glass shattered; wool socks rolled in multicolored balls; lacy underwear; designer jeans; a stack of Fiber One bars; a jewelry roll that had already been stripped of anything valuable; a deck of cards.
Farther down the street was a stuffed dinosaur, trampled in some mad stampede. The sight of it made me painfully sad. The child who’d dropped that stuffed toy would be crying, confused and scared, and now lacked even the simple, basic comfort of their favorite friend. Wherever that child was, the night would be a little darker, a little colder, without their dinosaur. Everyone knows dinosaurs keep the monsters away.
The bars on Clark Street advertised drink specials, live bands, half-priced hamburgers. The flags above the storefronts fluttered pathetically in the wind, the logos of the Cubs and the Blackhawks, the Bulls and the Bears. The red stars of the Chicago city flag looked like bloodstained hands lined up in a row.
Yesterday all of these things had seemed desperately important—whether or not the Hawks beat the Wings, or your friend was late to the bar. Today everyone was just trying to hold on, to not have to witness their family being devoured by vampires.
All of the edifices of humanity—the roads and the cars, the fast-food joints and the parking meters, the smartphones and the bicycles, lazy days at the ballpark, afternoons grilling while the kids scoot up and down the sidewalk, boutiques and thrift stores, Italian ice and Italian beef, cheering for a touchdown in a bar with a mouthful of nachos and beer sloshing over the table, complaining about the traffic, complaining about the taxes, complaining about the mayor and the garbage pickup and the noisy college kids having a party, library books and comic books, kissing in the kitchen or on the front porch or in the shadow of a tower—all of these things had been swept away. Maybe someday there would be a new normal. But for now everything that had made Chicago was gone.
“Madeline,” Nathaniel said. His hand was at my elbow. “Madeline, we are nearly home.”
I realized I stood in the middle of Clark Street with the dinosaur clutched to my chest.
“Madeline,” Nathaniel said again, and put his arm around my shoulder, made me move my feet.
“How can anything be the same again?” I said.
“This is what happens during war,” Nathaniel said, and his voice was gentle, so like Gabriel’s that my heart ached.
“The war is here because of me. These people suffered because of me, because Azazel hated me so much that he needed to send the monster to my doorstep.”
“If it was not Chicago, it would have been some other city, some other innocents. And you would have felt just as responsible, because Azazel is your father.”
I squeezed the stuffed dinosaur in my hands. “You’re right. I would have. But that knowledge doesn’t make this any easier. He destroyed my home, the city I loved.”
I’m not sure how we got home. The last mile or so was a blur. I remember ringing the doorbell—my keys had gone missing somewhere in the night—and Samiel opening the door, his face white and drawn with worry. I fell into his arms, and then everything was black.
When I opened my eyes again I was in my own bed. The sun streamed through the windows, and Beezle sat on the pillow next to me, watching me sleep.
“Do you know that your hair has grown about four inches while you slept?”
I sat up and rubbed my eyes, and the stuffed dinosaur rolled onto my lap.
“You were clutching that filthy thing for two days,” Beezle said. “No one could pry it out of your hands. I wiped it down with antibacterial gel as best I could so that you wouldn’t get botulism all over your sheets.”
“I was asleep for two days?” I asked.
“Yes. And have I mentioned your unusual hair growth, and the fact that Nathaniel’s essence is different from what it was when he left?”
I went still. I hoped Beezle hadn’t blabbed about the change in Nathaniel.
“You mentioned my hair. Twice. So it grew back. What’s the big deal?”
Beezle narrowed his eyes at me. “What happened between you two while you were out there?”
“I’m sure Nathaniel told you all about it,” I said with studied nonchalance.
“I’m sure you’ve noticed that Nathaniel is somewhat taciturn,” Beezle said. “He’s not what you’d call a gripping storyteller.”
“What’s to tell? We put a veil over the hospital to protect the people inside. We were chased by Bryson and a bunch of his goons. They shot us out of the sky and we had to walk home, dodging monsters along the way.”
“And nothing else happened?”
I gave Beezle my best big brown eyes and tried not to blink too much. I’d read somewhere that blinking was a sign of lying. “Nope. Nothing else.”
The door opened and Nathaniel came in. It was like all the air had just been squeezed from the room.
Beezle turned his head slowly from me to Nathaniel and back again. Then he addressed me. “You are a crappy liar. Don’t think you’ll be able to hide…whatever this is…from the others.”
And he flew out of the room, grumbling under his breath.
Nathaniel closed the door behind him. He looked clean and rested, and he was dressed more casually than I’d ever seen him in a gray sweater and blue jeans.
It was hard for me to look at him now that the crisis was over. What had happened between us seemed like a moment out of time, a thing that had happened once but couldn’t happen again. I could only imagine what Samiel would think if Nathaniel and I became involved. I’d just buried Samiel’s brother, and I was carrying his brother’s child.
Even as I thought all of this, Nathaniel sat down on the bed beside me. He took my hand in his, and the space between us crackled with electricity. I had serious doubts about my self-restraint. Something was compelling me toward Nathaniel, despite all reason, despite our history, despite the fact that a part of me sensed it was dangerous for both of us to go any further. Was I turning into a woman who wanted the wrong man for all the wrong reasons? Would my baser instincts really prevail?
“You are well?” Nathaniel asked. “Your powers are restored?”
I did a quick internal check and found that everything was as it should be. My baby fluttered its wings reassuringly.
“Yes. And you?” I said. “Is your wing healed?”
Nathaniel turned so that I could see that his wing had been restored. “Samiel helped me repair it.”
“That’s good,” I said, then decided I might as well forge right ahead before I lost my nerve. “Nathaniel, what happened between the two of us…”
He put his hand on my lips. “What I said to you still stands. I want you to choose me. I do not wish to be a dirty secret.”
“I understand,” I said, although part of me wanted to keep him as just that, if only so I could satisfy the unreasoning lust that had appeared when I’d kissed him the first time. “I just want you to know that I’m not ready to make that choice.”
Nathaniel rubbed his thumb over my mouth. “Then I will have to convince you,” he said, and replaced his hand with his lips.
As soon as he kissed me it was like I was falling again, falling into a mad abyss where I didn’t care about anything except Nathaniel, Nathaniel’s touch, Nathaniel’s heat. I could sense the same madness on him, as his mouth became more insistent, more demanding. His hands moved over me, and it seemed I moved inevitably toward him, that there was only one way this could end.
He pulled away, rested his forehead against mine. “Madeline. I cannot control myself around you.”
“I know,” I said, moving reluctantly away and rising from the bed. “Whatever this is, it seems to get stronger the more we…do stuff.”
The corners of his mouth quirked upward at my phrasing, but he sobered quickly. “I cannot tell if this is the normal course of intense attraction, or if there is another factor at work here.”
“Do you think someone put us under a love spell?” I was pretty much grasping at straws here.
“To what end? Who would benefit from our joining?”
“Maybe someone who wants me to be distracted.”
Nathaniel shook his head. “It does not have the sense of a love spell. Everything goes back to the moment when our powers combined. It was as if your magic unlocked something inside me. Since that moment I have felt stronger, more powerful. I have abilities I did not have before. And I sense something more, something untapped
