Sacrificed in Shadow

by SM Reine

  Elise glimpsed a symbol she recognized among the runes: the sigil of St. Benedict, the patron saint of exorcisms.

  “No,” she whispered, taking a quick step back.

  James flung his hand toward her.

  Light consumed her. Elise felt an instant of brilliant, blazing pain—and then nothing.

  TWENTY-SEVEN

  NORTHGATE BURNED INTO the early morning. Seth evacuated Stephanie to the mountain slopes overlooking the town, waiting just off the road into the sanctuary to watch the smoke climb into the sky. She had been all but catatonic since the confrontation downtown; she hadn’t spoken once, nor had she struggled against Seth’s attempts to move her. She sat on a pile of rocks, unmoving and pale and motionless for hours.

  Her silence suited Seth fine. He was still numbed by shock and exhaustion himself.

  Seth kept replaying that one moment in his mind over and over—the sharp bite of pain, turning to see James bleeding him, the slap of shock.

  And then the door opening.

  Seth was a simple guy. He liked a motorcycle ride on clear nights, sharing a beer with his brother, shooting cans off of fences to keep his aim sharp. He’d gone to college in a big city and decided that he liked rural life better. As far as he was concerned, he’d be happy to hide in the mountains with the pack for the rest of his life, never seeing anyone outside the same group, swimming in that lake and taking hikes.

  But he had glimpsed a bigger world, a bigger conflict. For some reason, it made him think of his mother. Failure, she had called him. Eleanor always said that Seth had failed to meet his destiny.

  That door that James had opened—that was destiny. He could feel the certainty of it lodged like a hard rock in his gut.

  He felt Rylie coming. Her Alpha energy was impossible to ignore.

  Rylie approached him, arms hugged around her ribs, looking so small and young and vulnerable. She must have stolen clothes out of the consignment shop, since she wore an ill-fitting sweater and ballet flats. Her bare skin was streaked with ash. She had spent all morning searching the burning buildings for survivors.

  “Is it true?” Rylie asked.

  He frowned. “Is what true?”

  She gave him a piece of paper. “I found this near the Bain Marshall statue.”

  He unfolded it. The letter was addressed to him and his brother, and it looked like it had been produced on a manual typewriter. Several letters were out of alignment.

  He skimmed the letter quickly. It was from James.

  James Faulkner had been a friend to the pack when they needed it. He had protected Rylie during her pregnancy and given them a safe harbor for her children. Strange as James seemed, Seth had trusted him enough that they had invited him back to cast the wards for the sanctuary. The risk of letting the witch know where they lived seemed worth the possible reward.

  Yet James had been different when he returned to the pack early that autumn. Not only had he used magic to disguise his appearance, he had seemed a little too shocked to find that the pack hadn’t gone to the Haven, and that Rylie’s children were wandering free. He had asked a lot of invasive questions about Nash, about Summer and Abram. But he had left without causing problems, and the wards he cast were fantastic. Rylie and Seth agreed that letting him in had been worth it.

  But now this.

  James had cut Seth. Taken his blood. Used it to cast a spell.

  And his blood had done…something.

  Seth read the letter again, stomach churning.

  Seth and Abel,

  If you’ve found this letter, I was forced to leave Northgate unexpectedly. By now, you may have realized that your family is different than normal, but you likely do not realize that you are the last members of the bloodline of Adam, the first man. I’m sorry I won’t be able to explain this to you in person. Instead, I’ve left a book for you under this altar that will explain everything.

  I have helped your family many times. Now I require something in return.

  I’ll return soon.

  It was simply signed “James.”

  “What book did he leave?” Seth asked.

  Rylie was gnawing on her bottom lip as she stared out at the burning town. The fire reflected in her eyes, making the gold dance with flashes of orange and crimson. “It’s not a book. It’s a diary.”

  “A diary?”

  “It’s your mother’s,” Rylie said.

  Seth crushed the letter in his fist. “I read my mom’s diaries. There was nothing about Adam in them.” He flung the letter into the bushes. “He’s playing some game.”

