by S. M. Reine
“How’s that feel?” he asked, still too cheerfully. Elise didn’t respond, and he went on as though he had expected as much. “Fantastic! That should do well enough. Might want to heal yourself up first chance you get, though. Are you a healing witch? Well, find one who is.” Frank gave Elise a friendly punch on the shoulder, and she scowled.
The tent flap opened again. Zettel carried a pair of folding chairs under his arm, which he set up in the middle of the tent. “Sit, Mr. McIntyre.” Anthony obeyed, but Elise made no move. Zettel folded his arms across his chest. It was a difficult pose; his muscles were so thick that they couldn’t have rested flat at his sides, either. “Has your partner’s hand been satisfactorily addressed?”
“Yeah. I think so.”
“Frank, take Mrs. McIntyre outside. Allyson’s waiting to interview her.” As soon as Elise and the self-proclaimed everyman had left, Zettel straddled the other chair. “Are you familiar with the Union of Kopides and Aspides?”
“I kind of think I am now, yeah.”
The commander ignored his response. “We’re an international corporation that trains, organizes, and funds partnerships such as yours. Thanks to private investors, we’re in the process of building a worldwide army that stands on the front lines of the war against Heaven and Hell. Are you familiar with the dangers both pose against humans?”
Anthony tried to decide if that was a trick question. He took a little too long to say, “Sure.”
“Things are sorely out of balance for the humans. One of the Union’s primary missions is to stop in-fighting amongst humans—kopides, aspides, and anyone else with special talents. We have to unite to focus our energies. Take up the sword and shield to defend ourselves.” He focused fully on Anthony. “Did you have an old rivalry with Michele Newcomb?”
“Uh, no.”
“Then why did you kill her?”
“I’ve never even met her.”
Zettel frowned. “You’re lying.”
“Yeah. Right. I am lying to a man who could shoot me dead on the spot.” Anthony rolled his eyes. “That’s a smart idea.”
“Why don’t you have any identification in your luggage?”
“You got in my luggage?”
“How long have you been married?” Zettel asked instead of responding.
Anthony’s pulse accelerated. Oh, hell. Allyson was probably asking Elise the same thing. When had they started dating? May? “Just about four months.”
“Newlyweds. Congrats. What year were you born?”
“Why the hell do you care?”
Zettel unfolded his arms, cracked his knuckles. Even though he had a schooled, east-coast accent, he still gave the physical impression of being a very smart gorilla with a crew cut. “Belligerence didn’t treat your wife very well. There are dozens of Union operatives arrayed throughout this base, and all of them are armed.”
“I’ve never even heard of Michele Newcomb. You can ask all the questions you want and that won’t change.”
“This can take all day if it needs to,” Zettel said. “All week.”
“Are you listening to a single thing I say?”
Judging by the commander’s expression, Anthony was ninety-nine percent sure that Zettel didn’t believe a thing he was saying. “She’s aggressive for an aspis,” he went on.
Anthony had to laugh at that. “She would be aggressive for a coked-out cage fighter.”
“You claim you don’t know Michele Newcomb. Would it be possible, then, for you to make any guesses as to why she might have had your name on her travel request?”
“You said she was a recruiter, right? Maybe she wanted to recruit us. How the hell am I supposed to guess at a stranger’s motivations?”
Zettel stared at him. Anthony responded in kind.
After a lengthy two minutes, which felt more like two hours, Zettel spoke into his phone. “You done yet? Bring her back in here.” Allyson escorted Elise back into the tent. She didn’t look like any new bones were broken, but she didn’t look happy, either.
“How long have they been married?” Allyson asked.
Zettel smirked. “Four months.” They both laughed.
So was that it? Had Elise given the wrong answer? Were they about to get shot and left to bleed out in the desert? Anthony couldn’t even find it in himself to panic beyond a slight hiccup of worry. Fear wasn’t nearly as heavy as the misery he had been carrying for weeks. It was actually a refreshing change.
