by Annie Bellet
Ten minutes would be more than enough time for Elise to rescue him.
The demons shrieked as they smashed against his wards. They were black-skinned in the way that hardened lava was black. Boiling blood oozed from the cracks. James didn’t need to pull out his copy of Hume’s Almanac to identify these beasts. They were creatures from Phlegethon.
The fissure was opening.
“Damn,” James said.
He reached toward Elise through their bond. They’re here, he told her silently, and then he shut her out before she could respond. He blocked every iota of information emanating from his kopis: the sight of Malcolm’s grin, her muscle strain as she raced toward the canyon, the sound of McIntyre lumbering behind her.
James tucked the moonstone artifact into the leather satchel, closing it with turquoise buttons. Magic hummed as his protections fell into place.
Demon claws skittered over the invisible dome of wards, filling the air with brimstone sparks.
James slung the satchel across his chest. It fit well. Elise had picked the perfect tool for his use. She had good taste—in some things.
Allowing Elise to graze the surface of his thoughts opened a hole in their bond again. She was making good use of their shared strength. Her heel snapped into the face of a demon that had been trying to claw open a motorhome. In the same motion, she leaped over its head and plunged both falchions into the jaw of another attacker.
He saw through Elise’s eyes when she fought like this. He felt her strength as though it were his. His heart sped, pushing blood hard enough to dizzy him.
When Elise whirled to stab another demon, Malcolm got there first. He shot it in the face. Elise was close enough to watch skull fragments go flying.
Then Malcolm kissed Elise, and James felt the scrape of the male kopis’s stubble.
“Argh!”
He slammed his protective walls down on their bond again.
James destroyed his altar with a few swift kicks. He was usually more respectful when removing his work—there were covens that would drain their collective life savings for a glimpse of his ritual spaces—but the kicking thing was far more satisfying after feeling like he’d kissed Malcolm. And fucked Malcolm. And…
He smashed his heel into the altar a few more times.
Demons continued to punch at the walls of his circle.
Dammit, James was better at hiding his feelings than this. All this time with Elise, and he hadn’t lashed out over his frustration once. Not once! Not even when he was alone, seemingly unobserved, and it should have been safe to scream his fury at the injustice of the universe. That was because nobody was better at lying than him. But today, he didn’t have the strength in him to lie.
Six months since Copenhagen.
Six months of knowing what Elise felt, being unable to respond, and watching her interludes with that abortion of a human being.
James ground glass into the earth with his loafer.
The Traveler came over the ridge above first. James had never seen the Traveler before, but he still recognized it instantly. Even if it had been wearing a paper bag over its head to conceal its identity, James’s inner wellspring of magic would have reacted to its presence. All of existence bowed around the Traveler.
It beckoned to someone James couldn’t see. “Found him!”
Elise launched over the Traveler’s head. She was momentarily weightless, knees lifted, blades glinting in the moonlight.
Then she plummeted into the mass of demons, a flash of muscles veiled in freckled flesh. Metal sang as her falchions tasted blood.
James was safe.
She was here, and he was safe.
That didn’t mean he wasn’t irritated at her.
“We’re almost out of time,” he called, tapping his wrist as though he were wearing a watch.
Elise surfaced from among the bodies. She was wearing those stupid leather chaps, which were now slashed in several places and blistered from boiling demon blood. “I know!”
“The fissure’s going to finish opening within the hour.”
“I know!”
Elise came up with her swords swinging. Heads bounced, rolled, hit the border of his circle of power.
The strength of his wards waned.
Malcolm and Lucas McIntyre came down the slope more slowly, moving as a unit. The Irishman took the left, and Lucas took the right. They plugged bullets into demons methodically. Calmly. Nothing new about what they were doing—just clearing a path so that the Traveler could approach.
They cleared the rear half of the plateau. Elise rose from among the demons at the front half, shoulders heaving, a curl plastered to her forehead by a thumbprint of blood.
Her eyes connected with James’s over the mass of bodies.
The bond between a kopis and aspis was strong when they couldn’t see one another. Once they could, the floodgates opened.
Elise was blistered from the heat of the demons’ blood, her knuckles sore from repeated impact, her adrenaline high. Yet she was thinking about Copenhagen.
That icy beach. The steely ocean waters.
Her attempt to kiss James, and the way that he hadn’t responded.
Elise had kissed James, and he had simply stepped away from her.
They hadn’t talked about it since.
If James hadn’t tortured himself thinking about it every night for the last six months, he could have convinced himself that it had never happened at all.
Self-loathing slicked Elise’s memory in oily disgust. She hated herself for struggling to make her one and only ever gesture of affection—or, at least, attraction.
Worse, Elise truly believed that James hated her for it, too.
“No,” James said aloud, startled by the realization. “I would never.”
She didn’t hear him. Elise had broken the piggyback the instant that she realized they were sharing thoughts again. She was trying to hide the fact that she had been thinking about the kiss ever since it had happened…constantly.
James ran a hand through his hair, mind whirling in the absence of Elise’s.
