Hell's Hinges

by S. M. Reine

  “Each time I killed another Remnant of Ereshkigal, I took more of the power for myself. I am the only one that remains. I am Ereshkigal.” The mouth opened wide. Oily venom oozed from the long white fangs. Lincoln could see all the way down this creature’s throat to an endless pit filled with seething souls. “And you shouldn’t exist.”

  It reared back to bite Lincoln—but the snap never came.

  The hands released Lincoln.

  He tumbled back into the water, shocked by the cold. He came up gasping. He swung around to see why Ereshkigal hadn’t killed him. The Remnant looked again like Elise’s demon form—nothing more than a lone woman draped with infernal power—but there was something much more shocking behind it.

  Elise had her arm wrapped around the demon’s throat.

  Human Elise. Auburn-haired, freckled, and looking as furious as a one-legged man at an ass-kicking contest.

  “Run,” she growled to Lincoln.

  He tried, but shadowy eels slithered through the water, and he got colder as they drew closer. Cold made him clumsy. His feet slid on the rocks, and Elise shouted behind him. He couldn’t tell which version. The sounds were mixed up in his head, just like the swirling forest was mixed up into a monochrome blur.

  Shadow brushed his jeans. He’d have thought the darkness spreading over the cloth was because it was damp, but that couldn’t be right—he was already soaked through.

  The darkness had stained him.

  And it was spreading.

  He flung himself to the shore, scrambling up the pine needles. The shadow didn’t drip off of him the way lake water did. It just kept growing.

  Don’t let it touch you.

  Lincoln shouted as he kicked off his jeans. They were getting hard and crunchy near the bottom. He scrambled to his feet, heart pounding in his throat, and watched to see if the shadow would expand over the ground once the jeans were devoured.

  It didn’t spread further.

  Another scream broke the air, but when he turned, he saw the human version of Elise alone on the rocks. Her hair had come out of its braid. Her bare arms were scuffed and bleeding, and her fist was clutched around a heavy rock. She tossed it aside at the sight of him.

  The mist began dissipating. The demon was gone, and so was Ereshkigal’s shadow.

  “Start talking,” Elise said.

  The walk to the cabins felt longer than the walk to the lake, maybe because Lincoln wanted it to take a long time. He was finally alone with Elise. She seemed uninjured from her fight against Ereshkigal. Lincoln couldn’t fathom it. Even if she would one day be the Godslayer, she was, for the time being, an underdeveloped female kopis in retirement. Yet she walked away with barely a limp.

  Her fingers traveled through her curls as she walked, retying her braid so that it twisted from over her left eyebrow around her skull to the right shoulder. “Start talking,” Elise said.

  He’d given it so much thought, but he still didn’t have an elegant way to get started introducing himself. “I’ve been looking for you. I know who you are, and I need your help.”

  “Who am I?” she asked.

  “Godslayer,” he said.

  Elise stopped walking. “Don’t say that out loud. What the fuck is wrong with you?” Her hands had fallen from her hair, balling into fists corded with veins and tendons. Her knuckles were a mass of scar tissue. She looked like she wanted to make him eat those fists.

  The name ‘Godslayer’ had been thrown around freely in the future. It hadn’t occurred to him there was a time she’d feared hearing it. “Sorry, I wasn’t trying to say nothing. I’m not here to hurt you, or blow your retirement, or—”

  “How do you know about me?”

  He cast his mind around for a reason that a man in dire need might have been referred to Elise. “It’s because of McIntyre. Lucas McIntyre.” The man had come up a few times around the werewolf sanctuary. He’d been a well-connected kopis who knew most of their ilk, and he hoped like hell that McIntyre and Elise had known each other by 2006.

  “Did he say this is to repay my debt after the fight in Guatemala?” she asked.

  “Yeah,” Lincoln guessed, relieved.

  “Fuck me.” Elise paced between trees. She continued braiding her hair faster than ever. “He better have sent you my way for a good reason.”

  “My friend is missing. It’s important that I find her, and fast. Sophie’s somewhere out there and—”

  “And McIntyre blew my cover calling in his favor. This is bullshit!”

