Oaths of Blood

by SM Reine

  The wrist wasn’t enough. She used her grip on his arm to draw his neck toward her mouth.

  “Relax,” Neuma said softly. “Just relax.”

  His upper body sank against hers. He didn’t seem to wear any kind of cologne. There was no chemical stink to mask the natural array of scents that wafted from his skin. He was so delicious and sweaty and mortal. Every moment he lived was a moment closer to death. It loomed over him like the shadow of an approaching eclipse.

  And then…blood. Her stomach growled at the smell of it.

  “Hey,” the man said sharply. “Warn me next time.”

  Elise’s eyes opened enough to see Neuma holding a short silver claw. Neuma sometimes wore them over her fake fingernails when she was doing bloodplay on stage. She was hovering over the man’s back, one hand on his shoulder, and had pressed the claw into his jugular to bleed him.

  “I like how you say ‘next time,’” Neuma breathed down his neck.

  Now that Elise had tasted the blood at his wrist, her vision had cleared enough to realize whom she was trying to feed from.

  “Seth,” Elise said. “Wait.”

  But the blood had already welled from his neck, thick and dark, dripping down the muscular line of his shoulder. A drop tapped on the corner of her lips. She couldn’t help but lick it away.

  Of course it was good. It was derived from Adam’s blood—pure and human and intoxicatingly ancient.

  “It’s fine,” Seth said bracingly. “Do it.”

  Neuma was rubbing his shoulders, her nose pressed to his hair, giving Elise a secretive smile from behind his skull. “You won’t hurt him. I’ve got you.” She tilted her head toward his ear. “You wanted me to warn you? Consider yourself warned, Seth.”

  She dug the claw into his neck again. Fresh blood spilled.

  Elise wasn’t strong enough to resist.

  Seth lifted his chin and offered his throat to her. She couldn’t see anything but the wound, the blood. She curled her fingers around the back of his neck, pulling him close.

  Warmth buzzed at her lips once she was only millimeters away from the vein. She hesitated.

  Seth was descended from Adam. What would that blood do to her?

  He bent down, forearm braced beside her head, and pressed his neck to her mouth. The blood gushed into her mouth in spurts, spraying over her tongue almost faster than she could swallow.

  Oh God…

  Heat flushed her body. As she drank, the energy of his blood surged through her, lighting up her veins and solidifying the surrounding tissues. She had struggled to remain corporeal for so long that it was a shock how quickly everything snapped together—as if she were born anew in the first few swallows.

  Elise gripped his shoulders, pinning him tightly against her body. Seth had been trying to keep himself elevated on his elbows pressed to the couch on either side of her head, but he collapsed when she pulled him, his weight heavy atop her. His hands cupped the back of her head, pillowing her against the arm of the sofa even as his chest flattened to hers.

  Her tongue worked against the wound, tracing the outline of Neuma’s cut, tasting deep inside of him. The blood stopped spurting and began to flow more smoothly.

  She had latched to him with every intent of letting go as soon as her faculties were returned, but her intentions meant nothing. Not with the smell of his sweat rich in her nose and his heavenly blood flowing down her throat.

  And then he groaned—a deep rumble in his chest. Maybe it was a groan of pain. Maybe it wasn’t.

  Elise’s fingers locked to his hair, digging her fingernails into his scalp.

  Neuma gave a longing sigh as she watched. Like she was witnessing a first kiss. Her fingers slipped through Elise’s bangs in a gentle stroke. “Careful,” Neuma murmured. “Not too much. Take it slow.”

  Elise didn’t want to take it slow. She wanted it all. As her body strengthened, her hunger only grew.

  Somehow, Seth had ended up entirely on top of her, and he wasn’t fighting to escape. She slid her leg up his side, hooked it around his hip, pulled him tight against her.

  And still she drank.

  Her heart raced, thundering in time with the gentle swells of blood on her tongue. Her hair, formerly a foggy mass dripping over the side of the sofa, turned to shining strands. Vibrancy returned to her skin and made it glow bright white against Seth’s flesh.

  She had never known such satiation—or such power.

