “We can’t leave. We can’t leave those people down there alone.”

“We cannot do any more,” Nathaniel said grimly. “There are four of us, and thousands of them.”

“We can’t leave,” I said again. I’d never run from a fight in my life.

Nathaniel landed on a nearby roof. Samiel was beside us holding Jude, still in wolf form, in his arms.

“Look,” Nathaniel said angrily, holding me by the shoulders so I could see what was below. “The city is overrun. We can’t do anything else.”

I stared down. It was so much worse from up here, where you could see the pouring mass of vampires undulating through the city streets, into the buildings and buses, leaving empty husks of humanity behind them.

It seemed that the more people who were killed, the more ferocious the vamps became.

“It’s a feeding frenzy,” I said, sickened. “How can we leave them down there, without anyone to defend them?”

“The police are fighting back,” Beezle said, his head popping out of my jacket.

From our vantage point on the roof we could see the teams moving in, hastily mounting barricades. The percussion of gunfire was added to the chorus of screams that echoed in the canyons of the city. My city, overrun by vampires.

“No,” I said angrily. “We have to go back. We have to help.”

Nathaniel’s hands rested on my shoulders and he spun me around to face him. His face was twisted in anger and, to my surprise, fear.

“Just what is it that you think you can do?” he said, giving me a little shake. “Do you not value your life at all?”

I saw Samiel move out of the corner of my eye, obviously intending to defend me from Nathaniel, but I slapped my ex-fiancé’s hands away before Samiel could.

“I value my life as much as you do yours,” I said. “But I don’t value it more than any of them do.” I pointed toward the terrified mass of humanity below.

“So you would kill yourself to save one of them?” Nathaniel said.

“I don’t think I’m superior to them the way you do,” I said coldly.

Nathaniel threw his hands in the air. “Gods above and below, you are the most thickheaded woman I have ever met. Do you really think this is about superiority? Think about your baby. Think about the people who love you. Don’t throw yourself away on the impossible.”

I stared at him, startled to realize that the fear in his eyes had been for me. He correctly interpreted the look on my face and sighed. “I do not know why you cannot credit me with human emotions, even after all we have been through.”

I didn’t have anything to say to that. There would always be a part of me—although that part was shrinking almost daily—that would be suspicious of Nathaniel, that didn’t trust his veracity.

Samiel tapped me on the shoulder.
This really isn’t the time for a heart-to-heart.

“Yeah,” Beezle agreed. “We need to get out of here before the police start firing on us just because we look weird.”

“The gargoyle is right,” Nathaniel said, lifting me up again. I felt a magical veil settle over us, hiding our appearance
from human eyes. “The humans are in a state of panic, unable to distinguish friend from foe.”

“That, and Maddy’s covered in blood and carrying a sword,” Beezle added.

As we flew away I turned my head from the carnage below. I knew Nathaniel was right. I knew that continuing a battle we couldn’t win was foolish and pointless. We’d barely made a dent in the endless stream of vampires. But I’d never run away before, and leaving felt less like good sense than defeat.

We continued north toward my house. Sturdier barricades were being assembled by the police farther away from the epicenter of the attack. It looked like the authorities were trying to contain the vampires to the Loop.

The sad truth was the density of commuters and residents downtown would probably keep the vampires busy there for a while. There was no need for the vamps to leave that area as long as there was food, and there was plenty of food to be found.

I could feel the pent-up tension in Nathaniel’s arms as he held me, and knew that he longed to have another go at me over my hardheadedness. He held back likely due to the presence of an audience. Of course, if he was waiting for an opportunity to get me alone, he would be waiting forever. There was always someone hanging around my house these days, and Beezle had completely lost all sense of personal boundaries.

We landed on the front lawn, Samiel and Jude beside us. In silent concordance we all trooped back upstairs to my apartment. The television was still on. Jude returned to human form, pulling on his discarded clothing.

I stopped in front of the TV, staring. Nathaniel took my
coat from my shoulders. Beezle flew out of the pocket and went straight to his brooding spot on the mantel.

