Oaths of Blood

by SM Reine

  Brianna cut her own arm next. She had been wrong—it did hurt. It hurt like a motherfucker.

  She gritted her teeth and scrunched up her face, trying not to cry out. This was the cost of power. Pain. Blood. She could do it and not be a big sissy. “Ouch,” she whispered, using the knife to flick drops of blood to all corners of the circle. Then she dropped the blade and grabbed the bandages.

  Seth watched in detached interest as she wrapped their wounded arms together, cut-to-cut, and secured it tightly. It was harder to tie a bandage one-handed than Brianna would have expected, but that was really the hardest part of the ritual, now that the circle had been created.

  She muttered a few incantations. The air went thick with magic.

  “What now?” Seth asked.

  Brianna leaned over to look at the book. In order for her to shift two inches to the right, he had to stretch his arm out and give her slack. “We wait until we’ve exchanged enough blood to secure the bond. We’ll know when it happens.”

  “And then?” He didn’t sound excited by the prospect at all.

  Brianna glanced to the altar at Metaraon’s feet. James had prepared that, too. He had told her that all they would need to do to open the door once the binding ritual completed was have Seth bleed on it and let the power flow through them. The fact that it sounded so simple made her extremely suspicious.

  But once it was done, she would have power. So much power.

  Brianna was feeling woozy from a mixture of blood loss and excitement.

  “And then we open the door to Eden,” she said.

  Nineteen

  Rylie wasn’t on top of the Bellagio when Elise arrived. “Fuck me,” Elise muttered, sweeping her eyes over the exposed, blood-drenched hotel rooms. There was nobody alive in sight. Just a lot of furniture that had seen better days and destroyed walls.

  In fact, Rylie wasn’t the only thing missing. Anthony had told Elise what happened on top of the Bellagio’s hotel tower. He had very clearly described the state of the eighteen cadavers that were on the ritual site. But there weren’t eighteen cadavers here. There wasn’t even one.

  All of the bodies were gone.

  Elise walked around the border of the wards and stepped to the edge of the room, bracing a foot on the broken window frame as she looked down. The bodies of the fallen Union team were gone, too.

  A chill rolled down her spine. She stepped back to look over the rest of the darkened Strip. It looked like a huge fist had punched through most of the casinos, decapitating the hotel towers and sending the remains scattering. The New York-New York’s roller coaster was in pieces. One of the metal tracks was on the street below. The imitation of the Eiffel Tower had toppled on top of a building behind it.

  But there were no bodies anywhere on the street. Elise would have been able to sense them.

  It was like they had all been…swallowed.

  She could feel the door to Hell standing open over the glowing symbols painted on the floor. The smell of brimstone lingered. The missing bodies didn’t mean that the fight was over—far from it.

  Elise lifted her hand in front of her face, spreading her fingers to look at the runes she had stolen from James. With the strength of Seth’s blood in her veins, the magic’s light didn’t burn quite as badly. But she had taken too many spells. Her fingers spasmed, making the muscles knot all the way to her shoulder. Maybe there was a tracking spell in there somewhere, maybe not—she couldn’t tell. Elise took a glove out of her jacket pocket and pulled it on.

  A Union helicopter flew over her, trailing its light over the street. It illuminated nothing but wreckage. She tracked it with her gaze to the end of the Strip, where more lights flashed beyond the last of the casinos. Even the Union had evacuated those few blocks of destruction downtown. They must have seen something that Elise had missed.

  She leaped off the side of the building, flashing into shadow and back into her corporeal form to land on the sidewalk. Glass crunched underneath her boots.

  The sense of infernal power twanged in her heart. She turned, expecting to see demons behind her, and found nothing but empty street—and a gaping hole in the ground where a casino used to be. Elise frowned, walking as close to the edge as she could without falling in.

  It was dark below. Very dark.

