by SM Reine
“Don’t believe her,” the priest said.
Elise would have liked to believe that Stephanie was insane. It would have been sweet justice after how much the doctor had driven Elise crazy. But while Stephanie was a bitch, she also had a sense of noble honor. She had stayed at the emergency room through apocalypse, risking life and limb to try to save people that couldn’t be saved.
Which meant that Father Night was lying.
She dropped Stephanie’s arm. “Go ahead,” Elise said. “Kill him.”
The priest’s eyes widened to circles.
Stephanie said a word of power, trying to unleash the magic contained within the page she held.
But the spell fell flat. Nothing happened.
The page evaporated in her hand, and Stephanie cried harder as she watched the ash drift away. She wasn’t as strong as Sheriff Dickerson. She couldn’t cast paper magic. “No,” she said, sinking to her knees, book clutched to her chest. “No.”
Father Night didn’t relax. He watched Elise from the corner of his eye warily as he backed toward the altar.
“Well, Father,” Elise said, “would you like to confess your sins?”
“I haven’t sinned.”
“Everyone’s a sinner, Mikhail. And all of those dead people didn’t sacrifice themselves.”
“That was the sheriff,” Father Night said. He faltered as Elise approached him. He stumbled over the first step leading to the statue, landed on his ass. “I may have guided them somewhat—”
That was enough of a confession for Elise. She lunged at him with shamefully human slowness, seizing his shirt in her fists, jerking him close.
His voice rose an octave. “It was for good reason! Blood had to be spilled, but they’ll be resurrected when He returns!”
“Who?” she growled.
Father Night fumbled with the hem of his shirt, lifting it to show his hip. There was a bloody apple tattooed beside his navel, half-hidden by hair. “We’re not opening a gate to Hell. We’re trying to open Heaven. The Lord’s been trapped for millennia, and he’s waiting on the other side. We will all be absolved of our sins when I open the door.”
He didn’t even know the truth. He thought God could save them.
She laughed a smoker’s laugh, low and raspy, dropping Father Night on the steps. “You’re wasting your time, Mikhail,” Elise said. “The garden’s been moved, and there’s nobody inside. You would be disappointed if you even managed to open a portal to it—which you can’t.”
He looked stricken. “Eden’s been moved?”
“Wait. You’re trying to get to Eden?”
If that was the case, then Father Night wasn’t just a little bit behind the times—he was centuries behind. Eden had been burned in the old war, and God had been imprisoned in Araboth. There was nothing in Eden. It was a charred wasteland.
Father Night was crawling up the steps, trying to reach his altar. It had candles, a bell, a wooden pentacle. But the altar was only tangential to the power in the square, not the nexus.
“Who told you to open a gateway to Eden?” she asked, closing the space between them so that he couldn’t run.
“An angel,” he said.
“Metaraon?”
“Orpheus,” Father Night said.
Elise’s jaw clenched. Her fists trembled.
James fucking Faulkner. It shouldn’t have surprised her to find him at the center of it all, pulling everyone’s puppet strings. He had been pulling hers for a long time. But she hadn’t believed he would be willing to kill humans—innocent humans—to achieve his goals. Ruthless, yes. Cruel, never.
“Did he tell you to sacrifice those people?” Elise asked. It was all she could do not to scream the question.
Father Night seemed to realize that the question had shifted her anger away from him. He straightened, speaking with more confidence. “No. The angel told me nothing except where to find the door.” He gestured at Bain Marshall. “That’s why I had to evoke a demon. This nightmare knows how to get to Eden.”
“Nightmare?”
“I exorcised her after she killed Father Davidek, but she continued to speak to me in dreams. She told me that she could help me open the door. All I had to do was give her a body.”
“Why Lincoln?” Elise asked.
“Because he has God’s blood,” he said, pointing at the statue of Bain Marshall again. “And only God’s blood can open the door.”
“Elise!”
Her head whipped around at Stephanie’s scream. The doctor was pointing beyond the statue, face pale.
