Oaths of Blood

by SM Reine

  “Hey, asshole,” Abel said when he answered.

  “You’re not going to believe this,” Seth said in a low voice.

  “What, Elise is somehow hiding balls under her leggings? Oh, right, I almost forgot that I don’t give a shit and a half about whatever drama’s going on with that bitch. Where’s Rylie?”

  Seth turned to watch Rylie’s retreating back. With her white sundress trailing behind her, her figure rippling with waves of heat off of the sunbaked earth, she looked like a desert mirage. The kind of hazy image of utopia a man might conjure as he died.

  He could have called out to her, given her the phone. But he only said, “She’s around here somewhere.”

  “‘Somewhere’ isn’t good enough,” Abel growled. “Where, Seth?”

  “A few hundred feet away. I can see her. What’s your problem?”

  “She’s not answering my calls or texts, that’s the problem,” he said. “For all I know, she could be dead in some Vegas gutter. She could have been kidnapped. The Union could have arrested her. I don’t know.”

  Oh, that wasn’t anger in his brother’s voice. It was Abel’s emotionally stunted attempt to convey his fear of losing the woman more important to him than anything else in the world.

  “I told you I’d protect her,” Seth said. “She’s fine.” If grieving the death of her pack mate could possibly be “fine.”

  The tense silence on the other side could only mean that Abel was relieved. But when he spoke again, the anger in his voice hadn’t abated. “Then why isn’t she talking to me? She gone mute?” And that would be his emotionally stunted way of conveying that his feelings were hurt.

  “You’re going to have to ask her,” Seth said.

  “Can’t ask her if she won’t talk to me.” Abel grunted. “We had a fight before she left.”

  Seth knew. He had seen. He sagged against the trunk of the tree, dropping down to sit in the dirt. “Elise exorcised a werewolf, Abel.”

  “Great. So Katja’s fine, and you’re all coming back.”

  “That’s not what I mean,” Seth said, letting a fistful of dirt trickle through his fingers, like sands through an hourglass. “Elise pulled the wolf out. Katja’s not a werewolf anymore. The wolf is dead, and the human is fine.”

  “You’re fucking with me,” Abel said.

  “If I was going to mess with your crappy excuse for a brain, I wouldn’t make up something that insane, man.” Another long silence. “This means we could cure the pack, I guess, if Elise felt up to forty exorcisms,” Seth said.

  “The pack doesn’t need curing. It’s not sick.” The fierceness with which he said it was shocking. Abel used to be as intense about hunting werewolves as Seth was. And now it wasn’t a sickness? A problem to be fixed?

  “I agree,” Seth said, surprising himself. “I don’t like where this could go. Not at all.”

  “You need to get Rylie home.”

  “Yeah. I think you’re right.”

  “And make it fast.” Abel huffed. “I can’t hold on to the pack without her.”

  Seth’s eyebrows lifted. That must have taken a lot of strength for his brother to admit. Rylie came into the position of Alpha naturally, with all the power and responsibility that entailed. Abel, not so much. He still struggled to help others through the change, and he didn’t have a leader’s personality. But damned be anyone that tried to tell him that. Abel had almost broken Seth’s face when he brought it up.

  If he was being honest about his shortcomings, it had to be getting bad with the pack.

  “Have you heard from Summer?” Seth asked.

  “Last I heard, she and Nash are still looking for Charla Hannity. Whatever. Get Rylie home now.”

  Abel hung up.

  Seth dropped the phone into his pocket, grabbed the shovels, and started walking back.

  His brother was overprotective of Rylie. That was another one of those truths that nobody in the pack was allowed to say, no matter how vehemently they believed it. Seth’s theory was that Abel knew that Rylie was too good for him, and he was smart enough to do everything he could to keep her from leaving. But maybe that was Seth’s jealousy talking.

  There was no jealousy in Seth that day. He hadn’t agreed with Abel in a long time, but he agreed on this.

  It was time to get out of Las Vegas.

