Hell's Hinges

by S. M. Reine

As it turned out, fitting a gargoyle into elevators wasn’t necessary when the gargoyle could punch through walls. Junior punched through the top floor of one tower at St. Mary’s Regional Hospital and took Elise and Lincoln inside, one by one. Lincoln hit bare subfloor inside. Everything around him had been stripped. Drywall torn down, doors removed, old equipment shoved into odd corners. Most of the support structure was exposed along one wall.

  Elise was limping as fast as she could toward that wall.

  “What are you doing?” Lincoln asked, running after her.

  “I heard someone screaming,” she said.

  “Nobody’s screaming.”

  “Not anymore,” Elise replied grimly.

  She jumped through the doorway to an operating room. The emergency lights were still running, so the room glowed dimly red. There were two figures inside, one on a table and the other standing beside them. Lincoln recognized the shape of the Traveler’s strange jacket and hair. That was the person standing up.

  And that meant the person on the table was…

  “Sophie!”

  Lincoln’s eyes adjusted enough to see the Traveler jabbing a needle into Sophie’s arm.

  He’d never leaped such a distance so fast before. He was simply there, fists swinging. Lincoln backhanded the Traveler into a wall. It fell in a shower of metal and crumpling cardboard boxes.

  Lincoln took the syringe out of Sophie’s arm then slashed the table’s straps to set her free. Sophie was weak against his chest. She was shaking with tears but could barely keep her eyes open. Sedated. “Jesus, Sophie!” He crushed her under his chin. Squeezed her tighter than he should have. “Don’t pass out, Sophie. Stay awake. Listen to my voice.”

  She was mumbling. He smoothed a hand over her hair—it was in tight coils now, instead of the braids—and listened closely to make out her words. “Is she okay? Is everything okay?”

  “Who are you worried about?” Lincoln asked.

  And then he realized there was a strange shape to Sophie. He pushed her away a couple of inches to look down.

  She was a slight girl, a teenager at best, and…

  “You’re pregnant?” he asked.

  “I don’t know. I’m not sure!” Tears coursed down her girlish face. “What did it do to me? Did it remove her? Is she gone?”

  Horror dawned over Lincoln. The Traveler had put Sophie’s feet up in stirrups, and it had been getting ready to go between her legs.

  It had been trying to abort her baby.

  His eyes flashed to the tray beside the operating table. The equipment still looked untouched. He had no idea what that duck-shaped thing was or what half the rubber stuff was for, but it was clean. “It didn’t do anything,” Lincoln said. “You’re safe. You’re—you’re both safe.”

  Sophie sucked in a breath. “Behind you!”

  He twisted too late.

  The Traveler was swinging its knife toward his back—

  —and the blade glanced off a steel pipe with a spray of sparks.

  Elise had gotten between them.

  Their eyes met over the crossed weapons, and the Traveler looked neither surprised nor worried to see Elise. It drove her back with a few fast jabs. Elise jumped back with surprising agility, even though her left leg looked like it was about to buckle.

  “I’m disappointed in you,” Elise said. “Attacking a pregnant girl?”

  “Stand down, Ms. Kavanagh. That baby is at the center of a Precept violation,” the Traveler said. “The very laws of the universe will be shattered when she’s born. Our world will begin falling apart.”

  Confusion flashed across Elise’s face. A lot of those concepts looked to be new to her. Nobody back then talked about Precepts. “There’s no excuse for this.”

  “And we don’t want to fight,” Lincoln said. “We’re all here—you and me, Sophie and Junior. We can travel now and fix the timeline. Close the loop.”

  “Things are most likely too different to go back to your timeline. I warned you to be careful!” the Traveler said. Its white gaze fell upon Elise again. “You know I’m right. Don’t get into this.”

  And the Traveler launched itself at Sophie.

  Lincoln tightened his arms around her, twisting his body so that he’d stand between the Traveler and the Historian. He screwed up his face in anticipation of having a dagger skewer him.

  But the blow didn’t come.