  “Seth…”

  “I don’t have special blood. I’m just some guy.” There was a note of desperation to his voice, even though he struggled hard to suppress it.

  Rylie reached out, then touched a hesitating hand to his shoulder. Seth shut his eyes. Even though they hadn’t been together for months, a stroke of her hand filled his chest with fiery warmth. “You’ve never been just anyone,” Rylie said softly. “I always knew that you were special.”

  “Don’t talk like that,” Seth said. His voice came out ragged.

  “You saw what James did with your blood.”

  He had. Seth had seen everything from the feet of the Bain Marshall statue: the opening door, the vast garden, the blue daylight skies. He had even smelled the fruit on the air and felt an unseasonably warm breeze. Somehow, his blood had done that. It had changed a door from Hell into a door from Heaven.

  But it couldn’t be true.

  “He’s going to try to collect payment from us,” Rylie said. “From you and Abel.”

  Stephanie finally looked up from the pile of rocks. Her eyes were shadowed, cheeks hollow. “The pack owes James nothing. Everything he did was a favor to me. The debt is between the two of us, not you.” Her mouth stretched into a pained grimace. “I’m sorry.”

  Seth was too overwhelmed to consider her apology. He paced along the side of the road, hands balled into fists, thinking about destiny and his mother and crimson streaks of blood.

  “Seth…” Rylie said.

  “I’m not going to help him,” Seth said. “Whatever he wants, I’m not going to get involved.”

  Rylie touched his back. He almost jerked away from her. It felt too good for him to touch him—too much like she still loved him. Instead, he went rigid.

  She wrapped her arms around him, pressing her cheek to the middle of his back. “I won’t let them hurt you,” Rylie said. “Not James or Elise or anyone else.”

  “I’m supposed to protect you,” Seth said.

  “We’ll protect each other.”

  He turned, and Rylie looked so fiercely determined that it made his heart feel like it might shatter. Seth knew what Rylie was capable of better than anyone else. But this fight was beyond her. It was beyond all of them.

  Seth wrapped his arms around her shoulders. She hugged him again, even tighter than before. Almost so tight that it hurt.

  That night, he would be able to go home and start repairing the havoc that Lincoln Marshall had wreaked upon the sanctuary. In a few weeks, everything would return to normal. There would be no sign of what had happened after Elise Kavanagh came to town. The pack would bounce back—they always did.

  But this was only the beginning. That door wouldn’t be the end of it, and James would be back to take payment from Seth’s veins, willingly or otherwise.

  No matter what Rylie said, she couldn’t protect Seth from destiny.

  Being exorcised and out of control was a new kind of Hell. Elise careened through a lightless void, out of body, out of time. She had no fists or feet or a mouth to breathe through.

  Without a body, without distraction, all she had to pass the time was her hatred for James Faulkner.

  She replayed their last conversation in her mind until she thought she might go insane. She dwelled on missing so many obvious clues, losing Lincoln, and Seth’s significance—how had she not realized?

  Her every mistake swelled inside h
er until she had room for nothing else. That was the exorcism: dropping a demon to her basest level and forcing her to stew in a primordial ooze of misery.

  Elise almost felt sorry for every demon ass she had ever kicked.

  When she had a body again, she was in a tree. It smelled earthy and dry, so it definitely wasn’t a tree in Hell. Their flora only came with the odor of rot. Its flaky bark itched at her bare stomach, and a cool gust of wind sent shivers rolling down her flesh.

  Her forehead stung. Elise flinched and swiped at it.

  Another sting.

  Was someone throwing pebbles at her?

  She peeled her eyes open. Tears blurred her vision, and she blinked them away. Her skin felt soggy from the too-humid air of Earth. Her hair was greasy. She salivated, drooled.

  Why couldn’t she have reappeared in the City of Dis? At least she could have recovered from her humiliating foray out of body somewhere comfortably hot.

  A third pebble struck her, missing her face to land on her shoulder. She leaned over the branch and blinked rapidly to focus.

  Anthony stood a few feet below her, handful of rocks at the ready. He’d shaved the moronic pencil mustache. His brown skin gleamed with a layer of sweat, and he wore a ratty pair of gray sweat pants, so he must have been jogging.

