by SM Reine
The nightmare froze.
“Try me,” she whispered.
“Hey! What’s going on?”
Anthony rushed out of the studio. David Nicholas’s black eyes flicked to him, then back to Elise. He stepped away from her, lifting his hands.
“If Death’s Hand doesn’t kill you, we’ll finish this conversation—and we’ll do it under the eye of the Night Hag, you understand?”
Elise tossed his knife to him. “Won’t that be fun?” she said flatly.
He vanished before Anthony could reach them.
So much for that customer.
“Jesus Christ! What happened to you?” he asked, grabbing Elise’s shoulders to steady her.
“Don’t touch me. I’m fine.”
Anthony scanned her injuries, from the rapidly swelling black eye to her bruised cheeks and swollen lip. He ran his fingers through the hair that had come loose from her braid.
“Why didn’t you call for help?” he asked.
She swatted his hand off. “I told you not to touch me. Is the Jeep done yet?”
“No, but—”
“Then you and Betty need to finish it. I’m going upstairs to get my sword. I’ll be back down in ten minutes, and we’re going to leave.”
Her legs buckled under her when she hit the stairs. Anthony wrapped an arm around her waist.
“Whoa,” he said. “Let me help you up.”
Elise turned a cold gaze on him, letting all her pain and frustration show in her eyes. He jerked his hand back. “I told you not to touch me.”
He followed a step behind her as she ascended to James’s apartment. She managed to keep her hands steady when she unlocked the door.
She leaned against James’s wall as she lifted the hem of her shirt to examine her stomach. Red welts had risen on her skin, and she probed the edges gently. Even a light touch made her wince.
“What can I get you?” Anthony asked.
“Bandages. They should be in the bathroom cabinet.”
He disappeared, and Elise took a ritual mirror off the kitchen table to take another look at her face. In the minutes since she had last looked, her eye had nearly swollen shut. Her lip was bleeding.
She moistened a rag in the sink and washed off the blood. By the time Anthony returned with the bandages, her skin was clean, but there was no help for her shirt.
“Thanks,” she said, pressing a fistful of ice to her swollen forehead. “I don’t think I’ll need it after all.”
Anthony folded his arms as he studied her, and Elise studied him back out of her good eye. She didn’t appreciate being scrutinized.
For the first time that day, she noticed he was wearing a nice button-up shirt and clean jeans, although working on the Jeep had gotten his hands dirty. His hair was even combed back. It showed off his full lips and dimpled chin. And he was muscular, too.
Elise wondered how long he had been so handsome. They had been neighbors for over two years, and she had known him as an acquaintance for four, and she had never seen him as anything but Betty’s kid cousin before.
“Elise?”
She realized he had been speaking, and she shook her head to clear it. It made the bruises on her face throb. “Sorry. What?”
“You got pretty beaten. Are you sure you don’t need bandages?”
“Yes.”
She twisted to check her back in the mirror, and the movement sent pain lancing up her spine. She squeezed her eyes shut.
“Careful,” he said.
“On second thought, I need you to look at my back and tell me how bad the injury is. Okay?”
He nodded. Elise turned her back on him and lifted her shirt over her head. She could feel him looking at her. Her cheeks got hot, and she was glad he couldn’t see it.
Her heart was beating fast, but it was probably from the adrenaline of the fight. Probably.
She heard him step closer. “Hmm,” Anthony said.
“Well? Do I need bandages?” she asked, keeping her tone level.
“You’re scraped up, but it looks mostly like bruising.”
“How about on this side? It hurts more.” She turned and lifted her arm so he could check her ribs.
His fingers traced over the bruises on her side. Elise closed her eyes as chills prickled down her shoulders. “Same here. That looks painful.” Warm breath blew over the back of her neck, tickling the hair behind her ear.
