A hissing noise emanated from just behind the chair I had been sitting in. I squirmed along the floor on my belly, feeling in front of me for the source of the noise. My vision was only slightly clearer than it had been when I stood up. The smoke was quickly filling the room. I could make out the vague shapes of furniture but nothing more.

“Open a window!” I shouted to Nathaniel. He didn’t respond, so I assumed he had found the nearest exit and gotten out of the building. Which is what a smart person would do. But still, not very gallant of him, considering he was engaged to me.

The hissing noise grew closer. I belly-crawled toward it, fingers of my right hand outstretched, the other hand holding my T-shirt over my nose.

There was a blast of cold air on my back and the smoke seemed to lift temporarily. I glanced behind me and could make out the shape of Nathaniel in the front living room, opening all of the windows. Huh. So he hadn’t left me, after all.

I turned back toward my goal, and saw that the smoke had dissipated just enough for me to see the source of the noise. I crawled toward it and carefully examined it without picking it up. It looked like a medium-sized black bowling ball with gray smoke emitting from a hole in the top. There did not seem to be any kind of incendiary device on it but I wasn’t about to take chances.

I came to a crouch and then carefully lifted the ball into my arms. It is an unfortunate testament to my total lack of fitness that despite my newfound angelic strength, the ball felt heavy to me.

I began to move through the house toward the back door. A moment later, Nathaniel was next to me, taking the ball from my arms.

“Where?” he asked shortly.

“Down the back stairs, to the yard and into my rain barrel,” I said. I was embarrassed that I was huffing and puffing, but it wasn’t all laziness. The smoke had obviously affected my puny mortal lungs more than it had affected his.

Nathaniel disappeared into the kitchen, streaming a trail of smoke behind him. I walked through the apartment opening windows and letting the frigid November air inside. Luckily, we hadn’t gotten into a period of deep frost so there should just be a thin coating of ice on the rain barrel. I just hoped that whatever was inside that ball would respond the way smoking things usually responded to water—by getting doused. If the item was magical, there was a good chance that it might blow up when it hit the water. You could never tell.

When I’d finished opening the windows and the air had cleared somewhat, I went back to the dining area to survey the damage. The ball had completely smashed the window—no surprise there—and rendered the back rest of the chair I had been sitting in to splinters. I put my right foot down and felt something sting. I stood on the opposite foot and looked at the oozing wound on the sole.

“Well, of course there would be glass on the floor, dummy,” I muttered to myself. I hopped down the hall to the bathroom and sat down on the toilet. There was a small sliver of glass embedded in the ball of my foot. “I don’t know how I survived this long on my own wits.”

I reached down to the cabinet underneath the sink, pulled out my nail kit and collected the tweezers. Then I grabbed some rubbing alcohol and cotton balls, all while twisting around on the seat with my right leg crossed over my left and my right foot dripping blood on the blue tile floor. I dumped a little alcohol on the cotton ball and swabbed the tip of the tweezers. Then I added some more alcohol to the other side of the ball and applied it to the wound. I hissed as the alcohol stung.

You would think that after nearly being killed by a nephilim I would have more tolerance for pain.

I bent over my foot and began the business of trying to extract the glass. I grabbed at the sliver with the tweezers and pulled, whimpering as it came free from my flesh.

“I am so not cut out for a life of adventure,” I muttered, wiping more alcohol on the wound to make sure it wouldn’t get infected. My eyes teared up as the alcohol did its thing.

I finished bandaging the cut and stood up to test my weight on it. I would survive. A moment later, Nathaniel slammed the remains of my back door. I stepped gingerly into the hallway to meet him and had to cover my mouth with my hand to stifle my laughter.

Well, I’d wondered if he’d ever get rumpled, and now he was. He looked kind of like that cartoon coyote after the dyn**ite has gone off in his face.

Nathaniel’s blond hair stuck straight up in front and had been blackened by soot. So had his face and his formerly pristine shirt front. As I sniggered into my palm, a couple of blackened feathers fell from his wings onto the floor.

He raised an eyebrow at me and I schooled my face into seriousness. Then he wordlessly thrust a piece of paper into my hand.

I turned the paper over and saw that there was a message printed on one side. It said, simply, “I KNOW WHERE THEY ARE KEEPING HIM.”

I flipped the paper again, looking for further information. There was nothing but the message.

