Hell's Hinges

by S. M. Reine

  Muffled screaming struck him from nearby.

  Elise .

  “Wait here,” he told Sophie, who sat bolt upright in bed.

  Lincoln took the stairs up to the roof three at a time. He flung the door open.

  Elise was roaring, attacking Junior with fists and feet and sword to no avail. Lincoln hadn’t seen anything that could bother the gargoyles, so Junior wasn’t in any danger. But Elise had completely lost it, and Lincoln couldn’t imagine why—until he saw James Faulkner dead at Junior’s feet. His head was twisted the wrong way around.

  Someone had broken James’s neck.

  No. Junior wouldn’t hurt anyone .

  The deadly potential of the gargoyles was huge, but of Lincoln’s clutch, there weren’t any real beasts. Their personalities skewed toward quietly affable. He’d slept between a half-dozen of them and hadn’t gotten so much as stepped on by accident.

  Junior would never have randomly attacked James.

  It didn’t make any sense.

  At least, not until Junior opened his mouth and started to talk.

  “Elise. I’ve missed you.”

  The voice that came out of him was tiny, rasping, like a snake shedding its skin against a mesa.

  Elise dropped her sword and stumbled backward, straight into Lincoln’s chest. He bracketed her arms so that she couldn’t attack Junior again. But she wasn’t trying. She’d gone limp with shock. “Another bullfrog,” she gasped.

  That was where he’d heard the voice before. It had spoken from the depths of the giant spider, and now it was in Junior. Nausea surged so strong in Lincoln’s gut that he was surprised he wasn’t the one barfing signs of the apocalypse. “Yatai must have gotten it into him when she attacked, so now we’ve seen the dragon and the beast, and—”

  “And the liar,” said the little voice from inside of Junior. He pointed a thick finger at James’s broken body. “Three signs, ten plagues, and one open doorway.”

  “Nine plagues,” Lincoln said. “Only nine hit.”

  “Ten,” said Junior.

  Quiet screams rattled through the city. Lincoln had never heard anything so horrible on Earth. It carried him straight back to the worst months of his life when he’d stalked the black streets of Dis, ridden by a demon who killed anyone she pleased. They used to keep human slaves in Dis back then, so there had always been screaming. Endless wails of anguish.

  The final plague had struck.

  Sophie’s wards on the condo had saved Lincoln, but thousands more had been left vulnerable. They had suffered through a burning city of darkness for hours only to lose fathers, sons, brothers. Nothing they’d done to Yatai mattered. Yatam was lost for no reason. And now Junior was possessed.

  A savage scream exploded from Elise, more animal than human.

  She launched herself at Junior.

  She’d gotten her sword. She was going to stab him, just like she had with Omar, just like Yatam had with Yatai. But this was Lincoln’s brother . If Lincoln had a minute to think about it, he wouldn’t have stepped in. Junior was stone, after all.

  But he didn’t think. Instinct took him over.

  Lincoln swung in front of Elise to block the sword’s blade. It slashed smoothly over his arm.

  He knew the cut must be horribly deep because he barely felt it in that first moment. Blood drenched his sleeve, and shiny bone was exposed under the meat, but he didn’t feel it.

  Elise hadn’t meant to hurt him. She froze, shocked. “Lincoln, what the fuck ?”

  Smoke billowing from the crater west of the city spiraled into a tight pillar. Like a serpent in midair, it twisted and shot toward them on the roof. Lincoln could see it over Elise’s shoulder, just as he could see Junior watching the pillar’s approach with quiet satisfaction.

  “Get down!” Lincoln grabbed Elise around the waist and threw them both to the ground.

  The smoke punched into Junior.

  Elise used their momentum and kept rolling. She hauled him behind the leg of the gazebo, narrowly sheltering them from the concrete and ash blasting across the rooftop. It peppered the ground around them.

  Lincoln had landed on his wounded arm. His heart was pounding with the pain as his nerves lit on fire. He groaned through his teeth, ripped his shirt open, and wrapped it quickly around the wound, just to minimize how much of the concrete was gonna get into it. “You’re an exorcist. We’re gonna have to try to exorcise Junior. We can’t kill him to get the bullfrog out, and—Elise?”