A sober-voiced anchor spoke over footage shot from a helicopter. I guess they weren’t stupid enough to send another cameraman into Daley Plaza.

“We are trying to identify the nature of this threat; however, as unbelievable as it may seem, eyewitness reports have indicated that these creatures are attacking anything in sight, biting and, it seems, feeding on the victims. They are like…like some kind of vampires. All we know for certain is that there are hundreds of them, as you can see from our aerial footage of the Loop. The police are attempting to halt the creatures’ progress as best they can. A spokesperson for the mayor’s office has said that the mayor has contacted the National Guard and that he will be making a statement to the press in approximately thirty minutes. The mayor and his staff have been airlifted out of the danger zone…”

“What about everyone else?” I murmured. I’d been there, fighting all morning, and it looked so much worse on TV. The news camera was far enough away that detail was blessedly lost, but the black horde seemed to swell even as I watched, a pulsing, cancerous growth engulfing the heart of Chicago.

I saw dark spots before my eyes. The picture on the screen went blank. A few moments later I opened my eyes to see four anxious faces above me.

“What happened?” I said. Somehow I’d ended up prone on the couch.

“You fainted,” Beezle said.

“I did not,” I said. I don’t know why, but I was embarrassed.

“You did,” Beezle said.

“And no wonder, since you have been exerting yourself and have not eaten since yesterday,” Nathaniel said.

“You look thinner,” Jude added.

“I can’t have lost weight since yesterday just because I didn’t eat breakfast,” I scoffed.

“Who knows what this baby is doing to you?” Beezle said ominously.

I really didn’t enjoy it when Beezle implied that Gabriel’s baby was trying to kill me from the inside out, so I waved the lot of them away without replying and sat up. Mistake. Everything went wobbly again.

“For the sake of the Morningstar, just rest for a moment,” Nathaniel said, pushing me back down.

“Quit manhandling her,” Jude growled.

“I will do what I must to get her to take care of herself,” Nathaniel snapped.

“You didn’t show such a touching concern for Maddy’s health when you were trying to kill her in Azazel’s mansion during the rebellion,” Jude said.

Nathaniel stood to face Jude, his hands curled into fists. “I do not have to explain myself to you, wolf.”

“Not this again,” I muttered, then louder: “Enough, both of you. I don’t need you talking about me like I’m not here. If you want to be helpful, you’ll go and get me something to eat.”

“I wouldn’t mind a little something myself,” Beezle said.

“You don’t need it,” everyone in the room replied, including Samiel, who signed the words.

“If you’re going to be that way about it,” Beezle grumped.

“We are,” I said.

Samiel went into the kitchen. Nathaniel and Jude continued bristling at each other.

“Why is my life filled with men?” I said to no one in particular.

“Beats me,” Beezle said. “It’s not your charming personality—that’s for sure.”

I gave him a sour look.

“I don’t even have to try,” Beezle said. “The punch line was right there.”

“Stand down,” I said to Nathaniel and Jude.

They both turned to look at me, and it was only then that it really registered that they were both covered in blood. And so was I. I was abruptly aware of the gore drying on my face, of my red-stained hands. It was a sad commentary on my life that I was so frequently covered in blood that I wouldn’t notice its presence even when I was soaked in it.

Samiel reentered the living room carrying a sandwich. The thought of eating it while covered in the ichor of dozens of vampires made my stomach turn.

“Help me up,” I said.

Nathaniel rushed to help me but I gave him a pointed look. “I asked for Samiel.”

My brother-in-law put the sandwich on the coffee table as Nathaniel backed away with a frozen look. I knew there was a reckoning coming with Nathaniel. Sooner or later I’d have to decide whether he was an ally or an enemy. I couldn’t keep him floating in the netherworld between forever.

Don’t touch that sandwich,
Samiel signed to Beezle.

“I know how to get my own food,” Beezle said loftily.

Don’t touch that sandwich,
Samiel repeated.

He came around to take my arm as I stood. Now that the adrenaline of the fight had worn off, my legs had turned to mush.