by Sara Reinke
She rammed her knee up and into Jason’s crotch, dropping him like a rock. Doubled over and breathless, he crashed to the ground, the gun falling from his hand. Out of all the pain and injury he’d suffered since returning to the Netherworlde, that throbbing, sickening agony pounding through his balls, twisting in his gut, crippling his entire body had to be the worst. He clenched his teeth, biting back a ragged, mewling cry as tears streamed down his cheeks and he clutched between his thighs.
Sarea reached down and retrieved her pistol. “You’re pathetic,” she seethed, pressing the barrel to his head and drawing back the hammer, cocking the gun.
There was a bright burst of light, discernablediscernible even though Jason’s eyes were tightly closed. I’ve been shot, he thought, his entire body rigid with frightened anticipation, steeled for the moment of the bullet’s impact and then the oblivion that would be the Outer Realm.
“Sarea, stop,” he heard someone cry out instead, and he risked opening his eyes.
“Gabriel,” he whispered, because somehow, impossibly, the priest was there, gun in hand.
Another man raced behind him, his face not as well known, but still familiar. Jason had seen him before, and in pretty much the same state—surrounded by white light, a crackling corona of energy enveloping him from head to feet, blazing in his eyes like fire.
“Nemamiah!” Sarea gasped, the muzzle of the revolver slipping away from Jason’s head. He took advantage of the momentary confusion to shift into shadow form, dissolving instantaneously. He rematerialized long enough to snatch the gun out of Sarea’s hand, leaving her to yelp in startled fright, and then vanished again, coalescing nearby, the farthest he could manage in his weakened, injured state.
He nearly collapsed again, but righted himself as Gabriel hurried toward him. The priest froze, his footsteps scrabbling to a halt in the dirt when Jason shoved the gun between them, leveling the sight at Gabriel’s nose and folding his finger against the trigger.
“Stay away from me,” he whispered, blood dribbling from his lips. Between the scorpion’s stinger sinking into his lung and the gruesome path Sitri’s sword had carved through his torso, he was in bad shape and knew it. He could feel blood rising in his throat now, a thick and steady flood, and he turned his head, spitting.
“Jason.” Gabriel looked confused as he held up his hands. “It’s me. It’s Gabriel.”
“Get away from it, gatekeeper!” Nemamiah had rushed to Sarea’s side, but strode boldly toward Jason now, whipping a gun out of a shoulder holster, a very large silver pistol that he aimed at Jason as he approached.
“Nemamiah, wait,” Gabriel began in protest.
“It delivered Sarea here,” Nemamiah snapped, not averting his furious, blazing eyes from Jason. “It would have given her over to the Nephilim, or worse, to the Outer Realm. Now stand aside and let me shoot it!”
“She brought me here,” Jason shouted, limping back in retreat, swinging the gun toward Nemamiah in warning. This did nothing to slow the archangel’s advance. Rather, it only seemed to piss him off further, which only made that hissing, crackling corona of electricity around him all the brighter.
“She brought me here,” Jason cried again, then he and Nemamiah stood nearly toe to toe, with Nemamiah’s pistol less than a centimeter away from his brow, and the ..44 revolver nearly touching Nemamiah’s nose. They were close enough for the ozone charge radiating from Nemamiah’s body to raise the hairs along Jason’s forearms, the nape of his neck.
“She brought me here,” Jason said, locking gazes with Nemamiah. Jason was frightened, terrified, in fact, and could feel the Eidolon, just barely back under some semblance of restraint, wanting to cut loose again, to seize control. “She said this is where I deserved to be. She’d made a deal with Sitri.”
“Liar.” The heavy cleft between Nemamiah’s brows furrowed more deeply. “The Elohim don’t cut deals with the Nephilim. And we don’t judge anyone. It’s not our place.”
“Then how else did I wind up here?” Jason cried. “How the hell else could Sitri have claimed me? You said so yourself. I’m not marked.”
Nemamiah swung to glare at Gabriel. “This boy was killed in your district, on your watch, gatekeeper. You would have been the one to deliver him.”
