Hell's Hinges

by S. M. Reine

  Elise didn’t immediately respond. She was staring at James in puzzlement. While their bond was so intense, she must have seen something in James. And it confused her. He wondered, with a sickening lurch of fear, if she could tell that the tenor of his thoughts was less dispassionate than usual.

  “Yeah,” Elise said eventually. “I’m ready to go.”

  She left with Lincoln.

  James remained in the room, trying to contain his anger, his fear—his jealousy. His permanent altar had been destroyed along with Motion and Dance. His emotions were getting difficult.

  He tried to sort the supplies for the ritual, but he couldn’t stop thinking of Elise’s last look. He wondered what had happened to the clothes she’d been wearing earlier. He wondered why she didn’t care if James knew where she was going.

  He wasn’t looking when he reached into one of Yatam’s baskets. Something stung his hand hard, and he sucked in a pained breath.

  The Father of All Demons had brought some kind of bejeweled scorpion—a variant of the scarab statue that Sophie had requested for her ritual. Its tail was sharp. Bright red blood flowed down his wrist. “Damn it all!” James hurled the bejeweled scorpion into the Lilith statue’s basin, flicking his blood across the clay mounding at her tail. The scorpion shattered on the stone.

  “I’ve never seen you jealous like this before.” Betty sidled into the room. She was smiling, almost like she was joking, but her tone was much too serious. “Anthony flirts with Elise all the time and it doesn’t bother you.”

  It was cute that Betty thought James was unbothered by Anthony. That was Betty’s cousin—the young man who lived next door to her on Caliente. Since Betty didn’t have a driver’s license or any interest in getting one, Anthony usually played chauffeur. He’d been getting to be friendly with Elise lately. James’s fingers itched to hex the boy half the time. “I’m not jealous of Lincoln,” James said.

  Betty took his bleeding hand to inspect the wound. “Of course you’re jealous. It’s just been you and Elise for a long time. Now she’s got somebody else to do crazy hero things with, and you’re getting left behind. You’d be insane if you weren’t jealous.”

  James gave a grudging laugh. “Nobody knows Elise as I do. If I’m replaced, it’s temporary.”

  “If it makes you feel any better, it seems like Lincoln has replaced me with Elise too.”

  An unpleasant chill coiled within his gut. “Has Elise said something to you?”

  “Oh yeah. It didn’t even occur to her to lie to me about it,” Betty said. “I trusted her with everything, only to discover that I can’t trust her around men that I like, and also, she’s destined to kill God.” Betty threw her hands in the air. “For some reason, I’m more upset about Lincoln! Isn’t that ridiculous? I don’t even like him.”

  “Who does?” James muttered.

  “Your hand is bleeding a lot. I saw bandages in the kitchen—let me patch you up.” Betty stepped out for a moment, then returned with water and gauze.

  “This entire situation is ridiculous,” he said. “It was only last week that I thought life had reached some semblance of normalcy. And now…”

  “You’re bleeding in a demon’s downtown condo while Elise makes out with my hook-up in the middle of the apocalypse.” She finished applying the bandages and set them aside.

  “The apocalypse is only the beginning.” What happened to Elise after God arrived would be far worse. She would be trapped in the garden with him until she died, after years of torture and madness. “Tell me, Betty, what would you do if you knew that you were about to lose someone very important to you? What would you do to keep them? Would you even try?”

  “You’re not going to lose Elise,” Betty said. “But you’ve got to tell her whatever’s eating at you, even if you feel stupid saying it. The sooner, the better.”

  “She may find the truth unforgivable.”

  “I find that hard to believe.” She was leaning against his arm and smiling. She hadn’t moved away after wrapping his hand. If anything, she’d edged closer, and James didn’t mind terribly.

  “You’re always so positive.” He caught himself brushing his knuckles down her cheek, tracing the line of her jaw. “How do you do it?”

  She smiled with a hint of mischief. “I drink a lot of alcohol, have sex with a lot of hot guys, and never miss a nap.”

