by SM Reine
Elise nodded.
They slipped past the deck. Elise kicked open the window with a tinkling of shattering glass and slithered inside.
She could still hear the music in Senator Peterson’s basement, but it was muffled through the floor. None of the lights were on. Her eyes adjusted quickly, and she scanned all of the diaphanous shapes—furniture covered in white sheets.
Rylie dropped to the floor behind her. “Great, we’re inside,” she said. “Now what are we looking for?”
Elise wasn’t sure. All she knew was that Abraxas had waited to get into Senator Peterson’s house until he was distracted, which meant that Abraxas had probably been trying to get at something in the home rather than the occupant.
“Look for anything unusual for a politician to own,” Elise said.
“Like a conscience or sense of decency?”
There was no humor in the situation, but Elise found herself smiling.
Rylie whipped a sheet back, revealing an antique fainting couch. She sneezed at the dust. Elise left her to search and slipped through the basement, senses open to any hint of the infernal or ethereal. An artifact, maybe. Or some kind of magic.
Senator Peterson’s basement spanned the entire length and width of the house above. The joists were only six feet high; Elise was short enough not to bump them, but it still felt low enough that she wanted to stoop. It made it hard to see far among the covered furniture, even with her perfect night vision.
She didn’t feel anything strange, but she slipped through the furniture anyway, tracing her hands through the air over the sheets.
Rylie gave a small laugh from the other side of the room.
Elise was beside her in an instant. “What?”
“Oh, it’s nothing,” Rylie said. She was holding a picture frame with a family photo. “It’s just…” She pointed at the youngest boy in the picture, a chubby-faced toddler. “I think this is Tate. He was my best friend in high school. I’ve never seen his baby pictures before—he was so cute.” Rylie sighed. “Tate’s gotten into politics. You might have seen him giving speeches on tour after the senator died.”
“Ah. That Tate Peterson.”
“Yeah. I know it’s hard to tell, but he’s a good guy.” She set the photo down and followed Elise, yanking the sheet off of an armoire. “I killed his mother while I was suffering from silver poisoning. You can’t blame him for being angry at preternaturals.”
She paused, like she was waiting for Elise to respond—whether to be angry, to condemn her, or to say that it wasn’t her fault, Elise wasn’t sure. She didn’t care. Death happened. The Peterson family was filled with assholes anyway.
“I think about it every day,” Rylie went on. “How much it must have hurt when I killed her. All the other people I killed that winter. The fallout for all those families.” She pulled off another sheet and held it loosely in her hands, staring at the white cloth as if it were a ghost. “And there’s so many other things I regret, too. It’s like…that grief is who I am now. I dream about it. I breathe it.”
“Are you asking for me to talk you out of the exorcism?” Elise asked.
“I don’t know. Maybe. Seth thinks I shouldn’t, and he’s not often wrong.”
The mention of his name made anger surge in Elise’s gut. She caught Rylie’s eye and held it. “You asked me if I would quit this if I could,” she said. “I would. In a fucking heartbeat. But I don’t have a way out, and you do. Don’t let anyone else choose for you.”
Rylie sucked her bottom lip into her mouth and fixed her gaze on the floor. She nodded.
Elise turned from her, focusing on the issue at hand. She felt a tug of power from the opposite side of the basement.
Something under the stairs was calling to her. Except that there wasn’t anything there—not a single couch, table, or forgotten antique. But a white sheet was lying on the floor, pinned down at the corners. What was it covering if not one of Senator Peterson’s many antiques?
Elise jerked the sheet off the floor and found a portal to Hell set into the floorboards.
She had only seen such a thing once before, at a Union facility, but she recognized it instantly. The ring of stones was imprinted with infernal runes. The center basin was wide, shallow, and smooth as river rock. The sheet had done nothing to keep it from getting dusty, but that was because the dust didn’t originate from the Earth; it was orange-red and thick. Hell dust. The sign of a well-used portal.
“Is that what I think it is?” Rylie asked.
Elise’s mind was whirling. It made sense that Abraxas would have killed Senator Peterson for a portal to Hell—the only route to Dis had been destroyed, and he would have wanted another one that he could reroute for his purposes.
But if there had been a portal to the City of Dis in Senator Peterson’s basement for almost a year, then why would Abraxas have waited to bring his forces over until the recent murders?
“Unless he didn’t wait,” Elise whispered.
“What did you say?” Rylie asked.
“I obey the Father,” she said, echoing the graffiti she had seen in the sewers. The local demons hadn’t fled the Warrens because of the trouble that was coming; they had fled the Warrens because of the trouble that had already come, and was lurking in the deepest pits underneath Las Vegas. “Damn. I should have realized.”
Realization finally dawned in Rylie’s golden eyes. “The demon army is already here.”
Elise stepped away from the portal, letting the sheet fall over it again.
“We need to get to the Bellagio,” she said. “Now.”
Once they climbed onto Senator Peterson’s lawn again, Elise swept Rylie into her arms and fluttered through the night.
After three years of practice, phasing between locations was easy. Elise hadn’t accidentally dropped one of her companions in months, and she had never smothered anyone permanently. Accidents had always been rare. Now they were unheard of.
