by S. M. Reine
She stood out of arm’s reach. He hadn’t noticed her back away.
“I’m sorry, Elise,” he repeated. “It can’t ever be like… that … between us.”
Her expression shuttered. The glorious moment of openness was gone, and Elise was dead-faced and distant again. “Sorry,” she said. He wasn’t sure if she was apologizing or echoing him.
“Elise—”
She walked up the beach toward town with long strides, putting more distance between them. Disappearing was her favorite way to end conversations, and he thought he had gotten used to it, but it suddenly filled him with powerful annoyance.
James ran both of his hands over his hair, cupped them behind his head, and blew out a long breath. He could still feel the surprising softness of Elise’s lips on his.
“Damn it all,” he said.
Malcolm wasn’t the kind of bloke who got hung up on dead people. He had seen a lot of bodies since he had claimed his territory at sixteen—it was just one of those things a kopis had to deal with. It was easier to laugh about it than get upset.
Sometimes, though, those annoying, niggling feelings of fear and regret and grief crept up on him, and he found that beer helped get rid of them. Good beer helped even more. And after all the tiny bodies he had covered with blankets that week, he found himself suddenly very, very thirsty.
Fortunately, the alcohol in Copenhagen was plentiful, and there was plenty of beer to be found. But three exceptionally large drinks later, he was still thinking much too clearly.
Bloody fucking hell. Babies should have been flopping uselessly on blankets, kicking at very bright dangly toys, and getting kisses from their mums—not having their organs sucked out their noses.
That was a bad place for his thoughts to stray. Not funny at all.
Beer. He needed more beer.
He waved down a bartender with his empty mug. “Got another?”
Someone took the stool next to him. “And one for me.”
A slow smile crept onto his face as he gave Elise a long look, from the melting snow on her boots, up the curve of her stockings to a loose skirt encircling her trim waist, and the blush of freckles on the back of her neck.
“Took you long enough to find me,” he said. “Come to regale me with stories of being a noble, wandering force of good against evil at long last?”
“I just want a drink.”
“You came to the right place for that, too. Bad day?”
She stripped off her scarf and dropped her forehead to her hands. “You have no idea.”
The image of tiny bodies came to mind again. “You’d be stunned at the ideas I have,” he said, tipping his glass back to try to find a few more drops. He slammed the mug on the bar. “Tell me, my beautiful lady friend—how much alcohol does it take to drown the sorrows of two very disturbed demon hunters?”
She fished around in her pocket and dropped a wad of cash on the bar. “Let’s find out. This round is on the blood of my enemies, long since burned and dead.” She kissed the second fistful of change before scattering it. “Thank you, Mr. Black. Hey! Bartender!”
“I fucking love Americans,” Malcolm said.
They did beer for a while, and then switched to shots of akvavit. Malcolm seemed to recall the liquor having a very powerful and very offensive flavor of black licorice, but his tongue was so numb that he couldn’t taste it.
Elise loosened up as she drank. She removed her sweater, which let him get a lovely peek at the impressive cleavage she usually hid under layers of clothing. But she didn’t quite relax, not like most women did. Her gaze remained fixed on the door and the people around her, as if she expected an attack.
He couldn’t even get her to talk to him. Of course, he didn’t really care if her tongue was loose, and he didn’t really care to hear what was on her mind. Mostly, he cared about her cleavage. And her legs. Definitely the legs.
The bartender kicked them out after a few hours. Or maybe they drank all the alcohol. Either way, the two of them ended up on the snowy streets of Copenhagen, gripping one another for support, and attempting to find a train station. It really shouldn’t have been too difficult, but Malcolm didn’t read Danish, and Elise didn’t seem to care.
“Why babies ?” he asked as they stumbled down the docks. How had they reached the docks anyway? Something about seeing the boats had triggered that nasty thinking thing again.
It was snowing, too. He didn’t remember it starting to snow.