But nobody drew a gun. Zettel stood.
“You both understand, this is an important summit. More important than any before. Not only are we dealing with a critical issue, this is the Union’s first move to provide some desperately needed organization to the United States. We can’t risk this going FUBAR. You got me?”
Elise glowered.
The commander strode to the flap and lifted it open.
“The first meeting is in an hour. I’ll expect to see you both there,” Zettel said. “We’ll be in contact.”
“You’re letting us go?” Anthony asked, but Elise was already grabbing his arm to haul him outside. The top of his head immediately stung from the sunlight.
“See you around,” Allyson said.
Elise shot the Union members a cold look. “Yes. You will.”
7
The Union dropped Elise and Anthony off at the edge of town. He waited until the black SUV headed back to camp before speaking.
“Seriously, screw those guys,” Anthony said. Elise slowly, carefully, tried to flex the fingers on her broken hand, but it was too painful. Her weekend was not off to a good start. “You know this is a trap, right? They know we’re lying. They’ve only let us go so they can mess with us later.”
“Exactly. That’s why I’m going back to Las Vegas.”
Anthony blinked in surprise. “You can’t be running away.”
“I’m not. I need answers, and the only person who might have them is McIntyre. And I’m not going to wait to see what the Union will do to us next.”
“He’s going to be busy with his wife, don’t you think?” Anthony asked, frowning.
“They broke my hand,” she growled, shaking her bandaged fist at him. “I’m going to break the other one on his face if he knew that we were going to deal with murder charges.”
He pushed her wrist down—gently. “Okay, fine. Let’s go.”
“You’re not coming. You have to attend the meetings and do your duty as kopis.”
“But I’m not—”
“Shh.” She put her unbroken hand over his mouth and glanced around. They were on an empty street corner. The only person she could see was another hot, exhausted kopis dragging himself toward the high school gym. But just because nobody was watching didn’t mean they weren’t listening.
He whispered into her ear. “I don’t know anything about... anything .”
“You know something about this. Trust me. There’s only one issue on the agenda—a violated quarantine on an ethereal dimension,” Elise said. Anthony stared at her blankly. “Because someone opened a gate.”
Realization dawned. “Oh. Oh . That’s bad.”
“At the meeting today, they will discuss who needs to be responsible for guarding the gates. The Union will make a case for it being their job and insist on stationing a unit or six in Reno. I don’t want those assholes anywhere near the gate. You need to insist that the local overlord guard the gate instead.”
“But you killed her.” He lowered his voice. “The Night Hag is dead.”
“That doesn’t matter.”
“It kind of matters a lot,” Anthony said. “I can’t face down some crazy organization on my own. Especially not with angels and demons and God only knows—”
She cut him off with a hand on his chest. “Just do it. This is important.”
“Then you do it!”
“I’m not going to argue with you. I’m taking care of McIntyre. You take care of the gate. Got it?”
She walked away.
&n
bsp; “Elise,” he said. When she didn’t turn around, he repeated louder, “Elise!”
“Leticia,” she shot back over her shoulder.
Elise ducked into the gas station before heading out. She soaked her button-up shirt in the sink and wrapped it around her hair. Then she walked out of town, past the trailers, beyond the “Welcome to Silver Wells, Land of Plenty!” sign, and hiked up the hill to the abandoned the car. Her shirt was soaked with sweat by the time she reached it.
Elise opened the car, grimaced at the blast of hot air, and used the open door to push it onto the road. Only one of her arms was any good, so she leaned her shoulder against the metal. It burned through her shirt.
She pushed it about a quarter mile before getting behind the wheel. Elise turned the key. The engine groaned as the dashboard flickered to life.
The drive to Las Vegas left her plenty of time to stew in anger. After all those years of teaming up with McIntyre—after they had taken down a whole legion together—and he had walked her straight into a trap. Elise didn’t trust many people, but she had trusted McIntyre. It was a mistake she wouldn’t make again.
