I stumbled forward, dizzy and still in pain, and latched on to the neck of the nearest pix. My burning hands blasted magic through its skin. Smoke poured from its mouth. The pix tried to break away from my grip but I held fast, pouring fire inside until the air filled with the stench of burning.

Nathaniel was fighting with two other demons. The bodies of three others lay at his feet, their heads missing. He slashed out with his sword, keeping them at arm’s length, but his blasts of nightfire didn’t seem to do much more than annoy them.

I could fix that.

I was tired and woozy from blood loss, but I had enough magic left for one last push. I grabbed the nearest pix demon’s head and sent fire through my palms. Freed of the necessity of fending off two attackers at once, Nathaniel stepped forward and beheaded the final creature just as I dropped the smoking body of the other to the floor.

We stood, both panting from exertion, and looked around at the mess. The beheaded demons had some gloppy blue stuff pouring from their severed necks. The pix that I had barbecued were still smoking slightly.

And still no one on the floor had come running at the sound of the struggle. No patients gaped in the doorway; no security personnel wondered what we were doing. There was something wrong here. Something bigger than the pix, or even the invading vampires.

Nathaniel moved toward me, and put his hand on my neck. The healing light of the sun flowed through the cauterized wound. “What did you do to yourself?” he murmured.

“It was a field dressing,” I said.

He kept his hand where it was for a moment, staring at the place where his fingers brushed my skin. “You made a mess of this. There will be another scar.”

I touched his wrist, pulled his hand away. “What’s another scar?”

He stared at me for a moment. It was so hard for me to know what he was thinking, to read his eyes. Gabriel had been so open to me.

I took a deep breath, because every time I thought of Gabriel I saw him falling in the snow, surrounded by pooling blood.

“There’s something wrong in this hospital,” I said. “We’ve been raising a ruckus all over the place and there have only been a couple of people moving around.”

“The doctor, the security guard,” Nathaniel said. “You are right. This is a large facility. There should be more activity.”

“There should be staff running around, if nothing else. And the only patient we’ve seen was being eaten by the pix,” I said. “Let’s check some of the other rooms and see what’s going on.”

I stepped carefully over the pile of demon bodies. They were decomposing quickly into a mass of goo that looked a lot like blue gelatin.

There was nobody in the hallway, no sounds at all. Now that I was aware of it, the silence seemed heavy with menace.

Nathaniel poked his head into the patient room across the hall and I crowded behind him. There was an elderly woman sleeping in the bed, seemingly peacefully. Her chest rose and fell with each breath. We looked at each other and shrugged.

I led the way to the next room, where we found another patient in an identical state of slumber. Then we went into the next room. And so on, until we’d checked the whole floor and discovered that every patient was sleeping as soundly as Beauty after she’d pricked her finger on the spindle.

Along the way we found several nurses, doctors and orderlies, lying peacefully on the floor.

“Someone put a spell on the building,” I said.

Nathaniel nodded. “But it did not affect everyone. A large spell like this would have to be extremely powerful to catch every individual in its net.”

“It’s pretty powerful regardless,” I said. “But who could have done it?”

Nathaniel shook his head. “There are several individuals that have the ability to do this. Certain faeries, for example. Or any of the Grigori.”

“But what motivation would any of the Grigori have for doing this?”

“Perhaps someone else is working with the vampires in the wake of Azazel’s death,” Nathaniel said grimly.

I’d been so preoccupied with the strangeness of the spell that I hadn’t thought through the implications. “Everyone here has been prepped like a lamb for the slaughter. Whoever did this made the hospital a cafeteria for vampires.”

Nathaniel nodded. “Once the horde gets here, none of these people will survive.”

I had faced some impossible odds since I discovered I was Azazel’s daughter. I’d fought some of the worst monsters imaginable. But I had never felt so helpless in the face of a threat before.

“What can we do?” I said.

Nathaniel shook his head. “There is nothing we can do.”

“That’s unacceptable,” I said angrily.

“We cannot undo the spell without knowing who cast it, or even what exactly they cast. If we tried to pull apart the magic without knowing its provenance, we could kill everyone by accident.”

