by SM Reine
“I can probably draw the nightmares off,” Jerica said.
“Not happening,” Neuma said, nuzzling her neck. “I don’t want you dead.”
“Nightmares don’t die. It’s no big.”
“Could you distract them for an hour? Long enough to do a ritual?” Nathaniel asked. His voice was tiny, barely loud enough to be heard over the bass seeping through the walls.
“An hour? That’s a tall order. I don’t think so.”
James sighed, rubbing his jaw. “Then we’ll wait until daylight.”
“Then you’ve got to deal with those Union jackoffs,” Neuma said. “What are you trying to do that requires witchy-dancing around the gates for an hour?”
“We’re trying to get to Araboth,” he said.
Neuma gave a low whistle. “You have juevos, I’ll give you that.” One of her hands snaked toward James. He stepped out of reach to prevent her from checking him for the aforementioned “juevos.”
“The problem is that there were only two doors to Araboth,” James said without missing a beat. “They’re both destroyed now. We’ll have to redirect one of the other gates if we want to get in. That will take time. Can you help us?”
“If you want a few safe hours in downtown Reno these days, no. We can’t help you. There’s gotta be another way in,” Neuma said.
“No, there doesn’t ‘gotta’ be anything. The garden is quarantined. All other doors were destroyed thousands of years ago. Only cherubim can get in now.”
“Actually, you just need to get into Limbo,” Jerica said.
All heads turned to look at her. The giant swell of bubblegum between her lips caught the light, showing the silhouette of her tongue poking through her thin lips. The bubble snapped, and she licked it back into her mouth.
“Limbo?” Nathaniel asked.
“It’s neutral ground. The only neutral ground.” She trapped her gum between her teeth, pulled a single strand out, and wrapped it around her finger. “It only has two entrances. One’s through Coccytus. The other entrance goes to Araboth.”
“How’d you know that?” Neuma asked.
Jerica’s sharp shoulders lifted in a shrug. “Malebolge is in the same dimension as Coccytus. That’s where most nightmares are born.”
“So we have to get to Coccytus,” Nathaniel muttered, opening his notebook, pushing a leather costume off of the vanity, and then using the space he cleared as a desk. “There’s no doors to Coccytus, so we’ll have to go in sideways.”
“What do you mean?” James asked.
“Skip dimensions,” Nathaniel said, writing “Coccytus” in a bubble at the bottom of the page and “home” at the top. “Go through fissures.”
“The fuck is a fissure?” Neuma asked, folding her arms underneath her ample breasts. She looked like she was going to smother on her own cleavage.
“The doors between worlds are only a convenience built by angels to make travel easier,” James said. “But all of the dimensions are interconnected. There are physical locations where they join together, like joints on a bone.”
“Not all dimensions are touching each other, though,” Nathaniel said, tongue sticking out between his lips as he continued drawing his map. “And Earth doesn’t have any fissures to Hell around here. We’ll have to take another gate and jump across a few dimensions to get to Coccytus.”
“Is that all?” Jerica asked dryly.
“Yup,” he said. “Give me a few minutes to look around. I’ll find a route into the garden.”
Gary Zettel stood on the deck of the dirigible, studying the ruined city spread beneath him.
James Faulkner was there somewhere. He had been seen in a silver Honda approaching the city, and even though he hadn’t been stopped at any of the guard posts, there wasn’t a single doubt in Zettel’s mind that the witch had made it through. The only question was what he was planning to do once he got there.
Zettel had taken out his earpiece so that there was nothing to disturb him as he stood alone on the platform in front of the bridge, hands gripping the railing, wind beating around him.
This high above the city, there was no noise. And with all of the spotlights illuminating the dirigible, there was no way that any of the millions of nightmare larvae could reach him.
If he hadn’t been preparing for war, it might have been peaceful.
