by S. M. Reine
Her hands stilled on the rope. “Has it been invaded by the darkness?”
“Not at all,” Nukha’il said, though he didn’t sound happy about it. “But I did find something interesting.” He hesitated, as though trying to choose his words. “It was a man. He was sitting on the gate’s dais when I arrived.”
Fear shocked through her. “A man? What was he doing there?”
“I don’t know. But he wants to speak with you.”
III
Fallen
January 2000
Something was killing babies. The disappearances could have passed for coincidence at first, but a pattern quickly became too distinct to deny: infants and small toddlers would vanish from their mothers’ beds at night, only to reappear weeks later, bloated and lifeless and miles from the places from which they had been taken.
The killer began in African villages and moved quickly. By the time the children’s bodies were discovered, the killer was already gone, leaving screams in its wake.
The kopis in Lesotho thought to cut open one of the bodies and was shocked to find it bloated by gas, without a single organ intact. Even the eyelids, when cut open, revealed empty pockets of air that reeked of brimstone.
Elise was passing through and heard about what was happening. It would have been hard not to—the entire countryside was in mourning. The cries could be heard for miles.
After questioning the local kopis—with the help of a friend who spoke a handful of English words—James extrapolated the pattern.
“The livestock dies first,” he explained as they walked the dusty road between villages. He had tied a cloth around his head to protect himself from the merciless sun, but his nose was peeling and crispy. “When there are no more pigs, one child disappears, and then a few more over the week. There is a lull for a couple of days. The locals find the bodies after that. It’s too late by then, of course, because the killer has moved on.”
Elise pondered this information. “Why pigs?”
“Don’t you think the question should be: why babies?”
“Everything eats babies.” She kicked a rock along the road with her boot. It skittered and danced over the dirt. “Maras. Ghouls. Lamias. Waiting to do it until there are no more pigs in town is the weird part.”
“We’ll have to agree to disagree on which part is weird, I think.”
“Fine, Mr. Doesn’t-Think-Babies-are-Dinner.”
He laughed. “I’ll stick to James. Thank you.”
Elise didn’t smile back. Her brow furrowed with thought as she gazed at distant Masai trees and the huge, leathery forms of the elephants milling beneath them. “Why pigs?”
“I have no clue, but given the pattern’s ongoing northward route, we’ll likely have a chance to see soon enough.”
He was right about one thing: the murders continued north very quickly. But they couldn’t seem to catch up. Every time they arrived in a new village, the residents were just finding the dead.
Suspicious eyes followed them as they hurried past farms empty of livestock. They didn’t need to understand the whispers to know that rumors of white demons were spreading in their wake. To the locals, their appearance after the deaths seemed too soon to be accident. To Elise, they were frustratingly late.
They were sleeping in a hostel a few weeks later when villagers arrived with guns.
That was when they decided that they were done with Africa.
Elise and James moved to France, which had been picked with the rigorous selection criteria of “soonest flight that doesn’t land in Africa.” She stayed in touch with the kopis in Lesotho with the help of her friend Lucas McIntyre, who had contact information for most kopides and had better luck finding a Bantu translator.
But the Sotho kopis had no more useful information. Pig farms were recovering, no more children were found as husks, and the killer’s trail had gone cold.
Despite renting a lovely apartment on the ocean, Elise soon began spending a lot of time in internet cafes.
“What do you hope to find?” James asked when she returned to their room one night. He was casting fresh wards on their balcony, which would render anything that approached their railing unconscious. There was already a seagull sleeping on the planter.
She kicked off her boots and stretched out on the couch with a stack of printed news articles. “Did you know that China has the highest population of pigs in the world?”
“Does this mean we’re making another trip to China?” He drew a chalk line over the doorway. “You know I’m not a fan of China—or that entire side of the continent.”
Neither of them were. They had mostly avoided East Asia since James had found her in Russia, just to be careful.
“Not Asia this time. Cairo recently had a big outbreak of disease on their pig farms. They lost thousands of heads.” Elise dropped a stack of pages on the side table. “Guess what infant mortality rates in Egypt are like this month?”
“If you know where the killer is right now, then why are we reading news articles?”
“Because it will already be gone by the time we get there. We have to know where it will be next. Before it arrives.”
James dropped his chalk and sat beside Elise. He flipped through the articles she had dropped. “You’re dedicating a lot of time to this.”
“Yeah. So?”
“So I don’t think I’ve seen you this interested in anything before. Does this killer sound familiar to you? Is this personal?”
Elise’s lips pinched together. “Look at this.” She showed him printouts from the bottom of her stack. The infants all had skin in mottled shades of brown and black. The bodies were tiny.
He studied the young kopis while she was distracted. It was easier than looking at the pictures.
Elise wasn’t sentimental; they had seen dead children in one of their very first investigations together, and she had been as bothered by it as she was by any other dead human—which was to say, not at all. Her face didn’t show any hint as to why these deaths were different.
Not for the first time, he wished he could pry open her skull and read her thoughts.
The seagull on their balcony woke up, took three dazed steps, and flew away.