She had begun dating Malcolm, if that was what it could be called, right after their kiss. James felt like an idiot for failing to realize what that meant earlier. He had pushed her toward him. And she had been using Malcolm to punish both of them ever since.
“Lord, no,” he said, quiet under the shrieking of a new wave of demons cascading up the slope.
Elise moved into the battle again.
The swift dance of demon slaying was graceful, even on her stocky form. James had been teaching her to dance, and Elise had absorbed that knowledge into her already terrifying ability to kill.
Twin falchions flashed through the night. Blood sprayed.
She leaped, she ducked, she spun.
Malcolm and McIntyre were both stronger than Elise, but that didn’t matter. She was the greatest kopis for a reason.
Elise didn’t need to be the strongest when she was utterly untouchable.
Yet she still didn’t realize how beautiful she was.
James was so distracted watching her fight that he didn’t realize his protective circle was weakening until a second wave of demons struck.
Magma black bodies crashed into his circle of power. James’s warding magic broke. The demons flooded in.
“Look out!” Malcolm shouted.
The male kopis smashed into James, pushing him out of the way just before a half-dozen hellspawn managed to strike.
Tangled together, the men tumbled into the canyon.
***
All things considered, falling was a much faster way to get down the canyon than the way James and Elise had done it last time, which had been on the back of flea-riddled donkeys. It was a hell of a lot more painful, though.
“Good Lord,” James groaned, rolling onto all fours to look around.
They had landed conveniently near the cave underneath the Tower of Set.
Convenient because it meant they
wouldn’t have to walk far to reach the fissure.
Slightly less convenient because it meant they were surrounded by demons.
Malcolm had taken the brunt of the tumble. Regardless of his feelings toward James, he still had a kopis’s protective instinct, and James was a mortal with all the associated weaknesses; Malcolm had shielded the aspis automatically. He had been cut open by the rocks in several places. Blood cascaded down the side of his face.
He was on his feet again, drawing a handgun from the small of his back and firing into a mass of demons that emerged from the cave.
Malcolm’s aim was precise. Each bullet planted into a fiend’s forehead. But he didn’t merely shoot them in the heads—he shot them in places where their stony flesh was cracked and oozing blood, indicating weakness.
Each bullet killed one demon. Not as impressive as Elise’s fighting skills, but close.
Still, his handgun could only hold twelve bullets at best. Twelve demons died at Malcolm’s feet and that was it.
He yanked James to his feet.
“Still got the moonstone artifact?” Malcolm asked.
James patted himself down. The moonstone was safely swaddled in the leather-and-turquoise satchel. “Yes, but we need the Traveler because—”
“Good enough for now!” Malcolm shoved his emptied handgun. “Reload and follow me.”
More demons were squeezing out through the tunnel leading to the cave.
Another earthquake struck.
The canyon around them groaned, rocks grinding, debris falling. The ground heaved under James. It was even more powerful than the last earthquake, as though the fissure to Phlegethon was starting to get really angry, and he couldn’t remain standing through it.
Malcolm dragged James toward the tunnel, unperturbed by the fact that the walls of the canyon were swaying around them.
The Tower of Set was wiggling, for the love of God.
It looked like the rocks would collapse on them.
The hidden cave wasn’t so hidden now. Each successive earthquake was grinding it open wider. The demons pushing through were helping it widen on their way, too. They were preparing a path to allow the forces of Phlegethon to invade Earth.
Malcolm cleared a path of his own with a second handgun.
“Reloading?” he asked James cheerfully.
Oh, right. James’s hands shook as he removed the first magazine and replaced it with a full one.
As soon as he popped it into place, Malcolm took the gun from him, swung the gun over James’s shoulder, and fired again. It exploded directly to the left of James’s ear.
There had been demons coming up on them from behind. If the fiends were heading back this way, it could only mean that Elise and Lucas were pushing them. They wouldn’t be far. And they would have the Traveler with them.
Malcolm shoved James inside the cave. The damp air stank of melted copper.
“What an ugly situation,” Malcolm said, reloading his second gun. “Apocalypse showing up when I was getting my rocks off. Barely even had time to empty that whiskey bottle. We did, mind you, but barely. And we could have easily started on another one.”
When he shot at the demons to clear the tunnel, it was a thousand times louder than when he had been shooting in the relatively open air of the canyon. James clapped his hands over his ears. “Don’t you have melee weapons?” he shouted.
Malcolm’s mouth moved. “Where’s the fun in that?” James could barely hear him.
James stumbled over the felled body of a demon. Its flesh crunched under his heel. “It’s not all about having fun! Sometimes, just sometimes, it’s about saving lives!”
“Try to be more boring, please, Jimmy.” Malcolm unloaded the clip into a string of demons, then whipped a high kick into the jaw of a survivor. “Elise isn’t boring. Even she thought it was funny when I handed her the Hooters shirt to fight in tonight.”
Frustration clawed at James.
Hooters? He hadn’t noticed what she was wearing up on the cliff. He’d only noticed how much pain she was in.
And Malcolm had stuck her in a Hooters shirt.
“I suppose you think that’s funny,” he hissed at Malcolm.
