by Reine, SM
Ariane embraced James. Her belly was a hard lump between them. “You will make the right choices and do good things,” she whispered into his ear. “You won’t let your thirst for knowledge destroy you. Promise me that.”
It seemed like such a weird thing to request, but James would have told her anything to make the crying stop. “I promise.”
DECEMBER 1982
The first Christmas after James’s sister died was somber. The Faulkners didn’t decorate a tree, bake cookies, or sing carols, as they had every year prior to that. Instead, they ate a quiet dinner of ham and sweet potatoes on Christmas Eve, and went to bed early.
James awoke to find snow outside and Pamela talking on the phone in the kitchen. She hung up when he stepped out.
“Merry Christmas, Auntie,” James said, kissing her on the cheek. He hadn’t called her that since he was much younger than his very noble age of twelve, but the name always made her smile, and there were far too few smiles in the house.
She didn’t smile. “And to you, James.”
“Who was that on the phone?”
“That was Landon,” Pamela said, opening the refrigerator to remove a carton of eggs. “Find a whisk. I’m cooking scrambled eggs, and you can make yourself useful by starting on the pancakes.”
He did as instructed. “What did Landon want?”
“Ariane gave birth this morning, just two hours ago. She and the baby are perfectly healthy. Six pounds, fourteen ounces. Nursing well.”
“That’s nice,” he said. His aunt frowned. “That’s…not nice?”
She huffed. “Of course all of that is nice, but the baby has tested positive as a kopis.”
Surprise washed over James. Ariane had seemed so certain that she was pregnant with a girl, but all kopides were men. He supposed that meant that the baby wouldn’t be named after Christine, after all.
“Excellent,” James said. “So what’s his name?”
Pamela cracked an egg. The yolk hit the skillet and sizzled.
“Her name is Elise.”
PART TWO
High Trial
I
NOVEMBER 2009
Elise was sharpening one of her falchions. The steady whisk-whisk of the file scraping along the edge of the blade was as comforting and repetitive as a heartbeat. James had fallen asleep to that sound on so many countless nights that he struggled to sleep without it sometimes.
They were in Saudi Arabia. The room they rented was small, and the window had no glass to keep out the unrelenting heat. Elise had removed her headscarf in the privacy of their room, and her auburn curls stuck out in every direction like she had been electrocuted. Her hair fell all the way down her back and veiled her freckled shoulders, but that wasn’t right. She hadn’t grown her hair that long until after retirement, and James and Elise hadn’t been in the Middle East since she was a teenager.
He watched her work from his bed without sitting up, head propped on his arms. The woman sitting by the window wasn’t a teenager. She was beautiful, mature, battle-worn, scarred. Her hair clung to the hard lines of her cheekbones and jaw.
Elise lifted the blade into the sunlight and blew metal fragments off the edge, but the file continued making a soft whisk-whisk even after she set it aside.
“You could ruin the geometry if you file that much more,” James said. That was what he had told her at the time, when she was sixteen.
In reality, when they had really been visiting Saudi Arabia, she had ignored his words of caution. Now she set her sword beside the whetstone and pulled out a pack of cigarettes. “Do you have a lighter?”
“You don’t smoke,” James said.
The cigarette was already lit. She put it to her lips, sucked in a breath, blew out smoke. “You don’t know anything about me.”
He was kneeling in front of her, watching her profile silhouetted against the harsh daylight. Light blazed behind her, but he didn’t know if it was the sun or the glow of a distant garden lit with angelfire.
Elise returned the cigarette to her lips. A line of blood trickled from her nose and detoured around the curve of her lip.
James swallowed against the lump in his throat. “I’m so sorry.” He reached up to brush the blood away with his thumb. It smeared on her cheek.
She didn’t react to his touch. Her skin was so cold that her freckles were turning blue.
Elise’s brow knitted, and she coughed. “Hell,” she muttered in the same tone of voice she used whenever she realized that she had made a mistake in the accounting for Motion and Dance. Annoyed, but casual. Black blood trickled from her hairline down her neck to pool around her collarbone.
James patted his pockets, searching for the Book of Shadows. “I can heal that.”
“You can’t fix everything.” She stubbed the cigarette out on her palm. Flesh sizzled. Above that, he could still hear her sharpening her swords. Whisk, whisk, whisk. It pulsed through the room. “Sometimes, I don’t think you can fix anything.”
There it was. He pulled the Book out of his pocket and opened it.
Every page was blank.
“Wait,” he said, “I’m sure I just filled this last week.”
“I took all your magic with me when I died.” She flicked the cigarette out the window. “You didn’t need it, did you?”
He searched within himself and found her words to be true—he was empty. He couldn’t have reached his magic with or without prefabricated spells. “How am I supposed to help you like this?”
“You’re years too late.”
Elise bent to kiss James. She tasted like blood.
The first time she had kissed him, he had assumed it was on a teenage whim. Maybe a misplaced sense of obligation, like she thought that she owed him something. But there it was again, nine years later—same lips, same pained expression, same resignation when she drew back. Her hair swirled around them, gathered by the wind generated by the blade of a helicopter’s rotor.