  “You’ve been out of contact so long, I was starting to think you were dead,” he said. He didn’t sound all that worried about it. “Now it looks like you got piss-drunk and forgot yourself.”

  Elise pushed herself up on the branch to study herself. She was sprawled over a sturdy branch in a Joshua tree, sagebrush below and black sky above. Naked, of course. One last “fuck you” from James Faulkner’s exorcism. And whether by James’s design or the decision of Elise’s subconscious, she had reappeared in the desert north of Las Vegas.

  She unstuck her tongue from the roof of her mouth. Wiped drool off her chin. Nevada was close to Hell, but not close enough. She felt like a soggy, exhausted sponge.

  “Sorry to disappoint,” she said, sitting back against the trunk of the Joshua tree. It was a big one. Must have been centuries old.

  Anthony dropped the rocks, lifted a pile of cloth. “I found your stuff.”

  “Where?” Elise asked.

  “They were scattered that way.” He gestured toward the mountains. “I followed the trail to you. You’re lucky I went jogging late; it’s almost midnight. Been hanging up there long?”

  She wasn’t sure. She couldn’t remember anything clear before Anthony started pelting her with rocks. Her memories of her time drifting through exorcised nothingness were quickly fading, and the harder that she tried to remember them, the faster they slipped away.

  Elise swung her legs over the branch and dropped to the earth. Anthony watched as she dressed, thumbs hooked in the waist of his sweat pants. “You look whole,” he remarked. “Where have you been?”

  She shot a look at him. Admitting that James had exorcised her to Hell, or something like it, sounded wholly unpalatable.

  “I’ve been…around.”

  He accepted that explanation with a nod.

  Once she was clothed, Anthony handed her sheath and falchion to her, and then her charms.

  “I think this is yours, too,” he said, holding up something small and metal.

  It was a plain gold ring. Elise spread the fingers of her right hand and found them bare.

  She wasn’t wearing her warding ring, but James’s mind was closed off to her. He must have been wearing his. He had finally given her what she had wanted: to be left alone. But she didn’t want him leaving her alone now. She wanted to know where he had gone so that she could kick the teeth out of his handsome face.

  “Thanks,” she said. She didn’t put the ring back on her finger. She unclasped the chain of charms and dropped it among the crosses and pentagrams, then affixed the necklace around her throat.

  “Have fun in Northgate?” Anthony asked, sauntering away from the mountains toward McIntyre’s trailer. She followed.

  “You have no idea,” she said.

  “Kill the bad guys?”

  “Mostly.”

  “Is everyone safe?” he asked.

  She opened her mouth to say “yes,” and then shut it. Elise wasn’t sure. “I don’t know,” she said. “You said it’s almost midnight?” He nodded. Plenty of time to skip ahead three time zones and pay a visit to the pack. “I need to go back.”

  Anthony hesitated mid-step. “For Lincoln?”

  “Is that a problem?”

  “Nah,” he said. “Guess not. Call me if you’re going to go mysteriously missing again, though. Dana and Deb were worried about you.”

  Elise managed a faint smile. “Only the kids?”

  “Leticia, too.” Anthony wasn’t going to admit that he had missed her. It didn’t matter. She could see it in his eyes.

  She nodded once, then returned to Northgate one final time.

  Elise still couldn’t enter the werewolf sanctuary, no matter how many times she threw herself at it. James’s wards were as merciless as ever. Maybe it was her imagination, but they seemed to slap her down harder every time she lunged at them, like they were trying to convince her to stop.

  They succeeded. She ended up pacing along the place that the border of the wards intersected with the road, glaring at the sparks of magic helplessly.

  A significant amount of time seemed to have passed since her last visit to the sanctuary, although she had no sense of how much, exactly. The branches were bare of all their colorful leaves, making the forest look like endless hills of gray skeletons. The wind carried the bite of winter.

  How had James drawn those new runes? She used to be able to cast his paper spells if he made them first. Maybe, if she could figure out his newest magics, she could break the wards herself.

