Oaths of Blood

by SM Reine

  “The registry is security theater to justify the slaughter of preternaturals.”

  “But this was the kindling,” Anthony said, rapping a knuckle on the closed screen. “If they arrest you, they’ll put you on trial in front of the whole fucking world.”

  “They couldn’t have picked a worse scapegoat,” Elise said. They had used powerful wards designed by James to attempt to trap her in the Bloomfield house and failed. It had been a good trap. Almost good enough to keep her. But they’d have to do a hell of a lot better to pin her down.

  “That’s right. They could have blamed this on anyone else, and they didn’t. So why would you think that you’re a scapegoat at all?”

  “Because I didn’t kill him, Anthony!”

  He braced both hands on the windowsill, staring out at the trashed Las Vegas neighborhood outside. Anthony and Elise had been hopping around the same handful of motels for months, trying to avoid census personnel and all of the demons their recent investigations had pissed off. Now that the Union was looking for them, too, they didn’t dare return to one of their regular motels. They had taken a room next to a boarded-up house that smelled like cooking meth and rotten human flesh. The windows were barred, and a man was sleeping in a pile of rags outside their door.

  Anthony jerked the curtains shut and turned to face Elise.

  “I don’t care if you did kill him,” he said. “We’re in this together.”

  How many times did she have to repeat herself? Elise wasn’t worried about Anthony’s support. She really hadn’t been anywhere near Washington DC in December 2012, and she definitely hadn’t killed any politicians.

  Elise pulled out a new cigarette. “Let’s pretend that the Union really does think that I murdered Senator Peterson, and that they’re ballsy enough to attempt taking me down publicly. That means someone is trying to get me out of the picture. That’s what we need to focus on: who and why.”

  “James,” Anthony said instantly.

  “Do you really think that he’d work with the Union?”

  “I think he would do anything to open the doors to Eden. He’s not exactly hesitant to ally himself with whoever he thinks will get him closer to his goals. And you said that the marks at the Bloomfield house were his.”

  But not drawn by him. James was definitely connected—she was willing to believe that he had tentacles in every goddamn preternatural plot on the planet—but Elise didn’t believe that he’d try to get her into Union custody. And she definitely didn’t want to believe that he would have killed that family at the cocktail party just to set up a trap for Elise.

  How many more ways could he betray her? Hadn’t he done enough already?

  “Maybe,” Elise said, lighting her cigarette. It was the only word she could get out. If she tried to keep talking, she was going to scream.

  “He might not be involved. This could be a lot more straightforward than that.” Anthony smoothed his hands over his hair, blowing a breath through his lips. “If you weren’t in DC—if that footage is fake—then where were you on your birthday last year? Why do you always leave without telling me and McIntyre where you’re going?”

  She turned on the news, standing outside the circle of light that the TV cast on the floor. Somehow, the networks had gotten wind of the Union’s attempt to arrest her, but their informant had gotten a few details wrong—mainly that the Union hadn’t arrested her at all. It was all that the talking heads had been going on about for the last twelve hours.

  There weren’t any updates. People were starting to get bored. The local news for Vegas was talking about a late autumn heat wave. Indian summer, they called it.

  No news wasn’t necessarily good news. It only meant that the Union was planning their next move quietly.

  “Who and why,” Elise muttered. That was the question. Who and why.

  “You’re ignoring me now,” Anthony said.

  He was right. She was ignoring him. It wasn’t his business where she spent her birthdays, and it wasn’t relevant to the conversation. Elise hated repeating herself.

  She snatched her leather jacket off of the TV stand. Indian summer or not, her light sensitivity was worsening, and she needed all the protection she could get. “I’m going out.”

  “Wait,” Anthony said.

  “We’re not talking about December anymore.”

  “No, look,” he said, turning up the volume on the TV.

  There had been another murder. An entire family vacationing in Monterey had been killed at their hotel. Nine people dead—two adults and their three children, as well as four other relatives. They didn’t announce any details of the deaths aside from the fact that police were still investigating.

