by S. M. Reine
Metaraon hauled James to the door. There were a dozen symbols on the top of the doorway, so the room on the other side was secure—very secure. But he waved an arm in front of the door, and it opened.
They stepped through to the narrow edge of a vast cavern filled with flame.
It was chokingly hot and smoky above the pit, which James had only glimpsed when he had first escaped his cell. The fires emanating from the earth below made the hair on his arms curl and his throat dry.
There were dark shapes thrashing in the flames. Bodies burning for eternity. Their wails echoed through his skull.
Metaraon shoved him toward the edge of the pit.
“What did you hope to accomplish?” James asked, sprawled on all fours. “You deposed Abraxas. You killed the touchstones. You’ve broken the Treaty, and ensured that angels and demons can cross freely between the worlds. There is no law that can protect mankind now!”
The archangel pushed his hood off, exposing his curly hair and hooked nose. The instant he emerged from the protective covering of his robes, the sense of power radiating from him flushed over James’s skin. “Yes,” he said. “I know.
“So you know that He can break free now,” James said. “Everything that He did before you trapped and fascinated him with mortal women—it’s all going to happen again.”
The angel didn’t respond, and a horrible sense of the truth settled over James.
That must have been exactly what Metaraon wanted.
“Why?” he asked.
Metaraon lifted him once more, using a tight grip on his shoulders to raise his feet off of the floor. “I had high hopes for you, Mr. Faulkner,” said the angel.
James heard commotion in the hallway. A pounding on the door, like fists. Someone had come to rescue him—the rebellion?—but the door was locked. He stared at the pit beneath his toes and saw dark figures thrashing in the flames. So many lost souls burning for all eternity, and one more about to join them.
Something gave a quiet click .
It was a small sound—so much softer than the screams emanating from the fires. Under normal circumstances, James wouldn’t have even noticed it.
Except that it was the sound of an impenetrable door with a dozen locks opening.
The doors slammed open, and Metaraon opened his hands. James’s stomach rose into his throat as he began to fall.
He screamed, but the sound was impossible to distinguish from the rest of the voices echoing throughout the cavern. He tumbled end over end toward the flame, rushing toward those reaching hands, the heat scorching his eyebrows—
Complete darkness consumed him.
For an instant, he thought that he was dead. It was too cool, too peaceful, too quiet for him to be in the fire, and he couldn’t seem to draw air into his lungs. But when he felt his heart speed up with panic, he realized that he still had to be alive.
His instant of peace was shattered when he slammed into the stone wall and fell to the ledge again at Metaraon’s feet. Elise dropped beside him, bounced off the floor, and almost slid into the pit. She caught herself with her fingertips.
The archangel had tossed his robes aside and stood in front of them wearing nothing but a tailored shirt and jeans. He had exposed his skin, unfurled his wings, and beamed with a powerful light that pierced straight through Elise’s darkness.
She hauled herself onto the ledge again.
“I passed through the courtroom. The touchstones are dead,” she said, glaring at Metaraon.
He lifted an eyebrow. “Excellent.”
His wings grew behind him, becoming so much brighter than the fire, brighter than the sun itself. He reached for Elise and James, and she struggled to her feet to face him.
His light clashed against shadow.
She braced herself in front of James, her arms spread wide, and he couldn’t see the line where she ended and the darkness began—they were one, singular and united. She was the night and the void.
Metaraon didn’t move, but his light brightened, forcing Elise back. She took one step. Two. Then she grunted and stepped forward instead.
Energy clashed like cracked cymbals rattling inside of James’s skull. He clapped his hands over his ears, but it wasn’t a sound that he could block—it was the power of one mighty creature against another, and neither of them were yielding. Elise was as beautiful as she had ever been, but it was a strange and deadly kind of beauty, like a sleek black eagle perched upon the spilled intestines of her victim. The muscles on her neck tensed into long, hard lines as she roared, teeth bared, eyes squinted, fists clenched.
She pushed forward.
James felt dull shock when Metaraon took a step back.
Bit by bit, the balance began shifting. The immense gray light gave way to the void—and then vanished entirely.
The cavern went dark.
The sudden absence of Metaraon’s wings left James blind, and he blinked rapidly, trying to clear the green shapes out of his vision.
Someone was laughing. It took a moment for James to realize that it was Metaraon.
“Finally,” the angel said, and as James’s eyesight cleared, he saw Metaraon sitting up from the floor. “Finally. After so long.” He turned his brilliant blue eyes on Elise, and instead of hatred or anger, they were filled with adoration. Worship. “The sword is complete. You can kill Him.”
“You’ve ruined everything,” Elise said as he stood.
“No,” he said. “For the first time in centuries, everything has been put right.”
Metaraon took her hand and bowed his head to her knuckles. Disgust twisted her face as she jerked free. “Don’t you fucking touch me,” she said. “I’m not a sword. I’m not a weapon. My name is Elise, and I’m a human being, goddammit. I don’t belong to anyone.”
His finger fell on her lips. “Swords don’t speak.” His fingers snaked around her face and gripped tightly, digging into her cheeks and blocking her mouth. “You are the product of angels, and you belong to me as surely as your mother does. At least she came willingly.”
