by Reine, SM
Hatred blackened Isaac’s features. The blond streaks in his goatee looked like shocks of lightning framing his mouth. “You should have run as far as you could instead of coming back,” Isaac said. “At least you could have died in the desert instead of burning for eternity.”
He heard a feminine shriek. One of the Palace guards had thrown a rock and knocked Hannah off of the cliff.
“Got another runner,” said the female nightmare, dragging Hannah over to Isaac by the ankle. It was the same woman that had stripped James in front of the court. “Did we want this one?”
“She’s not mine,” Isaac said. “Go find Belphegor.”
“That won’t be necessary.”
James wasn’t sure when it happened, but another demon had joined them behind the kennels. He wore a slim black suit, which offset his colorless skin and milky eyes. He stood as stiffly, as though his spine was made from a steel rod, with his hands folded in front of him.
Belphegor.
He didn’t look frightening enough to keep slaves in unlocked cages, but James had seen more unassuming things turn out to be horrible. The only difference was that Belphegor didn’t feel like anything powerful, either. In fact, he didn’t feel like a demon at all. James felt nothing from him—total silence.
“Isaac, you rat bastard, you know me!” Hannah yelled, struggling against the guard’s grip as she was offered to Belphegor. Falling a few yards off of a cliff didn’t seem to have even winded her.
Isaac finally glanced at her, but it was with total disdain. Like checking a piece of shit stuck to his boots. “What’s your point?”
“My point is…” She searched for words, but couldn’t seem to find any. Hannah finally settled on shouting, “You know what? Fuck you!”
Belphegor took Hannah’s hand more like he was greeting royalty than seizing a slave. The color drained from her lips. “Let’s go back now,” he said. His voice echoed a little, as if he were speaking from the bottom of a deep grave. It sent visible shivers through all of the humans watching. James, Hannah—even Isaac.
James used the moment of distraction to drive his elbow into Isaac’s solar plexus. The other man grunted and doubled over, and James ripped the knife from his belt.
“Hannah!” he yelled, throwing it to her.
She slashed clumsily at Belphegor’s face, but he didn’t attempt to dodge it or even flinch. The knife’s blade shattered on his cheek.
Isaac rounded on him.
Cries split the air at the bottom of the mountain and echoed off of the cliffs. The fiends had begun to shout in their garbled, barely-coherent language. James understood a couple of words—like father, and run.
Isaac obviously understood more than James did, because he stopped in mid-stride to stare at the gates. “What?”
The gates slammed open, and shadow waited beyond. The city had disappeared.
James blinked hard, but it didn’t change anything. There was a wall of lightless fog beyond the walls, towering and huge. A dust storm?
Belphegor stepped forward. “Please watch her,” he said, handing Hannah to Isaac. “I’ll take care of this.” He drifted down the path, spreading his arms wide as if to greet the fog. At Isaac’s nod, the two Palace security guards followed him. “You don’t have permission to enter.” His voice was calm and quiet, the kind of tone one might use while having a conversation over lunch, but it resonated over the entire House of Abraxas.
The fog didn’t respond. It blew through the gates to occupy the bottom of the street.
A finger of black mist swarmed the closest fiend, jerking it into the shadow. It disappeared with a muffled yelp.
Everyone was staring at Belphegor and the darkness—Hannah, the fiends, Isaac. James realized that he was staring, too, instead of trying to escape.
He swung at Isaac again. This time, the man didn’t let the blow land.
Isaac released Hannah and sidestepped James’s attack, whirling through the air to slam his own fist into James’s belly. James rolled with the punch and struck back.
They exchanged a flurry of blows. James was taller and much stronger than he used to be, but not strong enough—and his hundreds of play-fights against Elise could never have prepared him to fight against the man that had trained her.
Isaac was dizzyingly fast, and his form never faltered. Some distant part of James almost admired him. He seamlessly blended so many forms of martial arts. The man didn’t need knives or swords, like Elise did; his body was a weapon all its own.
James didn’t stand a chance.
But he also wasn’t alone. Hannah jumped onto Isaac’s back, locking her arms around his throat and squeezing. “I never liked you,” she growled. “You goddamn—”
He threw himself against the cliff and smashed Hannah’s head into the rocks.
She didn’t even cry out before going unconscious.
“Hannah!” James yelled, but he could barely hear his own voice. A wind had risen. Pebbles showered against his legs.
The centuria were disappearing one by one at the bottom of the mountain, sucked into the darkness as it rolled over the ground. And still, Belphegor walked calmly towards it. “This is your last chance,” he said in that enormous, resonant voice.
No response.
Isaac shoved Hannah’s limp body off of him. There was blood on his lip. He wiped it away and glared at James. “Maybe I’ll just kill you, after all,” he said.
That was when Belphegor became a colossus.
The creature in the suit was suddenly massive—as tall as the tallest tower of the House, each limb as long as two men. His skin didn’t seem to grow with him. It thinned and gapped, baring bone underneath. His cheeks ripped into a skeletal grin.
