Oaths of Blood

by SM Reine

  “I’m sure you want to know what’s happening,” Abraxas said. “You want to barter for the information.”

  Elise shoved him onto his stomach and sat on his back, pressing the bony spurs of her knees into his arms, using her weight to keep him facedown on the carpet.

  “I can give you what you want,” he said.

  All those bodies beside the pool flashed through Elise’s mind, as well as the Bloomfield woman at the top of the stairs.

  What she wanted? She wanted those people to have their lives back.

  She unspooled the chains in her hand, tugging them around his throat.

  “What are you doing?” Abraxas asked, eyes widening with fear as he realized that Elise wasn’t in a bantering mood.

  Elise snapped the chains back against his throat, jerking hard enough to make his head strain back against his shoulders. She twisted her fists around the edges of the necklace. Her biceps and abs strained as she pushed down with her knees and pulled up with the chain.

  Abraxas choked and gurgled. He thrashed. Fresh blood squeezed from the corners of his eyes and trickled down his cheeks.

  She heard footsteps, but didn’t relent.

  Seth appeared in the doorway, gun still drawn, blood slicking his jeans and hands. He opened his mouth as if to speak, but words never came out. He watched in silence as Abraxas’s struggles slowed.

  The demon blinked, eyes drooping shut and opening too slowly. His fingertips digging into the carpet eased.

  Elise waited until he stopped moving, then waited a minute longer.

  When she finally released the chain and allowed him to fall to the floor, he didn’t move again. Elise pressed two fingers to the side of his throat. His pulse beat sluggishly underneath. Unconscious, but not dead.

  She looped the chains around her neck again. “Did anything else come through the portal in the pool?” Elise asked, kicking Abraxas onto his back.

  Seth’s voice was hoarse when he responded. “No. Only the hybrid.”

  “Dead, I take it?”

  He nodded.

  Elise didn’t really need to ask. She could already tell that it was gone by the silence of the house, the stillness of the air. But she could feel the lingering after burn of infernal energy. This house would bear a permanent mark on it from the moment that its yard had been opened to Hell.

  Yet Seth and Rylie had killed the hybrid—one of the most powerful creatures that came in the shape of a human. It was impressive. And it was somewhat surprising that it hadn’t brought friends.

  She stooped to gather Abraxas into her arms. He wasn’t unusually heavy, nor was she weak, but he was almost her height; it was awkward to carry him.

  “We didn’t close the portal ourselves,” Seth admitted, flicking the safety back into place on his gun, then tucking it into his belt. “It closed on its own.”

  Elise frowned. “It did?”

  Rylie swayed into the room, human and naked. “When the hybrid’s blood touched the pool, the door closed,” she explained.

  Interesting. Very interesting. But Elise didn’t have time to explore that thought. Sirens wailed outside; it wouldn’t be long until the house was swarming with police, Union, and very bright lights. “Hold your breath,” she said.

  Seth looked like he wanted to protest, but before he could speak, Elise shattered.

  Elise dropped Rylie and Seth in the back room of Original Sin before taking Abraxas to the basement. Rylie was drenched in hybrid blood; she couldn’t be seen in public until she had cleaned off. Fortunately, the fetish models that worked at the club had group showers behind the office.

  It took a half an hour to find steel rope sturdy enough to tie Abraxas to a chair. By the time Elise was done, Rylie hadn’t joined them in the basement yet.

  “I’ll keep an eye on Abraxas,” Anthony said, reclining against one wall with a shotgun at his side. Neuma had been in his lap when she first dragged the demon downstairs, so Elise had a feeling that Anthony had a lot more planned than keeping an eye on Abraxas.

  “Don’t get too distracted,” Elise said. She pointed at Neuma. “That goes for you, too.”

  “You kidding? I wouldn’t dream of being a distraction.” She stroked her long fingernails through Anthony’s hair.

  Elise rolled her eyes and left.

  She found Seth poring over the map in the manager’s office with a notebook beside one hand and a laptop beside the other. He was so absorbed in his work that he didn’t even notice when Elise entered. He also didn’t seem to realize that Rylie was taking unusually long to emerge.

