by S. M. Reine
The demon continued to wail as she rushed toward James.
Elise hurled the falchion. It spiraled through the air and connected with the demon’s back, sinking right into her spine. She went rigid. Collapsed to the floor of the dungeon.
But even as she fell, she kept screaming.
Damn . Elise had been aiming for a lung. She must have missed.
“Kill it!”
The shout was so quiet compared to the demon’s wail that Elise thought she’d imagined it at first. But then the students from the tour group rushed through the door and attacked. They swarmed the demon, stomping and punching and shouting like their favorite team had just lost a football match.
“Get back!” Elise yelled. She couldn’t even hear herself—the men wouldn’t be able to, either. She jerked the second falchion out of the back sheath hidden underneath her raincoat and prepared to intervene. She’d have to save those dumbasses, too. They were seriously outmatched.
The demon’s pale hand lashed out at the man whose name tag said “Seamus.” Elise yanked him out of range just in time, bringing the falchion hacking down where he had been standing.
Its blade was sharp. It cleaved the demon’s entire hand clean off.
Demons tended to bleed black or red, but the fluid that gushed from this creature’s arm was jewel-bright, almost green in hue. Elise was so shocked to see green blood that she nearly dropped the sword.
The demon took the opportunity to leap free of the men attacking her and seize Elise. She screamed into Elise’s face, breath cold as the wind over the moors, the force like a fist through her forehead. Her vision blurred.
James grabbed the demon by the shoulders and tried to pry her off of Elise. Blood trickled out of his right ear, tracing a line to the stubble on his jaw.
During the struggle, Elise caught sight of motion out the corner of her eye.
One of the men was pointing wildly at Gregg’s body, shouting in silent horror as though the victim were somehow more horrifying than the demon itself.
Gregg was decaying rapidly. His skin bubbled, swelled, peeled away from his body. His exposed intestines were shriveling.
The demon screamed and screamed with no need to draw a breath.
His death was fueling her.
“James!” Elise shouted, delivering a swift uppercut to the demon’s jaw. The blow was hard enough that it would have taken the head off of a human. The demon only slammed into the dungeon wall behind her.
James mouthed a word back. “What?”
Elise thrust a finger toward Gregg’s body. James understood instantly. He nodded.
Something hard struck Elise in the back of the knees. She hadn’t seen the demon coming, so she smashed into the ground face-first.
Flipping to her feet, Elise picked up her fallen falchions and drove both into the demon’s gut. She aimed up, hoping to hit the lungs.
Either she’d missed or the demon didn’t have lungs. The blades entered underneath the ribs and exited somewhere near the shoulder blades. And the demon kept fucking screaming.
But only for another moment.
Elise felt the faintest tug of James’s magic, and then the demon cut off.
“Mary mother of God,” said Walker, one of the other students. He was crowded in a back corner with the other men, staring as Gregg’s body burned under the force of James’s spell. The tour guide went from rotting to ash within seconds.
Without the death to feed her, the demon couldn’t scream anymore.
She clawed at her own throat. Dry rasps rattled in her chest.
“Some things really are better seen than heard.” James sounded like he was talking from the other side of a wall. It was going to be a long time before Elise could hear properly again.
She wrapped her fingers around the demon’s throat, pressing the golden chain against her flesh. The charms glowed with trapped fire.
“Crux sacra sit mihi lux ,” she said, drawing deep on the strength within, the glory of God’s unwanted grace, and pushing it through the charms. “Non draco sit mihi dux. ” The phrase meant, “let the Holy Cross be my light, let the dragon not lead me astray.” The English verse would probably have worked as well for the ritual, but Elise preferred the Latin matching the words on her pendant of St. Benedict.
The Latin words resonated with a power that was somewhere beyond magic. They were usually enough to wrack any demon with pain.
This creature didn’t react.
Her eyes connected with Elise’s. A strange light filled the sparkling jewels of the demon’s irises and her flesh shimmered.
She didn’t look like a creature that had crawled from Hell.
In fact, Elise had never seen anything that looked like her before—and she had seen many, many strange things throughout her life.
She continued the exorcism anyway.
“Vade retro, Satana, nunquam suade mihi vana. ”
The blaze within the demon’s eyes brightened with fresh fury. It was a storm roiling over the ocean, an oncoming typhoon of energy. Her hands locked on Elise’s wrists, trying to pry the grip off of her throat. The charms burned hotter at the effort. Elise’s strength of will clashed with the demon’s.
“Elise!” James shouted. “Something is wrong!”
She set her jaw and pushed harder. “Sunt mala quae libas .”
The demon’s hair was a hurricane around them, lashing their flesh, leaving red welts where it contacted. Elise’s bones ached. Her teeth felt like they were going to rip free of her jaw.
“Ipse venena bibas !” Elise finished with a roar. She closed her hand around the demon’s throat, crushing with all of the force her muscles could muster. The demon finally cried out, whether under the weight of the ritual or Elise’s sheer grip. “Return to the Hell from which you came. Begone!”
