by S. M. Reine
The voice whispered, Kill him if you must.
Anthony flung dirt into James’s face. His eyes burned and stung as he fell.
James rubbed the dirt out of his eyes in time to see Anthony snap a fragment of glass off the window and dive for him.
He threw himself behind a planter. The makeshift knife swung over his head, whistling through the air.
James grabbed a potted tomato plant and smashed it into Anthony’s skull. He fell. James scrambled over the windowsill into his office again.
Something snatched at the hem of his pants. He twisted to see Anthony’s fingers grasping for his ankle. James kicked him in the face, freeing his leg.
He rolled over the futon, covered in sparkling fragments of glass, and hit the floor.
James didn’t have a spell to exorcise Anthony—if only Elise had been there. What herbs could he use? Lotus? Nettle leaf?
He tore open the drawers on his desk, searching the labeled compartments for supplies.
Anthony launched through the window and slammed them both to the floor. The younger man was so much stronger than he should have been—even with James’s newly developed muscles and extra height, he couldn’t get him off of him.
He struck at Anthony’s arms, ripped with muscle from his work at the mechanic’s shop, and found them like bars of iron.
Yatai’s voice slithered through the air. Take what we need.
“I’ll take what I need,” Anthony agreed.
Demonic energy built and crackled around them, sudden and choking, forcing itself down James’s throat. Power battered his heart against his ribcage. His spine arched as he roared.
Be quick. We’re out of time. They’re coming.
“What am I looking for?” Anthony asked.
Give me his secrets.
James knew nothing but the fire—it burned through his veins, coursing over his muscles and skin and leaving nothing but blistered charcoal in its wake.
He twisted and thrashed. Beat his fists against Anthony.
Nothing helped. Nothing made the pain end.
The shadow spread over both of the men and sank into them.
Let me see… ah. There we are. For an instant, Anthony’s face vanished over James’s, and all he saw was a boy—black-haired and brown-eyed, with thick-framed glasses and a grave expression. The child spoke with Yatai’s voice. I understand now. We’re finished here.
Anthony’s hands lifted, and the crushing weight went with it.
James rolled onto his side. His vision sparkled. His chest felt like it had been stuffed with the broken glass from his window.
The other man’s feet crossed in front of his vision.
“What now?”
Kill him.
James crawled for the end of his circle. Anthony stepped in front of him. “Sorry,” he said, fist gripping the fragment of glass so tightly that his own blood ran in a line down the edge.
The witch reached blindly over his head. He found the open drawer and a fistful of salt.
Anthony raised the glass.
James scattered the salt over the circle. With a mighty clap of thunder, the circle sealed.
Light flooded the room. Yatai shrieked. The shadows retreated. Anthony shouted, his voice mingling with the demon’s, and he dropped the glass. It shattered by James’s head.
He threw himself at the window, crashing through it to the safety of night outside. James didn’t wait to see if he would return. He broke the circle, ripped away the wards, and fled.
14
St. Mary’s Regional Medical Center was in chaos. Elise had to fight her way through the crowd in the emergency room’s foyer to get inside.
A man was huddled against the wall, crying. Children were screaming. A couple argued with the triage nurse in Spanish. An old woman was slumped in a chair with a young man pressing an oxygen mask to her face as he shouted in her ear. The stench of sweat and effluence dripped from the walls. Police were spread throughout the room, trying to get control, but three men and a woman in uniform meant nothing to the panicked patients.
Elise stepped over a man on the floor. His thigh had been bitten, and his gray skin oozed ichor. She hesitated, considering the injury. That man was going to die, and he wasn’t the only person who had been infected—there was another body by the admission desk that had already turned to obsidian.
She pushed past a teenage boy behind the triage nurse’s desk and slammed into the ER. Someone shouted at her to stop. She ignored them.
It was just as hectic on the other side of the doors. Every chair in the waiting room was filled. Elise didn’t pass a single empty bed as she searched for Stephanie’s familiar strawberry-blond hair.
