I OPENED MY EYES AS THE FIRST OF THE VAMPIRES came within reach of Soldier Field. I used my power to open all of the gates. The vampires spilled inside, moving inexorably toward me.
They entered the stadium and filed into the seats in an orderly fashion, first filling up the bottom rows and gradually moving toward the top.
“Are you making them do that?” Nathaniel asked.
“Yes,” I said. I couldn’t have a long conversation at the moment. It was taking a lot of effort to hold on to so many vampires.
“I cannot believe you have such a fine measure of control over them,” Nathaniel said. “You could make them do anything you wanted. You could make them your own army.”
I didn’t care for the speculative tone in his voice, which sounded a little too much like the old Nathaniel for my liking.
“I don’t want my own army,” I said. “And it’s not easy to do this, you know. It would be exhausting to keep them all under this kind of control forever.”
“Mmm,” he said.
I didn’t know whether to interpret his “mmm” as an “I understand, just a thought” kind of noise or an “I still think having a vampire army is a good idea and we’ll revisit this later” kind of noise. No matter what it meant, I wasn’t going to change my mind. Nothing on this earth would let me allow these vampires to live after what they had done to my city.
I don’t know how long we stood there. The tide of vampires swelled, then trickled, and finally stopped.
All of the vampires sat or stood inside Soldier Field. They had crowded into the aisles and spilled over onto the field. They had pushed within ten yards of where Nathaniel and I stood. Now they all waited, standing eerily still and watching me without blinking.
It should have been noisy in my head, with so many minds connected to mine, but it wasn’t. In this state the vampires had no thoughts of their own. It was like being bound to thousands of empty balloons.
“Let’s go up,” I said to Nathaniel.
We rose above the field, and as we did the sun broke through the storm clouds for a moment. My wings were illuminated by the sun. All of the vampires followed me with their eyes, their heads tilting back in perfect unison.
“Therion,” I called, feeling along the line of energy between us for the remnants of his magic.
I gathered all my power to me. It felt endless, a vast reservoir that had always been there without my being able to access it. Until now.
I sensed Therion turning toward me, his cautious attention.
“You’d better run,” I said.
I let the light of every sun in the universe shine through me. No serum of Azazel’s could withstand that kind of power.
The vampires didn’t even throw up their arms to protect themselves. They just stood there, thousands and thousands of monsters of the night, entranced by the blaze of light that poured from me. Then they were gone. Just gone. No flaking bodies, no ash, not even a smudge of black where they had stood.
They were gone. Forever. And Therion was afraid.
“I’m coming for you next, rat,” I said.
“Madeline,” Nathaniel said urgently.
“What?” I said, lowering the blaze.
I looked at the spot where Nathaniel was pointing. Several news helicopters hung in the air just past the Field Museum, far enough away to avoid getting blasted but close enough to have gotten quite the eyeful. I hadn’t even heard the sound of the rotors. I’d been so focused on maintaining control of the vampires that I hadn’t seen or heard anything except them.
For a second, a very brief second, I considered just blasting the helicopters out of the air. That would take care of that problem.
Then I remembered that I was not Lucifer or Puck or Therion. I did not swipe at humans just because they annoyed me. And it was very likely that the newscast had been a live feed anyway. So blowing up the helicopters wouldn’t solve anything. The video of me destroying the vampires would be all over the place anyway, no matter how much I would have preferred anonymity.
And I wasn’t a monster. I wasn’t.
“What do you think?” I said to Nathaniel. “Should we just make a run for it, or should I fly up and ask if they want an interview?”
“They will probably try to knock you out of the sky with one of the helicopters if you approach them,” Nathaniel said.
“Veil up, then,” I said, and winked out of sight.
Nathaniel followed suit. Interestingly, I could now see a faint outline of him when he was under the veil. Handy. It meant that I wouldn’t lose him, even when we were both invisible. However, to the humans in the news copters it would seem as if we had disappeared in midair.
He tilted his head to the side. “I can see you.”
“Like a ghost, right? Sort of see-through?” I said. “I can see you, too.”
“What is next on your checklist?” Nathaniel said as we glided over Columbus Drive and then continued north.
“Therion,” I said. “I want to know who is working with him now.”
I sent out a thread of power, looking for Therion’s signature. I noticed several creatures fleeing through the streets of Chicago as we flew over. Word got out fast when there was a bigger player in town.
“Those are demons, right?” I said to Nathaniel.
Nathaniel looked down. “Yes.”
“Is there any such thing as a good demon?” I asked.
“I have never met one,” Nathaniel said. “Why?”
“I’ve got a lot of excess rage to get rid of,” I said, blasting one of the demons. It went up in flames in the middle of Michigan Avenue, right in front of the Art Institute. “It was a little anticlimactic, scorching all of the vampires in one shot.”
The other demons tried scuttling out of sight, but they were too slow. A moment later they were ablaze.
“Madeline,” Nathaniel said, grabbing my wrist before I set anything else on fire. “Stop. This is not like you. You do not burn ants with a magnifying glass.”
“Why not?” I said. “I have the powers of a god, and nothing good has ever come from a demon. You said so yourself. I’m just saving myself the trouble of having to hunt them down at a later date.”
“They were leaving Chicago,” Nathaniel said.
“So that they can go and harm someone else in some other city,” I said fiercely, yanking my hand away. “When does it end, Nathaniel? When is it okay for us to take the fight to them? Why do we always have to be on the defensive, waiting for them to kill somebody, or hundreds of somebodies, first before we’ll do something about it?”
“Do not start crossing those lines unless you want to live in Lucifer’s kingdom,” Nathaniel said.
I heard Gabriel’s voice in my ear, from long ago and far away, saying,
And I heard Beezle, too, saying,
Was I crossing the line by taking out a few demons just because they’d never done anything to me directly? Or was I just ridding the world of some vermin?
“I thought you wanted to find Therion,” Nathaniel said.
“I do,” I said.
“The longer you spend toying with these creatures, the more likely it is that he will escape, and then you will never discover the identity of his cohort,” Nathaniel said.
“Fine,” I said. I felt like a chastised child, and I sulked as we flew along. I was still tracing the signature of Therion’s power through the city.
As we passed over Daley Plaza I felt the tug of my trace pulling me downward. I should have known he