  “Nine deaths,” Elise echoed, frowning at the screen. They had a reporter in front of the hotel in Monterey. There was a dark stretch of beach behind him, a few rocks, an Italian restaurant overlooking the bay. Before the news cut away from the reporter, Elise thought she saw a black Union SUV drive past in the background.

  She stubbed out her cigarette, donned her spine scabbard like a backpack, and put the leather jacket on over it.

  “Wait,” Anthony said. “You’re not going to Monterey, are you?”

  “Yes.”

  “It’ll take hours to get there. It’ll be swarming with Union by the time we arrive.”

  “We’re not driving,” Elise said. He opened his mouth to argue, but she interrupted him. “You’re not coming with me.”

  Anthony grabbed her arm. “They’ll arrest you.”

  She put her hand over his. His human bones were so fragile underneath the tissue paper of his skin; it would be easy to snap them. But she only patted him. “They can’t hold me, Anthony. Trust me.”

  Elise wasn’t the first person to arrive at the crime scene in Monterey, but she was the only one alive when she got there.

  “Shit,” she whispered, taking a step back off of the body on which she had landed. Judging by the black polo shirt and slacks, it looked like it had once been a Union-employed kopis. The person inside those clothes was charred and mangled.

  She kneeled beside the body, rubbing her first two fingers over the burns on his face. They were brittle and flaking on top, but wet underneath. Ash and blood stained her fingers.

  Lifting the smears to her nose, she sniffed. Brimstone. This kopis had been killed by demons.

  Elise had been starting to wonder if the murder at the Bloomfield house had been entirely a setup—a tableau established to trick Elise into walking into the Union’s circle of power. Maybe they had borrowed bodies from a morgue to make it look authentic. It was a crazy idea, but not too far-fetched. The Union had done more ridiculous things in the past.

  But there were runes stamped on the sidewalk that looked identical to the ones at the Bloomfield house. They had been burned rather than drawn in blood, like a giant branding iron had been smashed into the concrete.

  The same thing that had killed the Bloomfields had visited Monterey.

  Elise straightened, casting her eyes over the destruction in the street surrounding the hotel. Two black SUVs stood outside the hotel doors. Three police cruisers were similarly immobile. It was hard to count the number of bodies—they were flaking and dissolving, turning to an indistinguishable mush on the pavement. She estimated at least a dozen dead cooling in the saltwater wind.

  The Union must have been on edge after the Bloomfield murder and prepared to arrive at the next attack within minutes. Maybe they had even known where the next attack would occur. They had responded too fast and arrived at the hotel before the murderers had left.

  Now they were all dead, too.

  There were too many bodies in front of the glass doors to open them. Elise balled her hand into a fist, making the leather of her glove creak. It seemed like a shame to break and enter such a beautiful hotel, with its dark wood and brass fixtures, but the owners were going to have to practically nuke the place to clean it anyway.

  “Sorry,” she told the dead
valet.

  She smashed her fist through the window. Cracks spiderwebbed to the edges of the frame. Three hits, and she had cleared enough space to walk through.

  There were no lights within the lobby, but the full moon was bright enough to augment her excellent night vision. The two front desk clerks were draped over their workstations, killed too quickly to flee. Three more bodies in Union uniform were arrayed around the room. The elevator doors had been broken—smashed through as easily as Elise had broken the glass.

  She leaned into the shaft. The elevator itself had crashed in the basement. The walls of the shaft were scorched from the third floor down.

  It took her the same amount of time to disappear from the lobby and reappear on the third floor as it had to jump from Las Vegas to Monterey—only a heartbeat.

  There must have been a hasty evacuation; suitcases were scattered through the hall, and furniture had been knocked over. Before the chaos, it had probably been a very nice luxury hotel. The kind of place the Bloomfields would have spent summer break. Now, it looked like someone had detonated a bomb in one of the rooms. All of the doors stood open.

