by SM Reine
But he wasn’t carrying a tackle box when he emerged from the car again. He had pulled a bag out of the back seat of the sedan, and it was leaking blood. The scent of it made Elise’s nostrils flare. There was meat in the bag. It wasn’t packaged as if it had come from a butcher’s shop.
Elise’s heart skipped. The bodies had been found with missing parts.
She needed to get that bag before he could hide the evidence.
“I’m going in,” she said, opening the door.
But the wolves beat her to it.
Abel and Rylie erupted from the trees, pounding across the clearing. Twin streaks of lightning tackled Father Armstrong and his accomplice before either of them noticed that they weren’t alone.
The accomplice struggled under Rylie, kicking her away, and freed himself. She snarled as he broke into a run, hauling ass back toward the road.
Rylie looked torn—stay with Father Armstrong, or chase his friend?
“Get him,” Elise urged. “Go!”
The Alpha didn’t need to be told twice. She gave chase, disappearing into the trees.
Abel stood over Father Armstrong, nosing around the bag of meat without actually getting into it. He had one heavy paw on the priest’s chest. But it didn’t seem to be necessary. The man wasn’t moving.
Elise stretched out her senses.
No heartbeat.
“Shove over,” Seth said, nudging Abel with his knee.
The wolf backed off, and Seth checked Father Armstrong for a pulse. It was only a formality. Elise could already tell that he was dead. “What happened?” Elise asked.
Seth slipped a hand underneath the priest’s head. His fingers emerged bloody. “Hit a rock, looks like,” he said. “Accident.”
Elise kneeled at his side and pulled the meat out of the bag, grimacing at the texture in her fingers. It looked like any cut of steak she could get at a grocery store. Could have been pork, maybe.
She dropped the meat back into the bag and licked her bloody forefinger. “It’s not human,” Elise said.
Abel had just killed the priest over a slab of pig.
Great.
The black wolf’s body rearranged, losing its fur. Abel stood, naked and human, and gaped at the unmoving priest. “I didn’t… He wasn’t… I jumped on him, is all.”
Seth grabbed clothes out of the pickup and tossed them at his brother. “Get dressed.”
“Fuck,” Abel said with heat. He jerked a pair of jeans over his hips and belted them.
“He was probably with the cult anyway,” Seth said, resting a hand on Abel’s shoulder. The bigger man looked pale and shaking. Almost like he might faint.
Abel shoved his brother off and paced into the trees.
Rylie raced back into the clearing, sides heaving with exertion. She stepped behind the truck and changed even faster than Abel had. When she emerged again, she was already dressed. “I lost him,” she said. “His smell totally disappeared by the road. Someone must have picked him up.”
And if his first stop was the sheriff’s office, they would be well and truly fucked.
Rylie frowned. “Where’s Abel?”
Seth jerked his thumb at the trees. Rylie gave Elise an apologetic look, then chased the other Alpha.
Elise threw Father Armstrong over her shoulder and stood. “I’m moving him inside,” she said. “I want a look around.”
“Should we do that? Mess with a crime scene?” Seth asked in a whisper, as if trying to keep Abel from hearing him.
Her plans were much worse than disturbing the crime scene. Elise planned to swallow Father Armstrong’s body. No cadaver, no evidence.
The inside of the cabin was as nice as the outside. The living room walls were covered in shelves, which held dozens of antique, leather-bound books. Ceramic vases held potted plants, and the air smelled like damp soil and cleaning chemicals. The glass coffee table glistened, as if recently washed.
Elise dropped Father Armstrong on a couch in front of a brick fireplace.
“Get into the kitchen,” Elise told Seth when he followed her inside. “And shut all the doors. I don’t want to get confused and swallow the wrong person.”
He paled. “Swallow?”
“Close the doors.”
Seth did as she ordered, locking Abel and Rylie outside before retreating into the kitchen. Elise drew the curtains.
Once she was alone, she lit a cigarette and sucked deep. The smoke settled her nerves.
