felt.
I moved away from him and noticed a phone hanging on the wall. I eagerly picked up the handset, thinking to call in the cavalry, and found the line dead. Beezle had probably worn out his little thumbs trying to text my cell phone. I just prayed to the Morningstar that he hadn’t called J.B. My former boss tended to lose his mind when I was incommunicado.
Thinking of J.B. made me feel almost as guilty as thinking about Gabriel. J.B. had offered to marry me, to make Gabriel’s son his own. J.B. had told me that he loved me, and I’d told him I would always love Gabriel.
Which I would. But then I’d kissed Nathaniel, and everything had gotten mixed up in my head. Things were further complicated by the fact that whenever Nathaniel was kind to me, I saw Gabriel. Were my feelings for Nathaniel real, or was I projecting Gabriel on him?
My baby moved around in my belly, and then my stomach growled. As usual, I was in the middle of a crisis with nothing to eat.
Nathaniel slept soundly and the concourse was silent outside. I hunted around the aid station until I found a couple of energy bars that someone had stashed on a shelf. They had the approximate taste and consistency of chalk but I was too hungry to care.
After I’d eaten I drew my sword and stood by the door. I passed the time by making a mental list of all the things I was going to eat when the vampire apocalypse was over and the restaurants reopened.
A hamburger with blue cheese and mushrooms and a giant pile of waffle fries. Ann Sather cinnamon rolls. Pizza with peppers and mushrooms and onions and hot wings on the side. Toasted ravioli. Onion rings. Beezle would be in hog heaven. If I ate any kind of junk food, he interpreted that as default permission to gorge himself silly.
The concourse got darker and darker as the afternoon passed. I wondered whether safety lights would automatically switch on at a certain time, or whether the convention center remained unlit when not in use. Out of curiosity I flicked the switch on the wall and realized the point was moot. The electricity didn’t seem to be working.
Was the whole city out, or just this part of it? It was bad enough to contemplate vampires running loose in the daytime. The thought of a lightless night crawling with monsters was too horrible to think about.
The day passed, and night fell, and Nathaniel slept on. I was half dozing on my feet, my shoulder leaning against the wall, when I saw something moving outside on the concourse. It was too dark and too far away for me to see clearly, but I could see enough to tell that it didn’t move like any human.
I glanced back at Nathaniel. My first instinct was to investigate and possibly destroy without disturbing him. But if there was more than one creature or it was a protracted engagement, then we might end up separated. Nathaniel could die, sleeping and defenseless, while I was off playing Sherlock.
So I backed slowly away from the door, praying my movement would not be detected by whatever was out there. I knelt at Nathaniel’s side and put my mouth close to his ear.
“Nathaniel,” I whispered.
His eyes opened immediately. “You have let me sleep too long. There is something near.”
“Yes,” I said quietly.
He sat up with much more vigor than he’d had before his nap and picked up his sword. In the darkness I noticed a phenomenon I had observed once before. Nathaniel was surrounded by a faint aura, a glow that I did not have because I was not a full-blood angel. He moved toward the door without making a sound.
“Wait,” I said. “Can you hide your halo? Otherwise whatever is out there will see you as easily as they would a firefly.”
Nathaniel paused for a moment. “It is likely that whatever is out there will be able to scent us, but you are correct. We should not advertise our presence. Do you feel that your power has returned to its former strength?”
I shook my head. “I’ve probably got enough for a couple of nightfire blasts, but that’s about it. I need sleep and a lot more food before I’ll be back to normal.”
Nathaniel nodded as if he’d expected this. “I will veil both of us; then we can investigate.”
I felt the spell drop over me, and a moment later Nathaniel winked out of sight. The glass door to the aid station opened, and I eased out. The door closed behind me.
I had no idea where Nathaniel was because of the veil, and the darkness was almost total. It belatedly occurred to me that this was a very stupid idea. I’d been worried about getting separated, and now we were.
I slid as quietly as I could along the floor. Nathaniel could move as soundlessly as air when he chose, but I am not the ninja type. I gripped my sword in front of me, the blade raised high, ready to slash at anything that came near.
I had only a second to swing when the monster came out of the darkness. There was a skittering noise, and then the gaping maw of the vampire appeared, grainy and blurred in the heavy darkness. I didn’t stop to think. I just let muscle memory do its job and take the vampire’s head off as it had so many times before.
The whole episode lasted less than a minute, but my nerves were strung so tight that I stood there panting for a moment. Nathaniel spoke from behind me.
“There are more in the building. I can hear them investigating.”
“How many? Can you tell?” I whispered.
“It seems like an exploratory party. Perhaps twenty. If they find anything of note, they will report back to the horde.”
“Do you think they know this one is dead?” I asked.
“Vampires generally cannot sense the death of one of their own unless there is a blood bond, such as that between a maker and his child. But we must assume that all of these vampires consumed Azazel’s serum, and we do not know what kind of effect that may have.”
“Let’s just try to get out of here as quickly as we can,” I said. “And stay near me. I don’t want to lose you.”
The aid station wasn’t far from the stairs at the entryway, so after a few moments of groping our way through the darkness we were back at the top of the escalators. I looked down the stairs.
It was full dark, but we didn’t need light to detect the mass of vampires on the street outside. Through the glass doors and high windows, we could see the horde moving almost as one giant animal, a tremendous shape writing in the darkness. We backed away from the stairs.
“I don’t think we want to go that way,” I said.
“Where are the other exits?” Nathaniel asked.
“There’s another pedestrian walkway going over to the lakeside center,” I said. “Or we can try to get into the Metra tunnel and follow the tracks for a while, but the tracks terminate at Randolph and we’d be right in the epicenter of the horde. Plus, the tunnel goes away pretty quickly and we’d be out in the open.”
“It does not seem wise to put ourselves in a position where we might be trapped in a tunnel,” Nathaniel said.
“We have to take the same chance either way. If we go into the pedestrian bridge, we’ll have several feet where we have no way to escape if there are vamps ahead and behind. If we go into the Metra tunnel, we’ll be underground until it comes out of McCormick Place.”
“And then we will be exposed.”
I didn’t need to see Nathaniel’s face to know that he was brooding. I didn’t particularly like our choices—or our chances—either.
I had no wings. Nathaniel’s wing was broken. My magic was burned out for the time being, and we had no way to call for help. Most annoyingly, I could sense that Lucifer was somewhere out of touch again. The snake tattoo on my right palm had been very quiet for some time now. I wondered, as always, where Lucifer went on these occasions. Puck had said that the Morningstar was going somewhere he should not. What secrets of the universe were closed off to a being as powerful as Lucifer?
“It seems wisest to move toward the lake,” Nathaniel said finally, his quiet voice breaking my reverie. “The vampires appear to be avoiding the shoreline.”
“Why?” I said. “Is there any truth to that old chestnut about vampires and running water?”
“Obviously not, since they crossed the bridge over the Chicago River with ease,” he said. “But they do not like the lake, it seems. I observed that none of them came close to it as we flew over the city.”
