by SM Reine
She had spent three years’ worth of days drifting over the City of Dis, watching the city shape itself beneath her. Time moved more slowly in Dis than it did in Las Vegas—about seven times slower, meaning that an entire week on Earth passed before Dis marked the day complete. To elapse twelve hours of Earth’s sunlight in the safety of Hell’s darkness, Elise drifted over the city for fewer than two hours.
But in those tantalizing glimpses, she had been watching the Palace repaired by staff, a rebellion take the streets one by one, and the day-to-day buzz of activity in the markets. She had watched humans dragged to Hell to be sold as chattel, for labor or meat or sex, and seen nightmares immigrate from Malebolge in pursuit of corporeal life.
It was an ugly place, a place of horror, and Elise longed to be part of it, instead of having to drag herself back to Las Vegas every day for a few more hours of miserable life on a world hostile to her very existence. She wanted to walk the streets of bone and lose herself among towering iron skyscrapers. The oven-like heat was a balm to her aching flesh. The screams were music.
This crevice, slicing the ground in twain and spewing Hell onto Earth, was a glimpse of that beautiful horror. The smoke it poured into the sky smelled sweetly of cooking flesh.
It took all of Elise’s strength to pull Katja out of the rubble rather than jump into it.
She was too distracted by struggling with her own urges that she didn’t realize Anthony was going to kill the wolf until the deed was done.
Elise’s hungry eyes saw it happen as if in slow motion: The pellets striking the wolf’s head. The concussion of contact spreading through bone, shattering atoms and baring the brain underneath. The instant that life, such as it was, vanished from the wolf’s crazed eyes, and blood sprayed onto the dusty rubble beyond. The way that the white noise her brain produced cut off instantly.
The blood smelled familiar. Like hints of a long-forgotten dream.
Then it struck the light of Hell, and the crevice ripping open between Earth and Hell slammed shut with a gonging crash. The smoke dissipated with a rush of air, as if the crevice exhaled as it shut, blowing the sweet odor of brimstone over Elise.
“No!” Rylie’s scream penetrated Elise’s reverie, snapping her back to reality.
Anthony turned to glare at her, like it was her fault that the crevice had opened in the first place and forced him to shoot.
And then he wasn’t standing there anymore.
Seth had tackled Anthony to the ground, sending the shotgun flying. They rolled over the place that the crevice had been moments earlier. The earth underneath it was unmarked; the portal had actually been hovering inches above the dirt without breaking the ground itself.
Fists thudded against flesh as the men beat one another. Anthony, with his cast, was at a severe disadvantage—but he hadn’t spent years training with Elise for nothing.
Elise had no patience for that. For any of it.
“Get Anthony,” she told McIntyre, and then she waded in between them.
A blow landed on her shoulder. She didn’t know if Seth or Anthony had hit her, but she didn’t particularly care.
She zeroed in on Seth.
“Stop it,” Elise grunted, catching another punch before it could connect with Anthony’s jaw. He was strong; she had to use both arms to push him back.
She pulled Seth off of Anthony, but Anthony wasn’t ready to let him go. He jumped at Seth again with a cry. Only McIntyre stopped him.
“He killed the wolf!” Seth shouted, straining against Elise.
Enough of this bullshit. She hauled back and punched him across the face. He flattened to the dirt with a cry.
Elise whirled on Rylie before she could come to Seth’s defense, jabbing a finger at her. “Don’t move,” Elise said. “Nobody fucking move.”
Silence settled over the ruins of the shack. Anthony’s chest rose and fell with heaving breaths, tense behind the bar of McIntyre’s beefy arm. The body of the wolf was still bleeding on the ground a few feet away, and the rich, heady scent of its innards made it hard for Elise to focus on anything else. The blood oozing from its cranial cavity sank into the dust and turned matte.
Elise didn’t need to check for a pulse to know the wolf was dead. She had known it the moment that its brain signals ended. A fistfight couldn’t bring it back.
