by S. M. Reine
“Elise!” Nukha’il called. “You need to see this.”
Neuma remained poised with the fire extinguisher, eyes wide and chest heaving. Elise edged around Nukha’il’s wings. Her palms burned, and there was no way to tell if it was from the charms or the power of his angelic energy. But she forgot all about it once she saw Zohak.
He had stopped thrashing. The ooze had melded with his skin in much the same way it had with Elise’s knife, and he was frozen in obsidian.
His mouth was spread in a frozen cry. His eyes had been sucked into his skull, leaving empty pits.
“What did you do?” she asked.
Nukha’il’s eyes widened. “Nothing. I thought you did this.”
Elise recalled the voice she had heard from the darkness. Exorcise me?
It was suddenly too hot in the office. She wiped sweat from her brow. “Damn.”
“I think I missed something,” Neuma said, voice shaking. “Weren’t you going out to find Zohak and get rid of him, for good this time?”
“We just did.”
Nukha’il folded his wings against his back and stepped aside. Considering his impressive wingspan, they could be folded down comparatively small, and they vanished completely with a moment’s thought. He looked like any other man who was well over six feet tall, androgynous, and ageless, with blue eyes that glowed in the dark.
Neuma clung to Elise’s shoulder and got on her toes to peer into the garbage bag. “That doesn’t look like him.”
“It’s him,” Elise said. “What’s left of him.”
The bartender dropped the fire extinguisher and inched forward. “What killed him?”
“I did. I stabbed him in the chest with one of my falchions.”
“Oh,” she said.
Elise located a knife and sliced open the trash bag over Zohak’s gut. The shadow didn’t spill forth and consume her knife a second time.
Elise tapped the point of the knife against his stomach. It sounded like stone.
“We need to get rid of this.”
Neuma blinked rapidly, trying to process the order. “Shouldn’t we… investigate? Do an autopsy?”
“No,” Elise said, and it came out more forcefully than she intended. She kneeled and unclipped the chains from the rings in the floor. “I’ve learned everything I’m going to from Zohak. Someone needs to take him out of the city and drop him down a mineshaft—a closed shaft, preferably, that doesn’t lead into the Warrens.”
“So shall it be done,” Nukha’il said.
She shook her head. “Not you. Neuma, could you find a volunteer?”
“Sure thing.”
The stripper scurried downstairs again. As soon as the door shut, Elise stopped undoing the chains.
She drew her sword.
When the shadow had spilled from Zohak’s chest in the alley to devour her falchion, she had wrapped it in trash bags and jammed it into her spine sheath for later study. Now she held the sword in both hands without unwrapping it. Elise wasn’t sure what would be worse—if she opened it and her sword was destroyed by the same obsidian that had taken Zohak, or if the shadows were still seething.
She hefted its weight in her hands and swallowed hard.
Nukha’il noticed her silence. “Is there a problem?”
“No.”
Elise climbed to her feet, opened the closet after a short argument with the locking charm, and set the sword on a suitcase inside. Her back felt unbalanced with only one sword. It wasn’t the first time she had lost a falchion, but after months of using the pair together again, she hated to lock one away.
She shut the door. Her fingers were shaking, so she shuffled through the desk drawers and came up with a half-empty pack of cigarettes and a lighter.
It took two tries to get a flame. She sucked hard on the cigarette and sighed out the smoke.
That was all she needed—just a taste. If David Nicholas had seen her smoking his leftover cigarettes, he would have thought it was the greatest joke ever. He probably would have laughed himself to death.
Good thing he was already dead.
“You know that could kill you,” Nukha’il said.
Elise ignored him and stubbed it out in the ashtray, which was filled with barely-smoked cigarettes. All hers. She stuffed the box in her pocket.
Back to business.
Elise continued releasing the silver chains. “I need you to go into the Warrens. You have to go to the gate.”
That got his attention. His hands stilled on a clamp on the other side of the desk.
“Why?”
“Because you’re the ethereal delegate and it’s your job, that’s why,” she snapped. “Zohak said that there’s something underneath the city. I need to be sure that the gates are still safe. Still secure.”
“Very well,” Nukha’il said with an edge to his voice that hadn’t been there before.
He had remained in Reno to ensure the safety of the gates, so they had been working together toward those ends for over a month. But neither of them had found occasion to go that deep into the Warrens. In fact, they had both been doing their very best to avoid them.
She opened her mouth to speak again, but her ringing phone interrupted her. She glanced at the screen.
It was James. Of course it was James.
Elise pressed the button to deny the call and scrolled through the history. He had already tried to reach her three times since midnight. Nothing like a failed attempt at an exorcism to wake up her aspis.
“What if the gate has already been compromised?” Nukha’il asked, drawing her attention back to the task at hand.
What if the gate had been compromised? What could an infectious shadow do to an ethereal city suspended in a second dimension over her territory?
Elise grimaced. “Just go check.”
By the time Neuma found “volunteers” to discard Zohak’s body in the desert—which happened, in this case, to be two very nervous basandere—dawn was approaching, and it was much too late for Elise to try to get any rest.
