“Did Samiel do this to the werewolf?” Gabriel asked.
Baraqiel shook his head, surveying the carnage. “I do not know what caused this.”
“What are you doing here, then?” I asked.
“I was to deliver a message to you from Lord Lucifer. I heard the cries of the wolf and came to investigate. Before I reached this place, I was attacked by Samiel.”
“Wait a second,” I said. “I’m confused. How did you recognize Samiel? Nobody even knew of his existence until a month ago. I was under the impression that nobody had seen him but me, and then only for a moment.”
Was it my imagination, or did something crafty flicker across Baraqiel’s face?
“Samiel named himself when he attacked. I also have been informed of his existence by Lord Lucifer, who has been anticipating an attempt on your life.”
I narrowed my eyes. “Really. You’d think he could have informed me of that little piece of news.”
Baraqiel bowed his head. “It is not for me to know the ways of Lord Lucifer.”
“Nor me, apparently,” I said dryly.
To say that Lucifer kept things close to the chest was an understatement. I’d deliberately concealed the knowledge of Samiel’s existence from Lucifer in order to protect Gabriel. Gabriel’s life was pretty much always in jeopardy because of his parentage. Ramuell was Gabriel’s father also, a fact that should have been his death sentence at birth. I hadn’t wanted to draw any attention to Samiel lest the eyes of the Grigori fell on Gabriel, too. How had Lucifer found out?
“I hate to interrupt,” said Beezle loudly, “but I don’t think that this is a place we should be hanging around. It would probably look suspicious to the human authorities.”
“You’re right,” I said reluctantly.
I didn’t like the idea of leaving the wolf’s remains like this. I knew that the police would have no idea what could have been done to the wolf, or even what they were looking at. The average human didn’t know anything about vampires, or werewolves, or angels and demons. And if, in the course of investigating this murder, the police did stumble upon something supernatural, it was highly unlikely that said supernatural thing would just quietly answer questions and then send the nice officers on their way.
At the same time, it wasn’t as though I had any clue as to the perpetrator’s identity. Baraqiel claimed that Samiel had not killed the wolf, but he hadn’t actually seen the wolf’s attacker. And something about the power signature from the pulse had reminded me of Ramuell, which meant only Samiel could be the source. Could the pulse have been created when he attacked Baraqiel?
I wanted to stay and check around the crime scene a little more, see if I could ferret anything out. I don’t claim to be any kind of great investigator, but there was something not right here.
“The gargoyle is correct. I believe I hear the sounds of sirens,” Gabriel said.
He extinguished the ball of nightfire, plunging the alley into darkness.
“Gabriel, I need to have a private word with you, from Lord Lucifer,” Baraqiel said. His pale eyes glowed in the faint light that trickled into the alley.
I could feel Gabriel’s reluctance. “I am charged with staying with Madeline. Can this not wait until we have safely returned her home?”
“My lord was most insistent that these words be for your ears alone,” Baraqiel said.
“It’s okay, Gabriel,” I said. “Maybe you can check around the area for some more clues.”
Gabriel shook his head. “I must stay with you. Azazel has entrusted me with your safety.”
“I think I can manage to watch her for a few minutes,” J.B. said, and he scooped me up and took to the sky before Gabriel could protest. He grinned down at me as we zipped upward, cleared the roofs and headed toward my house.
I felt a little flutter in the vicinity of my heart. J.B. could charm when he was so inclined. “You do know that you’re asking for it, right?”
He shrugged. “I’ve dealt with your Rottweiler before.”
“He’s supposed to keep me safe. He’s been ordered to do so by my father and by Lucifer. He takes that responsibility seriously.”
“If you think that’s all he’s interested in, I’ve got a Skyway to sell you,” J.B. said.
I worried in silence about my powers as we flew home. I’d really only just started to get a handle on them in the last month or so. Before I’d discovered that I was a fallen angel’s daughter I hadn’t even realized that I had powers beyond that of an Agent. Then I’d gained all those talents plus more—a little boost from Lucifer’s lost lover Evangeline, my many-greats grandmother, who had possessed me briefly during the Ramuell incident.
Once I’d cleared Evangeline out of my system, I’d discovered I wasn’t quite as powerful as I’d thought. Evangeline had given me some pretty nifty—albeit totally destructive—abilities that had disappeared when she had. I was learning what I could do, very slowly. I could sense that there was untapped magic inside me but I wasn’t yet capable of drawing it out.
We approached my house in the deepest part of the night, that time about an hour before the sun rises. I live in a rundown brick two-flat in the west Lakeview neighborhood. I had inherited the house from my mother when she died. The red paint on the front porch was peeling, the chimney was crumbling, and the heating system was in desperate need of an update. I was always broke or on the verge of it, so it seemed that repairs were something that were deferred to a day when food wasn’t a priority, or possibly that magical day when I won the lottery.
I was thinking idly about dinner as we descended in silence toward the house. We landed in the backyard and J.B. set me on my feet with a grin. That was when the blast hit him.
There was a bolt of blue lightning accompanied by the smell of ozone and sage. J.B. cried out and flew across the yard. I turned to face my attacker but before I could think, before I could breathe, his arms were around me.
Claws bit cruelly into my flesh as I was drawn close. I looked up into the red face of a half demon that I knew well.
“Hello, Antares,” I said, and resisted the urge to cry out as his claws drew blood.
“Hello, little sister,” he hissed.
Antares looks like a medieval priest’s idea of a demon. He’s got huge, curving black horns, oversized bat wings, curling ebony claws, slitted pupils, skin the color of raw meat and many pointy teeth. He’s also my father’s secondborn child, the issue of Azazel’s affair with a witch-demon.
Azazel is the most powerful of the fallen save the Morningstar himself, and the witch-demon was a practitioner of exceptional ability. Despite all of this, Antares had been born oddly powerless. This made him resentful of everything, particularly me, whose head he wanted on a spit.
He saw me as the usurper to his inheritance—Azazel’s throne. I would have happily gift wrapped the throne and all the bullshit that went with it, but Azazel had named me his heir and I hadn’t yet determined how to wriggle out of it.
“Actually, you’re my little brother. I’m Azazel’s firstborn, you know,” I said casually. The scent of sulfur filled my nostrils and I fought down nausea.
As I’d expected, that set him off. His lack of status in Azazel’s court was a major sore spot, especially since Azazel had put out a death warrant on Antares for trying to kill me. Normally Grigori were forbidden from harming members of one another’s courts, but Antares had killed a lot of innocents in his attack on the Agency, and even Lucifer couldn’t ignore that infraction.
“First born and first to die!” he hissed, his saliva splattering all over my face. My skin burned where it touched.