  She slipped past him, avoiding the spill of light from the desk lamp, and entered the bathroom.

  Fetish models weren’t a shy breed. The showers were situated along a single wall without curtains or stalls to provide privacy. Every light was off in the shower except the one at the far end of the room, where a faucet was currently running. The water was so hot that it filled the entire bathroom with steam.

  Elise’s boots squelched against wet linoleum as she approached.

  “Rylie?” she asked, waving a hand to clear the steam.

  A tiny sound reached her ears—a sound that was neither water nor motion. It sounded like a whimper.

  Elise grabbed a couple of clean towels off of the table next to the complimentary body wash and threw one over the bulb. It dimmed the glow, casting a yellow tint over the steam. In the safety of darkness, she sidled along the wall to find Rylie in the back corner. The Alpha was sitting on the ground, naked and wet, knees hugged to her chest. Although her body was entirely unmarked, blood streamed out of her hair and spiraled toward the drain.

  She was also sobbing.

  Elise immediately felt an overwhelming urge to leave, pretend that she hadn’t seen Rylie, go downstairs, and beat information out of Abraxas. But before she could slip away, Rylie looked up. Her eyes were puffy. She looked pathetic and shrunken, hair stuck to the sides of her face and water dripping steadily off her bony elbow. “I hate being a werewolf,” she whispered. “I hate it.”

  Shit, Elise was stuck now. “Are you hurt?”

  Rylie shook her head. “I healed before we left LA.”

  “So this is self-pity.” Elise felt guilty the moment she said it. But that wasn’t her guilt. That was Eve swelling up inside of her—a shoulder angel telling her not to be such a raging bitch. She ignored that tiny voice and went on. “You can have a cry somewhere more comfortable than this.”

  “Seth can’t see me crying,” Rylie said, barely above a whisper. “He’ll give me one of those looks. And he’ll try to tell me something like—like how it’s not my fault, it’s always the wolf, and how I should forgive myself.” She spread her hands in front of her. There was still blood caked in the crevices of her palms. “How many people do I have to kill before it starts being my fault?”

  Elise reached into the hot spray and turned the water off.

  “Here,” she said, and she tossed Rylie the other towel. “Hybrids aren’t conscious like you and me. They don’t have families. When you kill a hybrid, you’re killing a machine. Culpability is irrelevant.”

  “I ripped his wings off with my teeth.”

  “You did well,” Elise said.

  Rylie shuddered, hugging the towel to her chest. “I used to do well making cappuccinos for my mom on Saturday mornings.”

  Elise didn’t understand how that was meant to be related. “I’m the only person that has a reliable kill record for hybrids. They’re hard to kill. Really hard. But Seth says you took that one down with barely any help. That’s incredible.”

  For an instant, Rylie’s bottom lip trembled. And then tears rolled down her cheeks and she buried her face in the towel. “I don’t want to be good at killing,” she said. “I don’t care if there’s justification for it. It’s never okay.”

  “You would feel differently if the hybrid were threatening your family, and that ‘creature’ had the ability to kill many families like yours. Do you think you should have
spared it?”

  Rylie didn’t respond. Her nails dug into her legs as she hugged herself tighter.

  That nudging, sympathetic voice was still in the back of Elise’s mind, urging her to do something. She sighed and sat beside Rylie. The wetness of the floor soaked through her leggings immediately.

  “I tried to retire from demon hunting a few years ago,” Elise said.

  Rylie’s head lifted an inch. “You did? What happened?”

  “Life was quiet for about five years, until the demons found me again. It’s inevitable. Trouble finds kopides.” She took the crumpled, unused towel from Rylie and wetted the corner in a puddle. “Fate’s a bastard. You didn’t choose to become a werewolf. You can’t choose to stop. But you can take the hand that fate has dealt you and make every deserving fucker that crosses your path regret it.”

  She scrubbed the blood off of one of Rylie’s hands, making sure to get under her fingernails. There was a trick to it. Elise had done it a thousand times for herself. It only took a moment to wipe Rylie up and make her look fractionally less pathetic.

  Rylie didn’t speak until her hands were clean.