Are you okay?
James’s voice was tentative in the back of her skull. She tightened her good hand on the steering wheel and tried to focus on the long, flat road in front of her. “I’m fine,” she told the horizon.
You’re in pain.
“We’ll talk about it later.”
His presence faded again. Very well.
She almost wished he wouldn’t go. It was a long drive from Silver Wells to the hospital, and the company would have been nice. But James hadn’t been good company lately—they had barely spoken since Betty died.
The sun was high in the sky when she parked in the hospital parking garage. Elise found McIntyre in the third floor hallway. He had taken a chair in the corner and stretched out with his eyes shut. He appeared to be asleep, but she knew he wasn’t—kopides weren’t wired to sleep in public areas.
“What do you want?” he asked when she approached, voice gravelly with fatigue. He had been unkempt the day before, but after the stress of his morning, he looked downright indigent.
“Who is Michele Newcomb?” she asked. He paled, ducked his head, and scrubbed a hand over his jaw without responding. “As soon as I arrived in Silver Wells, I got arrested by the Union for murder. Apparently, Lucas McIntyre was the last person to see her alive.”
“I don’t know what you—”
She dropped her voice to a growl. “Give me one good reason to keep up this idiotic charade. One reason. I’ve dropped everything to help you keep your territory, and I find myself accused of murder ?”
McIntyre waited for a nurse to shuffle past with a cart before responding. “We can’t talk about it here. Listen—they’re going to do a c-section tomorrow if this induction doesn’t work, and—”
“I don’t care if your wife is getting lobotomized tomorrow. Did you kill Michele Newcomb?” Elise leaned forward with her elbows on her knees. She held a hidden blade against her arm, and his gaze dropped to the glint of silver.
McIntyre swallowed hard. “Let’s walk. Cafeteria’s downstairs. Hungry?”
“No.”
“I am.”
She tailed him to the cafeteria without putting the knife away. Walking beside another kopis was always a weird dance—two paranoid people trying to keep the other in their sights.
The cafeteria was a gray, unpleasant place built of linoleum and concrete. McIntyre piled a plate high with stale pizza and joined Elise at one of the tables. He dropped a cup of coffee in front of her. She didn’t touch it.
“You recognized her name,” she said. “You reacted when I said it.”
“Michele Newcomb’s some Union recruiter. She was the one sending enlistment materials before the summit.” McIntyre dug into his food.
“They found her car a few miles away from your trailer.”
He slowly chewed his pizza. Elise wished that James were there—he would have been able to read that strange expression on McIntyre’s face and know what it meant. Other peoples’ body language meant little to her; it was a foreign language she didn’t speak. He could have been admitting guilt with that frown, and she would never have been able to tell.
“There are a lot of demons around for the summit,” he finally said. “Anyone could have killed her. What happened to your hand?”
Elise held it up. Just acknowledging the break was enough to make it start hurting again. “The arrest wasn’t gentle.”
He swallowed like the pizza was a rock and grimaced. “I figured the Union would be a pain in the ass. They always are. I didn’t think they’d break your hand.”
She emptied her coffee in one gulp. “If I find out you knew more than you’re letting on, I’m going to come visit you again. And it won’t be a little talk over lunch.” Elise dropped the cup on the table. “If I find out that you killed Michele Newcomb, I will give you to the Union.”
McIntyre wiped his mouth on a napkin. His lips drew into a frown. “Would you? Really?”
Elise really, really wished she could read his facial expression.
She dropped her eyes to the empty cup. “Come on, Lucas. Cut me a break. You are telling me the truth, right?”
His nod was slow. He didn’t look at her when he did it.
She shoved her chair back and left the hospital.
8
The first meeting was held below an abandoned silver mill outside town. It stood on the side of a hill with shattered windows and exposed beams where the cement had crumbled away.
