by S. M. Reine
Her heart sped. “It worked,” she whispered as Aniruddha dropped beside Abel, making his head and shoulders lower than the Alpha’s, instinctively submissive. Rylie turned from him to smile at the others. “Who wants to go next?”
“Coccytus,” Stephanie said. “No. I don’t think so.”
James glanced toward the doorway of the cathedral. Elise had refused to enter, electing to collect James’s ritual supplies from the basement where he’d left them, and it didn’t look like she’d returned yet.
He didn’t feel like arguing with Stephanie over this. His patience had vanished in the forest with Elise.
“Someone will take you back as soon as the ritual is finished,” James said as calmly as he could manage. “You don’t need to enter the garden with us.”
Stephanie’s strawberry-blond hair was loose around her shoulders for once. It made her look younger, almost soft. Of course, she managed to ruin that image every time she opened her mouth. “Allow me to think of a more colorful way to say no. Hell no? That seems appropriate, given the fact that you want to drag me to one of Hell’s darkest pits.”
“The fire in Ba’al’s mouth is quite bright, actually.”
“Then how does ‘not a snowball’s chance in the steaming wastelands of Dis’ work for you?”
“You realize we need to do this spell to bring Yasir and the Apple back as well, don’t you?” James asked.
“But you don’t need me for that. Just because you’re too lazy to go through Limbo—”
“Lazy? We could spend hundreds of years lost and wandering if we go through there.” He knew this for a fact because he’d spent far, far more than a few centuries wandering through the nothingness of Limbo in search of Elise. He wasn’t about to repeat the experience. “This is the only way I can guarantee Yasir’s return.”
Stephanie folded her arms under her breasts, but above her rapidly growing stomach. She was gaining a lot of weight at this stage in the pregnancy. She’d always been incredibly image-obsessed, and James tried not to feel too smug about how much the change in her figure must have been driving her crazy. “Will you? Guarantee his return, that is.”
James opened his mouth to respond then shut it. In truth, he and Elise hadn’t discussed what they would do with the other victims under New Eden. He’d assumed they would attempt to save everyone, but the pack was priority.
“That’s what I thought,” Stephanie said. “Yasir’s as good as dead. I won’t risk my life, and the life of his son, to help send you on a fool’s errand.”
“You’d give up on him so easily?”
Her lips pinched into a thin line. “He wouldn’t want me to risk myself for him when the odds of survival are so slim.” She occupied herself with unzipping a backpack on the table, pulling out the supplies, and arranging them in piles.
“Cold, Steph. Very cold.”
“Don’t call me that, Jim. It’s patronizing,” she snapped. “There’s a difference between being cold and being practical. I’m still alive, regardless of what’s happened to the Apple and what the angels have done to us. I’m moving on.” She pulled a knife out of the backpack and set it on a different part of the table from the first aid kit. “This is what Yasir called a ‘bug-out bag.’ He prepared it for me months ago. It’s all I need to make it to New York. There’s still life up there. People are attempting to recover now that the fissure is gone.”
“Thanks to our joined efforts,” James said. “I couldn’t have healed the fissure if you hadn’t helped me with Lincoln.”
“I don’t owe you or anyone else my life.”
“Be reasonable.”
“Just because I disagree with you doesn’t mean I’m unreasonable, you sexist pig.”
“What in the seven hells does this have to do with sexism?”
Stephanie scowled at him. “Would you tell a man to be reasonable, as if he were unreasonably emotional? I don’t think so.”
James was suddenly grateful that he’d always been careful with birth control while dating Stephanie.
Pushing her wasn’t helping—maybe it was time to switch to flattery. “I’m not sure that I can cast this spell effectively without your knowledge of gaean magic. Anything would help. Even if you have books or something that you could give me…”
“I don’t have books,” Stephanie said. She silently counted her supplies, swapped out a few items, and then began reloading the backpack. “What makes you think that you’d be able to do anything to the angels in New Eden anyway?”
