by S. M. Reine
He had looked this rough a couple or three times as a young man when his football team had gotten in a fight at a bar after the game. It had been bad enough once that Lincoln had been forced to spend a couple of days in the hospital for the concussion.
“Don’t pull that stoic man-crap on me. Did someone do this to you?” Betty’s hands were cool on Lincoln’s feverish forehead. “We should take you to a hospital. Some of these might need stitches.”
It sounded like a great excuse to get away from the coven. He’d been trying to think of a reason to vanish. “I might just do that, yeah.”
“I’ll find someone to drive you.”
“Elise already said she would,” Lincoln said.
“Elise was there when you got hurt?” Betty’s eyes got even rounder. “Did Elise do this to you? Because if she did, you deserve it, and you are welcome to walk back to Reno.” Her mood swung from sympathetic to ferocious between syllables. It was fast enough to give him whiplash.
“Nothing like that. She just…found me.”
“After he fell,” Thom filled in. “A man should know it is foolish to hike at night, but difficult lessons are the hardest earned.”
Vicious surprise unfolded in Lincoln’s stomach, and it tasted as sour as a crabapple.
Thom was lying for him.
Thom knew as much about Remnants as the lake demon.
He’d been nothing but helpful, but Lincoln couldn’t have gotten away from Thom fast enough if the Traveler sent him back to 2015 in that moment.
“Let me get my purse, and I’ll go with you two,” Betty said.
That would put her in the line of fire, and she clearly didn’t know the truth about her friend yet. “I think you oughta stay here with the coven. I don’t mean to be ungrateful for your hospitality, but—”
“But you’re done with me. I get it, I guess. You didn’t go to the bar even looking for a one-night stand, much less a recurring thing ,” she said.
Lincoln offered his most charming smile. “I’m sorry.”
“Don’t be. I just wish…” She shook her head. “Well, let’s go find Elise.” Betty looped her arm in his and walked him out. The night was actually getting brighter. The cloud cover had thickened, like a storm was rolling in, so that the lights of civilization could reflect off of them. It hadn’t looked like rain earlier, but he smelled it on the wind. “Looks like you have to wait a few minutes. Elise is busy.”
How can Elise be busy? She had just come back from battling the same demon he had.
It took a moment for Lincoln to spot her among the coven. Mostly because he expected to see her alone. This was the kind of person who sat on the fringes and observed things, waiting for the right moment to act. Yet Elise was at the heart of the coven, on the far end of the bonfire, where the stream ran into the lake.
She was with James.
Elise’s left hand was grasped in James’s right. He cradled her waist while she delicately touched his shoulder. Her arms were strong, unwavering in their position, though her gaze was cast down to the side. They were ballroom dancing.
The coven was watching raptly, talking in hushed voices around the fire. Someone had turned music on in their car with the doors propped open so that they had a soundtrack. Lincoln didn’t know the song. It was pop garbage, a male voice crooning along with sleepy piano. Elise and James floated across the ground, and she never smiled, not once. The distance in her gaze hurt.
James was not so distant. He was focused on Elise, very intently, and there was nobody in his world outside of her.
When Lincoln met them years later, they would be locked in bitter hatred.
He wasn’t sure why he thought they’d always kind of hated each other. Maybe if he’d known Elise before she became a demon, he wouldn’t have been surprised by how closely linked they were—not just where their hands connected, but the way that their bodies moved in unison and the obvious fascination that James had for Elise.
He’d never seen two people so obviously in love.
James is going to hurt her.
Lincoln could not watch this. He would not.
He stepped around the bonfire to break into the dance. Elise caught sight of Lincoln over James’s shoulder, and her foot slipped. She might have fallen completely into the stream if not for James’s steady hands. “Careful,” he murmured.
Elise held onto his arm as she lifted her foot out of the stream. “Why is that so warm?” She shook her shoe. Flecks of bright-red fluid spattered against the sand beside the bonfire.
