Hell's Hinges

by S. M. Reine

  Something huge slammed into him, wrapping an arm around his body. It felt like James went from zero to sixty in a heartbeat. The spider’s leg only whistled past him as he and Betty were wrenched to safety on the grass.

  James came to a halt sprawled underneath the tree outside Motion and Dance, gasping for breath.

  They had been saved by a monster taller and wider than James, with a boulder-like body, clawed feet, and wings akin to those of a bat. The creature was simultaneously mammalian and inorganic. It didn’t look like it should have been able to move, much less cock its head curiously at James.

  “Golem,” he gasped. He’d seen this thing with Lincoln before, but hadn’t truly gotten a sense of its size or the detail in its features. James ran a hand down his face to wipe a hallucination from his eyes. What he saw didn’t change. It was a golem. A sidhe subspecies that hadn’t walked the Earth for thousands of years.

  It grumbled, and the noise was pitched like a question.

  “Uh, yes,” James said. “We’re okay if that’s what you’re asking.”

  The golem nodded.

  Elise was still fighting the oversized spider in the park. She ducked and twirled out of the way of its legs, a rat skittering between stomping boots.

  It wheeled around to bow its head over her, bringing all those glistening red gels of its eyes down to her level. That tiny voice came out of it again. “I’ve missed you,” He said.

  Elise’s face went slack with shock. She looked young in that moment, even with the sword, the tattoos. She was a girl whose parents had abandoned her to a child marriage with God. Someone who had only ever been born to suffer. She was facing the worst of her fears, and James hurt with her.

  In that instant, the spider moved.

  Its pincers seized her. The demon lifted her from the ground.

  “No!”

  That shout didn’t come from James.

  Lincoln had come running out of the park. He grabbed Elise’s leg, trying to pull her out of the spider’s grip. It knocked him down with barely a twitch. He was thrown.

  The spider had already brought webbing from its spinnerets to cocoon Elise, and it skittered away at high speed, taking long steps with its long legs. It took only a moment to get across Idlewild Park, and a moment more to carry Elise over the Truckee. Then they vanished into the city.

  James only got three steps into the street when Lincoln shouted.

  “We’ll get her back!” he said. “Junior! Let’s go!”

  The golem was waiting with its arms open. Lincoln leapt against its chest. The gargoyle lifted him and took off with one hard blast of its wings.

  Whatever magic animated the gargoyle didn’t offer his passengers any protection from the elements. Lincoln was freezing in the brutal rain. The wind whipped his face so hard he couldn’t breathe. They climbed fast, and Lincoln could still only think about Elise kicking uselessly against the tight webbing.

  Junior dipped his right wing, sending them on a loose spiral toward the streets of Reno. There were no lights in the city. The power outage extended as far as he could see, and clouds blocked the moon.

  Lincoln barely got an impression of something huge scrabbling between the casinos downtown, squeezing its body through alleys where it shouldn’t have fit. “Get me on top of it!”

  Junior dropped him.

  He had a breathless instant to regret his order before landing on the spider.

  The breath was knocked out of Lincoln. He gasped, spasmodically sucking in air as he slid down the side of the carapace. He crammed his fingers into a crack so he wouldn’t fall off, but the rain-slicked exoskeleton was difficult to grip. He had to get his boots up under him and use the rubber soles for traction too.

  The exoskeleton had looked solid black from afar. Now that Lincoln was close, he could see the jewel tones in it. He could also see a slimy white fungus growing in the crevices. It stuck to his fingers when he peeled his grip away. Lincoln got up in a crouch, wavering as the spider continued shifting underneath him. It didn’t seem to be aware that he was on it. Sort of like how Lincoln didn’t notice when flies landed on his arm half the time.

  There was no way to get Elise from up there. She was still tucked under the spider’s belly.

  Lincoln looked up, shielding his eyes from the rain. “Junior?”

  That shout got the spider’s attention. Its foremost segments lifted, head bowing back to an unnatural degree.

  Lincoln came face-to-face with rows and rows of crimson eyes bigger than his head. They blazed like rubies in the belly of a fire. It saw him, and it knew who he was, and Lincoln had never wanted to be invisible so desperately before.

