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.”
“And once vampires had built up an immunity to sunlight, then what?” J.B. said.
“I think the massacre that we saw today was just a little taste,” I said.
“Vampires roaming free during the day, terrorizing the city?” Jude asked.
I nodded. “And since it’s Azazel, you know that’s only the smallest part of the plan. The vampires would probably be a distraction for some bigger splash he’d intended.”
“If you’re right, then the kidnapped Agents are probably being drained by vampires as we speak,” J.B. said.
“More importantly, if it works, then Azazel will want more Agents,” I said.
J.B. stared at me, his green eyes filled with horror. “The whole Agency is at risk.”
“I told you that the upper management was being shortsighted,” I said. “They need to put some resources into this.”
J.B. shook his head. “I’ll never convince them.”
“You have to,” I said. “They don’t want a repeat of what happened with Ramuell and Antares, right? So why would they tolerate their Agents being picked off one by one?”
“From their point of view, it’s not a problem. If an Agent dies, then the next person in their bloodline will be activated. Dead Agents are less troublesome than missing ones,” he said.
“They’re going to start having morale issues if they think like that,” I said. “And they won’t be able to threaten every Agent with Bryson or the Retrievers.”
“The problem is that we have no proof of this,” J.B. said.
“Sixteen missing Agents at the site of a vampire attack isn’t proof?”
J.B. shook his head. “You don’t know how stubborn upper management can be.”
“I’ve got some idea,” I said. “Well, the good news is we know what Azazel’s intentions are.”
“You think,” Jude said.
“Let’s just assume I’m right. The bad news is that we still don’t know where he is.”
“Try Lucifer again?” J.B. asked.
“I’ve got a feeling he’s not answering his phone for a reason,” I said, but I tried anyway. And got nothing.
“So it’s the Forbidden Lands, then,” Jude said.
“Yeah, but not for you,” I said, and pointed to J.B.
“Why the hell not?” he asked.
“You’ve got to stay here and try to convince the Agency that other Agents are at risk,” I said. “No matter how unlikely the outcome may be. If we can get the Agency to come around to our side, then we’ll be better prepared for whatever Azazel’s planning.”
“We can hardly take on an army of vampires with just the five of us,” Jude said.
“Six, if you count Beezle. And he usually doesn’t show up for the combat situations,” I said pointedly.
“So the four of you can manage Antares and whatever he’s got hidden in the Forbidden Lands?” J.B.