  “It seems I could learn a few things from you.” He felt a smile touching his mouth. “The naps, that is.”

  Betty laughed, a pink flush rising on her cheekbones. “Let me know if you need help with that.” She picked up one of the baskets. “Now let’s go finish that spell. If we take too long, Sophie is going to wonder where we’ve gone.”

  North Reno was even more devastated than the southern half of the city—unless everywhere was getting worse while Lincoln had been having skirmishes with Yatai, a giant spider, and the Traveler. Half the buildings were still burning. Any humans staggering through the streets were either covered in red boils or running in fear. Dropping a few bombs on the city wouldn’t have been as devastating.

  Lincoln hated how much he had to step on dead animals to keep following Elise up the sidewalks, but she didn’t seem to have trouble with it. Her stride over the carcasses was purposeful. She didn’t even look down.

  Junior stuck close, his wings shielding them both. The hailstones were only getting bigger. Some of them weren’t made of ice anymore but were instead rocks, and they clattered against Junior with noisy frequency. “We oughta get off these main streets,” Lincoln said. “Look north on Sun Valley Boulevard. See all those people? They’re all sick, and we don’t wanna find out how it spreads, if you catch my drift.”

  Elise didn’t seem to hear him. Her fingertips were pressed to her temple, her bitten nails so short that there was blood on the edges.

  “Elise?” he prompted.

  She stumbled on a dead coyote. He grabbed her, and she looked up at him in surprise. Like she hadn’t even realized he was following. “Sorry,” Elise said. “I’ve got James in my head.”

  Lincoln remembered that. “Are you guys…piggybacked? Is he bothering you?”

  “Not exactly.” She straightened. “We’ll take a back road. Head right here. We can go up seventh to Lupin.”

  It was faster up the back way. There weren’t as many sick people to avoid and even fewer cars. Not a lot of people in Sun Valley—an unincorporated town north of Reno—had cars in the first place. It was the poorest suburb of Reno with the highest concentration of trailers in the country, like one huge trailer park. Lincoln took the lead, since Elise was distracted. “Seems like piggybacking isn’t good for combat situations when you can’t risk having your mind wander,” he said.

  “Usually my mind doesn’t wander this much,” she said. “Why do you and James hate each other?”

  That wasn’t a question Lincoln had expected. He thought he’d been pretty subtle about how much he hated James. “He hates me?” he asked, faking a friendly chuckle.

  “When you touched me, he got angry,” Elise said. “He’s watching me right now. Paying a lot more attention than he used to. I think it’s because he hates you so much.”

  “Can’t imagine what’s up with that. We barely talked.”

  The disbelief couldn’t have been more obvious on Elise’s face. “He might trust you more if he knew where you came from.”

  “Protecting the timeline means—”

  “Does it look like there’s a timeline to protect?”

  They were currently hiding behind a discount grocery store while a gargoyle checked to see if they had an unobstructed path to Neuma’s address. They would have to route around any riots, car accidents, or fires.

  The timeline was well and truly fucked.

  Lincoln rubbed his jaw as he thought. “How close can James listen through this bond? Can he hear everything I’m saying?”

  “I don’t think it’s that clear,” Elise said. “It’s not for me.”

 
“All right. Look, James and I go back further than you and I do, and not for good reasons. If he’s still keeping his secrets—”

  “What secrets?” It was a very deliberate question, from a woman who knew exactly what she was asking. She knew what the answer might do to the timeline. She knew what it might do to her relationship with James. And she still wanted to know.

  “I can tell you, but it’s not gonna make a lot of sense right now. Might just make things worse. And things can still get worse. I’ve seen it.”

  “Tell me.” Elise was just a few inches away from him, staring at him hard with those raptor eyes. The little tick of a scar on her left eyebrow made it look like feathers split in flight.

  He would give Elise anything when she looked at him like that.

  “James is a half-angel Gray,” Lincoln said. “When I meet him, he was pretending to be a full angel, looking all creepy with the wings and stuff. He ordered me to read up on you, investigate you, because you and James hadn’t spoken in months. I owed him a debt. I couldn’t say no.”