  “I won’t tell anyone who you are or where you are,” Lincoln said. “My friend—Sophie—”

  “Girlfriend?” Elise interrupted.

  “No, just a friend.”

  “Good. Because if you’re cheating on this Sophie with Betty, I’m not helping you find her.”

  The idea was laughable. Sophie and Lincoln were, on the best of days, people who worked together. Friendship was still on the distant horizon, no matter what Lincoln felt about her. And the idea he could cheat on someone who thought he was a moron drew the most mirthless laugh from him. “That’s a real arbitrary line to draw.”

  “Yeah, but it’s mine,” Elise said. “What happened to Sophie?”

  “A witch cast a spell that was meant to move us through time,” Lincoln said. “She lost control of the magic or...something.” Fate, destiny, whatever. “When Sophie and I reappeared, we were separated. But I figure she can’t be far, right?”

  “You’re a friend of the Traveler’s,” Elise said. It wasn’t a question.

  “You know her?”

  “It,” she said. “It’s not a her or a him. It’s the Traveler. Of course I know the Traveler. My question is, how do you know both McIntyre and the Traveler, and I’ve never heard of you?”

  You will.

  His mouth was dry.

  “Can you help me?” he asked.

  Elise surveyed him. He felt a damn fool limping around with the Godslayer in damp boxers and a tee. “Fine,” she said, continuing her walk toward the campground. “Yes. I’ll help you find your friend. I’ll talk to James about leaving King’s Beach early.”

  He stopped in his tracks. “Don’t tell James about me yet. I don’t want him to know that I’m not just Betty’s date.”

  Elise folded her arms. “Why?”

  Because he’s not your friend. He’s using you.

  “It’s complicated,” he said.

  She considered this for a long time, and he wished that he could have reached into her head to figure out what she thought. The tilt of her eyebrows always made her look angry. The downturn to her lips may not have been an actual frown. Her shoulders were always tense like that.

  “Don’t tell him,” Lincoln said again.

  Finally, Elise nodded.

  10

  I t had been years since James had been with the White Ash Coven, and he seldom missed it anymore. There were times that he felt pangs of longing for a more serious coven, and even more times when he missed the people who used to matter to him, his dead aunt, his estranged girlfriend. But he never felt homesick without them. His home was with Elise now, in the dance studio they owned together.

  When he performed the esbat with his new coven, he almost forgot that he’d walked away from his family. He closed his eyes to stand in the eye of power and felt like he still had a universe at his fingertips and every whim met with a snap of his fingers.

  When he opened his eyes to see himself surrounded by the likes of Betty and Morrighan, hurt crashed over him. The beauty of nightfall over Lake Tahoe only made him ache for the Rockies more painfully. He was not casting magic to change the universe, but affirming the coven’s innate bond with the world, leaving a footprint so small that it could be blown away in a sigh.

  “So mote it be,” James said.

  The coven echoed him. “So mote it be.”

  Those words made the tension within the circle collapse into laughter. Windsong and Phoenixfire embraced. Betty gave a whoop like she
was at a sports game. James scrubbed the circle with his toe and it broke open. Power washed into Lake Tahoe with a sapphire shimmer.

  Elise emerged from the forest on the other side. She approached James at a brisk clip—not hurrying, exactly, but wasting no time.

  “Where have you been?” James asked.

  “Lincoln came here looking for us,” she said breathlessly. “Specifically, he was looking for me.”

  Then it was as bad as they’d feared. “We should talk privately.” James turned to Thom, who had been passive throughout the ritual. “Will you lead the grounding?”

  “It’s what I do best,” Thom said.

  James grabbed a plate from the table before guiding Elise away from the coven. “I should ground as well.”

  Elise followed him to the lounge chairs on the far end of the lawn nearest the beach. James stretched out on one. He placed his glass of water and charcuterie plate atop the sand. A ritual that used a lot of power required a lot of recovery time, and grounding was favored by most covens. Lying on the ground to reconnect oneself to the body, eating a snack, drinking some water or wine. Anything to bring up one’s strength and refocus power within.

