by SM Reine
She phased back to Dis. When she had a human body again, her heart was pounding, and the acidic environment had pockmarked her clothes. She should have been totally incorporeal while on the other side. Nothing should have been able to touch her.
Acid began to ooze from the cracks in the sidewalk, puddling around her, eating at the soles of her boots.
Elise phased out of her shoes and left them behind to be devoured.
Everyone else had already reached Belial Orchards, but another sinkhole had shifted to block their path. Darkness swarmed. Most leaped out of the way in time, but one man did not.
He screamed as his legs melted and fire crawled up his waist.
Neuma had stopped to slap the flames out. “Keep going,” Elise said, hauling the man off the ground. His right femur was exposed to the air. Tears streamed down his cheeks. Neuma was pale with fear, but she continued.
Air was disappearing rapidly from the orchards—probably why all of the hands in the flesh gardens had wilted. The former slaves that had been too slow to reach the sinkhole to Earth were dropping, gasping on the ground.
Gerard waited further up the path. “The bushes, the rosebushes!” he kept yelling, pointing into the darkness.
One by one, everyone vanished. Elise went back for some of those who had passed out—the ones who were still alive, at least.
There weren’t many left.
“Go!” Neuma cried, wrapping her arms around the man with the melted legs. “Hurry!” She lunged through the sinkhole with him in her grip. Gerard pushed a group of liveried soldiers after her before following.
Belial Orchards stood empty. Elise didn’t look back at Dis before leaping in after everyone else.
She found hell on the other side.
Rain gushed from swollen clouds, and it still wasn’t enough to wash away the blood on the streets. Elise had expected her army to have progressed from the entry point, spreading out to secure the city where they had emerged. Instead, she was trapped in the press of bodies, limbs flashing around her, screams piercing the night air.
Someone had been waiting for her army to arrive.
She heard something whistling, and then felt a punch to the chest. Elise looked down to see an iron arrow jutting from her breastbone.
She whirled into darkness, following the arrow’s trajectory back to its source. The archer—a demon with a crossbow—stood on the edge of a roof looking down at the rose garden, which formed the edge of a city park. She descended on the demon, swallowing him with an instant’s thought. She felt him struggle until his atoms were no longer cohesive enough to move in any coordinated fashion.
There were more archers lined up alongside him. When they realized that one of their number had gone missing, they turned to aim at Elise, but there was nothing to aim at.
She spread herself over all of them, and they were gone.
Elise reformed on the edge of the roof, crouching with a hand to balance herself as she studied the city. They had definitely reached Earth, but they had arrived nowhere near the rendezvous point with the werewolves; the architecture looked distinctly European. There was a courthouse, a museum, a large hotel.
Everything reeked of death, both human and infernal. Shattered windows, spilled blood, meat rapidly cooling to the point where it didn’t seem palatable.
Now her army was falling under the assault, too. Terah’s fell beast soared through the air, swooping and attacking ground forces; its scream shattered the air when a barrage of arrows and bullets peppered its flanks, folded its wings. It vanished into the seething crowd below.
It was hard to distinguish enemy from ally. But that was because, not that long ago, they had all been allies.
Elise had found the other half of her army.
Everyone fighting wore her livery. She recognized the marks of all the centuriae, including those that Neuma had reported missing.
They hadn’t been killed when the angels ripped apart the universes. They had deserted and returned to Belphegor, their original commander.
He had said she didn’t need the army anymore, hadn’t he? But she never would have expected him to take it back so effortlessly.
The halves of the army clashed like tidal waves. Elise’s remaining demons were stronger, but they had been funneled through a narrow rip in universes that only allowed a few of them to pass at a time, which meant they’d been easy to pick off. Belphegor’s half of the legions were also bolstered by hybrids.
It was a slaughter.
Elise flashed across the square to another row of archers. Most of them were fiends and easily devoured. One was a nightmare—she couldn’t crush him. He dropped his bow and jerked a Taser from his belt. Elise drew back, conceding the rooftop to him. No point in focusing on one demon when there were so many others.
But where could she even begin to fight back?
Goddammit.
Elise couldn’t continue devouring the demons fighting throughout the city. She had no idea which of them was still loyal to her.
A familiar voice rose above the screaming.
“Elise!”
It was Neuma.
She zeroed in on the half-succubus, still standing among the rose garden. Elise flashed across the square just in time to see a gibborim—one of Terah’s?—swinging its club-like arm at Neuma. Whether it was a traitor or just confused didn’t matter.
Elise jumped in its way, falchion flashing, and severed its arm. The gibborim fell as ichor consumed it.
Neuma was sobbing on her knees under the branches of a tree. Her hands were soiled, and in the darkness, Elise could only tell that it was blood rather than mud because of the way that it smelled.
Elise stepped up to her side. “What…?”
“It’s Gerard,” Neuma cried.
He had been ripped in half, and his shoulders rested at a strange angle to his knees. His all-too-mortal intestines were spilled through the mud. Neuma must have been close when he’d been ripped apart; she had been splattered from the chest down.
Anger clawed at Elise’s heart. “Who did this to him?”
