by S. M. Reine
Rylie bit her bottom lip and nodded.
They slipped silently through the streets together. Rylie considered herself to be fairly quiet—spending the last six years as a werewolf had given her a few physical advantages—but she felt clumsy alongside Elise, whose feet didn’t seem to touch the ground.
She eyed the blade in Elise’s hand. It was the obsidian falchion that had killed Seth. “I haven’t seen you carrying that in a while,” Rylie said.
Elise looked down at the blade, as though she’d forgotten she was carrying it. She reached back and sheathed it under her jacket. “I haven’t been.”
“Why?”
“It’s dangerous. I don’t trust myself with it.” She shrugged stiffly. “But it’s the only weapon I have that can kill an angel before the angel kills me. This sword, and you.”
Rylie startled. “Me?”
“I know what Abel has been doing in Hell. I’ve seen you against hybrids. You’re the greatest natural weapons against the ethereal.”
She didn’t feel like much of a weapon. She felt terrified. She missed Seth. “We’ll help any way we can,” Rylie said, focusing on her feet.
“Now do you want to tell me why you haven’t been shapeshifting?”
“Not really.”
Anyone else would have pressed, but Elise left it at that. She’d probably assume it was because Rylie didn’t want to be a werewolf in the first place—which was true. And that was a safer assumption than knowing the truth. At least for now.
But if Elise was in a chatty mood again, then Rylie had questions of her own.
“Are you okay?” It was a much less loaded question than “Why did you think I was your dead best friend for five minutes?”
Elise didn’t look at her. “Keep your nose open and your ears perked. I want to know if someone’s nearby before we see them.”
The werewolf sniffed the air. “There are angels over there.” She pointed toward what had been the temple district, but now was nothing but an empty spot in the skyline. “They’re at least a quarter of a mile away.”
“Good.”
The opportunity to talk had slipped away. Rylie could feel it.
Elise headed down the stairs. Though the canals were no longer draining into the space underneath the statue, the water was still puddled on the steps, and her sloshing footsteps echoed. Rylie winced at how loud it seemed.
“Is that as covert as you get?” she whispered, following Elise down. The demon shot a look at her, and once Rylie reached the first step, she realized why. She was even louder, and she was trying to be careful. This was exactly as covert as they could be.
Blushing furiously, she kept following Elise down into darkness.
The demon stopped at the bottom of the steps, gazing around at the cavern. It was just as collapsed and broken as it had been when Rylie had last been there; there was even a stain of blood on two columns where Nash had been crushed trying to protect Summer. The angels hadn’t made any efforts toward recovery here.
“Damn,” Elise said, stepping down into the water, submerging herself to the knees. “This isn’t it.” But she started feeling around in the water anyway.
“Looking for something?”
“I left a fragment of the Tree here. Just wondering if it’s still around. Could be useful.”
Rylie hung back, unwilling to get her boots wet. They were treated leather. Stupid to be so hung up on something like her shoes after the apocalypse, but she had so few luxuries left—if she didn’t need to wreck one of the few nice things that still belonged to her, then she wasn’t going to.
Elise only searched for a few minutes before emerging again, wiping her hands dry on her shirt. “Guess the door’s going to be wherever the angels are,” she said with a grunt. “Couldn’t be easy, could it?”
“Never,” Rylie said.
Elise flitted to the surface and waited at the top. As soon as Rylie’s feet hit the ground, the wind shifted. The sour smell of sulfur swept over her. A stench that didn’t belong in Heaven.
The glowing temple district was tinted crimson.
“Is that the army?” Rylie asked.
Elise’s grim expression was answer enough. There hadn’t been enough time for the army to join them yet, and Elise should have been the only demon within Shamain. Whatever that light was, it had to be ethereal—or something worse.
She grabbed Rylie’s arm. “Sorry.”
The street blinked out around them. Pressure crowded Rylie’s lungs.
