Oaths of Blood

by SM Reine

  The streetlights on the entire block cut off.

  But the Luxor still burned, and Anthony rushed toward it, hurtling over the pedestrian bridges as encroaching night crawled behind him.

  He reached the base of the pyramid and stared up at the glassy black obelisk. Its beam of light looked like safety and freedom. It looked like life.

  Unfortunately, everything between him and that light was sleek, unclimbable glass.

  Anthony unspooled the hook and rope in his hands, swinging it in a wide loop. At its periapsis, he released.

  The hook hurtled toward the light, shrinking to a pinpoint.

  It caught.

  There was no way to tell what it had hooked on—if it was the edge of a window on the fifth floor or the fifteenth, if it would get him anywhere near the light, or even if its hold was firm enough to support his weight. Anthony couldn’t try again. There was no light behind him now, and he could hear the screams of humans swallowed by demon-shadow.

  Anthony scrambled up the side of the Luxor, groaning at having to grip the nylon rope in his burned hands. He tried to support his weight with his feet, but the glass was so much slicker than he imagined, and the wind was too strong the instant he got off the ground. He wrapped the rope around his cast, gritted his teeth, and climbed one floor at a time.

  He pulled hard, struggling toward that beam of light, and it grew in his vision.

  He could hear the humming of the Luxor’s power systems as he got closer, buffeted by dust on the wind, eyes stinging with smoke. And behind him, he could feel the press of infernal energy at his back, and hear the whisper of a hungry, wordless voice.

  And then the Luxor’s light beam shut off.

  The Strip was dark.

  His aching hands lost grip on the rope, and Anthony tumbled into darkness.

  Brianna had never worked such complex magic in her entire life, and they weren’t even finished with the circle of power yet. James had drawn the initial ring to be bigger than any standard circle—big enough that a full complement of thirteen witches could have performed rituals within. But it wasn’t intended to be populated by a coven—just one witch and her kopis-to-be.

  “I’ve never seen symbols like this before,” Brianna admitted as they worked. They had each taken separate quadrants of the circle in an attempt to get it drawn faster. There seemed to be some kind of crystals mixed in with the sticks of chalk; the lines glimmered in the lights they had erected around the statue.

  “Few people have,” James said with a faint smile. “Until the Union began matchmaking their soldiers, only a few dozen kopis and aspis dyads existed at any given time. It’s not an easy ritual.” His smile grew as he continued to draw.

  “What’s so funny?” Brianna asked.

  “I’m thinking about the first time I made one of these,” James said, sitting back on his heels with chalk in one hand and a dagger in the other. His eyes were distant, lost in memory. “It was in a town called Klampenborg, which is a suburb of Copenhagen. We were on the trail of a fallen angel. It was cold and gray in the depths of winter, but I think those days—drawing that circle, performing that ritual—were the warmest of my life.”

  Brianna focused hard on drawing her quadrant. “What’s it like? Having a kopis?”

  He thought about this for a long, quiet moment.

  “It’s like being complete,” James finally said.

  She sneaked a glance at him. His smile was gone, but he still looked vacant, many years and many miles away.

  He realized that she was looking at him and met her gaze. Brianna busied herself with the drawing.

  “You’ll know soon enough,” he said, with less emotion than before.

  Brianna was still trying to wrap her mind around the idea of having a lifelong binding to Brogan. Brianna and Brogan—they could go by B&B. It was the makings of a cool team name. But no matter how hard she tried to work up enthusiasm for the idea, she wasn’t hot on the idea of having some twenty-eight-year-old ex-Marine with a wife following her around for the rest of her life.

  Wasn’t it supposed to be closer than marriage or something like that? How was a partnership supposed to be closer than a married couple if he was already married? Sounded like weirdness waiting to happen.

  She had noticed that James wore a band on his ring finger. She wondered if it was a wedding ring.