The Union’s face recognition database was running full bore at the Fernley base. The instant Faulkner showed up on a camera, they would be on top of him—all three units that he had brought from Montana, and every unit stationed in Fernley. All of those units were preparing to deploy right now. Sierra Street and North Virginia were a parade of black vehicles bristling with spotlights, machine guns, and electrified metal cages that could each take down an elephant.
The sight of the pieces moving into place below filled Zettel with grim resolve. He was laying out his side of the board with everything that he could muster, and he still wasn’t sure if it would be enough.
Somehow, he doubted that James Faulkner would be taken unaware—or alone.
The door behind Zettel opened and closed. “We’ve found him, sir,” Dante said. He spoke with forced bravado, but there was no hiding the undercurrent of anxiety. He had taken over as right-hand witch for Zettel after Allyson’s death, but those were big shoes to fill, and Dante’s metaphorical feet were about as small as his brain.
“You’re certain?”
“Yes, sir. Our cameras spotted him entering a casino.”
Zettel felt no excitement at closing in on his prey. A sense of purpose settled over him, as serene as being battered by the wind on the deck of the dirigible. That determination filled the gaping hole in his chest that Allyson’s death had left behind. The night she had died, he hadn’t been sure he would survive—it felt like his heart and lungs had been ripped out simultaneously.
There was nothing quite like losing an aspis, and Zettel would make sure that Faulkner paid for that suffering. There would be no arrest this time. No chance for escape. Just a gunshot, an explosion of blood, and a death both swift and righteous.
“Which casino?” he asked, putting his earpiece back in as he followed Dante to the door.
“A place called Craven’s. It’s demon-owned.”
Zettel stopped inside the bridge, letting the door fall shut behind him. He was familiar with Craven’s Casino. It was the home of an infernal terrorist cell. From those hallowed halls, they distributed drugs, sacrificed human lives to the Night Hag, and organized uprisings. Zettel had allowed Craven’s to continue operating because it was too hard to attack without also dealing with the nightmare infestation.
If Faulkner was in Craven’s, then it must mean that he had aligned with them. Zettel may have had guns, witches, and tanks on his side, but Faulkner had a whole army of demons. “Clever bastard,” he swore under his breath.
“Sir?”
Zettel ripped open the cabinet on the wall. He donned a flak jacket and helmet. “Get ready. We’re going down.”
“Uh,” Dante said, glancing toward the door. Zettel could practically see him considering jumping off the dirigible. Like a swift death on the pavement would be better than diving into downtown Reno with six units at his back.
Allyson wouldn’t have even blinked.
What a fucking pussy.
Zettel didn’t even think before drawing his gun. He shoved it into Dante’s forehead. “Get dressed,” he said, voice cold.
“Yes, sir,” Dante said, reaching out a trembling hand to grab body armor.
Zettel holstered his gun and prepared to drop.
Faulkner was going to die.
XVII
Neuma led Nathaniel and James back to the manager’s office so they could make their final preparations in privacy. “Nobody’s been back here since Elise disappeared,” she said as she unlocked the door for them. “Bet she still has a few toys around, if you want to play with them.” Neuma winked at James. “Not the fun kind. Sorry.”
&nb
sp; The office had always been gloomy and lightless, but the destruction had made it even gloomier. The windows looking down on the gaming floor were cracked like ocean ice. The back half of the office was covered in debris from a collapsed roof.
Nathaniel stood in the middle of it all. His puppy-brown eyes tracked over the giant slab of a desk, the executive chair, the bucket filled with half-smoked cigarettes.
As soon as Neuma was gone, James made a quick sweep of the desk for anything dangerous, but all of the drawers were locked and the surface was clean. “You can work here,” he said.
Nathaniel settled into the leather chair. Its massive silhouette dwarfed him.
“Can I get you anything?” James asked.
“Privacy,” Nathaniel said. “Mapping is hard. I have to zone out.”
James’s eyes fell on a closet in the corner. “Very well. I’ll stay out of the way.”
