by S. M. Reine
“Masochism and a broken condom,” McIntyre said.
“Yeah, right. That.”
They both went in the bathroom and shut the door behind them. Elise held Debora away from her body, as though the baby was a grenade with the pin removed. The cannula wasn’t the only thing attached to the tiny infant. A feeding tube led into her mouth, too. It forced Elise to stand awkwardly beside the incubator.
“Take it,” Elise said. “Put it in the plastic cage thing.”
Anthony grinned. “Why? Scared of a preemie?”
“It feels like a marshmallow. I’m going to break it.”
“Aunt Graciela says babies are rubber, not glass,” he said. “Trust me, you can’t break her. Not even a preemie. I’ve dropped all of my cousins at least once and they’re still running around.” He angled himself behind her back so he could shift her arms into a more comfortable position. “Head in your elbow, arm under the butt—”
Elise grimaced at him. “She smells.”
“You can handle it. I have faith in you.” He circled his arms around her and made adjustments until it almost looked like she was comfortable holding the baby. It was like positioning a mannequin—she was completely rigid. He hugged Elise’s shoulders in one arm as he stroked a finger over the baby’s wrinkled fist. Debora’s face scrunched tighter in sleep. Her lips smacked.
He expected Elise to soften once they were cozy, but she remained stiff. How could she feel nothing toward such a helpless little creature? Why couldn’t she do anything normally?
“Okay. I held it. I’m done,” she said.
“Enjoy the moment.” Anthony’s voice had a slight edge. “You did a good thing. McIntyre is only here to see his daughter because of you. Don’t you feel proud?”
“The baby had nothing to do with it.”
“They seriously owe you for this. I know that if you were having a baby and I was arrested—”
“Anthony.”
“—it would mean a lot—”
“Anthony .” She stepped away from him and turned around. Even with the baby settled against her chest, she didn’t look like the kind of person who should be allowed to hold an infant. Her expression was pained. “I’m never going to have children. I can’t .”
It took a moment for her words to sink in.
I’m never going to have children.
Elise had told him that before, but he assumed it was just stubbornness talking. She had never said it was because she couldn’t.
“You... can’t?”
The bathroom door opened. McIntyre helped Leticia into bed again, and then took his baby from a grateful Elise. “Hey, beautiful,” he murmured at the wrinkled newborn.
Anthony felt numb.
“We need to get to the airport,” Elise said, composed once more.
“Thank you. For everything. We’ll come visit you and James once I’m back on my feet,” Leticia said. “Save some couch space for us. A lot of couch space, actually. Our family’s growing.”
Elise grimaced. “Yeah. Okay. We’ll do that.”
She shook hands with McIntyre somewhat stiffly. Leticia insisted on kissing Anthony’s cheek.
They left the hospital and didn’t talk all the way back to Reno.
There were three messages waiting on Elise’s answering service when they returned to Reno. The first was a rather optimistic update from James, who was letting her know that his flight would be late—not that she was planning on seeing him when he returned—and the second message was six seconds of silence, followed by a click.
The third message had been left just a few minutes earlier. Elise couldn’t understand the first thing the caller whispered, but what she did make out was chilling: “He’s back.” Neuma’s voice was muffled. Judging by the sound of rubbing cloth, the phone must have been in her pocket. “Please, Elise—he’s back. He’s got the club.”
And then it cut off.
Elise considered the phone in her hand. Neuma had known it was coming. She had asked for help, and Elise had refused. Her choice had left the casino and the gate beneath it exposed to attack.
Guilt wasn’t productive. She took a deep breath and went into the bedroom. Anthony dumped the contents of their backpack on the floor before tossing the empty bag in the closet. It was his idea of organization.
“Feel like beating up some demons?” Elise asked as she donned her spine sheath and twin falchions.
“You have no idea.” His words smoldered with unvoiced anger.
