by SM Reine
That was where Elise descended.
Rylie staggered to her feet on the edge of a canyon, gasping for air. As soon as Elise had hands again, she steadied the other woman. “Careful,” Elise said.
Rylie tried to respond, but all that came out was a croak. One hand clutched at her throat; with the other, she pointed into the crimson glow of the canyon.
Elise looked down.
A white statue stood on the opposite end of the canyon. From above, Elise couldn’t tell who it was meant to represent—only a tall man wearing robes with one hand extended. He looked like he had been carved from marble.
In front of him stood a raised platform of earth, upon which glowed a witch’s circle. Below that, the three fissures joined. Elise could see directly into Dis, as if soaring overhead during one of her many daytime visits. It was opening wider, millimeter by millimeter. The black city sprawled below.
There was no sign of a mass murder. There was only an altar, a splatter of blood, and candles.
“Can you breathe?” Elise asked Rylie.
“Not really,” she gasped. “The smoke—it burns.”
It would, for a human. But for Elise, it was like her first breath above water in months. Hell was pumping its atmosphere directly into their world.
“Don’t move,” Elise said.
She blinked Rylie into the bottom of the canyon, downwind from the blasts of wind on the edge of the circle of power. It thrummed with energy. A spell had been cast there, and recently—though there was no sign of a witch.
A spotlight flashed over them. Union incoming. The helicopter buzzed away as soon as it arrived, but if helicopters had found them, then it wouldn’t be long before their vehicles and soldiers followed.
“Bain Marshall,” Rylie wheezed, pointing at the statue.
She was right—the statue standing over them did bear more than a passing resemblance to the Bain Marshall monument in Northgate. The features and clothes were dissimilar, but the pose was the same, and so was the material. “This was a door to Eden,” Elise said, her heart sinking into her stomach.
Which meant that it was Seth’s blood spilled on the altar—and James’s actions that had made Earth split open to Hell.
Another spotlight swept over them. Rylie ducked under the statue’s robes, taking shelter in its shadow. There were candles arrayed all around his feet.
“What do we do?” she asked, hand cupped over her nose and mouth.
The amount of energy Elise could sense in the circle suggested that there might be a door she could close, like in Los Angeles. But there were no hybrids emerging here, and the vial of blood had been lost.
She looked at Rylie, and Rylie looked back at her.
“The wolf,” Elise said.
Rylie’s eyes lit up. “Do you think that would work?”
“I don’t have any other ideas.”
The drone of helicopters approached, growing louder as they dropped closer to the ground. They didn’t have much time.
“Let’s do this,” Rylie said, dropping her hand from her nose. Her face was filled with fierce defiance. “Let’s close the fissure and save the world.”
“Sit down,” Elise said.
Rylie dropped to her knees in front of the statue, shrunken in front of the looming marble form. Elise lifted the chains over her neck and settled them over Rylie’s head. The Alpha ran the charms through her fingers, making them tinkle like tiny wind chimes. It was almost entirely drowned out by the air blasting through the fissure and the hum of helicopters.
“Do you think it hurts?” the Alpha asked. “Being exorcised?”
Having the spirit of a wolf ripped out of a human body? “Yeah, probably,” Elise said. “Can’t be worse than shifting shapes all the time.”
Rylie seemed to be thinking something similar, because she closed her eyes and smiled. When another spotlight touched her, it lit up her blond, wind-whipped hair like a halo.
“I’m ready.”
Elise didn’t waste any time. The earth was trembling beneath her feet, and she could hear distant screaming—the kind of screams she never should have heard outside of Hell. Worse still, she could feel demons and kopides nearby. The battle was coming to them.
She centered herself, seeking her core of power, and prepared to exorcise Rylie.
James wasn’t answering his phone. Of course he wasn’t answering his phone when Seth most desperately needed him.
