I stood wearily, using the sword as a staff to push me up, and turned to face that which I did not want to see.
A pool of dark blood stained the snow around his body. Samiel, Beezle and the wolves, changed back into humans, stood beside him.
“Where’s J.B.?” I asked.
“He took Gabriel,” Beezle said. There were tears glittering on his cheeks.
I looked again at the body, the thing that could not be Gabriel, and then back up at Beezle.
“Took him?”
“To the Door,” Beezle said.
“The Door,” I said. “No. No. Gabriel wouldn’t choose the Door. He wouldn’t leave me. He knows I can see him. He would stay. He wouldn’t leave me.”
“Maddy…” Beezle began.
“No,” I said angrily, swiping at the tears that were falling now, falling so hard I could barely see. “I told you once before, when he was kidnapped. Gabriel would not leave me. He would stay with me. J.B. must have made him go. You know how J.B. feels about ghosts and paperwork.”
I was babbling. I knew I was babbling. But it couldn’t be right. It couldn’t. Gabriel could not be dead, killed by Azazel, a maggot that had somehow crawled free. It should be Azazel who was dead, not Gabriel. Not my husband.
My husband, I thought, and I broke.
I screamed my pain and grief to the sky, a black howl that had no beginning and no end.
19
SAMIEL TRIED TO PICK ME UP, TO TAKE ME AWAY.
“No,” I said, and when he tried to make me move anyway I hit him in the mouth.
He looked shocked and hurt, and somewhere under all the pain I was sorry for it, but not sorry enough to let him take me from Gabriel.
“No,” I repeated. “Just leave me with him.”
“Come on, Samiel,” Beezle said softly.
They went away, but I didn’t care. I just wanted to be alone with Gabriel. I crawled through the snow to him and laid my head on his back. I hardly felt the cold and the wet through my jeans.
He was still warm. His coat smelled of him, apple pie baking in the oven. Tears leaked from my eyes.
“Madeline,” a voice growled, and there was a gentle hand in my hair. Someone crouched beside me, someone who smelled of wolf.
“Go away,” I said. “Just leave me here.”
“Madeline,” Jude repeated. “You can’t stay here in the snow.”
“Why not?” I said.
I had seen an incomprehensible amount of death in my life. I had fought against Death with all the power I had within me, and still it had triumphed. It had taken the only person who made me want to keep living.
“Gabriel would not want to see you this way,” Jude said.
“Don’t tell me what Gabriel would want or not want,” I said furiously, raising my head to glare at him. “Gabriel’s not here, and you didn’t know him.”
“That’s the Madeline Black I know,” Jude said. “Stand up. Stand up and fight. If you stay here, you will fall into grief that you will never overcome.”
“I don’t care,” I said, the fire that had lit me momentarily going out. “I want him back. I want to be where he is.”
“I know,” Judas said.
The pain in his voice drew me back from the darkness that threatened to swallow me, a pain so old and so familiar to him that he hardly knew he carried it most of the time.
I came to my knees, my hands on my thighs, staring at Jude. His blue eyes shimmered with unshed tears in the streetlights.
“Samiel needs you,” he said. “And your gargoyle.”
“Yes,” I said. It was hard to keep my head above the blackness that rose up inside, the blackness that tried to pull me under again.
“And you have a promise to keep, Lucifer’s child,” Jude said, but there was a gentleness that had never been there before.
“Azazel,” I said, and inside me a shard of ice pierced the darkness.
“Azazel,” Jude agreed.
He held his hand out to me, and I took it, and we rose together. He gripped my fingers urgently.
“From this day henceforth, I am your ally. When you hunt for Azazel I will be by your side, and I will hold him to the ground as you swing the sword to take his life.”
“Jude,” I said uncertainly, looking at Wade, who looked unsurprised by this proclamation. The ways of the alpha are certainly mysterious.
“I swear,” he said, and energy passed between our hands. I knew then that we were bound in some magical way, and that Jude would keep his promise no matter what the cost.
“Let us take Gabriel’s body,” Wade said.
I looked down at the ground in panic. They couldn’t take him. I wasn’t ready to say good-bye.
“You cannot bury him here, not without attracting the attention of the authorities. We will take him to a place near where our pack summers. No one will find him there,” Wade said.
He lay in the snow, facedown, with the dark stain around him, and this would be the last time I saw him.
But I knew Jude was right. I couldn’t lie in the snow beside him forever. I had promises to keep.
“Okay,” I said.
I knelt beside him for the last time, and Jude and Wade helped me roll Gabriel to his back. I tenderly wiped the snow from his face with my sleeve and closed his eyes.
For the last time, I pressed my lips against his, and then I let them take him away.
I stood and watched Jude and Wade disappear into the alley with the body of my husband. I was still standing there, staring at the place they’d gone, when J.B. returned.