by S. M. Reine
“Get out,” the witch said. “I’m going to search your car.”
“I don’t want to disturb him,” Brianna said.
Her lie was already falling apart—the guard didn’t look remotely convinced. But when James reached for a spell to attack, Brianna’s hand tightened on his leg, digging her fingernails into his thigh.
Brianna held up her wallet. It bulged with money. “Can you just inspect this?”
After a beat, the witch took it from her. When Brianna took it back a moment later, the wallet looked much thinner.
The guard stepped back and waved them through.
“See?” Brianna said when they had cleared the checkpoint. “I told you that it was fine.”
15
James didn’t allow his glamor to dissolve after they passed the checkpoint. He clutched it to his skin like armor.
“A study at UNR?” he asked Brianna, glancing over his shoulder at the retreating guard post.
“It’s been all over the blogosphere,” she said. “The Union’s experimenting on people in Reno now.”
“What kind of experiments?”
Brianna shrugged. “Who cares? It saved us.” She picked up speed as they hurtled down the highway, weaving between the empty lanes. “Where to now?”
James wasn’t sure what to tell her. Should he have her take them downtown, straight to the mirror city? Was he ready to pass through the gates? “Cross over to I-80 and get off on Keystone,” he decided after a moment.
Brianna did as he ordered, shooting him looks out of the corner of her eye, as if she couldn’t quite believe what her eyes were telling her. “You’re kind of sexy like that.”
Elise certainly seemed to think so. “I’ll choose to take that as a compliment.”
On the west end of Reno, the devastation wasn’t too bad. There were a lot of abandoned, ash-covered cars parked on the sides of the road, and a few blocks were cordoned off to block sinkholes that Yatai had created, but everything was otherwise normal. With the sun shining, it was hard to believe how much of a disaster had befallen Reno.
Despite the beautiful day and the wind smelling of blooming sage and sun-warmed earth, the streets were empty. Boarded-up windows concealed empty houses. Any cars that hadn’t been destroyed were missing, and the sidewalks were empty.
It was a dead city—as much a ghost town as any James might pass on the drive to southern Nevada.
Motion and Dance was just as dusty as the other buildings on the street, but everything else looked normal. The grass was even green—a condition that would end within the next two or three weeks, as soon as summer’s blistering heat struck.
Brianna pulled into the parking lot. She turned in her seat to face him.
“I want to know how to do…that ,” Brianna said, waving at James’s face. “I want to know everything you know. Landon might be dead, but I can still lead the coven if you teach me. Let me be your apprentice.”
James massaged his fingers over his temple. He could feel a headache forming. “You will not be my apprentice. I don’t have apprentices.”
“Pamela had apprentices.”
“Thanks for the ride,” he said, getting out of the car. “I hope your trip back is safe.”
“Trip back? But I’ve driven hundreds of miles to help you!” Brianna said.
“And I’m grateful,” he said. “But this is where we separate.”
He opened the back door and gently shook Nathaniel’s knee. He jolted awake, staring wildly around the car as if they were under attack. James could see the instant that he remembered what had happened over the last few days—his face hardened into a mask, and he shoved his glasses onto his nose.
“We’re here?” Nathaniel asked, squinting at James’s magicked features. It wasn’t a look of confusion; he looked to be analyzing the magic, trying to understand the spell that had changed his father’s face.
“We’re here,” James confirmed.
Nathaniel pushed the blanket off and got out. Brianna rolled down the window and hung her arm over the side.
“I’m going back to Colorado to see what I can figure out,” she said. “Give me a call when you’re done with…whatever you’re doing. I could use your help salvaging the coven now that Landon’s gone.”
“I’ll consider it,” James said, which was his way of saying, “Not a chance in Hell.”
“You’ll want to be somewhere safe before it gets dark,” Brianna said. “There are demons underground. A lot of demons. I can feel them. And as soon as the sun goes down, I bet they’re all going to come crawling out looking for something to eat. You know?”
“Yes. Right. Thanks for the warning.”
Nathaniel stood on the sidewalk until Brianna’s car disappeared down the street. It looked like he wished he could go with her—maybe he was having second thoughts about their ridiculous rescue mission.
James had bigger things to worry about than second thoughts. He drank in the sight of the studio, his heart aching.
One of the front windows had been broken. The carpet in front of the reception desk was sprinkled with glass. He reached through the broken window to unlock the door, then stepped inside.
The memories that Metaraon had dragged to the surface seemed so recent, rather than years old. It was like prodding a fresh wound.
James could almost hear Betty laughing in the dance hall.
Nathaniel followed him through the dance hall, where the blue exercise mats still covered the floor. The boy tapped a key on the piano. It was desperately out of tune, and the note rang sour.
A glimmer of metal under the piano caught James’s eye—a pair of rings that had been tossed aside in a moment of passion.
