Christina Henry: Black Night

“If I don’t get Azazel now and you bleed to death in your own backyard, he will kill me.”

“Don’t get him. I’ll figure out something.” The last person I wanted to see at that moment was Daddy dearest.

The wind picked up, and I shivered inside my coat. Beezle was having trouble staying close, his wings buffeted by a breeze that was fast becoming a gale. I reached out and grabbed him, stuffing him inside my pocket before he blew away.

“What the . . . ?” I said, and crawled slowly toward J.B., who wasn’t moving at all. I felt for a pulse and found one, but he did not stir at my touch.

The wind racketed around us. My hair came free of the woolen hat I was wearing. I covered J.B.’s still body with my own, clinging to his shoulders.

A faint red light appeared just above my garden, and the light grew until it was a circle the size of a city Dumpster. Inside the circle, wind swirled and electricity pulsed.

Beezle poked his head out of my pocket.

“It’s a portal,” he shouted.

I knew that. I just didn’t know who was in it, and if they were friend or foe. My magic crackled feebly across my fingertips. I was too weak to do anything.

A figure emerged from the portal, tall and blond and radiantly beautiful. He brushed some imaginary lint from his white-feathered wings. The portal closed behind him and the wind died down. The angel looked up, and the natural arrogance on his face turned to surprise.

I had been wrong. There was one person that I wanted to see less than my father.

“Hello, Nathaniel,” I said to my fiancé.

NATHANIEL HURRIED TOWARD THE PORCH, TAKING IN the situation in an instant.

“Madeline, what has happened?” he said, as he pulled me away from J.B., put me in his lap and checked my wounds. “Where is your bodyguard?”

Nathaniel never referred to Gabriel by his name, which was just one of many things that I disliked about the man whom my father had engaged me to against my will.

“Antares,” I said briefly. I felt dizzy, and Nathaniel wasn’t helping by shaking me around.

“How did you incur these injuries?” he said, covering each with his hands one after another. I felt a familiar heat, like the light of the sun was burning through my veins.

This kind of healing used to be very painful for me, when I was still mostly human. Now that I had acknowledged my heritage and my heart had been replaced by an angel’s heartstone, it was only slightly less painful. The half of me that would always be human knew that the sun was not supposed to run wild in your blood, nor was it supposed to heal you. The angelic half of me welcomed the heat and the burn like homecoming.

The blood ceased to flow, and I felt the skin knit together painfully. I didn’t feel like getting up and dancing around yet, though. The kind of healing that Nathaniel did could close up injuries but it didn’t help with recovery time.

“Thanks,” I said, and tried not to sound resentful as I did. It wasn’t Nathaniel’s fault that my father had affianced us without my permission, or that I wanted someone else. It was his fault, however, that he was totally unlikable in every way.

“What about J.B.?” I asked, squirming off his lap and onto the porch.

Too much proximity to Nathaniel made me uncomfortable. He is beautiful, and it is hard not to be drawn to beauty. But he is also a giant jerk, and no amount of attractiveness can make up for that. I did not want to think about our wedding night.

“J.B.?” he said, his eyebrows raised. “This human that you were . . .”

He trailed off, staring at J.B.’s limp form.

“Gods above and below,” he swore, and rushed to J.B.’s side. He lifted J.B.’s eyelids, checked his pulse, and then picked him up as if a six-foot-plus man weighed nothing. “What have you done with Amarantha’s son?”

I looked at Beezle, who was perched like a crow on the railing of the porch. He looked surprised.

“Who is Amarantha, and what does she have to do with J.B.?” I asked, pulling myself to my feet. The world wobbled in many directions.

Nathaniel kicked open the door and flew up the back stairs to my apartment without answering me. I heard a crash as he knocked out the door upstairs as well.

“Those locks cost money, you know!” I shouted, annoyed by both his high-handedness and his abandonment of me. Did he think I could walk or fly in this state? “What crawled up his ass?”

“Amarantha is the queen of the local faerie court,” Beezle said. “I didn’t know J.B. was her son.”

Beezle was like a phone book of things that go bump in the night. He knew every species, every subspecies, every hierarchy and every rule. He could run the gamut from werewolf law to the vampire courts to the reigns of demons. There was very little that Beezle did not know. I wondered how J.B. had managed to conceal his status from my gargoyle.

“Well, presumably Amarantha is someone with a lot of influence or else Nathaniel wouldn’t have touched J.B. even if he were wearing gloves,” I said, staggering toward my back door. “On the upside, this means that he is probably healing J.B. as we speak, and I don’t have to threaten him to do it.”

I grabbed the doorframe and leaned on it for a minute, which gave me a good look at the damage Nathaniel had done to the lock by kicking it. The door normally locked with a dead bolt. The bolt had torn through the wooden frame and was now totally useless, which left my abode uncomfortably open to the aforementioned things that go bump.

A threshold, even without a door, is enough to stop most supernatural beings of power. Vampires, werewolves, fallen angels, demons . . . none of them could cross a threshold without an invitation. Nathaniel had been (reluctantly) invited inside by me before, so he was able to cross the threshold without penalty.

But there were plenty of lesser magical beings for whom the rules were a little more fuzzy. They could construe an unlocked or open door as an invitation. I didn’t fancy an infestation of gremlins eating all of Beezle’s precious popcorn stash or an imp whispering nasty things to me while I slept. And repairs cost money, money that I didn’t have. I usually generate some income by working as a freelance recipe developer, but since I’d been running around trying to keep up with my Agent duties and Azazel’s demands, I hadn’t had much time for that work lately. Although I supposed that since Nathaniel had done the kicking and the breaking I could get him to pay for the repairs.

I dragged myself up the back stairs, holding on to the railing as if it were a lifeline. Beezle fluttered around my head, cajoling me to keep moving forward when I wanted to stop and rest.

When I got to the top of the stairs, I saw that Nathaniel had repeated his destroying act on the upstairs door, which hung drunkenly from its hinges like a scene from a Bugs Bunny cartoon. I slumped on the landing, exhausted and annoyed.

“Come on, Maddy, get up,” Beezle said, pulling ineffectually at my collar.

I waved him away. “Leave me alone. I’ll get up and go inside when I’m ready.”

“I want to find out what Nathaniel’s doing to J.B.,” Beezle said, tugging at me again.

“So go,” I said, leaning my head against the wall and closing my eyes. I heard Beezle flap uncertainly for a moment, and then the sound of his wings receding as he went inside the apartment.

I want Gabriel, I thought. I couldn’t help it. When he was away from me, I was like a planet without a sun. I wasn’t supposed to love him, and maybe if I could have had a normal relationship with him, I could have gotten him out of my system. But the longing . . . the longing . . .

“Madeline, wake up.”

Gabriel?