Black Howl
Page 40

I ran into the fray and tackled the nephilim to the ground. It still screamed and thrashed. I gagged from the smell of sulfur coming off its body, then pushed away to my feet and beheaded the thing.
It stopped screaming immediately.
Beezle flicked the eyeballs off his claws and then flew down to Gabriel’s shoulder. He’s learned to tolerate Gabriel, but my husband is still not his favorite person, so I was surprised. At least, I was surprised until Beezle used Gabriel’s coat as a napkin to clean the gore off his fingernails.
Gabriel shook his head in resignation.
“Let’s help the other two,” I said, and we backtracked down the passage to the stairs.
J.B. and Samiel were holding on, but barely. They had been pushed up the stairwell by the steadily increasing throng.
“Where the hell does Azazel keep all these soldiers?” I asked incredulously.
“Have you seen how big this house is?” Beezle said. “He could store them in the basement and never even know they were there.”
We grimly reentered the battle, but it was quickly apparent that all we were doing was tiring ourselves out.
“We need to distract them and make a break for it,” I told Gabriel.
“I have something appropriate,” he said.
He threw another blast of what looked like nightfire, but actually was a gigantic cloud of sulfurous smoke. The passage quickly filled up and everyone was coughing and groping.
Gabriel grabbed my hand and pushed at Samiel, and we all ran up the stairs. A couple of soldiers followed us but J.B. leveled them before they had the chance to get too far.
Gabriel was the only one who knew where Azazel’s quarters were, and he led us unerringly down the hall to the room at the very end.
The door was unlocked, and we poured in, slamming the door shut behind us.
I half expected Azazel to be waiting there, but there was no one.
The portal spun in the corner. It was inside a glass case to protect the room from the constant force of suction that was generated.
Bodies crashed into the door outside.
“No time to celebrate,” I said to the others. “Let’s go.”
I strode to the portal, pulling open the glass case. Lucifer’s tattoo wriggled in warning.
“Yes, I know we’re in danger,” I said to my hand. “Thanks for the update.”
Gabriel nudged me aside. “I will go first.”
“We’re going home,” I said. “What difference can it possibly make?”
“I will not take chances with your safety,” Gabriel said.
“Will the two of you just hold hands and jump together so that we can get out of here already?” Beezle said. He’d switched to Samiel again.
I took Gabriel’s hand firmly, thought of my backyard covered in snow, and we went through. I hoped the others would follow quickly.
Gabriel squeezed my hand tight as we emerged into the early-winter night.
I turned my head to smile up at him, and that was when I saw the sword protruding from his chest, and Azazel standing behind Gabriel with a look of malicious glee on his face.
Gabriel released my hand and fell forward into the snow.
“NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!” I screamed, and I turned on my father with a fury I had never felt before.
I slashed at him with Lucifer’s sword, and a long cut formed across his chest. He narrowed his eyes and swiped back at me, the longer reach of his sword slicing into my arm. Blood flowed down the sleeve of my shirt—my jacket was long gone, caught on fire and discarded in the throne room.
I didn’t care. I didn’t care about anything except killing this monster called my father. My magic still lay quiet inside me, and I knew it would not wake. I had depleted myself too thoroughly at Azazel’s.
I swiped at his face with the sword and gave him a cut to match the one on his other cheek. I felt numb inside, a machine with no purpose except to destroy this man. He seemed to realize this, and in any event he’d gotten what he came for—Gabriel.
Azazel swung with his fist and punched me in the face. I saw stars and blackness spinning before me. I tried to hold myself up, tried to keep fighting. But my body was half-mortal, and it betrayed me.
I fell to my knees, shaking my head, and when I looked up, Azazel was gone.
He’d flown away like the coward he was, and because my power was gone I couldn’t follow him.
I screamed his name into the darkness.
There was nothing but the emptiness of night, and the flashing lights of airplanes blinking across the sky.
“Know this,” I said to the darkness. “I am Lucifer’s Hound of the Hunt, and there is no place you can hide from me. I will hunt you to the end of your days. You will never know peace. You will never know rest. I will destroy you utterly, and the last face you see before you leave this Earth will be mine.”
I stood wearily, using the sword as a staff to push me up, and turned to face that which I did not want to see.
A pool of dark blood stained the snow around his body. Samiel, Beezle and the wolves, changed back into humans, stood beside him.
“Where’s J.B.?” I asked.
