by S. M. Reine
“Fine.” Elise stepped aside so that Rylie could return to her makeshift bedroom.
The staff had dragged furniture downstairs to make it as comfortable as possible for their visitors. They had a bed, a couch, and even a desk that had once belonged to Judge Abraxas. Neuma had also hung a large painting of demons silhouetted against the fires of Hell on one wall. It wasn’t the most comforting decoration, but better than most art in the Palace, and better than bare stone walls.
There was still no mistaking the room for anything but a windowless prison cell. Abel seemed incredibly annoyed to be in it, pacing from one wall to the other as if measuring its length with his footsteps.
When Rylie and Elise returned, he immediately pulled his mate to him. He had come into Hell naked and his condition hadn’t changed. That didn’t seem to bother him or Rylie.
Werewolves, Elise thought with no small hint of annoyance.
“You smell like Northgate,” Abel said. “Did you kill Levi yet?”
“I didn’t get a chance. Every single person in town has gone missing without a trace. Everyone except Stephanie Whyte.” Elise couldn’t think of any other way to say it. Better to be blunt and get it over with.
“They left?” Rylie asked.
“I have reason to suspect they were taken. Thousands of people have been going missing. I think Levi, the Apple, and the pack are just the latest of the disappearances.”
Panic and shock washed over Rylie. “Abram.”
“He’s not dumb,” Abel said. “He would have left after we were kicked out. He wouldn’t have stuck around.”
“We don’t know that,” Rylie said, anxiety mounting in her voice. “What if he stayed to try to fight for us? What if he was there when they got taken to—” She cut off. Her eyebrows furrowed. “Where did they go? Who took them?”
“Aliens,” Abel guessed.
Elise felt the corner of her mouth twitch. There wasn’t a hint of worry in him. Rylie was horrified by the idea of everyone going missing, but her mate definitely was not. “Levi Riese is responsible for a recent attempt on my life. I think that the demon who gave him the poison is also making people disappear.”
Rylie’s distress spiked. She dragged her bottom lip between her teeth, hands clutching her heart. “Levi wouldn’t do that.”
Lincoln edged into the cell, carrying a bundle of leather. “Gerard sent me down with these for the werewolf Alphas. We’re pretty sure they should fit you. Most of the staff isn’t so…big.”
Abel didn’t move to take the clothes from him. “What the fuck are you doing down here? You’re not possessed again, are you?”
The deputy tossed everything onto the couch. “I’m in full possession of my faculties, for your information.” Elise didn’t even need to be able to read his signals to know that he was pissed. A little bit of the Southern drawl had slipped into his voice, like it always did when he was mad.
“Growl at each other later,” Elise said. “Get dressed, Rylie. You have to go back to Earth.”
Abel lifted a couple pieces of leather. It was the same body armor Elise’s guards wore. “I’m not wearing your stupid uniform.”
“We don’t have enough street clothes to spare them for you. It’s either that or you keep walking around naked. Fine by me, but the winds of Dis aren’t much fun for mortal flesh, and the bridge to the fissure is long,” Elise said.
Rylie picked up a pair of trousers. “Thank you,” she mumbled, pulling them on underneath her nightgown. “Why are we rushing back to Earth? Do you think you know where everyone went?” The real question was unspoken, but obvious in her tone. Do you know where my son is?
“I have a lead on the disappearances. Lincoln and I are going to search a site in Hell. You, however, are going to take Northgate from Stephanie, and this time, you’re going to fucking keep it.”
Rylie’s cheeks burned. “I see.”
“Don’t bother rushing to haul the pack’s asses back to Northgate,” Abel said. He followed Rylie’s example and hiked a pair of leather pants up his hips. “The Levi problem will take care of itself in a couple of days.”
“What do you mean?” Elise asked.
“Levi’s not an Alpha. You can’t just pass the title around like—I don’t know, being king or president or whatever. It’s bigger than that.” He smiled unpleasantly, stretching the scars around his mouth. “Full moon’s coming. You know what’s going to happen when a whole pack of werewolves without an Alpha shapeshifts together?”
