Sacrificed in Shadow

by SM Reine

  Jesus, a pack of deadly monsters was being run by children.

  “Never would have expected to get carded here,” Seth said, gesturing at the milling werewolves ripping into their dinners. “You know, I’ve killed a dozen werewolves before. I’ve got an undergrad degree—I fast-tracked it through pre-med and graduated with honors. I’ve survived more attacks from the Union than I’d like to bother counting. Even if I wasn’t twenty-one, I’d deserve a cold one. Don’t you think?”

  “It’s against the law,” Lincoln said.

  “And it’s against the law for werewolves to have children, travel without filing an itinerary with the government, and vote in elections,” Seth said. “Sometimes, the law is an asshole.” He lifted his beer in a salute. “Cheers, deputy.” He took a long swig.

  Lincoln sipped his. “They don’t pass laws to try to ruin your day,” he said after swallowing. “Laws protect people.”

  Seth made a noncommittal noise. “They protect some people.” He sipped his beer again, then turned it in his hands, as if studying the lantern light through the distortion of the amber bottle. “Nobody here’s going to judge you for dating a demon, deputy. I hope you’ll give us the benefit of the doubt, too.”

  “Dating a demon?” he echoed. Was that what he was doing—dating Elise? Did visiting morgues and crime scenes count as dates? They probably did to her.

  “Gossip gets around town. Even here.”

  Good Lord, he hoped it wouldn’t get back to his mother. She’d have a coronary. “We’re not dating.”

  Seth shrugged, like he couldn’t have cared less either way. “Did you want something to eat? Elise thought you’d want steak.”

  Lincoln didn’t want anything cooked by werewolf paws. God only knew how the infection spread. He could think of a few things that he would like less than being furry twice a month, but not many.

  He finished his beer. It had been sealed. It was safe. “I’ll have another one of these,” he said, sitting on a nearby picnic table, far away from the crowds. Far enough that he would have warning if one of them ran at him, and enough time to draw his gun.

  “Sounds good to me,” Seth said.

  The kid disappeared for a moment, and then returned with an entire six pack. He set it beside Lincoln and joined him on the bench.

  Lincoln didn’t protest. He didn’t have to like Seth to drink all his beer, after all.

  Elise found Rylie in the thick of the action inside the kitchen, manhandling Nash. She was trying to get him to put on a pair of elbow-length yellow rubber gloves. He looked like Rylie was trying to convince him to stuff his arms into a pair of angry badgers.

  “I don’t do dishes,” he said.

  Rylie planted her hands on her hips, gloves crumpled in one fist. “I’m not telling you again.”

  “That’s right,” Nash growled, pale eyes sparking. “You’re not.”

  Elise stepped up to the sink. It was practically the size of a bathtub, and filled with a sudsy foam. A stack of dirty pans stood on the rack beside it. “All I want is for you to get them soaking,” Rylie said. “I’m not asking you to work while everyone eats. Just…do your part.” It was obviously not meant to be a request.

  “If it’s so easy, you can put the damn dishes in the sink.” His spine straightened, chin lifting, staring at Rylie down his nose. “I’m the CEO of Adamson Industries and richest man in—”

  “In the Haven,” Rylie finished for him. “Which has long since moved on and forgotten you. You’re not a rich asshole here; you’re just an asshole, and if you’re going to be part of my family, you’re going to act like it.” She shoved the rubber gloves in his chest.

  “How dare you?” Nash hissed.

  “Don’t make me tell Summer that you’re not pulling your weight.” Rylie poked him.

  He took the poking more like a slap to the face. “I guard the sanctuary, though I have no reason to be here without her. I tolerate her presence.” He pointed at Elise. “What more do you ask me to do?”

  “The dishes,” Rylie promptly replied.

  There was something much too sweet for words about watching the angel that had killed Eve’s children pull on the rubber gloves, looking disgruntled. Even an annoyed angel was beautiful. He was majestic, filled with the glory of ethereal light, and about to get soapy.

  “Don’t say a word,” Nash shot at Elise.

