by SM Reine
Elise descended the narrow steps. The air became still as the world above was blocked out, and soon, she only had her flashlight as a guide. When she finally reached the bottom, her legs were weak, her nerves were ragged, and one sword was drawn.
She took a deep breath and pushed through.
The undercity should have been a home away from home for the horrors that lived on Earth. It should have been teeming with life.
But it was motionless. The buildings were rotten from time and mildew, and faced the path with open doors. Empty.
Where were the demons?
Elise took a step forward and her foot connected with something soft. She knew without having to look that it was a body, and once she recognized the first, she saw the rest—lumpy shapes spread across the uneven ground of the cavern.
She knelt to examine the body at her feet. It had the same marks as the corpses of the humans on the surface. Bones gnawed by dull teeth, missing flesh, shattered skull. The tolling of the bells had struck underground, too.
Stomach acid soured the back of her mouth as she slipped through the undercity, stepping around bodies and avoiding sinkholes. Something smelled like brimstone.
She strode through the city, focusing on the path. Elise didn’t want to see the racks where they hung slaves for sale. She didn’t want to see the demons—many of which were indistinguishable from humans—that lay in bloody piles.
It looked so similar to Dis. There were even skulls over the doorways. They grinned at her with missing teeth and dusty eye sockets.
Many of the homes had pens in front of them, too. In Dis, it was where they kept their more docile slaves. In this undercity, there were strange, grotesque skeletons instead—unholy things that looked like a mix of pig and human. Chills rolled down her spine. She refocused on the street.
So many dead. The air was thick with it.
Elise ducked out of one cavern into the next, following a short tunnel that had been carved by a stream. It let out into a murky pool.
Something scraped on the shore. She lifted her swords, gripping the hilts so tightly that her arms trembled.
A dark form on the ground moved, then groaned. A survivor.
Elise made a wide circle around it, squinting through the dim red glow. It looked like a human, but no human had skin so papery-thin that the outlines of its bones were visible. Its eyes twitched open. They were completely black.
“Tikest vo,” it whispered in a quavering voice. That was the demon language. James spoke it, but Elise didn’t.
“Don’t move,” she said.
It gave another groan, and spoke again, this time in Latin. “Help me.”
Cautiously, she sheathed one of the swords and knelt at its side. The young nightmare was dying. Its skin faded in and out of Elise’s vision. For a few seconds it looked like a skeleton with a tangle of innards; then it faded back.
Nightmares couldn’t be killed by physical means—it could suffer for centuries without disappearing.
“I need to find the clock,” she said.
A pale hand reached for her. She jerked back. “It hurts,” said the nightmare. “Help me. Please.”
Elise set her jaw. “Do you know where it is?” After a moment, it nodded. “I need to find it.”
The skin faded. The nightmare shivered. “This path goes down,” it said. “Down. Beyond the Temple of Yatam—a stair. Down, down, down.”
“Is that where the chamber is?”
Its skeletal hand touched her arm. Elise’s skin crawled. “The door is behind the statue.” Its black eyes begged. “Please.”
She didn’t have her exorcism charms, but the blade of her sword was carved with some of the same symbols. She slid the falchion between two of its ribs. “Crux sacra sit mihi lux. Non draco sit mihi dux. Vade retro, Satana, nunquam suade mihi vana. Sunt mala quae libas. Ispe venena bibas.” The sword glowed briefly. The demon’s eyes fell closed. “Return to the Hell in which you belong. Begone.”
Its hand slipped off her arm, and a moment later, the body was gone. She stood over the place it had laid, staring at the empty ground. Killing demons was usually satisfying, but this time, she felt nothing.
“Be at peace,” Elise said to the empty chamber, sheathing her sword. She was surprised to mean it.
There was only one other path leading down from the cavern. Elise took it. It sloped into darkness, away from the red glow of the undercity, and she followed it down, down, down.
It took her an hour to reach the Temple of Yatam. The path opened into a quiet chamber with smooth walls. A stream spilled down the rocks to her right in a frothy mist, illuminated by the flickering glow of blue flame.
The only thing that made the room look like a temple were nine columns surrounding a faceless statue. It stared at her without eyes. Elise edged around it. As the nightmare said, there was a stair behind the statue, spiraling deeper into the ground. The air grew warmer and warmer as she descended.
Distantly, through the earth, Elise could hear the clock. Every swing of its pendulum gently rocked everything around her. Rock groaned. Dust showered from the roof of the stairwell. The stairs felt like they swayed from side to side—the slightest motion that made the entire world vibrate.
Tick… tock… The clock echoed through the air.
At first, she didn’t realize she heard it with her ears. But then she came upon a doorway and stumbled through… and she saw it.