He tried to open the door, but electricity shocked through his palm when he touched the doorknob. He jerked back.
“Well, what have we here?” he murmured, narrowing his eyes to study the magic sparkling around the doorframe.
It was a locking charm. That kind of magic required enough sentience to be able to tell who should be allowed in or out, and too much intelligence was a terrible thing for an inanimate object. They tended to get ornery as they aged.
“Open,” James said, shaking the doorknob hard.
The charm ignored him.
He gathered the force of his magic within him, letting it fill his words with power.
“I told you to open.”
He could practically feel the door raspberrying him silently, as if to say, Yeah, right.
James pulled the plastic bag out of his back pocket. He was still carrying the skin that he had severed from Elise’s palm in the Vault, and he flashed it at the door.
“Recognize this?”
He thought for a moment that the door’s sullen silence meant that it was ignoring him. But it finally, grudgingly, swung open.
The room on the other side was looked more like a small storage room in a sadist’s house than a closet. Several spiked torture devices hung from the wall, and heavy iron shackles were bolted to the wall opposite the door. In comparison, the rollaway bed in the corner was totally unremarkable. Elise must have used David Nicholas’s closet as a bedroom when she had run out of money. That was morbid, even for her.
James closed the door halfway. Enough to give Nathaniel privacy without leaving him vulnerable. Then he lay down to rest on Elise’s bed. The pillow smelled like her shampoo; if he closed his eyes, he could almost imagine that she was beside him. But when he rolled over, he hit a hard lump.
He reached into the pillowcase and extracted a box of cigarettes.
A half-smile crossed his lips. He rolled a cigarette between his fingers.
James had been horrified when he’d discovered that Elise had picked up the habit, but he would have given anything to have her with him now—even if she were smoking those damn cigarettes and having tequila for breakfast. He might have even joined her for a drink or six.
Elise wouldn’t have cared that Hannah was dead. Not when danger was still on the horizon. A petty thing like death wasn’t enough to distract her from her mission, whatever it had been on any given week. She was a rock in the ocean, immovable, eternal. He could have used some of that himself.
James touched a mark on his knee and snapped his fingers. A flame hovered over his thumb.
He lit the cigarette and took a deep drag.
Several of the dancers in James’s old ballet company had picked up the habit to keep themselves skinny, and smoking had been an easy way to ingratiate himself with the “cool” people. Twenty-five years later, he was surprised to find that the smoke tasted even worse than he remembered—and was equally surprised when the third drag settled his nerves.
James watched the smoke spiraling from the tip. It curved and twisted like a woman dancing. Or fighting. He set it on a plate Elise had been using as an ashtray, still smoldering.
He was still holding the flap of skin from Elise’s palm. James contemplated the intricacies of the mark, wondering how hard it would be to transfer the tattoo onto himself. Merely drawing it wouldn’t be enough. The power wasn’t held in the shape of the symbol, but in the way it had been transferred to the skin by the cherubim. James couldn’t emulate that.
But there had to be a way for him to use the mark.
His eyes fell on a shelf near the door. There were a few pairs of gloves on the top of it.
He found an oversized pair of fingerless driving gloves that didn’t look like they had ever been worn. Elise always preferred them fingerless, just in case she needed to use her fingers to kill someone. That was the explanation she had given him, anyway. It wasn’t that she wanted to have an easier time eating, or brushing her teeth—she always wanted to be ready to kill.
James searched until he found a needle and thread, which surely must have been for the waitresses to repair their costumes. Elise wouldn’t have had any idea what to do with it.
Sitting back on the bed, he extracted Elise’s skin from the bag. It was drying around the edges.
“Forgive me,” he whispered.
James began to sew her skin onto his palm.
He flinched the first time that he drove the needle through the edge of her skin and into his. He flinched the next dozen times, too. But as he carefully stitched around the edge, his hand began to grow numb, and he quickly became inured to the pain. He only stopped long enough to finish smoking the cigarette.