  A pipe jutted through the Traveler’s body, its broken end painted in prismatic blood. Elise had broken it off of some kind of mechanical arm, turning it into a javelin. She swung her makeshift weapon without withdrawing it, hurling the Traveler into another table. “You don’t make that choice for her! It’s her choice .”

  The Traveler shut its eyes. “There’s no hope for any of us now, you idiot.” It sagged against the ground. Fresh blood spattered over the floor as its fingers went limp around the pipe.

  It didn’t breathe in again.

  “Wait,” Lincoln said. “It’s not dead, right?” If the Traveler was dead, then there was no way to get back to 2015—and no way to fix this so that God didn’t find Elise so soon.

  Elise grabbed the end of the pipe and slid it free of the Traveler’s body. It didn’t even twitch. It just flopped onto its back, boneless. “I’ll look for a pulse,” she said, tossing the pipe aside.

  But she didn’t get a chance to kneel beside the Traveler. Air sighed through the room. The body faded away. Within moments, there was nothing left—not even the blood that the Traveler had spit onto the floor.

  Sophie had never known such a swing from fear to relief and then a downward spiral into crushing grief. She felt safer with Lincoln than ever before, which was, honestly, not a very high bar to clear in regard to her short and tumultuous relationship with Lincoln Marshall. It still took several seconds after the Traveler disappeared for Sophie to realize that she was safe—for now—and in the absence of adrenaline, she felt nothing but exhaustion.

  It occurred to her that Lincoln had new companionship—a woman that Sophie did not recognize. If he trusted her, then Sophie did too. But she’d likely have trusted a hippopotamus with a canker sore at that moment, so long as it meant she didn’t have to lift her head. “We have a problem,” Sophie mumbled.

  “Is this her?” Booted footsteps crossed the storage room. That clipped tone belonged to the woman with the steel pipe. “You didn’t tell me that Sophie is a kid.”

  “I didn’t realize she was this much younger than me.” Lincoln’s voice was deep, and it made his chest rumble. “She talks like she’s about eighty years old most of the time, and she dresses like a librarian.”

  “You’re mocking me while I’m drugged. You’re a terrible person, Lincoln Marshall,” Sophie said sleepily. He stroked her head and she swatted weakly against him. “Stop touching my hair.”

  “Marshall?” It was the woman speaking again. “You said your last name was Keyes.”

  Sophie managed to pry her eyes open at that, and she found that Lincoln was stubbornly not looking at her. “Lincoln Keyes? I have to say, I’m flattered.”

  “Great. I’m never gonna hear the end of this,” he said. “Can you stand?”

  Shock and morphine had turned her to spaghetti, but there was nothing physically wrong with her. “I don’t see why not.” She tried to slide off the table and her knees buckled.

  Strong hands caught her—and not Lincoln’s.

  It was a white woman with features that could have been carved from sandstone. Her loose brown curls did little to add softness to her face. Her shoulders were as broad as her hips and pronounced quadriceps, giving her the look of an hourglass supplementing with steroids. Yet she was very gentle holding Sophie. “Careful,” she said. “I’m Elise. You’re safe.”

  Elise .

  “He’s told me about you,” Sophie said, swaying on her feet.

  “Junior!” called Lincoln. “Little help?”

  She was scooped into enormous arms. It was the gargoyle. Junior’s broad chest
was cool—the same temperature as the room—and it was strange to feel stone that was not supple to the touch but nevertheless capable of bending. Her head fell back against his bicep to look up at his square features. The pronounced canine teeth made Junior look like a beast, but even with his features caricaturized by his Rebirth, there was something Lincoln-looking about him, and it was comforting for once.

  “I’m not sure I can stay awake,” Sophie said. Everything was so heavy. Now that she didn’t even have to sit up, she was dropping fast.

  “How are we going to get her to safety?” Elise asked. Sophie had given no thought to what Lincoln’s absent beloved might sound like, but if she had, she wouldn’t have chosen a voice pitched so flatly.

  “Junior can fly her to Motion and Dance. But he can only carry one at a time, obviously, and I’m not letting Sophie leave my sight.”

  “What is she, your sister?”

