by SM Reine
Normally, the desert stretched for seemingly endless miles around McIntyre’s property, empty aside from some scrubby sagebrush and scattered rocks. And it had looked like that when Elise had entered the trailer twenty minutes earlier: empty and clear.
Now the desert ended a mile away from the trailer, terminating in a solid gray wall.
For a terrified, dizzying moment, Elise thought that she had somehow been sucked into the garden again. It had looked like a floating island encircled by gray void. She associated that blankness with terrible things, the kind of things that she would kill herself before dealing with ever again, and she could no longer feel the heart beating in her chest.
“I think it’s smoke,” Seth said from beside her. “It’s blowing this way.”
Elise glanced over her shoulder. Looking south toward Vegas, the night was clear.
It was smoke. Not void. She wasn’t in the garden.
She still didn’t relax. “Fire?”
“Maybe,” McIntyre said doubtfully. “I’ll check the news.”
He returned to the trailer while Elise stood at the bottom of the steps with Seth. A leaden fist of dread had lodged itself securely in her chest. She didn’t need McIntyre to check the news to know that it wasn’t a wildfire—not when there had been a so-called “volcanic eruption” in Tacoma, and especially not when the night had been utterly clear minutes before.
“Where’s Rylie?” Elise asked.
“Scouting,” he said, jerking his chin toward the smoke.
She gripped her twitching, gloved hand in the opposite fist, trying to relax the burn. “And Leticia?”
“Almost done,” called a voice from inside the shack.
Plans tumbled through Elise’s mind, rearranging to fit the scenario. From what James had told her, she had been expecting a few more days before anything went bad on a large scale—and she had expected to figure out how to stop it before that occurred.
There should have been time to save Katja, to save everyone.
She needed to move fast.
Elise ripped her glove off, baring her twitching fingers to the air. Seth took a step back when he saw her glowing, skeletal hand. She began to speak. “If you see Rylie—”
Before she could finish, a pickup appeared, illuminating the dirt path that bridged the space between the highway and McIntyre’s property. Elise stepped behind Seth to shadow herself from the headlights. He seemed to understand—he faced the road so that the widest part of his body met the lights and provided her with the biggest patch of shadow possible.
The pickup skidded to a stop in front of them, showering dirt on Elise’s shoes. Neuma leaped out of the passenger’s seat before it had come to a full stop, stumbling on her four-inch heels. Her cutoff shorts and midriff t-shirt were splattered with blood.
“He’s gone,” she said, “I was feeding and he woke up while I was gone. He broke free. I don’t know where he went.”
Elise didn’t have to ask which “he” she meant.
Abraxas had escaped.
She seized a rock and hurled it at the smoke. “Fuck!”
“I can find him,” Seth said. “I’ll go into town.”
“There’s no time,” Anthony said as he killed the headlights and dropped from the driver’s seat, tossing the keys to Neuma. He was looking better after his hours recovering in the brothel—his arm was still in a cast below the elbow, but the bruising had faded, and there was color to his cheeks.
“Agreed,” Elise said. “Seth, tell Rylie I’m doing the exorcism now.”
Seth had never seen an exorcism before, but he somehow doubted that many of them were performed in a tiny shack with a half-dozen witnesses, almost all of them armed.
Elise had dropped Katja in the center of the circle, where Leticia’s chalk lines converged. Elise was without a weapon for the moment, but her look of determination was as intimidating as any number of swords, even if her skin was unusually gray, her hair foggy below the shoulders, and her stance wobbling.
Anthony, wedged in the corner of the room, had enough guns on him to make up for Elise’s empty hands. He cradled a rifle with the casual confidence of a man who used them every day, and the kind of caution that came with seeing the damage they could inflict. Even Leticia, on his opposite side, was holding a knife—although she had told Seth that it was a ritual knife, and he had no reason to be afraid of it.
Rylie wasn’t armed, either, but she didn’t need to be. She was crouched on the opposite side of the circle, chewing on her thumbnail as she stared intently at Katja.