She was going to go incorporeal for the first time since her exorcism. Elise had to do it sooner or later—she couldn’t remain in her human form all the time.
But what if she flung herself back into Hell and didn’t return?
Elise took a long drag, letting the smoke curl out of her nostrils. It was going to be fine. She only needed to disappear long enough to make the body disappear.
She dropped the cigarette in one of the potted plants, pushed her doubts away, and relaxed.
Elise released her skin.
She filled the room with her presence, blacking out the indirect light and flooding every corner until there was no air left. She traced the shape of the couches, the coffee table, the wine racks, the antlers on the mantle.
Then she settled on Father Armstrong.
His body was cooling rapidly, quickly becoming unpalatable. If Elise had possessed a stomach in that form, she would have been nauseated by the idea of eating something without a beating heart, flowing blood, a mind filled with sparkling neurons.
She didn’t want to eat the dead—especially not when there was a perfectly appealing heartbeat the next room over.
Can’t eat Seth. Concentrate.
Elise contracted over Father Armstrong, condensed, and swallowed.
When she popped back into her corporeal form, there was no body on the couch. The only indication that he had been there was a smear of blood on the arm rest. A decorative throw pillow had also gone missing.
Elise picked a blue thread out of her teeth.
“Crap,” she said, spitting it into the waste basket.
The back of her mouth tasted sticky, like she had eaten a heavy meal and it was trying to come back up. She was suddenly, desperately thirsty.
She pushed into the kitchen.
“Father Armstrong?” Seth asked, peering over her shoulder.
“Gone,” Elise said. “Don’t ask. Water?”
He handed her a glass from one of the cabinets. “You need to see what I found while you were…busy,” he said as she filled it in the sink and knocked back a good twelve ounces in one guzzle.
She set the glass on the counter with a sigh. “A Jacuzzi?”
Seth grimaced. “A basement.”
Rylie and Abel were quietly grim as they followed Seth into the basement. Elise drifted behind them, rubbing her aching stomach.
Abel’s mind was wracked with guilt, twisted and tormented. But his guilt vanished the instant that he saw the giant, bloody pentagram painted on the wall of the basement.
The cabin above was the kind of place that people would pay hundreds of dollars a night to vacation, but the basement looked more like a dungeon. It was bigger than the cabin itself, probably carved into the mountain, and cavernously dark. They couldn’t see into the far end of the room—only the wall with the pentagram.
Elise pressed her hand to the bloody symbol. Through the barrier of the warding ring, she could feel the burn of power, hot enough to scorch her palm.
If she tilted her head the right way, she could see lines of magic streaming through the walls, into the earth, and funneling toward…something else, something beyond the perimeter of the cabin. But what?
“What is this place?” Rylie asked, hand over her nose, as if trying to block out smells.
Elise dropped her hand. The table beside her held large jars of colorful fluid. “Looks like an embalming room,” she said, lifting one of the lids to sniff at its mouth. She pulled a face. It reeked of formaldehyde.
Seth flipped
a switch, and the lights came on. Elise immediately regretted being able to see.
She had been in autopsy rooms before, but nothing quite like this basement. It was a medical facility twisted by nightmares, a hellish pit of scalpels and jars of bone fragments. There was no hospital with candles placed around the floor at equidistant points. The iron cages on the left-hand wall, big enough to hold seated adults, weren’t typical hospital fixtures, either.
The stainless steel tables had been wiped clean, and their glistening surfaces seemed like an insult to the horror of the rest of the room—the crust of blood staining the concrete floors, the barrel of discarded gristle, the dripping brown pentagram painted on the wall. A trio of tables were aligned parallel to each other in the center of the room, waiting to receive bodies.
Elise edged along the wall, taking in the sight of what had to be some kind of ritual space, though she had never known a witch that was quite so…gruesome. Even the necromancer she had once faced preferred a homier setting; her ingredients had been kept in Tupperware, with clean floors and a dining room table for the sacrifice. The industrial nature of the room only made the gore that much worse.
