by SM Reine
A Jeep passed the other end of the street and stopped at the corner.
“Elise!” The Jeep backed up, made a hard turn, and pulled up alongside her backward. Anthony stared at her from the driver’s seat. “What’s going on?”
“No time to explain,” she said, grabbing the car’s frame and hauling her body up. She didn’t even wait to be fully inside the car before waving at him. “Go, Anthony!”
He adjusted his side mirror. “What are those?”
She clambered into the passenger’s seat. The sense of the servants was almost overwhelming, and she didn’t need to look to know they were coming up on the Jeep. “Drive, damn it! Drive!”
Anthony slammed his foot on the gas. The tires spun out, and the engine red-lined.
Then he found traction, and the car shot down the street. Elise was thrown back into the seat. She gripped the roll cage, twisting around to watch the street recede behind them.
He threw a hard left turn without slowing down. The Jeep felt like it was going to roll, but it barely kept its tires on the road.
The fiends couldn’t keep up. Even better, there wasn’t much traffic, so they didn’t have to stop. Elise dropped back again and ripped her jeans open even wider to see the damage. Three parallel gashes marked the side of her thigh, hip to knee. Although they burned, the wound was shallow.
“Oh God,” Anthony said, staring at her leg.
“Get to the studio, and take the back roads,” Elise ordered, reaching into the back seat to search through his junk. She found an oil-stained polo with a university logo on the breast. “Are you attached to this shirt?”
He shook his head, and she dabbed at her wounds.
“Elise, what in the heck was—shit!”
Anthony slammed on the breaks. She hit the dashboard hands-first.
She looked up in time to see a hand swipe at her over the windshield, white eyes and a pale face dripping with blood pressed against the glass.
“Don’t stop!” Elise yelled, pushing the hand aside when the servant reached for Anthony. He slouched low in his seat. “Faster!”
The engine roared. She pulled herself up on the windshield, hauled back, and punched the servant with all her strength. He didn’t register any pain, but his one-handed grip on the roll cage weakened.
Anthony swerved, and Elise fell against the side of the Jeep. The possessed one tumbled off the hood.
Elise watched him roll down the asphalt. A truck several car lengths behind them swerved to avoid him as it turned the corner. The servant picked itself up, and then Anthony and Elise turned a corner as well. He disappeared.
“What the fuck was that?” Anthony asked as Elise plopped back down in the seat again. His chest was rising and falling rapidly as though he had been the one running. His face and knuckles were white. “That looked like—I mean—was that a zombie?”
“Not exactly. I have no idea why you were passing that street, Anthony, but thank God you were. I’m not sure I could have out-run them. I think they’re getting stronger.”
“Oh my God, they’re still back there, aren’t they? Ann lives up there! We have to go back, she might be—”
“Fuck Ann,” Elise said. “She’s fine.”
“I’m going to take your word for it. I have seen the weirdest shit today,” Anthony said. “Do you want to tell me what’s the hell is going on?”
She studied the strong line of his nose and jaw in profile. He was focusing on the road, but the veins standing out on his neck belied how much of an effort it was for him not to stare at Elise.
“You know how you were saying you wanted to be a part of my life?” she asked. He nodded, knuckles white. “Wish granted. Now get me back to the studio.”
PART FIVE
The Twelfth Hour
GUATEMALA – AUGUST 2004
When James woke up in the condo, he was partially healed, and totally alone. Elise’s swords were gone.
He wasn’t sure if it was instinct or Elise’s history of getting into trouble that told him something was wrong, but he didn’t bother waiting for her to return. He stuffed what was left of his Book of Shadows into a bag, slung it over his shoulder, and hobbled out the door with his makeshift crutch. He could barely feel his knee as magic knit the ligaments back together. Every time he took a step, it tried to buckle under him.
Worse yet, it was still raining, and as dark as night even though it was afternoon. The ground was slick and muddy. But slowly, deliberately, he made his way toward town.
