Black Spring

“I’m not sure we can count on that,” I said. “Beezle will be with me all the time so we’ll be able to see any direct attack coming, but what if the shifter tries to pull the same trick? Stand outside the house and attack from a distance?”

Beezle shook his head. “Lucifer is going to have that mansion protected from anything and everything. Remember, he’s a lot more powerful than you are. And he’s had a lot more time to collect enemies. He would never risk being caught off guard in his own home. There will be layers upon layers of protection. I don’t think you’ll have to worry about murder by remote control.”

“So just the direct kind of murder, then,” I said.

“Anyone who attends the wedding would conform to the laws of hospitality. Most of the creatures attending are old, and many of them have conflicts with each other. But they know that if they air their grievances in Lucifer’s home, they’ll be violating some ancient understandings. You may actually be safer in Lucifer’s presence than you would be anywhere else.”

“There’s something really wrong about that,” I said.

Nathaniel returned to the dining room, looking disgruntled. “That boy doesn’t have the sense to be terrified, even after what he witnessed.”

“Let’s not worry about Jack right now,” I said. “Beezle apparently got some info from witches that will help us protect the house.”

The five of us discussed the spells, worked out a plan, and Nathaniel and I spent the rest of the morning sealing off the house. While we did that, Jude and Samiel went to see Alerian as my “ambassadors.” The hope was that he would either 1) call off any additional giant monster attacks that might traumatize the locals, or 2) help us figure out a way to track down and defeat the shifter and its master. Or both.

But when Samiel and Jude returned, they told me that Alerian had checked out of his room that morning. Jude had attempted to track him, but the trail had gone cold next to the river just outside the hotel. Now we had two superpowerful creatures missing in action on my watch.

They might be holed up somewhere together, plotting, as Nathaniel and Beezle suspected.

Or they might have been taken out of the picture by some other player, something strong enough to remove two ancient and extremely magical beings.

Neither option was particularly comforting.

There was a third option. Alerian and Daharan were off somewhere pursuing their own agendas, and those agendas didn’t necessarily mean destruction for me or anyone else.

But I had trouble believing that Daharan would go off for more than a day without telling me where he was going and what he was doing. A low-level knot of anxiety had permanently lodged in the back of my brain.

So there was no Alerian to negotiate with. The shifter seemed to have disappeared and there was no point wasting energy trying to hunt it down. There seemed to be no way to tackle the other problems at the moment, so we waited.

All of us were exceptionally bad at waiting except for Beezle, of course. Beezle thought he’d died and gone to heaven. He had four people in the house to annoy and all the snacks and TV he wanted. There was no blood and no crises for twenty-four hours, although there were an awful lot of reporters and whatnot lurking outside, making pointed remarks about the wisdom of the mayor’s plan while standing in front of the squid carcass.

The rest of us were snarling at one another like restless lions. Somehow there just wasn’t enough space in the apartment for an angel, a werewolf and a couple of mixed-bloods with too much power and nowhere to put it.

Beezle spent plenty of time on the computer. By Thursday night he reported that Jack had posted an extremely detailed account of what he encountered at my home and far too many details about the shifter itself. He thankfully spared me the stress of identifying my house as the site of the murder, but I was still pretty sure that he wasn’t going to survive much longer if he kept doing stuff like that. Once the shifter’s master got word of Jack’s report, the blogger would be counting the remainder of his life in minutes rather than days.

By Friday afternoon it was almost a relief to be packing for Lucifer’s wedding. It freed me from the tension of waiting for something to happen—waiting for Daharan to return, waiting for Alerian to appear, waiting for the shifter to attack, waiting for the police to show up to take me away to their camp for magical creatures. Now I had something to focus my energy on.

Beezle flew into the bedroom and landed on the dresser as I threw things into a suitcase.

“What are you packing?” he asked, disgust evident in his tone.

I pointed at the various articles of clothing I’d put in the case. “Little black dress. Heels. Second-nicest dress for whatever you do the night before a wedding.”

“Dress rehearsal,” Beezle said. “The dresses are cheap and they look it. And I see you’ve also packed your crummy jeans and black T-shirts. Why can’t you ever shop for anything new?”