“You better believe I do, doggy.” That pretend Western drawl was even more irritating than the words coming out of his idiot mouth.
“Of all the disrespectful—”
“You think I could make her wear it if she didn’t want to? It seems to me like one of us has an issue respecting Elise’s choices and it’s not me.” There was a spark of possessive jealousy in Malcolm’s words.
James gathered himself to his full height, which was at least half a foot taller than Malcolm. “I’m her aspis. More fatal than friends, closer than family—”
“Whinier than an incy-wincy baby,” Malcolm said. “Oi. Duck.”
After a few months of casual warnings from the kopis, James knew to duck immediately. He ate dirt.
Malcolm fired over James’s head. The bullet embedded in a demon’s throat.
“You’re a pig,” James said from the ground.
“A pig who just saved your life,” Malcolm said. He blew imagined smoke away from the muzzle of his gun. “Again. You’re welcome.”
He bolted down the tunnel again. James had no choice but to follow or get eaten by demons.
The fiends were on both sides: ahead of them, emerging from the juncture between Earth and Phlegethon; behind them, pushed into Malcolm and James’s retreating backs by Elise. James felt as though he were trapped within the closing maw of Ba’al. He was about to be devoured.
The only escape was getting the moonstone artifact to the juncture.
He followed Malcolm.
The tunnel soon widened into the cave where ancient demons had once attempted to burrow between the dimensions. The marks of infernal carving were everywhere. At another time, James would have enjoyed analyzing the specific shapes of the scorch marks on the crimson stone walls.
“There it is!” Malcolm crowed. “The fissure! Gorgeous!”
James didn’t see it at first. There were too many black-skinned, boiling-blooded demons between where he stood and the fissure.
But the fiends shifted and it became visible.
A gash in the stone.
That sliver was so narrow, barely wider than the width of a fingernail, that it would have been utterly invisible if not for the blood it gushed—and if not for the demons somehow, impossibly, twisting to extrude themselves into a mortal dimension where they didn’t belong.
James wedged himself between two rocks while Malcolm fought, fumbling the Book of Shadows out of his back pocket. He had known he would need offensive spells for this battle, and James had prepared a few special tricks.
He ripped the first page out of his Book of Shadows. Paper dust puffed through the air.
Demons rushed him.
He opened his mouth to speak a word of power.
It rocked the entire cavern in a silent boom, as though the entire canyon were a gong and his magic were the mallet. The demons within ten feet simply turned to a spray of blood so hot that they scorched the earth where they touched it. Fragments of flesh and bone flopped to James’s feet.
Malcolm rounded on James. Demons had splattered onto his shins. “Damn it, Jimmy! Be careful! You got close to me with that!”
“Not close enough,” James muttered. He ripped the next spell free and held it between forefinger and thumb, trying to decide if it was safe to cast it back toward the tunnel that led to the surface. Elise had severed their bond. He couldn’t tell where she was.
He shoved the rune back into his pocket and scrambled to the top of a rock, trying to escape the reach of the nearest demons.
Malcolm cleared the space in front of the fissure. “Easy!” He spun his handgun end over end and holstered it. “See, there’s advantages to being the kind of bloke who shoots things instead of blowing things up with magic. Nice and clean! Toss me the moonstone artifact.”
�
��Not a chance in all the hells,” James said. He slithered down the opposite side of the boulder and hit the ground just a few feet from the fissure. The air rippling from it was hot enough to make his hair curl.
Malcolm stepped into his path. “Come on, give it here. I’ll take care of everything.”
“I can handle it, thanks,” James bit out.
“Like you handle Elise?”
That was an open challenge if James had ever heard one.
Not the first from Malcolm, certainly. Nor the most blatant. But James didn’t ignore it this time. He didn’t want to.
“I’m better than you are in every way possible,” James said.
“That’s not what she seems to think,” Malcolm said. “I’m the one who she wears the Hooters shirt for, after all. All you do is follow her around the world like a pathetic puppy.”
James swung first.
Unfortunately, Malcolm was still a kopis, and his reflexes were far faster. He ducked under James’s fist and came up with a blow of his own. It was like taking a baseball bat to the face. James flattened on the ground.
Sweeping a leg out, James hooked his foot behind Malcolm’s knee. He jerked hard. Brought Malcolm to the ground. Jumped on top of him before his vision could clear.
James snapped his fist across Malcolm’s face.
It was impossible to tell if the brown smears on the ground beside his head belonged to the kopis or had come from the earlier fight against demons.
He was pretty certain he’d broken Malcolm’s nose, though.
Malcolm tossed James off of him, leaping to his feet. “Seems I struck a nerve in old Jimmy boy! And I do mean old. Bet you couldn’t keep it up for her even if you tried!”
James hurled the second rune into the air.
Magic thudded. The cave shook.
A ripple of air thumped into Malcolm’s chest and kept going. It bowled down the kopis and the half-dozen demons beyond him who had begun scrambling into the cave.
Just behind those demons, Elise was escorting the Traveler to the fissure.
That was what she saw.
Not Malcolm’s taunts. Not James’s attempt to hold back the demon horde.
Just James attacking her boyfriend.