by SM Reine
“That will be nothing compared to what will happen if you don’t give me James.”
“I offered you a trade,” Ann said.
“We both know you weren’t serious.” Elise took a deep breath. “We don’t have to fight, Ann. This is between me and vedae som matis.”
“I know,” she whispered. “I know.”
Ann straightened suddenly. Her head tilted, as though listening to some distant voice Elise couldn’t hear. And then she began to smile.
“We have company.”
The trap door banged open. Fiends jumped inside, dragging two larger shapes with them. For an instant, Elise half-hoped they were injured, struggling servants—but servants didn’t fight and swear like these two.
The fiends threw Betty and Anthony to the floor. One of them ripped the pocket off her jacket, and the stone vessel thudded to the floor. Betty struggled, trying to take it back, but the fiends held her arms.
“Hey, get your hands off me! I’ll punch you! Don’t make me do it!”
Ann cradled the staff against her shoulder like a baby. “This night just got so much better.”
Elise moved. Blood splattered on the walls.
The fiends holding Anthony fell. She sliced again, and the fiends holding Betty also fell. Intestines spilled onto the floor in a wash of red and yellow fluids, stinking of brimstone.
Anthony jumped to his feet. He punched another fiend in the eye. It keened, stumbling backward, and he hauled Betty to her feet before returning his attention to the little demons.
Elise twisted and jabbed, skewering a small demon on her sword. Something hit her wounded side. The breath rushed out of her lungs.
They hit the ground and rolled, and then it seemed like all the fiends were on top of Elise, clawing at her, grabbing and biting. The demons were nothing but shadows in the darkness of the room, blotting out all the light. She felt stubby teeth sink into her arm, and she threw the fiend off, struggling to stand. She was just a little too slow, a little too weak with the injuries David Nicholas inflicted.
Between the legs of an attacking fiend, she saw Betty fly at Ann like a manicured beast, her fingernails flying. Ann shrieked and Betty leapt onto her back, dragging them both to the ground.
Elise pushed away a fiend and swung blindly, feeling blade connect with body and hoping it was going to do damage.
Kicking off another demon, she flew to James’s side at the altar. His closed eyes looked like they were bruised.
He stirred at her touch. “Elise?”
“Let’s get you out of here, huh?” she said, throwing her jacket over his body. She felt around the ropes binding him to the table. “Hang on, it’s going to take me a minute to figure out these knots.”
“Finish the fight,” James rasped.
She took a moment to plunge her sword into a fiend’s stomach when it broke away from the others to attack. “I’m not leaving you behind.”
“Ann will get away, Elise.”
“She’s not going anywhere. Betty’s got her.”
He gripped her wrist. His eyes had darkened, no longer that perfect shade of ice blue. A thunderstorm roiled in his gaze. Elise’s fingers went still on the lock. “Trust me. I’ll be fine. Get Ann.”
“Okay.” Elise pressed her boot knife into his hand. “If she gets close to you—kill her.”
The room was in turmoil. Anthony thrashed in the grip of several fiends, but he wouldn’t relinquish his position over the trap door, which he had locked. He bled from a gash near his hairline. The other fiends had turned their attention to the fight between Betty and Ann, which seemed to involve a lot of slapping and hair-pulling.
Elise smiled faintly. A slap fight. That was new.
And then a blade flashed from nowhere, and Elise’s smile disappeared. Ann’s hand cracked against Betty’s skull with the flat end of the hilt.
“Betty!” Anthony roared.
Elise leapt forward, but the trap door suddenly exploded underneath Anthony. The force threw him forward into the waiting arms of the fiends, and the servants from the cemetery began to climb inside.
One by one, the attic filled with the possessed ones. The man from the hospital, his female partner. A burly, tattooed corpse Elise hadn’t seen before. And then Lucinde.
Ann stomped to the front of the room again, standing beside the altar. “Restrain them!” she ordered, and three of the servants came forward, grabbing Elise’s arms and dragging her to the end of the room.
