Sacrificed in Shadow

by SM Reine

  Elise rubbed her jaw. She half expected to feel stubble on her chin, but that was the lingering remnants of James’s mind, not hers. “Were you afraid, too?”

  “A little,” Rylie said. “Not like he was. I grabbed the Bible and followed him.”

  What kind of magical rune could evoke fear in a brave, blustering man, then exorcise Elise to Hell?

  It was hard to think when her skin ached so badly. Elise had spent too much time awake during the day that week, and the exorcism had wiped her out; she needed to rest, smoke a cigarette or six, and do some hard thinking.

  She forwarded the images to McIntyre’s email, then returned the camera to Rylie.

  “So what does this have to do with the murders?” Rylie asked.

  Elise wasn’t entirely convinced that it was related. Father Night was an experienced exorcist; maybe he had given tools to Father Armstrong that Elise didn’t recognize. She was going to have to ask Father Night himself.

  “I’m not sure,” Elise said. “I’ll let you know as soon as I do. For now…”

  Rylie nodded, wrapping the Bible in the blanket again. “You can sleep here, if you want.”

  “What?” Seth asked. “Seriously?”

  Elise didn’t feel up to arguing with him. “I don’t sleep, in the strictest sense. I’ll head back to base and get dressed.” She was still in her underwear, and while partial nudity might not mean anything to a pack of werewolves, she couldn’t exactly walk around Northgate like that.

  “I’ll walk you out,” Rylie said.

  She led Elise outside. Seth stayed behind.

  There was still no sight of the werewolf pack, although Elise could feel them nearby. The energy of the wolves was a low, humming buzz, almost indistinguishable from the weight of the moon through the clouds. The undercurrent implied that they were in human form, watching nearby. Maybe inside all of the darkened cottages, staring out at Elise and their Alpha.

  “How much do you trust Seth and Abel?” Elise asked as they strolled down the road. The asphalt was shiny with rain.

  Rylie didn’t hesitate to respond. “I trust them with my life.” There was such conviction in her words.

  So why had James despaired when he saw Seth through Elise’s eyes?

  Too many questions, not enough answers.

  “I’ll be in touch soon,” Elise said. She hesitated. “Can I borrow a car? I don’t want to go incorporeal again.”

  “Sure. They’re over here.”

  Rylie led her back toward the river, where they had built the carport. All of the vehicles looked to be in place.

  Nashriel stepped out from underneath the awning when they approached.

  Even with his wings concealed, there was no mistaking him for anything but an angel. There was no human man that walked with such grace. He moved as though he always had twenty feet of wings draped from his back, ever-conscious of their presence behind him.

  He moved to the center of the path and stopped. They would have to pass Nashriel to access the vehicles.

  Elise stopped, reluctant to get within arm’s reach of him.

  “You shouldn’t be out here,” Rylie said softly, touching Nash’s sleeve.

  He jerked at the contact. The marble features crumbled. “I felt her here,” he said.

  Nashriel was still struggling with his memories, Elise realized. He was trying to reconcile the demon standing in front of him with Eve, mother of all angels, and failing.

  “She’s leaving,” Rylie said. “She’s not going to bother you again.”

  He didn’t move. He looked at Elise over Rylie’s head. “What happened to them? All three of them?”

  Elise could only think of three people that he could be talking about: Adam, the first man; Eve, the first angel; and Lilith, the first demon. If Nashriel had been imprisoned during the first war, he wouldn’t have known what had happened to Eve.

  “They’re all dead,” she said.

  He sagged. Deflated. “I feared as much,” he said. “Did you kill them?”

  There was no point in lying about it. “Two of them. The other one had already been gone for millennia.”

  “That’s why Eden burned,” Nashriel said softly.

  Elise nodded.

  Rylie stared between them, brow furrowed, lip caught between her teeth, as if they were speaking in code and she was trying to interpret.

  “Metaraon?” the angel asked.

  “He’s dead, too.”

  “So there will be no war.” Nashriel actually sounded hopeful.

