by S. M. Reine
“Oh,” Sophie said.
“I don’t know why I’m telling you that. I just—you know, I heard what the Traveler did to you, and it was so fucked up,” Betty said. “I was kinda messed up for a couple weeks after I ended my pregnancy, and I did it on purpose. You know? So I feel like, having someone try to do it to you… I’ll listen if I want to talk about it. You don’t have to trust me. You don’t know me. But I think you’re a long way from home, so I’m as good as anyone else if you need to talk.”
Sophie felt overwhelmed by the tumble of words. She did not judge Betty for this abortion—at least, she tried not to. She had seen the statistics about how legal abortion was only ever a public health benefit. How improved access made women safer and more successful in life.
But she had also just been strapped to a table by a ghostly witch who’d been prepared to cut the baby out of her, and the word abortion was enough to send her into the darkest places inside of herself. It felt like falling.
“Oh shit, I didn’t mean to make things weird,” Betty said. “I know it’s weird. I don’t think there’s any way to talk about this that isn’t kind of weird.”
“I understand that you’re trying to be kind.” Sophie drew in a deep breath and let it out, folding her fingers in front of her navel. “Women must have these conversations. Statistically, embryonic and fetal death is common, but socially, it is left undiscussed, whether the death occurs naturally or by choice. I’m not in the right mindset to accept your kindness right now. Your willingness to discuss it may save another woman’s life or sanity, though. Thank you for telling me about your experience.”
Betty’s eyes got wider as Sophie talked longer. “Wait, how old are you?”
“It’s difficult to explain. My mind is in my mid-twenties, but my body is barely pubescent.”
“This has to do with all the weird ‘the world is full of demons and gods and argh, mayhem! Death! Destruction!’ thing that I’m only just learning about, doesn’t it?”
“Yes, quite closely related.” She took a single piece of cereal and let it moisten on her tongue. She felt as though she’d been stuffed with cotton by the Traveler. “Why did you terminate? If you don’t mind me asking.”
“It was really early. I’d just peed on the stick and hadn’t even started to get symptoms yet, so it was like…do I want to go through crazy medical crap for nine months for a baby I know I don’t want?” Betty cringed. “That sounds bad.”
“It’s realistic.”
“I was divorcing my ex-husband at the time. We had ex sex. In case you haven’t already discovered this, I highly recommend against ex sex, because it’s so emotional and weird and birth control gets hard and babies happen. My ex and I had zero future together. But if I’d had that baby, I’d have been stuck communicating with him the rest of my life about it.”
“It was to protect yourself,” Sophie said.
“I’m selfish,” she said.
“That’s not for me to judge.”
“Guess it’s for God, isn’t it?” Betty faked a laugh, shooting finger guns in the air. “Maybe that’s why this is happening.”
“That early in the pregnancy, it’s hardly a life,” Sophie said.
“Do you really believe that?”
Sophie didn’t. She had already seen how this baby developed. She had held her Heleentje’s hands as she learned to walk, kissed her lips as they unleashed their first laughs, and taught her to read. She knew that her daughter would grow into a leggy eight-year-old with no interest in studying books and a love of running.
“I feel good about what I did,” Betty said. “At first I was confused, but years later, it’s so much better. I’m so glad I didn’t screw up my life with a pregnancy. It was my choice, though. And you get the same choice.” She gripped Sophie’s hand tightly. “Nobody gets to make that choice for you, not some freaky witch things and not your baby’s daddy, if he’s in the picture. It’s just you.”
“Betty’s wrong, you know.”
Lincoln had been straining his ears to listen in on Betty and Sophie’s conversation, so he was startled at the sound of Elise’s voice so much closer.
The Godslayer was leaning against Yatam’s kitchen island, braid settled over her shoulder like a serpent before striking. Her skin was still rashy from the cobwebs, and she was glaring at the doorway like it was coming for her money.