  Her satisfaction must have been showing on her face. She schooled her features. “I only came to speak with Rylie.” But if she happened to enjoy sweet justice in the meantime, that was just a bonus.

  Rylie watched long enough to make sure that Nash was getting to work, then allowed Elise to draw her away.

  “Where’s Summer?” Elise asked, sliding through the busy kitchen.

  “Huh?”

  “Summer. Nashriel’s girlfriend. Where is she?”

  “Oh. She’s visiting my aunt with her brother Abram,” Rylie said. “Nash would have gone with her, but he’s one of our best fighters. We wanted him around while we’re still getting everything set up here.” She glanced back at him, lowering her voice. “And he needs to learn to get along with people when Summer isn’t around. He fakes it well for her, but he can still be kind of a dick sometimes.”

  “He’s an angel,” Elise said. That was just how angels behaved. They were creatures of the intellectual, brilliant and creative, and they believed themselves to be superior to everyone. It was part of the reason James was such a dick, to use Rylie’s term.

  Rylie snorted delicately at that explanation. “Like my aunt would say, being an angel is no excuse for being insufferable.” She sighed, stepping out the front door to the street. “You didn’t come here to talk family drama. Sorry. What’s up? Did something happen with the case?”

  Unfortunately, no. With Father Armstrong dead and his accomplice missing, Elise was at a loss as to how she should continue the investigation. But she had other, much more immediate needs. “I was hoping you’d have something I could feed my dog.”

  “You’re keeping it?” Rylie asked.

  “For now.”

  “We’ve always got leftovers.” She pulled a face. “Nothing he would want to eat.”

  “Beef bone?”

  “We can manage that. Hey, do you want to meet some of the pack while you’re here?” Rylie asked.

  Elise would have preferred to choke herself with Ace’s chain. But if she was going to be leaving Lincoln with the pack, she wanted to familiarize herself with the people that would be responsible for his safety. Just in case.

  “Okay,” she said.

  Rylie took her through tables, stopping to introduce Elise to each group. Few people were sitting. Most milled restlessly as if they couldn’t stop walking, even when they were eating.

  The werewolves came in a wide variety of shapes, sizes, and features, but there was still a slight family resemblance to all of them—even beyond the gold irises. Elise couldn’t put her finger on the familiarity. Maybe the way they moved, or how they peeled their lips back in a wolfish glare when they smiled.

  Rylie listed names: Trevin, Pyper, Bekah, Paetrick, one after the other. She knew everyone by sight. They all greeted Rylie with respect, and sometimes outright affection. The Alpha regarded them all with a little smile, a nervous laugh, a blushing wink.

  This big group of mismatched people were family, united by the very thing that had turned them out from society.

  What must it have been like to love so many people? Elise loved, somewhat reluctantly—it was one of Eve’s major drives, that love thing, but it came to Elise with difficulty. And with that love had come fear. Fear of losing Anthony, McIntyre, Leticia, their children.

  Loving that many people made Rylie spectacularly weak. It left forty-something chinks in her armor. It was a curse, not a blessing.

  Elise didn’t envy her.

  She also didn’t retain any of the names that Rylie rattled off. They slid off of her mind as soon as they entered. Their faces blurred togethe
r into a sea of indistinguishable smiles.

  “You look overwhelmed,” Rylie said as she led Elise away. “I thought it was overwhelming at first, too.”

  “You seem to do well now.”

  “I’m good at faking it. Being responsible for everyone still scares the crap out of me.”

  Abel approached at a rapid clip, head bowed over the manila folder that he had stolen from the sheriff’s office. “Hey, Rylie,” he called, glancing up at her. “This guy look familiar to you?”

  He whipped out a photo from the folder, shoving it in their faces. It was a man with short brown hair, thin lips, a scruffy beard.

  “That’s the missing man,” Rylie said. “Bob Hagy, right?”

  He wasn’t missing anymore. His body had been found that weekend, as mutilated as every other victim. But Elise stared at the picture. She had seen his face recently.

