“I was napping,” Beezle said.
“Napping,” J.B. said in disbelief.
“You can just keep that disrespectful tone out of your voice, Jacob Benjamin. I’m an old gargoyle. And what is that horrible smell?”
Now that Beezle mentioned it, I did notice a distinctly malodorous scent lingering in the alley. And something else. A trace of cinnamon.
“Something angelic was here,” I said.
“How do you know?” J.B. asked.
“Whenever something of an angelic bloodline uses its powers, I always smell cinnamon.”
I started to move cautiously in Gabriel’s direction. It seemed the smell was coming from just beyond him. J.B. followed.
“And there was something else, when the pulse happened. Did you feel it?” I looked questioningly at Gabriel, who was still giving J.B. the hairy eyeball. I saw him take a deep breath and refocus his attention on me.
“Yes. A sense of evil. It felt like . . .”
“. . . Ramuell,” we said at the same time.
I felt J.B. start next to me. “Ramuell? That nephilim that you killed?”
Gabriel nodded. “I do not know how it could be. Another nephilim could not have broken free from the Forbidden Lands. Lucifer persuaded all of the fallen to give some of their power to redouble the creatures’ bindings. It would take more than the power of a single angel or demon to free one of them. Even I could not do it now, despite my bloodline.”
“And it can’t be Ramuell. He’s dead.”
“Are you sure?” J.B. asked.
I thought of Ramuell burning, molecule by molecule, dissolving before my eyes until the last of his essence was gone and the souls that were bound within him were released.
“I’m sure,” I replied grimly.
We crept carefully through the alley. I wasn’t sure where we were—Chicago looks pretty much the same when all you see are Dumpsters and the back sides of brick buildings. We had been flying over the north side but the fall had disoriented me.
“Where were you coming from, J.B.?” I whispered as we crept closer to the source of the smell. The odor had to be amazingly powerful to cut through the cold air.
“Drop-off, same as you,” he replied.
“I thought that a regional supervisor would get to delegate the scut work,” I teased.
J.B. shrugged. “The new midwestern supervisor wants us to do fieldwork. He wants us to stay in touch with our roots or something. Anyway, I saw you flying back and was trying to catch up when that . . . thing happened. How come you fell out of the sky? What happened to your wings?”
“I don’t know,” I said slowly. “It was like that pulse kind of short-circuited my magic, and when that happened my wings disappeared.”
“That is dangerous,” said Gabriel. “If your enemies were to learn that such a thing could disable your abilities, even temporarily . . .”
He trailed off. I didn’t need him to elaborate. My enemies, which are many and mostly inherited from conflicts that Lucifer and my father, Azazel, created, would turn me into Korean barbecue in the blink of an eye if they thought I had a weakness. I’d recently discovered I was descended from Lucifer through my mother’s line, and I was not enjoying having another potentially fatal familial relationship.
“Let’s not worry about that right now,” I said brightly, trying not to think of my half brother, Antares, and his personal vendetta against me. Antares would be more than delighted to short-circuit my powers.
The alley came to a T-junction just as we passed out of the light of a streetlamp. It was pitch-black in both directions, the only light coming from the streets beyond. I wondered what happened to the rest of the streetlights.
The smell was nearly overwhelming now. It was something rotted and metallic, and there was a distinct scent of burned fur. Underneath it all was a trace of scorched cinnamon and sulfur—the smell that I associated with Ramuell.
I opened my palm and tried to create the same blue ball of flame that had scared away the vampire earlier. All that came out were a few blue sparks.
“I guess I’m still broken,” I said, and tried not to panic. I had no idea if the effects of the pulse were permanent. “Gabriel, can you?”
A moment later the alley was illuminated by nightfire. Gabriel is a more skilled practitioner than I, and so was able to send the ball of flame ahead of him instead of holding it in his hand. The light danced along down the right turn of the T-junction until I gasped. Gabriel raised the light up higher and turned up the illumination with a murmured word. J.B. covered his mouth beside me and made a retching noise.
It was difficult to make sense of what my eyes were seeing. There was blood—lots of blood, more blood than I thought could possibly be inside one human. And there were parts that were recognizable as human—a tibia, an ulna, a femur—all skinned but with small bits of flesh clinging to the bone. There was a torso that looked as though it had been through a shredder, and some scraps of cloth that might have been a flannel shirt.
But there was no head. And there was a hand that looked almost completely human save the fact that it was covered in fur.
“It’s a werewolf,” I said, trying not to gag.
“What could have done that to a werewolf?” Beezle asked.
“Another wolf?” J.B. said, speaking through his hand.
I shook my head. “There’s not usually that much disparity in wolf strength. Sure, the alpha and his lieutenants will be stronger than the other wolves, but not so much that one wolf could tear apart another like this. And where is the head?”
“More importantly, where is the Agent? This death wasn’t in my paperwork for the week,” J.B. said.
The implications were clear. If the death was not on file, then it was not meant to be. It was a death outside the natural order. And the last time there had been a death outside the natural order was when Ramuell had cut a swath through the innocent of this city.
“It can’t be,” I said as Gabriel stared at me. “It can’t. I killed him. If there’s one thing I’m sure of, it’s that I killed Ramuell. Lucifer’s been dangling it over my head ever since.”
“Then it must be another nephilim,” Gabriel said slowly.
“You just said that couldn’t happen,” J.B. said.
“Do you have another explanation, Agent?”
“No, but I’m not the one calling Maddy a liar.”
Gabriel narrowed his eyes. “I did not call Madeline a liar.”
“You implied it,” J.B. fired back.
“You’d better do something before this turns into a scene from a high school romcom,” Beezle muttered.
I stepped forward, intending to get between them and push them apart—they were practically nose to nose—when I heard somebody groaning. I froze, trying to determine the location of the noise, but I couldn’t pick it out over the sound of bickering.
“Shut up,” I snapped, and both of them turned to stare at me. “Somebody else is here.”
I heard the groaning again, very faint, farther along the alley and closer to the street. I started forward and Gabriel gripped my arm.
“Wait. It may be a trap,” Gabriel said. “Stay behind me.”
“Because I’m small and helpless?” I asked, annoyed.
“Because your powers do not seem to be functioning normally right now,” he answered reasonably.
I supposed I couldn’t argue with that even if it did make me feel useless.
J.B. took up a position behind me and we proceeded slowly toward the sound, picking our way carefully through the remains of the werewolf. I felt things squishing beneath my boots and tried not to think about what I was doing. My body thrummed with tension. What was waiting for us? Another of this creature’s victims, or the creature itself?