Elise hadn’t been touched like that in years. Her body’s reaction was almost violent—the way her stomach muscles jerked, the heat that flushed her face, the warmth between her legs. “That’s not helping,” she said, and her voice shook. It actually shook.
She turned to face him, and Anthony’s cheeks had a warm flush. There was a certain intent darkness in his eyes as he focused on her. His gaze couldn’t seem to make it above her lips, which was good, because her handful of ice had melted down her wrist and left her swollen eye exposed. “Huh?”
“You’re not helping,” Elise repeated. One of his fingers hooked under her bra strap.
“Oh,” he said. His hand ran down her bicep as he lowered the bra strap. He dipped his head to trail his lips along the exposed skin. “I thought you said you didn’t want help.”
“Anthony…”
“Yes?” he murmured, pushing against her until her back bumped against the wall. She relaxed against him, letting the pressure of his body hold her suspended.
She half wanted to forget the danger pressing on them—and the danger James was in. But when her eyes opened, she saw the Ansel Adams photo over Anthony’s shoulder, and the memory of the time her aspis bought it shattered the illusion of peace.
Anthony’s hand slid over a bruised rib, and she flinched as pain stabbed through her side.
“Sorry,” he said against her neck.
Elise took a deep breath and planted her hands on Anthony’s shoulders. She could have thrown him across the room, but she made herself shove gently. “This isn’t the time.”
He caught her wrists. “We’ve got a few minutes.”
“Anthony. Not now. I’m serious.”
“But later?”
“The odds are pretty good.” She smiled a little. “At least fifty-fifty.”
He kissed her again, but this time, it was only a brief touch of his lips on hers. “I like my chances.” He took her hand, giving it a gentle squeeze. “Can I ask one question?”
“You can ask.”
“What’s with the gloves you’re always wearing? Is this some kind of weird demon hunter thing?”
Elise’s mouth snapped shut. “Go see Betty. I still have to grab something, but I’ll be right down.”
“But you said I could—”
“You can’t ask that,” she said. “Go.”
His tongue darted out to wet his lower lip. Elise was a lot more interested in the look of that than she liked to admit, but the heat building inside of her dissipated at the thought of James.
“See you in a minute,” he said, voice husky. He straightened his shirt and moved to go back downstairs.
“Anthony?”
He paused in the door. “Yeah?”
“You look really good.” As an afterthought, she added, “I’m sorry I missed our date last night.”
A brilliant smile illuminated his face. “Thanks, Elise.”
Once Anthony had gone downstairs, Elise had trouble remembering where she dropped her shirt. She didn’t have any other, cleaner clothing left at James’s apartment, so she pulled it back on to cover her injuries.
The painkillers were starting to kick in. Lifting her arms over her head ached, but it was hardly debilitating.
She rolled out her shoulders, touched her toes, and reached for the ceiling. Full mobility. Painful, but workable. David Nicholas picked a bad time to take out his frustration on her.
If only Anthony had come a couple minutes sooner. She could have skipped a beating and saved her time. Elise pushed the thought aside. There was no point in regretting what s
he couldn’t change.
Taking a set of keys out of James’s desk, she went into the spare bedroom that used to be hers before she moved in with Betty. Now it was an extension of the library in his room, with a cozy chair for reading books... and a gun safe bolted to the wall.
James didn’t own any guns.
She twisted a combination into the lock, whispering the numbers to herself. Two. Twenty-five. Nineteen. Nine. And eight.
Nothing happened when she twisted the key in the lock until she passed her hand over a charm James had welded to the side. The tumblers fell into place with a heavy, muffled thud.
Twisting the lever, Elise opened the safe.
Once upon a time, James and Elise hadn’t had thousands of books. They hadn’t had an apartment or a duplex or furniture. In fact, they hadn’t even had a spare pair of pants between them. They’d had a handful of cash in various currencies, two tattered backpacks… and swords.
