by S. M. Reine
She cleared her throat. “More specific, please? Which runes exactly?”
He finally realized what she was asking. “Akashic wards. I’ll use runic magic to tether them to me, and I can actively feed them with my strength.”
“That sounds like a wonderful type of magic,” Sophie said. “Might I suggest that we try something more daring, though? A multidisciplinary ward?”
A frown dragged the corners of his lips down. “Do you mean using the elements?”
“I mean combining multiple kinds of magic. Infernal, ethereal, gaean. The latter is a word indicating the type of magic you use—which I can tell you’re excellent with.”
“I don’t know where Lincoln found you, but you’ve somehow been misinformed about a great many things,” James said. “Infernal and ethereal magic haven’t existed since the Treaty of Dis.” He meant it to be a dismissal. He’d much rather have been casting the wards than discussing them with someone barely old enough to be an adept in his coven.
“The other disciplines of magic are occluded but not extinct,” Sophie said. “In this year, certain events have weakened the Treaty’s boundaries. That makes the other disciplines available with some careful calculations.”
“Is that true?” Elise asked.
James lifted an eyebrow. “It’s ridiculous to discuss. Even if they’re available, nobody knows how to cast them anymore.”
Sophie looked bashful. “Actually…”
“You know how to do these weird wards?” Elise asked. “You think you can lock this place down as tight as Fort Knox?”
“Much tighter,” she said. “I normally live in a heavily warded home, a very ancient home, and I brought one of the soul links for those wards with me. Even two percent of the protections on my home would be enough to resist the strongest entities when placed over a condominium of this size. Of course, I would appreciate your assistance and wisdom, Mr. Faulkner.” It was unpleasant to feel like some teenage mother was condescending to him. Foolish enough to get herself in trouble, but somehow clever enough to combine multiple magic disciplines.
It wasn’t possible. James was the foremost authority on magic worldwide, and he didn’t even know who this girl was.
She couldn’t possibly cast more types of magic than James.
“Yes,” he said, feeling strangely hungry. “Let’s attempt these wards together.”
The rooftop was the ideal location to lay down multidisciplinary wards, despite how vulnerable the location felt to Sophie. They prepared a circle underneath the gazebo and watched hailstones bounce against the cement beyond its shelter. The night was so dark that the ice seemed to appear the moment it struck.
Elise stood watch as Sophie began placing the circle. She wasn’t unfriendly company, but she was almost as quiet as Junior, who still perched at the edge of the roof with no mind for the weather. Softball sized ice bounced off of him without seeming to register.
“Do you happen to know where Mr. Faulkner has gone?” Sophie asked, fidgeting by the edge of the gazebo. The tiger’s eye stolen from the farm was buzzing against her hip as if excited by the promise of being reinserted into wards. “Should I wait for him before beginning the circle?”
“He’s probably still looking for the ritual supplies you requested. Don’t worry. He’ll be back fast. James never misses a chance to learn new magic,” Elise said.
That only made Sophie want to get the entire spell done before he arrived. If the Traveler truly was dead and there was no getting back to 2015, then Sophie would have to take extra care to minimize changes to the timeline. Teaching an entire school of magic to the Godslayer’s aspis would, she felt, be like giving modern masonry equipment to the wall builders of Jericho.
Unfortunately, Sophie was too exhausted to hurry through the wards. She had wasted much of her energy escaping the farm with the Traveler, and the terror in the hospital had drained whatever remained.
An especially large chunk of ice smashed into Junior’s back. He grumbled.
“You could keep watch from in here,” Sophie called to him. “There’s room under the gazebo.”
Junior slipped off the roof’s edge. Elise tensed when he approached them, like a stray tom with a new cat in her territory. He settled with his back against the gazebo’s post and he was so heavy that the shelter creaked with his weight. He actually worked well as a wind block. Sophie found it easier to place the candles behind him.