  “Do we look anything like siblings to you? Did you notice she’s black?”

  “So what?” Elise asked.

  Lincoln muttered to himself in frustration.

  Sophie liked this woman. She liked her very much. Almost as much as she liked resting her head in the crook of Junior’s elbow like she was a baby and letting her legs dangle over his opposite forearm.

  She was drifting. Heavy.

  What is the effect of morphine on third trimester fetuses?

  The thought was darker than the hole the morphine tried to drag her toward. She could feel no motion from within her womb. It was possible, of course, that the baby was only sleeping. Or that Sophie was too numb to experience the sensations. Yet fear thrilled through her anyway.

  And she still fell asleep.

  Part VI

  A thousand years was a very long time.

  It passed for Anat in a blink.

  She lost track of the number of men who fell under her fangs before the first year ended. To be newly bloodless was to know uncontrollable hunger; she quickly lost her squeamishness for clutching men in her arms as they died. Her life was built around the flow of blood into her mouth. If she was not drinking it, or digesting it, she was hunting for it. Anat was quiet death in the night, merciful and just.

  Nügua had told Anat how to do it, though neither had realized one was teaching the other at the time. Women who wandered alone at night attracted men. Anat had died when she was at the peak of her beauty, when youth shined from her face, and she never wandered far before a man or two approached. Many of them were like Hannu, drawn to her power as much as they feared her and eager to dominate her body because of it. They knew the risks. They earned the result.

  Even Inanna could not complain about much of it.

  She did, at first. She complained frequently.

  “You shame my memory,” Inanna said. “Killing the mortals I dedicated my godhood to protecting is the worst insult you could commit, beyond sacrificing your life to be with a demon.”

  “You were goddess of love as much as war,” Anat would counter. “What did you do to be with Utu?”

  “You are not me,” Inanna said.

  But this did not take long to prove untrue. Inanna and Anat were inseparable in the way that Utu and Yatam were. Anat would gaze upon her husband’s face when he was lost in thought, admiring the master craft Nügua showed in sculpting him, and she caught Inanna gazing like that often too. Anat often spoke Inanna’s words when conversing with Yatam, and after a few generations, she stopped being able to tell which piece of her soul was in charge during conversations.

  She became closer to Inanna every time she made passionate love with Yatam, every time she drove a knife into a predatory man’s belly, every time she bathed in incense to purify her undead flesh.

  Eventually, she stopped seeing visions of Inanna at all.

  Yatam too grew in power as the years elapsed. He feasted upon blood almost as often as Anat and preyed upon the mortals’ more sensual urges even more often. People threw themselves upon him for a taste of his ecstasy. They would give anything for that taste. Even their blood. As Yatam grew hungrier, Anat only loved him more. She loved his control. She loved his care. She loved how freely he smiled. He was vibrant life and ecstatic death.

  One time he woke her at sunset by climbing into her sarcophagus, letting her feel the warmth of the sunlight trapped in his skin. They kissed and breathed the daylight. “I don’t often miss the sun because you give me no reason to feel I’m without it,” Anat said.

  Yatam had smiled with his eyes, warmed by love. “I do it for Inanna as much as you. She didn’t ask to spend her afterlife in night.”

  “I don’t mind,” Anat said truthfully. There was no we , not anymore. She was one with Inanna, as Yatam had always been one with Utu, and her husband understood the implications of the statement. They made love, and their kisses tasted like tears of gratitude—his, not hers, because her body was no longer capable of weeping.

  Though they were careful, they still had to relocate and rebuild their lives every few years to avoid suspicion. They rode north and south in Kush, from city to city, and even joined a few caravans to inhabit the deeper desert villages. The earth changed over those centuries. Quakes formed new valleys, storms destroyed villages, shifting rains moved natural pastures.

  They took care to avoid returning to Kemet.

  In this fashion, the years melted away before them. Yatam and Anat did not age. Her world felt eternal. She had entered the Field of Reeds that everyone used to discuss in Itjtawy—the world for the dead that was nothing but a peaceful continuation of life. But this Field of Reeds was truly a Heaven in its own right, a place where Anat knew peace. She made love to Yatam in the darkness of her sarcophagus by day and drank her belly full of blood under the brilliant moonlight. It was true peace.