“I came to collect his soul because Gabriel was drunk,” Sarea said and Gabriel offered nothing but a plaintive, shamed look in response. With a contemptuous snort, she added, “Surprise, surprise. When I arrived at the hospital, I met Sitri. But rather than attack me, he simply asked, ‘Why would you claim him? What has this boy done to distinguish himself and earn eternal reward?’ And when I looked into his mind, I couldn’t find anything to explain it! I saw a life wasted, catering to drunks, profiting from the debauchery of others, whoring himself like some kind of wild dog in rut.”
“That’s not ours to decide, Sarea,” Nemamiah said sternly.
“Why not?” Sarea demanded. “Why should our judgment be of any less merit than the Ophanim? We walk among the mortals. Who better to decide if their actions make them worthy?”
Nemamiah lowered his gun as he turned to face her, his eyes wide in surprised disbelief. “The boy is right,” he whispered, sounding aghast. “You traded his soul to Sitri.”
“And I’d do it again, a thousand times,” Sarea snapped balefully. “We’ve seen a million like him come and go, passing beyond the Edge and into whatever lies beyond, mediocrity lauded time and time again. Is a soul to be deemed worthy simply because it lacks sufficient moral turpitude?”
“That’s not ours to decide.” Nemamiah shouted this now as he caught her by the shoulder. “Do you have any idea what you’ve done? The universal balance you’ve upset? Have you lost your mind?”
“Get your hand off me!” Sarea shoved him roughly away. He wore his sword from a scabbard at his hip, and as she pushed him, Sarea grabbed the hilt between her hands and jerked it loose from the sheath. Before he could recover from his surprise, stumbling to regain his footing, she thrust the blade between them, the point aiming for his navel.
“Sarea?” Nemamiah stared at her in wide-eyed, stricken surprise. All at once, the fight seemed to drain out of him and he lowered his hands, letting the pistol drop from his fingers to the ground. “What are you doing?”
“Let me kill it,” she said, not lowering the sword. “You weren’t supposed to be here. You were never supposed to know!” Her voice had taken on a ragged, strained tone, like she struggled against tears. “I brought it back here so Sitri could scrape its skull clean, so it wouldn’t remember anything of its mortal life, so that this would be over. Sitri’s gone now. Just let me run it through and end this, once and for all!”
“I can’t do that,” Nemamiah said quietly as he reached out, catching the blade in his hands. He didn’t pull or push at it or try to wrest it away from her. Rather, he held it lightly, as he might have cradled her hand between his own. “You know that.”
“It killed Tartys,” Sarea cried. “And Usiel and Aeshma! It destroyed Miria and Gzrel—our friends, Nemamiah. It damn near destroyed you!”
“The boy is not responsible for that,” Nemamiah told her. “For any of them. Put the sword down, Sarea.”
Sarea’s gaze cut from him to Gabriel, then to Jason. Her eyes were round, filled with panic, like those of a wild animal backed into a corner, its fight-or-flight instincts fully kicked in.
“We have to leave this place,” Nemamiah pressed. “If the Nephilim find us here, if Mara senses us, she’ll engage us and we’ll be outnumbered, overwhelmed. Please, Sarea. We have to bring him back to our side of the Netherworlde. The Ophanim are waiting for us there, waiting for him.”
“And what about me?” she whispered, turning her large, lucent eyes back to meet his.
“That’s not mine to decide,” Nemamiah told her. “You’ll have to answer to the Ophanim too.”
All at once, she looked childlike and frightened as she clutched at the sword, her pale skin gone ashen, her narrow bo
dy trembling. She shook her head. “I can’t go before the Ophanim. They’ll send me away to the Outer Realm. Sitri knew it, that son of a bitch. He tricked me, Nemamiah. This is all his fault.” Her gaze cut past Nemamiah’s shoulder, locking with Jason’s. “His and yours.”
She rammed the blade forward, spearing through Nemamiah’s gut. He uttered a startled, breathless gasp and staggered backward, his knees buckling. With a sudden flash of light, Sarea disappeared, rematerializing almost instantly in front of Gabriel. She spun the sword between her hands and smashed the rounded pommel into the priest’s temple. He crumpled to the ground in a lifeless heap.
“Gabriel,” Jason cried. Then Sarea appeared again, less than a foot away, in a brilliant, blinding burst of light that left him crying out, drawing his hands to his face.