“We haven’t gotten an opportunity to meet properly,” she said, extending her hand to Junior. “I’m Sophie Keyes. Your brother and I are friends.”
The gargoyle stuck a finger into her hand. They shook.
“Brother?” Elise asked.
“Ah, half-brother,” Sophie said. “Clearly there are some…differences.” She didn’t want to explain Genesis to someone who had yet to live through it. She returned her attention to Junior, whose finger had slipped from her hand. “Has Lincoln told you much about me?”
Junior nodded.
“Very much?”
Another nod.
“I suppose he would,” she said, stooping to place another candle in another bowl. She forgot how impossible it was to bend with the baby in the way. Her half-squat was not at all flattering. “You must have spent quite some time looking for me in Grove County. I’m sure he told you all sorts of stories about how irritatingly brittle and morally superior I am.”
He shook his head.
“Did he complain about how annoying he finds me?”
Another shake.
“Lincoln must have been terribly distressed not to complain,” Sophie said. “I’m touched. Genuinely.” The door opened, and Betty emerged onto the roof, pulling a fluffy duvet around her shoulders. “Ah, help has arrived! Where is James? I was planning on having his hands as well.”
“James is negotiating supplies with Yatam,” Betty said. “Apparently some of the things you’ve asked for are hard to get, so they’re trying to figure out alternatives that Yatam can actually reach by teleporting around like interdimensional popcorn, because all of this is real stuff, and we’re actually having this conversation right now.” She joined Sophie on the other side of the circle. “What do you need?”
“Mr. Faulkner has the full list,” Sophie said.
“No, I mean, what do you need? Are you warm enough? Thirsty? Hungry?”
Sophie had fallen back into the practice of only sipping at water to guarantee she wouldn’t need to visit the toilet every twenty minutes. While pregnant, her bladder was the size of a macadamia. “I could use assistance with the circle. Getting up and down is tiring me.”
Betty darted into the hail to grab a patio chair, rushing back to place it behind Sophie. “Sit your buns down, miss. I’ll be your hands. Just tell me what to do!”
Sophie directed Betty to place stones in the correct positions, and once the circle was laid out, yielded the mortar and pestle to her.
“That needs to be ground into a fine paste for anointing the crystals,” Sophie said.
Betty began grinding enthusiastically. “So what’s the plan after this? We’re gonna lock down and keep ourselves safe, but…you guys know what the last of the ten plagues were, right? Dead babies? How are we going to handle that?”
“I’ve been thinking about that.” Elise gazed over the city, arms folded. “In the myth, Moses told the Hebrews to paint their doors with lamb’s blood and then God would pass them over. He wouldn’t kill their firstborns like he did with the Egyptians. He’s got Yatai instead of Moses, but it could be the same thing. She might want to protect ‘her people.’ Demons.”
“Not just any demons,” Sophie said. “Yatai and Yatam independently produced the entire class of demons we call incubi. Interbreeding with those incubi means they also spawned most nightmares, mara… If we know who leads those communities within Reno, we could speak to them for information. We could have every household protect themselves before the stroke of the last plague.”
“Won’t work. Cell towe
rs are down, no power, no way to tell everyone.” Elise came to crouch at the end of the circle, clasping her gloved hands together. “We have to stop the apocalypse before the plagues get that far. We find the leader of the demons, and from her, we find out where He’s getting into the dimension.”
“Getting in from where? Heaven?” Betty asked.
“A prison in Heaven,” Elise said. “It’s quarantined. He’ll need a way in. If we can find it and shut the door…”
“Isolate Him from His herald,” Sophie added.
Elise nodded. “We stop the ten plagues. Hopefully. It’s the best I’ve got right now, so we’re gonna have to give it a try.”
“Where in the world are you going to find a demon leader type during…this?” Betty gestured vaguely out at Reno.
“Neuma, the bartender at Eloquent Blood, is hooked up with the entire community around here. She’s half-succubus Gray. She’s also been possessed by Yatai at least once. I can go talk to her—I did her taxes this year, so I know where she lives.”