Elise’s old chain of charms—which had since been replaced with newer, shimmering chains and tokens—was pooled at the bottom of the safe, and her sword was mounted against the back wall. Three feet long and gently curved like a waning sliver of moon, the falchion had a leather-wrapped hilt worn perfectly to the contours of Elise’s hand. She had rewrapped it a hundred times after a hundred battles in the twenty years since her father gave it and its twin to her.
“A falchion is meant to be wielded with a shield,” Isaac had said as Elise studied her birthday presents with grave seven year old eyes.
“Then why two?” she asked.
“Because you don’t need a shield if you kill everything that approaches you.”
She still wondered if that meant Isaac never intended for her to have an aspis. Elise got the impression he would have disapproved of her partnership with James, and the lengths to which she would now go to recover him. She didn’t care. Her father was a bastard anyway.
The magical engravings on the blade shimmered with more than the light when she took it in her hand. Elise swung the kopis through the air, slashing it at an invisible enemy. It felt strange to wield without its twin.
The back sheath was in a drawer at the bottom of the safe. Elise slung it on like a backpack and had to loosen the straps to make it fit.
Sheathed, the hilt of the sword protruded over her right shoulder. She flipped her hair back to hide it.
When she examined herself in the bathroom mirror, she couldn’t see the sword, and the straps of the sheath looked innocuous enough. But her swollen, bruised face was all too familiar.
Elise didn’t realize she had lashed out at the mirror until her reflection fractured. Glass sprinkled on the countertop.
“Damn it, James,” she whispered as her knuckles bled through her gloves.
This was all his fault.
If she started hunting again, there would be no going back. No second retirement. Maybe she had been naïve to think she could have left it the first time.
She swept out of the apartment and didn’t look back.
XVII
Ann clenched her fist, and the city grew silent.
The matter of calming people was simple. Press magic against the right part of the mind, and a person would grow lethargic. Press again, and they became all but comatose. Another press… well, it would be a long time before someone woke up from that.
Ann had once been too weak with her akashic magic to calm a single person, but it had grown easier with time. Now, with the full force of vedae som matis behind her, she felt she could silence the world itself.
But the world was not her goal. Even the entire city was more than she needed for the time being. She envisioned only the surrounding neighborhoods and lulled them to silence. Normal people would panic if they saw Ann’s demons and reanimated dead on the streets. With a calm laid over them, they felt nothing. She could operate in the day as easily as the night.
She was so powerful now. The universe’s energy flowed through her veins, hot as molten lava.
Rain sluiced down the attic’s lone window. The fading gray light was barely enough for Ann to make out her surroundings, but she knew her workspace well. She could have navigated it in absolute darkness. The only new addition was the pale form on her work table—a man so tall his feet dangled off the end.
Ann found her pen and nibs exactly where she had left them on the desk at the end of the attic. She paused to glance in her small ritual mirror—her nose was twisted, swollen, red, and her eyes were rimmed with dark purple bruises. Elise had mangled it with a few well-placed kicks, and Ann wasn’t the right kind of witch to heal it.
She collected the special ink vedae som matis had instructed her to make and took it to the table. She studied the face of James, her high priest, in half-darkness. The poison worked so deep into his body that organs began to fail, and he looked very old. Deep lines furrowed his skin, accenting the faint hints of gray at his temples. His temperature was so high that Ann could feel it from inches away. The edges of his lips were blue.
The poison made it impossible for him to escape while Ann prepared, but once he housed vedae som matis, the demon would burn the illness from his blood. He would heal in moments, and James would be the perfect vessel. With maintenance, his body would last for centuries to come.
And Ann would be right there to witness it.
“I need my straight razor,” Ann said as she shook the ink bottle, and her smallest helper, the girl once known as Lucinde, went to find it. “And a light, please.”
The lamp on her desk clicked on. The room was filled with a pale pink glow. A huge sigil anointed the floor, drawn in the same mixture of blood that marked the basement.