  “He would tell me if he was a half-angel.” She said it with such conviction.

  Lincoln kinda wished that one of those fireballs would hit them, just turn the whole parking lot into a crater. “He’s lying to you. Hiding everything. Been doing it for years.”

  “But why ?” Elise asked.

  “Because James has been grooming you to kill God,” Lincoln said. “Do you think that a weapon would be put on this Earth with nobody to swing it around?” Every word out of his mouth made her look paler, yet he couldn’t stop talking. “Metaraon cast a curse so all angels would be Fascinated with you—helpless to get in the way of your mission to kill God. James has angel blood. He’s Fascinated with you. He’s in love, and he’s not ever going to leave you alone. Never.”

  Elise’s mouth was open, but no sound came from it.

  “Do you believe me?” he asked.

  She swung a fist.

  Lincoln was suddenly on the ground, dazed. The piles of trash behind the grocery store seemed to swirl around him, doubling every time that he blinked.

  “Why should I believe you?” Elise asked. “You wouldn’t be the first person to try to separate me from James to make us weaker.”

  “I don’t expect you to believe me.” He rolled onto his side, rubbed his jaw. He was surprised it was still attached. “Ask him. See what he says.”

  She stalked up to stand over him like she wasn’t worried about getting pelted with hail. Maybe she was too pissed to worry about petty things like pain. But even though she glowered, she didn’t argue. She believed him. She didn’t want to, but she did.

  A particularly big hailstone rocketed out of the air. It crashed into the ground next to Lincoln’s head, and it was so hot that he felt his ear hairs curl.

  Elise pulled him back to shelter behind the grocery store again.

  What used to be hail was now fireballs. Little ones, but a lot of them. They hit the ground loud and smoldered long. “And the Lord sent thunder and hail, and the fire ran along upon the ground,” Lincoln said.

  “James is right, that’s annoying,” Elise said.

  “After everything I told you about him—”

  “Don’t,” she said. “Just don’t.”

  Junior reappeared. Cinders shimmered over his shoulders, skidding harmlessly away where they struck. He rumbled and lifted a fist, pointing up the hill.

  “You found the address? Can we get there on foot?” Lincoln asked.

  Junior nodded.

  Elise didn’t look at Lincoln again. She walked straight to Junior and positioned herself under his wings.

  They were silent on the slow trek up the hill. It seemed like every third trailer had caught fire, and they had to reroute twice in order to avoid brawls in the streets.

  Somehow, Neuma’s single wide was untouched. It had a waist-high fence covered in unfriendly signs, two busted motorcycles parked out front, and a chained dog huddling behind a dead tree. There was also a smear of blood over the front door. “I won’t quote anything if it bothers you, but that’s what the Hebrews did to tell God where they lived,” Lincoln said.

  “I know.” Elise unleashed a single, powerful kick, and the door pulverized under her boot heel. She stormed through the doorway.

  People screamed inside.

  Lincoln rushed in after her. Neuma was frozen by the sink, clutching the counter. Two old people sat at a dining room table. The whole trailer smelled like human waste and rotten food, but Lincoln doubted that was normal. Mismatched and cheap as everything was, the trailer was mostly clean. There would be a lot of fridges without power in the city, all their food going to waste.

  “I need to talk to you, Neuma,” Elise said.

  “Take her to the bedroom,” Neuma instructed the old man. He got up from the table, grabbed the old lady, and pulled her into the back room.

  In her off-hours, Neuma looked less like a stripper from Hell and more like ordinary trailer trash. Her shorts were mostly made of holes. Her tank top had a neckline so low that Lincoln was surprised he didn’t see nipples poking over the edge like twin sunrises. Her hair was twisted under a towel, and her face was washed clean of makeup, leaving her plainer and cuter. Lincoln always liked women better without makeup.

  “You shouldn’t be out here,” Neuma said, edging nearer her refrigerator as if it would get her away from them. The room couldn’t have been more than two hundred, maybe three hundred square feet.