When her body reformed in Nevada, she knew for a fact that she had deposited Rylie on top of the Bellagio. Elise had clearly seen the blonde girl standing among the blood and bodies. She had seen Rylie drop to her knees, gasping for breath, dizzy with the transition between east coast and west.
But Elise’s body became corporeal again outside Las Vegas, with Rylie nowhere in sight.
She reappeared beside a desert lake—a vast expanse of deep cerulean that lapped gently against the soil at her feet. It was so far from civilization that she could make out distant stars like flakes of pyrite sparkling on a black sand beach. The clouds of the Milky Way arched overhead. There was no smoke here. No sign of apocalypse.
Elise turned, knowing whom she would see at her back.
James wore a dusty white undershirt and pants with holes at the knees—surprising to see on a man that used to iron his jeans. He hadn’t shaved since their last encounter, and his stubble had become a full-fledged beard, which only seemed to accent the hard lines of his cheekbones and nose. Bolts of white hair framed either side of his mouth.
He concealed his glowing knuckles by pulling on the kind of canvas gloves that gardeners might use, then opened his mouth to speak. Before he said a single syllable, Elise tried to phase out of the desert and back to Las Vegas.
It was like trying to run face-first into a titanium wall. The shock of it traveled through her body.
James had trapped her.
He must have known that she had tried to escape, but he showed no sign of it. “I’m sorry for disturbing you,” he said, “but I’d be lying if I didn’t say that I was pleasantly surprised I could grab you like that in the first place.”
The anger was almost too immense for her, like her body was too small to contain the size of it. She had no choice but to blow it out in a long, slow sigh—unless she wanted to punch him. Which she wasn’t entirely ruling out as an option. But Elise had tried punching him a few times, and as satisfying as it felt in the short term, it didn’t do anything about the long-term problem of J
ames Faulkner. And she didn’t want to get exorcised again, which was how their last argument had ended.
“You’ve got my attention,” she said, folding her arms.
“You were at Senator Peterson’s house. Have you discovered anything of interest?”
Elise didn’t owe him any explanation. She lifted her chin and stared him down. He stared back.
He blinked first.
“I understand that you’ve learned how to exorcise werewolves,” he said.
It wasn’t hard to figure out who had told James that—who would have had a problem with her decision to exorcise Rylie, as well as a direct connection to her aspis. “I’m going to kill Seth,” she said matter-of-factly.
James’s eyebrows furrowed. “Why? Because he loves her enough to try to save her?”
“If you’re asking me not to exorcise Rylie, don’t waste your breath. I need to sacrifice a creature that’s been infected by my blood if I want to stop the apocalypse. Not only is Rylie convenient, but it doesn’t require any real sacrifice. She’ll survive. She’ll be free of the curse. It’s a win all around.”
“From your perspective,” James said.
“Is this the part where you threaten me until I cooperate?”
“I don’t think that’s necessary, and we both know that anything I do to you would be a temporary inconvenience at best. No, this is the part where I appeal to your sense of decency.”
Elise couldn’t help but laugh. She’d heard a lot of wild things in her life, but never someone that thought she had a sense of decency.
“Rylie’s not making a rational decision,” James said. “She won’t know what she’s missing until it’s gone. Would you allow someone that’s suicidal to kill themselves, thinking that they know best? Would relieving their suffering be worth the pain you inflict upon their family?”
“I’d crush a thousand families to save a million others,” Elise said.
Surprisingly, James smiled. “We’re of a mind on that. But we must trust Seth’s judgment on this matter. When she’s in her right mind, Rylie trusts him—he’s made half the decisions for the pack for years. This is another such decision. Not just for the well-being of the pack, but for the woman he loves.”
She fixed him with a hard glare. “Do you think that loving her really entitles him to making her life decisions?” James stepped around her back, sloshing through the shallow waters of the lake. She didn’t turn to keep an eye on him, but she could feel his warmth. And she already knew the answer to her question. “If I stopped because Seth asked me to, Rylie would hate him as much as I hate you.”
James sighed. “Very well. If you have no decency, then let me appeal to your practicality. There’s an alternative to exorcising Rylie that will allow you to close every door marking the fissure between Hell and Earth.”
Elise blinked. “What?”
“The blood, Elise, the blood,” he said, holding a fist between them. “Abraxas’s vial controls everything—any members of his army that you’ve infected, every door opened with your blood as an ingredient. If you take the vial from him, you will have it all.” James’s hand trembled. “I told you not to give him your blood.”
“It was only three drops,” she said.
“Three drops in an enchanted vial. You know better than that.”
She did. She had thought it was worth it. If she had known the trouble that it would summon so many years later…
Elise shook off the moment of regret. There were bigger problems here—like the fact that he had known that Abraxas’s army was infected with her blood in the first place, but had withheld that information. “What else do you know about Abraxas that you’re not telling me?”
“That’s the extent of it,” James said.
“Did you know that he was going to open these fissures?”