  But she didn’t need to. A motorcycle buzzed up the road, heading out of the sanctuary.

  Elise stepped into its path. It stopped a foot away from her.

  The man on the front of the bike flipped up helmet’s visor. “Elise?” It was Seth, wearing a leather jacket and a pair of distressed jeans.

  She pressed her lips into a thin line without responding. She searched the sliver of his face for some hint of resemblance to Adam—some small indication that the blood of the first man was somewhere in his lineage. Maybe his eyes had that easy-going kindness that Adam used to have, before he became God. He was as handsome as Adam, though in a completely different way.

  No, the blood of God had been changed throughout the millennia. They looked nothing alike.

  But he had opened Eden. Appearances aside, the blood ran true.

  “Hi,” Elise said curtly.

  The woman on the back of the bike—sidesaddle, no less—wasn’t wearing a helmet. It would take a lot more to kill an Alpha werewolf than a crash in traffic. Rylie dropped her grip on Seth’s waist and stood.

  “Oh my God,” she said. “I thought that you were dead.”

  “Not yet. How long has it been?”

  “Three weeks,” Rylie said. She swallowed hard. “Almost four, actually, since the fight in Northgate.”

  Dread pooled in Elise’s gut. No wonder they had given her up for dead.

  “How many fatalities?” Elise asked.

  “If you’re asking about the pack? None,” Rylie said.

  Seth pulled his helmet off and held it under one arm. His hair stuck up on the side. “We got lucky. Nash took three of Lincoln’s bullets before James drove him away, and he’s healing. Summer’s babying him. He loves it, of course.”

  “Sir Lumpy’s tail got singed in the fires, too,” Rylie added. “He’s extra cranky now. But Trevin bounced back from his wounds pretty much overnight.” She gave a shaky smile. “The cottages took a lot of damage. We’re still rebuilding.”

  Elise frowned. “What about outside the pack? Northgate was burning.” Seth just shrugged. Rylie didn’t meet Elise’s eyes. It must have been bad if they didn’t want to tell her. She could alway
s check the news later, if she wanted the bad news. “And Lincoln?”

  “No sight of him since,” Seth said.

  After a month, Elise didn’t even know where to begin hunting for him.

  “I should return to Vegas and figure out how to find Lincoln, but I don’t need to leave right now,” Elise said. “I could help you rebuild the cottages.”

  Rylie and Seth exchanged looks.

  “I forgot something back home. I’ll be back in a minute,” he said. He jammed the helmet on again, muffling his voice. “Good to see you’re alive, Elise.”

  He kicked the motorcycle into gear, turned a one-eighty, and rumbled out of sight. Elise watched his headlights dwindle into the distance.

  Rylie smoothed her hair, which was wind-whipped and tangled. “Want to walk for a minute?”

  “No,” Elise said.

  “Oh. Right. Okay.” Rylie took a deep breath. “I appreciate your offer of help, but the pack’s agreed not to let anyone into the wards again. Nobody but pack can enter. If we hadn’t let Lincoln in, we wouldn’t have taken so much damage. And it could have been worse, you know. So…nothing personal, but…”

  But Seth, or Abel, or one of Rylie’s other trusted advisors had decided that Elise wasn’t trustworthy.

  “James can still get into the sanctuary,” Elise said.

  “Actually, Stephanie fixed the wards to block him out, too. Just pack. I mean it.” Rylie scuffed her shoe against the path. “It’s not like we’re trying to keep you out, specifically.” Except that they were.

  “Stephanie’s fine, then.”

  “Not really. She’s pretty beat up.” Rylie shrugged. “We’re working on it.”

  Elise narrowed her eyes. “Has Seth decided to help James open the doors?”

  “No! No, he wants to stay out of it,” Rylie said. “But if he did decide to help James, would you…?”

  Would you kill him? The unfinished question hovered in the cold night air between them.

  Elise was very tempted to give Rylie the “no” that she wanted, even though it would be a lie. Elise would kill Seth if that was what it took to keep the doors to Eden shut and James out of the Origin. One lie was nothing in comparison to what Elise would do to protect Eden.