by SM Reine
Not bad for a fight against a hybrid without magic.
Why hadn’t he used magic? Abram’s eyes traveled to the man’s hands. He’d never seen the witch without gloves, but now his skin was exposed and there wasn’t a rune in sight.
Abel howled his victory. It echoed over the street.
The hybrid was dead at his feet.
Abram staggered toward him. Adrenaline quickly drained away now that both hybrids were dead and he began to feel the pain of his wounds. James wasn’t the only one who would need medical attention soon. There was blood on Abram’s jacket. He must have been gored by the hybrid and hadn’t even noticed it.
Abel shifted back slowly. Fur gave way to human flesh, bones rearranging, blood spraying on the pavement.
Eventually, Abel stood where the beast had been, an intimidating six and a half feet tall. Scars marked the side of his face and chest, all the way down to his hips. As a human, Abel looked almost as much like a monster as his wolf.
“Thanks for the save,” Abram said.
The Alpha grunted.
It was the first time they had spoken since Rylie had been killed, and Abram didn’t know what to say next. It wasn’t necessarily that he was surprised that Abel had come to his rescue, but that Abel had even noticed something was wrong. He’d never paid all that much attention to Abram.
“How’d you know to come?” Abram asked.
Abel was strangely gentle as he lifted James from the hood of the car and tossed the witch over his shoulder. “I smelled ‘em. Warned James, because he was there and he’d just woken up, then changed and followed him down.”
“Well…thanks.”
“You’re my son,” Abel said. “They can’t have you, too.” His voice cracked when he said it, and it wasn’t because of his usual growl. The unemotional mask slipped from his features. There was so much pain in him—like he’d been the one to have a werewolf rip out his heart through his back.
Abram stopped walking. Rylie must not have told Abel that Abram was Seth’s son—not his.
At another time, he would have told Abel the truth happily. He would have enjoyed watching the anguish. Now he couldn’t bring himself to say it.
“Get inside,” Abel said, kicking the door open and edging in with James dangling over his back. “Not safe out here.”
Elise passed through a sinkhole and returned to Earth. Benjamin Flynn wasn’t waiting for her on the other side. She was certain that it was the escape route he had taken, but it looked nothing like the place she had glimpsed earlier.
Daylight had vanished during her return to the cavern under New Eden’s cemetery. The grassy plain was consumed by fire all the way to the mountains whose outline she glimpsed through the smoke.
Those weren’t the looming black mountains of Dis, either. There were pine trees. There was even a little bit of snow left on the peak where the fires had yet to touch.
Elise was on Earth, but it burned like Hell.
And goddamn Benjamin Flynn wasn’t there.
Frustration clawed at her as she phased into a sky flickering with hints of other worlds, places that were red and violet and orange. She was buffeted by tides that had never been able to touch her incorporeal form before as more sinkholes opened between worlds.
From above, she saw more plains burning, more mountains. She thought she might be in Canada. She phased west, keeping an eye out for sunlight—dangerous to her shadow form.
Elise never hit morning.
There was no more morning to find. The sun couldn’t penetrate the shredded sky and complete night had fallen over Earth. At last, Elise could travel freely.
It was a dream for demons. Belphegor was making Earth just like home sweet home.
Elise crossed the roiling ocean and found Anthony’s pickup in the ditch where she had left it, then followed the road to the nearest village. The residents were streaming from the buildings, taking cars, trains, and rickety carts in every direction, mostly toward the shore, as though they hoped that there might be safety at the docks.
There wasn’t safety for anyone. Not anymore.
She followed the mingling mental signals of kopides and werewolves and reappeared outside a hotel. She found herself ankle-deep in bloody remains.
Elise lifted a foot to look at the corpse. Sticky black ichor left a long string between her sole and the body. Definitely one of Belphegor’s hybrids.
He’d made a mistake attacking a hotel under werewolf occupation.
When Elise appeared in the lobby, Ariane was waiting for her by the fireplace. She was uninjured. One less thing to worry about.
Elise scanned the others seated around the room. The half-wolves had been turned back to their human forms and milled by the fireplace in ill-fitting clothes, hands cupped around steaming mugs. Nash and Summer were gone. So were many of the rescued wolves. Not many familiar faces.
“What happened out there?” Elise asked her mother. “What’s everyone doing?”
“We were attacked,” Ariane said, looking flustered. She held a potion bottle in each hand. They both glowed faintly with hints of gold—healing magic.
“Anyone dead?” she asked.
“No, but they seem to have been specifically targeting Abram.”
The young man was on the couch behind her, head cradled in his palms, blood staining his shirt. A werewolf attended to his wounds, wrapping bandages around Abram’s arm. It was the guy who had always hung around Stephanie Whyte—Levi, the would-be Alpha who had driven Rylie and Abel out of Northgate.
Elise frowned. “You were attacked by hybrids?”
“Pretty sure it was me,” Abram said without looking up.
“They never attempted to enter the hotel,” Ariane said. “Most of us weren’t even aware of the attack. It was over too quickly.”
But why would Belphegor want Abram dead? Like Summer, he had come from Abel’s line. His blood was different from that of Seth’s. He wouldn’t be able to open the locks to Eden anyway.