  “What’s she like?” Brianna asked. “Your kopis. You bound to, like, the only female kopis in existence, right?” Pairings of kopides and aspides wasn’t exactly public record, but Brianna had trained with the White Ash Coven for a few months before it dissolved, and James had been their favorite topic of conversation.

  “She’s my missing half,” James said, “and we won’t discuss her.”

  Brianna shrugged it off, but the curiosity gnawed at her. What kind of woman did it take to be a kopis? She was probably pretty scary-looking, all biceps and linebacker shoulders. Bet she has a mustache. Yeah, definitely a mustache. Brianna was probably a lot prettier, even if she couldn’t bench press cars with her pinkie finger.

  If James could grow to think of a hirsute ape of a woman as his other half, then Brianna could definitely get used to Brogan.

  Preparing the circle took about a million and a half years. James might have been okay doing hours of spell crafting, but Brianna wasn’t. When the air began to cool with approaching evening, she climbed out of the canyon to stretch.

  The sound of faint sirens drew her attention to the south. Helicopters were tearing over the desert, heading for a plume of smoke rising from Las Vegas’s distant skyline.

  It was a lot of smoke. Like, “an entire city block detonated” kind of smoke.

  “Should we be worried about that?” Brianna called down to James.

  He shielded his eyes and peered around the rock formations to see what she meant. “Damn,” James said, and then he went back to work, like it was no big deal.

  “Is this part of your plan, too?” she asked.

  He didn’t reply.

  In fact, he seemed entirely unconcerned about the whole thing. And sure, when you’re an angel-witch-thing who has been through a couple of apocalypses, maybe blowing up Las Vegas wasn’t really a big deal. But Brianna had seen what happened to Reno after demons hit it hard. It was ruined. She was envisioning Union perimeters, empty buildings, a winter of drifting ash on the Strip. That hadn’t been the Vegas she wanted to visit.

  Brianna worried, not for the first time, that she may have possibly—just a little bit—gotten herself into much bigger trouble than she had been hoping for.

  But then James waved her down, beckoning her sense of adventure to rejoin him, and she climbed back into the canyon to finish what she’d started.

  They completed the circle a few hours after nightfall.

  According to the guidebook, it would be a few hours before it had properly “set”—the crystals needed time to soak up energy from the surrounding world and the charms needed to age. But it was otherwise completely done.

  In a few more hours, Brianna was going to make a lifelong commitment to a kopis she barely knew.

  It was enough to make her question whether the power was worth it all. Giving up her one and only chance to be an aspis to some stranger, while James went around blowing up major metropolitan areas—or at least being totally chill about it. But she had already come this far, traveled hundreds of miles and dug in the dusty desert for a week to make it happen.

  She shook out her hands, laughing nervously. “This is exciting,” she told James, stepping back to study their handiwork. The circle was a work of art. “I’m as nervous as a virgin on her wedding night.” Or what she thought a virgin on her wedding night would feel like, anyway.

  James apparently didn’t find it funny, because he didn’t laugh.

  “Sorry,” she said, “that was in bad taste?” His eyes had gone all blank again. “Are you okay, James?”

  With a shout of pain, he doubled over, gripping his stomach with both
hands. She touched his arm just in time for the vision to crash over him and pass through her.

  Everything was dark. So dark.

  Brogan could hear the orders being shouted over his Bluetooth earpiece, but couldn’t make out any of the words over all of the running, the screaming.

  The power had gone out on the opposite half of the Strip minutes earlier, but it was even darker now than it had been before. It wasn’t a natural darkness. There was shadow spilling from the Bellagio, creeping toward the tank and the BearCats, approaching the line of men with guns—the line on which Brogan stood.

  A black wall of shadow was only inches away.

  “I’m supposed to be in IT,” he told the kopis next to him, who didn’t laugh.

  Everyone fired. The sound of bullets tore through the air, shattering his eardrums.

  And then the shadow dropped on him.

  There was no sound at all.

  Brianna tore away from James with a shriek, clutching her head. Her eyes were streaming. She expected to see blood when she looked down, but she was uninjured—the vision had been so real.