  Elise could feel everything in the darkness. She could feel the buzz of electricity and magic and life that inhabited McIntyre’s trailer. Beyond the walls, she could feel the endless night, and the demons that populated it. There were stars above and infernal beasts below, far below, in the Warrens tangled underneath the wasteland.

  Someone was spray-painting Elise’s mark on the concrete at that moment. A huge X, with lines bisecting its legs, and infernal words encircling it all. I obey the Father.

  And in the middle of it all, Elise on a couch with Seth’s body against hers, his throat on her mouth, and his blood in her belly.

  She was invulnerable.

  Neuma was still massaging Seth’s shoulders. There was a hungry light in her eyes, but her voice was firm. “Okay, you’re getting dangerous now. Time to let go.”

  Elise understood what she said. She also didn’t want to kill Seth. That looming specter of mortality was a warning. Death would mean the end of flowing blood and heated bodies and a delicious, beating heart. But she didn’t want to stop drinking from him. And Seth wasn’t exactly trying to pull away.

  She dug her fingers into his scalp, pulling him harder against her, savoring the taste of his blood.

  Then she used her grip to peel him off of her.

  He sat up, flushed and breathless. Elise could still feel the place that his arousal had pressed against her hip.

  Seth looked at her with a question in his eyes, like, Is that it? And she couldn’t help, for a moment, wondering the exact same thing.

  “If you’re not done, you can always feed more in other ways,” Neuma purred, burying her nose in the hair at the nape of Seth’s neck. “But no more blood. Not today.” Her hand crept down his chest, digging her silver claw into his abs—not hard enough to cut, but enough to scrape against his shirt.

  For an instant, Elise could imagine it perfectly: feeding off of Seth with Neuma, all three of them fucking, limbs tangled, bodies sliding together. But then Elise was throwing her feet over the side of the table and standing on newly strong legs, examining her body. The wounds were gone. She was healed, and she no longer needed to feed.

  “What happened to me?” she asked.

  “Dawn,” Neuma said. “You weren’t fed, so you scattered the instant it got too bright. You can’t do that to yourself, doll. You’re not going to come back one of these days.”

  Elise raked her hands through her hair, pushing the masses off her face. She had been delirious when she tried to come back—barely corporeal at all. If not for a quick hit of Seth’s blood, “one of these days” would have been that night.

  And she hadn’t managed to come back with her clothing. Bad sign. It meant that she had gone completely insubstantial for the duration of the day—not just a quick phase into Dis, but totally nonexistent. Her clothes, sword, and chain of charms would be somewhere in the desert.

  She had almost killed herself by starvation.

  Elise stepped into the McIntyres’ bedroom and grabbed a pair of Leticia’s rattiest sweats, as well as one of McIntyre’s Metallica tees. She dressed quickly.

  When she returned, Seth was in motion, donning a jacket and sliding guns into his holsters. He didn’t look at her.

  “What did I miss?” Elise asked.

  “Some kind of attack on Vegas,” Seth said, focusing hard on the straps that held his pistols in place. “It’s swarming with Union. Anthony and McIntyre already headed in.”

  Muttering curses, Elise fished around underneath the sink and grabbed a first aid kit. She tossed it
at Seth. “Bandage yourself. We’ll phase over as soon as you’re ready.”

  “That won’t be necessary.”

  Elise turned. Anthony stood in the door to the trailer, his arms caked in blood and his visible skin a mess of bruises. She wasn’t shocked at his injury. She was only shocked that the sight of his bleeding wounds didn’t make her mouth water and her stomach cramp with hunger. She had been reacting viscerally to blood for so long that she didn’t remember what it felt like to be sated.

  Her eyes flicked past him to the man who had spoken. He was taller than Anthony and wearing a well-tailored business suit—strange to see against the humble settings of the McIntyre home. The sight of him stirred affection in Elise’s belly. It wasn’t her affection.

  “Nash,” Seth said, sounding surprised. His hand was clapped to the wound on his neck, fingers bloody. “What are you doing here?”

