I found a heavy blue Cubs sweatshirt and pulled it over my head. Gabriel watched all this with a bemused expression on his face.

“Are you cold?” he asked.

“Yes,” I said shortly, and headed into the kitchen, flipping on lights as I went. The overhead glare nearly blinded me but I plowed forward. I sensed rather than heard Gabriel following me, a dark shadow in his omnipresent overcoat.

“What are you doing?”

“Making cocoa,” I said, pulling out two cups and a pan. I grabbed the milk out of the fridge and poured it in the pan, and then set the pan on the stove.

“Madeline, you need to sleep. Your body needs to rebuild itself. You used too much magic on Ramuell. When I awoke I found you nearly dead. Your life force had dwindled to nothing. When I tried to heal you, it was like touching the fluttering wings of a moth,” he said, and I thought his voice trembled a little. I turned to look at him, but his face was as impassive as ever.

“Thank you,” I said, looking at him steadily. “Thank you for saving my life, again. But I don’t want to sleep anymore. I feel like I want to get out and run a few laps, actually.”

He frowned at that. “My healing should not have restored you so quickly. You have only been sleeping a few hours.”

I held my hands up in an I-don’t-know gesture. “And I feel a little nauseous.”

“That is a common side effect of overuse of magic. You have thrown your body out of balance and you may feel a little sick until the balance is restored. But you should not feel so energetic.”

I stirred the milk on the stove, watching the heat carefully so that the milk didn’t curdle or boil. I voiced a concern that had been troubling me for some time. “Gabriel, I don’t understand the magic that’s inside me. When I have tried to use it in the past as an Agent, I felt like my magic came only reluctantly and with great exertion on my part. But now it seems like it wants to leap out of me. Earlier today, with Ramuell, it came pouring out of me and I couldn’t control it. I don’t understand what happened at the end at all.”

“At the end?”

I tested the milk with my finger. It was hot enough for cocoa but not so hot that it would scald. I poured two packets of instant mix into the cups and added the milk. I opened a cabinet and began rooting around for the mini-marshmallows.

“After you were knocked out, Ramuell got ahold of me. My magic was pretty tapped out at that point, and he was doing his evil villain thing, telling me horrible things to make me even more upset before he ate me.” I found the bag of marshmallows and added generous amounts to both cups.

“One does not generally refer to the threats of a nephilim as an ‘evil villain thing,’ ” Gabriel said dryly as I handed him one of the cups.

I waved my hand at him to indicate that he should follow as I went into the living room, turning on more lights. I curled up in my favorite chair and pulled a crocheted blanket over my legs. I wasn’t tired, but I was very cold, cold in my core, like I’d been out running in freezing rain.

“Anyway,” I said, dismissing his commentary, “Ramuell was threatening me, and I thought I was going to die. And then all of a sudden, some kind of force came out of me.”

“A . . . force? What kind of force?”

It sounded really goofy when Gabriel repeated it in that dry-as-dust tone. “I had no magic, and then all of a sudden I felt something enormous surge out of me, like a bomb going off. There was this burst of white light that sort of burned through me and out through my skin. Ramuell dropped me, and when I looked up at him I saw that whatever had come out of me had melted away his skin.”

The look of astonishment on Gabriel’s face would have been hilarious if it wasn’t so terrifying. Whatever I had done, it was clearly something Gabriel had never seen before, and that frightened me. I did not want to be any freakier than I already was.

“This is not good, is it?” I asked. My hands trembled and a little cocoa spilled from my cup onto the blanket.

“It is unexpected,” Gabriel said.

“A very careful answer.”

“I am not sure what to say to you. From the beginning, there have been events surrounding you that I did not expect.”

“Such as my vision of Evangeline?”

“Yes. And now this power that can harm the nephilim. As I have told you before, it took the power of every one of the fallen to bind the nephilim. The strength and invulnerability of these creatures is legendary. For you to manifest a power that can do such damage to them is unheard of, especially since you are part human. I wonder ...” Gabriel trailed off, looking thoughtful.

“You wonder what?” I asked.

“Perhaps your mother was not simply an Agent,” Gabriel said. “Perhaps she had some other supernatural lineage in her blood that she passed to you, and that mixed with your father’s power in a way that we have not seen before.”

The idea disturbed me, not least because it would mean that my mother had kept yet another secret from me. But there was one creature living who would know the truth. I pushed the blanket off my lap and went to the front window. Sure enough, Beezle was crouched just below the sill, listening to my conversation with Gabriel. He gave a guilty little start when I appeared at the window. I lifted the screen and crooked my finger at him. He flew into the room, scowling at both of us, and perched on the arm of my chair.

“I didn’t know of any magic in Katherine’s blood other than her powers as an Agent,” he said immediately. Then his face took on a hangdog expression. “You made hot chocolate without me?”