  Perhaps if they had been less peaceful, they would have ignored the summons.

  But it was not every day that their bloody routines were broken by the arrival of soldiers from a city-state beyond the sea. These men sought out Yatam in his palace, which he had built using money from generations of trading. They willingly abandoned their swords outside. The soldiers didn’t want to fight, but rather, had come to relay a message. “Should we speak to this king and his people?” Yatam asked Anat once the others left.

  Anat almost refused. To reach King Teleklos of Sparta, they would have to pass through Kemet again. Inanna had only ever lost battles when traversing territory owned by her enemy, where she lacked the advantage of knowing her battleground. And Kemet was the last place that they had seen Yatai.

  Crossing paths with Yatai wasn’t her only fear. Even before the king’s men found them, there had been whispers of skies torn open by battle, oceans turned to roiling blood, and winged men gutted by horned beasts. “The war is said to reach all quarters,” Anat said. “Not merely upon the land of black soil, but upon Heaven and Hell. They fight because Nügua is angry.”

  “My mother will not hurt us. She did not even ask us to join her fight. She knows we want to be alone.” It would have been difficult to ask for a more benevolent god than that. If Nügua had asked her favorite son for help, Yatam surely would have gone, and he would have been mightier than half an army. She hadn’t asked. He hadn’t offered.

  Anat never forgot that their centuries of peace were only because of Nügua’s kindness. “She’s not our only concern. Her enemies may attack if we reemerge.” If Nügua was warring against a cosmic body, it must have been Adam. He was rumored to be short-tempered, barely leashed by his ethereal wife Eve.

  “That war may never end if we don’t aid negotiations.” Yatam cupped her cheeks and kissed her softly. “But it hasn’t touched us yet. I’ll let you choose.”

  Loving the hunt wasn’t Anat’s only take-away from Inanna. She was also an icon of valor, still hungry to protect the humans she’d once fostered. She didn’t take long before making her decision.

  They chartered a ship and headed for Waset the next night.

  Their ride on the ship w
as, at first, uneventful. Yatam kept seemingly normal hours to avoid alarming the crew. Anat kept to herself, even at night. They had made a policy against killing men on the ships that transported them after one incident had led to sinking the ship and losing their assets. Better they think that Anat was a sickly, retiring woman than a potential murderer. But they had only traveled two days along the river when things became so disturbed that even Anat heard the crew’s shouts from inside her cabin.

  She stepped out onto the deck and watched as they passed a city that had caught fire. Bodies seethed between the buildings—demon bodies. They crawled from a crack in the earth. Another crack had appeared on the eastern bank, and steam billowed from it as the river slowly waterfalled into its depths. The barge’s rowers were struggling to keep from getting pulled into the swirl.

  “Fear not,” Yatam said, putting his arm around Anat. “They have the strength to keep us moving. We’re in no danger.”

  “I can’t believe Nügua has sent so many demons to this world. Nothing must be worth this much destruction,” Anat said.

  Her husband looked troubled. “Something must have made her angry.”

  The rowers did keep them from being pulled into the crevice, and they didn’t pass another city quite like the first. Most looked like they had been burned weeks earlier. They were graveyards, and she was sickened by the sight of them. Anat had killed so many throughout her life, but never on such a scale. One at a time. Two or three, if she was with Yatam. Entire cities dying was neither natural nor just.

  Anat hoped that Waset wouldn’t be so bad. Her heart sank when she saw the smoke on the horizon, heralding their approach into the city.

  “The fight is isolated there,” Yatam said. “Only some skirmishes in the outer districts. We will be safe where we’re staying.”

  As when Anat had been a human child, Waset was again the capital of Kemet. A thousand years truly vanished in the instant that their barge approached the pharaoh’s palace. The Nile was black underneath them. The scent of fish and waste mingled with incense and jasmine. The winds were warm and the flies were thick. They showed no interest in Anat’s bloodless skin.