by SM Reine
“Elise?” he ventured.
A man responded. “I’m afraid not.”
Brief light flared—a flame on the tip of a man’s gloved finger, which he touched to the candle on the center of the table. The wick lit and brightened. The glow of firelight illuminated a square jaw, straight nose, and a brush of dark hair. He was framed by ivy climbing down the brick exterior wall of the brothel.
James Faulkner.
Seth didn’t want to sit at the table, but his legs didn’t seem to be working right. He dropped to the bench.
“What are you doing here?” he asked, fists gripping the edge of the table. “Are you following me?”
James gave him a long, appraising look. His pale eyes seemed to glow dimly in the candlelight. “I’m not following you. I do find our crossed paths to be an interesting coincidence, but I’m afraid that’s all it is: coincidence.”
Seth wasn’t sure if he believed him or not. He also wasn’t really sure if it mattered either way.
The smart thing to do would have been to leave immediately. Abandon the search for Elise, abandon Original Sin, abandon Katja to McIntyre’s mercies. Where James and Elise were both entangled, only bad things could follow. But Seth had a thousand questions. They kept him glued to his seat.
“How did you get my mom’s journal?” he asked. It wasn’t what he had meant to say when he opened his mouth; it just spilled out of him in a rush.
“Pull the curtain,” James said. Seth untied one side, letting it swing half-closed to give them the illusion of privacy. “I’ve always collected rare books pertinent to my areas of interest. As the wife of Lucian Wilder, Eleanor’s diary made its way through the usual circuits for years. I eventually won it at an auction.”
The idea of his family’s personal diaries ending up at auction was disconcerting. Collectors with his mother’s writings—that meant a lot of people that potentially knew about his bloodline. Seth frowned. “Was that before or after you first worked with the pack?”
James hesitated. He wiped a finger over his jaw, removing some of the glistening moisture from his face. “Before.”
“Did you know about me then?” Seth asked. James didn’t respond. The silence was answer enough. “So why try to send us to the Haven? Time goes so much faster there. If you waited a month, Abel and I would have both been dead and taken our blood with us.”
“But Rylie was pregnant with your offspring,” James said. “The line would have continued.”
So the Haven had been an attempt to protect them, but not in the way that he had expected. It had been an attempt to put their family line somewhere convenient for later retrieval—like the metaphoric fish in a barrel. Summer and Abram must have carried the blood of Adam, too. And so would their children, and their grandchildren. James didn’t really care who he needed to bleed to open the doors to Eden so long as that blood existed.
Seth hadn’t been certain if he should count James as an ally until that moment. Now he was pretty sure he knew where he stood—and it wasn’t on James’s side.
“I understand that disturbs you,” James said, his voice surprisingly gentle. “It seems ruthless, doesn’t it? But your family could have lived happily for many generations. Few people are so lucky. I meant the Haven as a gift, and I hope you can see it that way.”
“A gift that robbed Rylie of her children’s youths.”
“That was an accident.” He sighed. “You never contacted me, so I doubt you’re here now to volunteer your assistance.”
“Assistance?” Seth scoffed. “To do what, bleed for you?”
“It doesn’t need to hurt.”
“It hurt when you stabbed me on the altar.”
“I was in a rush.” The witch sighed, steepling his fingers in front of his face. “When you’re young, it’s hard to understand the sacrifices we must make for the greater good, but try to see things from my perspective. If you helped me open these doors, I could do quite a lot for the ‘greater good.’ We both could.”
“How, exactly?”
“Eden contains a power known as the Origin. Whosoever acquires that power will be given the powers of a god—omnipotence, omnipresence, immortality. It’s what elevated Adam to a state of apotheosis many millennia ago.”
What the heck was apotheosis? He didn’t want to ask and sound stupid.
“Sounds dangerous,” Seth said.
“In the wrong hands, yes,” James agreed.
“And your hands are right?”