Neuma lifted a trembling finger to point at the other gibborim. They were fighting in a circle, closing in around someone who Elise couldn’t see, though she could hear Terah’s battle cry. The centurion had been cornered.
Traitors.
Elise whipped into the night, engulfing the entire century of gibborim. Not just the ones attacking Terah—the ones rushing through the trees, into the square, all of them within a hundred meters.
They were big, violent creatures. They knew the instant that they’d been surrounded and tried to fight back. Fists beat against the inside of Elise’s shadow.
It didn’t help.
She contracted.
The gibborim roared, they wailed, they were crushed into tiny pieces. And Elise drank them all down.
When she flashed back into her physical body beside Terah, there wasn’t even a smear of blood to mark the places where they had stood.
The centurion staggered toward Elise, gauntlet clutching her belly. She still looked more exhilarated than in pain. “They’ve betrayed us,” Terah groaned. She stumbled, and Elise caught her. “All these bastards betrayed us! The whole damned army!”
“All of them?” Elise asked.
“All of mine,” she said, “and so many of the others that it doesn’t matter who’s not.” Terah’s gauntleted fingers dug into Elise’s upper arms. “Kill them all, Father. Kill every last one of them and make their power yours.”
But she still needed the ones that were loyal to her. She needed them to join her at the gate to Eden. “There has to be a way to separate out the ones I can trust.”
Her command was the only thing that could override Terah’s perpetual blood thirst. The demon looked thoughtful. “The sixty-fourth has lost half their number, but the survivors are good. If I can recover the fifty remaining, I can try to turn it around. I’ll need my fell beast.”
“He’s gone,” Elise said, s
kimming the square beyond the trees. There were many bodies, but still enough standing and fighting that she couldn’t tell what was going on. “Where’s the sixty-fourth?”
“Over in the—”
A scream.
Elise whirled and came face to face with shadow, total and disorienting.
It was one of Belphegor’s Fates: Lachesis, a woman darker than darkness. She looked as though someone had cut a hole in the world and allowed the void of space to peer through.
Lachesis wasn’t quite there, wasn’t quite corporeal.
But, like Elise, she could phase selectively. Only her arm had physical form. It was buried in Neuma’s stomach and emerged from the half-succubus’s back. Lachesis’s black fingers were curled around a twitching heart.
Neuma’s scream cut off. Blood dripped from her bottom lip.
Elise felt the scream come from her, but she didn’t hear it. All she heard was the pouring of rain and the pounding of her heart and the white-hot roar of absolute rage thrusting through her body.
She had always been able to sense Neuma, in much the way she sensed any mortal; the half-succubus’s heart beat like a human’s, her blood flowed, her mind flashed with delicious thought.
Now all of that had been silenced. She smelled like nothing but meat.
She was dead.
The Fate dropped her body. Neuma splashed into a puddle of mud and remained still.
Lachesis lifted the heart to her mouth. Sank her teeth into the meat of it.
Fury blinded Elise.
She flashed into darkness and attacked, engulfing the Fate. But Lachesis couldn’t be swallowed like a corporeal creature could. No matter how hard she contracted, Elise couldn’t kill her.
Damn you, die!
To retaliate, Elise needed light. She needed electricity.
Goddammit, she needed to go back five minutes and take Neuma somewhere safe.
The Fate ripped free of Elise’s shadowy form. It was all too easy. Lachesis didn’t bother trying to fight back, either—she flashed away into the night, vanishing into the storm clouds now that her mission was over.
She didn’t even stick around to fight.
Cowardice.
Elise was tempted to chase Lachesis anyway, knowing that she couldn’t kill the Fate herself. But grief brought Elise back into her body. She landed beside Neuma and Gerard, both bloodied and dead.
Elise stared down at them.
Distantly, Terah’s cry shook the square. More meat fell under traitorous swords. Blood spilled on pavement, wasted and cold.
But she didn’t care about those thousands dead.
Elise lifted Neuma halfway into her lap, smoothing the hair from her face. The hole in her stomach was wide enough that Elise could see all the way through to her lap underneath.
She shook as she bent to kiss Neuma one last time, tasting the cold bitterness of her blood. They’d shared blood so many times. Sometimes because Elise was hungry, sometimes because Neuma just enjoyed it.
It tasted like the faint memory of all the times that Neuma had helped feed Elise out of love, out of friendship, out of a sense of unquenchable hedonism.
The blood was already becoming bitter and unappetizing.
Elise squeezed her eyes shut, pressing her forehead against her friend’s. She was stroking Neuma’s hair as though there was still a woman to comfort through the pain, though she wouldn’t be able to feel pain anymore.
Belphegor had done this deliberately.
The entire assault may have been intended to crush her army, but the Fate had been particularly focused on Neuma and Gerard. With both gone, Elise wasn’t sure how firmly the Palace’s soul-links would hold, especially since she was in another dimension.
Elise had been so sure Belphegor would have no interest in the Palace. He’d never been interested before.
Unless he wanted to reach someone who remained within.
Elise whirled into shadow, phasing with a single name on her mind:
James.