A fiend ripped the sword from her hands and dropped it out of reach. Another dragged Betty’s lifeless body to her side. It took two of them to restrain Anthony.
The rest had to hold Elise.
A knobby fist sank into her side, making pain explode through her body. She staggered and fell to her knees. Claws raked down her bruised face and smacked into her jaw.
Through blurry eyes, Elise saw James raise a free hand with the knife.
The motion drew Ann’s attention. She slapped it out of his hand.
“This was going to be my night of glory. This is when I was going to show vedae som matis that I’m good enough for her. Don’t you realize what you’re ruining?” She slashed her dagger along the wound she had carved on his belly. Fresh blood began to trickle down his side.
Elise struggled, but the possessed ones held her in place. “You better not—”
Ann pointed the knife at her. “Shut up. I don’t want to talk to you anymore.”
“He doesn’t deserve to die.!”
“Do you think he’s a good man?” Ann asked as she sprinkled herbs over his head.
Elise swallowed. “The best I know.”
“Then you don’t know him as well as you think you do,” Ann said. She traced her bloody finger down the bridge of his nose. “He’s never told you the truth. You would let me kill him if he had.”
Betty sat up, holding a hand to her head. “Ugh. What did I miss? Did we beat that—” Anthony threw a hand over her mouth.
Ann pulled an owl’s skull from underneath the table. Sharp teeth that birds had never possessed on Earth filled its mouth. She laid it on James’s chest.
“And now I can repay my debts to the Hand of Death,” she said. Her voice was hushed, reverent.
She smashed the skull on James’s chest. Pieces of bone flew everywhere, and blood seeped forth beneath it. She smeared it across James’s solar plexus.
Elise’s muscles were liquid. Every time she moved, little hands dug into her wounds, burying their nails into muscle.
If only David Nicholas hadn’t attacked.
If only Elise hadn’t provoked him.
If only she were a little stronger…a little faster…
Ann turned her back on them. She raised the dagger high, smoothing her hand over James’s brow. Shadows rippled off her body.
Elise felt the press of Betty and Anthony’s eyes on her. They were waiting to see what last-ditch trick she was going to pull out of her hat, like she was some hero from a movie with a plan always in place.
But she didn’t have a plan. She couldn’t think, or breathe, and she couldn’t move with so many demons holding her down. She met Betty’s gaze, and she saw her best friend’s worried countenance dissolve into terror.
The stress of the last days built inside Elise, growing and swelling until she felt her ribs might burst. Exorcising Lucinde. Fighting the possessed ones in the cemetery. Losing James, and finding him again to realize he had been all but gutted like a pig and left poisoned. Her new life destroyed; her old life returning like an unyielding cancer.
I’m not ready for this.
Ann. Lucinde. James.
The witch shifted her grip on the dagger so its blade faced down.
Elise threw herself against the steely arms of her captors, but they were unyielding. “Ann! No!”
Her hand came down. The dagger buried into James’s chest with a crack.
His mouth opened in a silent gasp, eyes blank.
For an instant, there was
no reaction. The world was reduced to the space between Elise and James—so close, just inches away, and yet utterly impassable. Elise’s breath caught in her lungs. Her pulse roared in her ears.
Betty let out a sob, deepening the silence rather than breaking it.
James’s chest hitched, and blood spilled over his lip.
“James,” Elise said. She was so cold.
His head lolled to the side, looking beyond the wall of servants to his partner. Their eyes met for a breathless instant, and his mouth formed a single word: Elise. No sound escaped his bloody mouth. His teeth were red.
The light behind his eyes faded, and that was all. His body sank into the table, muscles relaxing one by one until there was no sense of life in his face, his body.
And that was all.
“Berald, Beroald, Balbin, Gab, Gabor, Agaba,” Ann was saying softly, her hands moving over James’s body. A bracelet of bird bones dangled from her wrist, brushing against his bare stomach. “Berald, Beroald, Balbin, Gab, Gabor, Agaba…”
The world receded, slipping away from Elise. Her ears were ringing and her heart was thudding and she knew that James was dead. She could have been a thousand miles away, and she would still know with absolute certainty. It was as though, in his passing, a part of her had died, too.
