Black Spring (14 page)

It had been pretty apparent that Lucifer wanted me to take the fall for Evangeline’s murder. I didn’t know if it was an act or if he sincerely thought I had done it. But I did know if I stood in that hallway any longer, he would have continued to marshal “evidence” against me. And my best chance of wriggling off this hook that Lucifer had me on was to go along until Nathaniel and the others found the shifter—the real culprit.

The creature was still somewhere in Lucifer’s mansion. What I found shocking was that, if they were to be believed, neither Lucifer nor Puck nor Alerian could feel the shifter’s power or identify him when he was in disguise.

For creatures so old and powerful, this struck me as suspicious, particularly in Alerian’s case. If this shifter was like the ones Alerian had created so many centuries ago, then he should have been able to detect traces of its power signature. Alerian had expressed a decided lack of interest in the shifter. Lucifer, too, had been dismissive of the idea that such a creature could exist. All the evidence seemed to point toward the theory I’d developed earlier at dinner—that Lucifer was the shifter’s master, that he was using the shifter to corner me.

If Lucifer
was
manipulating all this, then I might have made a huge mistake by quietly offering myself up for imprisonment. But if Lucifer was simply using the circumstances to move things in his favor, then there was hope for me.

It was a gamble, but I hadn’t seen any other way to get out from under Lucifer’s microscope. Any other way that didn’t involve bloodshed, that is.

I was so involved in my thoughts that I’d barely noticed where we were going. Now I realized my two escorts were leading me down—and down, and down. We were on a curving stone staircase in a narrow passage, almost like one that would lead up to a high tower in a fairy tale. Except that in this case, the princess was going in the wrong direction.

We descended into the earth, far below Lucifer’s mansion. I wasn’t sure that any house built near Los Angeles could possibly have a foundation like this—more evidence that Lucifer magically manipulated his home to suit his needs. For all I knew this part of the house could be in a completely different dimension.

At the bottom of the stairs was a short row of cells on both sides of a hallway—metal bars that blocked rooms made of cold stone. There were no windows, and only a few flickering torches of flame provided light.

“Where did Lucifer learn about prison decorating?
The Count of Monte Cristo
?” I said.

Neither of the two men with me responded. One of them took out a bunch of keys on a metal ring. The feeling that I was suddenly trapped in a Dumas novel persisted. He opened the metal door and the other jail keeper ushered me in. There was a stone bench to sleep on, but nothing more.

As the door slammed shut behind me, I felt a moment of profound panic. I was trapped, pinned like a butterfly on a board. Lucifer finally had me where he wanted me—under his thumb and unable to do anything about it. My baby, who had been so unusually silent and still during the events upstairs, fluttered his little wings in time with the rapid thrum of my heart. Would Nathaniel even be able to find me down here?

Lucifer’s goons drifted back up the stairs. I was underground, in the dark, and alone. But I didn’t have to stay here. I knew that as soon as I put my hands on the bars. There was no magic binding me, nothing to stop me from blasting the doors off and fighting my way out of the house.

Except that I would be leaving the others behind, who would no doubt pay a terrible price for my actions. I realized that I had essentially left my family and friends as hostages, and that Lucifer’s plot to get us all under one roof would make his plans—whatever it was he had in mind—much, much easier.

I really wished Daharan were here. He would never have allowed it to come to this.

“I see that your sins have finally come home to roost,” a voice slurred from the darkness.

I peered across the hallway, trying to make out the shadow hidden in the cell opposite mine.

“Who is it?” I said. “Come into the light.”

The figure moved from the back corner of the cell, shuffling slowly. For a strange moment I thought that it was a zombie, or some other kind of monster imprisoned by Lucifer. Then the person’s face emerged into the flickering light of the torch. The face had obviously been hit multiple times, but I still recognized it.

It was Jack Dabrowski, and I had only one thing to say to him.

“You are a moron,” I said.

He shook his head, though it was obviously painful. “How could I pass up the wedding of Lucifer? Everyone online was talking about it.”

“You could have passed it up by using your brain,” I said harshly. “I warned you over and over again that it was dangerous to investigate things you don’t understand. You’re lucky Lucifer hasn’t killed you already.”

“He didn’t kill me because I told him I was a friend of yours,” he said.

“And as you can see I’m in the cell across from you,” I said. “Not your best move. And we’re not friends. Last time we met you were a little annoyed with me because I’d locked you in the storage area in my basement.”