She offered Seth a hand. He glared up at her, handsome face twisted into a mask of anger that was almost perfectly mirrored by Rylie. Sick or not, the wolf had been a member of their pack.
But after a moment, Seth took Elise’s hand and let her pull him to his feet.
“We can discuss this later,” Elise said, nodding to the body of the wolf. “For now, no fighting. Period. Abraxas is still out there. We need to—”
She was interrupted by a hard gust of wind, strong enough that it almost knocked her over. It traveled down the mountains, sweeping through the valley, and blasted the hair back from her face. It carried away the wall of gray smoke that had consumed the trailer, baring the line of the mountains against the paling sky.
Dawn was breaking.
Elise only realized that sunlight had touched her flesh because of the sudden burn. It was white-hot and blinding.
She had dreamed of sunlight, dreamed of going jogging in the early glow of dawn, of lying on the grass at midday and soaking up the warmth. It had been three years since she had watched the sunrise and greeted it with open arms.
It cut through her as surely as the slice of a sword.
Her skin vanished, and the rest of her followed in moments.
As far as Brianna could tell, Las Vegas began at McCarran International Airport and ended in a shitty hotel outside town. She got to glimpse the Strip when they were flying in, but Brogan had driven them away from downtown the instant they got into their rental car. She had twisted around to watch the outlines of the Luxor and Wynn and Caesar’s Palace and New York-New York fade into the gloom of night, beyond her reach.
“We’re not here to have fun,” James had said when he noticed Brianna’s longing gaze.
“We can’t spend the entire trip doing magic.”
“Oh?” he asked.
Of course the most powerful witch in the world wouldn’t see why he couldn’t do magic for days on end.
Brianna sighed. “Never mind.”
They hadn’t stopped at the hotel, either. James instructed her to stay in the car in that “I know you’re going to do exactly what I tell you to do” voice, spent ten minutes registering and giving Brogan a key to the room, and then got back in the car.
Since then, James and Brianna had spent all of five hours at the hotel—only long enough to take naps—and the rest of their time in the desert.
The Nevada desert. In September.
Brianna was seriously considering evicting her misplaced sense of adventure.
Especially since they weren’t really doing the kind of epic magic that she had envisioned James’s mission entailing. They were digging. Sure, it was fun to use James’s excavation spells—he had a whole book of them, and he let Brianna activate them herself, as long as she was careful about it. And it was definitely interesting to see the statue that emerged from the cliffs piece by piece.
But they hadn’t gotten to use the locked case he had given her yet, and Brianna was starting to suspect that his bald-faced attempt at bribery was just that: bribery, and nothing more.
“This is crap,” she told Brogan the next time he visited. She was at the motel for one of the brief stretches and had taken two showers instead of sleeping. Brianna thought that jumping in a vat of acid wouldn’t get her clean of sweat and dirt at that point. “James told me we were going to do cool stuff, and I’ve just been getting a lot of dust up my nose.”
“If he promised cool stuff, you’re going to get cool stuff,” Brogan said, clicking through the movie listings on the motel’s TV. He looked like somewhat less of a Nerd Viking now that he was in full Union gear. Yes, Union gear. Fun story: aside from being m
arried to one of James’s witches, and apparently indebted to him because of it, he was a contractor with the Union. He hadn’t been going to the dig because he had been too busy spying on Union operations and reporting them back to James.
Because there was absolutely no way that could go wrong at any point.
“You have bestowed a lot of faith upon our glorious leader,” Brianna muttered, leaning in close to her reflection to try to scrub a smear of dirt off of her chin, which had somehow survived her jaunts in the shower.
“Did he tell you about Metaraon?”
“He told me that the statue out there is Metaraon, yeah.” When Brogan opened his mouth to speak, Brianna talked over him. “Yes, I know. Voice of God. Meanest angel ever. Blah, blah, blah.”
“Did he tell you the part where he’s retracing Metaraon’s footsteps to open the doors to Eden?” Brogan asked with a small smile. Wonder of wonders, he found Brianna funny. Lucky for him, because they’d been stuck together a lot lately.
“Eden?”