Since their new apartment was so close to Craven’s, Elise didn’t even bother concealing her weapons before going out. They jogged through an alley, took the back entrance to the casino, and sneaked downstairs.
Eloquent Blood was full for a Sunday night, but not because of partiers. There wasn’t a single human on the premises. The floor was packed with demons—every single one an employee of Craven’s, which was dark and empty upstairs. They cowered in a cluster on the dance floor.
Elise studied the situation from the spotlight scaffolding. There was an ugly demon on the stage, leather-skinned and clawed, and he wore a crown of iron spikes. It had to be Zohak.
Neuma stood beside him, eyes lowered, legs bloodied, and a tray of drinks in her hands. He had been snacking on her again.
“If I jumped to the next scaffold, I’d be in range for a clear shot,” Anthony whispered, pulling the shotgun from his scabbard.
It was tempting. But shooting the leader would leave the employees at the mercy of his minions, who were positioned around the room with blunt swords. Zohak’s legion was populated by hunch-backed creatures that would never pass for human. Elise recognized them as a breed of lesser fiend—not quite as strong or sturdy as the ones she had fought in the spring, but a little smarter, which made them a dozen times deadlier.
One of his fiends climbed on stage. It spoke in the demon tongue.
Zohak grabbed Neuma’s wrist. “They tell me there is no sign of the Night Hag in the Warrens,” he growled in a guttural, thickly-accented voice. He obviously hadn’t been on Earth for long.
“I told you, she’s out for the week,” Neuma said, her voice high and panicked. “She’s visiting the San Francisco territory.”
“But she has left behind no army. Not a single daimarachnid. I think you are lying to me, succubus.” He used her arm to jerk her down to his level. His rubbery lips were already stained with blood. “Lies make me hungry.”
Elise hurried across the scaffolds and silently dropped backstage, concealed behind heavy black drapes. Anthony followed.
A fiend was positioned to protect Zohak’s back, but it faced the wrong direction. She slipped behind it, slit its throat with a dagger, and dropped it off the back of the stage before anyone could hear the gurgles.
It left nothing between her and Zohak—nothing but the curtain and six feet of stage.
Elise drew one sword with her good hand, and glanced over her shoulder to make sure Anthony was in position. He jacked a round into the shotgun’s chamber.
Sometimes, it was important to make an impression.
She stepped from behind the curtains.
“Elise!” Neuma squealed, and the demon-king turned.
Before Zohak had a chance to react, Elise jumped. She knocked him to the stage and kneeled on his throat.
Someone in the crowd screamed with surprise. The fiends lifted their swords and stepped forward, but she pressed the point of one falchion to the demon-king’s chest. “Stop,” she said, and they froze. “Get out. All of you.”
“Or what?” Zohak asked.
She leaned more of her weight on his throat, and he gagged. “Or I will kill you and every one of your followers.” His eyes flashed with anger. She pressed harder, and the anger turned into a hint of panic.
He couldn’t speak to give orders, but he nodded and wiggled a finger. The fiends scattered.
Zohak kept gesturing. “I think he wants to talk,” Anthony said, standing at the edge of the stage with his shotgun aimed at
the nearest fiend.
She lifted her weight. Not much—not enough for him to break free—but to the point where he could gasp a breath of air. “Who in the seven hells are you?” Zohak squeezed out.
“I’m Elise,” she said. “And this is my city.”
Damnation Marked
Book Four
I
Mercy
A great Tree stood alone, isolated within a gray void. It was wider than a city and taller than the clouds in the sky, and a garden was trapped between its winding roots.
Bridges of white cobblestone led from one root to the next, and a silent stream frothed underneath. The Tree’s branches stretched into the endless expanse of nothing, glimmering with broad leaves and bioluminescent blossoms. Empty stairs wound along the outside with spikes buried in the aromatic bark for support, and one gold-skinned apple dangled from the highest branch—too high for anyone to reach. The rest had been carefully extricated from the dimension.
