I stood and faced him. “That’s what love is. When you love someone you’re responsible for them, and they you. Until you understand that, I’ll never believe you when you say you care about me.”

“I do understand it,” he said. “But you are the only one that has ever made me feel this way.”

He seemed bewildered when he said this, like the feeling was some foreign disease that had invaded his body. I was all too aware of the fact that we were alone, and that he was not Gabriel.

“Let’s kill that demon so we can go home,” I said abruptly. “Beezle will probably have eaten everything in the pantry by now.”

Nathaniel didn’t say anything else as we silently agreed that further discussion on this topic was just going to make us both uncomfortable.

We took the stairway to the next level, peering cautiously around the fire door. There was a little more activity here—a nurse moving from room to room, patients being pushed along the corridor by an orderly—but it wasn’t the panicked rushing of folks who’d just seen a vision from their nightmares. I looked at Nathaniel, and he shook his head.

We skipped the next floor since Jude and Samiel were there, and presumably any monsters would be dispatched by them.

Nathaniel had dropped the cloak that covered us when we entered the hospital. I understood why. It required a lot of energy to maintain a veil and stay on your guard against demonic attacks. It was doubly hard to keep four people covered.

The thing was, Nathaniel’s wings were such an essential part of his appearance that I didn’t often think about them. Plus I was little preoccupied with finding the pix demon and not thinking too hard on what Nathaniel had said about my motivations.

So when we came face-to-face with a security guard on the next floor, I wasn’t thinking about the vampires, or the fact that all the humans were on edge. I wasn’t thinking that Nathaniel would look extremely strange to a normal.

We pushed through the door, and it was just unfortunate luck that the security guard stood there. And that his weapon was in his hand, and that he was ready to go off at the least provocation.

I was in front of Nathaniel, and the guard was a few feet in front of me. He turned as soon as he heard activity behind him, and while he was definitely tense, he might not have fired if he hadn’t seen Nathaniel’s wings.

“What the hell is that thing?” he shouted, and pulled the trigger. His hand was shaking, so his aim probably wasn’t as good as it normally would be. Likely it was the first time he had ever fired his weapon on the job.

Which was why the bullet hit me instead of Nathaniel. And why Nathaniel blasted the guard with nightfire as I fell to the ground, the bullet tearing through the soft flesh just under the joint of my shoulder, just above my heart. I screamed, not because it hurt but because it was too late for the guard. Nathaniel had killed him before my eyes.

I could feel the burning path where the bullet had torn through me, the wet stickiness of blood flowing from an open wound.

“Madeline,” Nathaniel said, already turning to me, falling to his knees beside me, the guard forgotten.

“What the hell did you do that for?” I shouted. Rather, I wanted to shout, but my voice barely rose above my normal speaking tone.

Inside me, my baby gave a little flutter, but nothing more. I guess a little physical distress was old news at this point.

The guard was prone on the ground, a smoking hole where his chest used to be. Farther down the hall behind him, a male doctor in a white lab coat stood frozen in place, his eyes wide.

Nathaniel scrabbled at my coat, pulled it away from my shoulder so that he could see the blood-soaked mess beneath. My sweater and shirt stuck to the open wound. He put his hand over the hole where the bullet had entered.

The warmth of the sun lit my blood, flowed from his hand and through the heart of me, healing the bullet wound as if it had never been. I sat up, still a little woozy. Blood loss is blood loss, whether your wound heals immediately or not. It takes a while to get your strength back if you’ve got anything bigger than a shaving cut.

The doctor watched us now with speculation instead of fear. Nathaniel had exposed his powers by healing me.

“What did you kill the guard for?” I hissed as Nathaniel helped me to my feet. I don’t think he yet realized we had an audience.

“He shot you,” Nathaniel said, frowning.

“He was scared to death. He didn’t know what he was doing.”

“He shot you,” Nathaniel repeated.

I put my hands to my face for a moment. “In point of fact, he was trying to shoot you and got me by accident.”

“That hardly recommends him,” Nathaniel said.

“Couldn’t you have stunned him instead of killing him?”

“I was not contemplating all the angles of the situation,” Nathaniel said, anger in his voice. “I saw someone threatening you and I eliminated the threat. I do not know why we are discussing this in any case. The man is dead. What is done is done.”