  “He was the man with Father Armstrong,” Elise said.

  “He’s supposed to be missing,” Abel said.

  She grimaced. “He’s supposed to be dead.” Elise spotted Lincoln on the edge of the hazy gold light cast by the paper lanterns. She gestured him over. He was followed closely by Seth, both of whom were holding half-empty beer bottles. Looked like they had been making friends. “This is the man that they found this weekend, isn’t it?”

  Lincoln squinted at the picture and leaned in close. His night vision must have been terrible in comparison to Elise’s. “Yeah. Bob Hagy.”

  Elise plucked his cell phone out of his pocket. “Be right back,” she said.

  She let the others fill Lincoln in while she stepped away from the group, toward the quiet edge of the forest, and dialed McIntyre’s number. She had used Seth’s phone to update him earlier after the confrontation with Father Armstrong, so she expected that he’d still be awake to do some research.

  Elise’s expectation was right. Someone answered on the first ring. But it wasn’t McIntyre—it was Anthony.

  “Hey,” he said, sounding surprised. “I was about to call you. I was reading up on Father Armstrong and found a connection between the victims. You’ll like this.”

  “Give it to me.”

  “They’re all members of the same church. Right?”

  “Everyone in Northgate’s a member of the same church,” Elise said.

  “But these people are part of a church group that goes back a few years. Like, fifteen years back, to a high school youth camp. Guess who else was in the group.” Anthony didn’t wait for her to guess. “Richard Armstrong.”

  Elise glanced over her shoulder at Lincoln. He was deep in conversation with Seth, gesturing with his beer bottle, maybe arguing.

  “You think that Father Armstrong used that camp to select his victims,” she said, and Anthony made a sound of assent. It would have made perfect sense if she hadn’t seen one of the victims with Father Armstrong that afternoon, perfectly alive. “Father Armstrong looked like he was only thirty years old. He wasn’t leading a church group in high school, was he?”

  “No, that was led by this other guy, someone named Father Mikhail Night,” Anthony said.

  Father Night?

  He hadn’t said that he had known Father Armstrong for fifteen years. In fact, he had given Elise the distinct impression that they had only known one another for a few months.

  “That’s interesting,” Elise said in what had to be the understatement of the week, if not the year.

  “It gets better. There were other people that went to this church camp—thirteen total. All of them have gone missing or turned up dead.”

  “Wait, thirteen?”

  “Five of them moved away to other towns nearby. Fairfield, Woodbridge, Bellevue City… But they’ve gone missing, too. It hasn’t been connected to the case because they’re not in Northgate.”

  “Anthony,” Elise said slowly, trying to organize her thoughts, “is it possible that the bodies in the morgue aren’t the people that they believe them to be? They don’t have enough teeth to match dental records, no faces…”

  He caught on quickly. “You think that this group is faking their deaths so that they can go missing?”

  “I ran into Robert Hagy this afternoon,” Elise said. “That’s why I was calling you. He was the man with Father Armstrong.”

  “Oh shit.”

  That summed it up pretty well.

  Twelve people—thirteen, counting Father Night. It was the exact number of people that a coven would get together to perform big rituals. The kind of spells that required a delicate balance of energies, forcing them to be cast on specific moon phases. The kind of spells that took human sacrifice.

  “Text me the names of the other people that attended that camp,” Elise said. “I need to run.”

  “Where are you going?”

  “I’m going to have a talk with Father Night.”

  TWENTY-TWO

  ELISE FLEW INTO the night and reappeared twenty miles away in Woodbridge.

  She coalesced on the front lawn of the house where Father Night was supposed to be hiding. The lights were on in the house, even though it was almost midnight. Everyone else in the neighborhood was already asleep. The glow of light beyond the curtains seemed to taunt Elise.

  She could have tried to mist under the front door, but those cult fuckers had exorcised her once, and she didn’t want to see what kind of magical booby traps they might have waiting for an incorporeal demon this time. Leaning back, she unleashed a powerful kick next to the handle, shattering the lock.

  The door swung open.