She pointedly wasn’t looking at Seth. He tried to pretend that it didn’t hurt.
“Close the circle,” Elise said.
Leticia spilled the last inch of salt over the circle. Elise sucked in a hard breath and squeezed her eyes shut.
If something had changed, Seth couldn’t tell what it was.
“Don’t cross the lines until the ritual is over,” Leticia said softly, twisting her hands over the hilt of the ritual knife. “I’m not good at the flexible circles. With this one, if you step over one of those lines…” She pointed at the inner ring, which was ten feet in diameter. “Step over that, and the whole thing breaks. It’ll blow the ritual.”
“Noted,” Seth said, stroking a hand down the barrel of his rifle. It was loaded with silver rounds. They were as thick as his thumb, and guaranteed to stop anything in its tracks—even werewolves.
“Shut up, guys,” Elise said. “I need to concentrate.”
They fell silent.
She lifted her hand. It was like the thrashing fingers had assumed a will of their own. That wasn’t as disturbing as the fact that her skin had taken on a dull, glassy appearance below the elbow. He could see the shadows of her bones underneath.
It was with her other hand, her more normal hand, that she unspooled the golden chains from around her neck. She rested the chains on Katja’s prone body.
McIntyre sidled into the shack, only opening the door far enough to fit his girth in. The smoke was creeping over his property and beginning to turn the sky hazy gray; Seth couldn’t see more than ten feet beyond the front door. “It’s all up the west coast,” he whispered to Anthony. “This smoke. There are earthquakes, magma, and sightings of demons all over the show.”
“Was there another mass murder?” Anthony asked, just as quietly.
“I don’t know. I didn’t get any of the Union’s alarms.” And then McIntyre was guiding Leticia out of the shack, whispering about getting the kids off the property, and Seth knew that things were only getting worse in the world outside.
But Elise was focusing on the ritual. As soon as the door swung shut behind Leticia, she kneeled beside Katja’s shoulders.
“Be prepared,” she said. She was looking at Rylie, like nobody else in the shack even existed.
“Prepared for what?” Rylie asked.
“Crux sacra sit mihi lux,” Elise said, pressing the see-through palm of her hand to Katja’s forehead.
The runes on her hand flared, whirling over the skin faster, brightening like the sun. Elise’s face twisted with pain, though she remained silent.
“Non draco sit mihi dux,” she went on. Somehow, even through her grimace, she was speaking normally. Calmly. Like the skin on her arm hadn’t disappeared all the way to the elbow.
Her eyes fell closed, and her lips kept moving, repeating the first two lines again. The sense of infernal energy only grew as Elise became quieter, as though she were focusing inward to collect her strength.
Then her eyes shocked open.
“There’s something there,” Elise said.
Seth’s hands tensed on the rifle. “What are you talking about?”
“A demon,” Anthony said, like it was the most obvious thing in the world.
But Elise was shaking her head without looking at either of them. The walls of the shack trembled with the wind. Dust showered over her shoulders, shaken free from the rafters. “Not a demon. A wolf.”
Rylie sucked in a hard gasp.
Elise put both of her hands on Katja, who jerked at the contact. “Crux sacra sit mihi lux, non draco sit mihi dux,” she said again, more loudly this time. Her voice was deep and reverberant, as if commanding Katja. “Vade retro, Satana, nunquam suade mihi vana.”
Ripples spread over the werewolf’s skin. Her spine bowed, hands clutching at nothing, fingernails scrabbling against the ground. One leg kicked out, almost hitting the barrier of the circle.
Elise took her hand off of Katja’s forehead long enough to grab her ankle, dragging her closer again.
“Sunt mala quae libas,” Elise boomed. “Ipse venena bibas!”
Katja’s eyes flashed open.
They were no longer gold, but totally black.
She screamed, and it wasn’t a human scream. It was somewhere between a wolfish shriek of pain and a howl. The kind of sound that never should have spilled from a body with two legs, two arms, and no fur.
Katja thrashed, and her foot connected with Elise’s side. Elise responded by kneeling on the werewolf’s legs.