His massive hands plunged into the fog, and the groan that spilled from his chest was a thousand times louder than his words had been.
The shadow began to shrink.
A small figure darted out of the fog with a battle cry. It wasn’t one of the fiends—it looked human. James glimpsed black hair, a round face, glasses. He thought that he recognized that face.
Magic slammed through the air, making the mountain shiver. Rocks bounced off the cliff. The ground gave a mighty crack, and Belphegor staggered back. A foot the size of a small car landed near James, bouncing him off of his feet.
Something popped, and then the foot was gone—and everything attached to it.
Belphegor had vanished with a clap of thunder, and the air rushed to fill the void left by his body.
The shadow had already eaten half of the centuria. The other half were fleeing, scrabbling up the mountain, screaming as they ran. They blew past Isaac as he advanced on James again, and one of them clipped the Inquisitor, sending them both to the ground.
James tried to shield Hannah from the stampede with his body. Fiends bumped into him, and an elbow connected with his temple. They were still on steep ground, so one blow was enough to make James slip. Light flashed through his vision, blanketing everything in an agonizing red haze. The pain followed a moment later, like an ice pick through his temple.
His hands almost lost their grip on Hannah, but then he caught her wrist. Rocks scraped down his belly as he slid several feet, dragging her with him.
They rolled onto the path. Isaac struggled to get through the rushing fiends, but their bodies pushed him back. “Faulkner!” he roared.
James pulled Hannah into his arms and staggered to his feet. He wobbled on unsteady legs. Too many falls and not enough water had left him weak and dizzy. It didn’t matter, though, because there was nowhere to run—the wall of shadow had almost reached him.
He had come so far only to fail.
Three steps down the road, his knees gave out. He had enough strength to make sure that he fell backward and didn’t land on Hannah. She slipped from his arms and fell into the edge of the looming fog.
“No!” he cried, reaching out, but the shadow didn’t take her.
Piece by piece, the darkness coalesced into a hu
man figure. A pair of legs appeared, and then a pale face, full lips. She crouched over him. “I’ve come for you,” said the darkness.
He blinked. His vision blurred. “Elise?”
He passed out before he could hear the response.
PART THREE
Secrets and Mistakes
MARCH 1984
James finally got to kiss Hannah after they won the blue ribbon at an international ballroom competition. They were only fifteen and seventeen, respectively, but they were no longer permitted to compete against other adolescents; parents had complained, the planning boards agreed that it wasn’t fair, and they were required to compete with adults who had been dancing for longer than either of them had been alive.
They stepped and twirled and made magic with their bodies. James gazed down at the girl in his arms and thought about how beautiful she looked with her hair in an elegant chignon and her frozen smile.
When their names were called after the judging and he realized that they had won first prize, he didn’t give any thought to looping an arm around her lower back, pulling her tight against his body, and kissing her. She was still out of breath and too overwhelmed to fight back. She tasted like strawberries, just like he thought she would.
He expected her to slap him. But she just accepted her flowers and curtseyed to the cheering audience.
Then she pulled him backstage, and they kissed among the curtains until her mother found them and said it was time to leave. He was pretty sure he had gotten to touch her left breast at some point—he planned to never wash that hand again.
It was the best day of James’s entire life up until that moment.
“You could do better,” Aunt Pamela had said at the celebratory dinner later that night. Their family was talking loudly, laughing, recounting the performances of other witches. Nobody had heard her speak but James, whose father had let him have a beer with his steak, despite his mother’s protests. His head was buzzing and spinning.
“It doesn’t get better than first place,” James said.
“I mean Hannah,” Pamela said. “There are a lot of other girls—girls who are in the coven—that you would be better suited for.”
She must have spoken to Hannah’s mother. James was too tipsy to be embarrassed.
“You’re probably right,” he said, because he knew better than to argue with someone like Pamela. Unfortunately, his prompt agreement wasn’t enough to make her drop the subject.
She leaned in close. Several gray hairs fell into her face. “Please, just keep in mind that you’re not a normal man. You have responsibilities. Commitments. A destiny. Decisions have been made, agreements from the time before you were even born—”
“Relax. It’s not like I’m going to marry her, Auntie,” James said. That was a lie. He had already decided, somewhere between training together as adepts of the coven and a blue ribbon for first prize, that he was absolutely going to make her Mrs. Hannah Faulkner. But it was going to be a while before he convinced his future wife of that.
“Don’t be selfish,” Pamela said, like she could read his mind. “You owe everything to the coven.”
He drained the last dregs of beer from his glass and wondered what his dad would say if he tried to have another one. “I know that.”
Family dinners weren’t the best time to discuss such weighty subjects as destiny. Pamela sat back and joined a conversation with some second cousin that James barely knew, and he hoped that that would be the last time they talked about destiny.
Something changed with the coven after that night. The next several times that James walked into Landon’s house for an esbat, he found the senior members whispering about something, but they cut off immediately when they realized that James had joined them.
