I leaned in the doorway, content to just watch him for a while. But he must have sensed me standing there, because he turned and smiled.
“Good morning,” he said. I hadn’t realized before how fraught with implication a “good morning” could be.
I crossed the kitchen to him and kissed him, because I could. Because I loved him, and there was no one to tell us not to.
Gabriel dropped the spatula on the counter so he could put his hands to better use. Things were just starting to get interesting again when someone cleared his throat behind me.
“The pancakes are burning,” Beezle said.
I leaned my forehead against Gabriel’s and rolled my eyes. “Why did I think you would give us a little privacy?”
“You had privacy. Yesterday. Now there are pancakes,” Beezle said, flying to the cabinet and pulling out his favorite plate. It was a plastic child’s plate with a cartoon of an owl and the word “night” above it.
He handed the plate to Gabriel, who shook his head at Beezle.
“I don’t want any of those burned ones.”
Gabriel obligingly loaded Beezle’s plate with unburned pancakes. The gargoyle flew to the table and sat down next to his plate.
“Where’s the syrup?” he asked, looking up at me expectantly.
I gave him an evil look, and he made a “pfft” noise at me. “What, did you think you were going to get some kind of honeymoon? You’ve got loads of stuff to do today. Does it really matter if I’m here right now?”
There was a tentative knock at the back door and Samiel stuck his head in hopefully.
I gave him a resigned wave. “Come on in. If you want pancakes, you’d better get them before Beezle eats them all.”
An hour later Gabriel and I landed on the roof of the Agency. Since Beezle and Samiel had seen fit to break up our morning after, I decided it was best to just get on with my regularly scheduled business day. And that meant finding out what J.B. had wanted to show me the day before.
We entered through the rooftop door after a biometric scan of my face and fingerprints. Security at the Agency had been considerably increased since Ramuell’s break-in a couple of months before.
As soon as we exited the stairwell we were all sent through a scanner. This scanner looked and acted a lot like a metal detector, except that it detected magical weapons and methods of concealment. A lot of Agents had worked overtime developing it, and it was now being duplicated at Agencies across the country. No one wanted to risk another massacre.
I had to turn in Lucifer’s sword at the checkpoint—no weapons were permitted past the entry, Agent or not—and I felt terribly vulnerable without it. The sword had saved me more times than I could count since Nathaniel had presented it to me.
J.B.’s office had been moved to an upper floor to correspond with his rise in position to regional manager. His frizzy-haired secretary, Lizzie, typed away in the reception area with her usual look of long-suffering patience. She gave me a tight smile when she saw me.
“He wanted to see you as soon as you arrived. Go on in.”
Usually Lizzie fussed over me like a substitute mother, so I was a little curious as to why she was so short with me, but I went to J.B.’s door and knocked. Gabriel followed closely behind.
“Come in,” he called.
As usual, his desk looked like someone had blown up a bomb made of forms filled out in triplicate. J.B.’s eyes had bags underneath them and his hair stood up in every direction. He looked like he had gotten no sleep at all.
“You look like shit,” I said baldly.
“Yeah, well, staying up all night trying to figure out how to calm dozens of screaming people will do that to you. Not to mention attempting to identify all of them so that they can be returned to their families—eventually,” J.B. said with a touch of asperity.
I felt a little jolt of guilt. I’d been having the night of my life with Gabriel while J.B. had gotten stuck cleaning up the mess with the warehouse. But it did not seem prudent to apologize for my wedding night—particularly to a man who had wanted to date me—so I covered the awkward moment by changing the subject.
“So, what was it that you wanted to show me?”
J.B. pushed to his feet. “You’ll have to come down to the basement. That’s where we’ve been working on it.”
“On what?” I asked as Gabriel and I followed J.B. out of the office and into the hallway.
“Not here,” J.B. said shortly, and pressed the button for the elevator.
Agents bustled back and forth in the hall as we waited, most of them carrying piles of paper. The Agency was definitely stuck in the twentieth century, data-wise. A project had been undertaken to move all of our records to digital media but its importance had diminished after the attack.
Improving security had been the priority, and anyway, most of the upper brass wasn’t completely sold on the necessity of moving to computers. I was sure that they’d felt this way when the Agency moved from papyrus to paper. There was definitely a culture of it’s-always-been-this-way-and- it’s-fine in my business.
We loaded onto the elevator with J.B. and stood in silence as the doors opened and closed, loaded and unloaded. I had a sudden memory of one of the elevators propped open by a severed human leg, and wondered if it had been this one. It was really a wonder that any Agents had returned to work after the place had been overrun by demons.
The elevator descended into the basement. The Hall of Records was down there, the place where every death in the Chicagoland area in history was recorded—even before there was a Chicagoland. The room was almost incomprehensibly big and filled with millions of index cards.
J.B. led us past the Hall, past the offices where Agents labored over the much-maligned data conversion, and to a door at the very end of the hallway. It looked to be solid steel and it was armed with another biometric scanner. J.B. swiped his I.D. card and then had his eyeball and both hands scanned.
The door clicked open, and we went inside.
The room was so secure that I expected there to be some fabulous treasure inside, or at the very least dozens of Agents working on some top-secret weapon. But all there was was one female Agent with short purple hair and both arms covered in tattoos, and a large pile of the cameras that I’d found with the wolf cubs and in the warehouse.
The Agent sat at a worktable with a lamp clipped to the edge. She hunched over one of the cameras, which had been disassembled into what looked like about eight million tiny pieces.
“This is Chloe,” J.B. said. “Chloe, Madeline Black. And Gabriel.”
Chloe gave us a little finger wave without looking up from her work.
“Chloe,” J.B. said. “Can you show Agent Black what you showed me yesterday?”
She held up a finger to indicate that we needed to wait. I wondered if she knew how to talk.
J.B. tapped his foot impatiently while we waited for Chloe to finish whatever it was that she needed to finish. She seemed to be teasing apart the pieces of what looked like a circuit board. I am not technically minded in the least—I can barely operate my cell phone—but whatever she was doing was fascinating to me. I crept closer to get a better look.
“You’re standing in my light,” Chloe said.
Okay, I guess she could talk. I shuffled backward, cheeks reddening.
After a few moments she looked up and pushed away from the table. She seemed to notice Gabriel for the first time.
“Well, hello, gorgeous,” Chloe said.
I felt strongly that it would not be good for me to act like an insanely jealous wife and rip her purple hair out at the roots, so I just said, “His name is Gabriel. And he’s married.”
She looked from my right hand to his left, saw the matching rings, and shrugged. “Worth a try. So, you want to see what we found?”
Chloe shot across the room on the casters of her chair and picked up one of the cameras from the pile. Then she used her feet to scoot back to the table.
