by Reine, SM
“Don’t hold your breath.”
Stephanie hurried off to intercept a stretcher with a young man missing his leg from the knee down.
Elise slipped out of the hospital again in time to see a fleet of Union SUVs coming around the corner. They escorted several large vans, which were filled with dusty, wide-eyed civilians. A witch was arguing with a paramedic beside the open doors of an ambulance.
“We need to evacuate the entire hospital,” the witch said. “We have medical facilities—”
“And who the hell are you?” the paramedic interrupted.
Elise rushed to the sidewalk, squinting through the mixture of ash and snow whirling through the air.
The situation had gotten worse since she and James had fallen from the ruins. Parts of the crumbling buildings in the ethereal city had collapsed and destroyed sections of downtown. She could see a restaurant that had been turned to obsidian by Yatai’s fiends at the end of the street. Now the ichor was spreading through the real casinos as well.
The only bright places remaining were the gates, still protected by Alain’s magical ribbons, still glowing in the darkness with ethereal energy.
The popping of gunfire broke the air.
Elise jumped behind a gas pump, watching from around the corner as one of those massive tanks rolled past. It was herding a cluster of limping fiends. It wasn’t firing with the cannon—there were two kopides sitting on the outside with submachine guns, and a handful of humans screamed and ran into the nearest parking garage when they saw it.
“Under control?” Elise muttered. “I am going to kill you, Malcolm…”
She waited until they were gone and made a break for Craven’s.
There were more demons possessed by ichor around the corner—more than Elise thought could have come from Zohak. They weren’t all fiends, either. A dozen of them milled in the alley.
Elise thought she recognized a few of them. The two basandere who volunteered to dump Zohak’s body—they were there. And so were a couple of nightmares. Yatai had been busy.
She skirted around the alley before they could spot her, sprinting full-speed down the street.
Elise passed under one of the gates, which hung from the mirror of the train trench. A mixture of silver and crimson light sparked in her vision as Alain’s magic mingled with ethereal energies. Her skin buzzed and her palms ached when she passed underneath it.
Craven’s looked like it had been closed and condemned, but then, it always looked like that. The neon sign was dim. No light came through the boarded windows.
Elise jiggled the front door. Locked.
Sudden energy built behind her. Lightning split the night. She spun, pressing her back to the door.
The gate in the train trench flared with light. Crimson sparks showered on the street, dancing over the buildings as the magic ripped free and splashed over the sidewalks. The light emanating from the pillars of bone intensified. The marks around the base flashed white.
And then the shadows began oozing up the sides.
Yatai had torn open the warding ribbons.
Elise gaped. “How…?”
She almost fell when the door opened behind her. Pale hands shot out, grabbed her shoulders, and dragged her into Craven’s.
Neuma wrapped her in a tight embrace that made Elise’s skin feel like it was going to crawl off her bones. Light from the gate poured through the cracks in the boarded window, and the half-succubus’s pale flesh glimmered in the darkness. “Elise!” she cried, gripping her shirt in both hands. “That shadow, that thing—it took Treeny!”
“Wait, slow down,” Elise said as Jerica hurried to chain the front door again. She was pleased to see the nightmare armed with knives and wearing a biker jacket and chaps. One other demon was waiting nearby—a squat, hideous door guard called Ed. “Who’s Treeny?”
Neuma was hyperventilating. Her impressive chest rose and fell with every breath. “The waitress, the witch! I called her into work, but when she was down the block—the black thing—the screaming—”
“A giant snake,” Jerica interrupted. “Blacker than shadow. It came down from the ruins and grabbed her.”
“Treeny must have opened the wards,” Ed said, peeking through slits in the boards at the gate.
He was right. A demon wouldn’t have had the requisite abilities. But how would Treeny have known what to do? Alain could only perform rudimentary paper magic because he seized some of James’s spells. Nobody else knew how to do it—certainly not a weak witch that worked for her casino.
Unless Yatai had somehow gotten the information from James.