  Elise pressed a hand to the wall, spanning her fingers over four parallel scorch marks similar to those in the elevator shaft. They were deep enough to cut through the sheetrock.

  She traced the burns back to room 306. Its door was sawdust.

  Elise stepped inside.

  The scent of blood wasn’t too overwhelming. A cross draft from the open balcony brought ocean smells to her, all salt and seaweed, and wicked away the iron tang of death. But it splashed the room in such quantities that the sight of it made her stomach cramp with hunger. Elise usually preferred to swallow the living whole, all beating hearts and juicy marrow, but this blood was soaked into the bed, smeared over the walls, and saturating the carpet under her boots.

  She shook the mental image of licking the wall as she stepped further inside. Pushing the bathroom door open, Elise took a quick glance at the destruction. There were fleshy lumps on the floor of the shower. Drenched towels. A shattered mirror. No tags or tape—the cops hadn’t had time to investigate before the second attack hit.

  Elise couldn’t proceed deeper into the room without crossing the line of the ritual circle. She skirted the edge, careful not to touch it. She didn’t want to get trapped in demonic wards again, like she had at the Bloomfield house.

  She followed the scent of death into the next room. 306 and 308 had been where the family of nine had been staying. Mercifully, there wasn’t enough of the family left scattered over the beds and floors to tell which of them had been adults and which had been children. Eve, the first angel within Elise, couldn’t stand dead kids.

  As far as Elise could tell, there were no uniforms in either room. Either they hadn’t made it that far before the demons hit, or the attackers hadn’t left anything behind.

  Someone spoke from behind her.

  “It started in room 306,” he said. “A maid had drawn runes inside the shower stall and cabinets earlier that day, forming a rough—albeit broken—circle of power. That became the entry point when Ivette Holden attempted to take a shower. She unintentionally triggered the runes by cutting herself while shaving her legs.”

  Elise turned. A man stood on the other side of the open balcony door, framed by the moon. Choppy waves sloshed behind him. The curtains stirred weakly in the breeze. They had been splashed with blood and were too heavy to flutter.

  He went on. “The portal opened in her body and separated her into hemispheres. She died instantly. The demons that entered via that portal went on to kill her husband and sister. Room 308 followed shortly thereafter.”

  She didn’t need to see the man’s face to recognize his voice. Elise’s hand fell on the hilt of her sword, loosening the blade within the scabbard.

  “You killed these people to open a gateway to Hell,” Elise said.

  The man stepped forward, and a moonbeam slanted across his face. He had a straight nose, thin lips, a brush of five o’clock shadow on his jaw. His hair was an entirely human shade of black, less like the inky color of Elise’s hair and more like strands of charcoal. But his eyes weren’t human, and there was no glamor that could change the appearance of his pale, nearly white irises. Elise used to think of them as Husky eyes, before she knew the truth.

  James Faulkner stepped carefully over the body in the doorway without glancing down. He was wearing leather gloves again, a long peacoat, gray slacks—dressed for winter in the cool seaside autumn.

  When he stood on the other side of the bed from her, Elise finally drew the sword.

  He stopped in his tracks.

  “I didn’t kill anyone,” he said, casting a disdainful glance over the room. “But this is entirely my mistake.”

  Elise hadn’t expected James to take responsibility for anything. Her sword wavered.

  She had loved him once—deeply, passionately, selflessly, with all the teenage intensity that she had been capable of mustering. Elise didn’t trust easily, and love was even harder. The day that James had finally admitted that he loved her, too, should have been one of the happiest of her life. But that was the same day that he had betrayed her to her greatest enemy.

  It would take a hell of a lot more than a few meaningless apologies for Elise to stop hating him.

  That naïve love was far behind her, and so was her ability to trust James. His words of contrition were nothing in comparison to the fact that he had a hand in over a dozen murders in Northgate. And now this. Whether he had killed the Bloomfields and the Holdens with his hands or by consequence of his actions didn’t matter.