“We’re discussing this,” I said through gritted teeth, “because I don’t want you to do it again.”

“Duly noted,” Nathaniel said, and then he turned his body so that I was behind him. I stood on tiptoe and peered over his shoulder so I could see what was going on.

The doctor approached us, his hands held high to show that he was no threat. He stared at Nathaniel in fascination. That fascination was almost as frightening as terror. The doctor looked like he wanted to whisk Nathaniel away and get the angel under a microscope as soon as possible.

“Do not approach any further,” Nathaniel said, the old arrogance in his voice.

The doctor stopped walking, dropped his hands to his side. “Who…who are you?”

“That’s not what you want to know,” I said, moving a little so that the doctor could see me. My voice was hard. Nathaniel wasn’t my favorite person, but I didn’t want anybody getting ideas about turning him into a lab rat. “You want to know what he is.”

“Yes,” the doctor said, barely giving me a glance.

“It’s none of your damned business,” I said, and stunned him right between the eyes. The doctor crumpled to the floor.

“I did not detect any threat from him,” Nathaniel said.

“I did,” I said grimly. “Come on, let’s check this floor for the pix before someone finds us standing over two bodies.”

“No,” Nathaniel said. “Let us wait.”

“Why? Do you want to pick a fight with another security guard?”

“You want to capture the demon, yes?”

“Of course.”

“The smell of the newly dead is irresistible to a pix,” Nathaniel said, gesturing to the guard’s body.

“Don’t tell me you killed the guard to attract the pix,” I said, disgusted.

“I told you, I killed the guard because he shot you,” Nathaniel said impatiently. “Think of this as an added bonus, as you would say.”

“That right there is the difference between you and me,” I said. “I can’t think of anyone’s death in terms of a ‘bonus.’”

“The world is changing,” Nathaniel said. “You may find soon that our perspectives are not so far apart.”

He dropped a cloak over the two of us, and we settled back to wait.

We didn’t have to wait long. A set of long fingers curled over the flaps of the air vents, and a moment later a vent popped free. The pix’s gelatinous blue body slithered from the air ducts.

“Told you they were in the air ducts,” I murmured.

Nathaniel moved his hand to shush me, but the pix hadn’t noticed us in the least. Every part of the demon focused on the body on the floor, every bit of it straining for what it wanted.

There were no marks on the demon from the nightfire blast I’d shot at it earlier. That combined with the ease with which it had leapt away from my magic told me that no simple spell would take this thing down.

The pix bounded atop the guard, making little clicking noises that sounded like glee. It buried its face in the guard’s chest, and I heard a slurping sound.

Nathaniel tensed beside me, a sign that he was readying a spell. I decided to follow his lead since he knew more about the pix than I did. Then the doctor stirred, and the pix lifted its head.

Nathaniel let loose his magic just as the pix leapt toward the doctor. The spell caught the demon behind its back leg, far off the kill shot that Nathaniel had no doubt intended. The blast was enough to knock the creature off its course, but now it was alerted to our presence.

It jumped for the ceiling, skittering along upside down like a bug, seemingly unhampered by its injury. Nathaniel’s spell had taken a big chunk of flesh out of the pix’s leg, and little drops of a jelly-like substance dripped from the wound.

I swore aloud, blasting electricity at the nasty thing. As with Nathaniel, my spell caught only a little of the demon. The electricity also didn’t slow it down a bit, even though I could smell barbecued demon in the air.

I ran down the hall after the demon, which was wickedly quick. The doctor reached out and grabbed my ankle as I went by.

The sudden halt in my momentum made me stumble, and my second blast went wild, spraying electricity into the wall. Smoke rose in the air, setting off the hallway sprinklers. The pix disappeared at the other end of the hall.

“Dammit, dammit, dammit!” I said, stomping down on the doctor’s fingers with my other boot. The doc howled and released my ankle, and I took off down the hall after the pix, Nathaniel close behind me.

“I thought we were not harming innocents?” he murmured.

“Just stay focused on the task at hand,” I snapped.

Nathaniel chuckled quietly.

The demon, of course, was gone when we reached the end of the hallway. The sprinklers had obliterated any trail of goo that the pix might have left behind.

I stopped in front of a bank of elevators, staring at Nathaniel with a mixture of annoyance and hopelessness, water pouring over us.