  Elise pointed toward the front door. “The blood over the doorway. What kind is that?”

  “It’s mine,” Neuma said, sticking a bandaged hand behind her back. “It’s not as much as it looks like.”

  “Did Yatai tell you to do that?”

  Neuma was sweating. “Elise…”

  “I know you’re scared,” she said. “Everyone’s scared. But I’m going to fix this if you’ll help me.”

  “All right. It was Yatai, but you shouldn’t keep saying her name like that, especially not around me. I can never tell what she’s going to hear. I told you at the club, I can’t help you!”

  “How many demons are marking their doors like this?”

  “The girls at the club,” Neuma said. “A lot of the casino staff. Some of their friends, I guess.”

  “Why just employees?” Lincoln asked. “Does she work there?”

  Neuma glanced back toward the bedrooms and lowered her voice to a whisper. “She’s been using it as her base of operations. Please, don’t tell her that I told you that. She’ll be so mad.”

  Lincoln wasn’t real likely to chat with the demon who wanted him dead. “Why did Yatai choose the casino?”

  “Because of the Warrens, of course,” Neuma said. “Tunnels under the old mines in Reno. She pulled that big spider out of there, but it’s not gonna be the end of it. She keeps going back down, and it’s gotten so dark that I can’t go below the first few levels. This is bigger than me. Bigger than all of us.”

  Elise and Lincoln’s eyes connected.

  “That’s where the door must be,” he said.

  20

  J ames had been reluctant to watch Sophie cast the magic he believed couldn’t be real, but once she began, he was awed. Sophie only seemed reluctant to answer his questions about her techniques for the first few minutes. Once she realized how clever his questions were, she brightened, and she began to ramble.

  The girl spoke his languages as fluently as James did: the languages of academics, witches, and the ambitious. And she never stopped talking as she moved around the circle, layering spell upon spell atop each other. The girl was a natural teacher and narrated her every movement. She didn’t build circles the way that he expected, adding reeds, incense, and woven walls with seeds knotted into them. It looked more like Sophie was building a small magical bunker on the rooftop.

  “This is truly amazing,” James said, glancing at his watch. Hours had passed in a blink. His hands were dirty with anointed mud, and he’d had to drop hi
s jacket long ago to keep from overheating. “I’m fascinated by how this is simultaneously more primitive and more complex than traditional magic.”

  “It’s a lower form of magic, unhindered by more modern regulations established in the Treaty of Dis,” Sophie said.

  “How do you subvert those terms?”

  “It’s part of the secret,” she said. “I’m sorry, I shouldn’t tell you too much.”

  “Right. It’s fine.” James didn’t feel remotely fine. He only felt hungrier, as if he’d been starving for weeks and given nothing to eat but a carrot. It was an irrational feeling. Rationally, he understood why someone would want to protect magic like this. “I’ve my own protected school of magic, to tell you the truth. I concocted a way to capture the effects of a spell years in advance and release them at will. It does mean that I can spend weeks at a time casting several spells to capture them, but the benefits are numerous.”

  “Weeks of spellcasting—I can’t imagine it!” she said. “I don’t have nearly the stamina for anything beyond a few hours. What’s the longest you’ve held a ritual open?”

  “Years.”

  “Years? ”

  “I think it’s six now,” James said, gratified by how impressed she sounded. “The spell ended when that giant spider crushed the wall of my dance studio. Might have been a record for active magic, come to think of it.”

  “Amazing,” Sophie said. “May I ask the purpose?”

  Among many other things, it suppressed most of his ethereal Gray attributes, since the Fascination was the primary source of his fixation with Elise. He could feel it unraveling hair by hair in the hours that had elapsed. He was afraid that talking about it would make it slip away faster. “It’s a secret, I’m afraid.”

  “Totally understood. I wish I were capable of designing magic and holding it open so long—that’s amazing.” Sophie made no secret of her admiration, not in her face or her words.

  “Anyone can design magic. It’s a time management problem, not a difficulty problem.” He sighed. “I have no explanation for how I can be so much older than you, but so much less learned.”