The clock stood at the end of a very long chamber with sloping walls. Elise wouldn’t have been able to reach its face if she stood on James’s shoulders.
The dagger-shaped pendulum rocked in time with every beat. It pulsed through her and made it hard to breathe. The hands on the face crept toward the place the twelve should have been—and all six were going to align simultaneously.
Dusty skeletons lay on platforms around the edges of the room. Scraps of red cloth hung from the bones, although time had eaten most of the robes away. They trembled with every tick and tock of the swinging pendulum.
Elise made her way through the room, stepping around metal grates that blasted hot air. She peered into one as she passed. It glowed red faintly, as though there were fires miles below.
She had to climb onto another platform to reach the body of the clock. It was almost too loud to approach. Elise drew her left-hand sword as she peered into the workings of the clock. Something throbbed in the depths of its cogs—a heart.
Why hadn’t the hour struck yet?
She didn’t wait to find out. There had to be attendants somewhere close.
Make it fast.
Bracing herself, Elise seized the handle on the cage of its body and swung it open.
A distant thud rocked the pyramid. The platform pitched beneath her feet. An invisible hand smashed into her chest, shoving her away from the clock.
She soared through the air and struck the opposite wall. The sword clattered out of her hand. Elise collapsed onto a grate and the metal seared her skin.
The tick tock was louder than before. The beating heart thrummed. And when she rolled over, her face came up against a pair of bare feet. Her gaze traveled up bare legs.
The woman wore a necklace of skulls. Her dark hair was tangled with teeth, her dagger was carved of stone, and her hips were draped in folds of leather. The silhouettes of demons framed her—dozens of them. The stink of brimstone was strong.
“What a surprise,” said the goddess in perfect Latin.
Elise leaped for her sword.
Something connected with her head from behind. It cracked her skull and rattled her brain.
A flash of white light—and then darkness.
Elise could see the sky.
Her eyes opened to slivers. There was a window above her—an open square too small for a human to slip through. The sky was a churning mass of violet and crimson.
No, wait. That wasn’t a sky at all. It was smoke from the fires beneath the clock.
Elise was still inside the pyramid. But sh
e was in a separate room, with the same jagged gray stone and hazy air. Her eyes and throat burned with it.
She had been chained to the wall. Her hip burned, and she shifted her legs out from under her, stretching out to see a mess of blood smearing her shirt. When had she been injured?
“That came from my children. They wanted a taste.”
Elise twisted around, trying to see the speaker, but the goddess stood beyond her field of vision. Her motion was limited by the shackles. “Who are you?”
The response came right behind her ear. “I am the cold kiss of death,” she whispered, “and you can never defeat me.”
Elise’s stomach churned. “Let me go.”
“No. You chose to come. Now you must live with that choice—and die for it.”
“I’ll kill you,” she said. It wasn’t a threat. Just a statement of fact.
“Maybe. Alive or dead, I will come back for you.” The flames outside flared, turning the smoke from purple to orange before fading back to red. A blast of heat filled the room.
Somewhere in the pyramid—somewhere else—people were screaming. Human voices. Elise wasn’t the only one trapped.
The goddess moved to block her view of the window. In one hand, she held a staff of sharpened human bone; in the other, a stone knife carved with symbols. The whites of her eyes were consumed with the endless darkness of space.
“I didn’t expect anyone to find me,” she said, “much less the greatest kopis. I’ve heard of you.”
Elise responded by twisting her wrists in the shackles. They rubbed against the skin of her right wrist, and she realized one of her gloves had been removed. She clenched her fist.
The goddess must have seen what was on her palm. She must have known what it meant. And she wouldn’t have been there if she didn’t need Elise alive. “You’re missing something for the clock—something that’s keeping you from tearing apart Hell and Earth. It’s a sacrifice, isn’t it?”
“Astute,” the goddess said.
Elise shifted, and her chains rattled. It wasn’t hard to be astute when she was tied up like a pig waiting for the spit.
The woman knelt by her. She smiled.
Then she buried the point of the knife in Elise’s shoulder.
Pain flamed down her skin. She grit her teeth and took deep breaths, refusing to cry out. It only hurt worse when the goddess pulled the knife free.
“You can’t think this will do any good,” Elise said, her voice barely shaking. “You can’t kill me yet. Not like this. Not without screwing up your apocalyptic plans.”
Her laugh was deep and throaty. From anyone else, it would have been pleasant to hear. “Who says I plan to use you?”
The goddess dragged the knife down her chest, drawing a line of pain along her skin in crimson ink. Elise’s blood swelled and dripped in a line down her ribs.
I won’t scream. I won’t scream.