“Which was significantly more comfortable than Lucifer’s accommodations, by the way. But I thought that saying I was with you was a safe bet. Everything I’ve read has indicated that Lucifer lets you do whatever you want because you’re his favorite. What are
you
doing in the oubliette with me, anyway?” Jack asked.

“Just how much of my life is discussed on the Internet?” I asked, avoiding his question.

“More than you think,” Jack said. “Even the average nonmagical person would probably be shocked to see what comes up if they Google their own name. And don’t think I didn’t notice that you didn’t answer me. I can see the blood on your clothes, so I bet there’s a body involved.”

“What an investigator you are,” I said. “You should have won a Pulitzer for your reporting by now.”

“No need to be snide,” Jack said. “The way I look at it, we’re in the same boat. We should help each other.”

“We are
not
in the same boat,” I said. “I can leave this cell anytime I want to. You can’t.”

“You can get out?” he asked.

In demonstration I waved my hand in front of the door. The lock turned under my will and the door swung open.

Jack clutched the bars eagerly. “Let me out, will you? I snuck into the house. I could probably sneak out again.”

I shook my head, pulling the door shut again, although I did not lock it. “You’ll never make it out of the mansion. Lucifer’s got servants everywhere, and he’s going to be on alert now that . . .”

I trailed off, not wanting Jack to know about Evangeline.

“Now that what?” he said. “You might as well tell me. I’ll find out anyway.”

“Then you can ferret it out. I’m not your source,” I said.

“Why are you always so hostile to me?” Jack said. “I could help you. I came to you from the start to help you.”

“I think you’re mixing up ‘help’ with unwanted publicity,” I said. “I don’t want my business published. I want my privacy.”

“Did you ever think that if more people knew about you and what you did, then you would be protected?” Jack said.

“Protected from what?”

“From stuff like this,” Jack said. “The more famous you are, the harder it becomes for someone like Lucifer to make you disappear. People would care. They would look for you.”

“And they would find nothing,” I said. “Even now, even when you’ve been beaten up and imprisoned, you still don’t get it. Lucifer didn’t have to do it this way. If you’re alive and I’m alive, it’s because he wants us to be, because it serves his purpose. He’s not showing you mercy. In fact, if he had been in a bad mood when he found you, then you would be nothing but vapor right now.”

“You mean he wasn’t in a bad mood when he ordered his goons to beat the crap out of me?” Jack said. “I think my arm might be broken. It hurts like hell.”

Now that he mentioned it, I could see that his left arm hung at a strange angle.

“Oh, yeah, that’s broken,” I said. “Now, that, I can fix. I think.”

I pushed the door of the cell open again and crossed to the bars of Jack’s enclosure. I hesitated for a moment. I knew the healing spell by heart, but I had never tried to use it on an ordinary human before.

“Having second thoughts about putting me out of my misery?” Jack asked.

“No,” I said. “I was just thinking that the spell might harm you more than it helped. I’m not sure an ordinary human can handle it.”

“I can handle anything,” Jack said confidently. His face was eager, and I could tell he was more excited about the prospect of having magic performed on him than about fixing what was broken.

“Don’t act like a child,” I said. “If I don’t do this correctly, or your body can’t process it, who knows what might happen. You could explode from the inside out, or have a stroke right in front of me, and there would be nothing I could do about it. You would probably be wishing that you had just waited for a regular doctor to set your arm then.”

“I know you won’t hurt me,” he said.

“Three days ago you thought I had mutilated a person right in front of you,” I reminded him.

“Yes, but now I know better,” he said. “C’mon, just fix my arm since you won’t let me out of the cell.”

He was putting on a brave face, but he was obviously in pain. And I could make it better. And I probably wouldn’t accidentally blow him up. Probably.

I reached through the bars, put my hand on his shoulder. He winced when I brushed my fingers across his arm.

A little pulse of magic flickered through me and into his arm. I was trying to find the precise point where the arm was broken, so that I wouldn’t have to overload him with power. I used my ability to locate the fracture and then sent gentle waves of magic through to heal it.

Jack watched me with wonder in his eyes. “You could do so much with a power like this. You could heal cancer. AIDS. Kids with rare diseases. Why do you hide yourself from the world?”

“This power isn’t an endless well, you know,” I said. “Whenever I use too much magic, it takes something out of me. Can you imagine what would happen if everyone in the world knew that I could heal people? Thousands would descend upon my house, each of them with a story sadder and more horrible than the last one. And I wouldn’t be able to say no. I’d help them, and I’d heal them, and eventually I would be too sick and exhausted myself to help anyone else.”