Even eternal flora required occasional tending, and their care fell somewhat ironically to Samael. His specialty was death and his preference was to avoid the garden completely, but he couldn’t stay away forever.
Samael passed through the gate, alighted on the plain, and folded his wings behind him. The feathered tips dragged along the grass like an overly long cloak.
As soon as he stepped away from the gate, its mighty humming was replaced by indomitable silence. He knew the stream was nearby, somewhere beyond the crumbling garden walls, but it did not babble. There was no wind through the branches, and no squirrels in the bushes. Nothing dared make a sound.
Samael sought the door into the garden. The entrance liked to move occasionally, and he walked around the gray stone wall for some time before finding it. He was careful to ignore the void behind him as he searched. Gray nothingness hung beyond the precipice of the roots, empty of stars or sunlight, and he did not want to see it again.
He located the door some minutes later. The garden’s entrance was twice his height and had no visible seam until he pressed his hands into the stone. It had been years since anyone had visited, so he had to tear away ivy to enter. The creepers curled around his hands, hungry for his warmth. He flicked them to the grass.
The marks on the bezel flared, and Samael entered.
Inside, the flowers were in full bloom. The river spilled cool water over its banks, as if filled with melted snow, and the grass was lush and springy beneath his bare toes.
He walked down a grassy path bordered by rosebushes, which reached for him with thorny fingers. Branches creaked softly as though muffled by fog. He paused to pinch a few of the buds off with his fingertips, and the roses sighed with relief.
Samael brushed his hands over each plant, occasionally stopping to stare at a weed jutting out of the earth. His gaze was death, but it took his hardest glare to kill those unwanted flora. They were black and thorny, born of ill thoughts and deeds, and they oozed ichor when snapped.
The air grew ever more silent and reverent as he spiraled inward, tracing the dark valleys and scaling the arching bridges toward the Tree. Samael tried to ignore the windows carved into the trunk as he passed, and continued to tidy the tangles of weeds and prune ambitious bushes.
He reached a platform built onto a low branch and stopped to strip creepers off the bark.
That was where he found the girl.
She didn’t acknowledge him at first, and he likewise tried to pretend he did not see her sitting on the gray stone bench overlooking the garden. Unlike the flowers, she didn’t need to be tended by Samael—someone else had that job. He was confident she would be well fed, groomed, and kept in perfect condition. All the children were, at first.
But her name and identity had been stripped away as soon as she had passed through the gate, and with them would have gone her mind. What remained of her consciousness would have been worn like rocks battered under a river of time. Samael had seen it happen a dozen times.
He kept his eyes down as he killed a sprig of thorns buried within the Tree’s bark, but he could not help but peek at the newest child as he worked.
This one was physically unlike the others. She was not fragile, nor doll-like. She had not been selected for her beauty. Her nose was a little too strong, her eyes a little too far apart, her freckles too numerous. Someone had brushed her hair out into a long, coppery sheet of curls down her back. The filmy white gown hid her figure beyond the hint of developing hips. She had been walking through the garden for years. Her eyes were empty.
But Samael was entranced by her—as he always was by the children and wives—and it was difficult to focus on his work.
He kneeled by a patch of growing weeds and dug his fingers into the bark. The weeds bled sticky purple and smelled of iron as he broke the stems, burning his fingers.
The girl rose from the bench, and Samael couldn’t resist the compulsion to look up.
Visions flitted around her head. The occasional flash of metal and a spill of crimson swirled through the child’s mind, and it gave him pause. Those were not ordinary thoughts for such a young girl.
He paused in the middle of his task to watch waking dreams flash over her.
She was thinking of murder. Demons. Hunters and prey and darkness.
He ducked his head and returned to weeding. Even with his eyes averted, he was acutely aware of her presence—she was electricity, magnetic and inviting, and his heart beat too fast in his chest.
Motion caught his attention. The girl lifted her hand to touch a branch. He saw the mark of their Lord on her palm first, and realized that she was holding something second.