“Perhaps. But there’s no limitation on the number of people that enter the Origin. If you doubt my competence, maybe you would be a good candidate to assume the same power.” He spread his gloved hands wide. “What would you accomplish if anything were in your grasp, Seth?”
Seth stared at the wood grain of the table. It was glossy, but not with varnish; it looked like layers of spilled drinks had dried and caked to the wood.
What would he do with godlike power?
He could protect the pack without being a werewolf. He could shut the Union down, remove the OPA from existence. He could heal so many more people than he could as a doctor—entire hospitals of sick and dying, saved with a thought.
He could make Rylie love him again.
“I’d never take it,” Seth said. “Men are weak.”
James gave a faint smile. “Most men.”
“Oh yeah? What would you do?”
“I have a few ideas.” James wasn’t looking at Seth anymore. His eyes were fixed upon the bar at the center of the room.
Seth followed his gaze.
A familiar black-haired woman had appeared behind the bar, on the far end from the stool where Rylie sat. It wasn’t the bartender. Her body was hugged by a snug black t-shirt, which was decorated by a golden necklace dripping with charms. He could barely see her hips over the bar, but she was wearing leather leggings, too.
It took Seth a second to look higher than her body and identify the face. Once he did, he regretted checking out the rest of her.
James wasn’t at Original Sin for intelligence purposes. He was there for the same reason that Seth was.
He was looking for Elise Kavanagh.
Seth studied James’s expression while the witch was distracted. It was a familiar expression. It was a look of mingled pain and longing—pretty much the same thing that Seth felt when Rylie was around. He almost sympathized.
“What would it take to earn your trust?” James asked, turning his attention back to Seth with obvious difficulty.
“You mean, what would it take for me to give you my blood?”
“Phrase it as you will.”
“There’s nothing you can do,” Seth said. “This Origin thing, if it exists—it’s too much for anyone. That’s why Elise is out to get you, isn’t it? She knows you want it, and she doesn’t want you to have it.”
“Elise and I have divergent goals, yes,” James said. He set a business card on the table between them. “This is my cell phone number. I plan on being in Las Vegas for a few more days. The world is changing, becoming a more dangerous place—not just for you and me, but for people like Rylie. I hope you’ll consider the good you could do and contact me.”
Seth almost didn’t take the card. There was no chance in hell he would want to donate his blood to something that dangerous—especially something that would piss Elise off. He needed Elise’s help more than he needed James’s.
But after a moment’s hesitation, he took it.
“This is creepy. You know that, right?” Seth asked. “Lurking in a fetish club to watch your ex-girlfriend is just plain weird.”
“Creepier than taking your brother’s mate to the brothel?” James nodded toward the bar. “Although you may need to hurry if you hope to find her again.”
Find her?
Seth swiveled on the bench, staring through the darkness and dancing bodies to the bar.
Rylie’s stool was empty, and Elise was gone.
“Shit,” he said, jumping to his feet. He pus
hed through the curtain, glancing over his shoulder in time to see James reach out and snuff the candle. Absolute darkness swallowed the booth once more.
Elise made it all the way into the room behind the bar before letting her appearances slip. Her shoulder slammed into the brick wall, knees buckling, head too heavy for her neck to support. Her hair fell over her face in a sheet, veiling her face from the dim office lights. It was dark enough that the average human probably wouldn’t have been able to see anything, yet it still pricked at her skin.
Just a few minutes in the bar’s strobe, and she felt like she might break into a thousand pieces.
“Fuck,” she whispered, black fingernails digging into the wall. She could see the faint outline of bones through her arm.
Rylie hovered nearby. “What’s wrong? Are you sick?”
The thing was, Elise had no idea what was wrong with her. She hadn’t felt right since the Union had tried to arrest her at the Bloomfield house. That much light tended to hurt her—but never for so long. Never like this.
It was easier to ignore the questions that she couldn’t answer. “What are you doing here?”
“You haven’t talked to McIntyre?”
“Have you?”