“But what if you could just help the really needy?” Jack asked as I pulled my hand away.

“Who decides who’s really needy?” I asked. “Does your arm hurt? Do you feel any aftereffects, like nausea?”

Jack bent and stretched his arm. “Nah, it feels great. I feel great, as a matter of fact. Like I just drank a lot of coffee. Wow. Magic is incredible.”

He started doing jumping jacks in his cell, almost like he couldn’t help himself. I noticed that even though I’d tried to pinpoint the fracture, my magic had still spread to other parts of his body. The bruises and cuts on his face were rapidly healing while I watched.

“Okay, I guess there are some side effects,” I muttered as Jack began jogging in place. “Apparently magic makes you high.”

I was about to tell him to quit it when I felt a sudden cramp in the side of my abdomen. The pain seemed to recede for a moment; then it twisted through me again. Something wet ran down the inside of my pajama pants.

“Oh, damn,” I said. “The baby’s coming.”

Jack stopped with his exercise-video routine and stared at me. “The baby? You’re having the baby now?”

“Yes,” I said.

The pain was not intense, but it was definitely there. I could feel the baby moving inside me. I didn’t know if normal human moms could feel that when they were about to give birth, but I certainly could.

“Damn,” I said. “Damn, damn, damn, damn.”

This was exactly what I had not wanted. I didn’t want to give birth under Lucifer’s roof. I especially didn’t want to give birth while I was “imprisoned” on a murder charge. Lucifer would use my incarceration as an excuse to whisk my son away from me, which was what he had wanted all along.

I staggered toward the stone bench in the cell. I needed to sit down for a minute, to breathe, to think. It was all becoming clear.

It didn’t matter, really, if Lucifer was the shapeshifter’s master. He had seen the opportunity given by my look-alike’s murder of Evangeline. Once I was locked up, I was under his power, and he could keep me locked up until I had the baby.

Once the baby was born, Lucifer would have everything he wanted. Two new heirs—my child and Evangeline’s—and no rebellious granddaughter or jealous wife to get in his way. He could execute me without even having to justify his actions before the court of the Grigori. No one would question that he would want his fiancée’s killer to receive justice.

And I had made all his plans easier by passively agreeing to be locked up in the basement. It had seemed like a good idea at the time, but as usual I’d been outmaneuvered by a master.

Now I needed to get out of Lucifer’s house before this labor progressed any further. And to do that I needed Nathaniel.

I could easily fly to the top of the long flight of stairs. But once I got to the top, there was sure to be more security than there was down here. There was no way Lucifer would leave me in a cell with a door that I could easily unlock with magic.

My second problem was Jack Dabrowski. The moron had followed me here and gotten himself locked up by the Prince of Darkness even though I’d warned him about a thousand times about interfering in the lives of supernatural creatures. It would serve him right if I left him where he was, but my conscience unfortunately would not allow me to do that. So I’d have to take him with me. And he was going to be deadweight in a fight. Completely manic high-with-magic deadweight. He’d gone back to exercising, and was now doing squat jumps from the bench on the wall to the floor and back again.

I tried not to think about how completely terrified I was. It wasn’t just the prospect of trying to fight my way out of the mansion while I was in labor. It was the possibility that my son was a horrific monster like Evangeline’s child. He could rip his way out of me, kill me before I ever had a chance to see his face.

Even if he was a completely normal adorable little cherub, I was still scared. Because I didn’t know how to be a mom, and I didn’t know how I would keep him safe from my own family members, never mind the multitude of enemies I had. Many of those enemies were staying right here in Lucifer’s house for the wedding that would now never happen, all of them conveniently placed for snatching my baby away or murdering me before he could ever be born.

I took a deep breath. The cramping feeling had intensified, although it was nothing like the way birth looks on television, with the mom all sweaty and screaming her head off with every contraction. It just felt like I had the worst menstrual cramps ever.

I stood up gingerly, using the wall as a brace. No matter what, I was not going to get far without Nathaniel, and I wouldn’t leave him or Beezle or the others behind anyway. So I reached for the connection between us. We weren’t able to send messages, per se, but I hoped that he would feel my need and my distress and find me.

The darkness inside me opened its eyes, lurking, waiting for me to drop my guard so that it could take over again. I ruthlessly put a lid on that part of my power. I didn’t need to deal with an internal struggle for my personality and sanity right now. As usual, I had more than enough to deal with.

