by SM Reine
The demon plunged into the dark hallway.
“Wait here,” Elise told Neuma.
She expected the demon to go make a break for the club—and the fresh meat the partiers could provide—but instead it went for a door she hadn’t noticed before. Elise began to follow.
“No!” Neuma cried, grabbing Elise’s arm. “Don’t!”
“It’s escaping—”
“You can’t go in there!”
“Why? Where does that door lead?”
“It goes down to the Warrens,” Neuma said. “You’d get eaten alive.”
“Shit,” Elise said.
“Shit,” Neuma agreed, stepping back into the room. She twisted around to look at her back in the mirror. Some of the glass was still in her back, and the injuries streamed thin, watery blood.
Elise grabbed the bathrobe and moved to cover the wounds. “We need to get you to a witch right now.”
“No. I’m fine. I have a charm to accelerate my healing to human speed. You know, for when I’m playing submissive.” Neuma grabbed a shard of glass and jerked it out of her back with a sigh. “Jewelry box. Toe ring with a red stone.”
Elise shifted through the gaudy bracelets and necklaces to find the ring. She passed it to Neuma, who leaned against the wall to slip it on her foot. The blood thickened and grew sluggish as she watched, slowing to an ooze.
“That’s a new toy,” Elise said.
“My girlfriend gave it to me. She likes playing rough.” Neuma pulled another shard of glass out, and another, dropping them in the trash can.
“Why did that demon attack you?”
“I don’t know. Don’t even know what it was. Would you pick some of this out for me? I can’t reach it all.”
“I think that might have been a fiend,” Elise said, ignoring the request. Neuma would have enjoyed it way too much. “They’re lesser demons, but it takes a strong demon to control them.”
“It looks like it dropped something,” Neuma said, pointing at a crumpled scrap of paper on the floor. Elise smoothed it out on her thigh.
It was an Eloquent Blood staff photo printed off the internet, and the former manager was circled in pink highlighter. “You sure this was on the demon?” Neuma nodded, and Elise studied it more closely. Aside from the circle, there was nothing odd about it. “Maybe it wasn’t after you. Maybe it was after that witch. Why would it have wanted the old manager?”
“I don’t know. Dumb bitch could owe someone money. Where did you see one of those before, anyway? Those are hellborn, and I don’t think you’ve been hanging out in Hell,” Neuma asked.
No, she hadn’t. Elise found herself recalling her fight against the death goddess again—the feel of her swords connecting with demon meat, watching the bodies hit the ground, the stink of their final, sulfurous breaths.
She had tried hard for so long to forget it that she wasn’t sure if she was imagining it now, but she was almost certain that the demons had been fiends.
“Maybe I have,” Elise muttered.
IV
James posed beneath a spotlight in a vast void.
The studio floor reflected his visage back on himself again, two Jameses touching foot-to-foot as the one atop mirrored the one on the bottom. He was dressed as he did for exhibitions—a plain white shirt, plain black slacks. His dress jacket lay over his shoulder, hooked on a single finger. The top button of his shirt was undone.
Somewhere, a piano began to play. First, a single note, and then a chord, and another.
James stretched out a hand. He reached toward the edge of the light, almost touching the darkness. “Dance with me,” he said, but his lips didn’t move.
“No.”
“Dance with me. I won’t teach you to fight until you know how to move.”
She was sixteen again. James was a stranger to her. They were in Saudi Arabia, and the heat pressed on their lungs and flesh. There was no air conditioning here; only the open windows letting in more oven-hot air. The sparse furniture was stacked against the wall, clearing a dusty eight foot by eight foot space of floor.
He was holding his hand out to her. Elise wanted to learn to fight. James wanted her to dance.
She stared at him in a silent challenge. She rarely spoke back then.
“Trust me,” James said, his skin brown with dust.
She reached out, and laid her fingers in his. In the black room, he grasped her hand.
The piano reached a crescendo.
Elise felt her armor peel away, dissolving to a simple black halter dress with a low back. Another spotlight clicked on above her, and she tried to turn away so he couldn’t see.
His arm slid around her waist, covering her lower back. James caught her right hand with his left.
“I’ve already seen,” he whispered. His eyes were kind, but only because he didn’t understand.
And they began to dance.
He led, and she followed. He took a step and she mirrored. When Elise tensed, he responded, moving in time to her whims but never ending the dance. They began with a simple box step, but it grew into more.
At sixteen, she had awoken in the Russian wilderness to find herself saved by James. She loathed him. She wanted to die. But he took away her weapons and forced her to rely on him, and she eventually grew to accept his presence—if not his attempts at friendship.
It wasn’t long before she accepted James’s challenge to dance. Even though she never became very good at it, it laid the groundwork for the way she fought today. The man she had started out hating became her friend, and only a couple years later, he had undertaken the ritual to become her aspis.
Their friendship didn’t surprise her anymore. Some things were meant to be.
But where were they now?
She pulled away, and he let her go until the rhythm of the piano brought her to him once more. His posture was perfect. Except for their hands, they never touched.
Closed telemark. Cross hesitation.