“Rylie and Abel are making new werewolves right now.”
A smile spread over her lips. “Ah.”
“That’s what the Apple wanted, isn’t it?”
“It’s what Cain wanted, yes. Levi as well.” She dug around elbow-deep in her backpack. “Cain may have been a psychopath, yet his goals ultimately aligned with Elise’s. Funny how that worked out, don’t you think?”
“Hate her all you want,” he said, “but she’s the one saving the world and you’re the one hiding in Northgate, unwilling to attempt to save your husband. You’re not half the woman she is.”
“Really, I’m twice the woman.” Stephanie snorted. “Three times, with this stomach. But there’s no competition with that thing wearing Elise’s face. She’s not really any woman at all, is she?”
He momentarily imagined drawing the falchion and burying it in her ice-cold heart.
His patience had always been short for her jealousy. Now, after all this—when it had never even been a competition, when Elise was dying—he had no patience at all.
But she spoke before he could completely lose his temper.
“You could come with me,” she said without looking at him, attention focused on the backpack.
James was so surprised that his anger defused. “What?”
“Your odds of survival on this suicide mission are no better than mine,” Stephanie said, sticking the knife in the side pocket of her bag. “The angels have done their worst. Let them go. With my knowledge of medicine and gaean magic, and with your powers, we could do good for the survivors of Earth. We’d be quite a team.”
“You must be joking.”
“It may have escaped your notice, but my sense of humor is incredibly lacking.” She zipped the bag up and stepped back, surveying it with visible satisfaction. “Do you think that you have any future with Elise? The girl will be your death.” There was a hint of something soft in her eyes that didn’t reach her voice. “I always thought you deserved more.”
She offered the bag to him. He stared at it.
James considered her suggestion for a moment—just a moment. Stephanie was a skilled doctor. She really would do well serving the struggling hospitals in the still-populated northeast. And if he left with her, he would never need to know that Elise had died.
It didn’t sound remotely appealing.
“Your husband can be saved,” James said.
Stephanie huffed and tossed the bag back on the table. “Naïve dreams will only prolong the pain.”
“Whereas moving on with your ex will make you feel much better?”
“I’m offering to save your life.”
“That’s cute,” Elise said flatly. She stood in the doorway of the church with his duffel bag over her shoulder, glowing faintly with the residue of the magical supplies within. “Very cute. Now let’s go. We’re already running late.”
“I’m not coming,” Stephanie said, and her eyes asked James to say the same.
He ignored her. “I’m afraid Dr. Whyte is beyond reasoning, Elise. I’ll have to do the best I can with the spell on my own.”
“I wasn’t asking if she wanted to come,” Elise said.
She darted across the room in a flash, clamping a hand on James and Stephanie’s wrists.
The doctor tried to pull back, mouth opening in silent protest.
Elise phased.
Seventeen
COCCYTUS WAS COLDER than Elise ever could have imagined.
; The first glimpse of it struck unexpected fear deep into her heart. There was something familiar about the skull that she was standing on, even though she knew that she had never been there before.
Icy flame danced from its central mouth, scorching the teeth. Its too-long spine twisted toward the roof of the cavern, where Malebolge waited—too distant to see at this distance.
She didn’t get long to study the ancient cadaver. She had appeared on the edge of the jaw with Stephanie and James in one hand, Rylie and Abel linked from the other. It was the first time she had carried four people across so many dimensions and Coccytus didn’t appreciate the invasion. She felt the walls between dimensions strain as she passed, vibrating through her body.
For once, it wasn’t just the humans that got sick at the shift between worlds. Elise did, too.
She sank to her knees on the pointed chin of Ba’al and vomited. The fluid that came from her was black. Not the shiny, healthy black of her body rejecting bullets, but a sickly, acidic black that burned up her throat, ripped her mouth raw, and made her lips feel like they were peeling away.
