by S. M. Reine
“I missed half my shift at the shop because of you. This is a great time.”
His upper lip twitched. “Fine. Let’s go inside, at the very least.” It was a small mercy that Stephanie was nowhere to be found, and that Betty was still sleeping on the couch. James brewed a pot of coffee, uncomfortably aware of Anthony leaning against the opposite counter with his arms folded and an expectant look. “Do you take cream?”
“No, but—”
“You would take an explanation. Yes. I get it.”
“I was going to say I take sugar, actually. But sure. How did you land in jail?”
“Elise. Elise got me arrested. Happy?” He poured two cups and sat down at the kitchen table, which was topped with rare Indonesian agarwood to match the paneling on the island, at Stephanie’s insistence. James massaged a hand over his brow. “Of course it was Elise. That should go without saying, shouldn’t it?”
“It’s not like she’s not a criminal,” Anthony said, grabbing his mug. He didn’t sit down.
“Your defensiveness is charming. It’s lovely not having to be the one doing it, for once. I hope you get to enjoy many, many years of making excuses for Elise.”
“Do we have a problem?”
James barked a laugh. “No. Of course not.”
“Good, because whatever you think, I just went through all the trouble of calling Milo into work to cover for me and opening a magical safe with one of Elise’s gloves. I’m going to catch so much shit for leaving early. And you—you and me—” Anthony gestured between them with the mug, “—if we’ve got a problem, then I don’t know why I would have bothered.”
James pinched the bridge of his nose and shut his eyes. It was hard to open them again. He was going to pass out for a few years as soon as he got horizontal.
“Then why did you bother?” he asked dully.
“Because you’re Elise’s...” Anthony wiggled his fingers in what was probably supposed to be a rough approximation of casting a spell. “I thought she had to be dead or something, if you were in jail.”
“She’s not. Not until I get at her, anyway.” James snorted at how offended the younger man looked. “That was a joke.”
“If you’re going to—”
The front door opened. Elise appeared in the space between the formal dining room and the kitchen like a ghost. Yellow, splotchy bruises covered the entire left side of her face. It wasn’t as bad as her expression—that exhausted, miserable look of someone who hadn’t slept or eaten in a week.
She looked so terrible that James forgot to be angry. He shoved his chair back and stood.
Anthony pushed past him. “Elise!” He wrapped her in a hug. Her arms stayed limp at her sides. “Jeez, are you okay? What happened?”
She handed him an envelope wordlessly. He removed a couple of pictures. James wanted to see them, but he remained frozen by the kitchen table instead. Elise’s expression was telling enough. Whatever was in those photos would be very terrible, and very likely mean a fight.
Instead, he studied her as Anthony studied the photos. It was the first time she had set foot in James’s new house, and she looked like a snake surrounded by mongooses. Her upper lip curled as she took in the nonporous countertops, the backyard, the framed photo of James and Stephanie waiting to be mounted in the hallway.
“Are these those spiders that we fought?” Anthony asked. Elise put a finger to her lips and shook her head. “What? Why are we being quiet?”
She pointed at James and Anthony, then at the floor. The message was clear: Stay here. And then she drew her sword and moved to the back door, peering into the yard. It hadn’t been landscaped yet, although stakes with yellow flags marked where empty dirt was destined to become brick paths and grass.
“You don’t need your sword. Stephanie isn’t here,” James muttered.
Even that couldn’t make her laugh. She slipped into the living room, and he took the photos from Anthony.
James didn’t recognize anyone in the pictures. The old woman had a distinctly inhuman appearance—the Night Hag?—and he was sure that the spiders were the same demons that Elise had been hunting in the desert. But that wasn’t what gave him pause. The gate in the third picture made a chill wash over his body.
“What is that?” Anthony asked.
James dropped the envelope and followed Elise.
She was kneeling under one of the bay windows to glare at the neighborhood through a crack in the blinds. Betty was so buried under blankets and pillows that only the top of her blond head stuck out. She didn’t stir when James crouched by Elise.
He tried to see what she was seeing through the window. Trees baked in the hot summer sun. His new neighbor gardened in a pair of purple Crocs.
And then—a flash of movement. Something darted past the back fence.
Elise hurried out the front door, which she had left cracked open. By the time James got to his feet, grabbed his notebook off the coffee table, and followed her onto the front step, she was wiggling onto the roof. All he saw were her feet kicking as she disappeared.
He swore under his breath and stuffed the notebook in his belt before leaping to grab the gutter.
The ceiling tile blazed under his hands. Stephanie had insisted on a white roof to reflect heat, so walking on it was like being trapped atop a range set to ten. He jerked his scalded fingers back.
Elise’s hair was just visible over the slope of the roof. She was already crouched on the other side.
He squatted beside her. “What—?” he began, but she cut him off by pointing.
The house James and Stephanie bought was a recent addition to the neighborhood. The only thing at their back was empty hillside, which had been leveled into terraces and marked for future development. From their elevated position on the roof, they could see over the hill, and all the way to the highway. But Elise wasn’t pointing that far.
His eyes fell on a hulking shape behind the fence. A daimarachnid.