“Seth and I were at his house this morning,” Rylie said, blushing delicately. She seemed to be recovering from the shock of the BDSM scene being enacted on the stage, and she was back to looking like the usual demure young Alpha werewolf that she usually was.
It had been a surprise to see Rylie at Original Sin, in more ways than one. After the terms on which they’d separated, Elise hadn’t thought that she would hear from the pack again for a good long time—probably not until James made a final strike for the doors to Eden. It had only been a few weeks. Seeing her in Vegas so soon wasn’t a good sign.
It took all of Elise’s strength to straighten. She inhaled a deep breath, exhaled it slowly. “Sit,” she said, taking one of the chairs by the table. Rylie slipped into the opposite seat.
The office behind the bar belonged to one of Neuma’s assistants. Cassandra was a lamia that ran the day-to-day operations of Original Sin, acting as madam for the demons that worked in the hotel above and arranging entertainment for the bar. She had the good taste to keep the dungeon decorations out of the office, and instead hung pictures of staff parties on the walls; the only sign that they were at a business employing sex workers was the one wall hung with whips, flails, and chains.
The table in the center of the room was Elise’s spot. Her laptop usually lived on that table, alongside all of Neuma’s files on the trays stacked along the edge.
But at the moment, there was a map on the surface of the table. It was set up like a war room, not an accountant’s workspace.
The map showed southern California and Clark County. Elise had been using it to try to calculate where the next murder might occur. The problem was, aside from a general southward pattern of the last few gates to Hell, there didn’t seem to be any rhyme or reason to the locations. She was making educated guesses, but her education just wasn’t any good.
This was the worst possible time for werewolf business to land on her.
Rylie reached out to poke one of the chess pieces on Los Angeles with her forefinger. “What’s this?”
“A bishop,” Elise said, deliberately misinterpreting her question. “What’s brought you to my door?”
“Seth and Abram went hunting a rogue werewolf recently. She murdered a few people.” She paused and looked up at Elise, as if expecting judgments. When Elise remained quiet, Rylie went on. “They thought she was silver poisoned, so they brought her back to me to see if I could heal her. But whatever’s wrong with Katja…it’s not silver.”
“What is it?”
“When she changes into a wolf on the moons, she bleeds from her eyes and has black symbols in her fur. Like seals or icons or…” Rylie shrugged. “She looked like the deputy.”
Cold washed over Elise. She braced her elbows on the table and tried to make the gesture look casual, not like it was the only thing holding her up. “Possession,” Elise said.
“I think so.”
Better and better.
She looked down at her hands, spreading her fingers out on the surface of the desk. Her skin was opaque again, but her skin still seemed to be more gray than its usual milky white. “A possessed werewolf—I’m not sure that’s even worth trying to exorcise, Rylie. Werewolves are bad enough on their own. And you saw what happened when I fought against you. It fucked me up. I can’t wrestle werewolves—if I get bitten, I could be out of it for days. And I’ve got a lot of other problems right now.”
“What if I help you with your problems first?” Rylie asked in a timid voice. “If I could help you with…this.” She poked the bishop over Torrance on the map.
“You can’t.”
“Are you sure? What’s going on?”
Elise stared across the table at her. As weak as she looked, Rylie had dived headfirst into a battle with the Prince of Nightmares, climbed a beast the size of a skyscraper, and tried to rip out his throat.
She wasn’t as useless as she looked. And while it was Elise’s habit not to trust people she barely knew, Anthony was still recovering from a broken arm in the brothel, nursed back to health by giggling succubi. She wouldn’t have him to back her up in a fight until they found a healing witch.
“I’m hunting a demon that’s trying to open the walls between Earth and Hell,” Elise said, pointing at the far north end of the map. “It was up there last. I believe it’s coming toward Vegas. I don’t know where it’ll be next.”
“Open the walls how?”
“Death. Lots of it.”
“Right,” Rylie said. “Because it can never be, like, bunnies and stuff. What happens if the walls get opened?”
“Not bunnies,” Elise said.
“Right,” she said again. And then, “Right.” Her hands were shaking. Rylie gnawed on a thumbnail, staring at the map. “How do we stop it?”