“Because it’s what he fears the most.” Elise’s face was red, and her eyelashes sparkled with melting snowflakes. “He’s fallen, and he’s hungry. He tried to satisfy himself with the pigs, but he’s been damned, and Samael can’t resist the infants.”
She was talking. Malcolm was sure she was talking. He focused on her lips and didn’t pick up half the words.
“Who in this whole bloody world is Samael?” he asked, pulling her between buildings, where it was more sheltered and the snow was replaced by slick ice.
“I don’t care,” she said. “I don’t fucking care.”
“Fantastic. I don’t, either.”
Malcolm pressed a sloppy kiss to her mouth.
She punched him across the alley, his feet slipped, and he sprawled against the brick. He was so drunk that it took a moment for his face to explode with white-hot pain, but his eyes watered when it finally did.
Elise had good aim. He wiggled one of his loosened incisors with his tongue. “Feisty,” he said, unable to repress a grin. “God, I love feisty women.”
The finger she pointed at him wavered in the air. “Why did you do that?”
“What, kiss you? Again?”
“Yeah. That.”
Malcolm pieced his thoughts together before responding. He liked to think of himself as a well-spoken drunk. “It might have escaped your attention, but I’m aiming to fuck you.” Well, maybe not that well-spoken.
She stalked across the alley, and he braced himself to get hit again. Maybe—with enough head trauma and all the sweet alcohol flowing through his veins—he would forget everything he had seen. He could bleach every one of the infants’ unmoving fist and pale, wrinkly face from his brain. Maybe he wouldn’t have any new nightmares to add to his cold nights.
But instead, she seized his shirt in both hands, slammed him into the wall, and mashed her lips against his.
It wasn’t graceful or all that sexy, really—or at least, it wouldn’t have been if Malcolm had been a few points more sober. The number things he found arousing when he was inebriated jumped from “almost everything” to “absolutely everything,” and he wasn’t going to argue with even the clumsiest attempts at seduction.
He flipped them around, crushing Elise into the corner of the alley. Her hands were everywhere, on his neck and shirt and face, like she didn’t know where to put them.
Malcolm thought he copped a feel of a very nice breast—two of them, in fact, as one always hopes for in the middle of a spontaneous drunken hook-up—but he wasn’t really sure. He lifted her weight, which was heavier than he expected, and set her on a trashcan. He occupied the space between her knees and pulled down her leggings.
“I would lick your feet,” he informed her, which seemed like a sexy enough thing to say at the time.
“Shut up,” she said, her breath tasting of akvavit.
Malcolm thought he probably ripped her underwear trying to get them off. Something ripped, anyway. She was completely hairless underneath. Kinky little slut.
She fumbled at his waist, clumsy with his belt, and shoved his pants away. He was erect—the knob was always game for sport—and he buried himself inside of her with a single, swift stroke.
Elise made a muffled noise against his shoulder, and her fingers bit painfully into his arms. “Yeah,” he said, feeling hazy and a few minutes away from falling asleep, as well as barely aware of any sensation below his navel, “that’s right.”
Malcolm was always down to fuck, but that didn’t mean he was at hi
s peak performance. After a few short thrusts, tension built in his balls, and he jerked free of Elise just in time to empty himself on her leg.
She gaped at him. “What the hell?”
“Ah, bollocks,” he said against her neck, bracing his weight on the wall behind her. “Sorry about that. Drinking… the thing… oh, well, you know.”
She shoved him off, dropped to her feet, and almost fell. She picked up her underwear. Swiped at her sticky leg.
“Oh God,” she said. “That is… fuck .”
“You are so sexy,” he slurred, trying to do his zipper again, but his hands didn’t work. His vision was fuzzy, too. Maybe it was the snow. Maybe alcohol poisoning was catching up with him. Either was fine.
His knees gave out. Malcolm was unconscious before he hit the ground.