Phasing only took an instant—much less time than it had taken to get to Shamain in the first place. But she still felt like she was suffocating by the time Elise set her down again.
They reappeared on top of a tall building overlooking a square with a large, arching doorway at the center. The street was rimmed with dead trees. The cobblestone was carpeted with apple blossoms.
This was where Rylie had smelled the angels. There were four of them—not a huge number where humans or demons were concerned, but practically a small army for angels. They were conferring on the other side of the gate, oblivious to their visitors.
The doorway itself was glowing a pale, wavering blue. Rylie had become way too familiar with ethereal stuff lately, so she thought she could tell that it was dormant.
The other glow—the much brighter, redder one—came from a machine.
It was the size of a car and built from ethereal stone, motionless cogs locked together. Most of it looked like it was made from the same substance as the rest of Shamain. But a few pieces didn’t match. Black, glossy cables connecting the body of the machine to the doorway, like the tentacles of an octopus trying to consume the stone arch. Crimson marks drifted a few inches over the surface, as though the magic couldn’t quite contact the material.
Whatever that machine was meant to do, it could only be bad.
Elise crouched at the end of the roof, glaring at the machine. “They’re working on it, too.”
“What?”
“Melding ethereal and infernal technology. Looking for a way to get at this other magic, this…gaean magic that Stephanie told us about. We’re ahead of them. We can cast new ethereal magic; they can’t. But they have ancient ethereal artifacts with magic already cast on them, and somehow, they seem to have found a warlock.”
“Wait, let me catch up. Gaean magic is like earth stuff, right?”
“How do you know?” Elise asked sharply.
“Latin roots.” Rylie smiled. “I went to a private middle school.”
Elise rolled her eyes. “Yes. It’s ‘earth stuff.’ James thinks that all three of them together can be used to manipulate the universe—the whole universe, on a macro level, like a puppeteer pulling strings. We don’t understand it yet, but it’s what cured Lincoln and closed the fissure.”
“So if the angels are trying to figure it out, then…this is bad,” Rylie said.
“Incredibly.”
“We have to do something about it.”
She expected Elise to argue. After all, this was meant to be a scouting mission. But Elise nodded slowly, rubbing a hand over her chin. “You’re right. I can’t leave that thing down there.” She straightened, jacket flapping around her knees in the breeze from the archway. “I want a closer look at that machine.”
“Wait!”
Rylie reached for Elise, but she had already slipped through the shadows to drop to the square a dozen stories below.
The angels didn’t notice that there was a demon in their midst. For all of Elise’s power, she was pretty good at pulling it in, just like the way that an angel could pull in his wings and pass for human. She slithered through the darkness with the ordinary gait of a mortal, a woman trained to fight demons, not the Godslayer.
“Crap,” Rylie whispered, searching for a way to follow her down. She probably wasn’t meant to follow, but all it would take was a couple good blasts of light from those angels to ruin Elise’s day. Maybe her whole life.
Rylie spotted dead vines
wrapped around the outside of the building that she stood on. She gripped a couple of the thicker parts, swung her leg over the side, and began climbing down. She tried not to rustle the leaves. They still whispered at her motion.
She swallowed her pounding heart and kept moving.
Elise was already beside the machine by the time Rylie’s cowboy boots connected with the ground. The sky seemed dimmed in the presence of the warlock magic, the navy hue washed out to gray.
“Can you pry any of these loose?” Elise muttered to Rylie, wiggling her fingers under one of the cogs. It was as wide as her head. This close, Rylie could see all the detail that had been carved into it in swirling, looping lines, making the stone seem to shimmer like metal.
Rylie wiped her palms on her shirt and then seized a second cog. She didn’t use all her strength on the first tug—she so seldom needed that much muscle—but it didn’t budge.
It did, however, groan at the strain of being pulled. She froze. Elise crouched down lower behind the machine.
“Did you hear something?” That was one of the angels on the other side of the gate.