  “Would you stop again if you could?” Rylie asked. “If you had the choice, and it was permanent?”

  Elise wrung the blood out of the towel and watched pink water slide into the drain.

  Would she go back to the time she had retired and lived in peaceful anonymity with James? Would she choose not to have Anthony and the McIntyre family in constant danger? Would she choose to never kill and thirst for the blood she spilled again?

  “There’s no point in dwelling on things we can’t change,” Elise said. “Don’t worry about what you killed. Think about all the people you’ve saved. Got it?”

  She didn’t wait for an answer. She stood and lobbed the towel into the laundry basket. Elise might not have been as nice about it as Eve would have liked, but Rylie wasn’t crying anymore, and the ancient bitch was pleased.

  The Alpha got up, too. She turned the water back on. This time, she didn’t make it as punishingly hot. “I’ll be downstairs in a minute,” Rylie said.

  “There are clean robes on the shelf. Help yourself.”

  Elise was halfway to the door before she heard Rylie’s soft reply echo behind her.

  “Thanks,” she said.

  Abraxas roused shortly after Elise returned to the Original Sin. The bruising around his throat had already healed—a demon of his power and prestige wasn’t bothered by physical injury for long—so Elise didn’t worry about accidentally killing him when she choked him into unconsciousness again. She didn’t like the way that he looked at her.

  “He is an ugly fuck, isn’t he?” Neuma remarked, pinching one of Abraxas’s facial wrinkles between her finger and thumb.

  In comparison to Neuma, Abraxas was ugly. But considering that he came from the depths of Hell, he was an impressive specimen. Few hellborn demons could pass for human, even one as aged as Abraxas; the fact that he resembled a man meant that he was ridiculously powerful. And that kind of power was a beauty all its own.

  “This is bad,” Anthony said, putting to words the growing sensation that Elise could feel in her gut. He hadn’t been with Elise on her first trip to the City of Dis, when she had met Abraxas, but she had shared the story with him over a few shots of tequila; he knew exactly how powerful Abraxas was, and what his presence on Earth meant.

  “This explains the graffiti,” Elise said. “Abraxas must have left them to taunt me.”

  Anthony shot her a look. “I’m going for a smoke,” he said, grabbing Elise’s cigarettes off the desk and heading upstairs.

  She watched him until he left and closed the door, suppressing her uneasiness at having Anthony spending time in the brothel alone. The succubus whores obviously loved him. He was as safe, if not safer, than he would have been in the basement.

  Neuma strolled around Abraxas’s body, trailing her fingers over his shoulders and the back of his head, tickling the hairs on the nape of his neck. Her acrylics were the same shade of red as her cherry-black lips. She was dressed to perform: leather boots that laced near her hips, no underwear, a collar with a chain that connected to her navel.

  Abraxas’s head sagged onto his chest. She jerked it back with her grip on his stringy hair. “You could feed off of this one,” she said. “It’s the most filling when they’re sleeping.”

  Irritation prickled down Elise’s spine. “I’m not going to rape my unconscious enemy.”

  “It’d be awfully Viking of you,” Neuma said.

  “It’s not under discussion.”

  “You can’t even walk in the light, doll. You might not be about to die, but you’re sure as shit on the verge of going so incorporeal that you can’t exist on Earth. You ready to give up the hunt ‘cause your morals say it’s wrong to fuck an unconscious guy?”

  “I’m not a succubus,” Elise said. “It wouldn’t even work.”

  Neuma shrugged. “Maybe, maybe not. Won’t know until you try.” She rubbed Abraxas’s sunken chest, creasing the shirt in her fist.

  Elise turned away. “We’re not talking about it.”

  “It doesn’t have to be him. Let’s go pick a human guy out, put him through his paces. I’ll keep you from killing him. It’s easy for a young succubus to fuck everything to death, but I could stop you in time.”

  “What if it doesn’t work?”

  “Then you had a great fuck,” Neuma said. “Better’n trying to feed by killing and finding out that doesn’t help.” She gave Elise a pitying look. “Is sex really worse than death?”

  Abraxas stirred again, wrinkled eyelids opening.

  “Daughter,” he said.