“Your cold demeanor is a defense,” James whispered. Reverse turn. “You used to be passionate about fighting. You used to be passionate about life. But now you’ve left it all behind, and what remains once the passion is gone? A cold shell.”
She kept her head turned to the side, her hand light on his shoulder as she stared into the darkness.
Feather step. Open telemark.
“What drives you now? Certainly not accounting.”
Cross chasse.
James dipped his head low, his lips brushing her ear. “What makes the fire in you burn? Does it thrill you to be so selfish?”
“No, James,” she said, barely able to speak.
“You miss the hunt.”
“No.”
A running right turn. The piano thundered. It echoed off walls that were not there, reverberating in the floor beneath them. The spotlight followed them, ever-obedient, illuminating them like a lonely star in an endless night sky.
“I just want to be happy,” Elise said, helpless to fight.
“What makes you happy?”
“I don’t know. I don’t know what that means yet.”
He released her, and she spun away from him, barely able to keep her balance. James watched her, and the piano went on undisturbed as though they hadn’t stopped dancing.
“Elise,” he said.
Her heart fluttered in her chest. Her dress swirled around her knees.
“Where are we now?” she asked.
James shook his head. “We don’t know.”
He stepped forward, and she let him pull her forward. He was always so much warmer than she would ever be. “We can never know,” he said
And then he bit her earlobe hard.
Shocked, she jerked back. The face that stared down at her didn’t belong to James.
Elise tried to pull out of his arms. “Who are you?”
He pressed his face into her neck. His breath was hot, flames licking the curls behind her ears and scorching her tender flesh. “You’ve forgotten m
e already,” he murmured, his hands tightening on hers until she could feel the bones break like celery under the knife.
She cried out and it made no sound. Her breath was swallowed by vacuum.
“Go about your life like nothing’s wrong, as though nobody is looking for you,” he said. His voice raked down her spine, metal blades scraping down the bone, nails on blackboard. He trapped her arms at her sides. “Forget if you want. Be my guest. I can’t see you from afar, but I have eyes everywhere. I will find you.”
Her dress was gone, and she was naked. His flesh burned against hers, and their dance was the fanning wind, a slow waltz toward an uncontrollable wildfire.
She was trapped.
“You will be mine,” he hissed.
Suddenly, Elise knew who he was.
The room exploded into light, and she screamed.
Elise’s eyes flew open, and then immediately flew shut again when light seared her retinas. Her head throbbed and every blat of her alarm made it worse.
Her hand groped blindly for the curtains at the head of her bed, and she jerked them shut. The room fell into blissful darkness. Another fumble, and the alarm silenced.
She sat up, a mess of curls falling around her face. The poster of Black Death’s most recent tour stared down at her: The Masque of the BLACK DEATH. The lead singer, Misery, posed dramatically in a white mask with blood pouring from underneath it, and the rest of the band brooded in macabre costumes behind her.
Her door was closed, locked. Her clothing was piled around her closet.
There was no piano. No dark room.
And he wasn’t there with her.
Her face fell into her hands, and she let the stress wash out of her in one long breath that made her shoulders shudder. The release was brief, merely seconds long, and then she dried her cheeks and she got out of bed as though nothing happened.
Elise showered, redressed the wound on her arm, and went about her day.
The afternoon arrived bright and sunny despite the steel-gray clouds lingering overhead. The sun should have warmed the air, but the light only succeeded in washing the colors out of the already-barren landscape. Beads of rain quivered underneath the letters on the street sign, Westfield.
Anthony Morales slowed his Jeep to a stop in front of Motion and Dance and glanced at the clock on his dashboard. Three-fifteen. Betty hadn’t asked him to pick her up until four (or, as the text had said “get me or die!”), but Elise handled the finances for the coven, and she always went in on the esbats.
There was movement beyond the glass doors. It was probably Elise.
He examined his reflection in the visor mirror, trying to order his brown curls by running his fingers through his hair. Anthony only succeeded in messing it up further. He scrubbed at an oil mark on his cheek. It was the best he could do for his appearance—he couldn’t make himself into Don Juan with a little spit and an attempt at a suave smirk.
He tried out the smile on himself, but it quickly faded. Smirk or not, Elise was way out of his league. She usually made him feel like nothing but Betty’s kid cousin.
A man Anthony recognized as James, the high priest of Betty’s coven, emerged from behind the building. He propped the open front door and went inside. All Anthony knew about the high priest came from his cousin, who liked to use adjectives like “dreamy” for him and said he was the most important person in the world to Elise.
“What kind of guy is a witch, anyway?” Anthony muttered to himself, climbing out of the Jeep.
Subsiding into half-coherent insults, he slammed the driver’s side door and headed up the sidewalk to the front doors. He heard voices and hung back to listen, easing in sideways to see who was talking.
James and Elise were in the midst of an animated conversation. Her posture was straight, shoulders back, chin lifted, like she was ready to fight.
“You were the one who wanted me to investigate, and I did. You see this?”
“I’m sorry.”
“This is serious, James, real serious, and I don’t want to be involved. I don’t want you involved.”