Elise thought she could imagine it. The werewolves were docile under Rylie’s control, but that wasn’t normal behavior. She’d been mauled by a werewolf when she was a child. She knew firsthand how brutal they could be.
Abel nodded at her expression. “Like I said. Wherever they are, the Levi problem won’t be a problem soon.”
“That’s why you just left, isn’t it?” Rylie asked, gazing up at Abel with horror. “Because you knew they’d just kill each other.”
Abel shrugged. “The assholes ditched us. Seems fair.”
Elise felt a hint of a smile creep over her lips. “The only problem is that they might be with more than three thousand other missing people.”
“Well, if you get a chance to conveniently leave the Apple and Levi somewhere alone with the pack…” Abel’s grin broadened. “Just saying.”
“Simple. Elegant,” Elise said. “I like it.”
“It’d be a bloodbath,” Rylie whispered.
That seemed fitting, considering that Elise and Lincoln had spent hours vomiting blood from Levi’s poison.
Lincoln wasn’t quite so pragmatic. “We can’t let the pack tear itself apart and take the Apple down with it. First of all, we wouldn’t get the chance to question them.”
A shame, but not necessarily a problem. “And?” Elise prompted.
“And it’s wrong,” Lincoln said. “There’s got to be a better way. We can bring these people to justice without being barbaric.”
“I don’t know how much you traveled in America during the last few months, Linc, but there’s no justice left in the world. It shattered with the fissure to Hell.”
“The world gone lawless doesn’t justify cruelty,” Lincoln said. “What we do in times like these is what sets us apart from evil. If you think you’re not a sinner, Elise, then you can’t make a sinner’s choices.” He gestured at the painting of the demons on Rylie and Abel’s wall. “You’ve got a Palace. I saw your dungeons. There’s a court, right? Guards? Pull together a jury, find a judge, seek out justice—handle this like civilized, Christian human beings.”
Appreciation flushed Rylie’s mind. Somehow, it didn’t surprise Elise that the Christian thing resonated with her. “He’s right,” Rylie said. “We don’t have to handle this like demons would. We’re not evil.”
Elise rolled her eyes. “I can’t believe I’m listening to this.”
“Even God flooded the Earth when humans acted like giant fucking dicks,” Abel said.
“I won’t let the pack tear itself apart if there are innocents in danger,” Elise said. “Happy?”
Rylie nodded, but she didn’t look happy.
“Gerard said he’d have a contingent of guards ready to escort the Alphas in about an hour,” Lincoln said, heading for the door. “Make sure you’re at the top of the tower before then.”
“We don’t need guards,” Abel said, pulling a jacket on over his bare shoulders. “Wasn’t it one of your people that just tried to kill you guys in the first place? I’m not letting any of them at my back.”
“Guards or not—I don’t care. It’s up to you. Get to Northgate,” Elise said. She caught Rylie’s eye. “You’ll keep it this time, right?”
Rylie bit her lip and nodded again.
Not the most inspiring response, but Elise didn’t have time to try to shake some confidence into the kid. She moved to follow Lincoln.
Rylie caught her arm, stopping her. “If you find out that Abram is with them…whatever else you do, mak
e sure that he escapes,” she whispered urgently, pleading in her eyes. “Don’t leave him at the mercy of Levi. Don’t let the pack bite him.”
Elise’s heart fractured. She kept her expression blank. “I’ll do my best to bring him home safely if he’s with the abductees.”
“Thank you,” Rylie said. “I know he’s an adult, and a kopis, and…” She dragged her bottom lip between her teeth. Her mind was awash with pain, and even her posture made it look like she had been physically injured. “He’s still my baby.”
Nathaniel’s face flashed through Elise’s mind. She pushed it away.
“He’s not the only loved one gone missing,” Elise said. She surprised herself with how gently she said it. “My friend Anthony is gone, too. I don’t plan on letting the werewolf pack go wild. Okay?”