It wasn’t water. It was so much thicker than water.
Someone in the coven screamed. “It’s blood!”
Elise seized a camping lantern from the top of a car and shined it toward the stream. It was blood. All of it. Not in tendrils, like the blackness that the demon had used, but like it was flowing in a coppery stream from the mountaintop.
“Oh my God!” Betty gazed in horror at the lake. Her hand crept up to cover her nose as if a terrible smell had reached her.
The entire lake was blood, too.
“I will strike the water that is in the Nile with the staff that is in my hand, and it will be turned to blood,” Lincoln muttered.
James swung around to stare at him. “What did you say?”
“It’s from the Bible. Exodus.” Lincoln swallowed hard, which was a mistake, since it meant he gulped down a breath of air that was starting to stink like pennies. “The first plague in God’s war against Egypt.”
11
O nce the coven realized that something was wrong, any chance of leaving King’s Beach without their notice vanished. As James had expected, the witches were ill-prepared for signs of real trouble. Watching them scurry around the cabins to talk about what kind of spells they could cast was equal parts quaint and frustrating. Windsong was convinced that the blood must have been an attack from another witch and wouldn’t hear alternatives. “We can fix this if we find the right counterspell!”
The reasoning wasn’t terrible, but James wasn’t the only one looking at the sky compulsively. Elise knew this was no witch. He trusted her instincts even more than his own. “I’ll help them to calm down before we leave,” James told Elise.
Her presence meant Lincoln was there too. The man seemed incapable of getting more than ten feet away from her. “If this is what it looks like—if it’s the ten plagues—” Lincoln began.
“We don’t know that yet,” James interrupted.
“That was a way of sending messages to God’s enemy,” Lincoln said. “There was some kind of negotiation intended. He sent a herald to manage that.”
“Moses, yes, I know.”
“Then God will send a herald to say what He wants the world to know from this.”
And that would only make it so much worse.
God’s favorite herald was his Voice, Metaraon, of the highest choir of angels. He walked cloaked in such power that he could knock the electricity out in an entire city. His eyes were the coldest blue. And he was patient. That was the worst part. Metaraon was always planning something , and there was no telling when he would strike.
Elise strode away, jaw clenched in silence.
“Load the Jeep,” James ordered Lincoln. “We’re out of here in three minutes.”
Silently, Lincoln followed Elise.
James watched them go, and he wondered if he had truly spoken. Lincoln hadn’t even acknowledged his command. He was the high priest, the one in charge—alongside Elise, of course—but he felt invisible to the man. That kind of disregard for orders would get them all killed.
“What do we do?” Betty asked, running over with Morrighan, their hands clasped together.
At least the coven was still willing to hear wisdom from James. “I think it would be best if the coven stayed here. Depending on how widespread the blood may be, there could be panic nearer civilization. Everyone is safe here. There are supplies to last at least a week.”
“What are you going to do?” Morrighan aske
d.
“I have some experience dealing with these sorts of things. I’m going into the city to see what I can do to help.”
“Not without me, you aren’t,” Betty said.
“As much as I admire your gusto, this could be dangerous,” James said. “I don’t think you realize the severity of the situation.”
“The lake just turned into blood,” she said. “I think I’ve got a pretty good idea how dangerous this is.”
Betty exchanged embraces with the coven. She was quick enough that James didn’t have an excuse to peel out of the campsite before she could throw herself into the back seat with Lincoln again.
James caught Elise’s arm before she could get in too.
“Is this really how we want to do this?” he asked, eyeing Lincoln and Betty.
“I have to get Lincoln away from the coven,” she said. “And at least this way, I’ll know Betty’s safe.”
“We’ve never worked well in teams. Remember that kopis from Guatemala?”
“We haven’t worked at all for years.” She rubbed her fingertips against her temples, brow knitting. “Can you drive? I can hardly focus since I fought that demon in the forest.”
