“I haven’t forgotten your reward,” I said, wondering just when I was going to get to Ann Sather for cinnamon rolls with everything else I had to do that day. “I’m not going anywhere until I’m clean.”
Gabriel walked silently behind. I wondered what he was thinking. Was he thinking of his half brother being taken before the Grigori? Was he thinking that I’d made yet another gigantic faux pas by killing the Hound of the Hunt? Or was he thinking of what had happened before Lucifer had shown up the night before, and what might have happened if the Morningstar hadn’t interfered?
I knew we needed to talk about it—again—but I had too many other things on my plate at the moment. I wondered how Jude and the pack were managing the cubs. I needed to get those camera things to J.B. They were definitely related to the ghosts that had been appearing all over Chicago. And that reminded me.
“Beezle, do you know where Samiel put those machines that we got from the cave?”
Beezle looked offended. “Of course not. You told Samiel to hide them.”
“Please. You are so freaking nosy there’s no way you could help yourself from following him.”
“He put them in the clothes dryer in the basement,” Beezle said without a trace of shame. “I suggested the refrigerator, since we never have any food in it…”
“Because someone who shall remain nameless eats everything as soon as I come home from the grocery store…”
“But he seemed to think they would be less obvious in the dryer.” Beezle sighed, and I knew that he was worried about Samiel. Ever since Samiel had arrived Beezle had treated Samiel like the brother he’d never had.
“I’ll get him back from the Grigori,” I said.
Beezle nodded and flew to the front room to sit on the mantel over the fire, his favorite brooding spot. Gabriel followed with a broom to sweep up the broken glass. I went to get dressed, and to cry in the shower where neither of them could hear me.
I had just finished braiding my hair into a long plait down my back when the front doorbell rang. Beezle flew into the bedroom a few seconds later.
“It’s J.B.,” he announced.
“Tell Gabriel to let him in,” I said, pulling my dusty black combat boots on and lacing them up over the ankles of my jeans.
“I’m not sure that’s a good idea. They have a tendency to act stupid where you’re concerned. And J.B. won’t like the implications of Gabriel answering the door.”
“I really don’t care what J.B. likes and doesn’t like,” I said. “Just tell Gabriel.”
“Oookay. Don’t say I didn’t warn you,” Beezle said.
I was sure that J.B. was there to bring bad news in any case, since it just seemed like it was going to be that sort of week.
I finished dressing and walked down the hall to the dining room. J.B. stood in the open front door glaring at Gabriel. Gabriel had his arms crossed and was leaning nonchalantly on the table while giving J.B. death-ray eyes. Beezle sat on the side table, and he turned to raise his eyebrows in an I-told-you-so way as I entered.
Gabriel had covered the windows with plastic so that we weren’t getting blasted by cold air, but the room was still freezing. I wore a long-sleeved shirt under a gray wool cabled turtleneck sweater—I am branching out from my usual uniform of black—and I was still chilly. I tucked my hands inside my sleeves.
J.B. broke his staring contest with Gabriel to scowl at me when I entered.
“Do you want to tell me why we intercepted a nine-one-one call this morning reporting a dead body in your basement?”
“Ha!” Beezle shouted, pumping his little fist in the air. “I told you that somebody would notice.”
“What do you mean, you intercepted a call?” I asked. “Am I under surveillance?”
“Of course you are,” J.B. said in a tone that implied I was an idiot. “It’s in the best interests of the Agency to publicly suppress all the weird shit that seems to happen at this address.”
“The neighbors do notice, then?”
“They’d have to be either dead or stupid not to. So tell me why it looks like there’s been a war in here, and why you’ve got bruises on your throat.”
I summed up the morning’s events. J.B.’s eyebrows went up to his hairline when I told him that it was the Hound of the Hunt in the basement.
“I don’t know whether to be impressed or depressed,” J.B. said.
“I often feel that way around Madeline,” Gabriel said, and the two of them shared a look of understanding.
“What’s to be depressed about?”
“You’re going to have to pay a price for killing Metatrion,” J.B. said.
“That happens to me all the time,” I said.
“And your enemies, which include my beloved mother, will perceive you as a greater threat since you managed to kill such a powerful being. Which means they will redouble their efforts to kill you.”
“Well,” I said, clapping my hands together, “what’s a few extra death threats when you’ve already got dozens of them? I have something more important to show you, anyway.”
I recounted the story of the cubs’ kidnapping and what I’d found in the cave as J.B., Gabriel and Beezle followed me into the basement. I pulled the bag of cameras from the dryer.
“That’s some security system you’ve got there,” J.B. said sarcastically.
“I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but my house was destroyed this morning and I’ve hardly had time to think about putting these in a safer place. Besides, now you can take them back to the Agency and put them behind a million layers of lead and steel if you want.”
J.B. untangled the knotted sleeves of my coat and pulled one of the machines from the bag, inspecting it. “It looks like a digital camera.”
“I know. I can’t figure out what they were doing to the cubs, but it definitely damaged their brains. The older cubs were acting exactly like the ghost I found.”
“So, is whatever is in this machine killing them? Or is it just damaging them beyond repair and their deaths are unrelated?”
“I can easily see someone dying by accident once they’ve been exposed to this machine,” I said slowly. “They could walk into traffic, or step off a cliff, and never even know where they are.”
“But it still doesn’t explain why they aren’t being tracked by the Agency. We’re finding these ghosts by accident, not at the sites of their deaths. If they have souls, then we should know when and how they’re going to die. But that’s not happening.”
“What if the mental damage is affecting the way the Agency perceives these people? They still have souls, but the Agency isn’t recognizing them as such because of…whatever it is that this machine does.”
J.B. looked doubtful. “We’ve taken the souls of people in many different mental states over the past several millennia. Recognition has never been an issue.”
“What else could explain how so many people are disappearing from the Agency’s radar?”
“I don’t know,” J.B. said, obviously frustrated. Then he grinned at me. “But I’m sure that if I wait, you’ll find out for me.”
“That’s nice,” I muttered. “Like I don’t have enough to do. And somehow I have to make new windows—and a new wall—appear out of thin air.”
“I can do that,” J.B. said, and pulled his cell phone out of his pocket. He barked a few terse orders at the person on the other end of the line and hung up. “Someone will be here in about an hour to fix everything.”
I stared at him. “You know, yesterday morning you were acting like I had a contagious disease. You haven’t spoken civilly to me for weeks. Do you have a multiple personality disorder or something?”
He shrugged and looked uncomfortably at Gabriel and Beezle, who were not disguising their interest in the least.
“Don’t mind them,” I said. “I can’t do anything these days without an audience.”
“Maybe I thought about some of what you said yesterday, and realized I was being unfair to you.”
“Can someone run and check the temperature in Hell, please? Because that sounded a lot like an apology.”
“You could just say, ‘Thank you for the windows, J.B.,’ and stop giving me a hard time.”