It was hard to worry about it too much when they welcomed his appearance like he was some kind of prince. They said flattering things and asked his opinion on important subjects. He was more than just welcome among the more experienced witches—he was wanted. Important. And Pamela was still teaching him paper magic, which nobody else knew how to do. He was happy to be the talk of the coven.
James got an inkling of what was wrong when he visited Landon’s house before the Imbolc ceremony. James heard someone say Hannah’s name through an open window, and he stopped to listen.
“Hannah’s family isn’t moving, after all,” someone said. Was that Pamela? “This could be dangerous. Did you know that they’re dating?”
The voice that responded sounded like Landon’s. “Who cares? He’s still just a boy. When the time comes, we’ll make sure he understands his responsibilities. He’ll do the right thing.”
“But when it’s time for the child—”
“That’s years away.”
“And what about Elise?” Pamela pushed.
Landon shushed her loudly. “Don’t talk about her. Not here.”
“Metaraon’s not going to like this if he finds out.”
“Then he’d better not find out about it. Let James have his fun! I wasn’t fifteen that long ago—I remember what it’s like. His little thing with Hannah will self-destruct sooner or later, with or without our intervention, and we can tell him then. But for now, we can relax.”
James slipped away as quietly as possible, heading for his parents’ car so that he could don his robes and prepare to lead the night’s ceremony.
His head whirled. What about children? What about Hannah? What about Elise?
None of it sounded good.
“Quit,” Hannah had said as they walked home, hand-in-hand, after another late night rehearsal. He had been telling her everything that had happened—even the part about his aunt being much too interested in their love life. “You need to quit the coven.”
“But I’m still not in the inner circle. There’s still so much I need to know,” James said, wrapping his arm around her shoulders. She used to look down on him, but he was rapidly approaching six feet tall, and now he looked down on her. He liked it much better that way.
“They’re spiraling like vultures waiting for you to fall over dead. It’s messing with you, it’s messing with me, and I don’t like any of it.” She leaned against him underneath his arm. “I told you a long time ago that I didn’t think you should initiate.”
“But I did.”
“But you did,” Hannah said. “This is only going to get worse. They’re going to get what they want, like they always do.” She glared at the street around them, like the entire coven was watching them saunter home in the darkness. “Maybe we should stop dating now, before they figure out some horrible way to make it happen. God knows what they’ll do next.”
“Maybe,” James said doubtfully.
“It would be easier.”
“Oh, yes. Much easier.”
“So it’s settled,” Hannah said. “We’ll just have to be friends. We can keep dancing. We’ll just stay out of this whole…destiny thing.”
“Friends,” James agreed. “Good idea.”
And that was that.
JULY 1989
Hannah Pritchard was one goddamn beautiful woman. Her skin was liquid, radiant gold. Her breasts were perfect handfuls. Her waist was so slender that it was almost possible to wrap two hands around her and have the fingertips meet. And all of that delicate, delicious perfection belonged entirely to James.
He ran his hands up her bare legs, cupped the curves of her hipbones, and traced the plane of her stomach to her ribs. She squirmed under his touch, giving a breathless giggle as she twisted onto her belly.
“Stop that,” she said, trying to kick James away with a bare, dainty foot. Her toes were crooked from years of dancing en pointe, and the pads of her feet were dirty. “You know how ticklish I am.”
James pressed his bare chest against her back. His hand slipped between her stomach and the blanket and traveled lower. “Of course I know. That’s why it’s so much fun,” he murmured into the back of her neck. She smelled like strawberries.
Hannah ti
pped her head back against his shoulder and sighed. The motion bared the long line of her throat. Such a sensual part of a woman—it was hard seeing those lines when she danced without getting embarrassingly aroused, which was a terrible thing to deal with when he was clad in nothing but a skin-tight bodysuit. He’d had more than a few awkwardly close calls with their traveling performance troupe over the years. There were many things he missed about being a professional dancer, but that was not one of them.
James’s fingers dipped between her legs, following the soft curls toward her most sensitive areas. “Mr. Faulkner,” she murmured with a little gasp, “you are not doing a very good job studying, are you?”
He bit gently into the soft skin of her shoulder, then sucked on the tiny imprints he left behind. “Oh, I’m studying. I’m studying very…hard.”
“You’re ridiculous. Pamela’s going to know you were up to something if you show up at the next esbat and don’t know the ritual.”
“I already know it perfectly,” he said. “I memorized their entire Book of Shadows last year, and I haven’t studied any of their stupid spells in months. I’m years ahead of those morons, which means that I’m free to study much more important things.”
She twisted onto her back and hooked her ankles around him. God, that look. James could barely control himself when she looked at him like that. “What important things do you mean, exactly?”
James was done with talking. He decided to show her.
Before he could do anything, the grass rustled beyond the shelter of their bushes, and voices rose in the distance.
“Over here should work. I recall a stream down that way…”
Hannah gasped, and it was only James’s hand over her mouth that muffled her even louder cry.
They held still for a long moment to listen to the intruders. Judging by their voices, it sounded like a family—a man, a woman, and a young girl. And they were heading straight for the bushes.
“Quickly,” James whispered, rolling off of Hannah.