The Union bused kopides from Silver Wells to the site, and it took three large vans to do it. Anthony was assigned to a twelve-seater next to a man with red-brown skin and a big grin. “This is very exciting,” said the kopis with a thick accent that Anthony didn’t recognize. “All this open space. Isn’t it marvelous?”
There was yellow emptiness outside the window as far as Anthony could see. The van’s air conditioning wasn’t powerful enough to reach the back seats, so he was drenched in sweat. “Marvelous. Yeah.”
The other man stuck out a hand. “I’m Ramelan. What’s your name?”
They shook hands. “Lucas McIntyre,” Anthony said with only a slight stutter. “Where are you from?”
“A village called Gobang in Indonesia. It’s nothing like this.” Ramelan’s teeth were very white against his dark skin. “Our villages are full of rice farms and fishing, and not nearly so vast. I have never seen anything like it.”
“Guess you don’t get around a lot.”
“Oh, I’ve been many places,” he said. “But not on Earth.”
Where could a kopis go that wasn’t on Earth? The only options that came to mind were Heaven and Hell, and that was subject matter he preferred to avoid. It was a weird enough pronouncement that Anthony decided not to ask about it.
Ramelan turned to another kopis—a young man with brown hair and a big nose—and they talked for the rest of the ride to the silver mill.
The Union lined everyone up outside the building before letting them enter the elevator in groups. Ramelan was in the same group as Anthony. He was extremely bright and outgoing, and Anthony wished he would go away. Elise must have been rubbing off on him.
A Union witch closed the elevator’s cage and pressed a button. They descended into the mines.
The mill looked abandoned, but the elevator was well-oiled and smooth. They dropped beyond several shafts that had been encased in solid concrete and kept dropping. Anthony lost count of how many levels they passed around eight or nine. Somewhere beyond that—where the air began to grow hot again, and they had to pump cold air in to keep it breathable—they reached a shaft like every other, and the elevator stopped.
Another Union witch opened the door. The men piled out.
In Reno, the demons inhabited gold mines that had been abandoned in centuries past, so they were filled with exposed wood and crumbling rock. The silver mine was much more recent. The
towering machinery was plated with steel, and the offices they passed even had beige computers from the nineties.
There was less cement so deep underground. The walls were raw stone supported with steel I-beams. The kopides were led to a dark, cavernous room with a rock tumbler, where three separate seating areas had been arranged among the machines. Their footsteps echoed off the walls as they moved to take chairs.
Anthony hung back to let the other men select their seats. The front row was marked by “reserved” signs, but he wanted to snag a spot there. If he was going to have to speak up during the meeting—a wholly petrifying idea—then he wanted to be somewhere prominent.
Fortunately, Ramelan saved him from having to pick a spot. “Nervous?” the kopis asked cheerfully. “You can sit with me!” And he took a seat in one of the reserved chairs. It left Anthony next to the Union’s desk, which was elevated on a platform. A huge pump whirred behind it, sending water sloshing through overhead pipes.
He leaned around to see who was up there, and a chill rolled down his spine. Zettel and his aspis, Allyson, were already positioned above everybody else. There were a few other people there, too—the red-haired man named Boyd, a petite woman with silver rings on every finger, and a Black boy who couldn’t have been older than sixteen.
“I’ve been excited about this summit for months,” Ramelan confessed, drawing his attention away from the Union. “I expect to meet so many interesting people. Demons, I see demons all the time—in fact, I just had lunch with Aquiel last week—but I seldom meet other kopides.”
Anthony was too nervous to respond. His hands shook.
After all of the kopides occupied the seats around him, the demons started to file in. They came from the opposite direction as the humans, as though they approached from deeper within the mines. A few passed for human, superficially, but Anthony would never mistake them for anything but demonic. He had run into enough nightmares and incubi to recognize that luminous skin and black hair.
Only a half dozen of them emerged and sat in the front row of their section. Considering the most powerful demons were supposed to be invited to the summit, they looked pretty innocuous. None of them even gave Anthony a headache.