He tensed when he saw two figures coming up the road toward him. When they drew close enough for him to realize they were human, he still didn’t relax.
One of the men was built like a cinderblock, and the other was a boy with a shotgun strapped to his back and nervous eyes. “Where’s Elise?” asked the first without prelude.
“Who are you?” James asked, raising his voice to be heard over the blasting wind.
“The name’s Bryce.” The cinderblock jerked his thumb at the other man. “This is Diego. McIntyre said Elise needs our help. Here we are.”
So they were kopides. Both of them. “I thought McIntyre was coming himself.”
“He couldn’t make it,” Diego said with an accent so thick that James barely understood him.
“Well, you’re too late. She’s already gone. She’s gone into the undercity—looking for that clock.”
“So she’s dead,” Bryce said.
James’s fist clenched on his walking stick. “No. She’s alive.” He would know the instant she died. It hadn’t happened. Not yet. “But that could change quickly. We have to find her.”
Bryce looked excited at the prospect of going into the undercity. He grinned, and James saw that he was missing most of his teeth. His skin had the tough, scarred look of an old farmer even though he couldn’t have been thirty yet.
“Fucking fantastic,” he said. “Tell us what to do.”
He opened his mouth to respond.
James!
Pain flared down his flesh. Burning silver spikes flayed his skin, baring his bones as the jungle blurred and darkened around him.
With a roar of pain, James staggered. A pair of hands kept him from falling.
“The hell—?” someone said.
But James was lost in a black pit of agony. Smoke burned his lungs. Hot stone dug into his spine, and metal bit his wrists, chafing until they went slick with blood.
No. Not his wrists.
A fist struck him across the face. His vision cleared in time to see Bryce rearing above him with his hand raised for another blow. “Stop,” James said with a shudder. Elise’s silent cried echoed through him. He hadn’t even know she could scream.
Bryce lifted him and set him on his feet like he was a child. Diego gave James his dropped crutch.
“What’s wrong with you?” Bryce asked warily. His hands flexed as he stared around at the trees, as though waiting to be attacked.
“It’s Elise. Something is happening to her. She’s—”
The pain blazed again.
James…James…
She was chained. Bleeding.
“What should we do? Tell us how to help,” Diego said. His hands were trembling.
Help? They wanted to help?
He took a moment to size them up. Bryce looked as dumb as the mud beneath his feet, but he was pure muscle. Diego wouldn’t be nearly so useful—he was too scared. He wouldn’t last long in the undercity, and James wouldn’t make it far with his ruined knee, either. And he wanted that shotgun.
“Sorry about this,” James said.
He dropped his walking stick, pulled a slip of paper from the Book of Shadows, and seized Diego’s arm.
Electricity leaped between them. Diego’s skin turned ashen gray, and he collapsed, dragging them both to the ground. Bryce shouted and drew his gun, but James held up his hands.
“He’s fine,” James said. “He’ll be okay. He’s unconscious.”
Careful to stay out of arm’s reac
h, Bryce checked Diego’s pulse. “What did you do to him?”
“I borrowed his strength to heal myself.” And to prove it, he stood up—slowly, no need to tempt the trigger finger—and stripped the bandages from his knee. It didn’t hurt anymore.
James expected him to argue. There were so few living witches that rivaled his power that most people weren’t aware such healing was even possible. But Bryce looked angry, not disbelieving. “Are you nuts?” he asked. “Now there’s only two of us!”
“And I wouldn’t have been able to go anywhere without healing first. Tell me: would you rather descend toward almost certain death with a scared boy, or the aspis who just defeated him with a single touch?”
Bryce couldn’t seem to find a reason to argue.
Elise had no idea that she could hurt so much without passing out. Time made no sense anymore. Had it been minutes? Hours? Years?
Had the clock struck twelve yet?
Brilliant white pain burned through her bones. Blood raced down her skin from a thousand shallow cuts.