Elise’s stomach flipped. “Where’s the team I asked you to collect, Neuma?”
“Downstairs.”
“Okay. Forget the excavation. Ed, I want you to take everyone into the Warrens. Find somewhere safe from Yatai and wait for me. I’m going to need your help getting the city back under control once I kill her.”
Ed wasn’t just the scariest-looking bastard on her team; he was also one of the most obedient. He nodded and headed downstairs.
“What about us?” Jerica asked.
“If the magic keeping Yatai out of the gates is failing, she’ll still need an angel’s mark to open them. So we’ve got to keep her from getting one.”
Neuma’s brow furrowed. “Nukha’il?”
“He’s dead.” She swallowed the lump that rose in her throat. “That means Itra’il is unprotected. We’ve got to get to her before Yatai does. Find weapons and get ready to move.”
Neuma scurried away, taking tiny steps in her four-inch boots—which were modest, by her standards—and vanished into the darkness of the empty casino floor. “Who’s Itra’il?” Jerica asked.
“An angel. She was driven crazy by enslavement to a human master, so another angel was keeping her in hibernation. But he’s dead now.”
“Where is she?”
“Locked in the vault beneath a former bank. It’s about four blocks from here.”
Jerica glanced out the slats in the boards. “Four blocks? Out there?”
Elise drew her obsidian sword. “Yeah.”
“Great,” said the nightmare. She blew a big bubble of gum and popped it.
As they waited, Elise felt the wards around another gate open. She couldn’t see it from inside Craven’s, but there was no mistaking the pulse of magic, the flush of ethereal energy.
Three gates unprotected. Six to go.
Neuma returned a few minutes later. She had traded out the boots for high-tops and worried a leather whip between her hands.
“That’s your weapon of choice?” Elise asked, arching an eyebrow.
She looked at the whip. “What’s wrong with it?”
“Nothing. Never mind.” She unchained the doors again. “We’re going to the bank on Center. We have to reach Itra’il first—whatever it takes. Don’t let anything touch or bite you. Assume everything out there is infectious. Got it?”
“Let’s rock and roll,” Jerica said.
Elise flung the doors open.
Lightning danced through the sky, arcing between the street and the gate above. It leaped from the gate in the trench to the gate in the cathedral—exposed by the missing roof—and lit the city with crackling white light.
“Move,” Elise yelled, “move!”
She ran west, and Jerica loped at her side, butcher knife in each hand.
Energy split the air. The gate suspended from the mirrored roof of Harrah’s Casino’s hotel tower flared with light and magic. The serpent of Yatai’s energy lashed through the clouds, darting from one gate to the next.
When they reached the next intersection, Elise leaned around the corner to check for fiends. There was a tank positioned under the Reno arch.
The cannon thumped as it fired. Fiends shrieked.
Elise gestured, and they darted to the old bank.
She almost thought they were going to make it unscathed.
The entrance to the vault was in the all
ey, and her heart plummeted to see that the other demons had gotten there first. The door was untouched, but the wall was melted away by ichor, and quickly eating into the foundations. A van was tipped on its side, and the red Turtle cases from its back were spread across the asphalt.
Elise’s feet crunched on CDs and tape media as she hurried to the hole in the wall. The demons had eaten through layers of cinderblock and steel to reach the vault’s entryway. Inside, fiends were digging and clawing at the door of the bank vault. Shadows made the paint peel.
She stepped inside and clambered on top of a desk that had once belonged to the intake officer. “Hey!” she barked.
The fiends turned, bulbous eyes bulging with inky shadow. They were being supervised by a possessed nightmare—a tall, slender man with yellow claws. Rick—from the drugstore—was barely recognizable.
Jerica gasped.
“It’s not him anymore,” Elise said. “You can’t—”
She didn’t get a chance to finish. The fiends rushed at them.
Elise whirled through the possessed demons. There was no room to fight, and the fiends could climb walls—they scurried to the ceiling and dropped on her. She jumped off the desk and kicked a fiend into the metal cage protecting the elevator.