She held her breath as she peered into another plastic barrel. The glistening black mass at the bottom seethed with maggots.
Rylie clapped her hands over her mouth. Her eyes watered. She kind of squealed as she stifled a scream. Her Alpha toughness didn’t seem to extend to bloody symbols inscribed on the walls of a torture pit.
She let Abel fold her into his arms, burying her face against his chest.
A low growl tore Elise’s attention away from Rylie.
Chains rattled. Claws scrabbled against concrete.
“What is it?” Seth asked, lifting the rifle to his shoulder as he circled around the tables, taking the left while Elise took the right.
She jerked a silver throwing knife from her boot.
The light didn’t quite reach the far end of the room, which was shadowed by another row of cages. Elise’s night vision was superior, so she realized what she was seeing in the back of the room before Seth did.
It was a huge, four-legged creature, with a box-shaped head and jaws that would have made a shark proud. Splayed paws dug into the ground as it strained against a chain, which had dug a bloody furrow into its neck. A ratlike tail thrashed from side to side. It was big enough to be a small werewolf, or some kind of imp from Hell, but Elise quickly realized that it was nothing quite so exotic.
“The pit bull,” she said, heart sinking. The dog growled in response.
They had found the pit bull that had been chewing on cadavers post-mortem. It was certainly big enough to fool the average person into thinking its bite was a werewolf’s, although it was still only half of Rylie’s size.
“This is where it happened, isn’t it?” Rylie asked in a tiny voice. “This is where everyone got sacrificed.”
She was right. The room was set up like a one-stop sacrifice shop, from the holding cells to the tables in front of the pentagram and the dog to destroy the evidence of cutting marks.
There was nobody in the room now. And their invasion probably meant that the cult wouldn’t dare use it again. Elise wished she had known what they would find when they followed Father Armstrong there. She would have waited to act until the next moon and tried to catch the entire cult in the act.
“Careful,” the Alpha said.
Elise turned to see that the pit bull was leaning against the end of its chain, lips peeled back in a growl. Tags jangled from its collar.
“I’m putting it down,” Seth said, angling the rifle to its skull.
Elise grabbed the end of the gun, covering the end with her hand. “Wait.”
“Shit, don’t do that,” he said.
“Don’t shoot.”
Elise released the rifle and stepped forward, hands out, fingers spread, shoulders hunched so that she would look smaller. The dog’s growls softened as she approached.
“Hey, there,” Elise murmured. “I’m not going to hurt you.”
It shied back, shrinking against the wall. Not an “it,” she noticed—the dog was a very impressive, unaltered “he.”
“Elise…” Seth said warningly.
She reached for the dog’s collar.
The pit bull’s jaw clamped shut on Elise’s arm, and he jerked. It felt like having a car roll over the left side of her body. The immense weight made her shoulder pop.
Elise grunted, falling to her knees. The crushing pain was bad, but not quite as bad as having an Alpha’s teeth in her throat—which was like saying that suffocating to death wasn’t quite as bad as being skinned alive.
Blood smeared the dog’s muzzle. He threw his head from side to side, thrashing her arm.
She slammed her free fist into the pit bull’s eye. His growls peaked, but he didn’t release. A vein bulged on his forehead.
“Let me go,” Elise said, jamming her knuckle into his eye again.
He released her. She shoved his head to the floor, hand in his throat, and his paws scrabbled wildly against concrete. His tail whipped against her bare legs hard enough to leave welts.
Seth appeared at her side, looking for a good shot. Elise kept her body between them.
She panted as she studied the dog, considering the tawny brown saddle on its back, white-furred hips, and pink underbelly. He was a beautiful creature. The scars on his face didn’t diminish his big eyes, uncropped ears, and pink button nose.
If he hadn’t been caked in blood, he would have been a beautiful animal. He was built sturdy, a working dog. It wasn’t his fault that the job to which he’d been applied was perverse. His proportions were all off, though. He didn’t seem to be finished growing.