“I can’t get him,” Brianna whispered, finally dropping her phone back into her pocket after her eighth failed attempt to reach James. They were hidden behind rubble that had fallen from the cliff face, out of eyesight from Elise and Rylie. “I know he must be nearby, but he’s ignoring me, or he’s dead, or…” She searched for another explanation, but didn’t come up with anything.
If James was ignoring them, he had better be dead.
He had made a promise. He had sworn that he could prevent Elise from exorcising Rylie, and all Seth had to do was surrender his blood, his autonomy, his entire goddamn life. He had done it against his better judgment—he had trusted James to stop Elise.
But here they were. Demon and werewolf on the brink of a widening gateway to Hell.
Prickles rolled down the nape of Seth’s neck, making the hair stand on end. He could feel Brianna in his head—the bond was still open and raw, like a gaping wound—and he would have given anything to get her out. He couldn’t think properly with her alien presence taking up residence behind his eyes, pressing against his brain like a witch-shaped tumor.
Seth slammed his fist into the opposite hand. He wanted to punch James or Elise, but he would have to settle for beating himself.
This was his fault. He shouldn’t have trusted James.
He watched as Elise lowered her chain of golden charms over Rylie’s head, just like she had with Katja. The chimes jingled.
Rylie looked happy.
For a moment, Seth was tempted to let her go through with it. There was nothing he could do to Elise. She was the night—how do you fight against the night? And Rylie had insisted that she wanted this. A lonely, rebellious part of him contemplated what it would be like for her to be free of the wolf. Maybe she would be free of the last five years of memory, too. They could start over again afresh. She wouldn’t remember Seth leaving her to go to college, she wouldn’t remember falling in love with Abel, she wouldn’t remember the children they had together.
He squeezed his eyes shut, and on the other side, he could see Rylie the way she was when he first met her. She had just arrived at her first day of summer camp. Seth had been scouting out the cabins, where he knew a werewolf was hiding; she had been sitting on a bench. They had seen each other across a hundred feet of glassy lake. Rylie hadn’t been bitten yet. She had been gawky and awkward and completely took his breath away.
They had been too far apart to tell such minor details, but Seth could have sworn that he remembered Rylie’s eyes being a deep, soulful brown. Not gold.
He could see those eyes again.
But resetting everything with Rylie wouldn’t reset Abel and the pack. Abel was a better person now that he had a mate. Losing her would be worse than killing him. It would rip his soul out.
The chance to start over wasn’t worth that.
“I can’t let her do this,” Seth said, eyes flying open. He was holding his gun. He didn’t even remember drawing it.
Brianna wasn’t much for guns—he could feel the panic rise within her at the sight of it. “What are you doing?” she hissed, stepping in front of Seth to bar him with her arms.
“I have to save her.” He had no idea how, but he had to try something. Anything. Elise was holding her hands over Rylie as Union helicopters circled, and he was out of time.
But his aspis was still in his way. “James specifically said that we needed to stay out of trouble once the door opened.” She planted her hands on his chest, trying to force him back. “Seth, don’t go, you have to be careful—”
Elise
was speaking Latin. Her voice drifted over them.
“Crux sacra sit mihi lux…”
Seth steeled himself, taking a deep breath. He sought out the peace within himself, tuning out the sounds of screaming and Latin and beating helicopter rotors and Brianna’s emotions tumbling through his skull. He found a place of calm within himself—the surety that he was, for the first time in months, exactly where he needed to be.
One last favor for the pack.
Seth easily elbowed Brianna aside, gripped his gun in both hands, and stormed toward Elise.
Elise felt her own power crackle over her skin, building to a fever pitch. Rylie was watching her with trusting eyes, oblivious to the magic, hands clutching the chains. “Crux sacra sit mihi lux,” Elise said, pulling her glove off with her teeth to bare the runes she had stolen from James. Her arm began to shake. “Non draco sit mihi dux.”
Rylie’s face tightened. She clasped her hands over the necklace.
“Vade retro, Satana, nunquam suade mihi vana,” Elise went on.