“If none of you survive”—she thrust her hand out at him and an arcing bolt of white-hot electricity slammed into his chest, sending him careening backward and crashing into the dirt—“then none of you can tell the Ophanim what I’ve done.”
He tried to get up, but she hit him again with another blast of that searing energy. It was stronger than when Gabriel had hit him with it—she was stronger than Gabriel, and Jason flew back again, cleaving a deep trough in the dirt as it shoved him across the ground. Again and again, she blasted him, sending him tumbling and skidding, until at last he lay in a shuddering, gasping heap.
With a groan, he scratched feebly at the dirt. All at once, his outstretched hand no longer had any ground beneath it, nothing at all but a coldness so terrible and absolute, it cut instantly to the bone, like he’d reached into a vat of liquid nitrogen. He immediately recoiled, lifting his head weakly and trying to sit up, tucking his freezing hand against his belly.
The Edge, he realized, his eyes flying wide. She’s going to push me over the Edge.
He’d reached the end of the line. Literally. Less than two feet away from him was what appeared to be the edge of a cliff. Nothing lay visible beyond its jagged boundary except for a deep, unbroken darkness.
The Outer Realm. Where you don’t die and you don’t live, you just cease to be.
“The Ophanim won’t find you here,” he heard Sarea say, and when he turned, she was less than an arm’s length away from him, her entire body engulfed in white light. It hissed and cracked in the air around her and her flaxen hair stood nearly on end, framing her face in a wild, electrified halo.
“They’re waiting for you on our side of the Edge,” she said. “They’ll never think to look for you here, leaving you to the Outer Realm. As good a place as any for you. And no one will ever know.”
She thrust her hand out at him to hit him again, shove him over the Edge and into that horrible darkness, and with a hoarse cry, Jason leapt from the ground, surrendering himself fully to the Eidolon again. He felt it seizing his body, infusing his muscles with its tremendous strength, his arms and legs with its indelible might, its ferocious and indomitable determination to survive.
He shifted enough to shadow so that her outstretched arm thrust through his body, her hand protruding behind his back, the golden fire spearing from her fingertips and shooting harmlessly beyond him. At the same time, he shoved his own hand forward; incorporeal, he reached up into her torso. He felt the tattooed triquetra mark on his shoulder suddenly burn like something alive, the molten core of a volcanic crater bursting back into sudden, fiery life. He solidified his hand inside Sarea’s chest, able to feel the incredible heat, the throbbing, pulsating strength of her heart as his fingers punched through the thin membrane of tissue enveloping it. He looked into her eyes, close enough to feel the sharp intake of her breath against his face, as he closed his fingers into a sudden fist, crushing her heart against his palm, first causing it to swell with blood, then burst like an overfilled water balloon.
When she fell, she fell hard, crashing against the dirt. Before blood even began to spread around her in a widening pool, her body began to jerk and bubble, her flesh running like butter left to soften atop a heated oven. Like Sitri, she began to melt, her skin blackening, her hair falling out of her scalp as the flesh peeled back from her skull. Putrefaction occurred at a wildly accelerated rate. Her belly distended in a grotesque, swollen bulge before splitting open wide, spilling her blackening, stinking entrails out in a steaming pile.
He stumbled back and fell to his knees. His arm was covered in blood nearly to his elbow and he rubbed his palm against his shirt, his jeans, in disgusted shock. Looking up, he watched the remains of Sarea’s body burble and hiss in a thick puddle of ooze, like a molten tar pit. With a groan, he tried to crawl away, dragging himself along the dirt.
“I have half a mind to kill you myself, Wraith,” he heard a woman say, and he looked up, dazed and bewildered. It took a moment for his vision to swim into focus. When it did, he recognized the tall, willowy woman who stood ahead of him, towering above Nemamiah’s crumpled form. He knew her icy, haughty features, her ivory sheaf of hair, the blood-colored gown that hugged her lithe, long form and pooled around her feet in a wide train.
Oh, God, no, Jason groaned aloud in abject dismay as Mara reached down, planting her foot against Nemamiah’s chest and wrenching the sword loose from his gut. The archangel cried out softly, breathlessly, arching his back off the ground in pain.
