by S. M. Reine
“We’re going to the garden center!” Elise broke into a run.
There wasn’t enough time to ask why she felt like gardening. The buzzing became a roar. James felt tiny insect bodies peppering against the back of his blanket, stinging him like hailstones. Betty’s squeal of horror was drowned out by the screaming from the others in the parking lot.
The crowd had been a mess before, but now it was a complete crush. James reached the back of the fray spilling onto the asphalt and couldn’t push through. Too many people were running inside the store at once. The doors couldn’t close, and that meant the locusts were flying inside too.
Screams spread like an infection.
“Get water,” Elise told James again. She was squirming between the bodies, using her elbows liberally. She gripped Lincoln by the blanket to keep him at her side. James lost sight of her in the tide of backs.
James caught Betty when she was shoved hard. She almost fell—a potentially deadly scenario in this kind of crowd. He wrapped his arm tightly around her shoulders. “Keep down,” he said, pushing her through the doors toward the bakery.
They stumbled free of the worst of the crowd. They could breathe.
“That was worse than the time I was in the mosh pit at Kelly Clarkson’s concert,” Betty said. “I have no idea how we’re going to get out.”
“Let me worry about that.” James was still holding his notebook. The cover was neatly labeled in his precise handwriting, Book of Shadows . It didn’t just have healing spells. Most were a lot more useful in battle.
He forged a path toward the drink aisle.
The store was in disarray. The shelves were emptying fast. There were no employees, no security guards. Half the people were running out with as many small electronics as bags of food.
The drink section was on the right of the store, halfway down. A man had an entire pallet of water. He aimed a gun at anyone who came too close, making sure that nobody else could get a single case.
“Oh crap,” Betty said, flattening herself against the end cap so he wouldn’t see her. “What a complete psycho! How are we going to get water with the Unabomber squatting on it?”
James discreetly slipped a page out of his notebook. “Stay out of the way.”
“But he’s got a gun!” Betty protested.
There was no way to keep her from seeing what James was about to do. “I’m armed as well.”
He flicked the paper into the air and spoke a word of power.
The shelves around them shook as if with a silent explosion.
The man with the pallet of water caught fire. His entire shirt blazed, and he yelped and dived away from the pallet. He slapped at his chest as he rolled over the linoleum.
Betty stared openly, hands over her mouth. “What was that ?”
She had no clue how much he dreaded that question.
James’s aunt, Pamela, had invented paper magic as a way of delaying spells. He’d cast an incendiary ritual in 2003 but held its effects until thirty seconds ago—something that no other modern witch could do. James guarded the secret closely. Witches were enough of a public safety risk when they needed hours to set fires.
“No time to explain.” He grabbed the handles and pushed the pallet. They were swarmed as people tried to get the water off of the cart. Nobody could take more than one or two cases at a time—they were too heavy. James didn’t try to stop them. He just kept going, pushing across the store toward the garden center.
Elise and Lincoln emerged, fumbling with packaging. Both of them had canisters hanging over their backs.
“What’s that?” Betty asked as Elise connected a tube to a box on her hip.
Elise twisted the nozzle, and flame licked a few inches in front of her. “Locust spray.”
Lincoln got his working too. Neither were that impressive. They wouldn’t clear enough space to protect the entire group.
“There’s no way we’re going to make it all the way to the studio with those,” James said. And they needed to get to the studio. That was where all of his spellcrafting supplies were, and where Elise kept her weapons. Every tool they needed to fight this enemy was still miles away.
“Can your scary notebook magic help us get out of here?” Betty asked.
James wished she wouldn’t speak of paper magic while Lincoln was there. Unfortunately, this wasn’t time to safeguard his secrets from his party. Locusts were starting to swarm across the floors, like a flood, and James didn’t want to think about what plagues they hadn’t seen yet. “There may be something I can do.”
He picked a couple of runes—elemental amplifiers. He usually used those sorts of spells to channel wind, but there was no reason they wouldn’t work as well for fire. He ignited the spells with words of power and affixed the runes to the flamethrowers.
Elise fired another blast. This time, it licked the ceiling. The heat nearly seared off James’s eyebrows, and for the first time in hours, she cracked a smile. “Let’s find a new ride.” She swung toward the doors. “Get out of my way!”
Fire ripped from the nozzle, reflecting harsh orange off of her teeth bared in a grin.
“I thought those were for locusts,” James said as Elise swept the flames in front of her.
The crowd scattered in every direction. There was a path through the doors.
“Can’t set locusts on fire unless I can get to them,” she said, tossing that merciless smile at him. Elise should have been frightening when she got this ruthless. He shouldn’t have felt a tug of fondness.
Betty nearly fell again, tripping over debris.
“Hop on the pallet,” James said.
She clambered in front of the jack, clutching the remaining cases of water so that they didn’t fall off when he picked up speed. He sprinted behind Elise and Lincoln as they blasted flames into the night. They lit the locusts like a thousand tiny meteors snowing to the ground as ash.
The parking lot was still jammed with the cars, but the people had jumped inside of them to escape the locusts. Their path through the vehicles was relatively clear. James had to push the cart up the hill to the street—a task that required Betty to get off and lift the end.
