by SM Reine
“I’m sure they would let me strip on the bar.”
James’s headache tripled in an instant. He mashed his bruised face against the concrete again to try to block out the mental image of Elise as a latex-clad bartender. “Why didn’t you just ask me for help?” He managed to sound exhausted instead of angry. “I have plenty of money.”
“Even though you just bought a house with Stephanie?”
The sharpness in her tone made him flinch, but he wasn’t sure why. There was nothing to feel guilty about. “You know you’ve always been my first priority,” he said in a measured voice.
“You didn’t even tell me you were moving. I found out because all your stuff was gone.” Elise’s words were slurred. He wasn’t sure if it was the bloody nose or the alcohol. “If that’s first priority, I don’t want to see second.”
James gathered his willpower and sat up. All the blood rushed to his head. He groaned and pressed the heels of his palms to his temples. “This conversation isn’t about me. This is about you becoming some kind of… I don’t know what in the world you’re becoming. A mercenary?”
“I did it for you.”
She was quiet enough that he wasn’t sure he heard her right. “What?”
“I said…” She snorted again. There was less blood this time, but pain furrowed her brow. “I did it for you. Jackass.” Elise dropped the tissue and rubbed blood off her chin with a wrist. “Mr. Black is out to get us. Killing you would be the fastest way to get back at me. I can’t go after him and protect you at the same time, and I needed money anyway, so I agreed to work with the Night Hag. She’s had guys watching you.”
“You’ve had demons following me? Demons?”
“You’re welcome,” she said, resting her head against the wall again. This time, it wasn’t to keep blood from flowing out of her nose. She appeared to be on the verge of passing out. A fifteen-minute blackout had probably been the most sleep she'd gotten in days.
“I can’t believe you’ve allied with an overlord.”
“I ally with no one.”
His fists gripped the bars. Now that she was beginning to sober, her chilly calm grated on him. “Then what do you call this?”
“Survival.”
James laughed harshly. “Survival? Getting drunk and fighting for money is survival? Getting thrown in jail is survival?”
“Yeah, well.” Elise gave a half-hearted shrug with one shoulder.
The only thing that calmed his temper—slightly—was when she moved her hand away so he could see that her face was practically hamburger. That damned sense of pity he always harbored for her had a habit of winning out over everything else.
She spoke again before he could find inner calm.
“Did you read the journal?”
“No, I didn’t have time. What’s in it?”
“It belongs to Mr. Black. It says he wants to use me as bait for… Him.”
And in an instant, all the anger vanished from James.
“Jesus.”
“Yeah. He seems to think it will give him power.” She sounded calm, but he could see the fear in her expression. Even Elise wasn’t good enough to hide that. “I won’t let Mr. Black do it. There’s no way in hell I’m going through one of those gates.”
“Why don’t I call Stephanie? She can post bail. We’ll discuss Mr. Black and decide how to address him. There must be a better way than working with demons.”
“Yeah, the good doctor’s going to love this,” Elise said. “Have fun with that.”
He threw his hands in the air. “Do you think those new friends of yours are going to help us? I seriously doubt that!”
“Hmm. Such cynicism.”
That wasn’t Elise’s voice.
James turned. There was a strange man outside his cell, with hair like night and darkly glimmering eyes. He set every one of James’s instincts alarming, but it was hard to tell why. The un-tucked black shirt and slacks were hardly threatening. He found himself backing into the corner of his cell anyway.
“Who are you?”
The stranger gave James a languorous look from feet to face. Silver rings with heavy black stones glimmered at each of his fingers. “You may call me Thom. I am known as a witch in the service of the Night Hag. There’s no need to introduce yourself; I am very familiar with you, James Faulkner.”
“Did you come to laugh at me?” Elise asked, utterly unsurprised at his silent entrance.
“No. I am here to take you away. The overlord wishes to see you.”