  A rasping voice echoed off of the walls of the parking gallery. “What are you?” asked the spider. “Do you matter? Should I know you?”

  “Let the woman go!”

  “But I’ve waited so long,” sighed the voice. Its knees drew inward, squeezing against the body. It was trying to scrape him off.

  Lincoln hurled himself flat against the carapace, squeezing his fingers into the slick, mildewed cracks. “Junior! I need a weapon!”

  Wham .

  The spider squealed as it shook. Junior had dropped onto it, crashing through the forest of legs fast enough that his impact left fresh cracks. Black fluid oozed over the mildew.

  Junior dropped the unicorn dagger into Lincoln’s hand. He grunted helpfully, as if to say, Here you go .

  Lincoln gaped. “You time traveled with the falhófnir dagger? Why didn’t you give it to me sooner?” The spider bucked so hard that Lincoln was flung into the air. The last word was sucked away as his lungs emptied.

  There was no spider underneath him when he fell. It had gone vertical, trying to scale Craven’s Casino.

  Lincoln’s empty hand flailed wildly at the air. He tried to catch something—anything—before he splattered on the pavement alongside all the dead pigeons. His fingers caught a thick hair on the spider’s leg. He grabbed it tight and slammed into its leg. The breath whooshed out of him.

  “Holy Hell,” he gasped, hugging the falhófnir dagger to his chest.

  The spider shook its leg to try to get him off, and he gripped the hair so tightly that the tinier fibers bit into his palm like spines on a cactus.

  He swung the dagger up and jabbed it into the knee joint. Hot fluid, black and slick, gushed out of the joint, and the leg buckled under him. Lincoln slid. Every hair slapped him as he tumbled down.

  He slammed onto the rainy pavement dripping with spider blood.

  Lincoln rolled onto his back just in time to see the thrashing leg hurtling toward him. He was too slippery to get much traction, so the spider’s enormous foot came down on his calf. Lincoln’s entire leg went numb like he’d gotten pinned under a semi. His roar was lost in the cacophony of night.

  The spider-demon struggled to climb now that one of its legs was busted. It slid back, and Lincoln caught a glimpse of Elise bundled against its thorax. She was no longer struggling within the crush of the webbing. Her eyes were closed, and her braid hung toward the ground.

  Was she even breathing?

  “Junior!” Lincoln shouted again. He didn’t need to. The gargoyle had already crashed into the back of the spider, punching into the cracks. It was trying to beat the carapace into a pulp. There wasn’t time for that. “Go for the legs!”

  Junior grabbed one of the legs in both hands, near the root. A rocky groan rumbled out of him as he heaved with all of his preternatural strength.

  The leg cracked. The spider stumbled again. “I’m almost gone,” said the rasping voice. “Why won’t you just let me take her?”

  It swung around, bringing its pincers to bear on Lincoln. He rolled behind the planter just as the thorns of its fangs jabbed for him. It struck sidewalk. The spider had bitten hard enough to get its left pincer jammed, and it pushed against the asphalt to try to free its fang.

  “She’s not yours to take!” Lincoln brought the unicorn dagger hacking down on anoth
er leg joint. The unicorn horn was sharp enough to penetrate the leathery skin with little effort. He cleaved halfway through in a single stroke. This time, he was smart enough to jump away before it could spray him.

  The spider wrenched free of the sidewalk, and Lincoln jumped again, going for its mouth. It wasn’t hot and smelly like the mouths of big sidhe beasts. It was eerily dry. Everything looked sharp, from the hairs on its head to the shining tip of its cracked pincer.

  Lincoln crammed the dagger up its jaw. Brittle exoskeleton cracked.

  The open mouth released a slew of words in a language that he didn’t recognize.

  Junior ripped off another leg. It fell to the pavement with such force that the ground shook under Lincoln’s feet. The demon was rolling on its belly, struggling to stand as its other legs lost control.

  It was going to crush Elise.

  Lincoln threw himself underneath the spider. Two of its legs still cradled Elise, though they were also beginning to shake. He hacked at the webbing connecting Elise to the spider’s thorax, and she fell to the pavement. Lincoln grabbed her using fistfuls of webbing. The sticky gray material stung his hands like nettles.