Rylie set her jaw and pulled again, harder this time. Her biceps strained. She dug her shoes into the ground.
The cog popped out—just an inch.
And then it turned.
Rylie released it, clasping her hands over her mouth to muffle her gasp.
“Sounds like the war machine,” another angel said.
Elise tried to shove the cog back into place, but it only kept turning under its own impetus. Its edge was caught on two other cogs. They twisted and forced the others to rotate, until the entire exterior of the stone machine was a mass of sliding pieces like a puzzle ball.
The warlock magic brightened. It wasn’t quite right—no longer crimson or orange, but a sickly violet.
“Next time I come up with a spur-of-the-moment revision to our original plan, let’s not do it,” Elise muttered, jerking the falchion out of her sheath.
“What are we going to do? What is this thing going to do?”
“No idea. Hopefully, not destroy the world.”
That did not fill Rylie with very much confidence.
She clamped her fists on either side of the cog that jutted out furthest, gritting her teeth as she pushed all her weight into holding it in place. The machine jerked to a halt. Stone grumbled in protest. Her shoulders ached, fingers rubbed raw by the friction.
Magic crept over the backs of Rylie’s hands. It was hot and cold all at once. Kind of…slimy.
“I can’t hold it for long,” she whispered.
And the footsteps were coming faster now. She could hear feathers rustling. They only had seconds before they were caught.
“Don’t move an inch,” Elise said. “Unless you want to lose a hand, in which case, move all you want.” Then she plunged the falchion into the machine, driving it between two cogs, right beside Rylie’s fingers.
Rylie jerked back with a gasp. The machine didn’t move when she released it. The sword shivered, but didn’t break.
But the doorway was shuddering all over. The top vibrated so hard that it seemed to blur in the air. The bright marks ringing its base had turned violet too, just like the ones on the machine itself.
An angel rounded the doorway. His eyes fell on them.
“We have company!” he shouted over his shoulder.
Elise leaped on top of the machine, bracing her feet against the rigid cogs. Her hands were empty now that she didn’t have the sword.
“Elise!” Rylie hissed. “What about the original plan? The one where we escape before they kill us?”
“What is this? Which one of you made it?” Elise asked, thrusting a finger toward the machine. Her voice sounded strange. Not quite Elise. It was deeper, throatier, kind of…well, kind of pretty, although that was a word that Rylie wouldn’t have usually associated with her.
The angels stopped dead at the sight of her. Near-identical confusion flashed over their faces.
Rylie bit down on her knuckle, suppressing the urge to shift and fight. They were right there. Four of those things that had taken her pack, controlling the door that led right into New Eden where she could save them.
They could probably kill Elise. They would, if she didn’t intervene.
Elise had to know that, but she wasn’t backing down. “Answer me. Which one of you made this? Was it you, Maniel?” She faced the angel furthest to the right. “Is this another of your designs? Or was this something you put together with Belphegor, Tamriel?” she asked, turning to the female angel on the left.
“Don’t listen,” said another angel, shaking Maniel. “That’s not her. You know what they said.”
The sword and the cogs groaned. Something was going to give.
“Elise,” Rylie whispered.
Speaking was a bad choice. Her voice drew Maniel’s attention to her. His skin had bluish undertones, tinged with violet from standing beside the machine, and there was nothing particularly intimidating about his willowy build and hooked nose. Yet alarm washed over Rylie at the weight of his gaze.
He snapped out of Elise’s thrall, leaping around the machine to seize Rylie’s arm.
The wolf surged inside of her. It left no room inside of her for fear or uncertainty.
Her fingertips burned, and when she slashed at Maniel’s face, it was with two-inch claws. Four parallel gashes opened on his face. Silver blood gushed down his cheek.
It splattered on the machine.
The cogs groaned louder, and Elise’s sword started shivering at the same frequency as the gate. It was going to snap.
“One of these days, pulling the Eve thing on them is going to fucking work,” Elise said.