  For a long time, angels had been severed into two dominant factions: those that supported Adam, and those that revolted. The revolution had been led by Metaraon. Nashriel had been one of the supporters. But without Adam, and without Metaraon, there was no reason for civil war within the angels.

  Just because the war wouldn’t be civil didn’t mean that there would be no war at all.

  “I hope not,” Elise said.

  Nashriel nodded once.

  Then he lunged.

  He moved like a streak of lightning, and Elise didn’t have enough time to realize that he was attacking, much less try to defend herself. His hands fisted in her shirt. Nashriel carried both of them over the lawn, and they smashed into the lake together.

  Frigid water consumed Elise, stinging the wounds on her throat and bicep.

  The shock of the cold made her reflexively suck in a breath—but there was no air to breathe, and the water surged down her yawning mouth, filling her chest.

  Nashriel’s face was twisted into a mask of anger as he shoved her deeper into the lake. His wings blazed behind him. They churned the water to a white froth that scorched Elise’s flesh. Ethereal chimes gonged through her head as she struggled to free herself of him, beating her fists against his back, his face, his neck.

  She kicked herself free. Swam for air.

  Her head broke the surface, and she gagged, gushing water out of her throat. She only got to suck in a single breath when Nashriel erupted from the water, too.

  They struggled, a tangle of fists and kicking legs.

  Rylie shouted from the shore. “Nash, stop!”

  But the Alpha’s commands held no sway over him. Elise swung around to his back, looping her arm around his neck, and squeezed tight. His wings beat on other side of her, unable to dislodge her grip.

  “I’m not your enemy,” Elise grunted, struggling to hang on.

  Nashriel blasted his wings at full bore, lighting up the night with his power. It seared Elise’s flesh. Her muscles liquefied. She dropped off of his back, sinking into the lake.

  It was deeper than it had looked from the perspective of the sanctuary. Elise had assumed that it was no more than a shallow pond that fed into the river. But she sank and kept sinking, tumbling into bottomless darkness, chased by Nashriel’s radiance.

  She jerked the falchion out of the sheath, but didn’t get a chance to use it. Nashriel slapped her with his wing, knocking her sword free, and she could only watch as it dropped out of reach.

  He grabbed her by the throat, digging his fingers into the bite, and powered them through the lake. Water frothed around them.

  Nashriel shoved her under the waterfall. It battered her, made her suck down water.

  And then he was lifting her again. He shoved her into the cliff face behind the sheet of mist, hard enough that her vision blurred.

  After all of the battles Elise had fought, the enemies she had killed, she was helpless against the glow of Nashriel’s wings. She couldn’t fight or flee. All she could do was let him punch her across the face, again and again, and wait for him to stop.

  “You killed them and stole their power,” Nashriel said, slamming her into the rocks again. Her entire body rang with pain like a cracked bell.

  “You have no idea what you’re talking about!”

  Another hard slam. Elise’s head bounced. Her vision swirled, skull filling with the roar of the waterfall.

  “Enlighten me,” Nashriel hissed
.

  She wasn’t sure what would be worse—being forced to relive her past by telling him, or letting Nashriel destroy her again, ripping her apart with his energy and sending her back to Hell.

  Elise wasn’t sure she’d be able to claw her way back to Earth if she went to Hell again.

  No more Anthony and McIntyre. No way to absolve the werewolves. No way to unpack the mystery of Lucinde Ramirez.

  “Adam killed Eve,” Elise blurted.

  Nashriel’s face darkened with rage. “You lie.”

  “He killed her, and Metaraon trapped Him in Araboth to contain Him. You don’t believe me? You didn’t see that omnipotence was driving Him insane?”

  “He was struggling to adjust to godhood,” Nashriel said. “But he loved her. He never would have hurt her.”

  “He killed her,” Elise said, putting every ounce of conviction she could muster into those words. “So Metaraon trapped Him in Araboth. And then he started sending women in to pose as Eve so that Adam wouldn’t know what He had done. Human sacrifices, Nashriel. All of the women went insane from being trapped with Adam, too. They were raped and tortured and tossed aside like trash, just to be replaced and start the cycle over. Adam never knew He was imprisoned. He thought everything was normal.”