She spotted the doctor working on a man with a bite wound on his chest. She was elbow-deep in blood—all of it, thankfully, a normal shade of red-brown—but the shadow was creeping up her scalpel.
“Stephanie!” Elise burst into the room. “Drop that!”
The doctor took one look at her and the bulletproof vest and returned her attention to the patient. “Whatever you want, I don’t have time for it.”
Elise knocked the scalpel out of her hand as the shadow spread up the handle. It swarmed with ichor. “Don’t touch that with anything you aren’t prepared to lose. And don’t let it get on your hands. It’s infectious.”
“Who are you?” asked a nurse in blue scrubs, stepping into Elise’s space, as though he was going to force her out of the room.
She shoved him. “Listen to me! The black stuff can kill you with a touch. Don’t get near it!”
The nurse looked askance at Stephanie over his medical mask. The doctor reluctantly nodded. “Spread the word.” The man on the table whimpered and thrashed. Shadows pulsed from his chest wound and dribbled over his body. “How do I save him?”
“You can’t,” Elise said.
Stephanie let off a colorful string of curses and led her out of the room, pulling the curtains around the man. She lowered her voice. “First of all, don’t talk like that where the patients can hear you. Second of all, that’s not the right answer. There must be something I can do for them.”
“You can keep the infection from spreading. That’s it. Tell your staff to quarantine anyone who’s been bitten or has a black wound. Focus on the people they can save—the ones with other traumatic injuries. And once you’ve spread the word, we need to get out of here,” Elise said.
“I’m not going anywhere. Where’s James?”
“Safe. You can join him if you come with me.”
“Thank God for small mercies,” Stephanie said, heading down the hall. She stripped off her gloves, removed her apron, and washed her hands in the sink. “This attack has caused thousands of injuries. We’re overwhelmed.”
“And there’s nothing you can do.”
“That’s pessimistic for a kopis.” She put on a fresh apron. “You should know that there’s always something to be done for someone.” Stephanie took a moment to close her eyes and take a few deep breaths. When she began moving again, it was with newfound resolve. “Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have patients to treat.”
Elise caught her arm. “Come on. Please. James is worrying about you.”
Stephanie’s eyes filled with fire. “And these people need me.”
They shared a long stare. Elise dropped her hand. “Evacuate as soon as you can.”
“Don’t hold your breath.”
Stephanie hurried off to intercept a stretcher with a young man missing his leg from the knee down.
Elise slipped out of the hospital again in time to see a fleet of Union SUVs coming around the corner. They escorted several large vans, which were filled with dusty, wide-eyed civilians. A witch was arguing with a paramedic beside the open doors of an ambulance.
“We need to evacuate the entire hospital,” the witch said. “We have medical facilities—”
“And who the hell are you?” the paramedic interrupted.
Elise rushed to the sidewalk, squ
inting through the mixture of ash and snow whirling through the air.
The situation had gotten worse since she and James had fallen from the ruins. Parts of the crumbling buildings in the ethereal city had collapsed and destroyed sections of downtown. She could see a restaurant that had been turned to obsidian by Yatai’s fiends at the end of the street. Now the ichor was spreading through the real casinos as well.
The only bright places remaining were the gates, still protected by Alain’s magical ribbons, still glowing in the darkness with ethereal energy.
The popping of gunfire broke the air.
Elise jumped behind a gas pump, watching from around the corner as one of those massive tanks rolled past. It was herding a cluster of limping fiends. It wasn’t firing with the cannon—there were two kopides sitting on the outside with submachine guns, and a handful of humans screamed and ran into the nearest parking garage when they saw it.
“Under control?” Elise muttered. “I am going to kill you, Malcolm…”
She waited until they were gone and made a break for Craven’s.
There were more demons possessed by ichor around the corner—more than Elise thought could have come from Zohak. They weren’t all fiends, either. A dozen of them milled in the alley.