  Usually the darkness was as comfortable to Elise as her skin; it was part of her soul, and it welcomed her with warm arms. But she couldn’t see or hear through this darkness. The shadows didn’t reach out to her for an embrace. It was impenetrably black. Even though she couldn’t see more than a few feet below street level, she knew that the sewers should have been under her feet, and the upper tunnels of the Warrens below that.

  That was where the sense of the infernal was coming from.

  Surely Rylie wouldn’t have deliberately plunged into a dark, hellish pit without waiting for Elise.

  Unless she hadn’t had a choice.

  The sense of infernal power grew, with the faint buzz of hybrid minds and tainted ethereal energy. The shadows roiled like black oil in a cauldron. There was something inside of it—bodies with clawed hands and twisted faces.

  They were climbing toward Elise.

  She backed away, slipping behind the corner of a wall.

  Demons erupted to the surface, arms thrusting into the air, seeking purchase against the broken cement. Shriveled arms hauled frail, skeletal bodies to the surface. A dozen brutes came first—the kinds of ugly beasts that spawned from the pits of Dis and had never seen Earth. Elise lost count with the next dozen. They poured out of the hole in a ceaseless stream and sprinted down the road to disappear into the darkness of night beyond.

  Going straight for the Union.

  There were no human survivors left in the city, and the Union had a small army of their own. Elise could let them worry about Abraxas’s army.

  She needed to find Rylie.

  Elise slipped around the other side of the wall to the back edge of the pit, watching the demons continue to scramble to the surface. There must have been hundreds of them. They were all lower-class demons branded with the marks of the House of Abraxas. These were the front of a brute force attack. Abraxas would waste the Union’s resources, shrink their numbers, use all their ammunition—and then he would bring out the real attack, if she didn’t stop him first.

  She took a deep breath and jumped into the pit.

  How many hours had passed since Brianna and Seth started the binding ritual?

  Brianna patted her pockets in search of her cell phone, thinking that she should check the time, but her fingers couldn’t seem to grasp properly. She could get them to her hip, make them pinch closed. They kept shutting on empty air instead of her shorts. A giggle escaped her lips.

  She was feeling kind of punch drunk. Probably the significant blood loss, she thought, gazing at Seth with heavy-lidded eyes.

  Here she was with this guy she barely knew, and she had somehow ended up with her arm bandaged to his, pouring her blood into his system, and taking his blood into hers. Her grandpa, always the vehement advocate of condoms no matter how much his grandchildren didn’t want to hear it, would have been so disappointed in her.

  “Condoms,” Brianna said, and then she laughed.

  Seth gave her a weird look. Or maybe he had a weird face. It was hard to tell.

  “Feels like I’m going to fall asleep,” he said.

  “I think that’s normal?” She laughed again. “Normal! Like anything about this could possibly, in any universe from here to Coccytus, be considered normal.” The chuckles shook her entire body and made Seth’s arm shake.

  “It’s not how I planned on spending my night,” Seth said.

  “And it’ll get better,” she said. “At some point, we’re going to have to open that door for James.”

  He blinked blearily up at the statue of Metaraon. “Tall guy,” he remarked.

  “They all are,” Brianna said, thinking of James. Freakin’ James. Off running around with that m
ustached kopis of his instead of being there to make sure that Brianna didn’t cock up the highly skilled, highly sensitive spells that he expected them to perform without error.

  “Do you think we’re done yet?” Seth asked, gesturing at their arms with his free hand. “It’s been a while. My shoulder’s hurting.”

  She wasn’t sure, but there was an easy way to tell.

  One of the big advantages to having a kopis was something colloquially known as a “piggyback.” It was where they activated the bond, opening their minds and hearts to each other, allowing them to combine their strengths. Seth would temporarily become stronger and faster. Or Brianna would be able to draw a lot more magic, using him as a battery. If they could piggyback, then they were bound.

  She fumbled for the instruction book and opened it one-handed.

  “Let’s see,” she said, rubbing her eyes to clear them. The page slid into focus. “I’m going to try to open an active bond. If it works, it’s going to feel really funny.”

  “And if it doesn’t work?”