“I’m already going in front of a judge for assault. I don’t need a jailbreak on my record, too. But tell the Night Hag thanks.”
“You will have nothing on your record, and no officer will remember bringing you here,” Thom said.
James squared his shoulders. “We won’t go.”
The other witch surveyed him expressionlessly. “You will owe us nothing, James Faulkner. The debt from this release falls solely on the shoulders of your kopis.”
Even worse.
Elise tossed her tissues to the floor and climbed off the bench. “Fine. Let’s go.” She showed no sign of her earlier intoxication aside from flushed cheeks. James searched for something to say that might convince her, but words failed him.
“Don’t,” James said. Thom laid a hand on the lock to her door. It sizzled and filled the air with the smell of hot iron. Molten metal dripped to the concrete. “Elise—listen to me. Don’t do this.”
The cell sprung open with a whine. Thom offered his hand to her—the same hand that had just melted a lock.
Elise met James’s eyes and laid her fingers in Thom’s.
“This is your last chance,” said the other witch.
“Go to hell,” James said.
Thom grinned a disarming grin.
He took a step to the side, and without so much as a sound or a flash of light, they both vanished.
Instantaneous teleportation was not all it was cracked up to be.
Elise’s mind was unprepared to process the shift. She didn’t black out and her vision didn’t fade, so she had no frame of reference for a transition from the jail to Eloquent Blood. James’s face watched her from the other side of the iron bars one moment, and then she was staring at a mirrored wall illuminated by blue neon the next. The air went from warm to cool. The smells shifted.
And then, too, did the contents of her stomach.
She doubled over. Her shoulders heaved, and with two short jerks of her abs, bile spattered at her feet. It tasted like vodka. Tears blurred her vision.
A smooth hand cupped her elbow, keeping her on her feet. “Don’t worry. Your head will clear shortly.”
Elise had to spit another mouthful of acid onto the floor before she could speak. Good thing she hadn’t eaten anything in days. “That’s impossible. How do you…?”
“Your aspis possesses magic of which other witches cannot dream. It is not inconceivable that there are greater and older magicks beyond that.” Thom stood back and she righted herself with a hand on the bar.
All the house lights were on in Eloquent Blood. The paint was dull and boring without the mystery afforded by strobe and fog machines. Broken bottles and scraps of paper littered the floor by the empty cage.
It wasn’t an illusion or a dream. She had really been transported.
“I believe this is yours.”
Thom held up her chain of charms. They had been confiscated by the police before they put her in a cell to sober up.
She took them. “Don’t touch these ever again.”
“You’re welcome. This is yours as well.”
Where had he gotten her falchions and spine sheath? It seemed like a stupid question, considering he had magically whisked her out of jail. Of course he could get into the trunk of her car. She pulled the scabbard on like a backpack and pulled her hair out from under it. “Why am I back here?”
“You’ve been summoned to the Warrens. I prefer not to substantiate where demons will see me for
now, and the walk will help you ground yourself. I thought you might also like to clean up.”
He swept a hand toward the dressing rooms. Elise climbed over the bar and went inside—alone—to flick on the lights over the vanities.
Her reflection blazed in the mirror, and she grimaced to see herself. Blood caked her hair to her scalp. Her face was one big bruise from chin to forehead, and her left eye barely opened. There were lines on her brow she didn’t think had been there before.
No wonder James had been so disgusted with her. She looked like she was dying.
Elise turned on the sink and stuck her head under the faucet, scrubbing her hair until the steaming water ran clear. Then she rinsed off her cracked knuckles, patted her face dry with a towel, and bound her hands in fresh bandages. The damage almost looked worse once she was clean.
Either Thom was too polite to remark on her appearance when she returned to the bar, or he genuinely didn’t care. “Come.” He strode off, ponytail floating behind him, and she realized belatedly that he wasn’t wearing shoes.
Elise’s head spun as she followed him, unsteady from the transition. The floor tipped under her feet as she walked.