“What will our next destination be?” James asked
She resumed reading. “I’m not sure yet. I’ll let you know in a couple of days.”
It turned out they didn’t have a couple of days. Pigs began dying in France that very night.
They took the train to a village in Brittany, where a farm’s entire stock had gone missing. The day was wet, gray, and miserable. James wandered the fields searching for footprints in the mud, while Elise tried to understand the farmer’s complaints through his thick regional accent.
It took an hour for her to rejoin James. Her face was pinched. “He didn’t hear anything. He didn’t see anything, he doesn’t fucking know anything. God, what an idiot.”
James gave her arm a brief, sympathetic squeeze before crouching by the fence again. He hiked up his pea coat so it wouldn’t drag in the mud. “See this?” Elise dropped beside him, leaning her shoulder into his. The wood had been burned. Yellow residue was left behind in a shape like two crescents. “Does that look like a cloven hoof to you?”
She tilted her head to the side. “Maybe one of the pigs fought back. Left a mark.”
“Or maybe our assailant has hooves.”
Elise scanned the edges of the farm as the wind whipped her scarf around her face. They were right outside a village, and there were no other farms with pigs for miles.
“We have to be on the streets tonight. It’s going to hunt.”
They took a room at a hostel. James napped through the afternoon while Elise kept watch on the street outside.
When night fell, they split up to search.
James walked through the darkness alone. A damp, heavy fog overtook the city, so he could see nothing beyond the next street corner.
There could have been anything in to
wn that night, and he wouldn’t have known. There was no way to distinguish if his feeling of unease was truly due to eyes on his back, or paranoia.
He didn’t come across a single person on the street, but at midnight, he heard a cry—a single, sharp noise that ended as quickly as it had pierced the night.
He spun on the spot, searching for the origin of the shriek, but saw nothing. He couldn’t even tell where it had come from. The fog muffled every noise. The glow from a single streetlight radiated hazy haloes into the night, undisturbed.
The night was utterly silent after that.
Elise and James met the next morning near the shore. She was wind-blown, quiet, and disappointed. “Nothing,” she said in a grim tone that told him that she had heard the cry, too. They walked back toward their hostel, taking the long route past the docks.
That was when they discovered the bodies.
James’s heart sped as he realized what he was seeing in the early morning fog—three tiny shapes, too small to be fully-grown pigs, and too small to be adult humans.
Infants.
“They didn’t try to hide the bodies,” Elise said, crouching by the closest husk. It must have been a newborn. Its legs were twisted and froglike, the skin on its fists was peeling, and its eyelids were sealed shut by dried yellow fluid.
James coughed wetly into his arm. He hadn’t vomited at the scene of an attack yet, but the sight of a dead baby brought the flavor of last night’s wine to the back of his throat.
The sound he had heard at midnight replayed in his mind over and over again. The sharp little yelp. A sound of such pain and fear.
“Good Lord,” he groaned.
Elise stroked a hand down the side of the baby’s unmoving face. Her brow furrowed. It wasn’t sadness in her gaze—not exactly—but something else he hadn’t seen before.
Then she reached behind her and drew one of the swords. Before James could stop her, she sliced the body open.
He lost his fight against the nausea. He ducked behind a shipping container, braced his hand on the metal, and vomited everything he had eaten for the last twelve hours onto the asphalt.
Elise didn’t listen the corpse as James emptied his stomach a few feet away. The air that had been trapped inside the carcass smelled like brimstone, but there was a strange undertone to it—something familiar.
She leaned her nose close to the body to get a good whiff.
“Now that is dedication,” someone said from behind her.
It was a man’s voice, but not James’s.
She spun on her knees, bringing up her sword, and it connected with metal. Her blade bit into the rebar and stuck.
The person standing behind her was surprisingly handsome, in that drunken football hooligan kind of way. He had bright eyes, a square face, and brown hair that stuck up in the back. His jacket bulged under the arm. He had a gun.
“See? I expected that. I’m learning.” He dislodged the rebar from her sword and dropped it.
It took Elise a moment to bring a name to mind. “Malcolm. Right?”
“Bless the gods, she remembers me. It was the kiss, wasn’t it? Couldn’t forget that, could you?”
“What do you want?”
“Oh, I can think of a few things.” Malcolm grinned, but it quickly faded. His eyes dropped to the body on the ground. He swallowed. “McIntyre called me. He said the French kopis died last month—I think by drowning. He asked if I felt like covering this territory. Good thing I agreed.”
“Good,” Elise said. “Right.”
James came around the shipping container. “Oh, great, it’s you. Just who I hoped we would run into never again.”
Malcolm took a few big steps back. “Ah, the guard. Don’t worry; I’m here for the same thing you are. Pig demon. Cloven hooves. Eats its kindred, then moves to the human babies, and then leaves.”
“It’s not a demon,” Elise said.
James inched around Malcolm to her side. His face was still very pale, and he wouldn’t look at the babies. “What makes you think that?”
Because it smelled like an angel.