  James would be surprised if he managed to do any rejuvenation while grounding on that lawn chair, though. Elise was sitting beside him, elbows braced on her knees, every muscle tense.

  “Apparently he got word about me through McIntyre,” Elise said. “Lincoln wants me to find a missing friend.”

  “You?” James asked.

  “A kopis,” she said.

  Perhaps that was why Lincoln was so transfixed with Elise. Female kopides were white elephants. For a time, there had been three female kopides worldwide, but only two now remained. There were thousands of male kopides by comparison. A reasonably common sight in the preternatural world. “The question is how did Lincoln know McIntyre in the first place?” James asked. He forced himself to put crostini in his mouth, though he was much too parched to swallow.

  “If it’s Malcolm, I’m going to gut him.” She probably meant it. It was easy to want to gut him. James had spent the entire six months Elise and Malcolm dated fantasizing about gutting the man. “Either way, Lincoln knows of us. If he knows, then others are going to find out soon.”

  James couldn’t help it. His eyes wandered skyward, searching the stars for a sign. The night was becoming cloudy, and the stars were as murky as his fear.

  His mind raced with what they’d need to do to uproot. It had been so long since Elise and James had gone into hiding. They didn’t have many caches of money left, and new identities were expensive. James would be losing his business too, and...

  “I think I’m going to help him,” Elise said. One of her knees was jiggling. She couldn’t seem to stop moving.

  “You can’t,” James said. “We have to get out of here.”

  “If I help him, he’s grateful and quiet.” The conviction in her words was betrayed by her fidgeting. She kept twisting the wrist straps on her gloves, scratching her palms through the cloth, like she couldn’t stop thinking about her hands. Her eyes were on the dark sky too. Elise was afraid, and with good reason. “Something found us tonight. A demon in the lake. Lincoln thinks it’s chasing him, and I drove it off, but I don’t think it’s dead. If it comes after us, it’ll find the coven.”

  “This sounds bad, Elise,” James said.

  “It used to be a normal Saturday night,” she said.

  “Not for a long time.” And not until Lincoln had arrived. “I’ll figure this out.”

  Her knee stilled, and her gaze came down to the bonfire. The flames leaped in her pupils. Her freckles looked violet in the cast of moonlight. “We’ll do it together. You and me. One last mission.”

  “I can take care of him alone,” James offered again.

  She shook her head.

  “You shouldn’t have approached him,” he said.

  Elise shrugged.

  Though she looked calmer, she was still nigh unto nonverbal. Elise had become well-practiced in conversing like normal people did. Spending so much time with Betty, who never stopped talking, had rubbed off on her. This reversion was because of Lincoln.

  James stood and extended his hand. She followed the line of his arm, up to his face. Frazzled curls framed the hard lines of her cheekbones. Elise’s jaw was set tight, but her eyes were softer.

  He smiled. “Care for a dance before we go?”

  Lincoln tried to sneak back to the cabin without being seen. It had less to do with avoiding demons and mostly to do with avoiding the coven. He still wasn’t wearing any pants. And he looked mighty stupid running around in his underwear. The witches had built a bonfire that shone bright across the entire clearing, but the darkness in the forest was deep, and every shifting shadow looked like a demon. Nobody spotted him on the way to his cabin’s back door.

  “Lincoln.”

  He gave a strangled yell at the sound of his name, swinging around.

  “You are jumpy,” said Thom, the other high priest. He’d somehow come up behind Lincoln. Had he been in the forest too? “When a man disappears for hours and reappears looking this anxious, it would be reasonable to get suspicious.”

  Part of the reason Lincoln had disappeared for hours was because he’d been taken by a weird vision. A vision that featured someone who looked a hell of a lot like Thom.

  They weren’t exactly the same. Khet wasn’t as pretty, and his skin had been tanned darker. But the biggest difference was really just the outfit.

  Somehow, Lincoln doubted that it was coincidence he’d been dreaming about Thom.