“Duck!” Jerica yelled.
She threw herself to the ground as the nightmare flung a butcher knife. It hurtled through the air with terrifying precision and buried into one of the fiend’s skulls with a thump.
Rick lunged for Jerica. Neuma lashed out. The whip curled around Rick’s throat and held firm; she jerked, and he fell to the ground.
She loosed it with a flick of her wrist and lashed again. It sliced open his cheek. Ichor spilled over his mouth and down his jaw, dribbling to his chest and soaking his shirt.
“No!” Jerica cried.
Elise hacked him in half. He collapsed in two pieces, splattering wetly on the concrete floor.
She made short work of the remaining fiends, which fell under the possessed blade like water evaporating on a heated skillet. She flicked ichor off her blade onto the ground and went to check the vault’s door.
There was a hole the size of a small child halfway up the wall. It was still growing.
Jerica sobbed over Rick, hands covering her face. “Get her off the ground, Neuma. We have to move,” Elise said.
The bartender’s eyes widened. “Right now? Can’t you see she’s grieving?”
“She can grieve when we aren’t in mortal peril.”
“But Elise—”
Her argument was cut short by a groan in the building above them. The walls cracked. Shadow seeped through the fissures. “Take cover!” Elise shouted, shoving Neuma for the door.
It was too late.
Sudden light flooded the basement. Cold air gushed over Elise’s skin.
Pain flared in her shoulder as a chunk of concrete struck it, and the ground rushed to meet her face. She rolled onto her back in time to see a steel I-beam fill her vision.
She flung her arms to shield her face from the blow—which never came.
Elise lowered her arms.
The debris was frozen, suspended in a black fog. It looked like Yatai had clenched the building in a massive fist of darkness. And with a single blow, she scattered it, leaving Elise and the entire basement vault bared to the open air.
Above, Elise could see the mirrored bank: only half of the building remained, which was twice as much as the building on the ground. Ash snowed on her, turning her bulletproof vest and braided hair a dull shade of gray.
Three fiends scrambled over the debris from the street. They ignored Elise’s army and plunged through the hole in the wall to vanish inside the vault.
Elise struggled to her feet. Her shoulder ached. She slipped.
A hand caught her elbow and helped her to her feet. Jerica’s face shone with tears, but her eyes blazed with hatred.
“Come on, Godslayer. Let’s get your angel.”
She gave Jerica a thin-lipped smile and clasped hands with her for an instant. Then she jumped through the vault’s door, and the nightmare darted after her.
Beyond what remained of the door, the vault was a huge, concrete room with shelves, smaller safes, and iron bars. It was big enough to fit an entire office inside. But ripping away the building hadn’t touched the reinforced walls of the vault, and it was too dark to see a few feet beyond the door. Elise could only hear the scrabbling of fiends’ feet and claws ringing flatly on the cement.
Jerica didn’t seem to have any trouble seeing through the gloom. She darted into the depths of the room, and Elise followed the dim glow of her skin.
They jogged down the hall and turned a corner. Pale light emanated from a cage at the end of the hallway, though it struggled against Yatai’s shadow to brighten the wall. The fiends pawed at the door, trying to melt away the bars.
Jerica flung her second butcher knife. It buried itself in the back of a fiend’s skull.
Elise attacked the other two, letting rage and instinct move her through the dance of flailing limbs.
Dull nails slashed through the air. She twisted and parried.
With a thrust, she impaled one of the survivors. It shrieked. Splattered. Jerica sidestepped the ichor that oozed forth.
An impact rocked through her side as the remaining fiend struck her in the small ribs. It felt like a knife to the kidneys, and it left behind a smear on her jacket.
Elise stripped it off and flung her coat in the fiend’s eyes.
Before it could see again, she buried the sword in its gut. She kicked her jacket to dislodge its corpse from her blade. “What in all the hells possessed these guys?” Jerica asked as Elise’s coat turned brittle and began to break apart.
“You don’t want to know.”