Rylie finally looked comforted. She released Elise’s arm.
Elise headed into the hall with Lincoln and headed up the iron stairs. “So where are we going?” he asked once they were out of earshot from Rylie and Abel.
Elise rubbed her upper arms, even though she wasn’t cold. She felt heavy with Rylie’s sadness. Eve’s sadness. The loss of Abram. Ridiculous. She needed to shake free of it all. “We’re going to the House of Volac. I think there’s something in the canyon on her property.”
“There are wards on all the Houses,” Lincoln said. “She’s not going to let us in.”
“But Volac is in my hierarchy, and I’m at the top now,” Elise said. “The wards won’t keep me out. We just have to make sure that she doesn’t see us coming.”
The City of Dis was peaceful from above. She used to drift over Dis every day while avoiding daylight on Earth, and she’d watched so many horrible things happen to the humans within the city—slaves dragged to butcher shops, skinned in the streets, and cooked for food.
Elise’s legions had changed the face of the districts, shifting chaos into order. Humans outside the Houses were as safe as she could make them. Some free men even dared to walk alone, without escorts.
It almost seemed to make all the trouble worth it.
She flitted to the outskirts of town and felt a buzz of warmth as she slipped through Volac’s wards. Elise set down at the bottom of the canyon. Lincoln staggered, gasping for air, clawing at his throat.
She touched his arm. “Breathe, Deputy.”
It took him too long to catch his breath—much longer than it usually took her allies—and when he did, he still looked too pale. “I’m fine,” he rasped.
He wasn’t fine, and if James didn’t find a cure for him, he wasn’t going to be fine ever again.
“Good,” Elise said, thumping him on the back. “Where are we going?”
“Why are you asking me?”
“Davithon’s memories sent me here. He was working with Aquiel, so he probably worked with you.”
Lincoln looked around the canyon. Its walls were surprisingly smooth, almost as though they had been carved out by water, although Elise imagined that it must have been something more like magma. The stone had been compressed into layers of alternating rust-brown and orange.
A winding path led deeper into the canyon, narrow and steep. That was where Lincoln headed.
“Remember something?” she asked.
“No,” Lincoln said. “Yes.” He groaned and rubbed at his temples. “Yeah, this definitely looks familiar.”
Their footfalls echoed in the distance, bouncing off of the curved stone. The bloody sky was only visible in a sliver high above their heads, split by a single bolt of gray-blue that Elise didn’t dare look at for long.
She walked briskly, eyes open wide, watching the shadows for a sign of Volac’s near-invisible mass. She was looking so hard for a threat that she didn’t notice when her companion stopped.
“Wait,” Lincoln said. “In here.”
He had paused in front of a narrow opening in the cliff. It was only four feet tall, and it vanished into darkness.
“What’s in there?” Elise asked.
Lincoln shrugged helplessly. “I don’t know.”
She stooped and walked inside.
The passage constricted around them as they walked deeper, squeezing until Elise’s shoulders were too broad to fit. She turned to an angle. Watched Lincoln following her, face pale in the darkness, feeling his way along the walls with arms outstretched.
They kept walking, and it kept constricting.
“Lincoln,” she began.
“It ends,” he said. “I know it ends.”
It did.
Elise squeezed through a slit that was barely large enough for her to sidle through, and then she was there, and she understood instantly that it was the place that they had been looking for.
The cavern under the flesh farms was broad and vast, made from the same clay-colored stone that looked like it had been hollowed out by water. Ancient stalactites hung from the roof. And among those rocky crags dangled bare human feet, some limp, some twitching, all of them far too high to be within Elise’s reach.
They really were directly underneath the flesh farms.
But as horrifying as the feet hanging from the rock were, Elise still couldn’t tear her gaze from what was below them.
For a moment, Elise thought that the hole was filled with water, but what she saw on the other side wasn’t the bottom of a pool. She saw distant fires and dark shapes that gave her a sense of immense scale.
