Black City (21 page)

I’d spent more than my fair share of time in darkness lately. Maybe one day I’d go to the Caribbean and lie in the sun until all of the dark was burned away.

Do you think Lucifer will ever let you do that?
I thought.
Do you think he’ll let you go now that he has you so close to his grasp?

I already knew the answer to that. The darkness would be with me forever, and no amount of sunshine would ever light those shadowed places again. That was Lucifer’s gift to me—the power of the stars and the universe, cloaked in the black emptiness of space.

We had been walking for some time without incident when I heard Chloe. Her breath had been coming faster and louder gradually, and now she sounded like she was
hyperventilating. Samiel must have tried to comfort her because she said, “Not helping. Not helping at all.”

“What’s the matter?” I said.

“I can’t breathe,” she said, sounding strained. “I can’t get enough air in here.”

“You can,” I said, trying to cut through her panic by being firm. “There’s plenty of air.”

“There’s not,” she moaned. “I can’t breathe. I can’t breathe!”

“She’s having a panic attack,” J.B. said, and there was the sound of a struggle.

Jude let go of my hand.

“Hey, don’t let go,” I said.

“I have to get out of here, I have to get out, I have to,” Chloe said.

“Hold her still!” J.B. said.

Sheathing my sword so I wouldn’t accidentally stab anyone in the dark, I turned on the spot and reached out in front of me, trying to find the others by sound.

“Get ahold of yourself, girl,” Jude growled.

Jude, J.B., Nathaniel, Samiel and Chloe were nothing but shadows moving in the dark, formless, indistinct. My hand touched someone’s shoulder, but before I could figure out whose it was, I was decked in the face by Chloe’s flailing arms. I staggered backward, hearing J.B. grunt as Chloe hit him, too.

Chloe seemed to lose more control as the moments passed. Her words ceased to have meaning and instead turned into a low keening noise. None of the men was able to get hold of her. A second later, she bolted.

I felt and heard her go by rather than saw. Her boots crunched in the dirt of the cave floor, and her moan trailed behind her as she ran.

“Chloe!” I shouted, and scrambled after her.

“Don’t go haring off after her, idiot!” Beezle said.

Samiel shot past me, nothing more than a sense of a body moving in space. I knew it was him because he didn’t call her name. I ran behind both of them, deeper into the black.

“Maddy, wait!” J.B. cried.

I should have waited. That was the whole point of the chain, so that we would not lose one another in the darkness. But all I could think was that Chloe was panicking, and Samiel couldn’t call us if he needed help.

Then Chloe screamed, and my blood ran cold.

“Chloe!” I called, running harder. Beezle dug his claws into my shoulder so he wouldn’t fall off.

She screamed again, and it sounded farther away—much farther than she should have been able to run.

“It sounds like something’s carrying her away,” Beezle said.

“I know,” I said.

The rest of the guys were running behind me and soon caught up. We were sprinting together like a pack, me in the center, J.B. and Nathaniel on each side, and Jude behind. The cave tilted downward, and there was a faint illumination ahead.

“Chloe! Samiel!” I called.

“Samiel can’t answer you,” Beezle said.

“I’m hoping he’ll come back to us,” I said.

“He won’t come back if his woman is in danger,” Jude said.

“What’s that ahead?” J.B. asked. “I can see some kind of halo.”

“The walls of the cave are lit,” Nathaniel said.

The cave was gradually getting brighter, the walls shot
through with twinkling veins of luminescence. It was a tremendous relief to be out of the suffocating dark.

It was less of a relief when we came to the place where the cave was split.

“Great,” I said, looking at the two identical paths. “How are we supposed to know which way they went?”

Jude sniffed the air. His nose wasn’t quite as good when he was in human form, but it was still better than an ordinary person’s.

“Samiel went this way,” he said, pointing toward the right-hand cave. He then pointed to the other tunnel. “Chloe and some kind of reptile-mammalian thing went that way.”

“Reptile-mammalian thing?” Beezle said.

“I don’t know what it is, but that’s what it smells like,” Jude said.

“I don’t want to meet anything that fell off two branches of the evolutionary tree,” Beezle said. “Let’s go away from the multispecies monster.”

I was less worried about the reptile-mammalian thing than I was about the fact that Samiel and Chloe had entered different passages.