“Change her, Rylie,” Elise said. Her voice echoed through the entire shack, making the jars rattle on the shelves.
Rylie looked startled to be addressed. “Into a wolf? Now?”
“Do it!”
Seth looked askance at Rylie and found that she was giving him the exact same expression in return. She was looking for guidance, silently begging him to tell her what to do. Maybe she was even asking for permission to end the exorcism entirely.
Yet he nodded. Do it.
Rylie didn’t move, but Katja began to shift.
Seth had become so accustomed to peaceful changes that the resonant snap of bone shocked him. He tried to jump back and found that there was nowhere he could go. His shoulders were flattened to the wall.
“Lord above,” McIntyre muttered, lifting his gun to aim it at Katja. His finger wasn’t on the trigger yet, but his entire body had gone tense.
Everything was happening in the wrong order. Katja’s hair puddled on the floor as fur swept over her bare human flesh—and then that fell out, too, only to be replaced with sludgy black fibers that looked like some kind of fungus. Her spine twisted, legs thrashing, and bone snapped as the knees reversed.
Anthony and McIntyre had backed as far into the corner as they could fit without tearing through the wall. And Elise’s face was twisted with exertion as she held Katja down, trying to prevent her from breaking the circle of power with her thrashing limbs.
Katja’s face stretched and popped, ears sliding up the sides of her skull. Claws erupted from her fingertips.
Elise took a deep breath and shoved her hand against Katja’s throat, tangled in the golden chains. The glow of the runes on her fingers intensified.
A silent explosion rocked the shack, making the packed earth floor toss under Seth’s feet and his eardrums pop. Jars slid off the shelves, shattering in a rain of sparkling glass fibers.
Katja and Elise and Rylie were all screaming now, and there was no way to tell their voices apart, because something had gone wrong, terribly wrong; the weight of the energy pressed against Seth, crushing his lungs, squeezing out all the oxygen.
Shadow flared, momentarily making the inside of the shack turn inky black.
And then, with a pop, all of the pressure vanished.
The screaming stopped.
After the moment of darkness, Seth felt disoriented, and his vision was slow to recover. It almost felt like he had tried to look directly into the sun—or a black hole. He rubbed his eyes, wondering why it looked like there were three figures inside the circle instead of two.
“Oh my God,” Rylie whimpered in a tiny voice.
There were three figures inside of the circle. Katja had flopped onto her back, limp and unconscious and drenched with sweat—not to mention completely human.
But Elise was still struggling with a second figure, hands locked on the throat of a wolf bleeding ichor onto the ground.
The wolf was separate from Katja.
Seth had lifted his rifle to aim it at the wolf before he even realized what had happened. The creature was thrashing and growling and snapping, fighting to sink its teeth into Elise’s arms, and she was doing everything she could to keep its jaws away.
It didn’t look like a normal wolf—or a werewolf, for that matter. Maybe a very sick werewolf. The black fur, the foaming mouth, and the fluid gushing from its tear ducts weren’t remotely normal. But it was as big as a werewolf, and it looked like it was as strong, too.
“Break the circle,” Elise grunted, slamming the wolf’s head into the ground. “I need help.” Anthony was the first to react. He grabbed ropes hanging from the wall and jumped in, scuffing the line of salt.
Seth dragged the human Katja into the corner of the room with Rylie. She was breathing. Alive.
“Is she…?” Rylie asked, hands over her mouth, unable to finish the sentence.
He thumbed Katja’s eyelid back. Her irises were brown. Not gold. Brown.
Elise had exorcised the wolf from the woman.
Thirteen
Anthony finally managed to tie down the thrashing wolf while Elise held it down. Every jerk of its body sprayed ichor over the walls and floor. Both of them were soaked sticky black from the jaw down, like they’d gone swimming in a tar pit.
“That’s what they look like on the inside?” Seth asked, unable to keep the revulsion out of his voice.