She could feel Rylie’s beast stirring under her skin, like Katja’s had. It pressed against her bones, threatening to break out. If Elise concentrated hard enough—if she could just catch her grip—then she could jerk the wolf straight out of her body.
But she didn’t get to concentrate hard enough.
Elise heard footsteps thudding behind her. She got no sense of a human mind—only the white noise of a creature she couldn’t read.
Surely Atropos couldn’t have come back so quickly.
A hybrid?
She didn’t think that she could go incorporeal and swallow her attacker without breaking the exorcism in progress, so she braced herself for the fight. She took a quick mental inventory of the hybrid’s few weaknesses—specifically, the wings, and occasionally the eyes—and decided that she would have to redirect its blow to protect Rylie before moving to the offensive.
In the time it took her to make that decision, the footsteps came within two, maybe three meters of her back, and then stopped—preparing to attack. Her heightened senses, incredibly clear with the rush of adrenaline, heard the swoosh of arms as it lifted its fists.
Elise raised her sword, turned around, and swung the blade in one smooth motion, putting enough force behind it to cut through its leathery hybrid skin.
She didn’t expect the blade to slice through a human’s shirt, or the flesh of a human man.
The instant that her falchion connected, he fired his pistol.
The bullet entered her breast left of center. Elise felt it sink into the ichor within her body, rattling against her ribs and tearing through tissue. Her body immediately began to reject the damage with a hard cramp of her stomach.
The gunshot had caused no lasting wound.
But Elise had just gutted Seth Wilder.
The look of shock on Seth’s face burned into Elise’s mind. For a moment, she couldn’t tell the difference between him and James, and she felt the dizzying terror of having killed her aspis. But it wasn’t James. It was Seth. And in many ways, that death was a thousand times worse.
He looked down at his wound. Under other circumstances, it might not have been deadly. He was healthy, young, a kopis. Despite the depth of the cut, baring glossy white bone and the curve of intestine, he could have survived with prompt medical attention. Elise’s mind spun with the possibilities—the idea of carrying him to a hospital, having them pack the wound, stopping the blood flow.
But medical technology could do nothing about the fact that Elise had cut him with the obsidian falchion. A cursed blade. Ichor was already hardening the edges of the wound in the same way that it had with Abraxas.
“Seth!” Rylie’s ragged cry split the air, driving straight into Elise’s heart.
The gun slipped from his hands. He dropped to his knees.
Elise managed to catch him before he fell, lowering him gently to his back. The black poison was spreading rapidly over his abs. Rylie scrambled to their side on all fours, taking position beside him, clutching one of his hands in both of hers.
“What did you do, Seth?” she asked, tears streaming down her cheeks, dripping off of her chin.
He gazed up at her blankly. “I’m sorry,” he said emotionlessly. “I couldn’t let her exorcise you.”
Elise should have realized that an open door to Eden meant that Seth would be close, that he might still be nearby, that he might interfere with them. But how could she have known that his mind would have been blank to her like Atropos’s had been? He must have bound to an aspis. Elise never would have seen that coming.
But she should have known, for fuck’s sake, she should have looked before she swung, and now his skin and clothes were black to his knees.
Elise jammed her hands against Seth’s wound, even though she knew that stemming the flow of blood would do nothing to stop the spread of ichor.
His lungs labored as the obsidian crept toward them, stiffening the tissues.
“No,” Elise muttered, “don’t you fucking dare…”
Seth struggled to speak. “I still…” His lungs hitched. “Rylie, I never…” He couldn’t seem to finish the sentence.
Rylie’s eyes begged Elise to act. “Do something!”
Without hesitation, Elise ripped into her wrist with her teeth. The taste of her amber-hued blood splashed over her tongue, cool in comparison to the hot air gusting through the fissures, and she thrust her fist over his body. It flowed out of her veins and dripped onto the wound.
Smearing her blood into his wounds, over the obsidian, onto his bare flesh, Elise watched breathlessly to see if it would slow the spread. But it didn’t.