  Rylie was stepping out of the McIntyres’ master bedroom as he entered the trailer. Seth glimpsed Katja sitting upright in bed with a laptop for a half-second before Rylie shut the door behind her. “She doesn’t remember anything,” she whispered. For a moment, Seth wondered why Rylie bothered to keep her voice down—but then remembered that Katja would no longer have a werewolf’s supernatural hearing.

  “The exorcism?”

  “Nothing since she got bitten,” Rylie said. “Her last memories are from before she got kidnapped, or whatever happened to her and Charla. She said it feels like she’s been asleep for a long time.”

  Seth stared at the door, stomach twisting with unease. “No memory at all.”

  That meant that Katja wouldn’t remember her first six moons—the transitory period in which she went from human to werewolf. She wouldn’t remember how she had become infected with whatever had made her wolf sick. She didn’t have any of their answers.

  A huge piece of her life, gone.

  “Why doesn’t she remember? Was it the exorcism, or the trauma?” Seth asked.

  Rylie shrugged. “We’ll have to take Katja to the California werewolves to find out. Bekah’s been studying to become a therapist, and she’ll have contacts that know about us. We can have them check her out.” She scuffed the toe of her shoe on a bump in the carpet where it hadn’t been stretched out correctly. “It’s probably a blessing, though. Getting to forget everything.”

  “Sounds like hell to me,” Seth said.

  She gnawed on her bottom lip. “Hell is having every bone in my body shatter twice a month so I can become a killing machine. Hell is missing twenty years of your kids’ lives. Hell is… Hell is breaking my boyfriend’s heart because my wolf wants to be mated to another wolf.” She shook her head. “I don’t know.”

  “What are you trying to say?” he asked.

  Her smile was weak, with none of its usual glow. “Nothing. I’m not saying anything at all.”

  He rubbed a hand over the back of his neck. “Abel wants you to call him. He said you’re ignoring your texts.”

  Rylie had already turned to leave, heading for the kitchen. “I’ll get a hold of him,” she said over her shoulder.

  Somehow, Seth knew that she was lying.

  Seth showered the dust and sweat from his body. The McIntyres’ bathroom was small, and the shower smaller still; his shoulders didn’t even fit unless he angled his body in the stall diagonally. Water and soap sluiced down his body. He couldn’t seem to get the temperature hot enough to burn away the stress knotted in his muscles.

  Every time his eyes fell shut, he saw that wolf again, its skull a bloody mess. He saw Rylie’s tearful face, and Katja’s relatively blank stare.

  He remained in the shower until the water ran cold, then toweled off and dressed in his last clean shirt.

  Leticia was in the kids’ room with her daughters, speaking softly, putting toys in pink backpacks in preparation to leave. Katja was sleeping in the other bedroom. The trailer was otherwise silent, heavy with the fading evening, its windows caked with dust from the earlier storm.

  There was no sign of Rylie or Elise.

  Seth found McIntyre and Anthony arguing outside, near the wreckage of the shack. The sight of Anthony brought Seth’s hackles up. It also brought back that terrible moment again—the explosion of the shotgun, the spray of blood over the crevice, and Rylie’s scream.

  If Seth had been less of a man—if he had been Abel, for instance—he wouldn’t have been able to control the anger that made him want to introduce Anthony’s face to his fist again. But he sealed his mouth.

  “She never comes back un
til sundown,” McIntyre said to Anthony, caught in mid-conversation. He had dragged one of his tables out of the wreckage and set his laptop up on it.

  Anthony thrust a finger toward the horizon. “What’s that look like to you?” Burying Katja’s wolf had taken most of the morning, and recovering McIntyre’s most important equipment from the shack had taken the rest of the day. The sun touched the mountains, stretching long violet shadows over an orange desert.

  “It looks like sunset’s still an hour away,” McIntyre said, tossing a box into the rear of his pickup. It was already filled with grocery bags of food and clothes, as well as a plastic toy cooking stove and a few other toys that Dana and Deb had deemed necessary to evacuate. “Fucking relax.”

  Anthony shoved McIntyre. “Watch your mouth.”

  “We don’t need her yet, anyhow,” McIntyre said. “You know what she’s going to say. We need to get Abraxas back before shit gets worse. That break between worlds—it’s not closed permanently. It’ll be opened again if we can’t stop it.”