James fished the rings out from under the piano and pocketed them.
“Who’s that?” Nathaniel asked, staring hard at James.
He touched his face. He could still feel his own nose and chin, but it was Anthony’s face in the mirrored walls.
“This is a man named Anthony Morales,” James said. “He’s a…friend.” He let the glamor fall away. His skin turned white again, gray stubble reappeared on his cheeks, and exhausted blue eyes stared back at him from the mirror.
“How did you do it? Not just that one. All of them.” Nathaniel waved at James’s body to indicate the marks. Even with the glamor concealing his skin, the magic contained within the spelled tattoos glimmered faintly.
“Like I told Brianna—”
“No crap. Just tell me,” Nathaniel insisted. He sounded exactly like Hannah when he talked like that.
James sighed, running a hand over the stinging welts on his arm. “It’s hard to explain. Human magic requires a source of power, preferably one that originates from plants. The strength of the spell correlates to the energy source, which is why sacrifices are sometimes—”
“I know,” Nathaniel interrupted.
Of course he did.
James stared helplessly at his son, wondering how the hell he was meant to bridge this gap between them. Nathaniel was already educated well beyond the point that any boy his age should have been. James couldn’t speak to him like Pamela spoke to her initiates.
He would have to approach it from a different angle.
“Arcane ethereal magic is self-powering,” James said. “The words themselves are the magic, augmentable with herbs and crystals, rather than using them as a source of power.”
He extended his arm toward Nathaniel. James had used all of the spells on that forearm, but the imprint of welts remained. Even with increasingly kopis-like attributes, he couldn’t heal the burn of magic quite so quickly. The red marks stung when he looked at them, as if they burned anew.
“See these marks? It’s a bastardization of written magic and arcane ethereal magic—what they used to call magecraft.”
Nathaniel rolled his eyes. “Magecraft hasn’t worked for hundreds of years.”
“Thousands,” James said.
“And only angels can perform it.”
&nbs
p; He coughed into his fist. “That’s true. Mostly. It’s been strictly regulated by the Council of Dis, but the touchstones of the Treaty have all been killed.”
Nathaniel’s eyes widened. He sat on the piano bench.
“So there’s nothing to stop humans from using it safely.”
“‘Safe’ is not the word I would use,” James said. “But…desperate times.” He pushed his sleeve down again, then clenched his fist on the warding rings—the only reason that he had returned to Motion and Dance in the first place. Very desperate .
Nathaniel didn’t seem to hear him. He was rubbing his own arms, lost in thought, as if imagining what he could do with that kind of power.
James hoped that he would never find out.
They headed out immediately. James dug the bicycles out of the shed—a small red mountain bike for Elise, and a larger blue one for James. He pushed Elise’s bike toward Nathaniel. “Take this one.”
Nathaniel wrinkled his nose. “That’s a girl’s bike.”
“You’re welcome to walk,” James said, climbing onto his bicycle and starting to pedal.
He heard his son follow a few seconds later.
Orange twilight drenched the neighborhood, fading the shadows to blue. The shadows seemed to writhe. Darkness was approaching quickly, and James could feel a familiar tingling growing as the demons underground began to stir.
They climbed north, toward downtown Reno. James set a hard pace, but Nathaniel kept up without complaining.
Once they got on the freeway, they had to weave through the lanes to avoid crumbling concrete that would throw them off of their bikes. It meant James couldn’t stare at the ruination surrounding him, even though it was impossible to ignore. Several distinctive buildings were missing from the skyline.
As the sun grew dimmer, the shadows grew darker. It wasn’t simply an absence of light. The shadows had substance. James’s kopis senses itched.
Nightmares. Reno had been flooded by nightmares.
The ruins of the mirror city were still suspended above downtown Reno, encompassing the area from the Truckee River all the way to St. Mary’s Hospital. It had been deteriorating rapidly the last time that James had seen it, but now it was propped up by Union scaffolding. The honeycomb of metal looked like it hadn’t been maintained since it was originally erected. It was beginning to rust.
There were also multiple cameras on the scaffolds. If the Union hadn’t known that James was coming before, they certainly did now.
He punched the button on Allyson’s disruptor anyway, just in case.
“What is that?” Nathaniel asked, staring at the inverted city.
“It used to be an ethereal city in another dimension, but a demon pulled it into ours so that she could use the gates to destroy the world,” James said. “It didn’t work.”
“I get that.”
James took his feet off the pedals and glided through the shadow of Circus Circus’s remains. What used to be one of the tallest buildings in Reno had been sucked into the earth, leaving behind nothing but shattered walls and a lot of broken glass.
They crossed to Sierra Street, and James finally stopped beside the parking garage.
“Here it is,” he said, lifting his eyes to the city above. It was always dizzying to see streets and buildings hanging over his head. The darkest gate was positioned on top of the parking garage’s twin.