“You can’t go out there,” Betty said.
“I’ll have backup. It’s fine,” Elise said.
“You are so much scarier than I ever realized, and I mean that in the nicest way possible.” Betty’s grinding was slowing, and her face was red. “Wow, that’s harder than it looks!”
“That’s because you keep ducking out of the gym with me. I’ll finish grinding if you promise to stop avoiding workouts after we save the world.” Elise took the mortar and pestle and worked quickly, twisting her wrist with practiced movements.
“It’s weird to think about life getting back to normal after this,” Betty said, gazing balefully at the stormy sky. “Will everything get back to normal?”
“Maybe,” Elise said.
“Are you still going to move in with me?”
“Maybe. If I don’t have to leave. If I don’t die.”
“Oh my God, don’t even talk like that.” Betty slapped her on the arm. “No dying, okay? Dying is strictly forbidden!”
“People like me don’t usually see thirty,” Elise said.
Betty’s smile was wobbly, her eyes a little red. “And you chose to spend your twenties becoming an accountant?”
“It’s something to do.” She focused hard on the mortar and pestle, even though the mixture of herbs was already a fine powder. “I don’t know what’s going to happen now. I’m not ready for things to change, but I don’t have a choice.”
“It’s not all bad. I mean…you and Lincoln,” Betty said. “Right?”
Elise gave her a blank look. “What?”
“You guys have a thing going.”
“Define ‘thing.’”
Betty sat back on her heels, rubbing her temples. “A thing a lot like the thing I had with him.”
Sophie should not have been listening to this, but they weren’t being especially quiet. She exchanged looks with the gargoyle. It looked like Junior was kind of smiling—silently laughing at Lincoln, almost.
“How did you know?” Elise asked.
“Because I’ve never seen you hook up with a guy before, and you’re making faces I’ve never seen before, and also you guys came back wearing the same weird leather bondage gear.”
“We got dressed by the half-succubus bartender,” she said.
“First of all, that’s amazing, and I’m jealous,” Betty said. “Second of all, what the hell? You’re hooking up with Lincoln?”
“So what? You guys aren’t interested in each other, and you’re not the jealous type.”
“Not over Lincoln, God. No. He’s just some guy. I just didn’t expect it from you ,” Betty said. “You’ve never dated anyone in the whole time I’ve known you, and I guess I just… I couldn’t imagine you doing the kind of stuff my sorority sisters do to each other all the time.”
Elise’s brow lowered over her eyes. She seemed to evaluate this information as though it were totally new. “You and Lincoln weren’t anything.”
“That doesn’t change the fact that we briefly were , and you’re my best friend.”
“And?”
“I’m going to chalk this confusion up to the fact you’re secretly a legendary figure from myths and legends. So let me put it clearer. The girl code says we don’t date each other’s exes, at all, ever. And especially not without asking permission first.”
“We don’t do it at all, but when we do, we ask permission?” Elise rolled her eyes. “This is ridiculous.”
Betty looked stung. She stood up. “You could pretend to understand.”
She pushed through the door leading downstairs and vanished.
Elise watched her leave. Sophie didn’t know the woman well enough to read her facial expressions, but she got the impression that the Godslayer was genuinely, forcefully confused by their exchange.
“There are many things I don’t understand about this world,” Sophie said helpfully. “I’ve committed numerous faux pas since entering society, and I’ve found that apologies pave a path to better understanding.”
Elise didn’t reply. She brought the ground herbs over, and at Sophie’s direction, sprinkled them at each of the cardinal directions.
“If Betty is truly your friend, I hope she will come to understand that you’ve likely a preternatural draw to Lincoln,” Sophie said. “I’ve heard how he speaks about you. It’s amazing to think someone can care that much about another.”
“He’s talked about me with you?” Elise asked.
“Quite a bit.”