“I’m planning to get to the next murder while it’s happening and kill the perpetrators.” It wasn’t exactly an elaborate plan, but Elise believed in elegant simplicity.
Neuma slipped into the office. She was wearing nothing but a leather G-string and bitch heels, which rang out like hammers striking an anvil with every step. She glowed with inner light. She always looked like that after a good feeding.
Succubi needed sex to survive. Neuma had told Elise that the purest, most filling way to feed was to drink it from someone who was asleep—a process that involved mounting an unconscious individual’s chest, injecting sexual nightmares into their minds, and drawing their life force back out. But Neuma claimed she didn’t like the violence of that method. She preferred good, dirty sex between consenting adults, and a lot of it. Especially when it involved whips.
She was swinging a whip from one hand now, which was still dripping with the blood of the man that had been on stage. It was smeared on Neuma’s hand. She licked it off as she sauntered toward the table.
“Who’s Goldilocks?” Neuma asked, tossing the whip onto the leather couch. Rylie stared at her, slack-jawed.
“This is Rylie, Alpha of the werewolves,” Elise said. “Rylie, this is Neuma. She owns Original Sin.”
A look of appreciation crossed Neuma’s features. “Alpha? Cool.” She turned a chair around and straddled it with her arms on the back. “What’s that like? You get to order lots of hunky werewolf boys around? Tell them to obey you and shit?”
“A couple of guys, yeah,” Rylie said faintly.
“Ooh.”
Elise shot a look at Neuma. “You’re scaring her.”
“Am not. I felt her while I was on stage. She liked what I did to Bill more than anyone else in the club.”
Rylie blushed and ducked her head. “If you can help me, I’ll try to exorcise this werewolf of yours,” Elise said loudly, returning the conversation to its original subject. “I’ll do it on the next moon if this other is
sue’s resolved by then. Okay?”
“Okay,” Rylie said without looking up.
The door opened again, and Seth came in. Of course Seth was there, too—Rylie couldn’t go anywhere without her male harem. The sight of a descendant of Adam in Elise’s home territory was still an unpleasant shock. She stood to face him too quickly and almost fell.
Only Neuma’s quick movements saved her—cool hands encircling her upper arms, pulling Elise against her body. “Aw shit, look at you,” the succubus murmured. She was so soft, so warm. Elise pushed Neuma away.
“What’s going on back here?” Seth asked.
“I think she’s sick,” Rylie said.
“No, not sick.” Neuma grabbed one of Elise’s hands, looking at the fingernails closely, and then touched one fingernail to Elise’s lips. “You’re starving,” she said matter-of-factly. “You need to feed.”
Seth looked alarmed. “Feed how, exactly?”
“Hard to say,” Neuma said, steering Elise to the leather couch and helping her sit. When she passed the desk lamp by Cassandra’s computer, the light made her head throb. “She acts like a lot of different demons, y’know? So I bet she can feed in a lot of ways. When’s the last time you swallowed, doll?”
“It’s been a while,” Elise said.
It sounded filthy, but “swallowing” was a cute term that her friends had coined for a terrible act. When Elise expanded into shadow and devoured everything living within her radius—like an entire Union brigade, for example—it was swallowing.
The last time she had done it, she had devoured a priest named Father Armstrong. He’d already been dead. She still cringed to remember the flavor, and many long weeks had passed since the deed had been done.
Neuma stroked the hair over Elise’s shoulder. It wasn’t as glossy as usual. “Looks like you might need to do it again.”
“I’m not going to kill someone to see if it makes me feel better.”
“There are other things you could try.” Neuma smiled. “You could fuck.”
“I’m not a succubus.”
“Don’t know until you try,” she said, and she made it sound like an invitation.
The phone rang, saving Elise from having to ponder the many ways that demons fed on human victims. Neuma rose from the couch to answer it. She listened to the voice on the end for only a second before extending it to Elise. “For you, doll,” she said.