Elise bowed her head to the ground, pressing her forehead against bone. It was slick with ice. It should have been too cold for her, but she couldn’t feel it. Someone said, “Elise?” and the sound of it made her skull throb.
A gentle hand touched the back of her neck. She looked up. Betty was stroking her back with a gloved hand, swaddled in a thick fiend-hide jacket that was lined with harpy wool. Her cheeks were bright pink from the kiss of wind.
How much had Elise been drinking last night? Must have been a hell of a bender, if she was still throwing up.
“I would love a glass of water,” Elise croaked.
“I don’t think there’s any liquid water here,” Betty said with a faint smile. “Sorry.”
Betty didn’t talk like that. She didn’t apologize.
With help, Elise sat up. The world seemed to have a strange texture to it, like there were no distinct edges between the surface on which she stood and the cavern beyond, the great fangs in front of the fire, James outlined against Ba’al’s vertebrae.
It was Rylie holding her steady. Rylie. Wolf girl who had no idea how to use condoms. Not Betty.
That confusion meant that Elise was slipping again.
She was too hot even though the bite of Coccytus’s harsh winds was freezing the gray sweat on her arms. Elise pulled her sleeves down anyway. James was watching—she didn’t want him to see her skin blistering.
Slowly, the other demons began popping into the dimension, carrying the new werewolves with them. They were already in their half-wolf forms and looked impressive in the chilly blue darkness of Coccytus, protected by layers of dense fur. None seemed to struggle with the dimensional change the way that mortals usually did.
“Huh,” Elise said.
Rylie followed her gaze. “Cool, aren’t they?”
That wasn’t the word Elise would use, exactly. But even though she had initially been disappointed at the sight of all these half-wolves, now she thought that they almost looked like an army to fear. A small army, but an army designed specifically to kill angels.
“Cool,” Elise agreed.
One of the nightmares sauntered up to them. It was a guy named Yvo. He was only wearing a thin shirt and shorts that looked unsettlingly like human skin, but he didn’t seem affected by Coccytus’s wind. “Can we go?”
She struggled to remember where he might want to go from there. Back to Dis? They had come from Dis, hadn’t they?
“Could you make another trip?” Elise asked. “Get more people?”
“There aren’t any more wolves,” Rylie said softly.
Right. She had forgotten about that.
“Stephanie needs a way back,” Rylie said. “One of you needs to stay, please. Just long enough for her to cast a spell. I think everyone else can go. We won’t be coming back this way.”
Yvo turned to the other nightmares. “Who’s staying?” he called over the howling wind.
“I can,” said a woman that Elise didn’t recognize. She wasn’t a nightmare. She was a nivex, blue-skinned and yellow-eyed, with a serpentine tongue that lashed as she spoke. She looked comfortable among the ice.
“Great.” Yvo didn’t wait for her to change her mind. He vanished. Taking his cue, the others followed immediately, leaving Elise alone with the witches and werewolves on the jaw of Ba’al.
“Good God,” Stephanie said, staggering over to them with her teeth chattering. She only had the rain slicker and light sweater that she’d been wearing in Northgate. Her few minutes in Dis had made her sweaty, but now she was frozen, and her strawberry-blond hair looked like straw. “You people are insane. Utterly insane. How—how dare you drag me to this g-godforsaken place?”
“What are you going to do about it?” Abel asked. He’d just shifted back from his wolf form moments before they phased from Dis, and his skin was steaming from the change. “Here’s an idea. Shut your mouth and cast the fucking spell so you can leave.”
Stephanie turned to James, as if she thought he would help her. But he didn’t look at her. Elise could feel hatred through the bond.
The doctor flung her hands into the air. “Give me the damn duffel bag.”
James dumped it on her.
Elise stepped away as the witches went to search for a flat piece of bone to cast James’s spell. She wouldn’t have been able to help even if it had been purely warlock magic. Coccytus’s darkness was the only thing keeping her skin from fading away.