Elise reached back to draw the obsidian sword. He caught her wrist before she could attack and used it to drag her against him.
Metaraon dropped his lips to hers, his eyes sliding closed as though he was in rapture.
He released her after a moment and tossed Elise aside almost casually. She stumbled. James caught her before she could fall.
The angel’s wings appeared behind him again. There was a line of blood dribbling from one of his ears. Metaraon wiped it way with his fingers, looked at the silvery blood on his skin, and he smiled. He smiled .
His wings curled around him. “No,” Elise growled, pushing James back to lunge at Metaraon again. “No!”
She jumped—and tripped on empty air.
Elise spun to search the room, but she was alone with James and the screams of a thousand tortured souls.
Passing through the courtroom was a grim journey. Every single touchstone was dismembered and dead, draped over their chairs with blood slicking the ground. The worst part—if there could be such a thing—was that James only saw the body of one angel as he passed: the cherub. No sign of the monster.
“What are we going to do?” he asked, hugging Metaraon’s robes around him.
Elise didn’t respond.
The Union was standing in the hall outside the portal room when James and Elise returned. She strode up to a uniformed man by the door who was one of the few humans in the area not wearing an oxygen mask. It took James a moment to recognize Gary Zettel—one of the men that Malcolm had introduced to James at the warehouse back on Earth.
“What are you all doing out here?” she asked.
Zettel looked annoyed to see her. “One of our recruits let the door close, and now we can’t open it again. We have to wait until more men come through the other side of the portal to let us in.”
“That won’t work,” Elise said. “These doors are locked on both sides.”
“Then what the he
ll are we going to do?”
“I don’t know.” She folded her arms. “What are you going to do? Why did you want to invade Dis in the first place?”
“We’re bringing justice to this unholy place. The Treaty’s been in danger for years now—we’ve had our ear to the ground, and what we’ve heard isn’t good. If we don’t act fast to secure the Palace, we might not have any Treaty at all.”
The Union didn’t realize what had happened yet. “Good thing you acted fast,” she said dully.
“Not fast enough. We’ve arrested some of the surviving conspirators, but we can’t get them back to HQ to answer for their crimes if we’re trapped in Hell.” Judging by his tone of voice, James was pretty sure that Zettel thought that Elise was among those who should be brought in front of Union HQ.
“Yeah,” Elise said. “Too bad.” She glanced at James, swathed in Metaraon’s discarded robes. “Look, we need clothing, and transport back to Earth.”
“You’re not in a place to make demands.” Zettel grunted. “Our supplies are still in the portal room, anyway.”
She laid her hand on the doorknob, pushed it open, and headed inside. Zettel stopped laughing.
James followed Elise.
The portal was still open, and James stood beside Elise as the Union rushed inside. James contemplated the sight of the Union’s warehouse on the other side of the dancing light. Not just the compound—Earth. The mortal planes.
Fear knotted in his stomach.
“Here,” Zettel said, crouching beside a crate that his men had dragged into the room. He opened it, removed a Union uniform, and tossed it to James. “Might be a little baggy on you.”
James quickly donned the slacks and discarded Metaraon’s robes. They stunk of angel, and he was glad to be rid of them. “You do realize what the death of all the touchstones means, Elise,” he said, pulling on the shirt and straightening it out before doing the buttons one at a time.
Elise nodded stiffly. “Yeah. I do.” It meant that Isaac, touchstone and Inquisitor, had to be dead, too. And it also meant that Elise wasn’t safe from God anymore. There was nowhere that He couldn’t reach her, once He realized all of the barriers were gone. Not on Earth, or in Hell.
She leaned her arm against his and let out a sigh. That was it. No panic, no fear. Just resignation.
“Are you going to be okay?” he asked.
Her expression made her feelings on the matter perfectly clear. “Don’t worry about it.”
James cupped Elise’s chin in one hand. “I’m sorry,” he said. “I’m sorry for everything.”
A tiny line formed between her eyebrows. Her frowns were different from when she was human, like emotion couldn’t pierce the marble perfection of her features. “I’m sorry, too. When we get back to Earth, we’re fucked. It’s going to be war.”
“That’s not what I mean.”
The corner of Elise’s mouth quirked. “You’re not worried about Heaven and Hell warring on Earth again? The kind of thing that kopides were specifically designed to stop?”
“Perhaps a little worried,” he said. “But I have bigger problems.”
“Like what?”
James bent to brush his lips over hers. Her lips were cool and moist, completely unaffected by the harsh atmosphere of Hell, and she tasted strangely like blood and leather. After a moment’s hesitation, Elise tangled her fingers with his, and she squeezed his hand tightly. The edge of her thumb ring cut into his palm.
He released her, but he kept a hand at the back of her neck, pressing their foreheads together.
Elise smiled. It was a small smile, and it didn’t touch the shadowy, endless depths of her black eyes. But it was extremely gratifying to see. A confirmation that she wasn’t angry at him—not yet.
“No,” someone said.
They broke away, and James looked up to see that Ariane had been brought into the portal room. She was handcuffed and being led by a pair of kopides at gunpoint, but she had stopped to stare at Elise and James.