  He dragged with all of his strength, hauling Elise behind the planters.

  Junior was trying to rip off another leg, but there was no point. The consciousness filling those evil red eyes had focused upon Lincoln, rather than trying to finish the fight. It knew that the spider was not going to win. “I thought I killed you,” said the voice from within the spider. Lincoln wasn’t sure if it meant Lincoln or Inanna.

  The light faded from its gaze. The spider went limp.

  The gargoyle leaped up to stand triumphantly on the demon’s back, wings flared as the rain pummeled him. He released a roar that shook the entire city.

  Junior deserved to celebrate his victory, but Lincoln had nothing to celebrate yet.

  He turned the unicorn dagger on Elise, hacking at the webbing to try to free her chest. It didn’t look like she was breathing. Her face had lost all color, and her freckles looked almost black on her cheeks. “Come on, come on…” He tore the webbing down to her navel.

  Elise’s eyes popped open, and her chest expanded as a gasp filled her lungs.

  She thrashed against the webs, struggling to get out. “No! Let me go!”

  “I’ll get you out of there.” Lincoln put a hand on her to hold her back against the sidewalk. It didn’t take a lot of force. She couldn’t get leverage from inside the restraints. “Hold still. I don’t wanna accidentally slice you instead of web.”

  Elise stopped fighting. “Where’s James?”

  The spider’s mouth opened again. A blast of wind gusted from inside.

  Something was moving inside.

  Lincoln lifted the dagger to his shoulder before realizing that the spider wasn’t alive. Something flopped out of its mouth—a bullfrog the size of a small dog, with leathery green skin covered in warts. Its eyes were white. The body was slimy with the same mold that covered the spider.

  It flipped onto its side, mouth opening and closing slowly. Its tongue thrashed.

  That tiny voice came out of the bullfrog. “There’s no point…fighting…” It was louder now that it wasn’t buried deep within the spider, but Lincoln could tell it was the same thing. This was the spirit that had possessed the demon.

  He wasn’t afraid of spiders or bullfrogs, yet this combination made Lincoln’s stomach lurch.

  But not for long.

  Junior jumped off of the back of the spider and squashed the bullfrog under his clawed foot.

  15

  A t Elise’s command, Junior went back to Motion and Dance to check on Betty and James. “Is there a reason you didn’t want him to take you back?” Lincoln asked, watching his brother’s form retreat into the sky with a sinking sense of regret.

  “Betty and James don’t need to see me like this,” she said through gritted teeth. She’d managed to squirm around enough to roll onto her side, but the webbing wasn’t coming free, and she looked pissed. “Take me to Eloquent Blood. There’s a bartender there—Neuma.”

  “You sure that’s a good idea?” Lincoln asked. “I already met her, and she flipped out on me.”

  “She’s safe,” Elise said.

  It was raining harder, and the air smelled like brimstone. This wasn’t the time to bicker. He swept Elise up, braced against the scratching cobwebs, and staggered toward Craven’s.

  The club under the alleyway was full of demons that didn’t look nearly so scary cowering from the apocalypse. Only about half of them looked happy with this turn of events—the ones doing shots by the bar and dancing naked downstairs. The other half, clustered among the sulfur-encrusted tables, were quiet and wary. There must have been a thousand bodies.

  Showing up with Elise tangled in spiderwebs caused a stir. The bouncer saw her and shouted deeper into the club.

  Neuma came vaulting over the bar. She wore boots so tall that the pointed tops scraped at her hips when she walked, and that was most of her outfit. Lincoln felt a stir of heat at the sight of her hairless body, curvaceous and pale. She’s a demon. A succubus. She turned freaky in a heartbeat earlier .

  She probably noticed Lincoln’s face going red, but she only had eyes for the bundle in his arms. “Elise! Oh shit!”

  “Get me out of this,” Elise said.

  Neuma wavered, glancing at Lincoln, at the hallway to the surface, at the bar. “All right. Head down that hallway right over there. Take the elevator to B3. I’ll meet you there.”

  She was fast slipping through the crowd, like a pallid ghost of a stripper. Lincoln had to shove through the crowd around the bar in order to get to the other side of the club. By the time he got to the hallway behind the bar, there was no sign of Neuma. A white-haired bartender lifted the door to let Lincoln through.