  The angel lifted a blinking stone. “You summoned me.”

  “No, I didn’t.”

  “Ah. Well, I created the stone to respond to your physical distress without requiring direct activation. I must have forgotten to mention it to you.” He frowned. “But perhaps I made a mistake. You look well.”

  Seth glanced at Elise. “Yeah. Uh. I’ll be right back.”

  He carried the first aid kit into the bathroom, shutting the door behind him. Neuma was lolling on the couch. She smirked at the sound of the door locking, licking the blood off the tip of her silver claw with slow, suggestive motions.

  “Did you lose?” Elise asked Anthony, taking in the sight of his shredded palms, his bruised arms.

  He nodded grimly. “We need to talk about that.”

  “It’s blood,” Nash said. “They’re not possessed by a demon; they’re all infected with some kind of blood.”

  That announcement fell flat on the air, and everyone in McIntyre’s kitchen exchanged glances. It was a strange collection of faces ringing the table across from Elise. Had she been given the choice to assemble a team for the fight to come against Abraxas, she never would have picked Seth, Anthony, Nash, and Neuma—any one of them individually, maybe, but not collectively.

  But Elise didn’t have the team she wanted. McIntyre was missing, and so was the entirety of Las Vegas. She didn’t have time to be picky.

  “Infected with blood,” she repeated carefully, emotionlessly.

  Nash nodded. “I saw it in Charla Hannity’s mind. Katja was deliberately bitten by a werewolf, and then injected with blood from a tear-shaped vessel as she changed.” He paced the kitchen, hands folded behind his back, a deep frown carving lines into his face. “Charla was also infected, but her body didn’t respond to the transfusion. Humans appear to be unaffected.”

  Chills rolled down Elise’s spine. “A tear-shaped vessel?”

  “Approximately this size.” Nash spread his first finger and thumb apart.

  Elise shut her eyes and tried to remember the last time that she had faced Abraxas in Hell. The only portal to Earth had recently fallen, and she had thought that she was trapped in the City of Dis. He had offered information to her—the secret of how to escape Hell to return to Earth. In return, Abraxas had wanted Elise’s blood, and she squeezed three drops into a tear-shaped vessel for him.

  “He’s been testing this method of infection on his infernal forces to create a stronger army,” Nash went on. “He knows that the walls have been destroyed. He knows that he can enter Heaven now that the Treaty has been shattered. This is not a mere assault on Las Vegas, but a stepping stone toward a greater attempt to conquer.”

  “That doesn’t explain what McIntyre and I saw at the Bellagio tonight,” Anthony said.

  Unfortunately, it did.

  He had already described it to her. It made perfect sense now—there had been someone that looked like Elise on the Union’s footage of the assassination, too. Elise had been thinking that it had to be doctored, some kind of conspiracy by people out to get her. But Nash’s information made it all fall into place.

  Infecting a nightmare or a succubus with Elise’s blood might make more demons like her.

  She looked down at the map that Neuma had spread across the table. It was the same one that they had been using in Original Sin’s back office. Elise had crossed out doors that she knew Abraxas had opened—the Bloomfield murder, the ones in Eugene and Tacoma. Anthony was combing crime databases in search of other crimes that might have been related—anywhere that nine people had died, with at least a few of them in the same family—and marking them off on the map, too.

  They were putting together an ugly image. The sites were each roughly equidistant, and it wasn’t just a long line of death down the pacific coast. There was also a gash straight through the center of the country, piercing its heart on the way to Pennsylvania.

  They had closed the pacific coast fissure with Katja’s blood, but that was only one fissure. This map looked like there could be two or three more—with Las Vegas at the crux.

  Elise stared at the X she had drawn over Los Angeles. She had drawn a line through the legs unconsciously, changing it to the symbol that had been graffitied in the sewers.

  “Sacrificing infected demons should close the other doors,” Anthony said. “We can capture a few of the hybrids and kill them messily on top of the weak points in the fissures. It worked in Los Angeles.”

  “Prevention would be easier than trying to contain hybrids,” Seth said. “If no more doors open, then more fissures won’t open. Right? We need to grab Abraxas. That’s the real solution.”