“The Night Hag said she would have you guarded,” Elise murmured. “I thought she meant by the Gray.”
“Those photos—the old woman—”
“That’s her. She’s had the spiders this entire time. She’s the one who tried to kill Betty.”
The daimarachnid scuttled to the corner of the fence, and Elise pulled James behind a gabled section of roof. It was a half a degree cooler in the shade underneath. Sweat dripped from the back of his neck down his spine. “It’s logical, in some sick fashion. How do you cement the allegiance of a reluctant warrior? Do you give them promises of safety and money, or do you take away the people to which they already hold allegiance?”
“Why not both?” Cold fury glowed in Elise’s eyes. “We’re killing her today. Right now. And I’m starting with that spider.”
Without warning, she leaped to her feet, rushed around the gable, and launched from the roof.
James couldn’t help it. He gave a little shout of shock and fear as she plummeted to the other side of the fence. It was barely a half second of warning, but it was enough—the spider attacked while she was still on her knees.
She brought up her sword. It connected with the mouthparts of the daimarachnid with a meaty thump.
Elise cried out.
The fence blocked his view, so his mind was immediately flooded with a thousand horrible thoughts of huge bite wounds and pulsing venom. James dropped to his belly—the roof burned even through his t-shirt—and slid down feet-first.
But when he got to the other side of the fence, the daimarachnid was already dead in the dirt. Elise stood over it, sweaty and panting with ichor caking her shirt to her chest. Relief swamped him. “I thought you got bitten. Those spiders—you know they’re venomous.”
“Yeah, I know. We have to move fast. The Night Hag is going to feel its death, and we have to get there before she realizes what that means.”
She took a step toward him and staggered.
James tried to catch her. Elise’s arms were so slick with th
e demon’s juices that she dropped to the ground anyway.
“What—?”
“It’s fine,” she said, but then he saw the ragged flesh on her thigh, and he realized that she had been bitten after all.
He wiped some of the blood away with his fingers for a better look at the wound. From somewhere in the musty depths of James’s memories of academia, he recalled the word “necrosis.” It should have taken hours to develop, especially with Elise’s robust immune system, but there was nothing normal about bites delivered by demons. The injury was already as big as his fist and blackening around the edges. It didn’t bleed so much as ooze.
She grabbed his wrist when he pulled the Book of Shadows out of his belt. “Save it.”
“We can’t leave that,” he said. “I have a spell—”
She pushed him back and shook out her leg. “I said I’m fine. It just burns. We’ve got to kill an overlord and shut an ethereal gate, so I can’t let you drain your magic.”
“How do you plan on fighting like that?”
“With this,” she said, picking up her sword and sheathing it again. Her cheeks were pale. “Now help me push this body over the fence before someone sees it.”
15
Anthony was waiting at the back door when they shoved the daimarachnid into the yard, and he hurried over to help them drag the body under the shelter of the house. Elise wished she could see how Stephanie reacted to finding a dead demon in her yard. That would have been a popcorn-worthy conversation.
She limped into the kitchen and took one of James’s dish towels out of the drawer by the sink, where he always kept them. The spider bite burned like a cigarette jammed into her thigh.
“We have three major problems,” Elise said, wetting down the towel and pressing it to the wound. “First: We just killed the spider guarding James, and Mr. Black is still out there, so he could jump on us at any moment. Second: We have to kill the Night Hag. And third: She’s about a half mile under the city, so we have to get in and out without dying.”
To Anthony’s credit, he barely blinked. “Okay. We’ll go together.”
She lifted the rag to inspect her wound. The flesh was shiny red in the center where her skin sloughed away. She squeezed bloody water into Stephanie’s stainless steel sink and wetted it down again.
“You can’t fight like that,” James said.
“I just need bandages. Anthony, wake Betty up. Tell her we’re getting out of here.”
He looked startled at the order. “Betty? Really?”
“We’re not leaving her alone.” Elise cast a disdainful glance around the kitchen. James might have organized it, but everything else was obviously Stephanie’s doing. Betty was right. The house reeked of bitch. “Where’s the bathroom?”
James pointed her down the hall. She limped through the formal dining room and helped herself into the guest bathroom. They had seasonal towels and decorative soaps in the shape of frogs. She grimaced.
“Just let me heal you,” James said from outside the door with exasperation. “This is ridiculous.”
She hopped onto the edge of the countertop. There was no bathtub where she could rinse her leg off; they had opted for a glass block shower instead. “I would need an antivenin before you could heal it properly. Tylenol? Advil?”
He opened the medicine cabinet and tossed her a bottle. She turned it over to read the label. Percocet. Nice.
She chewed a couple of pills and palpated the edges of the wound with her fingertips. It felt like getting bitten anew. James watched her splash water onto the wound with a deep frown.
“If you say ‘I told you so,’ I’m morally obligated to slap you,” Elise said.
He threw his hands in the air. “What’s the point? You won’t listen to me. You turned to demons for help and won’t let me heal you, so obviously you don’t want anything to do with me these days!”
“You’re the one who decided to move away from the studio we bought—together—without telling me. When you try to decide which one of us doesn’t need the other anymore, you should think about that. Where are your bandages?”