Elise thought she recognized a few of them. The two basandere who volunteered to dump Zohak’s body—they were there. And so were a couple of nightmares. Yatai had been busy.
She skirted around the alley before they could spot her, sprinting full-speed down the street.
Elise passed under one of the gates, which hung from the mirror of the train trench. A mixture of silver and crimson light sparked in her vision as Alain’s magic mingled with ethereal energies. Her skin buzzed and her palms ached when she passed underneath it.
Craven’s looked like it had been closed and condemned, but then, it always looked like that. The neon sign was dim. No light came through the boarded windows.
Elise jiggled the front door. Locked.
Sudden energy built behind her. Lightning split the night. She spun, pressing her back to the door.
The gate in the train trench flared with light. Crimson sparks showered on the street, dancing over the buildings as the magic ripped free and splashed over the sidewalks. The light emanating from the pillars of bone intensified. The marks around the base flashed white.
And then the shadows began oozing up the sides.
Yatai had torn open the warding ribbons.
Elise gaped. “How…?”
She almost fell when the door opened behind her. Pale hands shot out, grabbed her shoulders, and dragged her into Craven’s.
Neuma wrapped her in a tight embrace that made Elise’s skin feel like it was going to crawl off her bones. Light from the gate poured through the cracks in the boarded window, and the half-succubus’s pale flesh glimmered in the darkness. “Elise!” she cried, gripping her shirt in both hands. “That shadow, that thing—it took Treeny!”
“Wait, slow down,” Elise said as Jerica hurried to chain the front door again. She was pleased to see the nightmare armed with knives and wearing a biker jacket and chaps. One other demon was waiting nearby—a squat, hideous door guard called Ed. “Who’s Treeny?”
Neuma was hyperventilating. Her impressive chest rose and fell with every breath. “The waitress, the witch! I called her into work, but when she was down the block—the black thing—the screaming—”
“A giant snake,” Jerica interrupted. “Blacker than shadow. It came down from the ruins and grabbed her.”
“Treeny must have opened the wards,” Ed said, peeking through slits in the boards at the gate.
He was right. A demon wouldn’t have had the requisite abilities. But how would Treeny have known what to do? Alain could only perform rudimentary paper magic because he seized some of James’s spells. Nobody else knew how to do it—certainly not a weak witch that worked for her casino.
Unless Yatai had somehow gotten the information from James.
Elise’s stomach flipped. “Where’s the team I asked you to collect, Neuma?”
“Downstairs.”
“Okay. Forget the excavation. Ed, I want you to take everyone into the Warrens. Find somewhere safe from Yatai and wait for me. I’m going to need your help getting the city back under control once I kill her.”
Ed wasn’t just the scariest-looking bastard on her team; he was also one of the most obedient. He nodded and headed downstairs.
“What about us?” Jerica asked.
“If the magic keeping Yatai out of the gates is failing, she’ll still need an angel’s mark to open them. So we’ve got to keep her from getting one.”
Neuma’s brow furrowed. “Nukha’il?”
“He’s dead.” She swallowed the lump that rose in her throat. “That means Itra’il is unprotected. We’ve got to get to her before Yatai does. Find weapons and get ready to move.”
Neuma scurried away, taking tiny steps in her four-inch boots—which were modest, by her standards—and vanished into the darkness of the empty casino floor. “Who’s Itra’il?” Jerica asked.
“An angel. She was driven crazy by enslavement to a human master, so another angel was keeping her in hibernation. But he’s dead now.”
“Where is she?”
“Locked in the vault beneath a former bank. It’s about four blocks from here.”
Jerica glanced out the slats in the boards. “Four blocks? Out there?”
Elise drew her obsidian sword. “Yeah.”
“Great,” said the nightmare. She blew a big bubble of gum and popped it.