Her resolve lasted for almost an hour. The goddess lasted much longer.
Part Four: The Twelfth Hour
VIII
James wasn’t sure if it was instinct or Elise’s history of getting into trouble that told him something was wrong, but he didn’t wait for her to return to the condo.
He stuffed what was left of his Book of Shadows into a bag, slung it over his shoulder, and hobbled out the door with his makeshift crutch. He could barely feel his knee as magic knit the ligaments back together. Every time he took a step, it tried to buckle under him.
Worse yet, it was still raining, and as dark as night even though it was afternoon. The ground was slick and muddy. But slowly, deliberately, he made his way toward town.
He tensed when he saw two figures coming up the road toward him. When they drew close enough for him to realize they were human, he still didn’t relax.
One of the men was built like a cinderblock, and the other was a boy with a shotgun strapped to his back and nervous eyes. “Where’s Elise?” asked the first without prelude.
“Who are you?” James asked, raising his voice to be heard over the blasting wind.
“The name’s Bryce.” The cinderblock jerked his thumb at the other man. “This is Diego. McIntyre said Elise needs our help. Here we are.”
So they were kopes. Both of them. “I thought McIntyre was coming himself.”
“He couldn’t make it,” Diego said with an accent so thick that James barely understood him.
“Well, you’re too late. She’s already gone. She’s gone into the undercity—looking for that clock.”
“So she’s dead,” Bryce said.
James’s fist clenched on his walking stick. “No. She’s alive.” He would know the instant she died. It hadn’t happened. Not yet. “But that could change quickly. We have to find her.”
Bryce looked excited at the prospect of going into the undercity. He grinned, and James saw that he was missing most of his teeth. His skin had the tough, scarred look of an old farmer even though he couldn’t have been thirty yet.
“Fucking fantastic,” he said. “Tell us what to do.”
He opened his mouth to respond.
James!
Pain flared down his flesh. Burning silver spikes flayed his skin, baring his bones as the jungle blurred and darkened around him.
With a roar of pain, James staggered. A pair of hands kept him from falling.
“The hell—?” someone said.
But James was lost in a black pit of agony. Smoke burned his lungs. Hot stone dug into his spine, and metal bit his wrists, chafing until they went slick with blood.
No. Not his wrists.
A fist struck him across the face. His vision cleared in time to see Bryce rearing above him with his hand raised for another blow. “Stop,” James said with a shudder. Elise’s silent cried echoed through him. He hadn’t even known she could scream.
Bryce lifted him and set him on his feet like he was a child. Diego gave James his dropped crutch.
“What’s wrong with you?” Bryce asked warily. His hands flexed as he stared around at the trees, as though waiting to be attacked.
“It’s Elise. Something is happening to her. She’s—”
The pain blazed again.
James… James…
She was chained. Bleeding.
“What should we do? Tell us how to help,” Diego said. His hands were trembling.
Help? They wanted to help?
He took a moment to size them up. Bryce looked as dumb as the mud beneath his feet, but he was pure muscle. Diego wouldn’t be nearly so useful—he was too scared. He wouldn’t last long in the undercity, and James wouldn’t make it far with his ruined knee, either. And he wanted that shotgun.
“Sorry about this,” James said.
He dropped his walking stick, pulled a slip of paper from the Book of Shadows, and seized Diego’s arm.
Electricity leaped between them. Diego’s skin turned ashen gray, and he collapsed, dragging them both to the ground. Bryce shouted and drew his gun, but James held up his hands.
“He’s fine,” James said. “He’ll be okay. He’s unconscious.”
Careful to stay out of arm’s reach, Bryce checked Diego’s pulse. “What did you do to him?”
“I borrowed his strength to heal myself.” And to prove it, he stood—slowly, no need to tempt the trigger finger—and stripped the bandages from his knee. It didn’t hurt anymore.
James expected him to argue. There were so few living witches that rivaled his power that most people weren’t aware such healing was possible. But Bryce looked angry, not disbelieving. “Are you nuts?” he asked. “Now there’s only two of us!”
“And I wouldn’t have been able to go anywhere without healing first. Tell me: would you rather descend toward almost certain death with a scared boy, or the aspis who just defeated him with a single touch?”
Bryce couldn’t seem to find a reason to argue.
IX
Elise had no idea she could hurt so much without passing out.
Time m
ade no sense. Had it been minutes? Hours? Years?
Had the clock struck twelve yet?
Brilliant white pain burned through her arm, down her body, through her bones. Blood raced down her skin from a thousand shallow cuts.
She was a roast pig on a spit. She was a rabbit being skinned. Pillars of fire raced along her spine, arced through the sky, scorched the earth.