“Yeah, you know, the garden.”
“I know what the garden is. I meant… You know what, never mind. So we’re trying to get into Eden, huh?” That was more than James had told her on their dig. “Where is it?”
“Here. There. Everywhere.” Brogan gestured at the walls.
Brianna lifted her eyebrows at him. “Uh…”
“It’s in another dimension layered on top of ours. Kind of like an alternate Earth.” He grinned. “Did I mention the part where I work in the Union’s interdimensional sciences department? Yeah, I work in their IDS department. To tell you the truth, I’m pretty sure it’s the only reason James let my wife in his coven.”
“So Eden’s right on top of us.”
“Yep. But in order to get there, you have to open this…it’s kind of like a lock. You know locks? They’ve got tumblers, and a key pushes them into position so you can turn it? There are seven tumblers that are holding the Eden lock closed. James is trying to make a key that fits. That statue of Metaraon is one of them.”
“Huh,” Brianna said. She watched through the mirror as Brogan finally gave up on the TV and turned it off, tossing the remote onto the bed. “Why are you telling me that?”
“He’s not going to take the time to explain it to you. You should still know what you’re getting into.”
“Thanks, Brogan,” she said, and she meant it, even though she really had no idea what to do with that information.
He glanced at the bedside clock. “We’ve wasted enough time,” he said. “I need to drop you off at the site and head into my shift. Gotta commit more acts of treason, you know.”
Brianna laughed. “Yeah. I can’t wait for more digging.” She could not have possibly worked up less enthusiasm for that idea if she’d tried.
She gathered the spelled case that James had given her off of the side table and followed Brogan out to his car. They listened to the news as they drove toward the dig site. It was off road—way off road—so she had plenty of time to hear a dull-voiced man drone on about preternatural regulation and Senator Peterson’s assassination on NPR.
They drove into heavy smoke about halfway there.
“What is this?” Brianna asked, flicking the switch to close the car’s vents. The Joshua trees were only visible about ten feet out. Everything beyond it was flat gray smoke. “Wildfire?”
Brogan beeped. Well, he didn’t beep, but his pager did, and Brianna was endlessly tickled to see that he had a pager at all. He dug it out from under his seat belt and read the screen. “I don’t think so,” he said. “Grab the earpiece out of the glove box?”
She did, handing it to him.
Brogan throttled down and drove slowly as he listened to his Bluetooth earpiece. “We’re in trouble,” he said after a minute of grim silence. “The pacific coast fissure is opening from Vancouver to Vegas. This smoke? It’s coming out of Hell.”
“Hell? Like, actual Hell? ‘Satan and pitchforks’ Hell?”
“More like, ‘human skin leather and bloodthirsty behemoths’ Hell.” He tossed his earpiece onto the dash. “Thank God it’s Friday. That’s all I’m going to say.”
A figure appeared in the smoky gloom. James was waiting for her, as always. Come rain or shine or apocalypse, he wasn’t going to let her get out of digging. One of his gloves must have been off, because his hand was glowing.
Brianna got out with the case and Brogan wasted no time peeling out, leaving them behind in the hazy desert.
“This is from Hell,” Brianna said, waving a hand in front of her face to try to clear a few inches of breathable oxygen. Her eyes and lungs burned. “Just thought I’d tell you, in case you were wondering.”
James made a noncommittal sound. He didn’t seem surprised at all. “What do you think of him?” he asked, nodding toward the car’s taillights, which had already faded to pinpoints.
“Brogan? He’s fine, I guess. Funny. A lot nicer than you are, too.”
Brianna would have been lying if she pretended that the jab wasn’t meant to hurt, but James didn’t look stung. In fact, he smiled. “Good,” he said. “I’m glad. You’ll be spending a lot more time together soon.”
“Why’s that?” Brianna asked.
“I told you that I was going to give you power, and I meant it,” James said, turning to walk back into the canyon. “You and Brogan are going to bind as kopis and aspis so that you’re strong enough to open this doorway for me.”