“We don’t have any.”
“How can you not...? Never mind. Old t-shirt?”
James left and returned a moment later with a Motion and Dance polo shirt and a pair of scissors. Elise cut it into strips and bound her leg. The painkillers were starting to take the edge off.
“I want to say, for the record, I think—”
She held up a hand to cut him off. “Does Stephanie make you happy?”
“We just killed a daimarachnid behind my house and are about to attack a demonic overlord. Is this the time for such a conversation?”
“Yes.”
Anger flashed across his face. “Well, believe it or not, I don’t have to confer with you to make every decision. So tell me what you want to hear, Elise. Do you want me to say that she makes me miserable? Would that satisfy you? Because you seem to have this sadistic urge to make me suffer alone, and if telling you that will make you leave me to live my life, then so be it!”
The question that had been bothering her for weeks—months—leaped out before she could give it a second thought.
“Why aren’t I enough?”
His face was inscrutable. “What?”
Elise shrugged and focused on cutting more strips. “You’re all the companionship I’ve ever needed. Going to college, getting a job, trying to make other friends... it kept me busy when I wasn’t hunting anymore. But I don’t need Betty or Anthony. I don’t need any of it.”
Just you.
The last part was left unspoken, but it hung between them. He swallowed hard. “When you went missing over a decade ago—when the coven summoned me to find you—I had a life of my own. I had a home and plans to marry. Do you ever think about that?”
Anthony’s open, imploring face came to mind. Do you ever think about the future?
“No,” she said. “I don’t.”
“Well, I do. I’m almost forty. I can’t get back all those years I’ve lost. You don’t want a spouse? A home? Children? Fine. But most people don’t find comfort in a splatter of blood and the company of demons. Some of us need other people. Intimacy. A real life.” He waved a hand at the house surrounding them. “And while you’re seeking satisfaction at the end of a sword, I...” He finally noticed her expression and trailed off. “I’m sorry. I forgot you can’t—you know.”
Her mouth twisted. “Anthony asked me about...” Elise mulled the words over. Just thinking about it made her sick again. “Marriage. Kids.”
“After three months of dating? Ambitious.” He made it sound like a joke, but he wasn’t smiling. “Does he know?”
She washed her hands in the sink with soap and water, then swung her leg to test mobility. It wasn’t pretty, but it worked. She couldn’t expect anything better. She also couldn’t seem to meet James’s gaze.
He stepped forward, reaching out to touch her shoulder, but changed his mind. He sagged against the counter beside her instead.
“Death’s Hand killed me, Elise. When I think back on that night—hell, on the thousands of nights like that one—I feel my age. You will not be able to save me every time. We were right to retire.”
She tipped her head back to study him in the mirror. His reflection wasn’t nearly as tired or aged as hers, even though she was twelve years younger. “You were the one who wanted to do it again.”
“Once. Just once. Only because we needed to.”
“Once for you, maybe. But that once was enough to ruin everything for me. I don’t have any choice now. Everyone knows where I am, and Mr. Black has taken everything.” She stuffed her hands under her arms, hugging her ribs tight. Her feet dangled over the side of the counter. “I can’t get out of this. Not anymore.”
“He hasn’t taken your friends. Or me.”
“No. You did that yourself.” James flinched as though she had punched him. A sick sense of satisfaction resonated through her. “So... does Ste
phanie make you happy? Really?”
“Yes.” He almost sounded sure of himself. “Yes. She does.” James brushed the braid over Elise’s shoulder, and his fingers paused on her skin. It looked like he wanted to say something else, but the sentiment stuck in his gaze without making it to his lips.
“Fine,” she said after a protracted silence. “Good. I’m happy for you.” She didn’t bother making it sound like she meant it.
“What is that, Elise?”
She had to twist around and look at her reflection to see what he meant. She had forgotten about the Night Hag’s brand on her shoulder. It had mostly healed and left a fresh pink circle marked with eight radiating lines.
She didn’t have time to answer. Someone knocked at the door, and James dropped his hand.
The door opened another few inches, and Anthony’s reflection joined theirs. “Betty’s awake,” he said. “We can go.”
Elise’s leg buckled under her when she jumped off the counter, but she ignored James’s attempt at giving her a hand. “Great. We’ll take the Jeep.”
“Family field trip,” James muttered. “What joy.”
Getting into the Warrens was the easy part. Craven’s was mostly empty in the afternoons other than the demon employees, who weren’t surprised to see four heavily-armed humans march through on a mission. They did, however, give them a very wide berth. Nobody tried to stop them as they ascended to David Nicholas’s former office.
His door placard was conspicuously missing, which left a blank beneath the “general manager” sign. Elise felt a faint twinge of guilt—but only a twinge. She made sure it was empty before letting everyone inside.
Where his office had once been filled with trash and bowls of masticated chewing tobacco, now it was nothing but a cavernous room overlooking the game floor. She found a light switch behind the desk. The overhead fluorescents cast the room in harsh blue light. “What is this place?” Betty asked. Going on the offensive had put a pink glow on her cheeks and a gleam in her eye.
“This is where the manager worked. There’s a back path down to the club here.”
