by SM Reine
There were too many. Dozens. Hundreds. The jungle seethed.
He flipped through his Book of Shadows, searching for a spell that could stop everything, to save the people ripped open by blunt teeth. But then the earth rocked with the eleventh bell and he was slammed against a wall. The Book flew from his arms.
A demon crashed into him. He saw a flash of bloody tongue a heartbeat before its heavy foot mashed into the side of his knee.
James heard a wet crunch. He hit the ground. The pain struck him a few seconds later.
He roared, gripping his leg. The demon fell on him, pressing more than two hundred pounds of weight upon his chest like the crush of a boulder. Its breath stank of acid.
“James!”
Teeth ripped into his sleeve. He shoved the demon off of him, but another took its place.
And then it shrieked, blood sprayed out of its severed neck, and disappeared. Elise stood over him where its face had been. He couldn’t draw enough of a breath to thank her.
She sheathed one sword before lifting. He tried to put weight on his leg and cried out. “Lean on me,” she said, pulling his arm over her shoulder.
“We can’t go—those people—the Book—”
“I’ll come back for it. Move!”
She dragged him from the village. Slowly, so slowly, they fought their way into the jungle, where the trees grew thick and the demons could not follow.
He slid to the ground with a groan.
“I think it’s dislocated. My knee. I can’t walk—can’t feel my foot—”
Elise kneeled in front of him. His leg looked crooked through the slacks. She sliced open the pant leg, and her jaw tensed when she saw the unnatural twist of his knee cap. Seeing it made the pain worse.
“I’m going to relocate it,” she said. “Try to relax.”
“Maybe we should wait—”
But she had already put both hands on his leg and twisted.
When the sun rose, Elise sat in the common area of the village, wiping down her blades with a soft rag. It used to be someone’s shirt, but they didn’t need it anymore, and there was something immensely cathartic about cleaning blood off her falchions.
There were more bodies this time than after the tenth hour. Shopkeepers, farmers, laborers, friends and mothers and brothers. All dead. Losing so many lives was hardly a victory. It made her tense. Her neck felt like it might never unknot.
But cleaning her blades and gently oiling the metal—it was better than a professional massage, better than the comforting burn of whiskey, even better than her ex-boyfriend’s ministrations. It made her feel a little less guilty to be sitting next to a child whose face had been torn off. Just a little.
Elise walked into an abandoned house. The doors had been left open, and rain made the carpet squish under her feet. She used the phone to call McIntyre.
“Fly to Guatemala. I need you here,” she said.
His responding silence was long. “Elise…”
“Did you see what happened with the last bell?”
“How could I miss it? It was a massacre in the Warrens.” He paused, and Elise thought she heard his girlfriend crying in the background. “You’d laugh if you saw how the news is trying to explain the deaths away. They’re calling it a new outbreak of SARS. Those mundane bastards will make anything up to avoid seeing the truth.”
“There won’t be eyes to see if you don’t help me,” Elise said. “My aspis is out of commission. I need backup.”
“And my aspis is pregnant.”
Nausea flipped Elise’s stomach. She gazed at the body on the couch. Flies were starting to cloud around it. “If you want Leticia to live to give birth, you need to help.”
“Screw you,” he said without real ire.
“You can be down here in twelve hours. We’ll go get this together. It’ll be the Grand Canyon all over again. Call some of your friends—I know you have a lot of them.”
“And I’m the only one you have?”
That was probably meant to sting. “I have better things to do than make friends. Your priorities are fucked up.”
This was an argument they had been through a dozen times. McIntyre switched tactics. “Would you leave James to save the world?”
Yes. That was the plan, after all.
“Just get down here,” she said. She gave him the coordinates of the condominium. He said that he wrote them down. They hung up.
Elise found the Book of Shadows in a puddle of mud. Half of the pages were stuck together. She didn’t need to be a witch to tell that they were ruined.
She stole a bottle of pills from an unoccupied pharmacy to soften the blow. James was covered in sweat and half-asleep when she returned to the condo on the beach. “Here,” she said, folding two pills into his hand. “Sorry it took so long. Have you slept?”
“Barely.”
He swallowed them while she looked at his knee. It had swollen to twice its normal size. She suspected there were torn ligaments and arterial damage—the kind of thing that would require surgery if he planned on walking again. “You’ll get over this in no time,” Elise lied.
He laughed. “Good thing I don’t dance anymore.”
She took an avocado from her jacket, sliced it lengthwise, and pried the pit out with her knife. He took half. “At least all the dead people mean we don’t have to pay for food.”
He stopped laughing.
By the time he ate the avocado and some plantains, James’s color had improved, and he didn’t look like he was in nearly as much pain. “We can’t move you to a city for surgery,” she said. “We don’t have time.”
“I know. But I think I can heal myself, with your help…and the Book of Shadows.”
She handed the Book to him. His face fell.
“Is it enough?” she asked.
He flipped through the pages and gave a hard swallow. “It will have to be. I can do a ritual.”