His lungs hardened to stone, and he stopped breathing. His eyes unfocused. His lips moved, trying to speak.
“Seth,” Rylie said, clutching his hand, “Seth, Seth, Seth—no, you can’t, you don’t—Seth!” Nonsense words. Hardly a befitting goodbye.
His eyelids fluttered shut. Pain twisted his face.
Elise watched the dark energies of a mortal life coming to a close, muting the signals in his brain, slowing the beat of his heart for moments before it stopped entirely. It was like watching Las Vegas go dark again, block by block.
She could feel the instant that death took him.
Elise heard nothing but a dull roar as shock overtook her, as though she were the one who had hardened to stone. She tried to sit back on her heels and somehow missed. She slipped, landing hard with one elbow on the ground.
He wasn’t moving. He would never move again.
Rylie’s sobs shook her entire body. She didn’t cry prettily—her face was red and puffy, with tears streaming over her face, her hair a mess. She held on to Seth after he had died, as the ichor finished consuming his features, and up until the moment when he no longer had any human tissue. Seth was entombed in stone, preserved by the very poison that had killed him.
“Do something,” Rylie pleaded. “Elise, you have to save him.”
Elise shook her head slowly, trying to remember words. It took her too long to say, “I can’t.”
Rylie threw her head back and screamed into the night.
At some point, James had mentioned to Brianna how important it was for a kopis and aspis to get along, and how the bond was intended to last until death do they part. But he had mentioned a lot of things to her, to be honest, and she just wasn’t that good at listening. The guy liked the sound of his own voice. It was always blah blah akashic powers, blah blah magic is dangerous, blah blah I’m so awesome at everything, look at how Gandalf I’m being right now, blah blah.
But in the moment that she heard Rylie’s scream and Brianna realized that her new kopis was dead, she kind of wished that she had listened to James a little bit better.
I seriously regret my life choices, Brianna thought.
It was her last coherent thought before the madness hit.
Seth’s death ripped through Brianna, cleaving her mind down the center. She was tearing apart like the Ear
th bared to Hell. She could feel everything that Seth had felt in the moments before he passed—the despair, the struggle to breathe, the numbness in his ichor-blackened extremities—and Brianna knew she was going to suffocate.
Darkness crept over her. Her heart wasn’t beating anymore. Death gazed into her soul with a skeletal face, digging into her belly with a sword of obsidian, ripping through her intestines until blade met spine.
She was going to die; she was already dead.
Hands clawed at her face as she screamed. They looked like they were her hands, they were attached to her wrists, but she couldn’t feel them. Her fingernails were bloody. She was hurting herself.
A hole gaped in her skull and heart—the place that Seth had occupied for only a few short minutes before being ripped away.
Something is missing. I’ve lost something. Where has it gone?
There was nothing to hold back the magic that still coursed through her, all too powerful from the union with Seth and the ritual that had opened Eden. It gushed out of her. It turned the air to acid, scalded her flesh, made the earth cry for mercy.
Brianna was falling. She had fallen.
She was dead.
Magic sledgehammered into Elise, flooding her nerves with agonizing energy.
A woman was screaming, and it wasn’t Rylie. It was someone with a deeper voice, hidden behind the robes of the Metaraon statue. She staggered into open air, raking fingernails down her cheeks and leaving bloody tracks in their wake. This was the source of the magic, too—this crazed woman with rolling eyes, dusty shorts, and a bloody forearm.
She was the high priestess that James had brought with him during his last encounter with Elise, but she wasn’t cute and pixie-like anymore. She was crazed and mindless.
Elise instantly understood what had happened to her, and wished she didn’t.
Rylie blinked at the witch through teary eyes. “Brianna?” she asked thickly. Her shoulders shuddered. “What are you doing here?” Brianna hit her knees beside Seth’s body, and a furious growl tore from Rylie’s throat as she lifted an arm to strike. “Get away from him!”