The long, slow elevator ride and journey through the mines left her nothing to think about but James’s guilt trip. She couldn’t push away the memory of his last plea: Don’t do this.
Ungrateful bastard.
“He will come around,” Thom said, stopping in front of the doors to the Night Hag’s chambers.
“What, is mind reading another one of your super-witch skills?”
“I don’t need to read your mind when I can read your hormones. The cortisol, the oxytocin—not to mention your heart rate. The flush in the cheeks. The longing stares.” He sneered. The lines on either side of his mouth were strange on his blank, beautiful face. “Always the same, you people. So predictable.”
Elise realized her jaw was hanging and clapped her teeth shut. “What are you talking about?”
He pushed the doors open.
“As you requested,” Thom said, entering the room like a herald in front of royalty.
The Night Hag was in bed again, but she wasn’t propped up by pillows anymore. Instead, she sat with a straight back and her arms resting on the bars like it was a throne.
Thom moved to attend to a bag of saline on her right, regarding the valve with the same impassive gaze he used on everything else. The rubber tubes on the overlord’s other arm led to metal drums tucked behind the bed, where a whirring motor pumped something sludgy and black through the needle. There was no way her veins should have been able to accommodate so much fluid. Her skin was flushed with crimson.
She snapped her fingers. “You. Come here.”
Heat stabbed through Elise’s shoulder brand. Clenching her jaw, she limped to the chair at which the Night Hag pointed.
As she moved to the other side of the bed, a bloody pile writhing on the floor came into view. It looked like several thick, twisted worms draped in shreds of cloth.
A daimarachnid? She froze.
“Sit. Sit!”
Elise sank into the chair. “The payment…”
“Yes, I’ve heard what David Nicholas did, even though I explicitly told him not to fuck with you. I also heard about his little game with the cage. Funny. Very funny.” Her lips peeled back in a grimace. “Unfortunately for his sake, I have no sense of humor.”
She glanced at the pile of flesh when she spoke.
Oh no.
Elise’s stomach flipped. She could see it now: the yellow hairs, the leather jacket, the shredded black jeans. It was as though David Nicholas had been turned inside out. Nightmares didn’t have bones and organs and muscle the way humans did, so he was barely more than a rubbery mess of skin.
He moaned from a hole that might have once been his mouth. A ruined black tongue lashed between shattered fragments of teeth.
“Kill him,” Elise said. “This is…”
“Lose the sentimentality. He knew the consequences of challenging me.”
Sentimental? That was one adjective Elise had never heard used to describe her before. Was it sentimental to find the destroyed nightmare’s agony nauseating? Was it sentimental to prefer quick, clean deaths to… that?
“You should know that I volunteered for the cage fight.”
The Night Hag’s skin shivered. The flesh over her shoulders rippled as though something pressed against it from the inside. “And you should be thanking your beloved God that I need you more than David Nicholas, or I would do the same to you.”
Elise gripped her chain of charms. “You’re awfully confident you would win.”
“Keep that mouth shut, kopis, or I’ll rip it from your face. Remember who is branded by whom! Now. We have two things to take care of. Firstly…” She lifted a hand. Elise tensed.
Thom stepped forward to offer Elise an envelope. Her skin crawled when she took it.
There was cash inside. She took the time to count it without caring if it was rude to do so. “Five hundred dollars? I brought you a semi full of angelic artifacts.”
“No, you brought a semi partly filled with angelic artifacts. That’s a failure in my book. Don’t pull faces; you can earn more—much more. I’m not done with you yet.”
Elise stuffed the money in her back pocket. At least it was more than David Nicholas had tried to pay her. “What else?”
A smile grew on the Night Hag’s lips. It wasn’t a happy smile, and it made her gut clench like she was going to throw up again.
“The second thing, yes. Finish David Nicholas.”
He groaned.
“Nightmares can’t be killed,” Elise said.