Northgate was burning.
Smoke rose from the roofs of the buildings in white spirals, inverted against the pale, magic-drenched sky. If Elise focused, she could feel rippling heat from the infernal energy behind it, but the magic drowned it out. It was overloading her senses, blocking everything else out.
The nightmare was coming, bringing Lincoln’s body to Elise. Whatever horrors had been committed at the sanctuary were over now. It was too late to save the pack.
Father Night tried to stand, but Elise shoved him down, letting the back of his head smack into the altar. He cried out.
She straddled his lap, knees pinning his hips to the ground, cradling his skull in her hands. Elise had always thought that Father Night was a handsome man, as far as fusty, infuriating old priests went. But she felt no attraction to him now, and no sympathy.
“Orpheus didn’t tell you to kill,” Elise said, stroking his hair out of his face.
“No—and I didn’t tell the cult to kill, either; that was merely how they chose to evoke—”
She fisted his hair, silencing him. “This door that goes to Eden. It’s in the statue?” He nodded fractionally within her grip. “And the spell to open the door is already finished?”
“Almost, but we need the blood of—”
She jerked his head back, silencing him again. That was everything she needed to know.
Elise traced a fingernail down the pulse leaping in his throat, strangely entranced by the sight of the blood coursing underneath the surface. We need the blood, Father Night had said. It sounded like an appealing idea.
The nightmare was close. They didn’t have much time.
Eve would have shown mercy to the priest. For fuck’s sake, Eve wouldn’t have even hurt the cult, much less killed them. She would have joined hands with those sick fucks, asked them to be nice in the future, and encouraged a group hug.
After hearing what he told her, Eve would still believe that Father Night was redeemable. She would have somehow found love in her heart for him. For all of them.
Elise wasn’t Eve. She could never be Eve.
She snapped Father Night’s neck.
Elise had enough time to break a window and shove Stephanie inside of the consignment shop before Lincoln arrived. It was on the opposite end of the square from the nightmare’s approach, so the shop was probably as safe as anywhere could be in Northgate. Lincoln would have to kill Elise to reach Stephanie. The doctor would have much greater concerns than a few fires after that.
The demon’s energy singed her back like an iron pressed to her spine. She was surprised to see that Lincoln was still on the far side of the Bain Marshall statue when she turned, a nimbus of black energy haloing his tawny hair and blood dripping off of his chin.
Elise drew her sword and met him at the center.
“What’s your name?” she asked, separated from Lincoln only by a couple of charred flower beds. The petals curled at his proximity.
He tipped his chin down with a devilish smile. “Don’t you recognize me, lover? Your dear, noble Deputy Lincoln Marshall?” It didn’t sound remotely like him. Even if Elise hadn’t exorcised a dozen demons in her life, even if he didn’t bleed from his tear ducts, she would have known that he was possessed in an instant.
With his head turned, she could see an imprint of a cross on his cheek. Elise turned her falchion to look at the blade. His cross matched hers. Lincoln and James had a
lready had one encounter that night.
The fact that Lincoln stood in front of her now didn’t bode well for James. Elise wasn’t sure if that pleased her or not.
“Give me your name, hellspawn,” she said, lifting her chains of charms over her head, looping them around her fist.
“That’s rich, coming from you, Father,” Lincoln said. The honorific irked—a reminder that the demons in Hell regarded Elise as one of their own. She had accepted her powers, accepted that she was no longer human, but loathed the idea of being infernal royalty.
Her fist tightened on the falchion. “A name,” Elise repeated, and this time, there was force behind the command.
Lincoln’s jaw worked, as if chewing on the name. But the demon couldn’t resist the demand. Elise had always been good at her job as an exorcist, and now she had the force of gods behind her.
“Judy,” Lincoln finally said.
Elise blinked. Her falchion swayed. “…Judy?”