But I could feel the black energy seeping around the edges of my connection to Nathaniel, looking for an opening, looking for a way in.

“Nathaniel,” I said aloud. I thought I felt him respond, but I wasn’t sure.

Maybe we were, as I’d suspected, in another dimension here in the basement. When I’d been on that strange planet far away in time and space, I hadn’t been able to feel Nathaniel. Which meant that I would have to at least get back up into the mansion before I could call him to me.

“I’m not Nathaniel. I’m Jack,” Jack said.

He was soaked in sweat. He looked like one of those people from the P90X commercial, jumping around all over the place and seeming superhappy about it. I don’t get those people. I’m not quite as lazy as Beezle, but how can anyone be that happy when they’re expending that much energy?

“Come on, exercise boy,” I said. “We’re busting out of this joint.”

I waddled over to his cell and waved my hand over the lock, opening the door.

“Yes!” Jack said. “What do we do now? Sneak out of the house?”

“I doubt there will be any sneaking,” I said. “As soon as we get to the top of the stairs, there will be guards. And we will have to dispatch those guards before they raise an alarm if we want to have any chance of escaping at all. So I need you to calm the fuck down and stop acting like a toddler who just ate a bag of Halloween candy. Because if everything is blown because you’re acting insane, then I will personally throw you to the bottom of these stairs.”

“No, you won’t,” Jack said, swinging his arms back and forth. “I know all about you now. You talk tough, and it’s cute, but you’re just a big softy.”

I wanted to list off all the big, dangerous creatures I’d battled and defeated, but it sounded too much like bragging, and I didn’t really like to brag about the murders I’d committed, however justified. Plus, there was not enough time to convince a half-crazed human that I was a hell of a lot tougher than I looked.

“Just stay close to me and don’t make any noise. Got it?” I said as I started up the stairs.

It would have been significantly faster to fly, but I would have to carry Jack. Under normal circumstances I would have plenty of strength for such a task, even though Jack was about ten or twelve inches taller than me. But it took a lot of work to remain calm in the face of increasing contractions as well as maintain control over my lurking dark side. I didn’t have much left over for carting around the wayward blogger. So it was climbing the stairs for us.

Jack immediately pushed ahead of me and started jogging up the stairs.

“Hurry up, won’t you? Why are you so slow?” He started to sing the chorus from an old Duran Duran song.

“I
am
going to kill you when I catch up to you,” I mumbled. “I have tried so hard to forget the eighties.”

I fluttered up to the step behind him. There was no reason for me to trudge up the stairs and get out of breath chasing him if he wanted to run the whole way up.

We were about halfway to the top by my estimation when Jack suddenly ran out of gas. He slumped against the wall, sliding down until his butt hit the step. His face was white and pale, and he looked like he might boot.

“Don’t you dare throw up on me,” I said. “I’m the one who’s about to give birth here. I should be falling down and getting sick, not you.”

My hands were wrapped around the shifting bulge in my belly. I was trying to slow my son down, trying to keep him from emerging into the world at that very moment. I didn’t want to reach the top of the stairs and have the baby pop out right there, into Lucifer’s waiting arms.

“I feel like crap,” Jack moaned. “I don’t think I can climb another step.”

“Serves you right for behaving like a lunatic,” I said, trying to pull him to his feet. “No one made you run up the stairs like you were in the Olympics.”

“Go on without me,” Jack said. “I’m going back to the cell to take a nap.”

“Get up, you idiot,” I said. “If you stay here, you’re going to be executed by Lucifer in front of his whole court.”

“Says you,” Jack said. “Maybe he’ll keep me as a performing monkey.”

“I can’t believe you would consider that a viable alternative,” I said. “Now, get your ass up and moving before I have this baby right here on the stairs.”

After much grumbling he rose to his feet and started moving again, albeit much slower than before. On the upside, he was much less likely to alert the guards of our presence when he was in his current (and much mellower) state.

I continued flying behind him. It took a lot less energy for me to fly than to try to climb. My whole stomach now felt like a sponge that was being wrung, and my breath came in pants. Sweat trickled around my face, and I imagined that I now closely resembled those movie moms in labor.

Jack glanced back at me. “You don’t look so good. How are you holding up?”

“I just need to get to Nathaniel,” I said.

“That tall black-haired guy who always stands near you and glowers?” he asked.