As they waited, Elise felt the wards around another gate open. She couldn’t see it from inside Craven’s, but there was no mistaking the pulse of magic, the flush of ethereal energy.
Three gates unprotected. Six to go.
Neuma returned a few minutes later. She had traded out the boots for high-tops and worried a leather whip between her hands.
“That’s your weapon of choice?” Elise asked, arching an eyebrow.
She looked at the whip. “What’s wrong with it?”
“Nothing. Never mind.” She unchained the doors again. “We’re going to the bank on Center. We have to reach Itra’il first—whatever it takes. Don’t let anything touch or bite you. Assume everything out there is infectious. Got it?”
“Let’s rock and roll,” Jerica said.
Elise flung the doors open.
Lightning danced through the sky, arcing between the street and the gate above. It leaped from the gate in the trench to the gate in the cathedral—exposed by the missing roof—and lit the city with crackling white light.
“Move,” Elise yelled, “move!”
She ran west, and Jerica loped at her side, butcher knife in each hand.
Energy split the air. The gate suspended from the mirrored roof of Harrah’s Casino’s hotel tower flared with light and magic. The serpent of Yatai’s energy lashed through the clouds, darting from one gate to the next.
When they reached the next intersection, Elise leaned around the corner to check for fiends. There was a tank positioned under the Reno arch.
The cannon thumped as it fired. Fiends shrieked.
Elise gestured, and they darted to the old bank.
She almost thought they were going to make it unscathed.
The entrance to the vault was in the alley, and her heart plummeted to see that the other demons had gotten there first. The door was untouched, but the wall was melted away by ichor, and quickly eating into the foundations. A van was tipped on its side, and the red Turtle cases from its back were spread across the asphalt.
Elise’s feet crunched on CDs and tape media as she hurried to the hole in the wall. The demons had eaten through layers of cinderblock and steel to reach the vault’s entryway. Inside, fiends were digging and clawing at the door of the bank vault. Shadows made the paint peel.
She stepped inside and clambered on top of a desk that had once belonged to the intake officer. �
�Hey!” she barked.
The fiends turned, bulbous eyes bulging with inky shadow. They were being supervised by a possessed nightmare—a tall, slender man with yellow claws. Rick—from the drugstore—was barely recognizable.
Jerica gasped.
“It’s not him anymore,” Elise said. “You can’t—”
She didn’t get a chance to finish. The fiends rushed at them.
Elise whirled through the possessed demons. There was no room to fight, and the fiends could climb walls—they scurried to the ceiling and dropped on her. She jumped off the desk and kicked a fiend into the metal cage protecting the elevator.
“Duck!” Jerica yelled.
She threw herself to the ground as the nightmare flung a butcher knife. It hurtled through the air with terrifying precision and buried into one of the fiend’s skulls with a thump .
Rick lunged for Jerica. Neuma lashed out. The whip curled around Rick’s throat and held firm; she jerked, and he fell to the ground.
She loosed it with a flick of her wrist and lashed again. It sliced open his cheek. Ichor spilled over his mouth and down his jaw, dribbling to his chest and soaking his shirt.
“No!” Jerica cried.
Elise hacked him in half. He collapsed in two pieces, splattering wetly on the concrete floor.
She made short work of the remaining fiends, which fell under the possessed blade like water evaporating on a heated skillet. She flicked ichor off her blade onto the ground and went to check the vault’s door.
There was a hole the size of a small child halfway up the wall. It was still growing.
Jerica sobbed over Rick, hands covering her face. “Get her off the ground, Neuma. We have to move,” Elise said.
The bartender’s eyes widened. “Right now? Can’t you see she’s grieving?”
“She can grieve when we aren’t in mortal peril.”
“But Elise—”
Her argument was cut short by a groan in the building above them. The walls cracked. Shadow seeped through the fissures. “Take cover!” Elise shouted, shoving Neuma for the door.
It was too late.
Sudden light flooded the basement. Cold air gushed over Elise’s skin.