Unless…
Her eyes tracked to the body on the coffee table, set at the center of the lobby like a memorial.
If Rylie had any secrets left to her, she wasn’t going to be the one to tell them.
“Huh,” Elise said.
Abram finally met her eyes. He looked worried. Why? Worried because he’d been attacked, or because he didn’t want Elise to know that he had been fathered by Seth after all?
The werewolf bandaging him stood. “We’ve got to get somewhere safer before the full moon. If we can get everyone to California, we’ve got another werewolf sanctuary there. We can fit the whole pack there.”
Elise arched an eyebrow. It was optimistic of him to think that there would be another full moon.
“We’re still a few hours of driving from the nearest port, and whatever ship we hijack won’t be fast,” Abram said. “Might have to handle the moon here.”
“Abel’s not up for handling an entire pack,” Levi said. “He can’t even handle being in the same room as anyone else.”
The petty arguments rankled. Levi was acting as though werewolf packs and leadership mattered anymore. Nothing mattered—whether they were in Russia or the United States or on the fucking moon, everyone was going to die if Elise didn’t figure out how to kill Belphegor.
She wasn’t going to listen to it. She stormed away from Abram and Levi.
Ariane sped to catch Elise before she could leave the lobby. “Where are you going, ma fille?”
“I’m going to go talk to Anthony,” Elise said. “We need a plan.” She gave her mother a brief, searching look. She wanted to promise that the plan would involve some Hail Mary to find Marion and bring her back to safety, but how could she promise that when nowhere was safe? “You can help if you want,” she finished, knowing it wasn’t enough.
She put a foot on the stairs, but Ariane caught her arm, stopping her.
“What?” Elise asked. “Is it a problem with Anthony?”
“No.” Ariane hes
itated. “It’s James. He’s awake.”
Four
Every inch of James’s body hurt.
He’d forgotten what it was like to be so damn vulnerable to injury. When Abel had alerted him to the hybrid attack, he’d thought only to react how he normally would have: by engaging them immediately. James hadn’t remembered until he was halfway down the stairs, falchion in hand, that he wasn’t entirely sure he would have supernatural strength anymore.
He certainly hadn’t forgotten that his access to magic was gone. It was a yawning hole in his heart and mind, an absent limb, a loss of awareness that felt like walking around under partial sedation.
And yet he had gone out there to fight the hybrid anyway.
Needles shot down James’s spine as he shifted in a leather chair. He had definitely overestimated his ability to confront creatures that powerful, especially once he’d killed the first with relative ease—only because he’d surprised it.
To heal Elise, he had severed himself from everything magical, ethereal, and infernal. Perhaps he should have considered trying to sever himself from his misplaced sense of heroism as well.
“Damn,” he groaned, lifting the hem of his shirt to see how the bruises were developing.
Ariane’s potions had given him a head start on healing. The purple marks all over his body were already yellowing at the edges. He would need weeks to reach prime physical condition, if he could consider any condition his body would now reach to be “prime.”
James gritted his teeth and turned back to the desk.
He was using the hotel’s stationary to draw runes. He’d attacked the task with an unreasonable amount of hope that was quickly turning to frustration.
The paper was only wood pulp, the pencil only graphite. He could still draw the runes, but there was no magic in them.
His fist tightened on the pencil until it snapped in half. James lunged to his feet and hurled the pieces across the room.
“Damn it all!”
The pencils bounced off of another person’s chest and landed on the floor, spinning across the wood.
Shock froze James beside the desk.
Nathaniel Pritchard, James’s missing son, stood beside the bed. He rubbed his chest with a look of hurt. “Why did you do that?”
James’s jaw dropped.
When he’d run into Benjamin Flynn in Araboth, he had begun to suspect that Benjamin was Nathaniel’s attempt at manifesting on Earth despite being trapped in Eden. But now Nathaniel was in the room, and James felt like he didn’t know anything at all.
He had grown so much. He looked like he was almost an adult. His hair was tousled and brown, his shoulders broad, his eyes pale blue. His jaw had lost its childish point, becoming squarer, and was faintly shadowed with a humorously patchy beard.
“Nathaniel?” James whispered.
Anger flashed in the young man’s eyes. “What? Didn’t you want to see me? Guess nothing’s changed that much over the years.”
The door to the hotel room opened. Startled, James glanced over his shoulder to see who it was and saw Ariane entering.
By the time he turned back again, Nathaniel was gone.
“How do you feel?” Ariane asked, slipping through the doorway. She hadn’t seen Nathaniel.
Had the boy really visited James for that brief second, or was he discovering another side effect of his sudden mortality—insanity?
“James?” Ariane prompted.
He didn’t know what to say.
Ariane looked pitying. She definitely thought that he was losing his grip on sanity. “Are you ready for visitors?”
He finally asked, “Visitors?”
She opened the door wider. Elise stood behind Ariane.
Her skin was glowing milk, her lips a shade of red almost as dark as her black eyes. Her hair faded into the shadows behind her. All signs of a perfectly healthy demon.
Elise also looked angry.