“Of course I can.” James’s brow furrowed as he looked her over. “Did you get injured?”
“I don’t know. My head’s hurting.” She turned, lifting her hair over her neck. She had a significant contusion developing at her nape. Some of her hair had gone stiff with dried blood. “I’ll be okay in a few hours.”
James wasn’t certain they’d have a few hours. “Hold still a moment.” He drew a notebook from his back pocket. Each page was covered in a different rune, elaborate masses of swirls and jags carefully inked in James’s hand. Every line had a meaning. He contained entire spells on every paper. The one he sought now was one of his oldest.
He tore it out of the notebook and whispered a word of power. Magic surged. The trees surrounding them trembled, showering them in pine needles. Elise let out a shudder. For a moment, James let his fingers rest on her neck, feeling the goosebumps as they washed down her skin. He could see a cut closing underneath her hair.
Elise had only begun growing her curls this long after retirement. She’d spent most of her career with her hair off her neck, so the skin was covered in freckles there. The shorter hairs at her nape curled into tight corkscrews. They were soft as feathers on a newly hatched bird.
“Impressive,” she said.
James had been touching her too long. He dropped his hand. “How do you feel?”
She rolled out her shoulders, stretched her neck. “Great.” Elise launched herself into the front seat. “Then let’s go.”
Having Betty and Lincoln in the back was different on the ride down than it had been on the ride up. They weren’t cuddling, laughing, whispering. They were tense, gripping the sides of the Jeep for balance as James careened out onto the mountain roads. “Should we put up the ragtop?” Betty yelled over the wind.
“I think it’s too late for that now,” Lincoln shouted back.
“But if this is like the Bible—if we’re gonna get the plagues—isn’t there one that involves bugs? Like, raining bugs?”
Elise gripped the console between herself and James. Her jaw was so tight that he was surprised he didn’t hear teeth cracking.
All this talk of the plagues surely had her thinking about the worst of their enemies.
James took his hand off the gearshift and rested it over Elise’s, offering what small comfort he could through the kopis and aspis bond. She turned her hand in his and laced their fingers together.
Elise had no idea what that degree of contact did to James. Every time he touched her, he was convinced that this would be the time that he gave away his true feelings—the dark things that lurked inside of him, addicted to her scent, and the feel of her gloves against his palms. It was a dangerous thing, touching Elise. He had already risked it healing her.
But when she glanced his way, her lips weren’t pinched shut as tightly. One of the lines between her furrowed eyebrows had relaxed.
Some risks were worth it.
Lincoln and Betty were still talking. “One of the plagues is locusts,” he said. “The rain of fire. You’re mixing up the two of them.”
“Is one of the plagues something about cows?”
“Livestock dying, yeah,” Lincoln said.
James wished he could have gagged the both of them. “We’ve still only seen one indication of an attack, and tainting water is hardly an outright assault. We have no reason to think that this is going to escalate to all ten plagues. One symptom doesn’t make a disease.”
Elise’s hand tightened on his. “Look out!”
James refocused on the road in time to see a deer flashing through the headlights.
He shouted and tried to swerve. The Jeep rocked up on its left two wheels as they careened toward a rock wall.
They still didn’t miss. The doe glanced off the front right headlight. James was thrown into the steering wheel, neck whipping.
The Jeep jerked to a halt.
For a moment, James didn’t move. His hands gripped the steering wheel so tightly that it felt like he couldn’t let go. The Jeep’s airbag hadn’t deployed from the impact, and his shoulders hurt enough to remind him of it with every breath. “Is everyone okay?”
Elise groaned as she sat up beside him, touching her forehead. She’d bumped the roll bars and opened a gash over her eyebrow. “Good thing you healed my last head trauma.”
“We’re fine,” Lincoln said.
“I don’t know about that,” Betty said from the back. “Are those raccoons?”
James leaned over the side of the Jeep, hands braced against the door. Little animals were flowing between the tires as they scrambled downhill toward the lake.