He had wondered for a long time what it would be like to separate the wolf from the human—if there had been some way to give physical form to the spirit of the animal, what that might look like. But Seth had imagined that it would look very much like the wolf that emerged on full and new moons.
This didn’t look like a wolf. It looked like a beast dragged from the darkest pits of Hell.
Elise seemed to agree that something was awry. “I think it’s sick,” she said, mopping at her chest. She looked as if she were considering licking her hand clean, but she settled for wiping it off on her pants.
“It looks like the hybrid,” Rylie said in a small voice from beside Katja. Her expression was unreadable.
It did look a lot like the hybrid at the house in Los Angeles, all sick and half-dissolved and bleeding. The growl that squeezed out of its throat didn’t even sound like a wolf’s. It was high and keening, bubbling in its throat.
A deeper rumble shook the floor under Seth’s feet.
“Is that the wolf?” Anthony asked.
The rumble intensified, deepening, making the shelves shiver. Elise backed toward the door, staring up at the ceiling as dust shook free. “I don’t think so.”
A huge crack split the air, and the north wall of the shack fell away.
McIntyre’s shout of dismay was almost entirely drowned out by cracking wood and the thunderous crash of metal siding. Rylie was nearest the break—she threw herself over Katja, arms shielding the woman’s head as half of the shack collapsed on top of them.
“Rylie!” Seth moved to jump for her, but a hand dug into his bicep.
Elise had grabbed him. “Careful,” she said. “Watch your step.”
Confused, he turned to look at where he had almost stepped. It should have been flat ground—except that it suddenly wasn’t. Light was burning in the open air beyond the wall of the shack. It wasn’t dawn, even though the night should have been drawing to a close, giving way to morning. This glow was somehow coming from below the horizon.
The dust that had been kicked up by the falling wall of the shack settled. It looked like an angry red mouth had opened in the desert, devouring half of the shack and all of the sagebrush through which it sliced. Flames and smoke and screams spewed from the gash. He looked down into the crevice, ten feet wide and endlessly deep. There was fire inside, and dark, twisting shapes that looked like the writhing shadows of the damned.
“It’s a fucking portal to Hell,” Elise said.
And it stretched as far to the nor
thwest and south as Seth could see. The crevice was opening wider, spreading across the earth.
Growing.
Seth hauled Rylie out of the wreckage as the creeping portal devoured more of the shack’s floor. Part of the wall slipped into it, tumbling out of sight into darkness. “Katja,” Rylie protested as he tugged on her arm.
“I’ve got her,” he said. “Find solid ground.”
Rylie stepped deeper into the shack. Acrid smoke stung Seth’s eyes as he fought to free Katja, who was trapped underneath a ceiling beam, before the crevice could devour her, too.
Elise dropped by his side, tossing pieces of the roof into the portal to get them out of the way. The smoke blew her hair around her face, tangled by the wind, and the light of the licking flames making her gray skin flicker. Seth could see the table behind her for an instant as she went invisible. She returned to grab another piece of wreckage.
They freed Katja, and Rylie dragged her onto the relative safety of solid ground at the back of the shack. But that safety wasn’t going to last for long. The crevice was still widening.
“This is Abraxas’s doing,” Elise said, standing on the brink of it, staring down into the flames. Her eyes had bled completely to black. “Someone must have been killed in Vegas and ripped the pacific coast open wide.”
Seth’s heart was pounding, his pulse rushing in his ears almost as loud as the wind whistling through the crevice. “How do we close it?”
“Hybrid blood,” McIntyre said.
Anthony seemed to have a better idea. He hauled the dripping body of the wolf to the crevice by the ropes encircling its paws. It thrashed when he dropped it at the edge, trying to break free. Its tail flopped over the side of the portal.
“We don’t need a hybrid to close this,” he said, shouldering his shotgun and balancing the muzzle on his cast-encased forearm.
Seth realized what Anthony was doing an instant before he pulled the trigger, spraying the wolf’s skull and brain and blood across the break.
For an instant, staring deep into a crevice opening a path between Hell and Earth, Elise felt like she was gazing into her own heart.