“Yes, him,” I said.

“Is he the baby’s dad?” Jack asked.

“No,” I said.

I didn’t want to explain that I had been married only a few short months before, and that my husband had been killed by my father. It seemed like the sort of thing that might end up on Jack’s blog—if he ever lived to blog again, that was.

We rounded a curve of the staircase and suddenly there was a small landing and a door directly in front of us. It looked like a plain, ordinary metal safety door, like the kind that are in emergency exits in tall buildings. But there was something different about it. I couldn’t put my finger on it. I put my hand on Jack’s shoulder.

“Wait a second,” I said.

I landed on the stair behind him and then nudged my way past. I reached out with my power, looking for a trace of a magical signature.

And boy, did I find one.

“That’s no ordinary door,” I said. “It’s booby-trapped with magic.”

The doors downstairs had been so easy to open because of this. I knew that Lucifer wouldn’t have allowed anyone he considered a threat to be locked up with so little security.

I just hadn’t thought there would be quite this much security elsewhere. Right away I could tell that the spell on the door would trigger at the slightest touch. There had to be a way to disable the trap from the other side so that the prison guards could come and go.

Unfortunately, I didn’t have time to wait for Lucifer to decide to give us bread and water. We needed to get out of this stairway immediately. My contractions were getting closer together and more painful. However, I wasn’t certain I could break down the spell without making everything go kablooey. It was a complex work of magic, and a highly dangerous one.

“I need Nathaniel,” I said again. “Life would be a lot easier if I wasn’t wearing pajama pants.”

Jack stared at me, his eyes blank and tired. He was coming down hard from the effects of the magic. “What do pajama pants have to do with anything?”

“If I wasn’t wearing pajama pants, I would have my cell phone,” I said. “And if I had my cell phone, I could just call Nathaniel and have him come and get us out of here instead of trying to rely on a very tenuous emotional link through magic.”

“I still don’t understand what that has to do with your pajamas,” Jack said.

“Never mind,” I said. I concentrated hard on Nathaniel, on the connection between us. Now that I was out of the depths of the mansion, I was hoping it would be easier to sense him, and for him to find me.

Nathaniel,
I thought. I didn’t know if it would work or help, but I tried to send a mental picture of where I was and what I needed. It felt slightly silly. Even with all of the things I had seen and done that involved magic, telepathy seemed like it was still an “out-there” concept.

After a few minutes I had to stop. It was hard to concentrate on sending Nathaniel an S.O.S. when it felt like my stomach was being ripped in two.

And as soon as I stopped, I heard him.

I’m coming.

“Wow, I can’t believe that actually worked,” I said.

“Can’t believe what actually worked?” Jack asked.

He had sat down on the stairs with his back against the wall while I did my human-telephone act with Nathaniel. His face was white and covered with sweat, and he was shivering. I probably did not look much better. It was a struggle to stay upright, and a couple of times I saw black dots in front of my eyes, like I was on the verge of fainting.

“Don’t worry about it,” I said. “The cavalry is on its way. Unless I’m hallucinating Nathaniel’s voice in my head. Which is entirely possible.”

“You know, I’m starting to wonder how you have such a powerful reputation,” Jack said, his eyes closed. “You seem like kind of a flake.”

“You’d seem like kind of a flake if you were trapped in a stairwell with an unhelpful blogger while you were in labor,” I said.

I wondered whether I had really managed to reach Nathaniel, and whether he would understand where I was and how to get rid of the booby trap on the door. I wasn’t really sure what our options were otherwise. There was not nearly enough time for me to try to take apart the spell from this side. If I tried blasting through the wall that surrounded the stairwell, I would most definitely alert Lucifer and his goons. I was still hoping that we could find some way to sneak out of the house.

How long should I wait, though?
I thought. How long could I wait? I didn’t really know anything about having a baby (somehow I’d never gotten around to reading the pregnancy book that Beezle and I had bought a billion years ago), but it seemed to me that the whole process was moving pretty fast. I should have expected this, since the baby had grown unusually large in a short amount of time. In fact, I wasn’t anything close to a normal term for a human pregnancy, and yet here he was, on his way.

Suddenly I felt a surge of emotion inside, and I realized that two things were happening at the same time. One, Nathaniel was coming for me. I hadn’t hallucinated his voice in my head. The bond between us, forged in magic when I’d released his legacy from Puck, had penetrated the barrier of the door and whatever dimension we were in.