“Why? You’ve written spells more powerful than this. You could fix yourself in a half second.” She took the Book of Shadows, flipping through it to one of the pages in the very back. James jerked it out of her hands.
“All my benign healing spells were destroyed.”
“So use one that isn’t benign.”
“Do you see this?” He turned it to show her a page. It was completely obscured with ink. “This is all I have left. It would ‘fix me,’ but requires a small sacrifice.”
“How small?”
“If I used you as the subject, it would also render you unconscious for a week.”
She couldn’t afford to be useless any more than he could. She considered the page. “I could get someone else. A survivor from a nearby village.”
“This spell might kill a normal person.”
“That’s dark magic, James. Your aunt would be ashamed.”
He snapped the Book shut. “As I said, we’ll use a ritual.”
James made a list of supplies, and she collected everything from the village of the dead. The bodies were in the same places she had left them. Nobody was coming back to dig graves.
When she returned with the stones he needed—pried from cheap jewelry at a tourist shop—and some herbs, James had created a circle of power out of pillow feathers on the bed. “What next?” she asked, eyeing his circle dubiously. He was a powerful witch, but she wasn’t sure he was powerful enough to work with such a weak circle.
“I’m weak. Let me piggyback for strength.”
Elise didn’t hesitate to offer him a hand.
He took it, and his magic washed through her. It sent warmth cascading from the top of her skull to her toes. Her awareness of James’s senses came to her one at a time—first, the smell of rain grew stronger, and then she felt his knee (which hurt as bad as she imagined), and then she glimpsed her face as though peering through his eyes. Her cheeks and eyes were hollow. She looked skeletal.
His emotions came upon her last. He was tired. Worried. Relieved to have painkillers. Happy to see Elise. Angr
y at all the devastation. Once the power securely fastened around them, it faded, but Elise was left unsettled. James felt too much.
He leaned back against the wall with a low chuckle. “I didn’t realize I looked that bad.” Of course, he had seen through her eyes at the same time she saw through his.
She rubbed her own aching knee. “You’re fine.”
Elise followed his diagrams to apply the stones and herbs to his leg. James activated several spells from his Book and left them on the bedside as they worked.
“Careful now,” he said when she pulled out the bandages.
She closed her eyes to process the information coming silently from James. He showed her the motions to make, and she did.
When she was done, he eased back against the wall with a groan. “How long?” she asked.
“I’ll be dancing again by tomorrow.”
Elise could tell he was lying through the bond. It would be days before he was in service again—and with a crippled Book of Shadows.
Her knee throbbed. James looked sympathetic. “I can lift the bond.”
“No. You’ll heal faster while piggybacked.” She locked what was left of the Book in its case. “I called McIntyre again,” she said, just to change the subject.
“Is he coming?”
“Yes.”
“Good.”
There was nothing else to say, after that.
Rain coursed down the eaves of the condo. Ocean rushed up the beach like it was going to devour them, and then receded after lapping at the wooden supports. It made the condo feel just this side of dangerous, even though James sat back on the bed. He kept Elise in the corner of his eye. She stood on the edge of the porch, and it made him nervous. He could easily imagine an errant wave rising to slap her off the balcony.
The spray blew back her hair as another crest swept toward their temporary condo. A thin layer of water sloshed over her feet. She reached out a hand so the rain drummed on her exposed fingertips, and a thrill raced through his stomach when he saw that her glove dangled from the other hand.
“Careful,” James said.
She turned her hand over so the rain fell on her palm instead. “Who cares?” she muttered. “He can’t get me if the world’s going to end anyway.”
“Let’s not test the theory. Come in and close the door. Our room is getting wet.”
She pretended not to hear him. She did that a lot.
James traced the outline of a symbol onto tissue paper. He could feel the power vibrating in his wrists as he wrote it. He had filled almost the entire notebook with spells before it was damaged, one at a time. He could do it again.
His aunt had been the inventor of paper magic, but he was the innovator. There were things she taught him that nobody else knew—ways to store immense, unthinkable amounts of power; methods of copying spells without performing them again; how to distort a spell after binding it to the page—and the knowledge was so dangerous that he seldom used it.
The only person he trusted to have in the room while he worked was Elise, and she wasn’t paying any attention to him. She was staring at the ocean and getting soaked.
He wrote the final curl of the symbol. The page glowed with their shared power before fading.
James carefully stood, using a tall stick as a crutch to stagger to the patio. The wind gusted around him. He braced himself on the railing. “Come inside,” he said.
She trailed a finger along her palm. “Do you think He can see when one of my gloves is off?”
He didn’t even like discussing the subject. James grabbed her arm and slid the glove back on. “You only get this contemplative when you’re exhausted. And don’t forget, I can feel what you’re thinking.” He tapped his temple.
Elise tucked her hands against her sides. “It doesn’t matter. The twelfth hour is coming soon. I should be searching.”
“You can’t do anything in this downpour.”
Another wave sluiced over the patio. She finally went inside, helping James settle in bed again.
They sat in silence with nothing to entertain them but the thrum of magic as his knee knit itself together.