“He took Gabriel,” Beezle said. There were tears glittering on his cheeks.
I looked again at the body, the thing that could not be Gabriel, and then back up at Beezle.
“Took him?”
“To the Door,” Beezle said.
“The Door,” I said. “No. No. Gabriel wouldn’t choose the Door. He wouldn’t leave me. He knows I can see him. He would stay. He wouldn’t leave me.”
“Maddy…” Beezle began.
“No,” I said angrily, swiping at the tears that were falling now, falling so hard I could barely see. “I told you once before, when he was kidnapped. Gabriel would not leave me. He would stay with me. J.B. must have made him go. You know how J.B. feels about ghosts and paperwork.”
I was babbling. I knew I was babbling. But it couldn’t be right. It couldn’t. Gabriel could not be dead, killed by Azazel, a maggot that had somehow crawled free. It should be Azazel who was dead, not Gabriel. Not my husband.
My husband, I thought, and I broke.
I screamed my pain and grief to the sky, a black howl that had no beginning and no end.
19
SAMIEL TRIED TO PICK ME UP, TO TAKE ME AWAY.
“No,” I said, and when he tried to make me move anyway I hit him in the mouth.
He looked shocked and hurt, and somewhere under all the pain I was sorry for it, but not sorry enough to let him take me from Gabriel.
“No,” I repeated. “Just leave me with him.”
“Come on, Samiel,” Beezle said softly.
They went away, but I didn’t care. I just wanted to be alone with Gabriel. I crawled through the snow to him and laid my head on his back. I hardly felt the cold and the wet through my jeans.
He was still warm. His coat smelled of him, apple pie baking in the oven. Tears leaked from my eyes.
“Madeline,” a voice growled, and there was a gentle hand in my hair. Someone crouched beside me, someone who smelled of wolf.
“Go away,” I said. “Just leave me here.”
“Madeline,” Jude repeated. “You can’t stay here in the snow.”
“Why not?” I said.
I had seen an incomprehensible amount of death in my life. I had fought against Death with all the power I had within me, and still it had triumphed. It had taken the only person who made me want to keep living.
“Gabriel would not want to see you this way,” Jude said.
“Don’t tell me what Gabriel would want or not want,” I said furiously, raising my head to glare at him. “Gabriel’s not here, and you didn’t know him.”
“That’s the Madeline Black I know,” Jude said. “Stand up. Stand up and fight. If you stay here, you will fall into grief that you will never overcome.”
“I don’t care,” I said, the fire that had lit me momentarily going out. “I want him back. I want to be where he is.”
“I know,” Judas said.
The pain in his voice drew me back from the darkness that threatened to swallow me, a pain so old and so familiar to him that he hardly knew he carried it most of the time.
I came to my knees, my hands on my thighs, staring at Jude. His blue eyes shimmered with unshed tears in the streetlights.
“Samiel needs you,” he said. “And your gargoyle.”
“Yes,” I said. It was hard to keep my head above the blackness that rose up inside, the blackness that tried to pull me under again.
“And you have a promise to keep, Lucifer’s child,” Jude said, but there was a gentleness that had never been there before.
“Azazel,” I said, and inside me a shard of ice pierced the darkness.
“Azazel,” Jude agreed.
He held his hand out to me, and I took it, and we rose together. He gripped my fingers urgently.
“From this day henceforth, I am your ally. When you hunt for Azazel I will be by your side, and I will hold him to the ground as you swing the sword to take his life.”
“Jude,” I said uncertainly, looking at Wade, who looked unsurprised by this proclamation. The ways of the alpha are certainly mysterious.
“I swear,” he said, and energy passed between our hands. I knew then that we were bound in some magical way, and that Jude would keep his promise no matter what the cost.
“Let us take Gabriel’s body,” Wade said.
I looked down at the ground in panic. They couldn’t take him. I wasn’t ready to say good-bye.
“You cannot bury him here, not without attracting the attention of the authorities. We will take him to a place near where our pack summers. No one will find him there,” Wade said.
He lay in the snow, facedown, with the dark stain around him, and this would be the last time I saw him.
But I knew Jude was right. I couldn’t lie in the snow beside him forever. I had promises to keep.
“Okay,” I said.
I knelt beside him for the last time, and Jude and Wade helped me roll Gabriel to his back. I tenderly wiped the snow from his face with my sleeve and closed his eyes.