She ripped her sword out of the machine.
Rylie slashed her claws down Maniel’s hand, breaking his grip on her arm. Another of the angels lunged at her. He flared his wings wide, flashing so brightly that she was instantly blinded. She felt rather than saw the blast of wind on her face, hard enough to knock her onto her butt.
Whatever attack he had coming at her next didn’t land. Something wet spattered on her cheek.
She wiped her face dry and blinked the green shapes out of her vision to see silver blood on her fingertips. Her eyes flicked up to the angel still reared over her. A blade jutted through his ribs on the left—a shallow wound that was rapidly turning to ichor. Elise jerked the blade free. Kicked him to the ground beside Rylie’s feet.
The earth began shaking. The machine’s cogs opened, expanding to show the inner workings, more magical than mechanical. Electricity arced between the gears. There was total darkness at the depths.
Elise whirled, slashing the falchion at another angel. He parried her blow and swept his wing out. It slammed into her gut.
Rylie jumped in front of Elise, giving her the relative safety of her tiny shadow.
Pure adrenaline rolled through Rylie as instinct took over. The angel swung his saber. She dropped low to the ground and shoved off, leaping so quickly that the whole world blurred around her.
She hadn’t transformed, but her jaws ached, and she knew she had fangs even before she buried them into the angel’s bicep.
The taste of blood flooded her mouth.
He flared his wings at her, but what was death to Elise only blinded Rylie. She didn’t need to be able to see to rip the muscle from his arm. She could bury her claws into his throat in the sun as easily as she could in the darkness.
“Get through before it changes!” barked Tamriel, ripping the injured angel away from Rylie.
The world distorted around them. It shimmered.
Within the gateway, everything began growing dark.
“Too late,” Maniel said, gripping his bleeding side. “It’s gone.”
“What’s gone?” Elise shouted over the buzz of the cogs. Her blade was locked with the other angel’s, sweating black fluid from her hairline, bones flickering through her skin. “What the fuck did you do?”
&
nbsp; All light vanished. Not just the light within the gate, but the light from the angels’ wings, too. It swirled into the depths of the gate.
Rylie slammed her still-human foot into one of the cogs hard enough to shatter it. Her body had shifted enough that she didn’t need to think about unleashing her strength—it just exploded from her.
She dropped to the ground, clapping her hands over her head as cogs snapped free, whizzing around the square like discuses.
They struck the columns of the buildings around them and punched through. They decapitated trees. One caught Maniel’s wing and snapped it back with the wet crunch of bone.
And still it grew darker, beyond shadow—a void.
Rylie lifted her head enough to watch the fragments of the buildings get sucked back into the doorway, swirling through the vortex to be crunched into pinpricks at the center.
“Oh my God,” she whispered, lisping around her fangs.
A hand seized her by the scruff of her neck, dragging her to her feet. Tamriel had Rylie in her grip. “I thought we’d gotten all of you,” the angel growled, beautiful eyes narrowed to slits. “None of you were supposed to be left outside.”
Rylie dug her fingertips into Tamriel’s arm, trying to rake the angel’s flesh open underneath her claws. But she had lost grip of her wolf. The shock of seeing the doorway to New Eden turned into a black hole had forced her to revert to human.
Tamriel curled her other hand around Rylie’s jaw. Perfect position to rip her head off.
“Not that one,” Maniel groaned. “Leliel’s rules.”
Annoyance creased Tamriel’s brow. “But it’s a werewolf.”
“Tell that to Leliel.”
The hand on Rylie’s throat unclenched. She hit the ground in front of the angel’s bare feet. She momentarily envisioned how easy it would be to change and sink her teeth into those calves, letting herself surrender to the joy of bloodlust that Abel had been experiencing.
But in a flash, Elise was on top of Rylie, consuming her in shadow. The world contracted around them.
Heaven—and the hole punched between dimensions—vanished.