  The cage elevator jangled and rattled on its way down. Elise was getting heavy, but he just held tighter.

  Neuma was waiting in the darkened hallway when the elevator jolted to a halt. She wasn’t even out of breath. “I got the bath running. Hot water’s the best way to get the Night Hag’s webbing off,” she said, using a brass key to open the first door on the left. She hung well back as Lincoln carried Elise past her.

  The room was worse than the average post-apocalyptic motel. The roof was sagging with moisture, the “window” was a cheap painting, and there was only one little desk lamp to offer lighting. He couldn’t turn it on without putting Elise down first. The room was so dark that he didn’t know where to do it.

  “This is one of our safe house rooms,” Neuma said. “Nobody’s gonna bother you down here. You’ll be fine as long as it takes to…” She trailed off, her expression pinched. “How’d you cross the Night Hag?”

  “Is that the giant spider?” Elise asked.

  “Yeah. She’s slept for years. And then she wakes up, crawls out of the Warrens, and goes to web you? I mean, what the fuck ? You’re an accountant!”

  “I gotta get her in the bath,” Lincoln grunted. “You gonna help at all?”

  Neuma shook her head. “Not when the Mother is in town. Was—was she involved with this? The Mother?”

  “You mean busty, dark, and scary? She’s probably related.” When it rains blood, it pours locusts, and it seemed like all manners of evil were coming out of the woodwork.

  “I shouldn’t come in to help. The Mother got into me once—she could do it again if she wanted.” Neuma rubbed her arms and shuddered. “I don’t want her crawling in when you’re all like...” Her eyebrows knitted at the sight of Elise cocooned. “Can I get you guys anything else?”

  “New clothes,” Lincoln said. “These ones itch.”

  She bobbed her head in a nod. “I’ll get on that. I should go.” She reached in, shut the door. Wham.

  Lincoln bumped the other door open with his hip. It led to a bathroom that looked like it came from Reno’s Wild West days. It had an oversized clawfoot tub, a toilet with no seat, and a cracked porcela
in sink. The tub was already full, as promised. The sole bulb over the vanity tinted the water orange.

  He lowered Elise into the water, which was about two degrees too hot. It slopped over his chest and thighs when he dropped her in. She hissed. “You all right?” he asked.

  “It stings. Start cutting.”

  He took the falhófnir dagger out of his belt. “Hold still. This thing’s really sharp.” Lincoln kept cutting down the seam where he’d started, careful not to cut too deep. The layers peeled away one at a time. The hot water was soaking in, making it softer, and the cutting got easier fast. But it was still adhered to Elise’s clothes and skin.

  “It’s not coming off!” She struggled to get an arm out, snarling.

  “Hang on,” he said. “Relax. Just let me do it.”

  Her eyes glinted. “I don’t relax well.”

  “You don’t got a lot of other options.” Lincoln was careful about getting web off of her shoulder. He used the dagger’s blade to lift if off the surface of the water and flick it into the corner.

  Slowly, she stopped fighting inside of the webbing. She relaxed back. “Why a frog?” Elise asked, glaring at nothing. That glare was her thinking face. Sort of like how Sophie’s chin might crinkle up when she was thinking hard.

  “If it’s Biblical, like the plagues, then I’m thinking it’s one of the three signs of apocalypse,” Lincoln said. “There’s this thing about frogs—how the end of times will be signaled by a frog coming from the dragon’s, the beast’s, and the false prophet’s mouths. Guessing a giant spider qualifies as evil enough to be a dragon.”

  “Guess it could be worse,” she muttered. “It wasn’t an actual dragon.”

  He slid his knife carefully along her shoulder to loosen a big patch. It was stuck too close. “We’re gonna have to scrub this off after it soaks a while longer, at least where it touches your skin. I don’t know if we can get it off your clothes.”

  “Cut my clothes off,” Elise said.

  Her tone reminded him of the way she’d started out flirting. She’d offered to drink his blood, if he wanted. Lincoln had never once thought of blood drinking as sexy before. Now she was giving him that familiar steady gaze, ordering him to cut her clothes off in that exact same tone, and she didn’t even know what kind of memories she was bringing him.