“What will the Ramirezes do? Someone has to help them, and if—”
“I’m not going over this again.”
James shook his head. All the tension drained from his shoulders, and he leaned forward to press his lips to her forehead. She closed her eyes. He whispered something into her hair, but it was too quiet for Anthony to make out.
A swell of jealousy rose in his chest, and he bumped the door with his foot. The entrance bell jingled.
James’s straightened. He glanced at Anthony without expression. “We’ll talk more about this later.”
Elise’s mouth stretched into thin line. “Fine.” James left, and she sighed, rolling her right shoulder to loosen it.
Anthony opened his mouth to speak, but words failed him. Elise always managed to render him nonverbal. Today, she wore a shirt that was swooped low in the front to reveal a lot of cleavage that he had to struggle not to look at. She was wearing gloves again—she always wore gloves—and cutoff shorts.
He cleared his throat and tried to find his voice. “Hi, Elise.” He shouldn’t stare at her legs, either. Really. “You and James... Are you okay?”
“Yeah. It’s just a stupid disagreement.”
“It looked kind of bad,” he said. She shrugged and sat down at the reception desk, dragging a squat filing cabinet to her side. Elise favored her right arm.
“What are you doing here? Did you feel like taking up ballet all of a sudden?”
“No,” he said. “I’m picking up Betty.”
“The coven’s not done for another half hour.”
“I guess I lost track of the time.”
The corner of Elise’s mouth twitched. “That’s fine. You can hang out with me while we wait for the witches to finish. They’re boring when they’re meditating.”
“Awesome,” Anthony said, and he tried not to sound too enthusiastic about it. He took the second chair and moved over.
The door between the entryway and the dance hall was open and James’s voice echoed through the studio. “How did that meditation make you feel? Ann?”
“I felt in tune with the Earth,” she responded. “It was relaxing. Finals have been crazy.”
Others made assenting noises. Elise made a face at Anthony, and he grinned.
“You feel like working? There’s a lot of paperwork to go through,” she said. “I need to find where James stashed last year’s registrations that came through the workforce education program. They have to be here. He’s organized, but in the most obscure way possible.”
“I would love to help,” he said, and Elise turned the filing cabinet to face him.
Anthony absorbed himself in his search, trying to forget how tedious he found paperwork. She focused on her laptop, fingers ticking away at the keyboard, and Anthony shuffled through the folders. Elise’s bare legs occupied the corner of his vision.
The seconds dragged. She hadn’t been joking about James’s bizarre methods of organization—everything was neatly tagged and labeled, but with indecipherable codes. He had no idea what “G-3B” had to do with receipts for cleaning supplies, or why the thick folder full of yellow-tabbed sheet music was marked “T6” (or why it was between the receipts and what looked like coven inventory lists), but it meant that Anthony had to read everything to figure out what it was.
He distracted himself from his chore by scooting his chair back enough to peek through the door to the next room. An assortment of women and men rested comfortably on cushions around a small altar. Smoke rose from a censer between them.
Anthony’s cousin sat beside James, her blonde hair pulled into loose pigtails. She listened raptly to the high priest, nodding along with everything he said.
“As we discussed last week, Marisa’s family is facing some troubles right now,” James said. “An exorcist determined that Lucinde may be possessed. I believe we should partake in a cleansing ritual.”
Elise began typing with renewed vigor. “Do you hear this?” he whispered.
“I don’t listen to their crazy witch nonsense.”
“Who’s the exorcist?” Ann asked.
“She prefers to preserve her anonymity,” James said.
“It would be so interesting to talk to her for my thesis. It’s on the supernatural and old-world religion in modern times.”
“I can pass along questions for you.” His tone left no room for argument. “What do you all think of my proposal?”
“An exorcist,” Anthony murmured. “It’s like they think they’re in a movie or something.”
Elise typed harder.
“Do you mean actual demons, or the kind of demons we regard as goddesses, like Lilith?” asked a man whose voice Anthony didn’t recognize.
“The two aren’t mutually exclusive,” James explained. “This one may be little more than an angry spirit, though. As such, it can be cleansed and cast out with ritual and positive energy.”
“I don’t think we should get into it,” Ann said. “Demons are risky business.”
Elise sighed and stretched in her chair, drawing Anthony’s attention away from the conversations in the other room. “God, it’s hot in here,” she said, slipping off her sweater. He had to look. Her tanned skin was flecked with freckles, creating alluring trails that dipped down into the neckline of her shirt and out along her shoulders. He would happily explore those paths with his fingers and lips, if he could just get the balls to make a move.
And then the sweater dropped enough for him to see the gashes—three deep, parallel slices on her arm. That was what James had apologized for. Had he hurt her?
“What happened to your arm?” he asked.
“What? Oh. I got attacked by a bush when I was out running last night.” She pulled her sweater back on. “It’s nothing.”
“I thought you said you felt hot.”
“I changed my mind. I’m going to close this door,” Elise said. “I don’t want to hear them anymore.” She shut it and the conversation became an inaudible mumble.