She should have fed before coming down. If not on James, then on another volunteer. Someone who wasn’t using her trust to achieve his goals. Someone whose manipulations wouldn’t hurt as much.
Elise stepped up to stand on one of Coccytus’s teeth, the toes of her boots hanging off the edge. It was a few degrees warmer there. The air was distorted by the fissure, as though time itself was compressed near its center, crushed into a pinpoint where Coccytus connected with Limbo.
She had never been to Limbo before, but she could still summon the mental image of the endless gray land, where ground and sky were the same flat color. The landscape was unbroken by hills or valleys. It was beyond flat. Everything was nothing.
It was where it had all started out, before even the Tree appeared.
Limbo was the beginning.
Elise lost herself, staring down at the fissure. All sounds faded away around her. The people at her back faded. The entire world faded.
And then she began to fade, too.
Rylie glanced up at Elise as she settled onto an icy vertebra beside Stephanie. The demon was hanging out by the fissure, staring down into Limbo, and she hadn’t moved for a long time now. Rylie wasn’t sure if she was imagining the strange translucency to Elise’s skin or not.
“Does she look okay to you?” Rylie asked, struggling to keep her teeth from chattering. Her parents had taken her skiing in the Alps over Christmas once. That had been cold. This was something else completely. The wind break they got from the curve of the spine behind them barely helped.
Stephanie didn’t even look up. “I wouldn’t know, would I?” She ripped open the duffel bag that James had brought into Hell. “What’s the plan?”
James settled across from them on his knees. He grabbed a thick pen out of his bag—the kind that Rylie had used in middle school leadership class to paint posters before Homecoming. The paint in them was pretty potent. Her classmates had liked to snort them. Hopefully, they would be just as useful at drawing runes in Coccytus as they were for getting preteens high on fumes.
“We’ll start by drawing the symbol that Ariane gave me,” he said. “Make it as large as possible.”
Rylie took another pen. “At this rate, helping with all these spells, I’m going to become convinced that I’m a witch, too.”
“Be grateful you’re not,” Stephanie said. “If you think that being subject to the pack structure as a werewolf is frustrating, imagine being subject to hi
gh priests like James.”
“I’ve enlarged the rune onto a grid here,” James said loudly, talking over Stephanie. He set a notebook between them. “Don’t draw the lines that I’ve marked in red. I’ll need to do those myself while chanting.”
“Chanting what?” Stephanie asked. He handed her another page covered in his handwriting. She skimmed it then gave an imperious sniff. “This is what you think passes for gaean magic?”
“Not exactly. But that’s why Elise brought you to Coccytus, as you are the expert.”
She scowled. “Brought me? You mean kidnapped me.”
“Your help means a lot to us,” Rylie said.
Something softened in Stephanie’s expression. Or maybe she was just starting to become so numb that she couldn’t pull angry faces anymore. She took a smaller pen from the duffel bag and sat back. “Get the rune drawn. I’ll rewrite these stanzas for you.”
Rylie smiled. “Thanks.”
Stephanie sniffed again.
James and Rylie broke the rune up into halves, and Rylie drew as quickly as she could without messing anything up. She had a pretty steady hand. That wasn’t a werewolf skill. Just another leadership class skill.
“It’s looking good,” James said, watching her work.
His praise fell flat. When she didn’t respond, his smile quickly disappeared, and he refocused his attention on the rune at hand.
Rylie stopped drawing long enough to blow on her fingers, trying to loosen them. They’d gone cold and stiff despite her gloves. Worse, the paint in her marker had stopped flowing.
“Here.” He touched the ground between Stephanie and Rylie. A small rune slid from underneath his sleeve and settled between them. Coccytus’s wind almost seemed to blow it out. But even though it flickered, weakened by Hell’s power, it emanated warmth like a campfire.
It warmed Rylie through her jacket. She held her hands over it.
“Thanks,” she said grudgingly. Stephanie muttered something that might have been an agreement.
James continued to draw. Once Rylie’s pen thawed, she followed suit.