It didn’t seem to reassure Elise. If anything, she looked more troubled. “I didn’t choose any of this.”
“I’m sorry,” Sophie said. “I understand.”
Elise got up to stand guard at the door again, arms folded tight, eyes fixed on the black sky. But her voice was surprisingly gentle when she said, “Thanks.”
19
T he Father of All Demons seemed too eager to help James get supplies, to an arguably detrimental degree. If James asked for one kind of root, Yatam would return with a dozen different kinds—entire baskets of them. “It has been millennia since interdisciplinary magic has been cast,” Yatam said. “You may find some things don’t act the way you expect once the magic begins. This will enable substitutions. You’ll have fewer problems.”
That may have been true, but that was likelier to be Sophie’s problem than James’s. Assuming she was truly capable of casting such obscure magic. “Don’t take long on this last trip,” James said. “We’ll need to bind the wards to you.”
Yatam vanished before James finished speaking.
For all of James’s fears, Yatam didn’t seem interested in telling Elise any secrets. In general, Yatam seemed disinterested in talking with James at all, as though he were nobody important. Not the most powerful witch among all the witches on the planet. Not the man who had innovated the paper magic his aunt invented. Just a bit player in someone else’s story.
James was not accustomed to feeling so unseen.
He went back to sorting through the baskets that Yatam had left behind, separating Sophie’s ingredients from the extras. He was working on a stack piled near the statue at the moment, which was no longer covered in a drop cloth. Yatam had removed it. The statue turned out to be a perfect replication of a beautiful woman who happened to have a serpent’s tail rather than legs. James had seen illustrations of her before, and he assumed the statue had been carved in honor of Lilith, the oldest demon. Her smirk made him all the angrier. It was like she knew something that he didn’t.
Footsteps clattered on the stairs from the roof. James recognize the cadence of Elise’s boots a moment before she appeared. She wore leather and black cotton, carrying her sword loosely in her bandaged fist. James had found the sword in Idlewild and made a point to bring it. Elise hadn’t thanked him for restoring her weapon.
“I’m heading out,” Elise said.
“Out where? Fire is raining on the city,” he said.
“I’ll be safe. I’m going
to have a gargoyle escort,” Elise said. If the gargoyle was going, then its handler would too. She was leaving with Lincoln.
“It’s too dangerous for the community if I hide. I have to get ahead of the last plague.” She gazed across the field of baskets and crates. Yatam had been kept amply busy by Sophie’s numerous demands. It would take multiple trips to get everything upstairs to her, much less put together the spell that required these supplies. “Get these wards on lockdown. Whatever happens, I don’t want to be worrying about you guys back here.”
“And yet you’re fine leaving me here to worry about you,” James said.
“You always stay back to cast magic while I go fight.”
But they hadn’t done that in years. James had gotten used to feeling Elise was safe, and he no longer spent his nights spellcasting in worried solitude, waiting out the endless hours until she dragged herself home. “Let’s piggyback,” he said.
Elise considered the offer, then nodded.
Piggybacking was one of the greatest advantages of the kopis having an aspis. They were always afforded some level of protection by virtue of their bond, but once it was activated, they became hyper-connected. Elise would be faster, feel better, fight harder. James would be able to cast stronger magic and hold the spells for longer.
Their minds connected.
It felt like looking through Elise’s eyes and feeling Elise’s feelings. She was still injured from her fight with the giant spider. Her skin was raw. When she looked at James, she saw none of his flaws—not the two gray hairs that he had grown at his left temple or the age lines on his forehead. She didn’t notice the scars or the fact that his eyes were much too blue. She saw him to be almost as flawlessly alabaster as Yatam.
Once the bond locked into place, it felt like a hook in James’s breastbone.
Elise stepped back from him with a small gasp, pressing her fingertips against her chest. She felt the chain too.
“Are you ready to go?” Lincoln called from the doorway. He was carrying a flashlight and a backpack, ready for the apocalypse.