  “We can’t stop it without Elise,” Anthony said.

  Seth raised his voice to speak over the men. “Where’s Rylie?”

  It was like the men hadn’t even noticed he was there until that moment. They both rounded on him. They may have been arguing, but they presented a united front to the outsider—the man that thought Anthony was a sick, heartless fuck for shooting a wolf spirit. He wondered if Elise had broken it to them yet that Seth was joining their team.

  “I don’t know where she is. We’re not babysitters,” Anthony said.

  “Last I saw, Rylie’s out walking. Again.” McIntyre shrugged. “Think she needs breathing room.”

  She wasn’t going to find it in the desert. The wind had cleared away the worst of the smoke, but a low haze still clung to the ground, making Seth’s throat raw. The moisture from his shower had already evaporated, and his skin was cracking. “And Elise?”

  Anthony’s answer was drowned out by the roar of helicopter engines, buzzing low over the desert. They roared over the mountains and blew past at high speed.

  Seth reflexively ducked, even though they weren’t that low, and lifted a hand to shield his eyes from the dust kicked up in their wake. The rotors glinted brightly in the falling sun, but the helicopters themselves were painted matte black.

  Moments later, the sound of other engines followed. Seth turned to see a convoy of hulking black vehicles driving on the highway at the bottom of the slope. They weren’t the Union’s usual black SUVs; these looked more like heavily armored tanks without the cannon on top. A long line of them was following the helicopters.

  “BearCats,” McIntyre said. “Shit. Haven’t seen those in a while.”

  Seth tracked their progress with his eyes until the lead vehicle vanished on the horizon, where he knew Las Vegas to be.

  Light flared bright against the dimming sky, and a black arm of smoke thrust into the sky. For them to see it at that distance, it had to be at least as wide as a city block.

  The sound of rumbling took a few seconds to catch up with them.

  Something big had exploded in Las Vegas. Since the Union was on top of it, Seth somehow doubted that it was anything as mundane as a gas main.

  McIntyre was already typing on his laptop. “There were no alarms,” he said. “Why weren’t there any fucking alarms?”

  “There wasn’t anything before the last event, either,” Anthony said, grabbing a rifle off of the table and slinging it over his good shoulder. He tossed another gun to Seth. Apparently, there were no hard feelings once things started exploding.

  Wasn’t it obvious? “They know you’ve hacked them,” Seth said. “The Union must have realized that you’ve been in their system and blocked you out. They know that we’re watching.”

  McIntyre’s colorful string of curses only cut off when Leticia emerged with the kids, each of them wearing a backpack with rainbows and ponies on the back. The smaller girl was holding a rag doll almost as tall as she was, its feet dragging in the dust. Katja drifted behind them, hugging a blanket around her shoulders and looking entirely baffled by the surroundings. Ace took up the rear, muzzled and chained.

  “Take the pickup,” McIntyre said, kissing Leticia’s cheek.

  Her eyes sharpened, but she didn’t argue. She nodded once. “Okay.”

  Anthony was already in the other car—a gold sedan that looked like it had already been through an apocalypse or three. “Come on!” he shouted out the driver’s window.

  “Where you guys going?” Seth asked.

  “We need Abraxas,” McIntyre said with a grim glance toward Vegas. Seth peered through the windows as he climbed in with Anthony. The car may have been ugly as fuck, but they had a gun rack and a safe built in where the backseat should have been. “You wanna come?”

  Seth couldn’t go anywhere without Rylie. He stepped back, getting out of Leticia’s way as she loaded the kids in her pickup. Katja took the front seat with Leticia.

  “I’ll catch up,” he said.

  The men didn’t seem to care. They peeled out, tires squealing and dirt spraying behind them, and Leticia wasn’t far behind them, though she soon turned in the opposite direction.

  He didn’t wait to see where the two parties were headed. Seth mounted the steps into the empty trailer, throwing open McIntyre’s gun safe and grabbing the rifle that he had racked inside. He flipped it upside down to load it one round at a time. Katja must have been watching the news before Leticia dragged her out of the trailer; the TV was blaring in the other room.

