Christina Henry - Black City

I frowned at her. “I don’t think so. They’re just curious.”

“They want me to pay,” she said. “Can’t you hear them whispering?”

I shook my head. “No. I can’t.”

“They are in my head,” she said, her green eyes wide with terror. “They are telling me of all the sins I have done.”

It was like Evangeline was trapped in her own personal Maze while I was drifting along in a stream of cotton candy. There was nothing I could do now. I had fulfilled Lucifer’s charge to me, and fetched Evangeline from the dead. Now it was up to her whether she would pass into the land of the living again.

She began to thrash, and it was harder for me to hold on to her. I knew if I released her now, she would end up in the netherworld forever. That wasn’t really a problem for me, but Lucifer might think I’d left her there on purpose.

I grabbed onto her other shoulder with my left hand while keeping a good grip on her fingers with my right. She couldn’t even see me now. Her gaze was somewhere else, far inward.

Then she nodded. And then she screamed, and we were falling, rushing through the air like we’d been dropped from the top of the tallest building in the world. There was no chance for me to slow us down. Her shoulder slipped out of my grasp, and there was something wet and sticky on my fingers. I white-knuckled her hand, and hoped that we would make it. There wasn’t much else I could do.

The ground appeared out of nowhere, and all the breath left my body. Evangeline’s hand was still in mine, and it was colder than death. I sat up slowly, realizing I was in my own backyard, and that it was night. I don’t know how long I had been gone, but all of the snow had melted.

“Thanks, universe,” I muttered. I didn’t really want to have to stash Evangeline until Lucifer felt like coming to pick her up.

I looked over at Evangeline. Her eyes were closed. Now I knew why I’d lost my grip on her shoulder, and why my fingers were all sticky.

Evangeline’s right arm was gone, cut as cleanly as if by an ax, and she was bleeding to death on my lawn.

“Gods above and below,” I swore.

The back door slammed open. Nathaniel stood silhouetted in the doorway.

“Madeline,” he said, his voice full of relief. “You have been gone for three days. I thought you would never return.”

“Never mind that,” I said urgently. “I need you to help me with Evangeline. She’s bleeding to death.”

I have to give Nathaniel credit. He didn’t stand around asking about the whys and wherefores. He rushed to my side, and seemed to know what I wanted immediately.

His fingers twined around mine, and we each put our other hand over the gaping hole where Evangeline’s arm used to be.

Our magic, Nathaniel’s and mine, lit up the night like a searchlight. It took a long time to close the wound. There was a lot of damage.

After a while it was done. Evangeline was still breathing, although it didn’t sound like she was restful. I lifted her right eyelid to check her pupils and gasped.

“What?” Nathaniel said.

“Look,” I said.

There was no eye underneath, just a black hole where the orb used to be. Nathaniel checked the other socket. I watched expectantly.

“Empty,” he said.

I put my hand over Evangeline’s belly, wondering whether her child had survived the passage. Beneath my hand there was movement, but it wasn’t natural. It felt like she was carrying a litter of snakes. I yanked my palm away, rubbing it on my pants leg.

“Both her eyes and her arm,” I said.

“It seems a small price to pay for returning from the dead,” Nathaniel said.

“And still, I wonder how happy she’ll be about paying it once she wakes up and realizes she can’t see,” I said.

Nathaniel lay down in the grass. He pulled me to him so I could rest my head on his chest.

“It’s done,” I said. Evangeline’s happiness with her choice was not of any concern to me. My eyes closed. I felt an almost overwhelming urge to sleep right there. “Lucifer, she’s here.”

I drifted into a doze, woke when I felt him beside her, kneeling in the grass, lifting her away. His voice was nothing but a whisper on the wind— Thank you, granddaughter.

Nathaniel and I both slept right there in the yard. When I opened my eyes again all that remained of Evangeline was a bloodstain in the grass. It was still very dark out, not even close to the dawn yet.

I sat up, rubbing my eyes, and stretched. I was stiff all over. I wanted a proper sleep in a proper bed after a very hot shower with lots of soap. There was sand in my eyes, sand in my clothes, sand in my socks. I still had Evangeline’s blood on my hands.

Nathaniel opened his eyes. They glittered in the starlight, the deep blue of the sapphires. He was beautiful to me in that moment, a creature of another world, black-haired and white-winged, bathed in the night.

I lowered my head to kiss him, drawn by a force I could not resist.

He smiled, and I realized at the last second that it was not his smile. Something was wrong.

His hands latched on my neck and he pushed me to the ground, his weight on top of me, suffocating me.

I tried to say his name, to pry his hands from my neck. I put my hands over his, fought for consciousness, pushed power through the connection between us.

I didn’t find Nathaniel’s magic welcoming me as I had before. There was someone else inside him, someone else at the controls.

My life was fading fast. My baby beat its wings against my belly. I found the spark of the Morningstar inside me, and gave one tremendous heave, pushing all of that power into Nathaniel. The source of his power, that gift from Puck, rose up to meet me. Together we chased the thing that was inside Nathaniel out.

There was an audible pop , and then Nathaniel released my neck. I coughed, breathing great lungfuls of air. Nathaniel looked horrified.

“Madeline, I am so—”

“Don’t apologize,” I said, and jerked my thumb at the silvery apparition floating in the air. “It was her fault. You’re some piece of work—you know that?”

Amarantha smirked at me. “I may have failed in this instance, but you will never know when I will strike again.”

I stood up, rubbing my throat. “Whose magic did you steal to be able to do that?”

“I stole nothing,” Amarantha said, miffed. “Your useless brother left his cupboard of toys behind when he was beheaded. There are many useful things in there.”

Greenwitch’s magic. She’d been an exceptional witch, and since Antares had no magic of his own she had bequeathed him a collection of magical objects to help him. I’d noticed the cupboard in the cave in the Forbidden Lands where I’d killed Antares, but once the mountain came down on the cavern I’d assumed nothing could survive.

Somehow Amarantha had ferreted out Antares’ goodies. Before, she’d just been an annoying ghost. A closetful of magic suddenly made her a lot more dangerous. That meant I would have to find her stash and destroy it before she could do any more damage to me and mine.

Amarantha smiled like she knew what I was thinking. “You will never discover it, Agent. You will be forever looking over your shoulder for me.”

She rose up, her tinkling-bell laugh just as irritating in death as it had been in life. She threw her arms wide. “But first, a gift for you.”

The vampires came slithering over the fence from the alley, dozens of them. Behind them clambered humans with blank eyes, and I realized that Amarantha had somehow ensnared these humans with other ghosts, just as she had possessed Nathaniel. It was a crafty move, since she knew that I wouldn’t deliberately harm a bunch of innocents. And because it severely limited my brand of blast-and-burn magic.