Black Lament
Page 33

“I don’t think that’s going to be a problem,” J.B. said. “Most normal people aren’t out and walking about on a night like this.”
Chloe’s apartment was about a ten- or fifteen-minute walk from mine. There was very little traffic on the street, and we saw no pedestrians from my house to hers. Most homes were darkened, their residents already tucked in bed for the night. I thought longingly of my own bed, but hard on the heels of that thought came the memory of Puck disguised as Gabriel.
Maybe I would sleep on the couch for a while and give Jude my room.
Chloe’s apartment was on Melrose in a white-siding two-flat not much different from my own. We walked up the porch and peered at the names on the mailboxes. Chloe was on the first floor, which was handy.
“I’ll go in through the wall and come out to let you two in,” I told Jude and J.B.
They nodded, and I laid my hand on the exterior door.
“I am the Hound of the Hunt, and no walls can bind me,” I said softly.
My hand slipped through the door like water, and the rest of me followed with it. I turned around and let the other two into the foyer, and then repeated the process on Chloe’s door.
A few moments later we were inside. I flipped on the light switch that was near the front door.
The place was trashed.
The apartment was an open studio with a small galley kitchen at the far end and a little corner reserved for a bathroom.
There were clothes everywhere, papers scattered willy-nilly and an open futon covered in tools and bits of metal. Her storage system seemed to consist of cardboard boxes and old milk crates, and they were used for everything from underwear to books. The sink was piled high with dirty dishes, and I think there was mold growing on the coffeemaker.
“Has someone been here before us, or does she live like this?” I said, horrified.
“You’ve never seen her cubicle, have you?” J.B. said. “This is actually somewhat organized for Chloe.”
Dismayed, I looked at all the paper all over the floor. “You don’t think she took the sheets out of Azazel’s binder, do you?”
Jude, who had been sniffing around the room, gave a short bark. He stood near a small, two-person card table that Chloe had shoved under a window.
Azazel’s binder rested on one of the chairs. I opened it up and found it empty.
“You’ve got to be kidding me,” I said, scanning the mess on the floor. “We have to go through all this junk.”
J.B. sighed. “It’s you, right? Nothing can ever be easy.”
We spent the next hour or so on our hands and knees, crawling around collecting pieces of paper and sorting them into two piles—“Azazel” and “not Azazel.”
After a final walk-through we were pretty sure we’d gotten all of the documents. I’d noticed as we were collecting them that Chloe had made oblique notes on several of the pages in purple marker.
I shoved the papers back through the rings of the binder and shut it. “Let’s bring this home and look it over. I can’t take the smell of this place anymore. Hasn’t she ever heard of disinfectant?”
I shut off the lights and sent Jude and J.B. outside first so that I could lock the interior door. Not that Chloe would notice if someone broke in, but it seemed like the right thing to do.
I drifted through the outside door and saw J.B. and Jude waiting for me on the sidewalk.
We started walking north back to my place. J.B. carried the binder under his arm, and Jude trotted a little bit ahead, sniffing as he went.
We were on Lincoln, across from the Burrito House and near the public play lot, when Jude stopped.
“What is it?” I asked.
He whined, pawing at the metal fence that surrounded the play lot. I reached around him and opened the gate.
He darted inside, nose pressed to the ground, and crossed between the swings and the slide. The playground was bordered by a high wall that supported the Metra tracks that ran through the neighborhood.
Jude went right up to the wall, sniffing and whining so that we would follow him. J.B. and I followed, bewildered.
After a few minutes Jude stopped and barked. He pointed with his nose toward the wall.
There, inscribed in the metal support, was a tiny symbol—a circle topped by an upside-down V.
“The sigil of the charcarion demons,” I said.
Jude barked.
“This is probably a portal,” I muttered. “But why put it so close to my house? Why risk my finding it?”
“If it’s a portal, can you open it?” J.B. asked.
I stared at the symbol. The last time I’d opened a portal like this, I’d found the wolf cubs that had been taken from Wade’s pack. If I went through the portal now, would I find the missing Agents? Would I find Azazel?
Or was it a trick, a trap planted by Azazel? If I went through the portal, would I find nothing but my own doom?
I looked down at the tattoo of the coiling snake on my right palm. There was no tingle of magic, no prompting to open the portal.