He tried to remember the last time they had sat together in comfortable silence for longer than a few minutes. James couldn’t recall having ever done it before. They were always on the run. “This is nice,” he said, surprising himself.
He was even more surprised when a smile spread across Elise’s face. A real smile. “What if it was always like this?”
“What, if we were in a monsoon with a dislocated knee?”
“No,” she said, gesturing between them. “Like…this. You and me. Not fighting. Not running.”
James studied her for a long moment—damp hair stuck to her forehead, bruises on her jaw, bandages concealing her arm. “It can’t ever be like this. We can’t stop running.”
“I know. But…what if we could?”
The question gave weight to the air between them. James was tired, and it wasn’t just because of the healing. He was tired of having no home. He was tired of trying to stay a step ahead of the death that pursued them. In the past, he had imagined what would happen if he could stop, and it involved reconciling with Hannah and rejoining the coven, but James hadn’t dwelled on those thoughts long. The fantasies hurt.
He tried to imagine stopping with Elise. Living a normal life. He couldn’t fathom what that would be like.
“It would be nice to teach again,” he said slowly. “I could start a dance company.”
“I’ve always wanted to own a business.”
“Really? I didn’t know that.”
She shrugged. It wasn’t something they had ever discussed. “Maybe I could be in your company. I could be a professional with enough practice. I think it would be…fun.”
Those were the probably most words she had ever strung together that didn’t have anything to do with dying.
“You should sleep,” she said, tipping a couple more pills out of the bottle on the bedside. He swallowed them. “You’ll heal faster.”
She was right. His eyes fell closed, and he let himself relax as the painkillers kicked in. His breathing grew deep and even, keeping time with the ocean, and he thought he could almost hear Elise’s heartbeat. He could certainly feel the magic knitting his knee, even as he dozed.
The fatigue of healing and magic was powerful. It sucked him under.
He wasn’t sure how long he floated in the gray haze before he felt lips on his forehead. “Take care of yourself,” Elise whispered. It alarmed him on some distant level, but he couldn’t rouse himself enough to figure out why.
When James woke up, the active bond had been closed, and Elise was gone.
Elise gave McIntyre sixteen hours before calling him back. He was still in Las Vegas when he answered.
“I’ve sent two of my friends down to help you,” he said. “This guy, Bryce, and a kid called Diego—he’s already close. They’re going to meet you at the condo. They should only be four hours away, max.”
“You’re a goddamn bastard, Lucas McIntyre.”
He blew air out of his lips. “Maybe you’ll have a family someday. Maybe you’ll understand then.”
“Not a chance in hell,” she said.
Bryce and Diego. Elise didn’t know any kopides named Bryce and Diego, and she didn’t want to know them. Whenever she ran across other hunters, like her, they were always a disappointment—too weak, too emotional, or too fixated on her gender. She had never met another kopis she couldn’t hate, and that included her ex-boyfriend. She wouldn’t go into a fight with anyone but James or McIntyre.
So Elise armed herself and went into the undercity.
The entrance was easy to locate. Demons left telltale marks to help each other find their dens: a stack of rocks, a symbol carved into a tree, a sign with demonic text written in graffiti on the back.
She found the trap door in the basement of a shop five miles away. It was dirty and smelled like a latrine, but the mark on the
wall was unmistakable.
Elise descended the narrow steps. The air became still as the world above was blocked out, and soon, she only had her flashlight as a guide. When she finally reached the bottom, her legs were weak, her nerves were ragged, and one sword was drawn.
She took a deep breath and pushed through.
The undercity should have been a home away from home for the horrors that lived on Earth. It should have been teeming with life.
But it was motionless. The buildings were rotten from time and mildew, and faced the path with open doors. Empty.
Where were the demons?
Elise took a step forward and her foot connected with something soft. She knew without having to look that it was a body, and once she recognized the first, she saw the rest—lumpy shapes spread across the uneven ground of the cavern.
She kneeled to examine the body at her feet. It had the same marks as the corpses of the humans on the surface. Bones gnawed by dull teeth, missing flesh, shattered skull. The tolling of the bells had struck underground, too.
Stomach acid soured the back of her mouth as she slipped through the undercity, stepping around bodies and avoiding sinkholes. Something smelled like brimstone.
She strode through the city, focusing on the path. Elise didn’t want to see the racks where they hung slaves for sale. She didn’t want to see the demons—many of which were indistinguishable from humans—that lay in bloody piles.
It looked so similar to Dis. There were even skulls over the doorways. They grinned at her with missing teeth and dusty eye sockets.
Many of the homes had pens in front of them, too. In Dis, it was where they kept their more docile slaves. In this undercity, there were strange, grotesque skeletons instead—unholy things that looked like a mix of pig and human. Chills rolled down her spine. She refocused on the street.
So many dead. The air was thick with it.
Elise ducked out of one cavern into the next, following a short tunnel that had been carved by a stream. It let out into a murky pool.
Something scraped on the shore. She lifted her swords, gripping the hilts so tightly that her arms trembled.