“You’re a puppy, aren’t you?” she murmured, stroking her knuckles down his flank. The muscles rippled under her hand. Stress had coated its short fur with sweat.
“It’s eaten human meat,” Seth said, revulsion twisting his features. “It’s not a dog anymore.”
Just like Elise wasn’t a human anymore.
She unsheathed her sword.
“What are you doing?” Rylie asked.
Elise pulled the leather wrappings off of her falchion’s hilt with her teeth, then wrapped the cord around the pit’s short muzzle. He fought against her, but she kept him pinned under her arm until his mouth was sealed shut and the cord was knotted.
“You’re kidding,” Seth said. He hadn’t lowered his rifle, and the muzzle remained aimed steadily at the pit bull’s skull.
“Drop it,” she said, jerking her belt through the loops. The dog glared at her with wet eyes. “You’re not shooting him.”
“Let’s talk reason,” Seth said. “Even if you take him out of here, he’s been used to eat cadavers, and maybe even trained to kill people. He’s evil.”
A dog couldn’t be evil. Dogs were eager to please their masters, and that could be turned either way. Evil came from the black heart of the man that had trained his pit bull to eat human flesh. The dog was neutral.
The chain around his throat had carved a wound into his thick neck. Elise looped and locked the belt over the back of its head, at the base of the spine, and then peeled the chain free. He yelped.
Elise released her weight on the dog and stood, holding the end of her belt like a short leash. He jumped to his feet and lunged against the belt. As strong as the pit bull was, Elise was stronger, and she held him tight.
The dog strained to get at Abel, whose lip was peeled back with revulsion.
“Animals don’t like werewolves,” Rylie explained from the other side of the room.
It appeared to go both ways, because Abel was growling back at the dog. Elise hauled the pit bull upstairs.
She may have arrived too late to rescue the first seven sacrifices, but at least there was one victim she could save.
TWENTY
ELISE SAT ON the rear bumper of the pickup, shredding a roasted chicken with her fingers. The pit bull paced inside the campe
r shell. He had finally stopped throwing himself around a few minutes earlier, but he still wasn’t exactly peaceful; his claws scraped against metal like a knife sharpened on stone.
She lifted the back window a crack and flung the meat through. Jaws snapped in the darkness.
Elise watched him eat through the tinted glass. The reflection of the parking lot’s street lights made it hard to tell, but she thought that his tail was wagging weakly.
She picked up her cigarette. The smoldering tip had been hanging off the bumper while she fed the dog, but she dragged deep on it now, letting her eyes fall shut. The flavor made her muscles melt. Better than sex, and exactly what she needed after seeing that basement.
Headlights fell on the pickup, making her skin tingle. Lincoln had arrived. She flicked the cigarette to the pavement.
He pulled up alongside her. She had picked a parking space as far from the grocery store as possible, so there was plenty of room for the both of them. He wasn’t driving a cruiser anymore—instead, he stepped out of a beat-up mom van from the eighties, with a boxy hood and square accents.
“Where did you get that?” she asked.
“Mrs. Kitteridge.” He looked embarrassed. “I assume you wanted me to pack a bag and meet you at Walmart for a reason other than to have an impromptu picnic? I already ate anyway.”
“The rotisserie chicken isn’t for you,” Elise said.
She tossed another piece of meat into the camper shell. Lincoln leaned close to see what was inside just in time for the dog to slam into the window.
He leaped back. “Lord above! What in the world is that?”
“I think I’m going to call him Ace,” Elise said. She had been brainstorming all evening, and that seemed most appropriate. An ace’s value tended to differ widely, even within the same card game—high or low, one or eleven. The dog could be retrained and allowed to live, or he might not. It depended on the hand that Elise played.
“Is it a demon?”
“He’s a dog.” She gave Lincoln a significant look as she stripped a chuck of back meat off of the chicken. “A pit bull.”
Recognition dawned. “Jesus,” he breathed.