The scar on her arm from the binding ritual that tied them together as kopis and aspis burned.
Dead.
Anthony was muttering under his breath. It sounded like prayer. The valley of the shadow of the death. She took another step back, and the fiends finally released her. Betty was on her knees. Anthony was beside her, holding his cousin’s hands. They were pale and shocked and Elise barely even registered it.
James’s eyes were empty.
“Balbin, Gab, Gabor, Agaba, Berald…”
She didn’t feel pain anymore. She didn’t feel anything at all. A glint of metal caught the corner of Elise’s eye.
“…Beroald, Balbin, Gab…”
She dropped.
The hands of the possessed ones reached for Elise, but she rolled under their grasp and took her sword. She came up on her knee in one smooth motion, plunging it into a servant’s stomach until the hilt slammed into flesh and the blade burst out its back.
She freed the sword with a jerk of her wrist and kicked the servant to the floor. It fell, lifeless and gaping.
Ann spun. Her jaw hung open. “That was mine,” she said. “You little—”
Elise spun, burying her sword into the belly of a nearby fiend, tearing it out its side with a gush of blood and mucus. It dripped down the blade and onto her gloved hand.
“Plan B,” Elise said. Her voice was dead.
The attic exploded in motion.
Fiends and servants alike dove for Elise. She dropped to her knees and slashed, slicing through hamstrings and driving her blade into torsos regardless of whether it belonged to a demon or had once been human. Her ribs ached and she thought something was broken and she didn’t care.
Blood splattered on the walls. Someone screamed.
James’s empty stare remained fixed on the wall.
Elise kicked, punched, and dodged entirely on instinct. She let her long-unused muscles twist her out of the way of blows just in time, feeling claws whistle past her cheek and slice into errant curls.
Something sharp sliced down her arm. She chopped off its hand.
Anthony fought behind her with less grace but no more regard for what he was fighting. His fists flew, making sledgehammer noises against flesh.
Elise threw herself around him, ducking low to stay out of the way of one of his blows even as she gutted another enemy. A body. It had once been the man from the hospital, but now he was mulch. He hit the floor in several pieces, and Elise’s foot squelched on a piece of steaming intestine as she spun to attack another.
And she came face-to-face with Lucinde.
The little girl didn’t look human anymore. The symbol on her forehead burned, and she reached for Elise with little hands that almost looked like the fiends’ claws.
But her face registered in Elise’s numbed mind. She froze mid-swing.
A fiend struck her in the side, sending them both bowling to the floor beneath the altar. Its slavering mouth flashed at her face, and she blocked it with her forearm. Its teeth buried into her flesh.
She used its own grip on her to slam its head into the underside of the table. She smashed its head twice, and it released her.
Betty had crawled between two bookshelves and covered her head with her arms. Elise couldn’t hear her over the beat of her own heart, but she knew her friend was screaming, crying.
Another clawed hand came at Elise. A flash of her sword. Dismembered.
She rolled out from underneath the table, throwing a high kick into the face of a possessed one. Its head snapped back, and it stumbled into a set of shelves. Glass alembics and vials shattered against the ground, raining tinkling shards of glass across the wood floors.
“You idiot!” Ann stormed around the altar with demonic energies swimming in her wake. She burned with black fire. The tangled hairs on her head stuck straight out in every direction as though repelled by her flesh. “I’ve won! Can’t you give up already?”
Elise’s couldn’t think of a response, so she didn’t speak at all. She swung her fist, clenched around the hilt of the sword. It cracked against Ann’s face and her head snapped back.
Ann slashed at her with the dagger stained by James’s blood. Elise dodged it and kicked her in the head. Ann fell.
She rolled onto her belly, scrambling for the knife as Elise loomed over Ann’s supine body.