James didn’t stir when Ann touched the silver nib to his forehead. She drew intricate symbols on his face, repeatedly checking both to make sure she was drawing them correctly.
She cleaned a clumped fleck of red ink off James’s brow and let her fingertips trace on his skin. Ann couldn’t wait until her mistress had a body at long last. She was grateful that they had failed to prepare Lucinde properly. Ann could ignore a man’s body as long as it was vedae som matis inside. She wouldn’t have been able to deal with her mistress appearing as a five-year-old.
Ann moved down his body, writing the specific marks of transference on each critical point of his flesh. In order to preserve James for as long as they could, she had to inscribe over two dozen marks. She drew one carefully on his left shoulder atop a brilliant white scar he bore just over his chest.
Her smallest helper returned with the straight razor.
“Thank you,” she said, brushing her hand across the top of the child-servant’s head. “You can go sit in the corner again.” Ann didn’t watch to make sure she would obey. They always did.
Ann flipped open the straight razor and sliced it through the waist of his pants and down the legs. The cloth fell open as a snake shedding its skin.
A twinge of guilt clenched in Ann’s gut as she cut away his trousers, removing James’s last semblance of dignity. Although she had never been close to her high priest, or even that fond of him, she knew he and Elise were close. It was obvious they adored one another. She would be devastated.
The kopis is the enemy, Death’s Hand reminded Ann, brushing her mind. She will not share in our vision. She will not accept your offer to join us.
Ann didn’t reply. Betty wouldn’t share in her vision, either—or so vedae som matis insisted. Death’s Hand had deployed a fiend to kill Betty without asking Ann, and now one of her creatures was dead. She was still angry, but she sensed the demon’s jealousy—the worry that Ann would find she preferred human company. Ann tried not to feel too pleased with that. Vedae som matis’s jealousy made her feel wanted, and it was hard not to preen a little.
Marisa has betrayed us. I must kill her.
“No,” Ann said. “I don’t want anyone else to die if they don’t have to. You know I’m still mad you sent one of our babies to attack Anthony and Betty.”
Her voice tu
rned soothing. It was necessary. I knew they would get in the way, and if you could see what they are doing now, you would agree. They are coming to kill me.
“They can’t,” she said. “They wouldn’t.”
But the demon had already subsided from her mind, leaving her with a sense of the inevitable. Marisa wasn’t a big deal anyway. She had served her purpose. Vedae som matis wouldn’t kill anyone that didn’t need to die—right?
She resumed preparing James, trimming the thatch of pubic hair over his genitalia so she could properly access the skin beneath. She carefully tried not to look at his naked body. Ann wasn’t interested in the sexual sense, but it was so distracting trying to draw so close to a penis. She suppressed the insane urge to giggle.
He would be ready soon. She would only need the anointing oil, and perhaps a few herbs…
The clock chimed. Ten o’clock. Elise would be in the cemetery soon.
Ann smiled and continued to work.
“How’s it looking?”
Betty leaned on the Jeep’s roll cage to support her elbows, peering through a set of black binoculars. She hummed at Elise’s question, lips pursed.
They were positioned in the driveway of a sports complex across the street from Our Mother of Sorrows. Even though they had been parked at the edge of a busy road for twenty minutes, not a single car had passed.
The view from their side of the five lane road wasn’t good—the statue at the entrance of the cemetery was in the way, along with a few well-placed trees, and Elise could only barely see the illuminated angel statue in the back of the cemetery through the obstructions. “Hmm,” Betty said, fidgeting with the focus. “Interesting.”
“What?”
“It looks very black. Almost like it’s nighttime and I can’t see anything.”
Elise grabbed the strap. “Hand them over. You don’t know what you’re doing.”
“I’m not using them wrong and I can do reconnaissance all on my own, thank you very much!”
Anthony made an irritated noise and slouched in the driver’s seat, folding his arms. His feet sloshed in the half inch of water that had collected at the bottom of his Jeep.