Oaths of Blood

by SM Reine

  He had to fold his wings behind him to fit through the window, compressing them tightly against his back. They lacked their usual radiance; if Nash let his energy leak, the entire hospital would lose power and hundreds of people could die. His face was tight with concentration as he straightened, tugging his suit jacket so that the tailored lines hung neatly around him.

  “Well?” he asked.

  “No problems,” Summer said, shucking the scrub top and tossing it in the trash. She had bought the outfit from a store down the street, only to discover that they didn’t carry sizes big enough for voluptuous, six-foot-tall Amazonian women. Stripped to her plain white tank top, she could finally breathe.

  Nash’s eyes sparked with appreciation, but he kept his thoughts to himself as he turned to the bed. “What are all of these apparatuses?”

  “I’m not a nurse; I only play one on TV,” Summer whispered, casting a glance at the door. “Looks like Charla’s quarantined, though.”

  Nash made a noise of disinterest and pushed through the curtains to Charla’s side. After a moment’s hesitation, Summer joined him.

  Inside the plastic curtains, the air was cooler and drier. It was easier to make out Charla’s injuries without anything between them: her dry, cracking skin; the burns on her hands where they rested atop the sheet; all of the bruising around her throat. She definitely wasn’t a werewolf. She would have long since healed that damage if she had been.

  Summer snapped her fingers over Charla’s head. The patient didn’t react.

  “I don’t think we’re going to be getting any answers out of her tonight,” she said.

  “Perhaps not verbally,” Nash agreed, stretching out his fingers, as if he were preparing to play a classical piece on the piano. “You may wish to leave the room if you prefer not to glimpse her memories. It’s too difficult to keep you out of my thoughts now.”

  Summer snuggled against his arm, as much for his comfort as her own. There hadn’t been sick people back in the Haven. Not like this. “And have to put the scrubs back on? Not happening.”

  “Very well.” Nash settled his hands on either side of Charla’s head, careful not to disturb the tubing.

  Angels were creatures of the intellectual; they could control human minds almost as easily as they could see into them, and all it took was a moment of concentration to get into the patient’s skull.

  The overhead lights flickered. Her breathing machine stuttered, stopped, and restarted.

  He plunged into Charla’s memories.

  Summer struggled not to let Nash’s energy suck her under, but it was difficult when they were so in tune with one another. She focused on the tactile sensation of his expensive suit under her fingers, the sound of machines beeping, the cool air breezing over her skin.

  But she still caught glimpses of Charla’s memory.

  Red. Fire. Burning. Summer heard the words whispered to her in a feminine voice she didn’t recognize—probably Charla’s.

  Summer blinked rapidly, watching Charla’s impassive face clutched between Nash’s hands. The woman’s eyelids fluttered, as if she were caught in a dream.

  Katja’s in pain. So much pain.

  She grabbed the bed rail with one hand, gripping it tightly. Her legs trembled, suddenly unwilling to support her.

  Nash’s features contorted as he raked through Charla’s memories, pale eyes open, but blank and unseeing.

  The blood. The blood…

  And then an image crested over all of it, filling Summer’s mind with one terrible moment of agony.

  Katja is changing, and he’s beating her as she does. He’s driving the vessel into her belly. It’s a teardrop shaped piece of glass that sloshes with blood on the inside, and its tip is a point like a needle, but that doesn’t mean that it doesn’t hurt Katja. He’s squeezing—the blood, there’s so much blood—

  Summer stepped back with a gasp. “What was that?” she asked, snapping out of the memory. She was trying to whisper, but her voice was too loud in her ears, as if projected with a megaphone.

  It took a moment for Nash to reply. He visibly struggled to dredge himself out of Charla’s mind and refocus his eyes. “The red place,” Nash said with a deep scowl. He removed his hands from her head and wiped his palms down the breasts of his jacket. “Charla and Katja were taken to Hell as slaves.”

  “Slaves?”

  “Human trafficking is the foundation of Hell’s economy.” This was said impartially, like sharing a particularly boring fact of life. “Katja was given the werewolf curse deliberately by the slavers as an experiment. And then she was…infected.”