  It had been real…for Brogan.

  “Oh my Goddess,” she whispered.

  James had collapsed to his knees. He gazed up at her with horror in his eyes, and said the words that didn’t need to be said.

  “Brogan is dead.”

  Sixteen

  Anthony was pretty sure that he was dead. He was drifting among the clouds, high above nothingness, drawn along by the wind. If this was death, it wasn’t so bad—it was awfully quiet.

  But he was still hurting. That couldn’t be right. Death should have been painless.

  The sound of churning air and rustling feathers made him look up. There was a man above him with broad wings that stroked at the air, neck and shoulders straining as he carried Anthony.

  With a jolt, he realized that he had been caught by an angel falling off the Luxor.

  Anthony wasn’t dead. Just lucky as hell.

  “Who are you?” he tried to say, but the wind whipped away his voice, sucking the breath from his lungs. He struggled to breathe at that altitude. From up high, Las Vegas looked like an isolated cluster of glimmering stars, and the air was cool and damp.

  As Anthony watched, the lights went out a block at a time, spreading from the Strip toward the edge of the city.

  He had been saved, but he was the only one. The darkness was conquering.

  The angel descended swiftly, folding his wings back to reduce drag. The ground grew rapidly. A dark plane spread below as the air turned warm and dry and smoky all over again.

  Anthony set down on the desert far outside Las Vegas, miles away from the nearest highway, and his legs immediately buckled under the weight. He sagged to his knees.

  The angel crouched beside him, a hand on his shoulder. “You’ll be fine,” he said. “My name is Nashriel. I’ve saved you from the demon.”

  “Thanks,” he said, voice raw in his throat. “Don’t know why you picked me out of everyone else to save, but thanks.”

  Nashriel’s pale blue eyes focused hard on him, boring through Anthony’s skull. “I’ve seen you in her mind.”

  “Whose mind?”

  The angel looked impatient. “Eve. Elise. You know who I’m talking about.”

  “You know Elise?” Anthony asked.

  “We all do,” he said.

  Oh. The angel thing. When Elise had been designed by Metaraon to be the Godslayer, he had included a heavy dose of ethereal fascination in her—an intangible quality that gave her sway over angels. Anthony had watched it in action before. It was enough to turn scary immortal creatures into reluctant lapdogs. Creepy as fuck. He had been hoping it would have gone away after she left the garden.

  He shook off his sense of unease and turned to look at the horizon. That close to Vegas, he should have seen a glow from the lights. But it was so very dark. “Is that it?” Anthony asked, struggling to stand. “Did Vegas get eaten by some demon?”

  Nashriel gave him a hand up. “Possibly.”

  It was hard to imagine destruction that swift. It had taken Yatai, the mother of all demons, the span of many days to destroy Reno, and she had left behind survivors. But there was no light on the horizon anymore. No hint of the city that should have been there. If Anthony hadn’t seen it while flying away, he would have thought that the earth had swallowed it whole.

  “It’s still gotta be there,” he said.

  “But it may not be populated,” Nashriel said. “Time will tell. First, I must find Seth and Elise. I have reason to believe that Seth is in danger, but I was unable to locate either of them within Las Vegas. Only you.”

  “I left Seth at McIntyre’s place,” Anthony said, gesturing toward the mountains. “He said he was going to follow. I don’t know if he did.”

  “Show me,” Nashriel said.

  Elise woke up in darkness. A face hovered over hers and cool hands touched her wrists. She felt like she should have known that face, but it only looked generically mortal. Dark brown eyes, thick lips, strong nose. The man’s hair was black, but humanly so; he was not a demon.

  Which meant that human blood was running through his veins.

  He may or may not have been handsome, but appearance was irrelevant. What mattered was the vibrancy of his skin, the strength of his life force.

  “Her wounds aren’t even clotting,” said the man in a low voice. “Considering the depth of the bruising, these gashes, the way they’re bleeding—I’d almost say she’s anemic. But I don’t know. You were right. I’ve never looked at a demon before. I don’t know how they’re…arranged.”