The darkness in Yatam’s safe house was absolute. Aside from the bedroom, it was all unfurnished. Yatam had covered a large statue in a white drop cloth so they couldn’t see it, and that was his only other personal item. The stark modern design of the white walls and industrial steel lighting was too clean for someone like Elise, still bloody, her hair damp from the bath, her fingers stiff from webbing.
“You think Betty’s wrong?” Lincoln had figured Elise for a feminist type like the one he’d dated in college who had been a card-carrying member of NARAL Pro-Choice America. Those purple-shirt bitches had loved abortions. Lincoln had loved how much bringing home one of those shirts freaked out his sisters.
“I know she is,” Elise said. “I was there.”
“Kind of a relief to hear it, actually. It’s wild to think she didn’t even talk to her ex about getting it done. You’d think he should have some say.”
She cut him off with a jab of her hand like she could slice through the words in midair. “Stop. You’re not getting it. Betty’s wrong because she doesn’t know what happened.” Elise’s gaze flicked to him, her eyes as dark as they’d been in the bathroom below Craven’s. “It wasn’t even her husband who knocked her up. We went out drinking when the divorce was about to close, and she thought we should go to Eloquent Blood. She’d heard about it through a classmate. Sometimes they let humans in. I thought I’d be able to protect Betty and her stupid friends, but I got distracted. She got raped by an incubus. She doesn’t remember it.”
She said it so matter-of-factly. A demon had raped Betty, and Betty didn’t know.
“Betty doesn’t drive, so I booked the abortion, paid for it, and took her to the clinic,” Elise said. “That’s how we went from classmates to best friends.”
Lincoln had to take a step away. It was too much to take all at once. “So you bonded over…killing a baby?”
“It would have been demon-spawn, a half-incubus Gray, and it would have fed through Betty’s body even if she put it up for adoption. But do you know what matters most? She didn’t want it.”
“If Sophie wanted to save the universe by killing the baby…?”
He didn’t even have to finish the sentence.
“I’d do it for her, if she asked,” Elise said.
Lincoln shuddered. “Jesus. That baby inside her isn’t a demon, and it’s got a right to life.”
For the first time, Elise looked truly angry at Lincoln. Not the world in general, but Lincoln. “It’s only got a right to life if she wants to let it take up space in her belly for nine months.”
“What about what the baby wants?”
“It wants nothing . It’s not a baby.”
Nobody earned a name like Godslayer without being bloodthirsty. But he’d also always known Elise to protect the weak, and it didn’t get weaker than an unborn child. “Damn,” he said.
She paced along the counter, arms folded tight enough that a vein was popping out on her neck. She looked frighteningly harsh in the lantern light. The shadows in her eye sockets were deep, her cheekbones like knives. “What about my choice?”
“Uh,” Lincoln said. “Your…choice? About what?” He wasn’t sure how many more secret babies he could handle.
“God is coming for me,” she said, relieving him of his momentary confusion. “I won’t let him take me back to the garden—never .” She fixed him with a look as chilling as he’d ever seen from her. “I should slit my wrists now. Eat a bullet. Hang myself from the rafters.”
As dark as it was in the city, the spaces inside Lincoln were even darker.
That was the choice his
father had made.
The selfish, abrupt choice that could never be taken back.
“Don’t you dare talk like that,” he said. “You’re just scared.”
Her eyes flashed. “I’m going to catch up with James. Don’t follow me. And don’t tell anyone what I told you.” Elise slipped backward into shadow. Her hair looked inky-dark for a moment, her eyes depthless black. “I’ll castrate you the way I did the incubus.”
Lincoln had no doubt of that.
18
J ames Faulkner was in a poor mood by the time he arrived at the condominium. He could no longer deny that the ten plagues of Egypt—which were a long distance from home, geographically and temporally speaking—were afflicting Reno. He had watched the business he built from the ground up destroyed by a rampaging spider. He had been rescued by another high priest—one who could, apparently, somehow teleport. Thom had refused to tell him how such a thing was possible. And the apocalypse was hurtling toward them with no obvious source or solution.