  It was time for answers. Elise pulled a chair from one of the inactive consoles in front of him and straddled it.

  “How did you get to Earth?” she asked. “The portal in the Palace of Dis was destroyed.”

  He smacked his lips, wetting them with his tongue. “There have always been ways to Earth. Possession. Fissures. I found my way here some months ago, when I learned that there was no longer a God to stop me. I had help.” Abraxas’s mischievous smile seemed to take too much effort. It dropped off of his face quickly. “A mutual friend assisted me.”

  Elise’s heart dropped into her stomach. James. “Why?” she asked.

  “Isn’t that the question,” Abraxas said.

  Rylie slipped into the room, quiet on bare feet. Her features were composed, and there was no sign that she had been crying earlier, although she gave Elise a shaky smile when their eyes met. Swaddled in a fluffy white bathrobe, she sat on the edge of the table to watch Abraxas, only her feet and face visible.

  “How did you get hybrids?” Elise asked, ignoring Rylie. “I killed them all.”

  “All the ones on Earth, perhaps,” Abraxas said. “Metaraon had stationed a centuria in Malebolge. I recovered a few.” Another smile. “Converted them, that is. And now they’re assisting me from the other side. There’s no stopping them now. Once those doors open, they don’t shut.”

  “You’re wrong,” Rylie said. “We closed the door under the pool with the hybrid’s blood.”

  Abraxas stiffened in the chair, and relaxing again required a visible effort. He hadn’t meant to show his surprise. “It only looks closed. The doors are all open.”

  The others, maybe. Elise hadn’t had time to inspect them. But the one in Los Angeles had definitely closed. How many doors needed to be opened at once to completely break the walls between Earth and Dis? Could Elise slaughter infected hybrids at each one to seal it again?

  Even if she could, it wasn’t so easy to kill hybrids and leave blood behind. She had spent months hunting down the army of hybrids that Metaraon had unleashed on Earth, swallowing them one by one until no threats remained. But swallowing left nothing behind. Nothing.

  “It’s too late for you to stop me,” Abraxas taunted. “Kill one, kill two, it doesn’t matter, because there are more. Everything is in motion. No mat
ter how many of my men you kill, what I have begun will come to fruition.”

  Rylie spoke. “What did you begin?”

  Abraxas’s beady eyes fell on her, gleaming with pleasure. “Conquering.”

  Elise’s fist connected with the side of his head. She had always been stronger than the average woman, but her strength seemed to have few limits as a demon once she was angry. And Elise definitely was angry. She struck him hard enough to instantly render him unconscious.

  Rylie swallowed a cry of shock, hand over her mouth.

  “Converted ‘em,” Neuma said thoughtfully, unperturbed by Elise’s interrogation. She took a scarf off of the console and wrapped it around Abraxas’s mouth, effectively gagging him. He wouldn’t be unconscious for long. “He said that he’d ‘converted’ the hybrids. What’d he mean by that?”

  Elise couldn’t imagine, so she focused on what she did know. “If there are other hybrids, we need to get hunting,” she said, taking a long drag on the cigarette. The light from the flame stung her hand.

  “What about Katja?” Rylie asked.

  “What about her?”

  “I said I’d help you if you could help me. Quid pro quo,” Rylie said. Her voice was soft, almost a whisper. “If he’s the one that was opening the doors to Hell, nothing else is going to open as long as you have him here, and…Katja needs help.”

  Elise studied the girl. Rylie was staring back just as hard, not backing down. She didn’t fear Elise at all, and their heart to heart in the showers hadn’t helped.

  “I told you, I’ll take care of her when I’m done with this,” Elise said.

  “But I think ‘this’ has to do with Katja. The hybrid was rotting and slimy. That’s not normal, is it?” She didn’t wait for an answer before continuing. “Katja has the same thing. When she changed into a wolf on the moon, she started…oozing. She had the same black marks, too. I think that whatever conversion Abraxas did to the hybrids, he also did to Katja.”

  “Did she tell you that a demon did something to her?” Elise asked.

  “No, but she’s not in the state of mind to tell us what’s happened to her, and she won’t be until she’s been exorcised.”