For weeks, her nights had been dedicated to unearthing the roots that Zohak had embedded in her territory. He had trafficked drugs, used his fiends to bully other demons, and had managed to destroy one of Craven’s subsidiary restaurants on the south end of town.
Tracking him meant hitting the streets for hours on end, every single night. It meant that she hadn’t slept more than two hours at a time since September. It meant that she could rest, now that Zohak was dead.
So why did she feel so unsatisfied?
Elise loosened her fraying braid, retied it into a ponytail, and threw on her jacket before heading out onto the streets for a jog in the dim blue light of false dawn.
That was the time when she liked the city the best. Most demons had crawled into the Warrens to sleep for the day, and it was before shifts changed for the human casino workers. All that Elise faced on her jog was empty streets and blissful silence.
The guard she had posted at the front door of Craven’s gave her a polite nod as she passed. “Good morning, ma’am.” Sharp teeth flashed between his lips when he spoke. He was a real teddy bear, but he looked scary as hell, and he was meant to deter Zohak from sending fiends through the front door.
Elise paused. “Go home, Ed. Enjoy the day.”
She didn’t have to tell him twice. His shark-like mouth split into a grin, and he loosened the top button on his Craven’s-branded polo shirt. “Thank you, ma’am.”
“And stop calling me that,” she yelled over her shoulder as she jogged away.
Even at five in the morning, the casinos hadn’t turned off their lights, so gold and green and red strobes splashed on the sidewalk beneath her pounding feet. She dodged patches of black ice as she crossed the street and headed down to the river, which was never quite empty. Not since the economy had crashed and dumped the jobless onto the streets. They made their camps on the path that ran the length of the Truckee.
Elise slid down the embankment to the
trail, careful not to disturb three men sleeping under heavy jackets and reflective blankets.
She didn’t see the trail beneath her feet as she ran. Her mind was back in the manager’s office.
Exorcise me?
Zohak wasn’t the only demon that had visited the city with unsavory intentions. Everyone knew that there was no overlord left in Reno. Elise had been forced to quash a few other uprisings, none of which had been very effective.
Was the shadow another demon moving in to conquer? And what the hell was she supposed to do about an enemy that could take out Zohak’s army of fiends, and was impervious to exorcism?
The morning didn’t seem quite so bright after that.
She continued running until the path narrowed and the sun rose. Elise angled herself to return downtown.
North of the city, in a suburb built around golf courses, James was falling asleep again. He had been sitting awake in his kitchen since she had rejected his calls, but his head was drooping. James hadn’t been sleeping well, either. She knew this for a fact because she often saw his dreams. He dreamed of the same things she did—pillars of towering white bone, cobblestone streets, and a blond woman with a gunshot wound in her forehead.
Sensing her attention, he yawned and spoke aloud, his gaze fixed on a cup of tea. She heard his voice as though he stood beside her.
“Are you okay?”
She replied silently. I’m fine .
“Do you need help with anything?”
No.
“What are your plans for the day?”
She sighed. His persistent attempts to have a chat were wearing down on her.
It wasn’t that Elise didn’t want to see James—she did. Really. But he had a way of steering the conversation toward Betty, and wanting to address Elise’s “feelings,” and she could only put up with so much of that before it became too much. And she wasn’t going to talk to him in the house he shared with Stephanie.
I’m busy , Elise said shortly, and then she blocked him out.
Sirens wailed in the distance, breaking the stillness of the morning.
An ambulance roared up the street, blew past Elise, and cornered hard. It was followed less than ten seconds later by a police car.
She didn’t think much of it until she saw two more police cars approach from the opposite direction and turn down the same street.
Never a good sign.
Elise followed the sirens and found herself in front of Rick’s Drugstore.
Or at least, the place where Rick’s Drugstore had stood the night before. It had been a tiny shop on the corner of West and Second that should have been condemned for fifty years.
But the shop was gone. All that remained was the tiny alley, half of the sign, and the frame surrounding the door Elise had shattered.
It appeared to have collapsed. It was an old building, after all—everything that had been built around it was newer, stronger, and untouched by the destruction. But when she stepped around the police car to peer over the wall, she could see that it wasn’t just the floor and walls that had imploded. The basement had collapsed, too, and the hole it exposed was deep enough to disappear into darkness.
It led straight down into the Warrens.
A police officer blocked her view. “Move along. It’s not safe to be here.”
“What happened?” she asked as she backed up.
“Sinkhole. Looks like a mineshaft. We have to evacuate the street until we determine whether the substructure is safe.”
“There aren’t mines this close to the surface in downtown Reno.”
He took off his cap and ran a hand over his bald pate. “I said ‘move along,’ didn’t I, sweetheart?”
“Sorry,” Elise said, and did as she was told.
3
It had taken three months, but James’s home office was finally exactly the way he liked it.
Six constant weeks of burning frankincense and lavender had purged all the preexisting energy from the air, leaving him a clean workspace. Now he had filled two of the walls with bookshelves, which reached from floor to ceiling. He had a permanent altar by the window leading into his greenhouse.
