Black Heart

11

I DUCKED MY HEAD AND TRIED TO STEP AROUND HIM. “No, sorry; you must have mistaken me for someone else,” I mumbled.

He put his fingers on my shoulder to stop me. “No, I think you are,” he insisted.

My temper flared when he put his hand on me. I know he didn’t mean me any harm, and even if he did, it would be nothing for me to squash him like a bug. But nobody pushed me around. Not even an insignificant human.

I let my power surge up, so that my eyes would change. Then I lifted my head so he could see it.

“Get your mitts off me and get out of my way,” I said in a low voice.

“Whoa, check out your eyes,” the guy said.

“He doesn’t have enough brains for self-preservation,” Beezle said to me. “You ought to blast him just on principle.”

“I thought we were against harming the innocent?” I said under my breath.

“Some people are too stupid to live,” Beezle said.

I looked up at the guy in my way, who was staring at me like he was hypnotized. “Move now or forever hold your peace.”

“Jack, move,” another guy hissed. He was seated at the counter that ran along the front window, overlooking the parking lot. The counter seating was right next to the front door.

Jack stepped out of the way, finally. I pushed open the door and went into the lot.

“See if he’s following me,” I said to Beezle.

Beezle twisted on my shoulder. “His friend is arguing with him. Jack’s collecting up his stuff to run after you.”

“We’re going under a veil,” I said. “Stay still.”

I pulled the veil over us just as Jack and his friend emerged into the parking lot. They both stood there blinking.

“Did you see . . . ?” Jack asked.

“No,” his friend said firmly. He grabbed his buddy’s shoulder and steered him back inside. Jack looked back several times, obviously hoping to see me.

“No one was going to recognize me, huh?” I said. I walked back toward the six-way intersection to find a bench to sit on while we ate.

“How was I to know that Jack Dabrowski would be in Art of Pizza at that very moment?” Beezle complained.

“Wait—you knew who that guy was?” I said.

“Of course I did,” Beezle said. “He’s got a blog that collects all the supernatural sightings in Chicago. He’s been doing it since before the vampire invasion. Once upon a time he was considered a crackpot who saw ghosts.”

“And now he’s a viewed as a high priest, right? All the people who made fun of him know he was correct, that there really are things that go bump in the night.”

“He’s the reigning authority on anything out of the ordinary,” Beezle said. “And he’s been a very vocal advocate of yours.”

“I guess he wasn’t aware that I was supposed to be dead.”

“Oh, he knew. He just didn’t believe it,” Beezle said.

“Why? All the evidence indicated such. He didn’t have a personal relationship with me. Why would he think I wasn’t dead, and more importantly, why would he care?”

“He wants you to take a leadership role in Chicago. Something high profile, like mayor.”

I stared at Beezle. “Did you investigate him to see if he was an agent of Lucifer?”

“He’s not,” Beezle said. “He just really, really thinks that you should use your powers for good. Be the human face of the supernatural world. People already like you. They already think you’re a hero because you wiped out the vampires. He might have a point.”

“No, he doesn’t,” I said firmly. “I am not running for public office, or turning into some kind of mouthpiece for supernaturals. I might as well walk around wearing a T-shirt with a target painted on the front and back. All I’d be doing is making it easier for one of Titania’s men to assassinate me while I stood on a platform at a press conference.”

“That’s true,” Beezle admitted. “Dabrowski isn’t exactly in full possession of the facts. He just thinks you did something heroic and therefore—”

“I should be punished for it?” I asked.

“I don’t think he views it as punishment,” Beezle said.

I dropped the veil when I found a very weatherworn bench with a yellow “Your Ad Here” sign on the back rest. There was a boarded-up storefront behind it with a cell-phone carrier name on the crooked sign. Every third or fourth business had been completely abandoned, and it wasn’t just a product of the bad economy. It seemed like a fair number of people hadn’t bothered to return to Chicago after the vampire devastation. I couldn’t say that I blamed them.

Beezle flew off my shoulder and landed on the seat, rubbing his hands together in anticipation as I opened the take-out box.

“You will use utensils,” I said, pulling a rubber-band-wrapped package with a fork, knife and napkin out of my pocket.

“You’re using your hands,” Beezle whined as I removed my slice from the box.

“I did not get deep-dish,” I pointed out.

“Oh, fine,” Beezle grumbled. He climbed inside the container and started cutting into the crust. “Now tell me everything that happened to you.”

I started with Alerian’s appearance on the beach. Beezle hadn’t been around for that. Then I told him about the Retrievers attacking the house, the portal that Nathaniel had made (prompted by Puck), my experiences on the other world, and Puck’s deception. I told him about Daharan and the need to pass through the land of the dead. I told him that I saw Gabriel again, although I didn’t fill in the details.

