“What do you know about my powers? I could have unsuspected depth.”

“Right. You’ve never seen Ramuell. There’s no way your depths are that unsuspected.”

“I’m with you or you get nothing from me,” he said. “I could have you barred from the building if I wanted.”

He would do it, too, just to be a pain in the ass. I thought that Gabriel and I could probably let J.B. feel like he was involved and still keep him from the worst of it.

“Fine, let’s just get to it,” I said.

A couple of hours later the three of us were dusty and irritated and not a bit closer to finding Ramuell. We’d decided to narrow our search to the year that Katherine had died and the last six months. Gabriel and J.B. had split the files of the general populace and I had taken the Agents, which were in a different section. The records of each death were kept on typed index cards. The index cards were sorted by date and kept in long thin drawers, like the cards for the Dewey decimal system at the library—before libraries had gone digital. We each pulled several drawers from a cabinet and sat down at a table that would seat eight, and began the laborious process of flipping through each card.

We’d discovered that twelve Agents had died without showing a record of their choice, and there was no discernable pattern or link between them. None of the Agents was directly related. Ten of the deaths had occurred the year that Katherine had died. Patrick and one other Agent had died in the last six months.

“I don’t understand,” J.B. said. “If ten Agents in the Chicago area died without showing their choices, wouldn’t their supervisor have noticed?”

“Not every supervisor is as anal as you are,” I muttered.

“You know, Black, I am really sick of your attitude. You may think that paperwork is just a chore, but it is necessary to the functioning of this business,” J.B. snapped.

“Yes, because soul-collecting just couldn’t happen unless paperwork was filed afterward,” I said sweetly.

J.B.’s face turned red and he opened his mouth—no doubt to remind me of my place—when the building suddenly shook, like an earthquake had struck. The lamps swung crazily from side to side, the drawers of index cards shook from the table and plaster dust fell from the ceiling.

My chair tipped to one side and I landed heavily on my elbow, crying out in pain.

Gabriel was at my side in an instant, J.B. right behind him. They both manhandled me to my feet, Gabriel on the left side and J.B. on the right. Both of them patted me all over, looking for injuries.

“Get off, get off!” I shouted, and flapped my arms at them. They both stepped away.

“Are you all right?” Gabriel asked.

“Are you hurt?” J.B. asked.

“I’m fine,” I said, and wobbled a little as the ground shuddered again. Gabriel put his hand just above my elbow to steady me. I waved him away. “What the hell is going on?”

That was when the screaming started. We could hear it through the vents.

J.B. dashed into the hallway, Gabriel and I following. The Hall of Records was in the subbasement, two floors below ground level. The hall was filled with confused-looking Agents, the ones who worked on the thankless task of moving the Agency into the twenty-first century. These were the data processors who spent their working hours entering information from the file cards into a database. They looked like naked mole rats seeing the sun for the first time.

“What’s happening?” a woman asked as J.B. shot past her and into the stairwell.

The sounds of screams and snarls filled the air. Heating/ cooling vents lined the hallway, and they broadcast human agony as clearly as if it had been a P.A. system.

“Stay here,” I shouted, slowing long enough to make sure they understood. “All of you stay together and go into the Hall.”

The Hall had a steel-reinforced door and a coded entry system. It was one of the few rooms in the building with anything that resembled security. The Agency took the records of the dead very seriously.

Gabriel ran past me and followed J.B. The stairwell door banged into the wall as he threw it open, and then slammed shut with tremendous force.

“But what’s happening?” a man asked.

“I don’t know, but the important thing is that you stay safe and you stay together. Go into the Hall and lock the door, and don’t open it until I or J.B. Bennett comes back.”

“What if you don’t come back?” another woman asked.

“Then wait until the screaming stops,” I said, and ran to the stairwell.

17

THERE WAS NO SIGN OF GABRIEL OR J.B. THE STAIRWELL was eerily quiet—there were no vents. My boots echoed as I pounded up the two flights of steps and threw the door open at the first-floor lobby.

Hell awaited me.

The carnage was nearly too much to process. Everywhere I looked there were bodies of Agents, dozens of them, most of them in pieces. Blood had been spattered on the floor, on the walls and on the ceiling—the air was filled with the tang of it. This was death at its ugliest, its most undignified. I covered my mouth and nose with my sleeve so that I wouldn’t throw up.

The bodies of the receptionist and security guard were slumped over the front desk. There was nothing left of the guard but his torso and a few dangling entrails. His uniform appeared to be torn by the teeth of something very large.

The receptionist had fared a little better. Only her head was missing.

I shivered and realized that there was a big gaping crater where the front door and part of the exterior wall used to be. Chunks of glass and cement appeared to have been thrown inside the lobby from some kind of explosive impact. That must have been what shook the building when we were in the basement.