They were standing on the brink of a portal.
“There’s another road down here that goes through the flesh farms,” Lincoln said, jerking his chin toward the opposite side of the portal. “That path’s a lot bigger, but it’s exposed. You couldn’t reach it without Volac knowing about it.”
Elise squinted at the portal. On the other side, she could make out something that looked like a long, curved tibia. It was so distorted that she had a difficult time determining its scale. Her eyes traveled over a jagged ridge below the tibia, trying to decide if she was looking at small rocks or something else like…buildings?
It was a skyline.
And that bone was definitely large. She was looking at one of the legs of Malebolge.
Heat washed over her as she realized what it meant.
The two dimensions shouldn’t have been connected so seamlessly—certainly not at the bottom of a canyon at the back of the House of Volac. There were approved pathways between the worlds—portals that the Palace controlled—but this was a gaping hole big enough for Aquiel to have dropped through without scraping his elbows.
Abraxas hadn’t just been tearing open fissures between Dis and Earth. He had torn open a fissure between Dis and Malebolge, as well.
“I remember this,” Lincoln said. “I’ve been here before.” His eyes unfocused, lost in memory. “I was escorting people. There must have been…dozens of them. They were human.”
“This is how they’ve been getting the slaves out of Dis without being detected,” Elise said, gazing down into the shimmering pool. “They haven’t been killing them or passing them through portals. They’ve been marching them.”
It was equally feasible that humans could have been transported directly from Earth to Malebolge, too. There shouldn’t have been any portals there, either, but at this point, nothing that Abraxas had done could surprise her.
“But why Malebolge?” Lincoln asked.
She searched her memories of retrieving Jerica. She hadn’t seen any signs of unusual industry within the mass of the cadaver—nothing that was unusual for Hell, anyway. She wouldn’t even know where to begin looking for something new or different. Until Elise had traveled down the borehole, she had never been in Malebolge.
But she knew someone who had.
Fourteen
ELISE FOUND JAMES sitting on a bridge between two towers with his legs dangling over the side and his arms wrapped around the railing. He wore the veils that several of Elise’s guards chose to wear while patrolling the barricades, though they looked much stranger hanging over the shoulders
of his white cotton shirt than they did over leather.
She dropped beside him, letting her feet hang over the edge like his. Even though she knew that she couldn’t be killed by a fall—she could phase into shadow long before hitting the ground—it still made her stomach twist to look all the way down at the courtyard so far below them, at the city stretched beyond the walls, and feel the wind making the towers sway gently. She was just one snapped cable away from a very long fall.
He didn’t acknowledge her presence. He only glared at Dis. The curve of his nose and mouth were faintly visible through the veils, so she could tell that he was frowning.
“I need you to come with me to Malebolge,” Elise said. “I need you to be my guide through the city.”
His pale eyes seemed to glow from within the shadows of the shroud. “Okay.”
Elise waited for him to say something else. To threaten her, set conditions, or make an ultimatum. But James turned back to the courtyard, blue light of the fissure reflecting on his irises, and ignored her.
“We leave in two hours,” she said.
“Okay.”
His hand was resting on the bridge between them. It would be so easy to move her own hand two inches to the left, brushing her skin against his, opening the bond between them.
Elise folded her hands in her lap.
“What about Lincoln’s cure?”
He gave some thought to the question, hands tightening on the bridge’s railing. “The reason that angels are so much stronger than demons is that there are fewer of them,” James said. “There are millions of demons. Perhaps billions of them. Each time one dies, the rest are strengthened infinitesimally.”
She frowned. “That’s not true.”
“No?”
“The strength of demons versus angels was determined by the Treaty of Dis. They decided angels should get more power because they were fewer in number, but it’s not like if you killed every angel but one, the survivor would have near-infinite strength.”
“That’s what they said, isn’t it?”
She could tell a rhetorical question when she heard one. “You think that all demons get their strength from a sole, finite power base.”