One of the city buses had been abandoned near the stop.
James opened his mouth to speak and made the mistake of inhaling. The fire was good for killing locusts but not for keeping bug ash out of his mouth. James wiped his face with his sleeve before trying to speak again. “Can you drive that, Elise?” he called, nodding toward the bus.
“Probably,” Elise said. She had to pry the bus doors open manually. By the time all four of them were shut inside the bus with the water, James was drenched in sweat, gasping, and his mouth tasted like burned bugs.
“Is everyone okay?” Betty asked.
“Oh yeah, I’m having a great fucking day.” Elise climbed into the driver’s seat of the bus. She got it running and pulled out onto the road.
“Where in the world did you learn how to drive a bus?” asked Lincoln over the seat, holding onto the pole.
“I considered a lot of careers before settling on accounting,” she said. “A commercial driver’s license is easy to get. Two weeks of school. It would have been useful if I needed to make ends meet.”
“If you can drive a truck, then why turn around and become an accountant?”
“Too much sexism in trucking,” Elise said. “I’d have murdered someone in the first week.”
The city bus had enough gas to reach downtown Reno, but it was too wide to turn down the narrow side streets surrounding Idlewild Park. They had to abandon it. Elise pushed Betty on the cart again because they didn’t need flamethrowers anymore. The locusts were dead in this part of town. They formed a crunchy, inches-thick carpet under James’s feet as he navigated the darkness toward Motion and Dance.
Lincoln kept his flamethrower aimed the whole time they were out there, looking eager to go Rambo on more plagues. “Locusts covered the ground until it was black,” he intoned. “They devoure
d everything growing in the fields and the fruit on the trees. Nothing green remained on tree or plant in all the land.”
“I swear to God, if you keep going on like that, you won’t live to see the end of the world because I’ll hex you into oblivion first,” James said. “We don’t need to leap to worst-case scenarios.”
Especially when those worst-case scenarios left Elise looking wan. She wasn’t as malnourished and twitchy as when they had been on the run, but the haunted look in her eyes said she was regressing quickly. He’d just gotten used to seeing her smile almost every day.
James opened the wards on Motion and Dance, ushering the party through the front door. The cheerful jingle of the entry bell seemed mocking. He reached up to pluck it off the bar and toss it behind the registration desk where Elise often sat to menace people into paying their outstanding bills.
“Shut everything,” James said. “Make sure the windows aren’t even cracked.”
Even Lincoln was smart enough to obey without arguing this time. By the time the other three returned from checking windows, James had set up the charms to initiate his strongest wards. “Everything’s locked tight,” Betty said.
“Perfect.” James swept a hand over the small circle of power on the desk.
Magic settled over Motion and Dance in a shimmering cloak—a barrier that nobody else could see. Only Betty blinked in surprise as though she glimpsed something.
“There. We’re locked down, and now we can find the origin of…” James bent to peer through the curtains. “This.” Out front, a pair of cats were frothing on a dried bed of locusts. Rain sighed over the park, and he picked up the scent of blood even with the windows closed. “It might take me an hour to establish a ritual to find the cause. It’s probably infernal.”
“Probably infernal?” Lincoln asked. “Are you kidding me right now?”
“Demons are far more common on the western side of the nation, Mr. Keyes,” James said. “Aside from the occasional basandere, demons are the only thing we get here.”
“It’s the damn ten plagues! You don’t get more ethereal than that!”
“I’m going into the back dance hall,” Elise interrupted. “Don’t open an external door or window for anyone, no matter what you see outside.” She aimed that at Betty and Lincoln before slipping through the door to the ballroom.
“Why?” Betty asked.
“Some of the strongest wards ever cast are on this dance studio,” James said. “As long as we leave the doors and windows closed, few things will be able to reach us in here.”
Betty let out a low whistle. “These are impressive wards. How do they work? Do they keep magic in as well as out? Can we scry the source of the attack without busting wards?”
That actually wasn’t a bad question. “Mapping infernal energy is plausible but tricky. Scrying is impossible. It’s said that there are ancient ethereal ruins deep under Reno which limit magical imaging.”
Betty’s eyes got wide. They had only turned on the desk lamp when they came in, and the orange light made her eyes an especially luminous shade of brown. “Ethereal ruins? Do you mean…angels? And they’re bad guys ?” She shivered. “Oh man, I don’t know anything, do I?”
“There’s a lot more to the world than we discussed at the coven, yes.”
James expected that most people would have felt betrayed by that revelation. Betty looked sort of impressed. “That’s why you’re here, isn’t it?” she asked. “You and Elise are hiding out because people can’t spy on you on top of ethereal ruins.”
“It worked for two years.” That was a full year and a half longer than they’d stayed anywhere else. “Frankly, we’re lucky it succeeded that long, considering the caliber of enemy searching for us.” He glanced through the open door to the ballroom. Both Elise and Lincoln had gone missing, and he couldn’t see them through the doorway. For once, James was grateful. Elise didn’t need to hear them talking about Him again.
There should have been no way for Him to find them in the first place.
Yes, they used their birth names legally, but He was not the type to look up His enemies in the phone book. He’d lost His sanity and been confined in the garden thousands of years before phones existed.