Everyone was preparing to leave Gora Hotel…except Abel.
He sat in a room upstairs, eyes closed, and listened to the pack.
He’d had a weird connection to the wolves ever since the night he mated with Rylie and became the pack’s male Alpha. He’d eventually learned to use that connection to make the men turn into wolves, and vice versa. Sometimes he could even make them obey his wishes if he meant whatever he was saying hard enough.
Now he had a pack of ghosts. They were different. They didn’t just obey him—they were part of him. When his eyes were open, he didn’t just see the room in front of him. He saw whatever the wolves were looking at. Right now, that meant Abram’s legs.
The spirit wolves were different from the rest of the pack, kind of more complicated, and yet…better.
Wasn’t everything more complicated now, though?
Life had been so much goddamn easier before Rylie Gresham.
Everything had been shit, of course, but it was easy shit. Life had been work from the moment he woke up to the moment he passed out from exhaustion. Finding another werewolf with his mom and brother. Hunting that werewolf down. Planting a silver bullet in their skull, yanking out the teeth to help keep track of the deaths, and looking for the next one.
“Easy,” Abel said to the cloth-wrapped body on the bed in the hotel room.
Life hadn’t been easy with Rylie, but it hadn’t been shit, either.
Now it was hard and awful. A life filled with shades of gray, where he was following a fucking demon through Russia after her fucking demon sword turned his mate into stone, where the angels had been the ones to kill Rylie, where he was suddenly the only surviving Alpha of the species he’d spent his teenage years doing his goddamn best to exterminate.
It wasn’t without its pleasures, though. Some of the wolf spirits were gamboling through the village they inhabited, searching for nothing in particular, smelling everything they crossed. They were happy, even if he wasn’t, and he couldn’t help but feel their joy vicariously.
If Abel let his mind drift, the room vanished around him completely, leaving him nothing but a rider in the minds of the pack. He felt paws on the earth like an embrace, and it seemed like the earth embraced back, like it was relieved to have the wolf spirits among its trees again.
Like he’d said—not easy at all. Real fucking complicated as a matter of fact.
He couldn’t stop thinking about how much Rylie would have liked it.
“What’s it like?” Summer asked.
His daughter was standing in the doorway of the room. Abel wasn’t sure how long she’d been there, or how long he’d been riding the minds of the werewolves as they whirled through the village.
She’d asked him a question. He didn’t understand it.
“What?” Abel asked.
“The new pack. What’s it like for you?”
When he didn’t respond at all, Summer seemed to understand. She always fucking understood.
She moved toward him, keeping her distance from the bed. Her eyes were puffy and red. Her cheeks were wet. She was still crying, even now.
“We have to go,” she said. “We’ll be running behind everyone else as it is.”
Abel braced his hands against the window and stared out at the garden. The whole damn world was so much darker now without Rylie in it. Had nothing to do with the smoke and the fires and the endless night that had fallen. All of that would have been fine, if she’d just been there.
“Fuck off,” Abel said. “I’m not on anybody’s goddamn timetable. Just fuck right off.”
Summer’s arms wrapped around his chest from behind. “It’s okay to be angry.”
Anger wasn’t a problem. Abel had no problems accepting the anger, and he would have been happy to let it fill his blood if it would have just turned off everything else he was feeling.
It was the part of him that wanted to turn around and hug Summer back that he didn’t like. The part that made him so furious when h
e realized Abram was in danger, and then feel vulnerable and prickly and scared once the adrenaline wore off.
He felt like he was going to lose his kids every time he turned his back and that was a whole new kind of painful that he hadn’t faced before. Almost as bad as the pain of losing Rylie all over again.
Abel shoved Summer’s arms off of him to try to make those soft, scared feelings go away. “Don’t touch me.”
“Take all the time you need,” she said softly, “but don’t lose sight of what you haven’t lost. I’m going to take her to the pickup.”
Summer bundled Rylie’s body into her arms and slipped away.
Abel had been pissed to see Summer, but her retreating scent just made him even more pissed.
His daughter had walked away from him. He didn’t want her to walk away. He wanted to keep her with him, stick her in a little box where she’d be safe, where he couldn’t lose one more thing.
How did Summer know? How did she always know?
He was about to chase after her when he smelled brimstone.
Elise had returned.
He was ready to rage at her, angry that she had invaded his room, the private place where he’d spent hours trying to sort through all those ugly emotions—but then he turned, and saw that she felt just like he did.
Elise’s rage was painted in every line of her face and body. She filled the corner of the hotel room with absolute darkness. What little bare skin that she had made corporeal again was painted with blood. “I need you to help me kill someone, Abel,” Elise said, voice echoing off the walls. “And we have to go now.”
Killing someone—Abel could handle that. That was simple. That was easy.
So he said, “Okay.”
Eight
The tower shivered above James, urging him to search faster. He wiped the sweat from his brow and pulled another book off the shelf.
None of the books he found in the secret stacks of the Library of Dis were labeled. Unlike the books he’d read above, they had no titles or authors. Yet, also unlike the books in the rest of the library, every single one he pulled off the shelf seemed to be about gods and geneses.