He stood in the chilly corner of the condo, where the windows met to form a near-unobstructed view of Reno. There was little to see. The fires burning around the city offered some light, but it also clogged the air with smoke. No matter how James tried to think his way through the problem, he could only arrive at two conclusions. God was heralding his approach to take Elise back to the garden, and this was somehow Lincoln’s fault.
Elise had been in quiet conversation with Lincoln for almost an hour. James could see them reflected in the glass—her angry posture and his angry face. Their conversation looked unpleasant, and there was no sensible reason for James to feel satisfied about it.
James turned from the reflection so he would stop staring.
He stood in an open room that was likely meant to be living room, dining room, and study all in one. Open floor plans were wretchedly exposed like that. Thom had furnished for none of these uses, leaving the room like a sparse museum exhibiting only a single statue, hidden underneath a drop cloth.
His fingers itched to take the cloth away, but Thom had forbidden it.
Considering that they were in Thom’s safe house, James was obliged to keep his hands to himself—if not from courtesy, then because Thom had revealed himself to be threateningly powerful. Teleportation was impossible for witches. Yet Thom had simply appeared in the small ballroom at Motion and Dance without seeming to have cast any magic. He’d said, “I’ve been ordered to bring you and the blond one to my safe house. Hold your breath.” And then he had pulled James and Betty halfway across Reno.
It had turned out that Thom had fetched them by Lincoln’s command. James hadn’t been surprised to learn that. Of all the strangeness that had stricken James’s life, Lincoln was somehow at the epicenter of it. The connection between Thom and Lincoln wasn’t obvious. Both of them remained enigmas, much like the statue.
James could not yet answer his questions about the men, but the statue was within arm’s reach, hidden only by a cloth.
He lifted its edge.
“Stop.” Thom stepped from the other side. He may as well have been boneless, his stride was so fluid.
Until that moment, James had been confident that their host was not in the room. He appeared and disappeared freely, despite the fact that ability was nigh unto impossible in humans. It took far too much power. It was impossible that another high priest could be more powerful than James.
“Apologies. Sometimes my curiosity gets the better of me,” James said.
“I imagine it does, given what you are.” Thom’s dark eyes gleamed in the lightless condo. His voice was so quiet that James was surprised he could even hear it over the pounding of hailstones against the windows. He looked markedly worse than he had at King’s Beach. His skin was sallow rather than luminescent, and his eyes seemed sunken. Yet he was still graceful, dragging the sense of power behind him like a shadow. “Does your kopis know?”
“She knows everything about me,” James said.
“We both know that’s a lie.”
“I have no reason to lie.”
“Don’t insult my intelligence.” Thom circled around behind James, as if trying to see him from all angles. “What’s interesting is that you don’t present as a liar.” He tapped a finger against his temple. “Several catecholamines are released while lying. Norepinephrine, dopamine, and adrenaline. You, on the other hand, remain calm. It’s been a long time since I’ve seen a witch so suppress his emotions via magic. I’ll be curious to see the cost when you can no longer maintain your lies.”
James’s heart indeed didn’t speed because he felt no fear. “Perhaps you are wrong about me. Have you considered that?”
“No,” Thom said. “I’m the one who told Metaraon to give Adam brides to occupy his attention after Eve died.”
Now James felt a wash of fear.
He imagined his brain was releasing all the catecholamines.
It was verified by the faintest shift in Thom’s features. The high priest didn’t smile easily, but James got the impression that Thom was laughing at him silently.
“Impossible,” James said. Metaraon had begun producing brides for Adam millennia earlier.
“Just as you think it’s impossible I can be a stronger witch than you. I must say—I’ve always enjoyed taunting angels with the things they don’t know. Even Fascination doesn’t torment your kindred so much.”
