Christina Henry: Black Night

I swung the sword up, both hands wrapped around the hilt, and crept forward carefully through the yard. The dried and frost-tipped grass crunched under the soles of my boots. I sidled up to the fence and peeked through the slats.

There was a . . . thing in the alley. I don’t know how else to describe it. It was a monster, for sure, but like no monster I’d ever seen before. Its skin was a translucent greenish blue. I could see the play of muscle and bone underneath, the pulse of blood as it rushed through its veins. Its face was turned away from me but large batlike ears protruded from the back of its bare, oblong skull.

It squatted on elongated, froglike legs that ended in slender primate feet tipped with sharp claws. The curve of its spine was long as it bent over something on the ground. Wings nestled against its ribs, and the skin stretched over the wings showed the joints of bone where they connected.

The green light was coming from the creature’s body. I shifted, trying to get a better look at what the creature was doing. It was then that I saw the body the monster was eating.

All I could see was the top of a head, a yellow ponytail with streaks of gray, and the motorcycle boots that protruded from the other side. But that was enough for me to know that this was the other member of Wade’s pack that had been in Amarantha’s court.

And that meant that this creature was the thing that had been killing the wolves all along.

I pushed out my wings and flew over the fence, holding the sword high. I descended on the monster in a silent rush, intending to behead it before it realized I attacked.

Something betrayed me—a whisper of breath, the night air moving over my wings, or maybe just the instinct of prey and predator. An instant before I landed the monster turned, saw me, and leapt away down the alley.

I felt the toes of my boots drag across the asphalt for an instant and then I swept after it. The creature turned to face me and I was nearly blinded by green light. I covered my eyes, squinting, and the monster bounded toward me.

I swung the sword down as the monster reached me and felt its reverberation all the way up to my shoulder. The blade sliced through one of the creature’s arms and it screeched a terrible noise. My eyes were practically shut, squinting in the blazing light coming from the creature’s chest.

The creature lashed out with its other arm, knife-sharp claws slicing at my stomach. I sucked in my belly and danced backward, managing to get away with just a slender cut.

I tried to open my eyes a little more but it was impossible to be this close to the monster without sunglasses. I flew upward in a shot and turned back to blast the creature with nightfire. My spell bounced off the creature harmlessly.

Great. It was immune to nightfire and it was nearly impossible to fight the creature at close quarters without being dangerously blinded. What now? It wasn’t as though I had a whole ton of spells in my arsenal.

The creature flapped its giant wings and followed me into the air. I zipped away toward the lake, and it gave chase. I flew as hard and fast as I could, trying to think. Maybe I could knock the thing into Lake Michigan and drown it. At the very least I needed to lead it away from populated areas to reduce the risk of collateral damage.

The monster gave another high, keening cry, almost like the scream of a raptor. I glanced behind me to see that it was terrifyingly close, and that its clawed fingers reached for my ankle. I could just barely see the glitter of the creature’s teeth as it smiled.

I sped up, my breath coming hard and my heart beating a thousand miles a minute. The lights of Lake Shore Drive glimmered below us, and beyond that Lake Michigan swirled and crashed in its winter fury.

I stopped abruptly and dropped several feet, leaving the creature confused for a moment. It continued forward for a few seconds, allowing me to dip underneath it and come up behind. I slashed out with the sword and sliced one of its wings from its back.

Bluish blood spurted from the wound and the monster howled in pain. It dropped abruptly, unable to compensate for the loss of the wing. It spun down toward the beach in the darkness, the light from its chest shining like a beacon.

I flew down after it, headfirst, legs tucked in behind me like a skydiver, and using the monster’s own light to follow. I was going to finish this thing off, then call Wade and tell him to come and get the monster’s head.

And then the green light abruptly winked out.

I slowed my furious descent and came upright, wings flapping behind me, toes pointed toward the ground. Had I killed it, or was this some sort of trick?

I flew cautiously down to the place where I thought the creature might have landed. My boots slid in the sand and the lake rolled and crashed against the shore. In late fall, city workers had rolled in with earth movers and created a kind of breakwater out of the beach, mounding up the sand in small dunes. The dunes cast strange moving shadows in the lamplight from the lakefront bike path. There was no sign of the monster anywhere.

I fluttered up again, just a few feet above the beach, and moved north slowly, following the line of the shore. I wondered if I dared risk a light. If the monster was lying in wait for me, then it could use the light to find me. Of course, without light, I wasn’t sure if I could find any evidence of it. And it really would not do if some sunrise dog walker came across the decomposing corpse of a hideous monster in a few hours.

I decided to try to make a small light and try to focus it like a slender beam of a flashlight. Like so many new spells, though, I required an extra dose of concentration to get it going.

That meant I was a little distracted when the creature came screaming out of the darkness of the dunes and crashed into me.

The sword was knocked from my hand and flew away. A hand came around my throat and squeezed. The creature stood, slowly crushing my windpipe. My legs kicked underneath me as I clawed at the fingers holding me up. Lamplight fell across the creature’s face, and my hands fell away in shock.

It was Baraqiel. One wing stood white and proud in the moonlight, and the other was just a few ragged shards of feather. He smiled at me, and his mouth was covered in wolf’s blood.

I felt my magic surge up in anger, and a blast of heat burst out of me. Baraqiel shouted and dropped me to the ground. I rolled over, gasping for air, and stood up, facing him.

“You?” I said in disbelief. “You?”

His silver blue eyes glittered in the light, and I realized I had seen those eyes before. They were the eyes of Wade’s most recent pack member, James.

“You’re a shapeshifter,” I said, astonished. I had never heard of such a thing—an angel that could shift its shape. And I had certainly never heard of a shapeshifter that had more than two shapes. Baraqiel could become James the human, James the wolf and the hideous blue monster in the alley. What other tricks did he have up his sleeve?

“Lucifer does enjoy seeing the results of his affairs,” Baraqiel said. “I am unique among all of his children.”

“Lucifer?” I said. I was starting to sound like an idiot.

But it made sense. When I’d felt the magical pulse of energy and found the body of the first wolf, I’d thought that it felt like Ramuell, a thing not meant to be. I’d been half right. Baraqiel wasn’t a nephilim, but he was, like Ramuell, a thing not meant to be. Was there nothing Lucifer wouldn’t copulate with? What was he trying to do, manufacture the perfect monster?

There were things I didn’t understand, though. “Why would you kill all these wolves? Why the pointless bloodshed?”

“Pointless?” Baraqiel growled. “The wolves have thwarted and defied my father at every turn. Tyrone Wade has been a sworn enemy of Lucifer for more than thirty years.”