  “Infected? By what?” Summer asked.

  “The blood,” he said softly. “The dire blood.”

  The lights flickered again, the same way that they had when Nash first dipped into her mind. She clutched his arm.

  “Careful,” she hissed.

  Nash frowned. “I’m not causing that.” He clapped a hand to his breast pocket. “It’s the summoning stone.” He extracted a tiny gem from the pocket, dangling from a golden chain. It matched the stone that he had given Seth before he left, and it glowed, pulsing like a tiny heartbeat.

  Seth was summoning Nash—Seth was in danger.

  The Bellagio had taken the worst of the damage. It stood across from a smoldering pile of wreckage that used to be another hotel casino. Smoke poured from the broken upper story, and flames danced in the lower windows. The basin that held the fountains was drier than a cow’s bones baked in summer heat. Anthony wasn’t certain how tall the hotel tower used to be, but he was pretty sure that the Bellagio was missing about ten stories now.

  The casino across the street was the source of most of the smoke. It was still burning, still pouring black clouds into the air. It smelled like scorched plastic.

  “Looks like our stop,” McIntyre said, hanging one arm out the window, Desert Eagle in hand. One sight of the gun was enough to keep the running, screaming tourists from trying to jump into their car; all of the parking garages had been blocked off by Union barricades, and nobody else seemed to have a working car downtown anymore.

  Anthony braked hard to keep from running over an Asian woman in a sundress.

  “Why here?” he asked, punching the horn. She shrieked and ran faster.

  “Because we’re not getting any farther than this,” McIntyre said. “Kill the engine.”

  Anthony pocketed the keys and grabbed a shotgun out of the back before joining McIntyre. They had to stand on the roof of the car in order to see anything over the crowd.

  People were pouring out of all the surrounding casinos, none of which had any lights on. The ones at the end by The Excalibur still had light, but everything on this side was dark. It was eerie to see the Strip without power; the milling bodies looked like ocean waves in the darkness, crashing over the sidewalks and splitting around the BearCats that rumbled two blocks down. The faint glow of sunset still rimmed the horizon. In half an hour, it was going to be complete darkness in Las Vegas, aside from the Union’s emergency lights.

  It wasn’t the power outage making everyone run. Anthony heard another rumbling crack, and he turned in time to see that the Stratosphere had snapped. Its point seemed to tumble in slow motion, taking an elegant swan dive across the street.

  “What the fuck is going on?” Anthony asked.

  Plumes of light mushroomed over the Bellagio, washing the street in crimson hues.

  “Abraxas,” McIntyre said.

  They waded into the crowd, shoving against the flow of bodies. They didn’t have to struggle as hard once they reached the walkway alongside the fountains; everyone that was going to leave had already left the hotel, and the shops waiting for them at the top stood empty and dark.

  None of the elevators were working, so they had to take the service stairs. Even the emergency lights were turned off. McIntyre held up his cell phone with the flash turned on, illuminating their path into the higher levels of the hotel. Anthony’s heart barely beat as
they climbed.

  The first thing that Anthony noticed on the top floor was how nice the rooms at the Bellagio must have been before the roof and walls had been ripped away. The attack had occurred across two suites; it was impossible to miss noticing how beautiful the bathroom fixtures must have been, how nice the bedspreads, the view of the Strip. He bet that there had been nice wallpaper in the rooms, too. No way to tell now.

  Three of the bodies were arrayed around what used to be a doorway. Two more were draped over one of the beds. His eyes skimmed them, going from one to the next without lingering. Fading crimson symbols marked the floor around the bodies in the rough shape of a circle.

  It looked a hell of a lot like what Anthony had found at the Bloomfield house, but there were more bodies: eighteen instead of nine, at a quick count. Two separate rituals, maybe. The bodies had also been subjected to more damage. Instead of merely having gaping, bloody gashes marking their bodies, they had been ripped apart. Most of them were split from throat to genitals. Anthony didn’t see any intestines. It was like they had all been hollowed out.

  “Huh,” he said, because he was far beyond his ability to be surprised anymore.