James spent his evening mentally rehearsing things that he wanted to say to Elise—apologies, mostly, along with a few very carefully worded explanations.
But when three in the morning rolled around and there was still no sign of his newly bound kopis, he had to sleep. After all the magic he had performed in the last couple of weeks, he had no choice. If he hadn’t climbed into bed, James would have passed out against the window watching the empty street for Elise’s approach.
His dreams gave him strange, misty impressions of a towering tree, valleys of shadow, and babbling brooks. He awoke at midmorning with rain pattering against his window.
The pipes in the wall beside him rumbled. The shower must have been running. James muttered a quiet thanks, raked a hand through his hair, and headed into the living room.
He found Elise drinking a cup of coffee on the couch, which she had dragged out of her bedroom and left on top of the pentagram. Judging by the open bottle of vodka at her side, she must have put a shot in her morning drink. Her hair was also completely dry.
And the shower was still running.
James paused in the threshold. Glanced at the bathroom door. Frowned. “Elise,” he began, and everything he had prepared to say vacated his brain before finding its way to his mouth. Instead, he asked, “If you’re out here, who is in the shower?”
Elise got to her feet and went into her room without acknowledging him. James looked between the bathroom and bedroom doors, his frown deepening.
That was when he noticed that her shoes and sweater—which were in the middle of a muddy puddle by the door—were not alone. A pair of brown loafers and blue jeans lay beside them. The leather jacket hanging on the hook didn’t belong to him.
The shower cut off. The door opened. A very wet, very naked Malcolm stepped out. “Hey there,” he said, waving at James as though greeting him from across a coffee shop. “You’re out of clean towels in the bath. Got any spares?”
It took him a moment to find words. “What the hell are you doing in my condo?”
Elise emerged with a towel and handed it to Malcolm. James gaped at her. She stared at a fixed point over his shoulder.
“Well, I’d best put on some—you know.” Malcolm wiggled his hips. “I’ll be back to enjoy the awkward tension in a minute.” He kissed Elise on the shoulder, pinched her ass, and went into the bedroom.
The door shut behind him.
She did not move.
James had practiced the things he wanted to say. Lots of things. But he didn’t want to say any of it.
“McIntyre called Malcolm this morning,” Elise finally said. “He has a lead on Samael. We’ll be leaving in a few minutes.”
“I think we should talk,” James said.
She grimaced, picked up her coffee, and followed Malcolm into the bedroom. The lock gave a very loud, very clear click .
Concealing two heavily armed kopides on public transportation was easy in the winter. James had watched Elise strap on her twin falchions, and he still couldn’t see any bulges underneath her long leather jacket. The yellow scarf did a good job of concealing the swords’ hilts.
Malcolm was slightly more conspicuous. He only had two pistols, but his pockets were heavy with magazines. “If you need to shoot more than twenty-six rounds at an enemy and reload, you’re probably already dead,” he had informed James cheerfully, despite the witch’s best efforts to ignore him. “But I like to be prepared. You never know, with a fallen angel.”
Between the three of them, they could have killed everyone on the train—probably everyone on the railroad, really, given the power in James’s Book of Shadows. But the riders were totally unaware.
A man read the newspaper by the window. A woman whispered to a toddler chewing on the nipple of a bottle in his stroller. Two bicyclists chatted by the doors.
And Malcolm had his arm around Elise’s shoulders.
A pleasant noise chimed over the speakers, and a polite female voice announced that they were approaching Herlev.
“Next stop’s ours,” Malcolm said.
The bicyclists moved aside so that they could step onto the platform, and the trio walked through heavy snow to Herlev Hospital. It was truly a marvel of modern architecture—the tallest building in the Copenhagen region, and majestic with all of its bright glass and bronze aluminum.
A nurse met them outside the front doors. She looked relieved to see them.
“You’re Malcolm?” she asked in accented English. At his nod, she glanced around and pulled a silver pentacle necklace out of her shirt. “My coven put me in contact with McIntyre. My name is Karolina.”