There were raccoons. And squirrels, and rabbits. They were thrashing across the road as if they all had late stage rabies. Their bodies thumped against the side of the Jeep. Impacts rocked them every few seconds.
“What in the seven hells?” James asked.
“The Lord sent a mixture of noxious creatures to Pharaoh’s house and his servants’ house, and throughout the land of Egypt, and the land was destroyed,” Lincoln said. “Do two symptoms start adding up to a whole disease?”
The man’s lazy tone was like pins pricking James’s spine. “If you want to provoke a fight—”
“Keep going,” Elise urged in a low voice.
James set off again, progressing slower to avoid bears and stags—anything that could total the Jeep. There was no avoiding the smaller animals that came frothing out of the forest. He gripped the gearshift so tightly that he feared he might rip it off.
It didn’t get better as they approached Reno. If anything, it got worse—not in the quantity, but in the type. James got off the highway and instead of hitting raccoons, he found himself hitting house cats and pet dogs.
“Oh my God,” Betty said. It was the first thing that anyone had said for half an hour. She cupped her hands to either sides of her eyes, forming blinders. “Okay. Take a right up here. We need to get water from Walmart, if they haven’t already been ransacked.”
“I don’t think we can,” James said. The Walmart parking lot was a mess. The entrance was blocked by cars without drivers. Shopping carts crowded the doors, and more people were running from the nearby neighborhood. The current crowd was about to double in size.
Lincoln leaned forward on the seats, cramming himself between Elise’s and James’s heads. He was irritatingly tan and blond—a man who spent far too much time outside and not nearly enough time reading books. “Listen to Betty. If all these people are making a run on Walmart, I reckon it’s because water isn’t good anywhere. It’s all turned to blood. And that means that we need something to drink.”
“Fine.” James took the turn into the parking lot little too hard.
Lincoln was thrown against the side of the Jeep.
James should’ve been watchin
g the parking lot instead of the satisfying tumble in the back seat. The vehicle jerked again—hard—and James’s head whipped against the visor. The Jeep ground to a halt.
He was momentarily dazed, but Elise recovered much faster. She shot to her feet and started yelling. “Watch where you’re going, asshole!”
James had been driving over a sidewalk to get past the traffic jam, and someone else had attempted the same thing. Instead, their truck had struck the side of the Jeep and pushed them into a lamp post. They were pinned. By some metrics, it was lucky that Lincoln hadn’t been thrown completely out of the Jeep in the collision.
Elise’s face came into focus as she bent over James. “Are you okay?” She had a red mark on her temple, but it wasn’t likely to bruise. She was harder to hurt than that.
He reached up to brush his knuckles over her cheek. Strength flowed through the kopis and aspis bond, like a shot of caffeine straight to his heart. “Is everyone okay?” he asked, twisting to look at the back seat.
“Remind me to never make James designated driver again,” Lincoln said. Sadly, he was unhurt.
Betty was wincing but moving. “Do I have a concussion, or do I hear buzzing?”
If Betty had a concussion, James had the same one. He was picking up a hum that had nothing to do with the Jeep or the broken light post. “It sounds like…a swarm of bees.” He stood, cradling his head, and swept his eyes over the street behind them. Traffic had completely stopped.
Lincoln searched the sky. His jaw dropped. “Get inside the store!”
James hopped out, lifting his gaze to the clouds, but he couldn’t see them. Something was hiding them. Something that sounded suspiciously like locusts.
“And God sent—” Lincoln began.
“Stop, for the love of all that’s holy!” James said. He was about two seconds from decking Lincoln Keyes.
Elise grabbed James by the elbow, pulling it back so he couldn’t get leverage for a strike. “James, take Betty to find water. Keep her safe. “
Lincoln took blankets out of the back of the Jeep and threw one to each of them before throwing the last over his head. “If they’re going for water, what are we doing?”