The Darkest Gate

by S. M. Reine

  With an arm lifted in front of his eyes, he passed through the pillars and disappeared.

  Everyone was focused on the gate. Anthony saw his moment. He took one of the falchions out of Elise’s spine sheath, gritted his teeth against the pain, and got to his feet. Betty gaped at him as he ran onto the dais.

  The overlord heard him coming and turned. He drove the falchion into her stomach.

  Black blood spurted from the wound. The Night Hag cackled shrilly. “It stabbed me!” she said to Thom, turning to face him as though Anthony wasn’t even there. “That little boy stabbed me!”

  He shrugged. “That happens.”

  She shoved Anthony off the dais. The overlord was stronger than she looked, but not strong enough to throw him. He stumbled back to Betty as she jerked the falchion out of her stomach. “And to think I just finished improving this body. What a waste of time.”

  She wriggled her fingers into the stab wound and began to pull. Her flesh tore away like rubber. There was something underneath, something black and crimson and not quite blood.

  Her body shuddered. She heaved. The skin on her face loosened. The mouth-hole stretched until all her teeth were visible in a skull’s grin, and then they fell out one by one in sparkling shards of bone.

  A huge, slippery limb pushed from the stab wound. It slid out like a tree branch birthed from her gut and felt around for the floor. When it touched down, the tip of a second limb joined it and ripped the hole wider. Her entire ribcage was bared as a third leg pushed through, and then a fourth. Each was as thick as Anthony’s body.

  The Night Hag’s flesh sagged. Her arms and legs emptied into wiggling sacks.

  A hulking spider rose from the remains of her human form—larger than the dais, larger than the gate itself, far larger than the semi Elise had hijacked. Anthony fell onto his back. The Night Hag loomed overhead.

  Red eyes glistened on a brown and tan head. Brands blazed down her belly and legs. Her flesh was mottled with patterns meant to blend in with one of Hell’s deserts.

  Anthony had seen the picture of the giant spider next to the gate. But he hadn’t imagined it would be quite so… big.

  “Uh,” Betty said. She couldn’t seem to process any bigger words than that.

  They exchanged a glance. He didn’t have to read her mind to hear the unspoken motto they usually shared in jest, but now with complete sincerity: What would Elise do?

  There wasn’t time to strategize. He let his mind return to their week in the desert—he killed his spider by running it over with the Jeep, but he would need a really big Jeep for this one—and thought of how Elise always went for the eyes, the joints, the comparatively soft underbelly.

  The underbelly on this thing was about two feet over his head.

  “This really sucks,” Anthony said, and then he grabbed the second falchion.

  “Kill the humans,” said the Night Hag. Somehow, she sounded completely normal, like there should have been a woman standing in front of the dozen smaller daimarachnids.

  Oh yeah. The other spiders.

  Anthony swung the falchion into the mouth of a demon rushing Betty. She threw her hands over her head with a shriek. Ichor splattered on both of them.

  It stumbled back, but a second spider took its place immediately. He swung again, and again. There were so many of them. He couldn’t tell which legs belonged to which body. The only way he knew he hit anything was that the blade would stop, something would shriek, and venom would splatter burning hot on his hands.

  “Get out of the way!” Betty shouted.

  “What?”

  “I said, move it!”

  Anthony sidestepped.

  Something hot blasted past the side of his head and set fire to a spider-demon.

  All those wiry hairs ignited simultaneously. The hard carapace shriveled as it screamed and flailed and kicked. All the other spiders stopped to stare, too—like time came to a complete halt as one demon burned to death. Something inside its shell popped as its innards cooked.

  It flopped onto its side and stopped moving.

  He whirled on Betty. She was clutching a notebook decorated by pink flowers and an ephemeral white unicorn.

  “I told you I can cast magic missile!”

  “Perhaps I spoke too soon about children,” said the Night Hag.

  Her leg swung over Anthony’s head as she took a huge step. It only took one to reach them. The stink of rot and age overwhelmed him. Each one of her fangs was half as tall as he was. She hunched over, bringing that giant mouth toward their faces.