Someone else had told Him where to find Elise.
“Okay, so how do we map infernal energy if we can’t scry?” Betty asked.
“There are a few alternatives,” James said. He considered Betty, who didn’t look like much of a witch wearing a bikini top with cut-off shorts, but not everyone wore their strengths on the outside. “I could use help setting up the ritual.”
Betty looked sincerely excited. “Just tell me what to do.”
12
M otion and Dance had two ballrooms, but neither of them had started out life with that job. Lincoln could tell the bigger of them used to be a living room and a couple bedrooms, just with the walls between knocked out. The windows were placed asymmetrically and up high, leaving room for a long mirrored wall and barre. A piano stood in the corner. Cheap renovation, but effective. Grandpa Marshall would have approved.
The smaller dance hall was on the side of the building. It had been built as a garage, but they had layered red velvet curtains over the door, so it looked like a little stage. The other end of the room was cluttered with workout equipment—whether it was Elise’s or to supplement the dancers’ training, Lincoln wasn’t sure. The only light in the room came from the street lamps outside, but those were starting to brown out. In the gloom, the barbells and weights looked more like torture equipment.
Elise was digging through a closet at the far end of the equipment. “I can’t help you find your friend,” she said, twisting a code into a safe’s lock. “I know I promised, but circumstances changed. I’ve got to get out of here fast.”
The safe opened. From its depths, Elise drew a falchion: a sword that was only the length of her forearm. It was meant to be carried with the shield on the other arm, but he’d never seen her wield the sword like that. He’d also never seen the sword with a blade of metal instead of obsidian. In this year, Elise’s signature weapon hadn’t been infected with demon ichor yet.
“If anything, changed circumstances makes finding her more urgent. She’s out there somewhere in all this .” He flung an arm toward the window. The tapping of rain had grown harder. Lincoln wished it would wipe out the last of the locusts, but it was too soon to hope things were getting better. He had only seen a few of the plagues so far.
Elise gave a few experimental swings of the sword and jabbed an invisible enemy. The muscles in her arms tightened and released, rolling underneath her bulging veins. Her wrist was slim, her elbow was scarred, and the line from her collarbone to her throat reminded Lincoln of the rocky slopes of Hell. “Your friend is probably dead.”
“That doesn’t sound anything like the Elise I know,” he said.
She whirled on him, sword raised. “You don’t know me! You keep talking like that, but you—”
“I know exactly who you are.”
Her eyes searched his face. “How?”
God, how could he even explain what Elise meant to him? “I haven’t been the same since I met you,” Lincoln said. “For the last few years, ever since we went separate ways, I haven’t done much but think about you.”
Realization dawned over her. “You said the Traveler brought you here.”
“From the year 2015,” he said. “Well, getting on toward 2016. A few years from now, life’s gonna look different for the both of us,” he said. “It’s kinda funny to think about. When the two of us crossed paths for the first time, you didn’t give me much of a choice about what our relationship was gonna look like. You looked at me like you wanted to eat me, and I wanted—”
“Stop!”
Lincoln shut his mouth.
Elise was looking up at him like she recognized him, somehow. It was impossible. People other than the Traveler didn’t get weird temporal blips. Even the Godslayer couldn’t pick up jump
s in time and see through the years. “Prove it,” she said. “Prove that you’re from 2015.”
He didn’t know how. He hadn’t come back with anything from the future. He searched the air for ideas and grabbed the first one he found. “You’ve got a tattoo on your hip.”
“You could have seen that today. I was wearing a swimsuit.”
“You don’t like food much, especially sweets,” he said. “It was a bear trying to get you to take a bite of pie, and I took you to get the good stuff. You joked about how going to an autopsy was our first date.”
Her eyebrows met in the middle. “How...?”
“You don’t know any of that yet,” Lincoln said. “It’s not proof. Hell, I don’t know.” He paced away from her, scrubbing a hand through his hair as he thought. The Traveler could corroborate his story, but God only knew how he’d find it in the apocalypse. “I know that you will someday be known around the entire world as the Godslayer. I know that you’re going to succeed—you’re gonna kill Him.”
He didn’t even see Elise moving. He was just suddenly slammed into the brick wall of the dance studio’s south edge. She pinned him with the sword to his throat. “How do I know it’s not your fault that He found me?”
Lincoln kept his hands at his shoulders, palms open, refusing to push back. “Because I’d never hurt you, Elise.” He’d spent so long dreaming about her, seeing visions of her, and now she was here. He thought if she killed him, it might be a mercy. At least he’d die by her hand, smelling the sweat on her skin, feeling the tickle of her curls against his arm, watching her glare the way she had glared leading the troops of Hell.
Lincoln felt a nudge on his mind. It was the familiar sensation of Junior nearby. The gargoyle had caught up.
An idea struck him. “Come outside. I can prove everything I’m saying is true.”
They exited through the garage door, opening it enough to slither underneath before it fell shut again. The rain outside felt too warm, almost the temperature of blood. Rain was always cold in Nevada. But the street lights had finally given up, and in the darkness, there was no telling what rained upon Lincoln.