  “You were right,” she said, her face pale with dust. Her hair was tinted gray. “You were right about James. He wanted me to forgive him.” Shock blew out her pupils, even as her sclera stung red. “He said he’s in love with me, and he’s dead.”

  “Jesus, Elise,” Lincoln said under his breath.

  He reached for her. She shoved him away to lean around the edge of the gazebo, looking for Junior. Or she might have been staring at James’s dead body. It was impossible to tell from where Lincoln was sitting. A kopis had just lost her aspis. It must have felt like she’d lost her favorite limb, even if her limb was a lying scumbag who ought to have died a good long time ago. Nobody could blame her if she’d gone into shock.

  “Elise, you can’t do this right now. We’ve gotta move fast.”

  She let out a little sound like a sob-scream and clapped a hand over her mouth, eyes focused on something he couldn’t see.

  He leaned around her.

  The ash was clearing from the impact. Junior stood where he had been before, unhurt by the blast of smoke that still billowed behind him in a pillar bridging earth and sky. His body was hunched, wings forming a protective umbrella over himself. He guarded James’s body from debris, from wind, from light.

  There were so many times that Lincoln had fantasized about this man’s death. Back then, he’d expected that he’d thank God for it. He hadn’t thought Elise would be shaking beside him with silent rage. He hadn’t thought that God might be the one who’d done the killing.

  He hadn’t imagined James getting up after his neck had been snapped.

  Just as Junior moved as though controlled by a puppeteer, James rolled onto his side with strange motions. He came up by the shoulders first, and then lifted from knees to feet without using his hands. His head hung from his shoulders. His arms dangled.

  Fully upright—as upright as he could get, sagged over with the weakness of death—he was still shorter than Junior’s chin. James was plastered in dust, even more than Elise. It made his hair look colorless, a shock of white against white skin, with eyes so blue that they glowed in the shadows.

  Slowly, awkwardly, James straightened. He focused on Elise. “Finally,” he said.

  25

  E lise shook her head slowly, teeth clenched, fists shaking. Lincoln could practically hear her screaming inside. No, no, no… She flattened her back on the wall next to him and squeezed her eyes shut. Every one of her muscles was knotted. She was fighting harder than if she’d been on a bronco, a war inside of herself. “You don’t have to make this hard, Eve,” James said, his voice floating across the rooftop. “We could be happy together, if you would just come back with me.”

  “I think you already know the likelihood of that!” Lincoln shouted. His makeshift bandage was slipping, so he used his teeth to tie a tight knot over his arm. He was already soaking through the shirt with blood.

  “Oh, a Remnant,” he said. “I’ve seen you. I know you. I memorized your face out of her memories.”

  James stepped around the side of the gazebo. He didn’t walk with the dancer’s grace he’d had in life but with the cocky stride of a wounded old general. Elise stopped shaking at the sight of him. She went very, very still.

  Lincoln thought about the time he’d accidentally shot a hawk while out hunting for pheasants. He remembered how it had looked at him when he reached down to put it out of its misery. That wild-eyed rage screaming within shivering feathers.

  It was silent on the rooftop once James stopped
in front of them, Adam burning in his gray flesh. The only sound came from the wind rustling Elise’s thick red-brown plumage and the pounding of Lincoln’s heart. For once, he wished Inanna was there. He sure wouldn’t have minded her orders now. But she was stuck in Junior, immobilized by that bullfrog, and Lincoln was alone in this.

  Elise shifted next to him, and he looked down to see that she’d put her fingers on the hilt of the falhófnir dagger at his belt. She’d made it clear she’d rather die than go with God. The dagger was more discrete than her sword.

  “No,” Lincoln whispered.

  “I’ll do it myself. Just give it to me.”

  “Elise—”

  “My choice ,” she said, glaring like that dying hawk.

  Lincoln had ended up breaking the hawk’s neck, and he hadn’t thought twice about it. He’d grabbed its head and swung it once and heard the pop, just like he did when culling his family’s chicken flock.

