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barked into the receiver. “What’s the point of having a phone if you never pick it up?”
    “So sorry. I was busy battling the vampire menace taking over the city,” I said dryly.
    “I know where you were,” J.B. said. “I saw you, and so did everyone else in Chicago with a television set. You and Jude and Nathaniel and Samiel.”
    “We were on the news,” I said, dread filling me. This was not good.
    “Goddamn right you were on the news. And you’d better be more careful from now on. Half the reporters have decided you’ve been sent from heaven to save humanity from the plague of vampires, and the other half have declared you should be shot in the street with all the other monsters,” J.B. said. “I’ve got to go. It’s total chaos here. The whole Agency is in lockdown mode.”
    “Wait,” I said. “Can you tell me if Chloe and the other Agents we saved from Azazel are still at Northwestern?”
    “Yeah, the Agency hasn’t had time to move them with everything else going on. We can’t even come close tokeeping up with the new souls. The board is diverting Agents from other regions to help. Wait—why do you want to know about Chloe?” J.B. asked warily.
    “Samiel wants her with us,” I said shortly. “Why doesn’t the Agency put together an army to fight the vamps instead of struggling to clean up the mess?”
    “You know the answer to that,” J.B. said.
    “If the Agency doesn’t get off their ass and do something, there won’t be any souls left to collect in this city.”
    “You don’t have to tell me that,” he said. “But I’m not exactly a trustworthy figure around here anymore. No one in upper management is going to listen to me.”
    “You spend too much time with me.”
    “That’s the way I like it,” he said. “I’ll call you later. My mother is outside the window doing her best banshee impression.”
    “I thought you had devised some spell to keep Amarantha away from you,” I said.
    J.B.’s mother had been a faerie queen of her own court before I’d killed her. Unlike most creatures, she had chosen not the Door but an existence as a ghost. I think she did it just to piss off me and J.B.
    “The spell will keep her out of the Agency and out of my home, but it won’t stop her from hanging around outside and driving me crazy. Try not to burn down the hospital.”
    He hung up before I could respond.
    “Why does everyone think I’m going to destroy a building as soon as I walk into it?” I asked Samiel.
    Your track record speaks for itself.
    “But those were accidents,” I protested.
    Most people don’t have those kinds of accidents more than once.
    “Most people don’t have supernatural enemies trying to kill them every second of the day, either,” I said, standing up cautiously.
    The shower and the food had gone a long way toward making me feel human. I felt better equipped to fight another horde of vampires, although with any luck I wouldn’t have to.
    The barricades were north of the bridges that crossed the Chicago River. I didn’t know how long city authorities would be able to contain the vamps in that area once the monsters ran through their food supply.
    Of course, they would likely be evacuating most of the Loop and Michigan Avenue soon. And if they moved the patients at the hospital, we would have a lot of trouble finding Chloe.
    “She’s probably safer away from me, anyway,” I muttered. The sad fact of my life was that the low mortality rate of my companions was more luck than anything else. Since Gabriel had died I’d been braced for impact, waiting for the next, inevitable loss.
    What was that? Samiel signed. You have to look at me when you’re talking or else I can’t read your lips.
    “Nothing,” I said. “Let’s go get Chloe.”

2
    NATHANIEL HAD PREDICTABLY ARGUED AGAINST REMOVING Chloe from the hospital.
    “She’s safe enough there, and it’s an unnecessary risk for you,” he’d said.
    But Jude had come down firmly on my side, and