“If I didn’t keep finding you amusing at the least, and unwittingly helpful at best, then I would,” Mara told Jason. She was surrounded by more than a dozen of the burly soldier-grade Hounds, each one as big and strapping as an NFL linebacker. Amidst them, she looked all the more delicate and slight, but when she thrust the blade of the sword beneath Jason’s chin, using the light but painful pressure to tilt his head up toward her, she was menacing nonetheless.
“Where is my brother?” she asked, and when he didn’t immediately answer, she gave the sword an emphatic shove, digging the edge of the blade more firmly against his throat. “Answer me, Wraith. Where is the misbegotten son of a bitch that spawned you?”
“Dead,” Jason gasped, closing his eyes, waiting for her to cut his throat. The Eidolon was gone; like some kind of attack dog set loose to sic, then heeled again sharply, it had retreated into whatever little alcove of his psyche and soul it called its home. Without it, he was nothing against Mara, powerless. “I stabbed him with a talismanic weapon. Sitri’s dead.”
After a long moment of silence, he heard a soft noise. He opened his eyes, risking a peek, and saw that Mara was laughing.
“Dead,” she murmured, shaking her head. “Silly boy. An immortal can’t die.” The sword slipped away from his flesh and she knelt, nearly eye to eye with him, pressing her hand against the side of his face. “We can only cross the Edge—eternal banishment in the Outer Realm—a fate, one might argue, worse than any death.”
She leaned over and kissed him. Her lips were like ice, her tongue a cold, slimy thing that shoved its way into his mouth and muffled his voice, his disgusted mewl of protest.
“Thank you,” she breathed as she drew away. “Your little Elohim friends can see you out of the Netherworlde as they saw you in. We’ll pretend we never met here today, you and I, but this is the only olive branch you’ll get from me. You were unmarked before, Wraith, but consider yourself marked now—by me as vengeance for my brother. I’m placing a bounty on your hide so high none among the Nephilim will dare to resist it, and when it’s cashed in, you’ll belong to me.”
She smiled at him, beautiful and terrifying. “And trust me, boy, Sitri’s mercies were tender compared to what I have planned for you.”
Leaving him with a soft, mirthless chuckle, Mara approached what appeared to be a black-draped sedan chair, ducked beneath the heavy velvet curtains and disappeared inside. Four of the large Hounds hefted the chair onto their shoulders, bearing her slight weight easily. They carried her away, and though she didn’t offer another word, Jason could hear her laughter trailing behind her long after she had gone.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
“You bastard!�
�� With an angry cry, Sam balled her hand into a fist and punched Gabriel in the face. She was a small woman, but strong, and he hadn’t anticipated the blow. It clocked him squarely in the cheek and sent him staggering sideways across his living room floor, wide-eyed and gasping in pained surprise.
“We came to you for help,” she snapped. Jason had stripped off his shirt and crumpled onto the couch. As she held a towel against the flat plain of his stomach, the white terrycloth now soaked through to scarlet with blood, she glared at Gabriel. “We trusted you, you son of a bitch, and you set Jason up!”
“I didn’t know,” Gabriel began helplessly. “Samantha, listen to me…”
“Fuck you!” she cried. “You tricked him with that bullshit deal of yours, then you let that stinking bitch betray him to Sitri!”
“Sarea betrayed us all.”
Nemamiah’s voice, soft and stunned, drew her still. He looked like someone had drop-kicked him in the balls, then called his mother a dirty whore for good measure. He didn’t even seem particularly aware, much less concerned, about his injuries, this in spite of the fact that a talismanic weapon had run him through—his own talismanic weapon at that.
“Sitri got to her somehow,” Nemamiah murmured, his gaze wandering again. “Told her things, lied to her, tricked her.”
“The ancient Norse called him the contriver of all fraud,” Gabriel said. “The Lie-Smith, Sly-God, Shape-Changer and Wizard Of Lies.” To Jason, he added, “Sitri has always been one of the only Powers unafraid to roam the mortal plain. The other eight remain in the Netherworlde for the most part, let the Gader’el and lesser demons do their dirty work for them. But not Sitri. He made himself known. In old Nordic, he was called Lopt or Loki. Native Americans depicted him as a coyote or raven. To the Japanese, he was a yako kitsune, a trickster fox.”