He also carved a circle of power into the floor, so all it took was a touch of salt to prepare for a spell. James even had a cage of mice ready as small sacrifices for the most powerful magic.
And he had charms that could keep everyone—including Stephanie—out of his office.
That wasn’t the thing that completed his office, though. It was the futon he placed under the second window, which he had been sleeping on every night for the past week. He could fall asleep doing his research and continue working as soon as he woke up.
He hadn’t slept in the bed he shared with Stephanie since he had put the futon in his office. Of course, he hadn’t shared the bed with her more than a handful of times since they had moved in anyway, as she worked nights at the hospital.
The rising sun beamed light directly through the greenhouse window, spilling onto his circle of power and rousing James from his restless sleep.
He sat up, letting the book he had been reading drop to the floor. Resting it against his chest all night had broken the spine, and it flopped open on the page he had been reading. The heading said, “Mythologies of the Islamic World,” and he had left crooked highlights on two lines before losing the battle against sleep.
James sat on the side of the futon and scrubbed a hand through his hair, heaving a sigh. He reached for Elise out of habit—a quick probe to make sure she hadn’t gotten killed while he napped. But there was no response. The wards on his office really were powerful enough to block everything, including his kopis.
He shuffled to his altar and opened a wooden box that was seated between images of the Goddess and the Horned God. Inside, a cloud of colorless magic was beginning to resolve around two gold rings. He reached through the haze to tap one of the bands.
The magic sang up his arm. Almost done.
A teapot’s whine broke through the air, muffled by the wall.
He closed the box, stuffed his feet into slippers, and passed a hand over the protective charms on his doorway to disable them. As soon as he crossed the threshold, Elise’s consciousness blinked into the back of his mind again. She was still alive. Small miracle.
James yawned as he staggered into the kitchen. The crock-pot that had been cooking steel-cut oats overnight had been turned from “low” to “warm.” He grabbed a bowl out of the cabinet and was searching for a spoon when arms wrapped around him from behind.
“Good morning, handsome,” Stephanie purred, nuzzling her face into his back. “Long time no see.”
When was the last time he had seen his girlfriend? One week? Two? “Good morning.” He turned to drop a kiss on her upturned lips.
She didn’t release his arm as he served the oats. “Have you been doing a new workout at the studio? Lifting weights? You look very good.”
He set down the bowl, took off his glasses, and rubbed his eyes. “Pardon?”
“I was just saying how much I want you to take advantage of me,” she murmured into his ear.
He responded without thinking about it. “Right now?”
Her nails bit into his shoulders for an instant before letting go. “Not if it would inconvenience you.” She stabbed the button to start the espresso machine.
“I’m sorry, Stephanie. I didn’t mean to suggest I don’t have time for you.”
“It’s been so long since we’ve had any private time together. When I’m home, you’re always locked in your office, or I’m asleep.” She rubbed her hands up his biceps. Fondling his muscles made that angry glare soften. “Clearly you’ve been finding time for yourself, if not me.”
“What in the world are you talking about?”
James angled to study himself in the hallway mirror. He turned to the side and lifted an arm. It was hard to tell under his long-sleeved shirt, but there did seem to be more tone than usual.
He lifted the hem.
He had dropped a couple notches on his belt, but had thought it was because he had been too distracted to eat. That didn’t appear to be the case. His reflection was hardly a man shrinking from work-inflicted starvation: his stomach was flat, his psoas were more pronounced, and his abs could be best described as “chiseled.”
“It must be the new routines I’m doing,” he said faintly, but he knew it wasn’t true. He hadn’t had abs like that since his twenties. And he had only set foot in Motion and Dance twice that month: once to drop off paychecks, and once because Candace asked him to meet the accountant who was replacing Elise.
Stephanie squeezed his bicep. “Maybe you’d like me to help you practice? These routines must be magic.”
“Something like that.” He dropped the hem of his shirt. “That reminds me—could you humor a strange request?”
“Of course.” A naughty smile tugged at the corner of her mouth. Her fingers drew a line from the cut of his abs down his navel. “It wouldn’t be the first time.”
“Could you order a karyotype test for me?”
“Drawing blood? Kinky.” Her smile faded. “What would you be hoping to find, exactly?”
“An overall profile would do. I’m just… curious.”
“Weird curiosity,” Stephanie said.
He massaged her shoulders. “I told you it was a strange request, didn’t I?”
“You did.” She stretched up on her toes to plant a peck on his lips. “Visit me at work tonight. I’ll take care of it.”
“Thank you,” he said.
Their kiss lingered. He found himself glancing at the clock over her head, and Stephanie didn’t miss his distraction.
She pushed him off. “Really?” He didn’t bother apologizing. She grabbed a small coffee cup, slammed the cabinet door, and poured her espresso into it. “Fine. Go back to working on the almanac. I’m going to shower—I have an early meeting with the board.”
“Try to have a good day.”
Stephanie sniffed and left.
James returned the oats to the crockpot before ducking into the bathroom and stripping off his shirt. He turned to one side and then the other, studying himself in the mirror. The change was most pronounced in his upper chest and shoulders, where he had never been bulky. He tilted his chin to the side. His neck was thicker, too.