“Right, like ‘Elise’ is such the badass name,” he snapped. “Look, I was trying to modernize. It’s difficult to convince a priest of one’s benign intent with a name like Kolbach the Blood-Bringer.” Lincoln’s eyes skimmed past her. “Speaking of priests…”
“He’s dead. You’re next.” It was a statement of fact, not a threat.
Lincoln grinned. His teeth were stained with blood. “You want to try me, Father?” He extended his hand. “Go ahead. Let us battle on even ground.”
The demon probably thought it was a trap—that in a confrontation of powers, that the demon-possessed mortal would win out against Elise. If they were both nightmares, it would have been true. A nightmare possessing a human was much more powerful than a merely corporeal nightmare.
But Elise wasn’t a nightmare.
Keeping her grip tight on the falchion, she clasped Lincoln’s wrist, almost in a handshake. His bleeding eyes locked on Elise’s. And their minds opened to each other.
Elise blinked. When her eyes opened, she found herself standing on the vast wastelands outside an infernal city built into a giant, craggy cave. It must have been Malebolge—the birthplace of nightmares.
Judy stood before her. She was a skinny creature with sagging breasts, stick-like legs, a skeletal leer. Her sallow flesh was paper-thin. Her teeth looked like they were on the verge of rotting from her mouth, enamel cracked and gums black. She wore a spine as a belt and not much else.
In contrast, Elise was in full demon form: translucent skin, inky hair streaming into the shadows surrounding her, bare body ripe with eternal youth. Attractiveness was the gift of the father of all demons. Any life he had produced looked much the same. Judy obviously didn’t have a drop of his blood in her veins.
Between them yawned a vast chasm—a pit of fire from which screams drifted like curls of smoke. But Elise knew it wasn’t real. They hadn’t left Northgate. They had entered the arena of their minds.
“I wasn’t planning to open a door to Eden, by the way,” Judy said. She didn’t have to raise her voice for it to echo across space. “I gave Mikhail and the rest of those idiots an all-purpose portal spell. The blood is the key and the rudder. With the great-grandson of Bain Marshall’s blood spilled on the statue, it will open a door to Malebolge. A convenient highway for my nightmare sisters, don’t you think?”
“Why does Lincoln’s blood open a gateway to Hell?”
“Ask him yourself.” She grinned. “Oops—you can’t.”
“Give him back to me,” Elise said.
“Take him.”
Elise nodded. Challenge accepted.
She leaped. Judy met her halfway. They collided in the space above the fires, a tangle of shadow and slashing fingernails.
Thunder clapped at the place their bodies met, making the fire spew fresh clouds of ash, sending shockwaves through the earth. Judy moved too quickly for Elise to react on anything but instinct. She slammed the nightmare’s arm away, only to get a fist in her face, her gut. Elise kicked out and hit nothing.
“I will crush you and drink your blood, Father,” Judy said, wrapping her hand around Elise’s throat. There was glee in her face. Damn, but she was fast. “I’ll walk the planes of Hell wearing your skin!”
Elise couldn’t win a confrontation between their corporeal bodies. She erupted into darkness, filling the cavern with herself.
Judy tried to chase Elise into the shadows and couldn’t—Elise was the shadow.
Forced to remain solid, Judy thrust her fists into the sky. Plumes of flame shot from the crevasse. They licked the roof of the cave and spread light over the wasteland. Elise raced away like black lightning, jolting from one spot of darkness to the next.
But the fire brightened the darkest corners and left nowhere for Elise to hide.
Nowhere but within Judy herself.
Elise plunged into the nightmare, curling herself in the darkness of her chest cavity. She felt Judy’s shriek in the trembling of her shriveled lungs.
She wrapped a fist of shadow around the nightmare’s heart and squeezed. Let Lincoln go, she commanded, putting all of her will behind the words.
“If you kill me, I will drag him into death with me!” Judy gasped, voice echoing inside her body.
Elise held tighter, tighter.
I’m willing to find out if that’s true.
Judy tried to scream, but Elise gripped her lungs, too, pressing out all of the air. She weighed heavy on the diaphragm, expanded to push on the inside of her ribs, and crawled up her throat to fill her mouth.