“We have two choices,” I said. “We can all stay together and go after Chloe, then come back here to try and find Samiel after we retrieve her.”

“And the second option is that we divide forces,” Nathaniel said. “The answer is no.”

“I second that,” J.B. said.

“It’s impractical for us to move like one big amoeba and leave Samiel alone,” I said.

“I’ll go after Samiel,” Jude said. “And then I’ll find you. I can follow your scent easily enough.”

“Thank you,” I said, keeping my eyes firmly on his face. His clothes were somewhere in the woods. “I’m going after
Chloe. You can go with him or go with me,” I said to the other two, and I started jogging down the tunnel on the left side.

“I don’t think it’s good for you to be friends with Jude,” Beezle said. “He enables your bad decisions.”

“No,” I said. “Jude trusts me, which is more than I can say for anyone else.”

“I trust you,” J.B said, running up on my left.

“You just don’t think I can do anything without you there to keep me safe. And that’s what Nathaniel thinks, too,” I said, as the angel silently joined us. He ignored my jibe. “Nothing to say?”

“A wise man knows when to keep his own counsel,” Nathaniel said.

“And you know that nothing you say will stop her, anyway,” Beezle said. “Wait—I just realized we went down the tunnel of the freaky combination animal thing. I don’t want to go down this tunnel. I want to go with Jude.”

“Too late,” I said with a lightness I did not feel. The monster could be eating Chloe right now. “Look at it this way. You’ll be able to see something very few have ever seen.”

“That’s because they’re not alive to tell us about it,” Beezle muttered. “You know, I’m not much of a let’s-make-discoveries-for-science gargoyle. I’m more of a watching-science-on-TV-while-eating-pan-fried-noodles gargoyle.”

The cave was lit by the same trails of light that were in the main passage. After a while I noticed that the walls were also covered in some kind of white fluid, and that my boots were no longer crunching over rock. The ground was covered in the same goop.

Beezle noticed it the same time I did. “Once you start seeing viscous liquid, it’s time to turn around before you get put inside a cocoon and eaten at a later date.”

“Should we leave Chloe inside a cocoon to be eaten at a
later date?” I asked. I slowed my steps, moving more cautiously now that there were obvious signs of the creature.

Beezle muttered something that sounded like, “Better her than me, and she eats all the pancakes, anyway.”

“All the more reason to get her back,” I said. “She’s the only person who can give you a run for your money at the dining room table. And Samiel would be heartbroken if anything happened to her.”

“Fine,” Beezle said. “But when we’re encased in goo, I’m definitely saying I told you so.”

Nathaniel stopped, holding up his hand. “Shh.”

He tilted his head slightly, listening. “We are nearly upon it,” he said softly. “I can hear it moving.”

“Chloe?” I asked, afraid to hope.

“She is still alive,” he said. “I cannot vouch for her condition.”

“I can’t hear anything,” J.B. said.

“Nathaniel can,” I said, moving as carefully and quietly as I could. Even when trying to be silent I sounded like a lumbering bear next to the other two. Nathaniel’s footfalls were so light I had to check to make sure he wasn’t floating above the ground.

“When did he get bat ears?” J.B. asked.

“It’s a long story,” I said.

J.B. looked between me and Nathaniel. “Yeah, I bet.”

The tunnel appeared to continue on straight ahead of us for hundreds of feet.

“Where is it?” I asked.

Nathaniel shook his head. “It is nearby. With every step we take, its movements become louder.”

We walked a little farther. Nathaniel was very insistent that he could hear the creature, but there were no corridors or rooms off the main passage.

I stopped in the middle of the cave, looking all around. “Something isn’t right here.”

“You mean besides the fact that I’m hungry and there’s no food to be found?” Beezle said.

“Yes,” I said. “Nathaniel can hear the creature, but we can’t see it, and there’s nothing ahead of us but more tunnel. So there’s got to be some kind of entrance to another room or cavern that we can’t see. Beezle, did you lose your abilities when we entered the cave, too?”

“Yup,” Beezle said. “I’m just like a regular person now, no special gargoyle X-ray powers.”

“You’ll never be just like a regular person,” J.B. said.

“That doesn’t sound like a compliment,” Beezle said.

“I wouldn’t take it as such,” J.B. said.