“No.” He took her hand, and his canvas glove was rough against her fingers. He was really there, solid and whole. He wasn’t an illusion. “I made a mistake in trusting Abraxas with my magic, but this amount of destruction was exactly what I hoped to prevent. I hoped that my warning would show you that you can trust me.” His grip tightened. “And I want you to trust me when I say that exorcising Rylie would be a mistake.”
“What did Seth have to give you to have this talk with me?” Elise asked.
The resignation in his eyes was answer enough.
Seth had given James his allegiance, and his blood.
“This is Rylie’s choice,” Elise said. “And nothing you say can change that.”
He sagged, dropping her hand with a heavy sigh. “I see. Unfortunately, I’ve promised Seth that I wouldn’t let you exorcise Rylie, and I must keep my promises. I’m sorry.”
He jerked off one of his gloves.
Elise knew what he was going to do. He would pull out another one of those exorcism runes and toss her into Hell for a while—maybe not as long as last time, since she was running strong, but long enough to fuck up everything happening in Las Vegas.
She seized his wrist. “Don’t you fucking dare,” she said.
Elise could feel the power building within him. It buzzed between them, reaching a crescendo. James twisted his arm in her grip and opened his mouth to speak a word of power.
And then she reached out with her mind and pulled the marks off of him.
The marks Elise had drawn hadn’t responded to her call, but the living runes on James did. They flowed over his hand and onto hers, crawling up her arm like burning brands. She didn’t stop at taking the one that he had been about to use on her. She took them all—the exorcism runes, the fireball that had been hiding under his thumb, the teleportation spell that had taken him to the side of the lake in the first place.
Elise might not have been able to draw her own magic, but she could still use James’s.
Which meant she could take it, too.
She stumbled back, arm clutched to her chest as she fought to control the insane twitching. James stared at his bare hand in momentary shock.
Rendering him helpless was even more satisfying than punching him in the face.
“Thanks,” Elise said, unable to keep from grinning.
“No, wait—”
The last thing she saw before phasing was James reaching for her, unable to stop her, and she hoped that it hurt.
Weirdly, Seth Wilder wasn’t in a good mood after making his bargain with James. He didn’t exactly seem upset about the fact that a near stranger was about to become his aspis, but he wasn’t a chatterbox, either. No matter how many times Brianna tried to engage him in conversation, he didn’t respond. It made finishing preparations for the spell really boring.
Even so, she was trembling with excitement as she directed Seth to sit in the center of the circle, book clutched to her chest.
He sank to his knees. “What now?” he asked dully, eyes lifted to the statue of Metaraon’s impassive face.
“Most of the work has been done already,” Brianna said. “So just…sit tight. I’ll be right there.”
She stepped over the elaborate lines forming the exterior rim of the circle and clapped her hands to close it.
Electricity shocked over her, like leaping headfirst into a lightning storm. The world sharpened to shocking clarity, letting her see everything at once: the fine details engraved in the folds of Metaraon’s robes around his ankles, the curves of his toes, his ankle bones. She saw every drop of ink puddled in the crevices of the circle. She saw the shadows under Seth’s eyes and the cracks in the cliff face behind him.
But more than that, she saw the magic—the colors and light of it, the way it glowed within everything and connected all life with cables stronger than steel.
Her enhanced vision faded soon, but it left her breathless.
“Wow,” she sighed.
Seth glanced around him. He hadn’t felt anything when the circle closed.
Brianna folded her legs underneath her and sat across from him, drawing the locked case into her lap. Most of the obj
ects that James had given her were already embedded around the circle, but there was one remaining item. That, plus a whole pile of cloth bandages that Seth was eyeing dubiously.
She hesitated to open the case a final time.
“There’s something you need to know,” Brianna said. “A kopis and aspis aren’t just trading power. There’s this saying. It goes like, ‘More permanent than marriage, more fatal than family, more…’” He was staring at her. She had forgotten the words. “I don’t know, it sounds dumb. But it’s meant to be a warning. If things go bad between a kopis and aspis, it’s really bad. Maybe fatally bad.”
“Does it matter now?” Seth asked.
Way to sound enthusiastic.
“Guess it doesn’t,” Brianna said.
She opened the case and lifted a sharp silver knife from its depths. It was long and mean-looking, with an edge so sharp that it could cut through rock with a single swipe. Not that she had been playing with it or anything.
Seth barely reacted to the blade. He was still looking at Metaraon.
“This won’t be the last time he uses me, will it?” he asked. “James is going to find ways to keep me around until all of his doors are open.”
She pulled his hand toward her, exposing the length of his forearm. The diagrams in the book that James left her had made it painfully clear how deep she would have to cut—not only on his arm, but on hers, too. “You make fealty sound so grim,” Brianna said.
Seth finally looked at her, like he realized what she was about to do.
“It’s always the blood,” he muttered, rubbing the edge of the bandages on his neck again.
“The knife is really sharp,” Brianna said helpfully. “It probably won’t even hurt.”
Without waiting for him to brace himself, she slashed a long line from the inside of his elbow to the crease of his wrist.
She cut so deeply that it actually took a moment for the blood to surface. When it did, it was thick and dark, dribbling down his flesh to splatter on the circle.
At the contact, the magic around her seemed to sigh.