“What’s wrong, Karolina?” Malcolm asked. He hadn’t dropped his arm from Elise’s shoulders, but he was still leering at the young nurse. Foul excuse for a human being.
Karolina lowered her voice. “There’s a demon hiding in the hospital. I’ve only seen it on security footage, but it’s large, and it smells like rotting eggs on the roof.”
“Where did you last see it?”
“Last night, in the maternity ward—” Her beeper chirped, and she checked the number. Karolina’s eyes widened. “I’m being called to an emergency. The number indicates a lockdown. Missing patient.”
“And you work in the maternity ward?” James asked, but he and Elise were already jogging toward the doors.
Alarms were going off inside the hospital, and it took three swipes of Karolina’s security badge to get them inside the locked down maternity ward. A security guard met them at the swinging doors.
He shouted at them in Danish, but the sight of Karolina stopped him. James noticed a silver pentagram pinned to his lapel—another witch.
“An infant has gone missing from the nursery,” he said, switching to English. “The demon has gone to the roof.”
Elise didn’t need to hear anything else. She ran for the stairs.
Malcolm drew a pistol.
“Is there another way up?”
Karolina twisted her hands together. “The elevators, but they’re automatically disabled when one of the infant bracelets triggers the alarm. You could take the south stairs.” He gave a sharp nod to James and left. “There will be hysteria if this gets out, and if it kills the baby—”
“That won’t happen,” James said, hoping it was true, and then he followed Elise.
He had to sprint to catch up with her. She was already four floors up, sword unsheathed and fire burning in her eyes.
The air did smell like rotten eggs. Elise staggered when she reached the landing at the top of the building, pressing a fist against her stomach. Her cheeks were pale.
“Samael,” she said.
Elise moved to push through the doors to the roof, but James stopped her. “Wait. We need to… you know. Piggyback.”
The idea didn’t seem to have occurred to her. “What do I do?”
“Hold still,” he said.
James wished he had more time to recall what he knew of joining in an active bond—he hated to perform his first piggyback under duress. He turned inward, as though meditating, and sought out his core of power. That part was easy. Stretching out to join with Elise, as though with a heavy chain of energy—that was mo
re difficult. He lost his concentration twice before finally succeeding.
She gasped.
Her thoughts, feelings, and emotions crashed over him. For a dizzying moment, he could see himself as though looking up from Elise’s position, a good head and shoulders shorter—was he really that tall? The power of the fallen angel was overwhelming. Elise felt like she was on the verge of throwing up, or passing out, or maybe both. And her palms burned.
The worst part was her mind—it was a pit. She was so angry. James had never experienced that emotion at such depth, and it was almost crippling.
Yet she wasn’t thinking about Samael. She was thinking about kissing him on the beach, and how much Malcolm pissed her off, and that she blamed James for the previous night’s drunken sex. What little she remembered of it. And that only made her angrier—that she was still thinking about sex and kissing and struggling with embarrassment when Samael was on the roof with his next victim.
It would have been so much easier if you loved me.
He didn’t need to hear that.
James tried to tether off the binding. He fumbled and almost lost it—then caught firm.
Her thoughts dropped to a low murmur in the back of his mind. The seething anger faded. She didn’t show any indication that she knew that James had heard her most private thoughts.
“Elise—” he began.
A muffled gunshot rang out on the other side of the door.
She slammed through the door to the rooftop. The sky seethed with heavy gray clouds. Malcolm was crumpled on the concrete with a gun six feet from his outstretched hand.
But Samael was nowhere to be seen.
James kneeled to check Malcolm for a pulse. Cold winter air lashed over the rooftop, making his fingers cold as soon as he extended them toward the kopis’s throat. The other man wasn’t dead. Just unconscious.
Elise slipped on a patch of ice, caught her footing, and slid around a shed.
“Wait!” James called, hurrying to follow her.