  “Then we wait an hour and try again,” Brianna said. She burst into giggles, which Seth didn’t share. “Sorry. That’s not funny.” She closed her eyes to focus internally. “Hold onto your butts.”

  Finding her so-called “core of power” wasn’t easy on the first try or two. Or three. But she eventually found it deep within herself, smoldering like a coal about to burn out, and reached into it. Come here, you wimpy little bastard, she thought.

  Brianna probably didn’t need to make hand gestures to draw her core power into a long string, but she couldn’t help it. She waved her hand in broad circles as she extended the power toward Seth, trying to feed it into him.

  It slipped and stuttered—almost dropped.

  But then it caught.

  It felt like a hook burying itself in her breastbone, with the other end of its chain connected to Seth. Brianna gasped at how much it hurt. James hadn’t mentioned that it would be painful.

  For an instant, she could see herself through Seth’s eyes. Her hair was frizzed with sweat and sand. Her shins were scraped raw. She hadn’t even noticed that she had hurt herself when she was scrambling in and out of the canyon, but it looked like she’d been injured multiple times—some of it was scabbed over, and some of it was fresh. There was nothing remotely flattering about her baggy t-shirt and Keds.

  The worst part was that she could hear Seth’s thoughts. Can’t believe I’m doing this… Why does it feel so weird? Is she doing it right? Does she have any idea what she’s doing? It’s so hot out here…feel sick… This was a bad idea… God, I miss Rylie…

  The bond settled in, and her ability to use Seth’s senses faded, but the connection didn’t.

  Brianna was an aspis.

  She suppressed another spate of giggles. “We don’t need the bandages anymore,” she said, using the knife to saw away the cloth strips. They had been tied together for long enough that it hurt to rotate her shoulder again. She rolled out her joints, wincing, as Seth did the same.

  “Ouch,” he said, lifting his wrist to look at it. She had nicked him while cutting open the bandages. A line of blood dripped toward his elbow.

  Perfect.

  “Quick, over this way,” Brianna said, getting to her feet. She had been sitting too long. Her body creaked when she unfolded her legs.

  She grabbed his arm, hauled him over to the altar, and kneeled in front of it.

  “This part won’t take long,” she explained, shooting a smile over her shoulder at Seth. “James already did most of the work. Theoretically, all I have to do now is finish the incantations, spread your blood, and watch the door open.” She tried to make it sound a lot more impressive than it was, rather than being the magical equivalent of doing a paint-by-numbers.

  “Go ahead,” he said with a deep frown. “I’m ready.”

  Brianna focused on the altar, muttering the words under her breath. James didn’t actually need the words—freak of nature half-angel thing that he was—but she definitely did. It was in Latin, and she was certain that her pronunciation was terrible, but she enunciated carefully to make sure that she hit every syllable.

  When she stopped talking, Seth extended his arm. The cut was already clotting. She squeezed his wrist to encourage the flow of blood, and a trickle slid down his forearm…and dripped onto the altar.

  The instant that his blood contacted with the holy objects, magic flared, almost blinding her with its brilliance.

  An invisible fist slammed into her chest, throwing her back.

  “Whoa!” Seth caught her an instant before she slipped off of the raised platform of the altar.

  She didn’t have time to appreciate his bulging muscles up close. The magic was ripping through her. James-strength magic, the kind of stuff that only a half-angel Gray could concoct. She was nothing more than one fragment of the system. It flowed from the statue of Metaraon, through the altar, to her, and into Seth—then dragged back in the other direction.

  A roar ripped from his throat, face contorting with pain as their combined life forces were wrenched into the statue.

  Lightning lanced from Metaraon’s stone hand, punching into the ground with a deafening whip-crack that made her skull ring. A tall, narrow electrical arc connected the circle of power to the statue and then began to spread, ripping wide into a jagged hole.

  A doorway.

  Inside, she glimpsed a beautiful garden filled with rolling hills carpeted by thick green trees, like the rain forests along the Willamette. The sky was so blue. There were no clouds in the sky. She could feel the sun warming her skin and smell the rain-kissed breeze.