With a thunder crack, energy lashed through the dungeon. For an instant, Elise could see nothing but vast white light, filled with the sway of reeds, the calm of a murky pool, the whisper of wind.
And the demon vanished, leaving Elise ankle-deep in the tour guide’s remains with a half a dozen students gaping at her.
2
Even though one of his employees had died, Joseph O’Reilly was a very happy man. His cheeks were flushed with excitement as he counted euros into Elise’s hand. “Four twenty…four forty…four sixty…ah, here we go. Five hundred pounds for a job well done.” She could barely hear him talking. Her skull still vibrated from the demon’s scream.
She didn’t close her hand on the money. “Someone died before I could save him.”
“Aye, that’s unfortunate,” O’Reilly said. “But you did your best. I won’t blame you for that.”
James didn’t pay much attention to their exchange. Normally, he was the one who handled client interactions, since Elise was too much of a loose cannon—though cannons tended to be more personable. James was better at talking to people. Or even being in the same room as them, really.
But James didn’t feel capable of keeping up with the conversation that day. He’d watched a man gutted by a demon and done nothing to save him.
Elise was quiet as she considered the money in her hand. Through their bond, James could feel that she was weighing whether or not she wanted to take that money. A pleasant surprise. He’d always assumed Elise would have happily led a life as a mercenary, taking payment for jobs regardless of ethics.
Finally, she separated the money into two stacks. “I didn’t perform the exorcism in time. You get a discount. Here.”
O’Reilly wouldn’t take what she offered to him. “The lad died because he didn’t run fast enough. That’s not your fault.”
Elise’s hand remained outstretched.
There were few tools of persuasion more powerful than awkward silence. After a few long moments, O’Reilly took back some of the money.
“Call me if you have any other problems,” Elise said, and she left.
James tore himself away from the window and hurried to catch
up with her.
She strode downstairs, hand hooked in her pocket. Probably discreetly holding a knife. At least she was being subtle about it for once. She’d even taken the time to conceal the hilts of her falchions underneath her scarf.
He trailed a few steps behind her, watching her curls bounce as she descended. He wanted to praise her for her kindness. Wanted to tell her she’d done the right thing. They didn’t need the money, as they still had more than enough stolen jewelry to fence—enough to last them for years, if they were careful. And it was right not to make O’Reilly pay when they hadn’t done their job properly.
But that praise would unintentionally double as criticism of Elise’s performance as exorcist.
She didn’t need to hear that.
They stepped out into the drizzly afternoon. The rain was cruel and cold, pelting them with hard fingers. Elise jerked a hood over her hair. Tilted her head back to look at the tower. James stood close enough that their shoulders brushed. “Does this job feel complete to you?”
“No,” Elise said.
He flicked the lapels of his peacoat, shielding his jaw from the bite of the ocean breeze. “I don’t think this is the last we’ve seen of the castle.”
She turned to leave, but he knew that she was thinking the same thing.
They would be back soon.
James and Elise had been traveling for so long that the apartment they’d rented in Dublin almost looked like home. He barely remembered what it felt like to return to the same house every day after working. He wasn’t even sure that he’d preferred it.
This apartment was on the first floor of an old house. Elise preferred to rent rooms on the second floor, where they were safer from outside attack but could jump out a window without breaking any bones, but their rental options had been limited. They hadn’t even planned on coming to Ireland. O’Reilly had contacted them through a friend of a friend two days earlier while they were in Spain, so most rentals had already been occupied.
Elise had done her best to fortify their ground-floor apartment anyway. She’d caulked the bedroom windows shut—which James dreaded explaining to the owner—planted weapons near every entrance, and laid simple traps around the back garden.
She’d made herself at home in the only way she knew how.
James had made himself at home in a different way. He’d claimed the desk in the living room, and now it was covered in books and papers. Everything he’d needed to research the possession of Castle O’Reilly.
The fall of evening found James working at the desk while Elise changed clothes in the bedroom. She’d accidentally left the door cracked; he could hear the rustle of her arms threading through sleeves and the creak of leather as she slipped her feet into boots as clearly as though she were in the room with him.
He lifted the book to look at the classifieds hiding underneath. James wasn’t certain they’d be in Ireland much longer, but if they were, they’d need to find another apartment to rent.
Two bedrooms next time. He desperately needed two bedrooms. James needed to be able to put more doors between himself and Elise.
Hinges creaked. He dropped the book over the newspaper again, sliding his reading glasses back into place, grabbing the pen so he could take notes. He carefully didn’t look at his kopis. He didn’t want her to know that he’d been listening to her change.
“I’m going out,” Elise said.
James highlighted a line in the book about legions, which were demons that followed violence. It was reasonable to think legions might possess a castle dungeon. “What are you going to do?”
“Pub. Seamus invited me.”
Seamus. That redheaded boy who fancied himself a “Machine.” Handsome young man. James wouldn’t have expected Elise to notice, though.
Legions. Demons that follow violence.
He wrote the page number in his notebook and continued trying not to look at Elise.