The answer seemed to satisfy her. The nightmare shielded her eyes with a hand, squinting into the glow through the bars of the cage. “The angel is in there, isn’t she?”
Elise responded by taking out her keys and unlocking the door. She and Nukha’il had been the only people with copies—even the owner of the vault, a cambion named Ricardo, hadn’t been able to get in.
She stepped inside.
Itra’il was stretched out on her stomach on a metal table, cheek resting on her folded arms and coppery hair spilling down her shoulders as she slept peacefully. Although she was naked, her long wings concealed everything to the ankles. A layer of downy feathers covered the floor around her. They radiated a dim golden glow.
Elise skirted around her. She was uncertain what might stir the angel—Nukha’il had been the one to help her sink into a restful coma, and now that he was dead, there was no way of telling what was keeping her there, if anything.
“What’s the plan? Are we going to move her?” Jerica asked.
She had shown mercy to an angel before. It hadn’t gone well.
Elise approached Itra’il and stood at her side, gazing down at her sleeping face. Nukha’il wouldn’t have wanted his lover slaughtered. He loved her with all of his heart, and hoped that she could heal and live out eternity with him.
But now he was dead. Itra’il had no future.
Elise swallowed hard and lifted the blade, heart thudding in her chest.
The angel’s eyes opened. They were a pale, crystalline shade of blue, with an internal light like sunshine. Her lips parted in a sigh.
Elise buried the sword between her wings.
Itra’il jerked. Blood spilled over her lip.
She mouthed a name. Nukha’il.
“Sorry,” Elise said, even though she wasn’t sure she meant it. She definitely didn’t feel it. She didn’t feel anything.
She stabbed again, making certain to pulverize the chest cavity. Itra’il didn’t jump a second time. She deflated against the table, her wings sagged, and her eyes fell half-closed.
The light faded from her skin.
Jerica watched from the doorway. “You would have done well as a demon.”
Elise’s
mouth twitched.
She ripped a page out of the Book of Shadows and laid it on Itra’il’s immobile body. Even when an angel was dead, their limbs had terrible powers. The marks on their wings could be used to operate ethereal objects. Their flesh and bones could be turned into artifacts themselves, like the gateways. She couldn’t risk Yatai retrieving her corpse.
Elise pulled off her ring. James must have still worn his—she couldn’t feel his thoughts, and was glad for it. The magic around the page brightened as soon as the metal left her finger.
She sought her core of strength and collected her energy.
Help me, James, she silently prayed.
And then she spoke a word of power. The chain of magic jerked under her ribs. Fire leaped out of page.
It consumed Itra’il’s feathers, spreading over her back as quickly and surely as the ichor devoured the bodies of the possessed. It flared with heat that scorched Elise’s eyebrows.
She stepped back and sheathed her sword. It took two tries to get it in.
Watching the angel shrivel inside the flames, popping and twitching with the heat, jangled her nerves. And Nukha’il—what would Nukha’il have thought, if he’d seen it? “He wouldn’t want her to be alone,” Elise whispered, sliding the ring onto her thumb again.
“What did you say?” Jerica asked.
“Nothing.” She pulled out a box of cigarettes and extended one toward the pyre, catching the tip with the flames. “Want a smoke?”
The nightmare took a drag. “Thanks.”
The smell didn’t settle Elise the way it usually did, so she watched Itra’il smolder until her cigarette was burned down to the filter, and then flicked it at the charred remains.
“Let’s go,” she said.
Anthony walked for some time. Somehow, James’s neighborhood had turned into an empty highway, and then main street. He wasn’t sure how he got there—he guessed he must have walked all those miles.
He met nobody in the hallway of his apartment building, and his door was ajar when he arrived. The lock had been smashed, but nothing inside had been touched.
“I should wash my hands,” he told the darkened apartment.
He squirted a dollop of soap into his hands and used the back of his wrist to push the faucet into the hot position. Anthony massaged his left thumb with his right, scraping off blood he couldn’t remember bleeding. Brown clouds swirled down the drain.