  Elise jerked the falchion out of its scabbard as she stepped inside. “Father Night?” she thundered, fist tight on the bare hilt, ears perked for sound.

  Nobody responded. She also didn’t hear any rustling, doors slamming, or other sounds of attempted escape. The air was still, anticipant.

  She would have been able to taste it if there had been anyone in the house. Even when mortals slept, their minds gave off an electric buzz. But there were no functioning brains in the house. Not even the heartbeat of a family pet.

  The house was empty—or its inhabitants were hiding somewhere warded, where she couldn’t sense them.

  She prowled the living room, searching for family photos among the glass-front cabinets displaying antique shotguns, blunderbusses, and pistols. Everything was ancient; the house looked like a museum.

  Elise found what she sought in the hallway leading to the kitchen: a recent family portrait. She pulled it off of the wall and studied it closely.

  The family looked nice enough. Prim brunette wife; husky, bearded husband. She did a double-take at the wife. It was Sheriff Dickerson. Elise had only seen pictures of her on Lincoln’s phone, but in every single one of them, she had been uniformed, with her hair in a tight bun. Her hair was loose around her shoulders in these pictures. When she was smiling, she was unrecognizable.

  Elise pulled a second photo off of the wall. The sheriff and her husband were outdoors in that one, holding a pit bull puppy between them—a dog with a pink nose, brown markings, and a ribbon around his neck. Ace was ridiculously cute as a baby, all giant paws and big eyes. Must have been barely taken from his litter in the photo. And he probably hadn’t tasted human flesh yet.

  “You fuckers,” she breathed.

  She was going to kill them.

  Elise dropped the photo on a table.

  She rolled her feet down the hall, barely making a sound as she entered the kitchen, which was only illuminated by the hallway light. Long shadows stretched from the pots and pans hanging from the ceiling, throwing shapes on the wall beyond that looked like stalactites, or the open maw of a demon.

  The heater clicked on. The smell of blood slapped her in the face as the air stirred. It was a rich, meaty odor, suggestive of more than just a few drops spilled. And as soon as she slipped around the marble kitchen island, she saw why.

  Father Night’s body was sprawled in a glistening puddle. In such quantities, his blood looked black. It made his casso
ck shine.

  His arms were spread to either side, ankles together, head missing. Very much like a decapitated Jesus. At another time, Elise might have appreciated the artistry of it.

  Except that this time, it meant she was too late.

  She slammed her fist into the wall, letting loose a string of curses that might have even managed to shock McIntyre. She punched through sheetrock wrist-deep.

  And she heard a responding thud from somewhere else in the house.

  Elise froze, listening for the sound to repeat. A moment later, she heard another thud, and then another, like fists pounding on a door. It wasn’t far. Definitely on the first floor.

  She still couldn’t sense any mortals in the house. But that noise had to be coming from something alive.

  She searched the garage, the living room, the dining room, but couldn’t seem to find the origin of the pounding noise. It didn’t stop. She followed it back into the kitchen again and opened the pantry. There was a trap door leading to the crawl space, and it was bouncing.

  Elise kneeled to inspect the lock. Wards were etched into it. No wonder she hadn’t been able to feel anyone on the other side.

  “Hang on,” she said, “I’m coming in. You might want to step back.”

  The pounding silenced.

  She slammed the hilt of her falchion into the lock once, twice. The infernal obsidian sparked against the metal. On the third strike, the padlock shattered, and she was able to rip the door open. Her blood burned hot in the wake of finding Father Night—she pulled the door off of its hinges and tossed it aside.

  Elise dropped through the door.

  What had once been a crawl space had been carved out, converting it into a space large enough for her to stand in. Anyone taller would have to stoop.

  There was another pentagram smeared on the wall, another cage, plastic sheets spread over the floor. It was a second ritual site, though it didn’t seem to have been used in several weeks. The blood was brown and fading. The only footprints in the dust belonged to the person that had been trying to catch Elise’s attention, which were in the shape of designer heels. Shoes that definitely didn’t belong in a cult’s ritual space.