“Get up,” Elise said.
Ann’s fingers brushed the hilt of her knife. Elise stomped on her hand, grinding with the heel of her shoe. Ann’s bruised eyes were round and frightened.
Elise lifted her foot long enough to kick her in the ribcage. The witch cried out.
“You said this is your night of glory. Get up!”
Ann almost made it to her feet before Elise’s knee connected with her temple. The bone made a sickening noise like a rotten tomato splattering against concrete. Her eyes were empty before she hit the floor.
This time, the witch didn’t stand.
“Fight me,” Elise said, but there was no response.
She faced the room. The trap door had been shut again, and all that remained in the room were a half a dozen bodies scattered across the floor. A handful of Ann’s remaining servants had teamed up against Anthony, slamming him to the floor.
Elise began to move toward him—but a wall of demonic power struck her full force. Fire ripped through her body. Pain arched her back, and her sword fell from her fingers.
She clutched at her head as wave after wave of energy shattered her thoughts and twisted her brain, making her eyes explode with black lights.
Voices swam through her skull.
Crux sacra sit mihi lux…
I am the cold kiss of Death, and you can never defeat me.
Elise was on the floor, but she didn’t know how she had gotten there. She stared up at the raftered ceiling, the bars of heavy oak casting dancing lines against the ceiling.
The breeze twisted through the window and extinguished the oil lamp with a pinch of its invisible fingers.
But the attic was not dark.
A man towered above her. Every inch of his bare, sweaty skin was bared to the attic, and his eyes welled with tears of blood. Thick veins bulged under his skin, crawling up his arms and neck onto his face. His muscles bulged as though they had been shot full of testosterone. His pulse visibly pounded in his throat, erection full and straining in a bed of trimmed black hair.
A symbol swam to life on his forehead and multiplied, spreading down his body. As it passed the painted marks, they flared with black shadows. The distant fires of Hell reflected on the marks.
The witch usually made a sound like chimes in Elise’s skull when he was around, soft and powerful. Now he thrummed with th
e power of vedae som matis, and the air around him trembled.
“James,” Elise whispered.
XIX
Death’s Hand surveyed Elise with James’s eyes. She tensed, expecting him to attack, but he stared at her without moving. His face twisted with a tangled mix of emotions.
Emotions? Could a powerful demon feel?
The silence of the attic around them was broken by shuffling feet. The possessed ones left Anthony’s body to flank Death’s Hand, heads bent in submission. Lucinde kneeled with her small head resting against his knee.
The fiends crawled on their bellies to his feet. They laved their black tongues along his ankles, his calves, pawing his hips and stomach. Death’s Hand didn’t acknowledge any of them. His gaze remained steady on Elise, as though he was in no hurry to do anything but look at her.
Vedae som matis lifted a hand. She flinched.
Ann’s body lifted from the corner of the room behind the altar, where Elise had left her. Her limbs lifted, and her legs twitched, but her head remained slack on her shoulders.
She came forward without taking a single step. Her toes dragged against the ground. Ann’s face was blank and her mouth hung open. Her every motion was unnatural, as though she was a puppet with invisible strings. By the time she stopped moving just beside Death’s Hand, Elise was certain she was dead.
Ann spoke. The language that spilled from her lips made no sense to Elise, foreign and guttural and inhuman. Foamy saliva dripped from her bottom lip as though she were an ancient Pythia controlled by a demonic Apollo.
Death’s Hand gestured once more. Ann shivered, and when she spoke again, it was in English.
“Kopis,” she said. It came from her throat, her vocal cords, but the words belonged to vedae som matis. “I have been eager to see you and your aspis, who thrived as I struggled to rebuild my withered soul from the brink of nothingness.”
Another gesture. A fiend skittered from behind Death’s Hand and opened one of Ann’s drawers, withdrawing a long object wrapped in cloth. It supplicated itself at James’s feet. He took the item from the fiend’s hands, giving it time to scurry back before unwrapping it.