  Elise wanted a death like that. She wanted it fast and clean.

  He’d sunk his teeth into her the night before, and she’d tasted better than he remembered. He’d been inside of her. His body had been whole.

  James treated her like a hawk, but she wasn’t.

  “I can’t,” he said.

  The last syllable was barely out of his lips before he was lifted into the air. Junior had come around the other side of the gazebo, and he’d grabbed Lincoln by the back of his shirt, hauling him off the ground.

  Lincoln shouted and kicked. “Hey!”

  “Did you think that neutralizing my herald would save your life, Remnant?” James asked. “She gave me information in exchange for a guarantee. I promised that you would die.”

  Junior’s grip shifted. His fingers shut around Lincoln’s shoulder with painful tightness, and his other hand gripped him by the opposite knee. “Junior, don’t! Snap out of it!” He twisted as hard as he could, but it wasn’t hard enough. Stone was stone, and flesh was flesh.

  The pressure grew. Lincoln felt his shoulder creak and his spine ache. He gritted his teeth against the pain.

  “Junior…”

  It was so slow. The pop-pop-pop of his vertebrae spreading was his universe.

  “Stop!”

  Elise got up, wavering on her feet.

  James smiled faintly as he looked her over. “Stop what?” Junior jerked so hard on Lincoln that his hip screamed. He was screaming. He couldn’t get away, couldn’t push free, couldn’t save himself or Sophie or—

  “Tell the gargoyle to stop pulling Lincoln apart,” she said.

  “Why?”

  Elise licked her lips, spit on the ground. “Because I’m going with you.”

  Junior stopped pulling.

  “I’ve searched for you, Eve, and after all this time, all I want to do is go home,” James said. He looked heartbroken but hopeful. “It will hurt if you fight your induction into the Tree when we return to the garden, but you don’t have to hurt. You don’t have to fight. If you mean to come with me—”

  “Two conditions. First, let Lincoln go.”

  “I made an oath,” James said.

  “Break it.”

  Junior dropped Lincoln.

  It probably hurt to fall six feet onto broken concrete, but it hurt so much less than being rope in a one-person tug-of-war game. Lincoln curled in on himself with a groan, and his shoulder wouldn’t even move. Not without feeling like his back was breaking.

  James stepped toward Elise, holding his hand out like he was inviting her to dance. “You said two conditions.”

  “Bring James back,” she said. “Get out and give him life again.”

  “Elise, no!” Words surged from Lincoln’s throat as if he were the one possessed by somebody else. “You can’t—”

  “I can do exactly whatever the fuck I want with myself!”

  “Done,” James said. Elise rested her fingers in his hand. She shuddered when James’s fingers closed around hers, and her knuckles lifted to his mouth for a brief kiss.

  This shouldn’t have been happening.

  “Elise,” Lincoln groaned. He was still bleeding from his arm. Getting lightheaded. Probably going to pass out.

  James twirled Elise toward him, pulling her into his chest. He looked at her as if she were his last salvation, his wildest hope. The only thing in the world he truly cared about. “It’s not easy to bring humans back,” James said, grazing his fingertips down Elise’s face. “Even for me. You’ll have to sacrifice for it.”

  “I don’t care.” She was crumbling, twisted in despair and longing. “Do whatever you have to do.” Elise reached up gentle fingers to touch James’s dead cheek. It was like she was looking at him, rather than Adam. She couldn’t see anything but her aspis. “I love you, too.” She shuddered with a sob when she said it.

  James stroked his hand down her side. Lincoln’s head fuzzed with a nauseating wave of rage.

  And then James punched his hand into Elise’s body.

  Elise grunted but didn’t look down, like she didn’t want to know that he had somehow driven the blades of his fingertips through her skin. Even when James shoved himself wrist-deep, she only grabbed his shoulders harder.

  Lincoln screamed the way she couldn’t. “Elise!”

  James’s hand twisted. Something inside of her snapped.

  His hand came free drenched in Elise’s blood and holding one of her ribs. He’d broken it off near the middle curve. Its end was splintered and wet, exposing marrow.