“I’ll leave you alone,” Ariane said, slipping away.
James’s heart hadn’t had time to slow since he’d seen Nathaniel in his room, and now it beat inside his ribcage like it was trying to punch out of his breastbone.
Fear crawled over the back of his neck as he met Elise’s gaze. There was nothing on the other side. None of the awareness that he’d shared with her for so many years. Every scrap of the kopis and aspis bond was gone.
He couldn’t even tell what she was thinking when she looked at him, taking her time to study his body, his face, his hair.
Elise shut the door behind her. It made the room much too small.
“You look old,” she said.
“You look…” He swallowed hard and dropped his gaze. The sight of her was as overwhelming as trying to stare directly into the sun. “Beautiful.”
She stepped toward him. Reflexively, James stepped back. Pain pulsed through his body—a reminder that he’d just been tossed into a building and a car by one extremely powerful hybrid.
James sat down hard on the edge of the bed, grabbing his side.
“Are you okay?” Elise asked.
“I’m alive, fortunately.”
“You killed a hybrid.”
“I had surprise on my side,” James said.
“And years of experience. That hasn’t gone anywhere.” Her voice was strangely intense. He wanted to look at her face, but that fear was only growing stronger by the second. Nightmare thrall. His kopis—the woman he had spent a good part of the last fifteen years with—was leaking nightmare thrall at him, and he couldn’t even look at her.
“No, I suppose it hasn’t, for all the good experience does without the physical ability to act on it.”
Her feet didn’t make any sound as she paced. He wasn’t entirely sure that he wasn’t hallucinating her, like he might have hallucinated Nathaniel. She was a ghost drifting from wall to wall in his too-small hotel room.
She stopped by the desk and picked up one of the runes he’d been trying to draw. Her fingers traced over the page.
“Healing,” Elise said.
He risked a glanced at her. Her hips were sheathed in tight leather and she wore a borrowed t-shirt two sizes too small. There was nothing to conceal the curve of her breasts, the flatness of her stomach, her pinched waist and the swell of her hips. She’d always been stunning, but now she was beyond distracting.
James couldn’t remember if Elise had always looked like this in her demon form, but he didn’t think that the pull he felt was entirely due to his normal feelings. He couldn’t stop thinking sexual thoughts, even though he considered himself slightly more rational than that.
She was oozing succubus sexuality everywhere at the same time that she radiated nightmare energies. Truly a god among demons. And now he was nothing but a man.
“Could you turn it down somehow?” he asked. “Dampen your energies?”
Her eyebrows creased. “This is dampened.”
“It’s distracting,” James said.
“I should have left you alone.” She turned back to the door.
“No, wait.” There was a hard lump in his throat that he couldn’t quite seem to swallow. “Please.”
She stopped with her hand on the handle, still clutching his non-magical rune in the other fist. “I’m not reading your mind from the inside anymore. I’m seeing everything that I see on everyone else. Hormones and chemicals and flashes of thought. You look like a mortal to me.”
“I am mortal.”
“And I feel stronger than I’ve ever felt before.”
“Good,” he said.
Elise lifted the rune between them. “What’s the word?”
He knew what she was asking for. She wanted the word of power that he would have used to activate the spell.
James cleared his throat before speaking it. He chose the infernal variant rather than the ethereal one. “Temak-ivo.” There was nothing special about the word; it was just a collection of syllables on his lips.
She scooped one half of the pencil off
the floor and sat on the bed beside him. Her shoulder brushed his as she traced over his rune.
“Temak-ivo,” Elise repeated.
It wasn’t just a word when she said it.
Magic flared on the page. The only thing that James felt was pain—not from his physical wounds, but the sensation of a knife twisted in his disappointed heart. He watched the mark become inflamed and crawl onto Elise’s wrist and he felt nothing.
High priest of the White Ash Coven, most powerful witch alive, the man who had rediscovered ethereal magic.
He felt nothing.
Elise dropped the paper once she possessed the glowing rune. Her hand wasn’t even twitching from the force of the magic. “I wasn’t sure I’d still be able to do that. I only became capable of doing magic because of you, after all.”
James couldn’t respond.
“It’s a healing spell. Can I use it on you?” she asked.
“No,” he said.
She snorted. “I was only asking to be polite.”
A hand gripped his wrist. James looked down to see white fingers curled over his pulse point, and goosebumps climbed up his forearm.
It was worse when she touched him. He could clearly imagine throwing her to the bed, ripping away those snug leather pants, sinking deep inside of her and losing himself. And the thought terrified him.
No rational thoughts. All from the infernal energy she couldn’t shut down.
Elise spoke again. The word never quite reached his ears, but he felt a wash of cold settle over him, followed by an instant of heat so immense that he was certain he must have been on fire.
James leaped from the bed with a shout, slapping at his arms.
There were no flames. Only magic.
It was gone in an instant, and the pain along with it. He lifted the hem of his shirt again. The bruises had vanished.
Elise spanned her fingers over his unmarked ribcage. The brush of skin made his abs clench. He tried to step back, but there was nowhere to go—his back was already against the wall.
The mental images were so vivid.