  When Anthony was a kid, he used to visit the Morales farm down in Mexico. They would select a pig and slaughter it for the entire family to eat. He had been there for the butchering many times. Growing up with that, he didn’t see the pigs as pets or even animals. He saw them as cuts of meat.

  That was what this looked like. Cuts of meat. A butcher’s shop at the top of the Bellagio.

  McIntyre liked to pretend he was hardened to the bodies, too, but he was pale under the piercings, and he scratched at his tattoo sleeves like he was covered in swarming termites. “This don’t look like a hybrid attack,” he said. “I’ve seen hybrids, and this isn’t hybrids.”

  He was right. Hybrids usually killed by cleaving, tearing, or crushing. But the surgical nature of the wounds seemed more sadistic. And the missing organs? Hybrids weren’t man-eaters.

  “Maybe a possessed hybrid attack,” Anthony said, but he knew how wrong that was as he said it. It was too quiet on the roof—almost peaceful with the hot smoke blowing around them.

  “Where’s the Union?” McIntyre asked.

  Anthony frowned. McIntyre was right; there were no black-clad bodies among the dead. “They must not be here yet.”

  “You kidding? The streets were crawling with ‘em.”

  Was it possible that the Union simply hadn’t made it to the Bellagio yet, even though it was obviously the site of a recent attack?

  Anthony walked up to the edge of the room, careful to stand back a few inches as he looked over the side at the street. BearCats were still crawling along the pavement, slowly herding tourists toward evacuation points. A couple of them looked like they were approaching the Bellagio.

  “Guess we’re first,” Anthony began to say, but his voice died in his throat when he looked toward the back of the hotel. Metal claws gripped what had been a window frame, with long ropes dangling toward the ground on the other side. The Union hadn’t taken the stairs. They had scaled the outside of the building. At least, they had attempted it.

  Black dots marked the sidewalk on the other side. That was what his brain wanted to see—black dots. He couldn’t imagine that they were cuts of meat at that distance.

  A spotlight swept over the cement, momentarily illuminating the broken, twisted limbs, the scattered weapons, the splatters of blood.

  The entire Union unit had been tossed off the top of the hotel.

  Anthony wasn’t afraid of heights. He didn’t get vertigo in high places. He and Elise had even gone bouldering a few times for fun—which was climbing some pretty impressive cliffs without a scrap of gear. But he suddenly felt horribly insecure where he stood, like the floor was going to vanish underneath him and the street would rush at his face.

  He stepped back reflexively.

  “What could have done that?” he muttered, chancing another glance over the side.

  “Uh…Anthony,” McIntyre said.

  “What?” He turned.

  They weren’t alone.

  A woman stood where a hot tub should have been, perched on top of a pile of broken porcelain in precarious, spike-heeled boots. Her slender legs were wrapped in leather. She wore a loose shirt that billowed around her in the wind. Her hair was sleek black, the same shade of infinite nothingness as her eyes, and her face was pale.

  Anthony only got a glimpse of her before she flickered and vanished. Gone.

  “Elise?” he asked, stepping toward the place where she had been standing.

  McIntyre gave a guttural cry behind him. Anthony whirled in time to see a flash of the pale-skinned woman snapping a high kick at his face. He ducked under it. A boot whistled over his head. McIntyre was already on the ground, blood pouring out of his broken nose. He hadn’t ducked in time.

  Anthony lifted his gun, but the woman was already gone again.

  This time, he saw a wisp of black smoke darting across the floor—hard to make out unless you knew what you were looking for. And Anthony definitely knew what he was looking for. He had seen Elise phase like that a thousand times.

  Something hard connected with the back of his head, throwing him into the bed. His hands landed on slick, sticky blood. It immediately began soaking through his cast, leaving black stains on the rough bandaging.

  He didn’t take the time to look at who had attacked him. Anthony kicked backward blindly and felt his foot hit.

  When he straightened, there was nobody behind him.

  “That’s not Elise,” McIntyre said.