There was no point in arguing with Thom about this. Nothing James said seemed to matter. Somehow, this man—this creature—knew the truth to all of James’s closely held secrets. That James one of was several generations descended from Metaraon. That his coven had cultivated Adam’s brides for centuries. That his close relationship with Elise was far more troubling than that of an ordinary kopis and aspis.
“Who the hell are you?” James asked.
“I’m the morning star,” Thom said. “I’m the eyes watching you from shadows. I’m the liar who can never be fooled.” This time, he did smile with his lips, and a chill rolled down James’s spine.
“We have to talk,” Elise said.
James swung around at the sound of her voice. His kopis was marching toward them, and his pulse calmed at the sight of her. Not because he found her reassuring, but because the magic that helped regulate his emotions was strongest where Elise was concerned.
In truth, he should have been quite afraid that Elise had heard his conversation with Thom.
He turned back to the high priest.
But Thom was gone.
“How in the seven hells does he do that?” James asked. “The amount of magic it takes a witch to teleport is absurd. I haven’t been able to capture it in paper magic, and I have dedicated my life to pushing its limits.”
“It’s easy for him because he’s not a witch. He’s a demon,” Elise said. “The Father of All Demons. His name is Yatam. Lilith made him. His sister, Yatai, attacked Lincoln at the lake. Yatam’s looking bad because Yatai kicked his ass, but he’s still about a hundred times more powerful than any other demon I’ve encountered.”
James knew how to swear in several languages, and he ran through all of them before he could muster a response. If Thom truly was Yatam, the Father of All Demons, then it was no surprise he knew James’s secrets. There was little the demon didn’t know.
What if he had already told Elise about James’s past?
No. She must not know . Elise looked too normal and unguarded. She would have attacked him if she knew—or worse, vanished.
“We never should have come back to Reno in the first place,” James said. “The Bay Area is as near to King’s Beach, and we could have already been on a ship to—”
“There’s nowhere we can go that He won’t find me,” Elise said. “It’s too late.”
“How did this all happen so quickly? That demon-spider was larger than the overlord you killed three years back. Yatai and Yatam appeared after centuries without sightings. And His eye fell upon us in one of the few places He shouldn’t be able
to see!”
“None of this was supposed to happen.” Elise’s rage was only barely caged within her bones, and she looked like she might fly apart. “The only one who can undo all of this fucked up bullshit is MIA. Maybe dead. Because I skewered the Traveler today.”
“You…skewered it?”
“It was going to hurt Sophie,” Elise said. “I don’t have regrets. Maybe I should have regrets.” She finally stopped pacing and looked at him—really looked at him. “I regret everything.”
He couldn’t stand this far apart from his kopis when she hurt so much. James folded his arms around her. Elise buried her face in his chest, and he allowed himself to inhale the scent of her hair. They were hidden in the shadow of the concealed statue, unseen by others. James lost himself in the illusion that they were truly alone again, that it was just the two of them against the entire world and the mad god who ruled it from the prison of His garden.
He felt no nostalgia for that time.
Yet this version of reality was still worse.
The entire time they’d been running, there had been no calls this close. Mr. Black had tried to summon God and it still hadn’t been this disastrous.
For the first time, James had no control over anything.
“I’ll recast the wards on the condominium,” James said. “We can weather this as long as we don’t open any doors. Opening doors was my mistake at Motion and Dance, and—”
“We can’t just hide now that He knows where to look,” Elise said.
“Hello.” A small voice spoke up. Sophie had emerged from the bedroom carrying a bowl of cereal. “I don’t mean to intrude, but I was hoping to convene a meeting in regard to the wards on this flat, and—well, I heard you discussing wards. I must ask… What kind of wards?”
James released Elise, putting a safe distance between them. He felt guilty, as though he had been caught doing something he shouldn’t, though God only knew why he was worried what some scrap of a pregnant teen thought of him. “Complex ones. I’m much more powerful than any witch you’ve met, I’m sure.”