“Well, that’s really freaking helpful,” I muttered. “You’d think they’d have included a map or some flying directions or something.”

I looked back up at Nathaniel, who appeared to be gathering the shredded remains of his dignity around him. “What happened when you brought the ball outside?”

“It exploded before I managed to get it to the rain barrel,” he said tightly.

“I didn’t hear anything,” I said.

“It was a small explosion, and I held the bomb close to my chest so as not to cause property damage.” He looked as though he were regretting this act of charity.

“Well, thanks,” I said, touched by his thoughtfulness, however grudgingly given. “And where was the message?”

“Inside the bomb.”

I rubbed my fingers on the paper. It felt like perfectly normal standard bond notepaper. “How did the paper survive the explosion?”

“Perhaps there was an enchantment on the paper,” Nathaniel replied, shrugging.

He didn’t seem as interested in the mechanics of the message-delivery system as he was in straightening and dusting the cuffs of his shirt. I, however, was very interested. An enchantment could only mean that the message had been delivered by a magical practitioner. Okay, fine. Most things that go bump in the night have some kind of magic. Not all of them had the kind of fine abilities that would allow them to keep a piece of paper safe inside an incendiary device.

So that narrowed things down to a witch or a faerie. Probably. There was still a lot I didn’t know about the world, as I was discovering every day. But it seemed that your average Agent, demon, angel, vampire, et cetera, probably couldn’t have performed this kind of spell.

Of course, one had to wonder why a witch or a faerie would send this completely unhelpful message inside a bomb. Was the being that sent the message a friend? And if so, was it their idea of a funny joke to send it in a way that could have potentially blown off a limb?

“Did you get a look at whoever lobbed this thing through the window?” I asked Nathaniel. “You were facing that way.”

He shook his head. “I only saw the bomb approaching.”

I frowned. “So whoever threw it could have flown past very quickly. Or thrown it from a great distance. Or possibly levitated it from the ground. Oh, hell. Maybe Beezle saw something.”

“Where is your gargoyle?” Nathaniel asked. “Surely this commotion should have attracted his attention.”

“You’re right,” I said, turning and hurrying toward the front of the house. Beezle kept his nest underneath the picture window, on the front porch roof. This ensured that he would not only see anything approaching the front door, but also that he could spy on anything that was going on in the street. Beezle is about as nosy as it gets.

“Beezle!” I shouted, throwing up the screen and leaning out until I could see his nest. The nest was a jumble of sticks, leaves, newspapers and the small piece of plaid wool that Beezle used to wrap around his ears. “Beezle!”

He didn’t answer, and I felt a little ping of anxiety. Whoever had lobbed that bomb at my window could have hurt Beezle. I leaned farther, my h*ps balancing precariously over the sill, my skin coming out in goose bumps in the chilly November air.

“Beezle!” I shouted. “You answer me right now!”

Some neighbors walking by on the street below looked up in puzzlement and then quickly looked away when they saw me hanging out of the window and shouting like a lunatic.

“Beezle!” I repeated, my eyes searching every tree branch and every roof shingle in sight. No sign of my cranky gargoyle.

“Beezle!” I said again, and I felt myself overbalancing, my nose tilting toward the roof, and I had a second to wonder if I should call up my wings, when I felt Nathaniel’s arm around my waist, pulling me back inside.

I slapped at his arm, struggled against him. “Let me go! I have to find Beezle!”

“You are not going to find him by shouting out the window. If the gargoyle were there, he would have come at your call,” he said reasonably.

I breathed long through my nose in counts of three, and then did the same for the exhalation. I had to calm down. I had to think. Beezle was missing. He could be lying hurt somewhere out of sight.

“Okay,” I said, tapping at Nathaniel’s arm and looking up at his stony face. He was probably pissed that my behavior had reflected poorly on him—again. “Okay. You can let me go now.”

“You are not going to do anything foolish?” he asked.

“Define ‘foolish,’” I said, and then shook my head at his look of puzzlement. “Sarcasm. Obviously not something you are familiar with. Anyway, no, I am not going to hang out the window and shout like the neighborhood crazy anymore.”

He released me slowly, like he wasn’t sure whether or not to believe me. I turned around and faced him.

“I need to find Beezle,” I said. I tried not to think of how alone I felt at this moment, with no Beezle and no Gabriel, because if I thought of that, I might cry, and the last thing I wanted to do was cry in front of Nathaniel. “You can head back to court.”