Brianna forgot how to walk. Her foot slipped out from under her, and she dropped the case on the rocks. “What?”
“You don’t think I gave you those tools for fun.”
“But Brogan’s married,” she said. “I barely even know him.”
“Power doesn’t come cheap,” James said, hefting the case under his arm and standing aside to allow Brianna to find her footing.
It sure as heck didn’t, but Brianna had been expecting something a lot more awful and a lot less…personal, somehow. More like human sacrifice. She could get down with human sacrifice, especially if the human in question deserved it. But a binding ritual? A permanent, life-changing oath to a near-total stranger?
She realized that her cheeks were aching, and she must have been giving James her “you are a total moron” smile for a couple of minutes now. She couldn’t seem to stop.
“Why do you need us to be kopis and aspis to get into Eden?” Brianna asked.
James continued walking into the canyon. “Metaraon hid Eden after it burned, but he always intended on being capable of returning at an opportune time. He also wanted to ensure he’d be the only one who could get there. He established several requirements for opening the doors, and one of them is using the power of a bound kopis and aspis. I can’t draw on my power without alerting my kopis to what I’m doing. She’ll stop us if she senses that. Thus, I need you—my high priestess.”
Brianna liked the sound of being “his” high priestess less and less. “What’s in it for me?” she asked.
“Aside from a kopis?” James asked. “How does the sound of godlike powers at your beck and call suit you?”
Her mouth opened and closed wordlessly.
The smoke was worst in the canyon. The haze clung to the rocks, pooled low to the ground so densely that Brianna could barely breathe. She coughed and hacked. It felt like sandpaper in her lungs.
James looked up at the smoggy sky, exasperated. “I can’t see anything.” He flicked a rune into the air.
A mighty wind gusted over the desert, blasting the smoke out of the sky and buffeting Brianna in the canyon. Pebbles danced over the rocks, stinging her legs like a hundred bees. It was a strong enough blast that it exposed dawn over the mountains, the pink sky of dawn, and the dig site.
Brianna gasped clean air into her grateful lungs. Her vision blurred at the intake of oxygen, and when it cleared, she realized that the dig was done. Metaraon’s statue stood fully exposed, hand proudly upthrust, colorless eyes gleaming.
And James had
already begun to create the circle to bind Brianna to Brogan as his aspis.
Fourteen
It hadn’t been that many years ago that Seth kept trophies from his werewolf kills—usually teeth. Sometimes he had skinned them for their hides, too; a werewolf’s corpse remained in whatever condition it had been in when it died, and their pelts could be sold through certain channels. He wasn’t proud of that, but his family was poor. Better to sell the hides of the dead than starve.
The wolf that had been ripped from Katja was not skinned, nor did Seth break off its teeth. Rylie carried it to a copse of Joshua trees. Seth brought two shovels. Together, they dug a grave six feet deep and covered its body in the dust of the desert.
When they were done, they stood over the bulge in the earth, staring at the place where they had interred the wolf.
Rylie leaned heavily on her shovel. Sweat pasted her hair to her neck; it was only nine o’clock in the morning, and the temperature was already approaching triple digits. The trickles of perspiration from her hairline almost concealed the tears that streamed down her cheeks.
“Thank you, Seth,” she said. “You tried to save her.”
“I don’t know what would have happened if it was allowed to survive,” Seth finally said, “but it was pack.”
“Pack,” Rylie echoed.
He didn’t like the way she was looking at him. All that grief made him want to take her into his arms, kiss her forehead, tell her that everything was going to be okay.
It was his ringing phone that reminded him he didn’t kiss or hug Rylie anymore. He pulled it out of his pocket. The name on the screen read “ugly bastard.”
“Abel’s calling me,” Seth said.
Rylie propped her shovel against a Joshua tree. “I’m going to check on Katja.”
She started walking back toward McIntyre’s trailer, which blazed a brilliant, eye-aching shade of yellow in the morning sun. Seth turned from her to answer the call, standing in the tree’s shade. It was maybe two degrees cooler than being in direct sunlight.