Elise’s hand tensed as Ariane stepped toward them. Her bruised face seemed even worse in the lighting from the portal. James could see every wound in detail—the ring of bruises around her eye, the split on her cheekbone, the bruises peppering her jaw.
“Fille ?” Ariane whispered. “Ma cherie ?”
Somehow, Elise’s expression didn’t change. She was as stony and cold as Isaac had ever been. It was a terrifying expression—the kind of look she took on before killing something.
“Hello, Mother,” Elise said, voice dead.
The confirmation of her identity filled Ariane’s face with horror.
“Keep moving,” said one of the kopis guards, jamming his gun into the small of Ariane’s back.
The woman turned on James, cheeks pinkening with rage. It might not have been as chilling as Elise’s expression, but she had a temper of her own, and he had apparently managed to inspire the worst of it. “You’ve betrayed us all,” she told James. Then she reached into the neck of her dress and pulled out a vial. “Je suis désolé , Elise.”
One of the kopides shouted, and the other reached for her—too late.
Ariane flung the glass bottle at the portal. It exploded, and silvery fluid gushed over the stones, splattering on the floor.
James felt all the magic in the portal’s basin instantly vanish, as if it had never existed at all. Ariane had just canceled out the magic in the portal—the magic that bound together everything in the Palace.
The light of the portal blinked out in an instant. The Union warehouse on the other side vanished.
And so did Elise and James’s route home.
The guard smashed the butt of his gun into the back of Ariane’s skull, and she fell just as she attempted to extract another potion from the bodice of her dress. It was flung from her hand and shattered on the stone. It was the same color as the last potion, and James felt more magic leech out of the tower.
“Shit,” Gary Zettel said, “shit ! Allyson—”
His aspis ran across the room to lay her hands on the symbols ringing the basin, but there was no reaction.
The room began to tremble.
Ariane tipped her face up toward Elise. “I love you,” she whispered, reaching her fingers toward her daughter’s booted foot.
Elise stepped back before they could touch.
“We have a problem,” James said as a rumbling rose throughout the room, making the floor shake beneath their feet.
Something cracked. A brick tumbled out of the ceiling, crashed to the floor, and shattered.
James dragged Elise toward the door. The Union didn’t try to stop them—they were yelling, panicking, focusing on the basin of the portal as it began falling apart. “What just happened?” she asked.
“Your mother—she closed the portal and destroyed the magic holding the room together. The tower is falling.”
They were about to cross into the foyer when the wall over the doorway split. Bricks crashed to the ground in front of them, and Elise pulled James back at the last moment, shielding him from the debris. Broken stone pelted his skin.
Elise swore loudly, but he could barely hear her under the shouts of the rest of the Union.
The floor tipped beneath them. Deep, thudding explosions of collapsing stone rocked the tower. James could feel the magic dissolving around him, loosening the mortar and making the walls lose their structure.
There were no windows in the room, no other doors, and no portal—no escape.
“Hold on!” Elise yelled, wrapping her arms around James.
And then the tower vanished.
There was peace in the darkness. No noise, no light, no Union or cherubim or witches with potions that destroyed magic at a touch. Just Elise and James, a gentle buffeting, a drifting.
She hadn’t had a plan for escaping the Palace—all she knew was that they needed to be somewhere else, and suddenly, they were. Elise and James appeared in the desert fringes of Dis.
The nearby clif
fs were carpeted in iron trees. A fiery gash in the earth separated them from the city. A wild kibbeth floated not too far away, legs twisting and tangling as it traveled on a cushion of air. The desert was quiet except for a hot breeze, which showered sand against her legs. Distant echoes that could have been the wind through the chasms or the screaming of lost souls whispered over the desolation.
With sensation and clarity of sight came emotion, and all Elise could feel was dread.
A few miles away—so close, but so impossibly useless—stood the Palace and the destroyed portal room. “No,” Elise whispered, staring at the black city. A new plume of smoke rose from one of the towers and spiraled into the sky.
It looked peaceful.
“We’re trapped.” James sounded empty, numb. His voice was rough. “We’re trapped in Hell.”
And it was Ariane’s fault.
“So that’s it, mère ,” she said into the wind.
Anger vibrated through her, radiating from her crown over her skin to her fingertips and toes, until the fury suffused her every fiber.
She seized a rock the size of a softball that had been warmed by the fires deep below them and hurled it at Dis’s distant skyline as she screamed wordlessly into the endless night.
Someone spoke behind Elise in a silky-smooth voice that dripped with careful control. “I would be angry, too, if I had just surrendered the most ancient and powerful bastion of justice in our universe to a hive of bumbling mortal idiots.”
Abraxas—the real Abraxas—stood behind them, and his squashed face was twisted into a fury that rivaled Elise’s. “Are you only here to taunt us, or do you have something helpful to offer?” James asked.
“Why should I offer anything at all? I didn’t let you into the House of Abraxas for fun. I didn’t heal you, shelter you, guide you to victory in the Palace of Dis so that you could surrender it to humans. The Union!” He spat onto the red dirt. “I don’t owe you anything.”