  They had opened another one of the paths to Eden.

  “Forgive me,” Seth muttered.

  Annoyance plucked at Brianna. She had made a freaking portal to another dimension, and Seth was angsting about what it would make Rylie think of him?

  “It’s beautiful,” she said stubbornly, glaring up at him. His face shined with the pale gray light of the garden, highlighting the sharp planes of his face and casting dark shadows on his cheekbones.

  The door snapped shut with a thunder crack, hiding away Eden. Seth sagged, all the breath rushing out of his lungs, and bowed his head for a moment as if in prayer. “What now?” he asked in a low voice.

  James had said that once the door was closed they should evacuate quickly, head southwest to Los Angeles, catch a flight, and rendezvous with the coven at the site of the next door. Brianna opened her mouth to tell Seth what James had commanded, but she didn’t get a chance. The ground in front of Metaraon’s feet split, cracking like a mirror and shattering the rock. Cracks traveled up the sides of the canyon with a mighty groan.

  “Oh no,” Brianna said as Seth dragged her under Metaraon’s carved robes for shelter. Boulders erupted around them with pebbles and stinging dust.

  An electrical arc spread over the earth, yawning wide with a bright flare of light—not the hazy gray of Eden, but the red of fires deep within the pit. As Brianna watched, the fracture traveled up and down the canyon, splitting into a six-foot fissure that intersected the place where the door had been.

  They hadn’t simply opened a door to Eden.

  They had also finished tearing away the walls between Earth and Hell.

  Elise fell through the darkness underneath Las Vegas, and she finally understood why Anthony hated it when she phased him. Her senses were useless. She couldn’t smell, hear, or breathe. Her senses told her that there were demons everywhere—that she was inside of a demon.

  Then she dropped through the shadow and landed on rubble, and she could breathe again. Oxygen had never tasted so sweet.

  A flurry of motion around her stopped suddenly, and Elise realized that she was surrounded by dozens of demons—no, hundreds of them. She was in the upper levels of the Warrens, on top of what used to be a casino’s wall, with fiends and brutes and so many other creatures trying to climb past her to the surface. They were emerging from the lower tu
nnels, mounting the stairs, scaling the walls with their claws.

  She swept her eyes over the crowd. They stared at her with black, glossy eyes. It was at least an entire centuria: one hundred demons. Elise was outnumbered.

  But they didn’t attack. They stared at her as she stared back, hand touching the hilt of her falchion.

  After a breathless minute passed, a fiend dropped to its knees in front of her.

  “Father,” it said in the demon language.

  Once it supplicated itself, the others bowed in a wave, pressing their foreheads to the ground. The word was like an echo through the Warrens.

  Father… Father…

  These were the demons that Abraxas had been hiding in the darkest depths of the Warrens. The ones that had been leaving tributes to Elise in the sewers.

  She let her hand fall from her sword. “Where is Abraxas?” she asked, feeling sick at how easily the infernal tongue fell from her lips.

  They didn’t respond. They remained bowed, motionless and silent.

  Elise stepped down from the wall and moved through the immobile bodies. A few hands brushed against her ankles, her feet, her knees, as if desperate for her touch, but by the time she turned to see who had reached out for her, they were still again. The reverence made her skin crawl. She really hated demons from Dis.

  She jogged down the steps, careful not to step on any of the demons. The sound of motion increased behind her again as they resumed climbing to the surface, moment of prayer over.

  Let the Union deal with them. Elise didn’t want a single fucking thing to do with demons that worshipped her.

  Elise took the stairs two at a time, reaching a huge tunnel that looked like it had been carved by hand with jagged walls that sloped deeper into the earth. The demons were all coming from a fork to the left—the place where they had been hiding since Abraxas brought them through Senator Peterson’s portal, she imagined. But despite the vast numbers of the demon centuriae, she felt a much stronger sense of the infernal from the right-hand fork.