  Anthony wrapped an arm around Betty’s shoulders and launched into a run.

  The pincers snapped shut where they had been standing a moment before.

  “What else do you have?” he asked, swinging and hacking their way through the crowd of spiders. They all were trying so desperately to obey the Night Hag’s orders that they stepped on each other, toppling and clumsy.

  “Uh—just a second, I don’t—”

  “We don’t have a second!”

  She flipped through the pages and ripped one out from the back.

  “Okay! Here!”

  Betty ducked around him with a sheet of perfumed pink paper between her thumb and first finger. Her lips moved, but Anthony didn’t hear anything.

  The air popped.

  A firestorm blasted around them and blew through the crowd of demons. The three daimarachnids closest to them caught fire like the first one had, shrieking and twitching and falling all at once.

  Anthony had never been scared of Betty before. Never. Even when they were kids, and she was five years older, and her idea of babysitting was to literally sit on him. But watching the demons burn made fear thrill through his stomach.

  “I traced that one straight out of James’s Book of Shadows,” she said. Her lips were pale. Her knees buckled.

  Anthony had to let her fall. A particularly ambitious daimarachnid climbed over its burning friends, scuttling toward him like an attack dog. He dodged to the side and sliced, but missed. It twisted. Pain whipped through his calf as one of its pincers scraped him through his jeans, and then those fangs hooked on his shoe and jerked him to the ground.

  He kicked it in the face and sent it flying. But another one took its place and knocked the falchion from his hand.

  It was hard to throw a good punch from the ground, but he sure as hell tried. Hitting the daimarachnid in the face was like hitting a brick wall. His knuckles split open on contact. It reared back an inch—only an inch. It was enough. He lifted his knees, planted his feet on its hind segment, and threw it over his head with its own momentum.

  Betty got to her knees and ripped another page out of her notebook.

  Another word of power. Another silent explosion.

  The spider that had been on top of him splattered.

  The paper dissolved under the force of its own magic, and she wiped her hands clean on her shirt. “Oh my God. I didn’t know—I don’t—oh my God!”

  “Freak out later!”

  Anthony grabbed the falchion, getting to his feet again in time to take the impact from another daimarachnid. There were still almost a half a dozen—plus the big one over the gate, who seemed to be watching them with amused silence.

  He stabbed the falchion through the top of a spider-demon’s head with enough force for it to come out the other side. The tip of the sword buried in the dirt and pinned the demon down.

  “I don’t think I have anything else,” Betty said, dissolving into a coughing fit.

  “Help us!” he cried to Thom on the dais.

  The witch was examining his fingernails, reclined against the gate as though it wasn’t throbbing with immense, uncontrollable energy. Thom’s eyes skimmed over Anthony’s body, and something like approval flashed across his face.

  “Oh, fine.” Thom stepped down to Elise and brushed his fingers across her brow. He winked at Anthony. “You’re welcome.”

  “What are you doing?” the Night Hag de
manded.

  He vanished. And Elise didn’t move.

  “Anthony!” Betty cried.

  She was pinned by one of the smaller daimarachnids. He wrenched the falchion out of the ground, kicked the demon off Betty, and pulled her to her feet.

  The Night Hag’s leg swept over him with another step, and the lowest joint caught his attention. The armored shell was split so she could move.

  He drove the sword up with all his strength. It buried into her flesh. Fluid sprayed from the Night Hag’s leg. The giant spider jerked away with a screech, but Anthony followed her. He hacked at the joint like he was splitting firewood at his aunt’s house—hairy, twitching firewood.

  Elise’s falchion got stuck in the exoskeleton and ripped from his hands.

  She slammed him against the wall. “I am having a bad day,” the Night Hag said in a low, cooing voice that came from nowhere. “And you are not helping anything.”

  And then she bit.

  Elise woke up feeling very strange. Her skin didn’t sit right on the muscle. Brilliant spikes of light filled the empty spaces in her skull. Her tongue tasted like ozone. And the air—so many new colors surrounded her. A not-quite-silver, a blue that wasn’t blue, and so many shades of gray that she didn’t see with her eyes.