“Exorcise him. Send him back to Hell. Let him float in a mire of souls for a few hundred years.”
Even though Thom didn’t move or speak, Elise suddenly felt compelled to look at him. Indeed, his absolute stillness was what drew her attention. His eyes glimmered. They were completely black, from pupil to iris and consuming the whites.
She had exorcised nightmares before and would do it again. But she didn’t want Thom to see her do it.
Elise thought of her empty checking account. The insurance company. Her landlords.
“Fine,” she said, unspooling the charms from around her neck as she stood.
She considered David Nicholas at her feet. This was the creature that had irritated her like a fly she couldn’t swat for months. He had refused to pay her. Treated her like shit. Abused his employees. Gathered his friends, jumped her in a parking lot, and tried to beat her to death.
He twisted, rolled over, and oozed a few inches to the right. His body left an imprint of blood and ichor. A fingerprint of misery.
A single eyeball rolled in the mass that was his skull. She thought it was glaring at her.
“Hurry up,” snapped the Night Hag. “I have better things to do than watch this.”
Elise wrapped the chains around her fist, then drew one of the falchions on her back and rested the flat of the blade against him. He thrashed weakly. “Crux sacra sit mihi lux,” she said, closing her eyes and focusing on her other sense. Those shattered yellow teeth were burned in her skull. “Non draco sit mihi dux.”
A light flared through her eyelids. The St. Benedict charm had illuminated.
She reached out with her mind to grasp the sense of the nightmare in front of her—a once-powerful demonic force that had begun fading like a dying heartbeat. He fought, of course. They always did.
Elise gripped him tighter. The mass on the floor grunted, bubbled, and fell silent.
“Vade retro, Satana, nunquam suade mihi vana.” A shriek. A twitch. “Sunt mala quae libas. Ipse venena bibas.” Elise envisioned the gates to the infernal planes, and all the pain that would be waiting for him there. “Return to the Hell in which you belong, David Nicholas. Begone.”
It wasn’t as much of a struggle as it should have been. The light flared brighter for an instant, blotting out the shadow David Nicholas cast u
pon her senses. But when she opened her eyes, all that remained in front of her was the ichor stain. Her charms were smoking.
He was gone.
“The flame of a thousand years quenched in an instant.” The Night Hag grinned. “Fantastic.”
Elise sheathed her sword and stood, trying not to look at Thom even though she could feel him watching. She shook the charms loose from her hand and hung them around her neck again. “Five hundred dollars won’t last long.”
“Yes, yes. David Nicholas’s suffering has put me in a good mood, so I’ll send along your winnings from the cage fight. Does that mollify your greedy soul?” She didn’t wait for an answer before waving her hand again. “Get out of my sight.”
Thom glided to the door, and Elise followed him. She felt odd without David Nicholas’s taunts to follow her—odd, but satisfied.
The Night Hag called out.
“Remember, kopis. If you piss me off, that will be you next time.”
And with that friendly reminder, Thom closed the doors.
She strode briskly toward the elevator.
Thom stepped close, blocked her path, and stared at her with gleaming eyes. No, not at her—at her charms. “Interesting,” he said.
“I want to go home.” She took a quick step back when he reached for the chains. “I told you not to touch those again.”
His hand dropped. “I suppose I would be defensive if I had a critical piece of angelic ruin around my neck as well.”
Elise clenched her fists.
He knew.
The soapy white stone was the size of her thumbnail, suspended between an ankh and a Star of David, and completely innocuous. There was no way to tell that it was part of the bowl she had retrieved for Mr. Black a decade before. A kopis might have recognized it, if he knew what he was looking at, but a witch?
“Have you told her?” she asked.
“No. But she will seek it when her gate does not work.”
“You know, when I was in Mr. Black’s penthouse, there was a map of old mine shafts,” Elise said. “He’s found a way into the Warrens. The gate isn’t safe here. She shouldn’t assemble it.”
“Interesting. But hardly my concern.”