  James had become exactly the kind of thing that Elise hunted.

  “I’m starting to think that I could make my life a lot easier by killing you right now,” she said, tightening her grip on the falchion. Its obsidian blade was as black as her heart and carved with a dozen religious icons; it would only take a single cut to infect James with her ichor. He’d die within hours, angel blooded or not. She wouldn’t even have to watch him.

  “Perhaps you could,” he said. “But if you kill me, then more families will die like this.” James spread his gloved hands through the air over the bed. “You didn’t hear of the family that died in Klamath Falls two days ago, nor did you hear of the deaths in Eugene, or Tacoma. The Union covered them up. But tomorrow, you will hear of more murders. It will be somewhere south of here, perhaps in Los Angeles or San Jose. And the next day, the murder will happen to the east—most likely on your doorstep in Las Vegas.”

  “The killer is traveling.”

  “It’s cutting,” James said. He held up two fingers and made a slicing motion, like operating scissors. “Widening fault lines. Quietly bringing pieces of an army into our dimension from Hell.”

  Elise’s eyes dropped to the bed separating them. There was a body on the blood-slicked mattress. It was wearing penguin-print pajama pants.

  “How do you know?” she asked.

  “Because I gave a demon the runes necessary to open these gateways.”

  She was far beyond the ability to be shocked or angry, but her sense of resignation grew into a hard knot in her heart. “Why are you admitting this?”

  “I made a mistake,” James said. “My intent was to allow a wayward demon to return to his homeland. I tried to oath-bind him to me to make sure that he wouldn’t abuse the power, but the oaths don’t seem to have held once he returned to Hell.”

  “What’s an oath-binding?” Elise asked. “Is it like the oaths that made us into kopis and aspis?”

  “Similar, though not so…permanent. It’s a new spell I’ve designed to keep my assets in line.”

  “You’ve been designing a lot of new spells.”

  “The world is changing, Elise,” James said, stepping around the foot of the bed. “The Union can cast spells using nothing but a symbol drawn on paper. The walls between Heaven, Hell, and Earth are growing thin, and the Treaty that used to protect humanity has been shatt
ered. I must stay ahead of them, or we’ll all die.”

  “And now you’re telling me about this because you want me to stop this ‘wayward demon,’” Elise said, turning to keep him in her line of vision as he rounded the bed. He gave a small nod. “Bad idea, James. I’ve been looking for you, and now you’ve given yourself to me.”

  “Not exactly,” he said.

  Elise reached out for him—and her hand went through his sleeve.

  A chill shocked through her bones, making her spine go rigid. Magic flared in the corner of her eyes. She staggered, foot slipping on a piece of human flesh, and she had to pinwheel her arms to keep from falling into the blood. She caught herself with a hand on the wall.

  “You’re not here,” Elise said. No wonder he wasn’t dressed for the weather. He was probably somewhere much farther north, somewhere that winter was actually creeping up on him.

  “I need to stay ahead of everyone—including you. I made a mistake in giving this demon the power to open doors to Hell, and while I might swallow my pride enough to ask for your help, I won’t let you interfere with everything else I have planned.”

  “Why do you think I’ll help you with this demon? Clean up your own fucking mess. I have problems, too.”

  “You don’t want any more families to die, do you?”

  Of course she didn’t, but it pissed Elise off that he knew it. “How do I find this thing?”

  “The Union arrived at the hotel within five minutes of the first murder because they’re tracking the energy readings. There will be a surge of infernal energy centered on the location of the next murder.”

  “And then I’ll have five minutes to get there.”

  “Less, if you hope to save everyone,” James said, ever the optimist. “I trust you can figure out how to find those energy signals.”

  Elise glared up at him. Whatever magic he was using to appear in the room like a ghost was good—she couldn’t see through him at all, and the light hit him like he really was inches in front of her. She could see every line in his face, as familiar to her as her own. It looked like she could reach up and run her fingers through his hair.