“Still?” he asked, unable to think of anything better to say. What an idiot. He should have said something—anything—to keep her from jumping.
“Always,” Elise replied, looking sad. He was never going to forget how sad she looked, as if she had discovered that he had been lying to her for so many years. And then, “Bye, James.”
He tried to grab her wrist, but she was already a ghost. Her arm slipped through his grasp.
She jumped. Fell away from him. He leaned out the door of the helicopter to watch her disappear into the darkness and snow.
That was the last time he would ever see her.
Whisk, whisk, whisk…
Elise was still sharpening her falchions. It wasn’t comforting anymore. The sound taunted him.
It would have been so much easier if you had loved me…
“Sir?”
Always…
“Excuse me, sir?”
Pressure against his arm. The helicopter, the endless night, the sight of a distant Reno fallen under a shadow of evil—it all faded away. The sound of Elise sharpening her swords grew louder. Changed into scraping.
People were moving. Cloth rubbing against cloth. Quiet conversations.
James’s eyelids were so difficult to open. His head was a dead weight pressed against the plastic window of an airplane.
He sat up, wiping drool from the corner of his mouth, and saw that the hand on his arm belonged to a flight attendant. She had brown hair. Freckles on her nose. A round face and a polite-but-concerned smile. Not Elise—a stranger. She smelled like flowery perfume, and he doubted that her soft hands had ever been curled around the hilt of a sword.
Behind her, across the aisle, a small child was rubbing his shoes against the metal strip on the floor over and over again while his parents chatted and ignored him. That was the sound that James had heard. Not Elise sharpening her swords. Some little boy with white-yellow curls rubbing his feet on the ground. The same boy who had been playing noisy games on a smart phone for the entire three-hour trip.
He sat up with a groan, rubbing a hand over his eyes. The light drove spikes directly through his reading glasses into his brain and pinned it against his skull.
James thought he managed to say something like, “Thank you.”
He knew he must have managed to remove his carry-on from the overhead storage compartment and navigate the crowded aisle to the exit, because he found himself holding his bag by Gate B14 a few minutes later, not quite sure when he had gotten off or where he was.
Denver—the flight attendant had said Denver. Two long, pointless layovers since he’d left the Sacramento airport, and he was finally in Denver. The Union had given him a free flight to visit his old coven. Apparently “free” didn’t equate to “direct.”
He turned on his cell phone. There was a text message from Hannah Pritchard, his former fiancée, who was picking him up in a silver Honda. They had made the arrangements before he left California.
Her message only said, “I’m waiting in the garage,” and it took James three tries to read it.
The ground pitched beneath him. The crowd was dense. A blur of faces.
He appeared in the bathroom, hands braced against the sink, splashing water over his face. It clung to three days of beard growth and sparkled on his chin. The lines between his eyebrows and on either side of his mouth were deeper than he remembered.
For weeks, every time he had looked in a mirror, he’d seen her. James had grown used to having Elise’s constant presence lurking inside of him, watching him in all of his solitary moments. It was strange and invasive, yet had somehow become comforting. Even when she didn’t want to speak to him, she had always been there. A constant companion.
But now it was just him. Alone.
A man with a toothbrush and a razor loomed over his shoulder. Some stranger with two chins and a t-shirt stained with ketchup. “You using that?”
He stepped back to let the traveler use the sink.
James held his hands under the dryer, blew hot air over his damp fingers, and watched the light glinting off the ring he still wore on his right hand.
And then he was walking again, passing through the busy airport. His feet slid over moving walkways. The roof arched high overhead, blurry and indistinct. He forced his way past a long line winding outside of a McDonald’s.
His mind was back in Saudi Arabia. He could almost hear Elise sharpening her swords.
Whisk, whisk, whisk…
It had only been days since he had last seen his kopis, but he was already struggling to separate true memory of Elise from myth. He wanted to remember her from the times they were happy. He wanted to remember her excitement when she began her first week at college, followed by the typical exhaustion and dread of an overworked freshman; the flush high on her cheekbones when they danced at competitions; the way they played at fighting before dinner, sometimes, just to keep their senses sharp.
But he remembered her sharpening her goddamn swords. Preparing for her next battle. Readying herself to drive a blade through the spine of an enemy. He remembered her haunted by the ghost of her victims, smoking cigarettes and bleeding from her scalp. The spirit of fury and vengeance, the woman who never smiled or slept.
That was the legend. The Godslayer.
Not the woman.
He passed a television next to a souvenir shop and stopped when he recognized a photo of a gaping hole in the street between two casinos. It was a news report on the crisis in Reno, Nevada, which was widely believed to be the result of a volcanic eruption and collapsed mines.
“Recovery efforts continue in Nevada this week,” said the newscaster, whose practiced tone of concern was unconvincingly sincere. “Air quality reports suggest that it may be several weeks before downtown Reno is habitable again, and FEMA is seeking funding to expand operations to accommodate evacuees from Sparks and other surrounding towns. Most buildings in downtown Reno, including three major hotel-casinos, are considered unsalvageable.”
The camera panned over a few select scenes of destruction: cars caked in ash, firefighters quenching a domestic fire, and what used to be a motel.