  The high priest’s eyes swept down Lincoln’s body, taking in the sight of his drenched shirt and missing pants. “Come inside before anyone else sees you. I’ve got something you can wear.”

  Lincoln gave Thom a wide berth as he stepped into the house.

  The cabin was a typical vacation rental of its era. The furniture was overdue to be updated, since the floral couches had been rendered antiques by style developments in the nineties. The kitchen had tile counters, an offensively green refrigerator, and tattered chairs that had been sat upon by thousands of visitors.

  Once he was inside that mundanity, in a much more ordinary setting, Lincoln could feel the shock of the past days consuming him. His hands trembled. It took all his willpower to keep the fear packed down inside where it wouldn’t show.

  Thom leaned over a particleboard side table and extracted a shopping bag. He offered it to Lincoln. “I’m sure you’ll find this suitable.”

  “You said you were gonna lend me some of your stuff, not buy me new things,” Lincoln said. “What do you want for it?”

  “Nothing,” Thom said.

  “Everything’s got a price,” Lincoln said.

  “A price does not mean value. These are worthless to me. The act of obtaining them was nothing. This is something that I’m giving you, and you cannot repay when nothing of value has been given.”

  Lincoln didn’t trust a damn word of it. Nothing was free. But he was shivering in a sodden T-shirt and his underwear, so he didn’t have a lot of room for complaints. He took the bag into a bedroom to change.

  Thom was still waiting in the living room when Lincoln came back out. The priest had taken a position at the front window, and the bonfire turned his flesh orange and his clothes all the blacker. Halloween tones in the middle of summer. He looked Lincoln over critically. “You’re injured,” Thom observed.

  “I had a rough hike,” Lincoln said. “You wouldn’t know anything about that, would you?”

  “I’ve been here all evening. I helped cast the spell.”

  “Nice alibi,” he said.

  “Alibi implies that you’ve accused me of a crime.” Amusement played around Thom’s eyes. “What do you think I’ve done wrong?”

  You’re maybe also another time traveler, and you used to date the god-leech clinging to my soul.

  Lincoln had said some pretty crazy things in his day, but that ac
cusation was still beyond him.

  “I gotta go.” He moved for the door but stopped when Thom spoke again.

  “Norepinephrine, the stress hormone, will embed memories in your hippocampus,” said the priest. “It is a deft engraving etched by clumsy hands. You are drenched in this. You aren’t just injured, but terrified.”

  Lincoln turned slowly. Elise used to talk like that sometimes. She had been able to see into Lincoln’s mind, pick apart the chemical reactions, and tell him what he was feeling. She had always known when he wanted sex before he did. She’d seen the way his demon blood devoured anger. “Don’t come near me,” Lincoln said.

  Too late. Thom grabbed his shoulder.

  Lincoln’s skin caught fire.

  Every one of his senses was screaming, and his nerves thrashed inside of him. It should have been too overwhelming—he should have been unable to experience so much pain all at once—yet the pain kept climbing in the moments that Thom touched him.

  Lincoln wrenched away, tumbling into the back of the couch. The pain disappeared as soon as they were no longer in contact. “What the fuck are you?”

  “Good question,” Thom said. “I turn it back to you.”

  “I’m just a guy,” he said.

  “You’re a Remnant of Inanna, even though all of you were rendered extinct nearly three thousand years ago.”

  Lincoln gaped, wordless.

  Thom watched him as if to wait for a response to a question he hadn’t asked.

  The front door opened. Betty obviously wasn’t expecting anybody to be standing on the other side, and she gave a startled little sound at the sight of the two men staring each other down. “Gosh, sorry…” she began to say, but then her eyes adjusted to the dimness within the cabin. “Oh my God, Linc, what happened to you?”

  “I’m fine,” he said, even though a glance in the mirror on the living room wall told him that the lie was too obvious to float. Thom’s donation of clothing had only fixed his missing pants. Lincoln’s skin couldn’t be changed out, and he had taken damage trying to escape the demon. Blood crusted his face.