  Another voice. “We’ve got all the same parts. All of ‘em.” That was Neuma. “Elise don’t need a doctor, she needs to feed. But I’ve gotta say, I appreciate your determination. It’s downright heroic.”

  “She’s the only chance we’ve got against Abraxas.” Fingers stroked her throat, and she let her eyes drop shut again. Even the faint hint of light in the room made her eyeballs feel like sandpaper. “Her pulse seems faint,” he said. “I’m not sure. Should her heart be beating?”

  A second hand touched her beside the first. It hummed faintly with demon energy. It was easy to recognize Neuma, blood of her blood, the many-times-great-granddaughter of the demon that had formed Elise. “That’s not normal. Demons should run stronger,” Neuma said. “She’s starving. As long as she’s starving, she’s not gonna heal. This will keep getting worse until her body’s all gone.”

  “This is McIntyre’s house. They must have food here.”

  “She doesn’t need to eat like that, and she don’t drink water.”

  “Then what?” the man asked.

  Blood…

  The sound of blood sloshing with every squeeze of a juicy heart muscle roared in Elise’s skull. There was life sitting beside her. If she frayed, faded into night, she could envelop him. Devour him. Swallow deep.

  With a sigh, she let herself slowly begin to sink into the shadows.

  “Shit, she’s fading,” Neuma said.

  “What? Dying?”

  “Spreading out into the shadows. You should get outta here before she’s all done melting. I don’t think she’ll swallow me, but a juicy human like you?”

  Juicy. Like a bowl of black cherries leaking their fluids. Or a human heart pierced with a silver dagger.

  His pulse was racing. Even with her eyes closed, Elise could see it as clearly as boiling magma. If she wanted to, she could have put a finger on any of his major pulse points, or his heart. She could drive through his flesh and rip the heart free.

  Swallow deep…

  “We should bandage her wounds,” the man said.

  Neuma’s chuckle rolled through Elise. “No point in holding the blood and ichor in when it won’t replenish.”

  “There has to be something I can do, dammit.”

  There was definitely something that he could do.

  Her corporeal hand rested on his wrist, where the bl
ood flowed underneath. She squeezed, sinking her fingernails into the tender skin, and dug hard. The scent of blood filled her nose.

  He didn’t jerk away, but he said, “Christ.”

  And Neuma said, “If you’re feeling generous, go ahead. I won’t let her kill you.”

  “You think I should…” He trailed off. Elise could hear him swallow hard, a wet sound. “I should let her feed on me?”

  Elise lifted her fingers to her mouth and licked them clean.

  It wasn’t merely mortal blood. It was beyond delicious—like a fountain of liquid dark chocolate stirred with Kahlua and cream. Sheer decadence. She had been expecting a steak and had gotten a gourmet dessert. As soon as she swallowed, the sounds in the room grew a little sharper. And her sense of the pulse only improved.

  “You could,” Neuma said. “Depends on how comfy you are with your bodily fluids.”

  “Uh…which fluids?”

  Elise pulled the mortal’s wrist to her.

  “Blood,” said the succubus. “Looks like that’s the fluid she’s cravin’ right about now.”

  “You’re sure it would fix her?” he asked as Elise gripped his arm tighter. He wasn’t fighting to escape, but he also wasn’t letting her bring his wrist to her mouth.

  “About as sure as I can be.”

  “Okay,” he said, relaxing his arm. “Okay. I can do this. Don’t let her kill me.”

  Words, meaningless words.

  His skin was warm and rough and smelled of musky man. It stirred many hungers inside of her—the carnal kind that burned between her legs, a visceral need for meat, and an aching for death. But she wanted the blood more than anything else.

  She rubbed her cheek against his forearm, following the scent of tangy iron to the imprint of her fingernails. The blood was already slowing. He healed quickly—a sign of his strength. Elise licked the wound, lapping up what he had already bled. She could feel him holding his breath. It slowed his heart while his adrenaline spiked.