  It was the same thing she had seen on the chains binding Nukha’il, but it was magnified a thousand times and painted across the entire world. The light was brighter and the shadows were deeper.

  Elise was seeing magic.

  “James,” she groaned as she sat up, clutching her forehead in both hands. Her leg didn’t hurt anymore, and when she peeled off the bandages, she found blood staining unbroken skin. And one of her gloves was gone.

  Her aspis was sprawled motionlessly beside her, and she grabbed his wrist to feel for a pulse. It beat steady and strong in his veins.

  That was when she realized that Betty and Anthony were missing.

  Elise riffled through James’s shirt to find the Book of Shadows tucked in his belt. “Sorry about this,” she muttered, getting to her feet to look around.

  The gate was open. Pale light flowed from its center, warping the air so she couldn’t see through to the other side of the cavern. That explained why her glove was gone. But instead of the painful roar she experienced the last time a gate was opened, this one chimed. It was a soft, musical note, like a chorus waiting in the white beyond.

  It didn’t hurt. In fact, nothing hurt. She felt… good. Maybe a little too good.

  But there wasn’t time to figure out what had changed. An infernal presence was strong on the other side of the glowing dais, and Elise reached up to draw one of her swords.

  Her hand met empty air.

  She spun to search the floor. Her swords were nowhere in sight.

  “Great,” she muttered.

  Elise stepped around the dais. There were more pillars near the wall, although they were black instead of white. Where had they come from?

  Her gaze traveled up the long columns.

  Her jaw fell open.

  There was a huge spider in the room. It had Anthony pinned against the wall. And four or five smaller daimarachnids milled around them.

  One of her swords was right in front of the gate. Elise dived for it. Getting so close to the gate made her entire body vibrate, but it wasn’t nearly as agonizing as before.

  The giant spider moved to bite Anthony. “Hey!” she yelled.

  It looked at her. “Oh, wonderful. It’s you.” Elise recognized that voice. She was too giddy to be surprised that the Night Hag had turned into a spider.

  “Yeah. Me.” Elise lifted the Book of Shadows. “Betty!”

  Her friend looked up. Elise threw the notebook, and Betty caught it. Her eyes lit up. “Should I—?”

  “Make a miracle happen!”

  The Night Hag rushed Elise, limping on an injured leg. As soon as it landed in front of her, she jumped onto it and scaled the spider’s body, dragging herself atop the head. Elise nearly slid off the top when she thrashed, but her fingers caught a ridge near one of the angry eyes. It swiveled around to glare at her.

  She levered herself onto her knees, lifted the sword over her head, and plunged it into the Night Hag’s eye.

  Betty spoke a word of power.

  The air boomed as the symbols on the sword blazed. All eight eyes erupted at once.

  The Night Hag roared. Elise lost traction. Her sword tore free.

  It was a long way to the ground.

  Anthony caught her. She had the presence of mind to drop her sword to keep from stabbing him, but his arms barely softened the blow. His elbow connected with her stomach. All the breath rushed out of her as they both hit the ground.

  The spider stomped blindly toward them with a wailing shriek. Elise jumped out of the way of a crashing leg, pulling Anthony with her. She shoved him toward the wall.

  She didn’t even see the second leg coming at her.

  It smashed her to the ground. Elise threw her arms over her head, trying to shelter herself from the thrashing limbs, and felt ichor shower onto her shoulders from the stab wound. Elise was an instant from getting crushed.

  The light in the gate suddenly grew again. Nukha’il appeared at the top of the dais with a flash, looking winded and confused. “Nukha’il!” she shouted.

  He glanced between Elise, under the stomping feet of the giant spider-demon, and the Night Hag herself.

  A huge foot flew toward her.

  Nukha’il darted in—a pale blur in the darkness. Cold hands grabbed Elise’s. He dragged her out of the way.

  “Get against the wall!” Betty yelled, standing over James’s body.

  Elise didn’t ask why. She threw Nukha’il toward the side of the cavern and covered his body with hers.