She was a roast pig on a spit. She was a rabbit being skinned. Pillars of fire raced along her spine, arced through the sky, scorched the earth.
When she thought it couldn’t hurt worse, the knife dug in somewhere new, and it did.
“Amazing how well kopides heal,” a voice said. “You may not even scar.”
The words jangled in her ears. She screamed and screamed. Blood swirled past her head, filling the cracks in the stone, and flashes of black blurred her vision.
The tip of a stone knife scraped against her breastbone.
You may not even scar.
Her head swam. She had no blood. No skin.
The goddess of death held something over her, and it dripped warmth on her face, and Elise thought she recognized the strip of pink dotted by freckles and—oh God.
The world couldn’t end soon enough.
James ran through the jungle. He didn’t see with his eyes; he saw with Elise’s. He saw a limp hand in front of her on the floor. He saw pooling blood. He saw iron chains and bare, dirty feet.
Pain. So much pain.
He muttered under his breath as he ran on his repaired knee, even though he wasn’t sure she could hear. “I’m coming—hold on—stay awake—”
Bryce crashed gracelessly through the trees behind him, panting and swearing. Like many bulky, muscled men, he didn’t seem to have focused on his cardio health. He couldn’t keep up.
The rain poured around them, salty-sweet like the ocean. Trees swayed in the wind. James’s shirt stuck to his back, and he hugged the shotgun to his chest to keep from catching on the foliage.
Where was she?
James tried to follow the feelings Elise radiated, but it was difficult. Her mind made no sense to him. Maybe if they had been piggybacked—maybe if she wasn’t in so much pain—
A mark on a tree caught his eye. “Wait!” James called.
Bryce stopped and leaned on his knees, gasping for air. “What?”
A signpost was carved into the trunk of the tree. It was a marker from one demon to another, indicating the direction of the undercity.
His eyes tracked the signpost to the next tree, and the next. There were small marks all around him. They led back toward town. How could he have missed them?
“This way,” James said.
He doubled back, climbing toward the road. Bryce followed as well as he could. “Hey!” he shouted. “We got company!”
James turned. It was hard to see through the motion of the trees in the wind, but something was moving higher on the mountain. Dark shapes.
“Demons?” James called back.
“A whole fucking century of ‘em!”
He ran faster, the Book of Shadows bouncing on his back in its bag. He didn’t like his odds against a centuria of demons—over eighty of them—not even with Bryce’s help.
As he followed the marks closer to town, he began to hear yelps and howls. They were getting closer.
“It’s in there,” he shouted, pointing at a shop the markers indicated as the entrance. Bryce was hurrying to catch up, but he was still a hundred meters back. “I’m going down! Can you hold them off?”
The kopis responded by drawing his gun.
James dove into the shop and went into the basement. There was a trap door. It was open, but the stairs had collapsed.
James!
Elise was screaming again. She wasn’t far. He could feel her through the earth, through the collapsed paths, just a couple miles away but completely unreachable.
Gunshots fired outside the shop. Bryce shouted.
Fear dragged on James’s heart. What was he supposed to do? How could he get to Elise when the only entrance to the undercity was blocked?
He shut his eyes, trying to see through their bond again. Where are you? How can I reach you?
Through her pain, he glimpsed a bone scepter and a stone knife. James fought to push back the sounds of fighting above him and focus on her vision, trying to see beyond the bare knees of the goddess.
A wall. Smoke. Window. And beyond that, pyramid. It was tall. The chamber, and the clock inside of it, was huge.
James’s eyes flew open. She wasn’t at the end of a labyrinth of demonic undercity—she was just under the surface, in the jungle not far from him.
He quickly paged through his Book of Shadows, seeing how many battle spells he had left. There weren’t many. The simple ones—casting fire, blasts of air—were almost gone. Everything else that remained were the powerful spells his aunt told him not to mess with. Horrible, deadly spells. He’d been carrying them around for years.