It didn’t take long for him to feel the power of the mark connecting with him. It vibrated deep within his bones, making his head swim and his shoulder ache.
“What are you doing?”
He glanced up. Nathaniel stood in the doorway, watching him with a mixture of worry and disgust.
James considered hiding his hand. Instead, he turned the palm out so that his son could see the half-stitched skin. “It’s an ethereal mark. Do you know what a mark is?”
Nathaniel’s stunned silence was answer enough.
James returned his attention to stitching the edges of the skin in place, brow furrowed. “It takes two marks to open an ethereal door. Powerful angels have one mark. It means that only a pair of cooperating angels can open a door, and if an enemy manages to kill an angel for its mark, it still can’t get through the door.”
The boy sat down across from him on a cardboard box. “You mean that you killed an angel for that?”
“Elise used to have two marks. This is one of them.”
Horror dawned in his eyes. “You’re sewing her skin onto your body.”
“It’s the only way. She only has one mark now, so she alone is incapable of opening the gate to leave Araboth on her own.”
“How’d she get two in the first place?”
“They were given to her by willing angels and attached in much the same way that I am doing now. All angels adore her. They would do anything she asked.” James blew out a shuddering breath. “Anything.”
“You’re Gray, aren’t you?” Nathaniel asked. His wide eyes caught the dim light of the office. “Half-angel.”
James pulled the thread tight. “What makes you think that?”
“It takes two marks to escape Araboth. You’re only attaching one, so you must already have another. And Mom always said…”
He trailed off, train of thought derailed, and stared at his feet. When he spoke again, his voice was heated.
“The way she talked about you, I knew something was wrong.” He raked a hand through his hair, pushing his bangs out of his face. They immediately fell into his eyes again. He desperately needed a haircut. “If you’re Gray, that means that I am, too.”
“I suppose that would be true, if it were the case.” He wove the needle through his skin and jabbed a little too deep. A bead of dark blood trickled down his wrist.
Nathaniel continued to watch. “So what? Am I an angel?�
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“You don’t have any of the physical symptoms. Don’t worry yourself.”
He watched James continue to sew for several minutes without speaking. It was impossible to tell if he was interested, or repulsed—Faulkners had done much worse in pursuit of power.
“Do you have scissors?” James asked. He was almost done sewing.
Nathaniel stood. “You’re sick,” he said, and he walked out of the room.
So that was a “no.”
James knotted the wire, then bit it off at the base. He had picked up a phial of healing solution at Motion and Dance before they left. He smeared it on the edges of the mark, sucking in a hard breath at the sting. But it quickly numbed the stitches. Now James only felt tightness, like it was impossible to fully extend his fingers. He was hesitant to attempt it before it healed.
He tilted his hand in the light to look at it. The cream was already being absorbed by Elise’s flesh, rehydrating it, bringing it back to life. He would reapply it in an hour or so, and again an hour after that. Blood vessels would connect. The tissues would knit together. It would be a part of his body permanently, this mark of God.
Hopefully, the mark would long outlive the entity it was meant to honor.
A hard thud shook the wall next to him. James leaped to his feet. “Nathaniel?” he called, pulling on the driving gloves.
Another crash, followed by the sound of shattering glass.
A dozen ugly images flooded his mind—demons attacking Nathaniel in the office, or worse, Metaraon bursting through the window.
James flung open his door. A lamp hurtled toward his head. He ducked, and its ceramic base shattered against the doorframe.
Nathaniel was alone. Fists balled, face red, eyes streaming. Silent rage shook his entire body.
He had spilled pages from his Book of Shadows all over the desk, and as James watched, Nathaniel shoved the rest of them to the floor. He tried to throw the chair, but it was too heavy, so he settled for kicking it. It fell out the broken window.
James saw Nathaniel’s punch coming, but he didn’t move to dodge it. He took the blow in his gut. James also took the second strike, and the third. His son’s aim improved on each one.