She didn’t say that out loud. Maybe if Malcolm hadn’t been there, she would have shared her suspicion with James, but she didn’t trust the other kopis. It was impossible to trust someone who smiled and winked that much.
“I just know.” She sheathed her sword. It was going to need to be sharpened before she used it again anyway. “Check for tracks, James.”
The witch hesitated, glancing at Malcolm. “Very well.”
He headed down the docks, and Elise searched for a tarp. She found one covering a crate of fruit. Slicing the ropes free with her boot knife, she pulled the sheet over the three small bodies.
“How long has it been, Elise?” Malcolm asked, leaning his elbow on the fence. “A year? You certainly have… filled out.”
She faced him and crossed her arms tightly. “What are you doing?”
“What?” His eyes were wide and innocent.
“I’ve found three dead babies. I’m trying to figure out what killed them so I can stop it. What are you doing?”
“Well,” he said, sidling up to her, “this week, I’ve been hunting. Last night, I was searching. And right now, I’m hitting on you. I believe you still owe me a drink, miss.”
Elise glanced at James, who was walking up and down the docks in search of footprints. His pea coat fluttered around his knees like a cape.
“Maybe some other time,” she said.
After that discovery, James brooded in their apartment for hours. Elise took the time to sharpen the tiny dent the rebar had left in her falchion’s blade, smoothing it into a perfect arc once more.
A pig farm was attacked near Valenciennes the next day.
“We missed it,” James said dully, setting down the newspaper. “More children are going to die tonight.” She kneeled on the floor by the couch and touched his arm. He covered her fingers with his hand. “Why infants?” His voice was ragged.
Why pigs?
That was the real question. She was sure of it.
Elise leaned her head into his shoulder. “You should sleep.”
“We can’t lose any more time.”
“We won’t.” He glanced at her, and Elise gave him an innocent look. “Malcolm has already moved north.”
“And you trust him to take care of it?”
“I trust that he’ll move faster than we can, and that you need to get some sleep.”
Finally, reluctantly, James nodded.
As soon as he was unconscious and didn’t respond to his name, Elise wrapped her falchions in her jacket and took the train to Valenciennes.
She watched the country blur past her, mulling over infants and pigs and the slow move north. The smell of brimstone—not quite demonic—and the cloven hooves had set alarms ringing in her skull.
By the time she reached the city, night was falling again.
She didn’t go to investigate the farm where the pigs had died. She didn’t need to. Instead, she looked up.
Elise wandered the city all evening, searching for the sky and tracing the shapes of the buildings against the clouds with her eyes. Rain began to beat upon her, cold and harsh, but she didn’t don her coat.
She ducked under the awning of a shop for shelter while she considered her surroundings. The buildings around her were all low and old, sitting on the curves of wide streets. The train station was tall, but not tall enough. The city hall was impressive, too—but even though she had to crane her neck to see the top of the clock tower, it wasn’t tall enough, either.
A postcard in the shop’s window caught her attention. She ducked inside.
The photo was of a building with a tall spire with four tiers and grimacing grotesques. She flipped it over. Saint Cordon Church was not far, and it was apparently the tallest building in Valenciennes.
Of course.
Elise held the swords and jacket over her head as she ran the five blocks to Saint Cordon Church. It loomed
out of the darkness at the end of the street like a towering scion protecting the city.
The basilica was in poor condition—the grotesques were green and the stone was crumbling. The sign said it was closed, but the door was unlocked.
She eased inside. The stained glass windows were dim, but the cross on the altar was illuminated by a single light, a point of ghostly gold among the shadows.
Darting into the loft, she took the stairs two at a time and ascended into the tower. The sound of dripping rain echoed throughout the stairs.
Elise reached the first landing before she felt the presence.
Its energy was like walking face-first into a wall. It burned over her skin, twisted her stomach, and tasted like sulfur on the back of her tongue.
She had found him.
“I’m here,” she said to the empty room.
A shuffling noise responded from the level above.
She unwrapped the swords from her jacket and climbed higher.
It wasn’t until she had reached the top of the bell tower, with its open walls and weather-slicked floors, that she finally saw him. A dark shape crouched in the corner behind the bell. It made a huffing, wheezing noise that snorted through thin nostrils, and she realized it was crying.
A breeze sprayed her with rain as she stepped around the bell. “It’s me,” she said, holding out her hands to show that they were empty. “Don’t be afraid.”
It was too dim to make out the face as she approached, but she could see its curves silhouetted against the wall—the jagged beak, the patchy feathers, the goat-like legs. Through the darkness, she could see that the hooves were cloven.
The figure wheezed again. “Elise ?”
All it took was the name, and the reverence with which he said it, for Elise to know who was speaking.
She had suspected it would be an angel. She never would have dreamed that it could be Samael.
He inched forward so that she could see him in the dimming light of evening. Samael was no longer the beautiful, elegant angel that had freed Elise from His garden. His body was distorted. Wrinkled red flesh hung beneath his chin like a rooster’s wattle. His eyes sagged in their sockets. The bony stubs of what had once been marvelous wings twitched at his shoulders.