“So, Puck wanted you to go to this other planet and get rid of the giant insects,” Beezle said when I was finished. His stomach was splattered with tomato sauce. I took the unused napkin and wiped him down like a child.

“Yes,” I said. “Although I don’t know what Titania’s going to say when she finds out all the Cimice are gone.”

“Where did they come from in the first place?” Beezle asked. “If Lucifer closed the ways in and out except for that one portal, how did the Cimice even manage to get there in the first place?”

“Daharan said that if you had enough power, you could just manage to open a portal there. I assume Titania has enough power to do such a thing. Or maybe Lucifer just didn’t do a very good job of sealing the place up.”

“Yes, but why?” Beezle asked. “It doesn’t make any sense. She would have to move the Cimice across the ocean to get them off that planet and into Chicago. Why not leave them on the world that they originally came from?”

“Maybe she had a bone to pick with the fae that lived there,” I said. “It did seem like the Cimice were using their battles with the fae as some kind of training.”

“It still seems inefficient to me,” Beezle said. “And why is Puck so concerned about it, anyway?”

“He said that if Titania released the Cimice in Chicago, it would be tantamount to the Faerie Queen declaring war on Lucifer. Lucifer would be forced to respond. Puck says it doesn’t suit him to have the two of them at war. Yet.”

“I don’t know about that, either,” Beezle said. “He hates Lucifer. And he can’t have enjoyed pretending to be less powerful than Titania for all of these years. What’s he playing at? What’s his long game?”

“Don’t ask me,” I said. “I tried to think through all possible angles but I’m pretty sure I failed. I don’t have the right kind of brain for Puck-logic.”

“Well, now I’m back so the rightful order of things can be restored. I’ll do the thinking; you do the smashing,” Beezle said.

I collected up our garbage and stood. Someone touched my shoulder.

I spun around, grabbing the person’s wrist and wrenching him to his knees before he realized what was happening. I twisted the arm around the person’s back.

“Ow, ow, ow!” Jack Dabrowski said. “Dude, you’re breaking my arm.”

I kept him in position, especially when I realized who it was. “What are you doing here? Did you follow me?”

“How could I follow you?” Dabrowski protested. “You disappeared.”

“Don’t parse the question,” I said, giving his arm a tug. He let out a little bark of pain. “You were looking for me.”

Beezle landed on my shoulder and gave Dabrowski a good hard stare. “I told you he was too stupid to live.”

“Are you . . . Are you going to kill me?” he asked. “I wasn’t doing anything.”

“I’m sure that’s not true,” I said. “What happened to your friend?”

“He left,” Dabrowski said. “He thought I should leave you alone.”

“He was right,” I said. “How much of that conversation did you hear?”

“None of it,” Dabrowski said quickly.

“He’s lying,” Beezle said.

“I know,” I said.

“No, I’m not! I didn’t hear a thing. I just saw you sitting there and wanted to talk to you,” Dabrowski said.

He tried to pull away from me, but no human was stronger than an angel, even one with blood as diluted as mine. I held him firmly in place. I had a strong suspicion that he’d not only heard my conversation with Beezle but had recorded it. He was an investigator, after all. And the last thing that I wanted was for my personal business to be broadcast all over the Internet.

I pulled Dabrowski to his feet and grabbed his other arm. “Beezle, search him.”

“Eww,” Beezle said.

“Just check his pockets for a recording device,” I said.

Dabrowski started struggling in earnest, which confirmed my suspicions. Beezle flew around and patted the front of Dabrowski’s jacket.

“You can’t do this,” he said. “You have no authority to check my pockets and take my stuff.”

“That’s where you’re wrong. I have the right to a private conversation,” I said.

I was irritated with myself for not considering this possibility even after Beezle had told me that Dabrowski was interested in me. I’d been too happy to be reunited with Beezle and too involved in our conversation to pay attention to our surroundings. Any one of my dozens of enemies could have walked up behind me and slit my throat before I’d have realized what happened.

“The public has a right to know,” Dabrowski said as Beezle emerged triumphantly from the guy’s front coat pocket holding an iPhone aloft.

“Please do not try to disguise your invasion of my privacy as journalistic integrity,” I said. “You’re a blogger. You’re not writing an investigative piece on public corruption for the Chicago Tribune. I’m a private citizen.”

“You stopped being a private citizen the day you blasted all those vampires into oblivion on live television,” Dabrowski said.

“I didn’t plan on having the event broadcast,” I muttered. “And it doesn’t matter, anyway. Just because I was witnessed doesn’t mean I belong to you, or to anyone else.”

“Someone with powers like yours should be out protecting people,” Dabrowski said. “You have a responsibility to the citizens of this city.”

“Don’t you talk to me about responsibility, boy,” I said furiously, spinning him around and grabbing him by the lapel. “You have no idea what I’ve done, what I’ve sacrificed, while all of you were safely sleeping in your beds dreaming of sugarplums. I was fighting a war before any of you even knew the war existed.”