“Gertrude Priest is currently with Allyson Whatley, who is helping coordinate recovery efforts. Gertrude?”
The image flipped over to a petite woman with blond hair on a hill overlooking downtown Reno. The skyline behind her was almost unidentifiable. Half of the casinos had collapsed or burned, and the camera angle was low enough that the mountains were out of frame. A thick waisted woman in a polo shirt stood beside her.
“Thank you, John,” Gertrude said. “Reno has been through an unfortunate series of natural disasters this year, beginning with earthquakes in the spring, which experts now believe were a precursor to the eruption. Ms. Whatley, can you tell us if we’re at risk for further eruptions soon?”
“Not at all,” Allyson said, her expression hard and unreadable. “Seismic activity has significantly declined. This is the end of disaster for northern Nevada, and everything is under control.”
James took a notebook out of his pocket and flipped to the middle. The pages weren’t blank, as they had been in his dream. Elise had taken everything else with her, but not that.
He found a simple spell, tore it out, and blew on the page.
The lights flickered. The television fuzzed. Allyson, Gertrude, and the destroyed city behind them turned to snow.
“Something’s wrong with the TV,” complained an older woman who had been trying to watch from a nearby bench. “Hey! Something’s wrong with the TV!” The souvenir shop’s clerk picked up the remote and started clicking. Every channel was unavailable.
James tore himself from the television. Found a sign that said “Ground Transportation.” Drifted to the parking garage.
The slap of cold November air on his face helped wake him up. The air smelled different in Colorado than it had in Nevada, or even California. The sky was a different shade of blue. It carried a hint of grass and chlorophyll, more moisture than the desert. It was the smell of home—or, at least, the place that used to be home.
A silver Honda waited for him in the parking garage. James watched it, half-hidden behind a pillar, to make sure that it was Hannah’s. He could only see a woman’s shoulders and arms in the driver’s seat.
She leaned forward. He glimpsed her through the windshield.
Hannah was still beautiful. Until her injury, she had been the prima ballerina of their company, and grace lingered still in the curve of her throat, in the way she rested her hands on the steering wheel. But she had aged. Even through the tinted window, he could tell that the color had gone out of her lips and cheeks, and that her slow motions were more tired than deliberate.
She didn’t smile to see James when he stepped out from behind the pillar and approached. The trunk popped open. He set his carry-on inside, next to a boy’s backpack and some textbooks that had slid across the mat.
James traced a finger over the backpack’s strap. It was a big backpack. Bigger than a small child—like the one on the flight—would have been able to wear. The kind of bag a boy would take to junior high loaded down with textbooks and binders.
Ten years old. That hurt almost as much as the thought of Elise with blood smeared on her cheek.
He shut the trunk and slid into the passenger’s seat.
Hannah’s knuckles were white on the wheel. She gazed at him for a long time without speaking. The silence had such weight to it—the kind of silence that could only be shared by people who had loved each other for many years.
James was surprised to feel a new ache in his heart as his eyes tracked over the delicate bones of her hands, the curve of her elbow. Her fine blond hair was loose around her shoulders, pinned back over one ear with a white clip. She was wearing a plum-colored blouse. Knee-length skirt. Modest shoes. She was not the
bright, glowing woman he had left behind to find Elise.
He wondered what Hannah thought of him now, unshowered and wearing the black clothing the Union had given him to replace his abandoned belongings. He scraped a hand down his stubbled jaw.
“Hannah,” he said, just to break the silence.
Her lips pinched. “You look horrible.”
And even though he hadn’t meant to tell her, at least not immediately, he somehow found himself saying, “Elise is dead.”
Surprise registered in her blue eyes. Her fingers relaxed on the wheel. Her hands fluttered into her lap, and she plucked at the lace on the edge of her camisole. Beautiful little gestures. “What’s going to happen?” Hannah asked.
“I don’t know.”
“Have you warned the coven?”
“Not yet.” James hadn’t spoken to anyone about it. He could barely bring himself to think about what had happened to Elise, much less answer questions.
The fact was that he still didn’t know how she had died. Malcolm, the Union commander who had recovered her body, had left a few messages for him. Maybe there were some details in his voicemails. James couldn’t bring himself to listen to them.
Had her neck been snapped, like the greatest kopis that preceded her?
Was it a stray gunshot? Demonic possession?
Had she been alone?
He tipped his head back against the chair and rubbed a hand down his face. Those thoughts had been torturing him for days. He couldn’t escape—not when he was awake, not when he was unconscious, not when he had taken a handful of sleeping pills and passed out for twelve hours the night before traveling to Colorado.
Hannah tipped her chin down and arched an eyebrow. “You’re killing yourself over this, aren’t you?”
James was angry with her for saying it, but he wasn’t sure why.
“Let’s just go,” he said, too exhausted to yell and shout and rail against fate in the way he wanted to.
She pulled out of the parking garage.
James glanced into the back seat of the car as they emerged into the sunlight. There was a pair of shoes with cleats behind Hannah’s chair, and a miniature DVD player hanging on the back of her headrest. They were the kind of accoutrements that he would expect to see in the car of a mother.