Whispering a short prayer, James ripped a handful of pages out of the Book and flew up the stairs to street level.
Bryce blocked the doorway with his body. Another one of the leathery gray demons had its teeth clamped down on the arm of his leather jacket. Dozens more demons rushed down the street.
James barely had time to register the sheer number of bodies before they crashed upon them. He was lost in a rush of blood and drool and growls. He dropped the shotgun. “Get down!” he shouted to Bryce.
The kopis threw himself to the ground, and James threw a scrap of paper.
Power ripped from him. A dozen hearts stopped beating at once.
They fell like dominoes, but James didn’t stop to watch it. He grabbed Bryce by the arm and hauled him to his feet. “Move,” he said as the surviving demons clambered over their dead brethren. “Now. Hurry!”
The men sprinted across the road and into the jungle again. James could still hear Elise in the back of his mind, but it was faint. After another minute, he couldn’t hear her at all.
“Why aren’t we going down?” Bryce asked.
“We are going down,” James said. “But we’re not taking the stairs.”
After an eternity of pain, Elise awoke. She tried to sit up, but her hands couldn’t find traction. She slipped on something soft and slick. She looked down to see that it was a face with gaping eyes and no jaw.
Gasping, she jerked back. Something dug into her leg—an exposed rib.
There was nowhere safe to move. She slid to one side and rolled on top of a hairy chest with no head. When she slipped to the other side, her hand fell on a scapula.
The realization that she was in a pit of human meat came upon her slowly, and it was followed by emotional silence—a yawning void of feeling. Elise took one shuddering breath and stopped fighting to get away.
She settled back on the corpses and looked up at the steep walls around her. It was dark, but the occasional blast of flame revealed jagged rock. She could climb out. The clock was still rocking the earth with every beat of its human heart, and it sounded close.
She was still in the chamber. She was not dead.
But given all the pain she felt in her torso, she almost wished that were not true. No amount of emotional void could numb her cuts. Elise was slick with blood—both hers and that of the bodies—and she fel
t like she had gone through a cheese grater.
Her shirt was nothing but scraps, her weapons were missing, and there was a stab wound on her side. She flinched when she remembered the goddess burying the knife in her body. It was the last thing she remembered before waking up.
She must have missed all Elise’s important organs, but the goddess hadn’t known that before leaving her for dead. Thrown her in a pit of bodies. Forgotten her.
Elise decided to consider herself lucky.
She counted to ten and crawled to the wall of the pit. The clock continued to tick.
Digging her fingernails into a jutting rock, Elise climbed to the top with her teeth grit. Stretching her arm to find another handhold hurt her stab wound. Putting her weight on one leg to push made the bites on her hip burn.
She rolled over the edge and scrambled to the shadows on all fours, finding a dark corner to crouch before examining the situation.
Elise could see the back of the clock. It was only a hundred feet away. Her side of the chamber was empty aside from the pit, sheltered by half-rotten columns, and the occasional blast of steam from the floor grates made enough smoke to conceal her.
She couldn’t see many of those ugly gray demons around the clock, but she could feel them. There were hundreds. The goddess of death was talking to them, but Elise didn’t stop to listen.
She made her way to the other side of the chamber, sticking to the shadows, and climbed unseen onto one of the platforms with the dead cultists.
A flash of silver caught her eye. The goddess had dropped her staff of bone and was carrying one of Elise’s falchions as she paced across the dais.
There were four humans huddled beside her. It looked like a family. Their wrists were chained to the clock.
So that was the sacrifice. Elise wondered what it was about those people that made them a better sacrifice than her, the greatest kopis, who barely ranked as demon food. It would have wounded her pride if she had any.
She needed a plan, but she didn’t have any idea of how to cross the room through a hundred demons, prevent the sacrifice of four humans, and stop the clock with numerous injuries and no time. She didn’t even have her weapons.