“And the public should know that,” Dabrowski said. “They should know that someone is out there working for them. You should be on all the morning shows, letting people know that all supernatural creatures aren’t killers.”

I smiled, and I knew it was not a nice smile. “What makes you think I’m not a killer?”

Dabrowski paled. “You don’t kill people. You save them.”

“How old are you?” I asked casually.

“Twenty-seven,” he said.

“Would you like to make it to twenty-eight?”

Beezle had been busily tapping away at the screen of the iPhone while this conversation was occurring. “Listen,” he said.

He held up the phone and I heard my voice and Beezle’s, as clear as day.

“You didn’t hear a thing, huh?” I said to Dabrowski.

He swallowed. “What are you going to do?”

“Drop the phone, Beezle,” I said.

Beezle released the phone, and I blasted it with nightfire as it fell to the ground. There was nothing left of it except a few microscopic fragments.

“My phone,” Dabrowski moaned. “That phone cost four hundred dollars!”

“You can send me the bill,” I said as I released him. “And that will teach you not to mess with things you don’t understand in the future.”

“You should be grateful, really,” Beezle said. “Just think. That could have been your head.”

Dabrowski fell to his knees, picking up the tiny pieces that remained of his phone. Then he stood up and faced me, fire in his eyes. “I don’t care about the phone. Everything that just happened is going to be all over the Internet in an hour.”

“Listen to me, Jack Dabrowski,” I said. “If you continue your pursuit and harassment of me, if one word of anything I said or did is printed on your blog, you will regret it.”

“You think you can threaten me and get away with it?” Dabrowski said.

“Yes,” I said simply.

“Do not mess around with her,” Beezle said. “She has this addiction to fire. I don’t know where it came from. But she might just decide to burn your house down.”

“With you in it,” I added.

Dabrowski shook his head. “I can’t believe you’re like this. I thought you would be nicer.”

“I don’t know why you thought that,” I said. “The only thing you’ve ever seen me do is kill things.”

I turned and walked away then, leaving Dabrowski staring after me.

Beezle waited until we crossed the street and we were well away from the nosy blogger before speaking. “So, what are we going to do about that problem?”

I shrugged. “Burning down his house sounds like a great idea.”

“You’re not serious,” Beezle said. “I thought you were just throwing your weight around to scare him.”

“I wouldn’t burn it down with him inside,” I clarified. “But if he becomes too much of a liability, I will definitely make sure that he realizes he’s going to suffer.”

“And there’s the dark-side Maddy I know and despise,” Beezle said.

I stopped short and pulled Beezle off my shoulder, settling him in one of my palms so I could look him in the eye. “It’s not dark side. I’m trying to help that kid.”

“Help him by wrecking his house? Didn’t someone else just do that to you?”

“Yes, they did,” I said. “And I am grateful that it was only the house that burned, and not me, or my loved ones. What do you think would happen to Dabrowski if he had eavesdropped on one of my conversations with Lucifer? Or if he had stumbled upon one of the fae? What do you think Focalor would do to Dabrowski if he caught him spying?”

“He’d have his head ripped from his shoulders,” Beezle said reluctantly.

“Yes,” I said. “Unceremoniously and without warning. He’s all excited because his lifelong theories have been proven true. But he’s messing around in things he doesn’t understand. The supernatural world is no place for a mortal.”

“So you’re protecting him,” Beezle said.

“And myself,” I said. “I can’t do what needs to be done if I’m being trailed by a band of groupies.”

“And what needs to be done?” Beezle asked. “Seems to me like you’re a soldier without a war at the moment. You wiped out those bug-things that were supposedly going to invade. Daharan is taking care of the Agency/Retriever problem. The vampires are gone and the humans are learning how to play nice with things they don’t understand.”

“There’s still the pending problem of Lucifer and Evangeline’s child,” I reminded him. “And the fact that Titania probably still wants to kill me for defying her several times in a row.”

“Oh, she does,” Beezle assured me. “My contacts in the court have told me that she curses your name several times a day, particularly now that Bendith has left.”

“Bendith left his mother’s court?” I said.

That was interesting. I returned Beezle to my shoulder and continued walking north on Lincoln. We passed by Wishbone, a southern-cooking restaurant that always had delicious smells wafting out. The odd mixture of middle-class professionals and low-income students with a penchant for organic eating came and went from the Whole Foods across the street. Sweaty-faced gym-goers emerged from the YMCA. Everything seemed normal, like there had never been a crisis at all.

I remembered going to the YMCA once. I’d had to collect a soul there. I’d also made a grand pronouncement about losing thirty pounds and a noisy commitment to regular exercise. That hadn’t happened. The only regular exercise I got was swinging my sword arm.