  Seth stepped into the bedroom to find his jacket, and the television caught his eye.

  “A representative for the Office of Preternatural Affairs has confirmed that an arrest has been made in the assassination of Senator Peterson, who spearheaded the earliest non-human citizen laws,” said the anchor, a stern-faced man with a blue tie.

  The camera in the newsroom switched to footage of the arrest. Jostling bodies half-carried a woman out of a building lit by blazing spotlights—a strip motel, which was backed by a liquor store that Seth recognized. It was on the same block as Original Sin. Hands gripped the woman’s arms, the back of her head, covering her in a blanket as they dragged her toward one of the Union’s bigger assault vehicles.

  Her hair was black, her skin was pale, and she was wearing leather.

  Seth leaned in close when they froze a shot of the woman on the screen. Her face was blurred, but…she looked a lot like Elise.

  The image was replaced by that of the news anchor again.

  “Although the suspect has been identified as infernal in origin, further information, including her class, name, and motivation, have not been released. Sources have been unable to verify whether the suspect is related to the developing crisis in Las Vegas.”

  The screen door banged open with a squeal. Seth stepped into the living room, heart leaping into his throat, hoping that Rylie had returned.

  But it was Neuma that shouldered into the room.

  “Help me,” she grunted, hauling a tarp-wrapped body in her arms. It concealed almost every inch of the person that Neuma carried, although Seth could see a single bare foot dangling over one arm. “I found her out by the mountains. I think she’s dying.”

  “It’s okay, let me look,” Seth said, heart pounding. Who was it? Had Rylie gotten caught by the Union and injured?

  “It’s bad,” Neuma said.

  “I have medical training.”

  “Not in this, you don’t,” she said.

  Neuma dropped the woman on the couch. Seth pulled the tarpaulin back.

  It was Elise. She was gray-skinned, breathing shallowly, skin tight to her bones. Wherever she had gone during the day, it hadn’t healed her. The scratches that she had earned in the fight against Katja’s wolf had grown into massive, oozing gashes.

  He looked up at the image of the woman on the screen and then at the woman on the couch. They definitely looked the same.

  But if Elise was
unconscious on McIntyre’s couch, then who the hell had the Union arrested?

  Fifteen

  The woman looked a little young to be a nurse, but the Union guards weren’t looking at her face. This nurse had the kind of curves that made her look like she was busting out of her turquoise scrubs, and the guards noticed.

  She heard them muttering to each other as she passed.

  “Damn, that ass,” one said.

  The other said, “I should have gone to medical school.”

  She didn’t acknowledge that she had heard any such remarks, but she did add a little bit of an extra snap to her hips as she walked. Let them look at her body—it was awesome. Anything to keep the Union from realizing the nurse that had just checked in didn’t really work at Riverside Memorial Center.

  She grabbed a lab cart and wheeled it down the hall. Glass bottles rattled softly on the trays. She passed curtained rooms, most of them empty, and didn’t look inside; she was heading straight for the secure room at the end of the hall, and couldn’t have cared less about the other patients.

  The door to room 933 was guarded by another Union kopis: a man in a black uniform holding his gun swinging lazily from one hand. He didn’t acknowledge the woman in the scrubs that slipped around him to push the cart into the room.

  Charla Hannity was lucky—or maybe unlucky—enough to have a room of her own. Heavy plastic curtains hung around her bed, with clean air piped through tubing as thick as a man’s thigh. She had been tied to the bed even though she was sedated; she looked tiny and frail among the medical equipment.

  The one window in the back of the room was locked. The nurse abandoned her cart, snapped the lock off with her hand, and pushed the window open.

  She leaned out, hands braced on the frame.

  Cars inched past on a street hundreds of dizzying feet below. She ignored them to look up into the night sky, beyond the shadowed outline of neighboring buildings to the purple clouds heavy with moisture. A winged creature swooped overhead, far too large to be a bird.

  She stepped back to make room.

  Nashriel Adamson landed a moment later.