She was silent moving across the room. She had a way of occupying space without seeming to touch the world around her. If James hadn’t known any better, he would have thought she walked an inch above the ground.
The window groaned open under her hands. Rainfall pattered on the lifted pane, drizzled off the edge of the roof. Raised voices echoed in the street. The students from the tour group must have walked by to pick Elise up on the way to the pub.
Dungeons. Legions. James was writing essentially the same note over and over, but Elise still hadn’t left.
“Your new friends have already arrived,” he said. “You’d better get going.”
She sat on the edge of the desk. Even when James was focusing on the notebook, he couldn’t help but see her legs in the corner of his vision. She was wearing an A-line skirt—unusual for the girl who defaulted to jeans when she was on a job. When she balanced her toes on the leg of his chair, the hem of the skirt inched up her thighs, exposing the tops of her freckled kneecaps.
“I don’t have to go out,” Elise said. “I wouldn’t mind helping you.”
The tip of James’s pen was still touching the page. He wasn’t writing anymore. “It’ll be rather dull here.”
She swung her feet, kicking the chair lightly. “That’s fine.”
James set down the pen with a sigh, pinching the bridge of his nose. “If there’s one demon around here, there’s likely to be more. Demons are rare outside of North America. This suggests some kind of open portal to Hell, or someone deliberately bringing them into the area. A master of some kind.”
The people outside were shouting louder now. There was one voice in particular that was clearer than the others, a male voice, and he was calling Elise’s name.
Probably Seamus.
Elise said nothing. She also didn’t move.
It was impossible to have a conversation with Elise without making eye contact. She spoke so little that James relied on visual cues for half of their communication. Sometimes he thought that she often didn’t speak exactly for that reason—forcing James to give her the attention she wanted.
Finally, he relented. She was wearing a knitted sweater over the skirt with a leather jacket the color of butterscotch draped over one arm. A normal outfit like anything a normal young woman would have worn. She hadn’t picked it because it was good to fight in; she’d picked it because it accentuated the sharp lines of her collarbone, her slender waist, her muscular legs. Elise even wore her hair down, though the curls were a couple inches longer than she liked. Longer hair suited Elise. She looked lovely.
Aside from the injuries.
Though she wore long sleeves, there was no hiding the mottled bruising on her upper chest, cheekbone, and jaw. Doubtlessly, she’d a fractured bone or two. Were she anybody but Elise, she wouldn’t have been in any condition for drinking at a pub. She probably wouldn’t have been in any condition for leaving a hospital, in fact.
But this was Elise, and those bruises were already yellowing around the edges. The cracked bones would mend within days. She would be restored to her usual condition in no time, stronger than she had been before she was broken.
“They’re waiting for you,” James said.
Her lips thinned. That could have meant anything from agreement to annoyance.
He drummed the pen on his thigh. “Nothing’s going to happen here tonight. Just research. I’m fully capable of researching without you.”
“Yes,” Elise said.
What she didn’t say was that she would stay anyway.
It was tempting to tell Elise to stay with him. It was always tempting.
“They’re getting loud out there,” James said, returning his attention to Hume’s Almanac . “You should join them before someone reports the noise to the cops.”
There was a conspicuous emptiness to Elise’s expression—a look that James had come to recognize as a shield, a way for her to keep her thoughts private. She always used to look like that. He thought their friendship had matured to the point where she didn’t need to wall herself off with him a
nymore, but apparently he’d set her off.
She opened the desk drawer, took out a knife, and tucked it into a wrist sheath. Once she pulled the butterscotch-colored leather jacket over it, the weapon was invisible.
Elise didn’t say goodbye. Arming herself was its own kind of goodbye.
She stepped out the door and the voices changed from shouts to cheers of greeting.
As soon as the door shut behind her, James rose from the desk and went to the window.
He watched his kopis join the others in the street through the rain drizzling down the glass. Seamus and his friends looked like they’d already been drinking. Elise would have trouble catching up with them. Kopides had impressively high alcohol tolerance. James could only hope that Seamus would knock himself out in another couple of hours so that his mates could drag him away and leave Elise alone.
James felt suddenly drained, as though he and Elise had been arguing before she left rather than having a short, quiet conversation. He couldn’t find the energy to return to his desk and focus.
He could only watch as Elise retreated down the street, carried along by the tide of happy university students. At that distance, she looked like one of them. Like she was living the life a nineteen-year-old girl should have gotten to live rather than the one Elise had been given.
They turned the corner and were gone.
3
The pub Seamus led the group to was a kopis’s nightmare—or her dream, depending on the perspective.
It was dark, crowded, and small. Ideal for anonymity. Had Elise been searching for information, she would have looked for a pub just like this one, as it was obviously frequented by locals and dim enough that demons wouldn’t shy to visit.
However, there was only one public entrance. There was probably an exit through the kitchen as well, but that wasn’t easily accessible. One way in, one way out. If she were attacked, there would be a lot of collateral damage before she could reach safer ground.