“Yes, Bendith was particularly close to Oberon,” Beezle said, drawing me back to the conversation. “So when he found out that his mother had betrayed his father by sleeping with Puck, he got pretty upset. I guess he wanted to bring Oberon with him when he departed the court but Titania forbade it.”

“But she couldn’t stop him from leaving,” I said.

“No, she couldn’t. It was probably better for her, in any case. He’d been stirring up the courtiers, speaking out against her.”

“And there’s already a segment of the court that doesn’t fully support her, right?” I said, recalling something Beezle had told me long ago, before my first visit to Titania’s realm.

Beezle nodded. “So while Bendith’s departure was a blow to her authority, it probably was better than the alternative.”

“Having her son lead a rebellion against her?” I guessed.

“Exactly.”

“And she’d like to lay all of this at my door,” I said. “Why do I get blamed for everything?”

“It’s so much easier to blame you than it is for Titania to admit that perhaps she shouldn’t have made her husband a cuckold,” Beezle said. “Look, there’s Dinkel’s.”

“You just had deep-dish pizza. You’re not getting a pastry on top of it.”

“You have change in your pocket. I know you do,” Beezle said.

“So Titania will probably try to kill me again soon—that’s what you’re saying?” I asked, trying to steer the conversation back on track.

Beezle stared longingly across the street at the piles of sweets in the bakery window as we passed.

“No,” I repeated.

“You’re no fun anymore,” Beezle said.

“Do you know where Bendith went after he left Titania?” I asked.

“Nope,” Beezle said. “It’s like he disappeared into the ether.”

“Do you think she might have had him killed?” I asked, alarmed. I didn’t want one of Puck’s children murdered. I would probably get blamed somehow. Plus, Nathaniel seemed attached to Bendith. They were half brothers, after all.

“Nah, he’s her only son,” Beezle said.

“My father tried to kill me,” I reminded him.

“Titania only has the one child, and it’s difficult for the fae to breed. Presumably she would cherish him more, even when he was being disobedient. Your father had other children, so it wasn’t such a big deal to him to get rid of one,” Beezle said.

“Another child,” I said.

“Other children,” Beezle repeated.

I stopped in the middle of the street again and glared at Beezle. “Really? Really? You’re dropping this on me now?”

“What?” Beezle asked. “I always thought you would assume that Azazel had other kids. The fallen boink pretty much anyone willing that they can find. And as you discovered, all they have to do is look at a woman suggestively and she gets pregnant.”

I gritted my teeth and summoned up all of my patience. I had considered the possibility that Azazel might have other kids. But it was one thing to have a suspicion and another to have that suspicion confirmed by someone who should have informed me sooner. “Do you know the identity of any of these children?”

“No, not offhand,” Beezle said. “But they’re sure to be out there, lurking. Some of them may even be angry with you for killing your father.”

“That’s just great,” I said. “Another nebulous threat that will manifest at the least opportune moment.”

“Yup, when you least expect it,” Beezle said cheerfully.

“Do you care at all about the possibility that I have siblings who might show up to kill me sometime in the near future?”

Beezle waved a little clawed hand in dismissal. “Nah. I’m sure you could take them.”

“I’m not sure if I should be touched by your confidence or worried about your cavalier attitude toward my health and well-being,” I said.

“Look, you killed Ramuell. After coming back from the dead, no less,” Beezle said, ticking points off on his fingers. “You defeated Baraqiel. You survived the Maze and the Grimm. You found out who was stealing memories and you massacred a whole bunch of demons and giant spiders along the way. You beat Amarantha and Violet in a fight to the death. You killed the Hob, Antares and Azazel, who was not the least of the fallen. You wiped out an entire population of vampires, for crying out loud. You unlocked your magical legacy from Lucifer and now there isn’t a whole lot out there that’s stronger than you. I’m absolutely certain that if some mysterious brother or sister showed up, you could take them down without blinking.”

It was fairly horrible to hear a list of creatures that I had killed recited like Beezle was naming a few of his favorite things. In every case I’d either been protecting the greater population of humanity from a dire threat or just trying not to get slaughtered myself. But when all the incidents were listed out like that, one thing became pretty apparent.

I was a killer. No matter how you prettied it up, no matter how much I tried to justify it, I was a killer. And with that much blood on my hands, how could I not go dark side?

My hand covered the bulge in my belly. What would my son think of a mother who killed demons instead of baking brownies?

I’d been walking on autopilot, and therefore found myself back in front of the charred ruin of my house.

“Oh, yeah,” I said. “No home to go to.”

I sat down on the sidewalk and crossed my legs.

“It’s kind of depressing, isn’t it?” Beezle said.

“Kind of,” I said. “What are we supposed to do now?”

A voice spoke from the darkness. “Why, go home with me, of course.”