“We can’t leave these people unprotected,” I said, thinking hard. “What if we cast a protective spell over the sleeping spell? Like a shield, or a veil?”

“You are talking about magic that requires a tremendous amount of force. We would have to combine our abilities, and even then I am not certain we would be able to do it.”

“We have to try,” I said. “I can’t leave them like this.”

“Even if we succeeded, we would likely use up our magic for some time. We would be left vulnerable to attack.”

“You have a sword. I have a sword. They don’t,” I said, pointing at the slumbering patient.

Nathaniel looked doubtful. “Lord Lucifer would not condone any course of action that might lead you to harm.”

“Lucifer can stick it,” I said. “I’m not kneeling to anyone. I don’t know why we keep having this discussion over and over.”

“I have been alive for hundreds of years, and in all of that time I have had a master. First my father, then Azazel. And always Lord Lucifer ruled over all.”

“I’ve only been alive for a few decades, but I have never had a master. And I’m not about to start now.”

“You would not yield to Azazel, either,” Nathaniel murmured. “It angered him so.”

“Yeah, well, you know what I did to Azazel,” I said.

“You would not be able to do such a thing to Lord Lucifer, and I advise you not to even think of it,” Nathaniel said seriously.

“I won’t go after Lucifer if he doesn’t give me a reason to,” I said.

But I hoped he wouldn’t give me a reason, because despite my bravado even I knew that it was very, very stupid to go one-on-one with Lucifer. I’d felt his power and it was a thing of tremendous force. I also knew that he had shown me only the smallest fraction of it.

“Sometimes I wonder if you are trying to commit suicide,” Nathaniel said.

“Sometimes I wonder that myself,” I said.

“I am not joking,” Nathaniel said.

“Neither am I.”

There was a long pause after this, as I contemplated the truth of my statement and Nathaniel watched me with his frozen blue gaze. I didn’t want my baby to die. I wanted to protect him. But sometimes, especially when a fight didn’t seem to be going my way, a fleeting thought would say, If you just let go, you can be with Gabriel. You and the baby.

“We’re off topic,” I said, wanting to transition away from the awkward moment. “I want to protect the hospital.”

Nathaniel rubbed his forehead. “I must consider how to do this.”

While Nathaniel came up with a plan, I thought deep thoughts about who could have cast the sleeping spell in the first place and, more important, why.

My first thought was that Titania was in league with the vampires. Amarantha had been colluding with Azazel before she died, so there was a very real possibly that the queen of Faerie had picked up where her subordinate had left off. And when I was in Titania and Oberon’s court I’d thought that they were deliberately trying to harm me in order to provoke Lucifer.

At the time it seemed insane for them to try to tick off the Morningstar, but if they were working with this army of vampires, perhaps they thought they had an advantage.

My second thought was that one of the Grigori had taken up Azazel’s personal mission. Certainly any of the Grigori would be powerful enough to cast the sleeping spell, and presumably they would also be able to control the army of vampires.

“But who’s the contact?” I murmured.

“Pardon?” Nathaniel said, frowning. He looked like he was trying to do intense mathematical calculations in his head.

“I was just thinking. There has to be a vampire overlord or whatever, right? They’ve got a pretty rigid court system, as far as I know.”

“They do,” Nathaniel acknowledged. “And their heads of court are kings and queens, like the Faerie.”

“So they have little courts that are overseen by one big court?”

Nathaniel nodded. “You are thinking that the vampire king had to know about this prior to the attack.”

“If he’s got a good grip on his kingdom, then he should definitely have known about this. Is his court in Chicago?”

Nathaniel shook his head. “No. He is based in New York.”

“Isn’t it interesting?” I mused. “Lucifer’s court is in Los Angeles. The vampire king’s court is on the opposite coast. The high court of Faerie is in some dimension all its own. And yet all this trouble is here at my door.”

“Lord Lucifer has made it very clear through both word and deed that he would like you to be his heir.”

“So you’re saying that as long as Lucifer keeps going around talking me up, the other courts will swipe at me?”

Nathaniel’s eyes were troubled. “You would be safer if you would accept Lord Lucifer’s offer.”

“I don’t want to be his heir,” I said. “More important, I don’t want my child to be his heir.”