  Elise forced herself to look up from the map. “No, the king in chess doesn’t wage war alone. Abraxas is only a start.” She drew in a breath and let it out. “We need to stop that army. Anything that’s on this side of the fissure.”

  Nash turned an ice dagger stare on her. He knew what she was asking for. “You want me to call down the ethereal army.”

  She stared up at sculpted features with narrowed eyes, and he stared back, unwavering. He wasn’t going to let the ethereal fascination make him stand down.

  Angels were so much more powerful than demons. A half a dozen were as good as an army all their own. Asking Nash to rally help would mean losing the most powerful member of their party—and their best chance at finding McIntyre alive—but it was worth it for what they could gain.

  She wouldn’t use compulsion on him, and she wouldn’t try to bribe him with Eve’s memory. “Please,” Elise said.

  Nash nodded reluctantly. “When you call the sanctuary, tell Summer I’ll return as soon as I can,” he said, addressing Seth. He slipped out the front door, leaving it hanging open. The night beyond was heavy. The porch light barely penetrated the haze of smoke.

  “That’s all I can find,” Anthony said, closing the lid to McIntyre’s laptop and marking off a final murder on the east coast. I think I’m missing a couple here…” He pointed to the Midwest. “And over here.” He pointed near Washington D.C.

  Elise stood, hands braced on the map to get a view of the deaths. It was a large circle that touched Canada, the United States, and Mexico, with an X through the center—all too similar to the shape of the “I obey the Father” graffiti. She tapped one finger against Washington D.C. Anthony was right. It looked like one of the missing points should have fallen nearby.

  Abraxas had assassinated Senator Peterson for a reason. But he had been seen at the senator’s house that night—not the scene of the murder.

  “Find Senator Peterson’s home address,” she told Anthony.

  “Why?” he asked, beginning to type.

  She ignored the question and turned to Seth. “We’ll need another hybrid infected by the blood so we can prepare to close more fissures, if necessary. The more we can weaken this web, the better.”

  “I’m not going anywhere until we find Rylie,” Seth said.

  “I’ll find her,” Elise said. “We need to prepare now. This blood, the demons that it’s made… This is only going to get worse.”

  “How do you know
?”

  “Because,” she said, “they’re infected with my blood.”

  Anthony looked up from the laptop, hands frozen on the keyboard. He was white-lipped with surprise. He opened his mouth to speak, but a woman’s voice rose from the back of the room first. “Seth doesn’t need to go find other demons. Katja wasn’t the only werewolf that tasted Elise’s blood.”

  At those words, all heads turned toward the door.

  Rylie stood in the living room, looking frail and waifish and tanned from the sun. Dust covered her bare legs, and her blond hair was a tangled knot at her neck. She held a blanket around her shoulders. No dress, no shoes. Elise assumed that her nudity meant that she had been missing all day because she had been running as a wolf.

  Seth stood, chair legs scraping against the linoleum. “Rylie?”

  She ignored him and focused on Elise. “I drank your blood when we fought at the sanctuary,” she said. “And I’m pretty sure that my wolf would work as well to close a fissure to Hell as Katja’s.”

  The meaning sunk in slowly, washing over Elise with a chill.

  Rylie was volunteering her wolf as a sacrifice.

  She was asking to be exorcised.

  Seventeen

  Seth had never known such anger that he lost the ability to speak. Not until the moment that Elise agreed to exorcise Rylie and sacrifice her wolf’s spirit on top of the Bellagio.

  He paced through the trailer’s living room, alone with the fury knotting in his chest. Everyone else had moved on to put the plan in motion. Nash was with the angels; Anthony and Neuma were preparing ritual supplies; Elise was arming herself in the bedroom. Rylie had taken the phone into the kids’ room to call Abel, and Seth was listening from the outside of the door. He couldn’t make out what she was saying, but the murmur of her voice filled him with rage—and fear.

  What was it Rylie had said about Hell? That it was missing the infancies of her children, and killing people? Getting exorcised wouldn’t change that.