A piece of apple.
Oh no.
He dropped the weeds and straightened. “Put that down.”
She turned her empty gaze on him. Her eyes were unfocused and white around the pupil.
She brought the slice of apple to her mouth, closed her broad lips over the fruit, and bit. Juice oozed down her chin and dripped onto her dress. The apple’s meat was gold, but it stained the cloth like blood.
Her jaw worked. The bite slid down her throat.
The child’s irises unfogged.
She had hazel eyes. God help him.
Intelligence appeared next, all too quickly. She must have been eating the fruit of the Tree for days for such a small bite to have such a drastic effect. How long had she been aware that she was in the garden? This was wrong, it was all wrong.
The child considered Samael, from his expansive wings to the hair that fell to his elbows. “Help me,” she said, breaking the muffled silence. It was not a plea. It was a demand.
She was radiant and fierce and filled with fire. Samael realized, with sudden surety, that someone had made a terrible mistake in sending her to the garden.
He glanced around to see if they were being watched. Their Lord was certainly there—He was always there —but omnipresence didn’t mean that He was always paying attention, especially in recent years. “You shouldn’t speak.” Samael’s soft words faded into the groans and creaks of the growing Tree.
He backed up as she approached him. Her steps were swift and sure, and his back bumped into the Tree.
Her hands gripped his sleeve. Blood smeared on white linen. “I can’t be here.” Her voice was like a fist clenching deep in his heart. “Have mercy.”
The word hung between them. Mercy.
Samael was torn between adoration and fear. He was her servant—they all were—and he couldn’t ignore the request. But their Lord would be furious that they had spoken, and helping the children was definitely forbidden.
All he could think to ask was, “Why?”
Her eyes blazed, as if the question were an insult.
“My name is Elise. I need to get home.”
He closed his eyes and shuddered. Elise. A name, she had a name. Such sweet sin. He loved her as soon as the word passed her lips, and Samael knew he was damned.
“Yes,” he whispered. “Of course.”
July 1998
Piotr Blodnieks did not look like he was the best at anything. He had a gentle smile, soft features, and a tiny beard under his bottom lip that resembled a paintbrush. His narrow shoulders and sharp joints made him appear awkward and gangly instead of lean and fast. At twenty-one years old, he hadn’t yet grown into his adult muscles.
Regardless of appearance, Piotr’s name was stamped on Hell’s history books as the greatest living kopis. He was best known for singlehandedly slaughtering a centuria of demons in the Ukraine. And nobody would ever know it by looking at him.
Nobody aside from the dozen kopides he had just beaten in a sparring match, anyway.
Hamengku groaned on the ground, cradling his shattered knee, while Piotr wiped blood off of his hands with a white towel. “Will he be okay?” he asked his friend, Malcolm, in Russian.
Malcolm helped Hamengku to the sidelines. “Oh, certainly, given a couple weeks of healing.” He switched to his native English. “Isn’t that right?” The loser glared at him without a hint of understanding in his eyes. Most people waiting around the fighting ring didn’t share a common language. “Right! No hard feelings, then? Who’s next?”
The kopides who had lost their sparring matches muttered amongst themselves. The other men only shifted uneasily.
Two weeks prior, they had all been summoned to an empty warehouse in Wales by a delegate from the Council of Dis. Over three hundred invitations were sent out, and thirty men arrived to compete for the line of succession. But no one could defeat Piotr. He was, in Malcolm’s words, “a bloody machine.” The Council’s delegate—a petite witch with curly brunette hair—had supervised the fight from her seat on a nearby crate, and she looked bored.
She wasn’t the only one who was getting antsy. The shared bravado rapidly dwindled as Piotr felled one kopis after another.
“Oh, fine. Let me try,” said a man named Brandon when his friend, Shawn, nudged him forward.
They cleared the floor again. Malcolm mopped up a puddle of sweat with a bloody towel, then stood back.