Then again, my little parasite had been rather quiet lately. Not that I’d noticed, what with everything else that was going on.
“Better not try to open it now,” I said finally. “We don’t know where it goes.”
“It could lead to Chloe,” J.B. said.
Jude barked.
“Or it could lead to a nest of charcarion demons,” I said. “We don’t know how long that sigil has been there.”
“But—” J.B. said.
“No,” I repeated. “I’ve reached my limit of foolish, impulsive decisions for the last twenty-four hours. Let’s go home and try and see if Chloe left anything useful for us. We know that the sigil is here, so if we don’t come up with any other options, we can always come back to it.”
“If you don’t want to go through it now, maybe you should seal it,” J.B. said with obvious reluctance. “It’s right next to a playground. What if Azazel decides to send a bunch of demons through during the day when kids are playing here?”
That was a terrifying thought.
“I’m not sure I want to risk leaving it open, in that case,” I said.
“Either we should go through now, or we should seal it,” J.B. said.
Would I be sealing Chloe and the other Agents behind my spell, never to be found? Could I take that kind of chance?
Alternatively, could I risk the lives of innocent children who might fall prey to some wild plan of Azazel’s?
There wasn’t really a choice when I put it in those terms.
“Stand back,” I said, and lifted my hand to the sigil.
My tattoo lay quiet on my skin, but I didn’t need its help for this spell anymore. The metal glowed hot and yellow beneath my touch, and when I pulled my hand away the sigil was blackened, closed forever.
None of us spoke as we continued home. We all knew there was no other real option than to close the portal, but it was hard to feel good about that choice.
I only hoped that whatever Chloe had discovered in Azazel’s notebooks led us to her and the other Agents, and I wouldn’t have to regret closing the sigil.
Beezle buzzed into the living room as soon as we walked through the front door.
“I have been as annoying as I possibly could be. I think Nathaniel wants to kill me, but Bryson hasn’t given up anything interesting yet,” he said.
“Keep working on him,” I said. “I don’t want to let him go until sunrise.”
Beezle shrugged. “Okay.”
He went back downstairs while I settled in at the table with the binder. Jude went into the bathroom and came back out as a human being. He’d taken to keeping a pair of jeans in there.
I opened the binder and divided the papers into three stacks, one for each of us. I grabbed some yellow legal pads and pencils from the side table and gave one each to Jude and J.B. “Now the fun part begins. Write down any notes that Chloe made and the context, if you can understand it.”
It was slow and tedious work. Chloe had written a lot of formulas in the margins, and her formulas made as little sense to me as Azazel’s. She’d also written cryptic things like “beam?” and “how to hold it internally?”
I heard Jude sighing a lot. J.B. just got that fixed, long-suffering look that he usually had after dealing with one of my escapades.
As I was nearing the end of my pile, I came across a sheet that had a large purple box around the word “SUNSHINE.” Chloe had surrounded this word with many, many more exclamation points than were strictly necessary.
“Sunshine,” I said, and looked back over my notes. “How to hold it…”
I thought about Azazel’s own cryptic notes. Blood donors. Vampires. Sunshine.
“Gods above and below,” I said. “He’s trying to make vampires immune to the sun.”
“He can’t do that,” Jude scoffed. “Vampires are destroyed by the sun.”
“He’s doing it,” I said grimly. “Or at least he’s trying.”
“How would he do something like that?” J.B. asked.
“I’m not sure, because math is definitely not my strong suit, but I think that he’s trying to inject the power of sunlight into human donors. Then he’s letting the vampires drain the humans.”
“And over time the vampires will build up an immunity to the sun?” Jude said skeptically.
“Well, I don’t think it’s worked so far,” I said. “Because we saw the vampires at his mansion. The vampires were getting crisped in the sun, just as they should.”
“So maybe it’s not possible,” J.B. said. “He’s just wasting his time.”
“Or maybe,” I said slowly, “he had the wrong kind of donors.”
“The kidnapped Agents? What would they have that ordinary humans wouldn’t?”
“Agents’ magic is tied to the dead, right? And vampires are essentially dead,” I said, warming to my theory. “So an Agent’s blood might be better tolerated by a vampire, especially when something that would normally kill the vamp is running in the blood.”