  “No,” Nashriel said.

  “I was one of the human sacrifices. One of the brides.”

  “You’re a demon.”

  “Lilith changed me,” Elise said. “I was different than the other brides—intended to be Lilith and Metaraon’s weapon. I was meant to kill Him.” She swallowed hard. “So I did. I killed God.” It was the first time she had ever said it so bluntly, and it hurt. “I did it to save myself. I did it for the other women, and for Eve, and…and for me.”

  Nashriel didn’t move, didn’t speak. His hands remained tight on her arms.

  Elise searched his eyes, looking for a hint of understanding.

  “When I was done, Lilith wanted to die. Immortality was too much for her.” She couldn’t look at Nashriel anymore. She closed her eyes. “I helped her die.”

  She had taken her falchions—twin blades, at the time—and severed Lilith’s head from her body. Lilith had died smiling.

  It hurt so much to remember.

  Nashriel’s hands relaxed on Elise’s arms, releasing her.

  His eyes flicked down, tracking along her cheek. Elise brushed her face dry and looked at her fingertips. She had thought that her face was wet because the waterfall was splashing her, but she was crying black tears—demon ichor.

  “You look like the enemy,” Nashriel said abruptly, his voice still cold and unsympathetic. “You look like Lilith and her children. I made assumptions.”

  It was probably the best apology he would give. Elise accepted it with a small nod. He stepped back, sloshing through the lake to disappear on the other side of the mist.

  Elise staggered to the shore. She was drenched and sore, but her throat burned with tears, not pain.

  She was composed by the time she reached Rylie, who looked stricken. Nashriel hadn’t come back yet. “You didn’t kill him, did you?” Rylie asked, stepping into the shallows, as if about to swim after him.

  Before Elise could respond, the water stirred again. Nashriel emerged from the lake, streaming water from his hair, and extended his fist toward Elise. His fingers were wrapped around the hilt of her falchion.

  Her nerves leaped. If he had accidentally cut himself with it, then their tenuous ceasefire wouldn’t matter. He would be dead.

  She took it carefully. “Thanks.”

  He nodded once.

  It took three tries for Elise to thread the sword through her hair and into the spine sheath.

  “What were you thinking?” Rylie demanded as the angel pulled his shirt off, squeezing the water onto the grass. His torso was sculpted perfection.

  “Sorry,” Nashriel said. “Please don’t tell Summer of our conflict. She would be…frustrated with me.”

  Rylie rolled her eyes. “As long as you’re done being a jerk, your secret’s safe with me.”

  Footsteps rang out in the night. Seth and Abel jogged up the road together, stopping at Rylie’s side. “Look at this,” Seth said, shoving a piece of paper into her hand.

  The Alpha unfolded the paper. It was a typewritten table, with the gridlines drawn in ballpoint pen. There were dates down the first column, names down the second, and locations on the third.

  “Is this a schedule?” Rylie asked.

  Elise plucked it from her hand and read the names. She didn’t recognize most of them, and several had been scratched out, but one of them was both legible and recognizable: Bob Hagy, the most recent murder victim. “Where did you guys find this?”

  “It was inside the Bible, tucked underneath the pentacle,” Seth said.

  Elise’s eyes dropped to the bottom of the list. There were still two dates left. The last date had three names—three people that Elise didn’t recognize, because they hadn’t been killed or kidnapped yet.

  No, wait. She did recognize one of the names on the final date. Brick Gere was the cashier at the gas station that she had visited when arriving in the county.

  The next date was less than two weeks away. It only had one name on it.

  “Mikhail Night,” Rylie said, reading out loud. “Hey, isn’t that one of the priests at St. Philomene’s?”

  Father Armstrong had a list of victims, the dates they had been killed, and the name of his fellow priest at the bottom.

  “It’s a hit list,” Seth said.