  She collapsed at his feet.

  James gazed at her with traces of exasperation. “You said you wouldn’t care when I did what I had to do. You’ve always tried to tell yourself that. But there has never been a time when you haven’t cared, Eve.”

  He plunged the bone into his own belly like a knife.

  The spirit of Adam blazed out of the hole that James cut.

  It was so bright that it seared Lincoln’s retinas, blinding him. His head was filled with the holy choir, and his body vibrated with the awe that haunted him every time he went to church. But there was no salvation in this light. There was oblivion at the end of the tunnel.

  Junior stepped over Lincoln as the light intensified. The wind stirred by the gargoyle smelled like apples. There was a hint of rotten leaves and cinnamony bark and the iron tang of blood. He scooped Elise’s bleeding figure into his arms, and Lincoln winced into the light to watch them enter it.

  It struck him that he could give chase. He could easily bolt across the roof and jump into that doorway alongside his brother. He didn’t know what was on the other side—he had no clue if he could ever get back. But he could have gone. He wanted to go.

  Lincoln had promised Sophie that he would save her. He’d gotten them into this mess. He had to fix it for her first, second, and third.

  So he didn’t run. He stood back and watched his half-brother, propelled by God, carry the woman he loved into some unholy garden.

  And then it all vanished. Elise. Junior. The light.

  The wind sounded louder now, as if volume had been returned to the world. People were still screaming all around Reno. The fancy patio furniture was white with ash and dust. Sophie’s circle still wasn’t broken—it had been no barrier at all for a deity.

  James was once again collapsed on the roof, and he was even bloodier than before. His shirt was rucked up to his chest to expose the place he’d been gutted by Elise’s rib, but there was already no wound. He looked dead.

  Helicopter rotors thundered overhead.

  The choppers tearing over Lincoln in formation were painted black. They didn’t display the white Office of Preternatural Affairs logo in this year, but Lincoln knew OPA equipment when he saw it. They’d probably been in the region ever since Lincoln’s arrival, but they were somehow still too late.

  From downstairs, he heard screaming.

  Lincoln shouldn’t have had any adrenaline left to flood him. “Sophie!” he yelled.

  He left James’s body on the roof and limped downstai
rs as fast as he could. His arm was tucked against his belly, shoulder aching, hip out of place. The steps were swimming in front of him. His vision doubled, tripled.

  Sophie was still crying out as if struggling.

  Lincoln drew the falhófnir dagger and stumbled into Yatam’s condominium.

  A dozen men wearing black stood in the mostly empty living room. Half of them were armed. The other half were kneeling, restraining Sophie on the floor as they snapped handcuffs around her wrist behind her back. These must have been OPA agents, but they weren’t half as civilized as after Genesis. They were shouting at Sophie even though she only wept in response.

  Lincoln should have known how to handle the situation. He used to be law enforcement, after all. But the sight of Sophie, young and pregnant, with a black bag over her head filled him with blind rage.

  “Let her go!”

  He only made it two steps before something hard struck him in the skull.

  Lincoln hit the ground.

  Dazed, he realized he’d been pistol whipped. Even if he weren’t already losing blood so quickly, it would have just about knocked him cold.

  Sophie was picked up by two agents, and a third stood over Lincoln. He had square shoulders, a broad neck, and an ugly face. He looked human enough, but like some earlier evolution of human. The agent had his name written on the grip of his gun—the same gun that he had used to knock Lincoln silly. Zettel.

  Agent Zettel crouched beside Lincoln and cuffed him. “You’re under arrest by the Union under the authority of United States government.”

  “Friederling,” Lincoln managed to say. “Get me to Fritz Friederling.”

  And then a black bag closed over his head too.

  James awoke feeling very cold.

  He pushed himself onto his hands and knees. The ground underneath him was soft and slippery. Sand. He flexed his hands in it, feeling the cold grains flow around his skin. Water sluiced over the bottoms of his feet. There were fish in that water—not near him, of course, but in the chillier depths—and he vaguely sensed the life the way that he sensed magic. Somehow, being on a beach felt wrong. Like it was something that he had never done before.