I ignored their byplay and reached toward the wall. I had a suspicion and I wanted to see whether it was valid. Nathaniel grabbed my wrist.

“Do not touch that,” he said. “You do not know what kind of effect it may have on a human.”

I shook my head at him. “I’m not sure it’s there at all.”

Nathaniel narrowed his eyes at the substance coating the cave. “You think it’s an illusion?”

I nodded, and shook off his hand. I placed my palm on the wall of the cavern.

For a moment it seemed that my hand would become trapped in the fluid, which had the substance of craft glue. Then I put some will and some force behind it, and my hand passed easily through the wall, and the rest of me with it.

Nathaniel grabbed my other hand before I disappeared, and J.B. lunged for Nathaniel. All four of us slipped easily through the wall, which wasn’t really there at all.

I wished we had stayed put.

“So that’s a reptile-mammalian thing,” Beezle said. “It’s certainly…large.”

We were in a massive cavern, similar to the one where the nephilim had been imprisoned in the Forbidden Lands. At the far end of the cavern, blessedly away from us, was a gigantic creature coiled in a ball, sleeping. It had roughly the body shape of a lizard, the diamond-shaped head of a snake, and its body was covered in shaggy fur like a woolly mammoth.

Between us and the monster were piles of bones. Piles and piles and piles of bones, stacked higher than I would have thought possible.

“How long has that thing been here?” I breathed.

“It must have eaten everything that’s ever come through the passage for thousands of years,” Beezle said.

“Where’s Chloe?” J.B. said, squinting. “Are those bones?”

“I’m going to be so happy when you get your glasses back,” I said.

“There,” Nathaniel said, pointing toward the ceiling.

Three human-shaped cocoons hung there, suspended by thin strands of webbing. All three cocoons were wiggling, indicating that the person inside was still alive and trying to get out.

“I told you that once there was viscous fluid, there would be a cocoon,” Beezle said triumphantly. “Although I’ll tell you that I don’t want to know where it gets the thread for the cocoons from. That thing is already weird enough as it is.”

“Where did the other two come from?” I asked.

“It’s Jude and Samiel,” Nathaniel said. “Can’t you hear Jude?”

Now that he mentioned it, I could. The wolf’s voice was muffled by the webbing, but it was definitely him.

Chloe, Samiel and Jude were directly above the sleeping
whatever-it-was. The monster didn’t seem to have been disturbed by our presence or our whispers, but that couldn’t possibly last.

“Well, at least we’re all together again,” I said. “I think the only option is for the two of you to fly up and cut them down. Then bring them back here and I’ll cut the cocoon off so we can get out of here.”

They nodded, and I bit my lip as I watched them fly away from me. I wanted my wings back. I was tired of watching everyone else do things I ought to be doing. I was tired of being carted around like a child when I could have been flying.

J.B. and Nathaniel had a quick, quiet conference as they reached the cocoons. Beneath them, the monster shifted in its sleep, grunting and snorting, and we all went still.

The creature didn’t seem like it was waking, so J.B. positioned himself next to one of the cocoons. Nathaniel cut the thread with his sword and J.B. caught the person easily. I saw his mouth move, reassuring whoever it was, and he flew toward me.

Nathaniel was right behind him. He stopped only for a moment to whisper something to the person who remained.

J.B. landed just ahead of Nathaniel. “It’s Samiel,” he said, laying my cocooned brother-in-law on the ground. Samiel was contorting inside the web.

Nathaniel put another person next to him. “Jude,” he said briefly, and went back for Chloe.

I bent close to Samiel. “Samiel, you have to lie still for a minute. I’m going to cut you out, and I don’t want to cut you.”

He stopped moving. I placed the blade at his shoulder and carefully used the tip to lift away the tightly wound thread. Then I sliced through on a diagonal from his shoulder to his hip, and hoped I missed all the major arteries.

Once I’d loosened the thread, Samiel burst out of the cocoon like the Hulk bursting out of his clothing. He looked wildly around, and J.B. grabbed Samiel before he could go tearing through the cavern. He made Samiel look at his face.

“Nathaniel’s getting Chloe,” J.B. said.

I repeated the procedure with Jude, who looked very annoyed once he emerged.

“Never even heard it coming,” Jude said. “I think it only makes noise if it wants to.”