  The woman appeared on the wall behind McIntyre, hair streaming around her, bleeding into the night. It wasn’t quite as sleek as Elise’s—more like it was fraying and splattering ichor everywhere. Her head was ducked so that her features were impossible to make out.

  Anthony fired the shotgun. Buckshot sprayed into empty air.

  Gone again.

  The image of the broken Union bodies on the sidewalk flashed through his mind an instant before he felt hands on his shoulders.

  And then he was airborne.

  Elise didn’t love Anthony. She had never loved Anthony. She had been selfish, unappreciative, and thought of James first, second, and third, even when they had been deluding themselves into thinking they had some kind of relationship. But she would never hurt him. She had given up her life to save his when he was possessed by a demon; it was his fault that she had died, and they were friends now.

  She would never throw me off the fucking Bellagio.

  That was all he could think as he watched the edge of the building rush past him.

  He flung out a hand, making a swipe for the window’s ledge. He felt the bite of broken glass. Saw blood trickle up his fingers toward the sky, as if gravity had inverted. His good hand missed the edge, but the fingers on the side of his broken arm caught. Unfortunately, they were too weak to grip.

  He fell.

  Anthony’s side slammed into the glass, and he bounced toward the bodies of the dead Union unit.

  His hand brushed a rope.

  Anthony grabbed more by reflex than intent. His hands closed on braided nylon, and pain slashed his palm as the friction built. His instincts wanted him to let go—but he looked down to see the ground still rushing at him too quickly, and gripped the Union’s climbing rope harder instead.

  He gritted his teeth as he clutched the rope in both hands, struggling to slow his descent. He could smell burning flesh, saw the blood slicking the nylon, and held on for dear life.

  The hook at the top came loose two stories from the sidewalk.

  Anthony hit the cement a half-second later.

  For a blissful moment, he blacked out. He knew he must have blacked out, since he went from bleeding and burning and falling to utter motionlessness without any sense of transition. When he became aware again, he realized that there was something wet and sticky underneath him—he had landed on a bod
y—and the nylon rope pooled on top of him.

  “Argh,” he groaned, curling onto his side. He couldn’t begin to enumerate his injuries. Every inch of him hurt. The friction burns on his hands, though—that was a whole new kind of pain, far worse than having the breath knocked out of him.

  He grimaced up at the hotel that he had fallen from. A shadow had settled over the entire top floor…and was creeping down the side toward him.

  The Not-Elise was coming after him.

  If she was moving down to attack him again, then he didn’t feel optimistic about McIntyre’s chances. He realized it with a spark of grief, which was quickly overruled by his entirely selfish urge not to be on the ground when the demon reached him.

  He needed to stand and fight. But his shotgun, useless as it was, had been dropped on top of the Bellagio.

  Anthony only knew two ways to hurt Elise: light and electricity, neither of which was working on that block of the Las Vegas Strip at the moment. But there was one light a few blocks away—the brightest goddamn light in the world, which thrust from the peak of the Luxor’s pyramid and burned into the clouds.

  If there were an Elise-killer anywhere, that would be it.

  Clutching the ropes to his chest, Anthony staggered to his feet and bolted, slipping and sliding on wet pieces of the Union’s splattered bodies. He found traction and picked up speed.

  The tide of fleeing tourists had mostly cleared now, abandoning the dark half of the Strip for relative brightness toward The Excalibur and Mandalay Bay. Anthony rushed along with the crowd that remained, ignoring the shouts as he slammed into them, and not daring to look over his shoulder. He knew that the demon was following him. He could feel her at his back like blood dripping down his spine.

  When he hit the first row of streetlights, they blacked out behind him.

  She was catching up.

  Anthony ran faster.

  The Union rolled down the road. They had deployed one of their tanks now, and it aimed its cannon straight down the road, toward the growing shadow that pursued Anthony.

  Whumph. Mortar rounds hurtled into the air.

  He had seen Elise swallow bullets, blades, and anything else that was thrown at her when she was incorporeal. He was willing to bet she could devour the mortar rounds whole, too. And that thing, that sick bitch that had killed everyone at the Bellagio, seemed to have the same ability. He never heard the mortar rounds hit anything.