  Elise was already moving toward the vehicles. The motorcycle’s key was still in the ignition, so she climbed on and started the engine. “I’m going to find Father Night,” she said. “Rylie? You coming?”

  The girl nodded, but she didn’t climb on the motorcycle. She shucked her sweater, kicked off her shoes.

  “I’ve got your back,” Rylie said.

  She shifted, ignoring Seth and Abel’s protests.

  Elise peeled out of the sanctuary, and Rylie chased.

  SIXTEEN

  SETH HAD LEFT his cell phone in one of the motorcycle’s saddlebags. Elise tried to call Lincoln while she was stopped at a street corner, but his phone rang and rang without answer.

  Rylie gave Elise a questioning look. The weight of the werewolf’s furred body against her leg was strangely comforting. “Just looking for backup,” Elise said. “Forget about it.”

  She dropped the phone in the saddlebag, and they began to move again.

  They were twin beasts in the night, swift and sleek and growling. With her body arched over the moonlight-soaked motorcycle, her thighs welded to metal and leather, Elise felt like she and the bike had become a single animal—another member of Rylie’s pack, restricted only to where the wheels could take her.

  Rylie led her on the back roads to Northgate, letting the motorcycle get within inches of her tail but never quite touching. She didn’t tire. They didn’t have to stop until they reached the church.

  Elise skidded to a halt next to the pile of shutters, planting a foot on the ground and keeping her hands braced on the handlebars. The mobile homes behind St. Philomene’s were unlit—for all appearances, empty. If Elise had allowed herself to drift into darkness, she could have known instantly if anyone was watching them, but she didn’t dare turn incorporeal.

  The wolf paced the lawn, nose to the ground.

  “Anyone home?” Elise asked.

  Rylie shook her head—a strangely human gesture for something four-legged and furry.

  Elise almost departed around to search for Father Night elsewhere, until she noticed a dim light glowing through the stained glass windows on the back of the church. A shadow moved in front of it. Father Night’s office was occupied.

  She dismounted, drawing her sword with a whisper of the obsidian blade against leather. “Stay close.”

  Rylie nudged Elise’s knee. The nose was warm and leathery on her bare skin, reminding Elise that she was still only partially
dressed.

  “I’m not going to waste time finding pants that fit. Father Night’s in danger,” Elise said.

  The wolf made a gesture that almost looked like a shrug—a twitch of her head, a flex of shoulder muscles. It should have looked ridiculous on her. Like a dog doing some dumb pet trick. Instead, it was deeply unsettling, like a human was briefly superimposed over the beast.

  Elise opened the door to the church, and the wolf slipped through first, paws padding against the floor. She followed Rylie’s ghostly shape into the cathedral. Rylie stuck her nose into everything: skimming the seats of the pews, under the font of holy water, behind the confessional.

  The stained glass windows were even more beautiful at night, lit by the milky light of the swollen moon. A blue haze seemed to cling to the pews. The entire cathedral glowed with the faintest touch of magic.

  Rustling noises came from the other side of Father Night’s office door.

  Elise looked askance at Rylie, who jammed her muzzle to the crack underneath the door and whuffed.

  “Do you smell Father Armstrong?” Elise asked. Rylie shook her head. “A demon?” Another shake. “Anything?” But still, Rylie shook her head.

  A werewolf’s senses were beyond keen. Rylie could probably smell the one clove cigarette that Elise had smoked two weeks ago. If there was someone inside of the office, she should have smelled it.

  Elise ran a hand up the doorframe. Much like she had found at the sheriff’s office, there were tiny runes scratched into the wood. Someone had warded the church with magic powerful enough to thwart an Alpha werewolf’s nose. Somehow, she doubted it was one of the nice Christian parishioners.

  But there was definitely someone inside. Elise heard a deep voice humming tunelessly and the rustling of papers.

  “Stand back,” she said.

  Rylie stood against the wall, head lowered, forelegs bent, prepared to leap.

  Elise shoved the door open.

  Father Night looked up from his desk, surprised. “Elise?” His eyes landed on her bare legs first, then her bare falchion. He stood. “What’s going on?”