  Magic coalesced in a nimbus around Betty’s head. Her hair stuck straight out in every direction as though she had been struck by lightning. There was paper clutched in both of her fists. Steel-blue light crackled around her. Elise had never seen James’s magic before. It was so much darker than she expected.

  Betty threw the paper at the Night Hag.

  The spells hung, momentarily suspended, in midair. Then they rested against one of her telephone-pole legs.

  She pointed.

  The room filled with light and heat. All moisture vaporized from Elise’s skin. Her clothing charred instantly as the tapestries behind the gate caught fire.

  The Night Hag screamed.

  Elise ducked her head so she wouldn’t have to see. But there was no way to tune out the roars of pain and fury as she thrashed in her final death throes.

  It felt like she screamed for hours. Days.

  Eventually, they trailed into sobs, and then there was nothing but the echoes of crackling fire. The Night Hag had fallen by the dais. Her body was a black husk, and red embers glowed within her carcass. Entire tapestries had disappeared in a puff of smoke.

  Both Anthony and Betty were covered in ash, but unharmed. Elise let Nukha’il sit up. He stared around with shock, as though he couldn’t imagine a human causing such devastation.

  “My Lord,” he said.

  Elise’s mouth was too dry to speak. She worked her tongue around in her mouth to create saliva before saying, “Good miracle, Betty.”

  With a shaky laugh, Betty sank to the ground and pressed her face into her knees. Elise crawled over to her. “I’m okay,” she mumbled without getting up, “I’m okay. Is James…?”

  “He’s still breathing. He’s fine. What about you?”

  “That hurt,” Betty whispered. Her hands were closed so tightly around the remaining scraps of paper that her knuckles were white. Elise carefully opened her fingers.

  “Relax. That’s James’s magic going through you. You’ll be fine.” Elise made herself sound confident, even though she wasn’t sure that was true. What happened when a weak witch channeled power of James’s caliber? She had never seen it before, but they were probably lucky Betty was still awake, much less alive. />
  Nukha’il dusted himself off and came to stand beside Elise. The magic on his necklace had faded, but not gone out.

  “Free me,” he said. There was no supplication in Nukha’il now—only defiance.

  Elise stood. “Why?”

  “I helped you. Free me.”

  She nodded. He turned around. Her fingers tingled as she pressed the latch open, and the metal fell to the floor with a clink.

  A sudden swell of ethereal energy rose around him. Nukha’il sighed and rolled his shoulders. “Thank you,” he said. “Finally.”

  “What will you do now?”

  “Find Itra’il and move on. I have wasted too much time in servitude.”

  With a small bow, he turned to leave the cavern. Elise watched him go. The presence of an angel always left a sour taste in her mouth.

  “Elise?” Anthony’s call drew her attention back to him. He was gaping at the Night Hag’s body. It seemed to have lost half its mass in death, but it was still terrifyingly huge. “Should we do something about the gate?”

  “Sure. Why don’t you stay here for a second, Betty?” Her best friend nodded against her knees. She was pale and trembling. Elise collected her swords, sheathed both of them, and joined Anthony by the fallen overlord. She was impressive, even in death. “She’s dead, Anthony. We don’t have to keep an eye on her.”

  “I just can’t believe…” He blew a heavy breath out of his lips. “That was terrifying.”

  He probably was hoping for words of comfort. Elise didn’t have any.

  She turned to face the gate. The light inside whirled and swirled. She stretched a hand toward the broken fragment that had come from her necklace, but getting too close made her fingers burn.

  “Here,” Anthony said.

  He plucked the stone out of the gate, and with a resounding clang like a heavy iron door shutting, the light went out. It sounded like the very gates of Hell swinging shut. But it was so much worse than Hell—and so much more satisfying.

  A huge weight Elise hadn’t realized she had been carrying lifted off her chest. She sagged against his arm.

  His fist clenched around the rock, brown eyes burning bright. “What now?” he asked.

  Now she would take that rock and throw it into the deepest reaches of Lake Tahoe. Now she wouldn’t worry about anyone reaching those ruins again. Now the overlord and the brand on her shoulder were gone, and the city was hers. Now…