Let him go…
The nightmare thrashed. Fingers slid into her mouth, trying to make herself gag and purge Elise’s shadow.
Elise expanded. Swelled.
Judy erupted.
For an instant, Elise saw shreds of flesh slapping against dirt, the spray of ichor, and an organ that might have been Judy’s brain falling into flame. And then the illusion of Hell was gone.
Elise was suddenly back in Northgate.
Lincoln dropped Elise’s hand, stepping back with a gasp. Elise lunged, swinging a hard uppercut. She connected with Lincoln’s chin. He dropped.
Elise stood over his body, shaking out her fist and trying to catch her breath.
It was still too bright in Northgate. The spell was waiting for the final ingredient to open the gateway. Fires were spreading across the rooftops. The entire western half of the town looked to be on fire.
James and Seth staggered into the square.
Elise forgot Lincoln immediately. “You,” she hissed, stalking toward James. “You did all of this!”
She swung the falchion.
Obsidian met steel, crackling with energy. James had the other falchion in his hands. He shoved, and she shoved back, pushing together until they were hilt-to-hilt.
James was a foot taller and fifty pounds heavier, but Elise was a match for him—barely. They strained against each other. Sweat beaded his forehead.
“I can explain if you let me,” James grunted.
She didn’t want to hear more lies. She shoved, throwing him off of her.
“Stephanie’s in the consignment shop,” Elise told Seth, keeping the falchion between her and James. “Make sure that she’s okay.” She was going to have to beat the shit out of James and perform an exorcism on Lincoln, and she wanted as little potential for collateral damage as possible.
“But—” Seth began to protest.
“Now,” she snapped.
He started backing away from them, rifle at the ready, prepared to shoot without any target. “It’s just—”
“What?”
Seth pointed. Elise turned.
Lincoln was still possessed. But he wasn’t where Elise had dropped him. He had dragged himself to the statue of Bain Marshall, and as Elise watched, he wiped the blood off of his cheeks and smeared it on the altar.
The spell was complete.
TWENTY-SIX
THE STATUE OF Bain Marshall trembled. The magic drew inward, as though inhaled into marble lu
ngs, and collected on his surface until he glowed.
With a groan, the statue’s uplifted hand turned to face the ground. His fingers spread. Electricity lanced between his palm and the earth like a lightning bolt, gushing light over the town square.
The electricity spread, split, arced. It opened into a wide sphere, through which Elise could no longer see the other half of Northgate. Crimson light, like blood lit aflame, splashed onto the surrounding lawn. The grass instantly curled and shriveled.
Lincoln had opened a gate to Hell.
But it wasn’t Judy’s nightmare brethren passing through the portal. Massive silhouettes moved on the other side, much larger and more tangible than any nightmare should have been. It was something else—something more terrible. And they were coming closer.
“I can close it!” James shouted over the buzz of magic. He jerked one of his leather gloves off with his teeth. “Hold the demons!”
Easier said than done. A long, leathery leg slid through the portal, capped by a cloven hoof. A hand as wide as Elise was tall followed, resting on the grass for balance.
She recognized what was emerging. She had seen his etchings in books, heard demons whisper his name with fear. He was a creature that never should have walked where mortals dwelled: Aquiel, the demon prince of nightmares.
He was much taller than the statue of Bain Marshall, so he practically had to crawl between Hell and Earth. He struggled to squeeze his massive form between dimensions, twisting to force a shoulder through.
For a breathless moment, Elise watched him push forward, hoping that he would have to turn back.
Yet somehow, he fit.
Perfect. The night kept getting better.
Elise jumped when a hand gripped her bicep. She looked up to see Seth hauling her to her feet, looking ashen-faced, but determined.
“You should run while you have the chance,” Elise said once she regained her footing.
He handed her the obsidian falchion. She hadn’t even noticed that she had dropped it. “I’m not going anywhere,” Seth said, loading his rifle. “How do I kill that?”