Nathaniel dropped his bike. “How do we get up there?”
“We climb,” James said grimly.
Night was creeping over downtown as they took the winding metal stairs to the top of the parking garage, and they had to climb three different ladders to reach the top of the scaffolds.
The darkest gate was a pair of towering columns that joined at their peak to form an arch. James remembered seeing it glow with energy, but it was quiet now. Nathaniel could only reach the left leg of the gateway.
“I only have one spell left that opens doors like these,” Nathaniel said, flipping through his notebook. “We’ll have to cast another one to get back out again.”
Which meant that they wouldn’t be able to escape quickly. Once they entered the garden, they couldn’t leave again until He was dead.
“Just open it,” James said.
Nathaniel glared. “Just give me a second!”
He made a triumphant noise when he reached a page in the center of his Book of Shadows.
Nathaniel ripped the page free and slapped it against the pillar of the gate.
Nothing happened.
“What’s wrong?” James asked.
Nathaniel frowned as he looked at the page in his hand. “I don’t know.” He flicked his wrist twice, as if trying to shake it awake, and then pressed it to the stone again. The effect was the same. “The gate’s broken. We can’t go that way.”
“Broken? What?”
James gave the towering gate a second look. It couldn’t be broken. He had seen it open before.
But Nathaniel was right. Cracks ran through the column, deep enough that he could fit a finger in them. Metaraon must have known they were coming and visited it first.
The sense of defeat nearly overwhelmed James. He sank to his knees on the scaffolding, scarred chest burning and a heavy feeling in his gut.
Both doors to the garden…destroyed.
He was so overwhelmed by anger and grief that he almost didn’t realize that the sense of energy in his gut was growing. That power didn’t belong to the ethereal ruins.
James was feeling something else—something infernal.
He looked down. Through the pocked metal under his knees, James could see the shadows of the street churning. The sun had completely vanished during their climb, leaving nothing but a smoky sky above and darkness below. But even at night, it shouldn’t have been quite that dark.
The demons were out.
“Could you convert one of the other gates to go to the garden instead?” James asked, glancing around for the nearest archway. It would be hard to reach any of them—the tangle of scaffolding was like a maze.
“Maybe,” Nathaniel said. “I don’t know.”
“We’ll have to find out.”
James pushed him toward the edge of the rooftop.
Before they could move to the next scaffold, a black wall erupted in front of them.
The column of smoke whirled through the air, so thick as to be tangible. The buildings beyond them vanished. James grabbed Nathaniel’s arm and dragged him back before he could fall off the edge.
They turned to run in the other direction. But a second wall of darkness formed at the other end of the scaffold, too. It soaked him with nauseating power.
The fear followed a few moments later—a sense of dread that crept from his marrow.
Voices whispered from the shadow.
It’s your fault. They’re all dead because of you.
Nathaniel is next.
It wasn’t a rational fear, and he knew those voices came from the demons surrounding them, yet James couldn’t help but listen.
Nathaniel froze where he stood. “Mom?” he whispered, staring into the swirling shadows.
“Whatever you hear, it isn’t real,” James said.
The gate is broken. Elise is lost.
He tugged on Nathaniel’s arm all too weakly.
The demons swirled in. The black walls grew until James couldn’t see any hint of Reno beyond the edge of the scaffold.
He pulled the bag of Elise’s charms out of his pocket. Opened the cord and fumbled.
The charms glimmered gold as they scattered across the scaffold and bounced into oblivion. Their golden light was immediately devoured by the nightmares.
Nathaniel dropped to his knees.
“I’m sorry,” he whispered.
James could barely hear him over the throbbing in his own skull.
He had to have something that would drive away the nightmares—some kind of light to burn them back. But he couldn’t remember where he had placed any of those spe
lls on his body. All he could think of was Ariane limp in Metaraon’s arms, Nathaniel’s tears dripping on Hannah’s face, and Elise—oh God, Elise—
The walls closed in. James pressed a hand to a spell on his stomach and flung magic into the nightmares.
It was a wave of wind, guaranteed to blast through anything—even a brick wall. But the nightmares weren’t corporeal. The wind blew through them harmlessly.
It’s your fault…
Nathaniel was screaming.
When a voice shouted out in the night, James thought at first that it was another voice from the depths of his mind. But then it yelled again.
“Hey !”
A bolt of darkness lanced through the nightmares and splashing into the scaffold in front of James. It coalesced into a body with two legs, two arms, and skinny jeans. A woman.
She waved her arms at the nightmares, as if beating them out of the sky.
“You heard me! I said, go away !”
The shadows dissipated. James wasn’t sure if he imagined their reluctance.
As soon as the darkness faded around them, the terrifying sense of suffocation faded. The whispering voices vanished.
The woman waved her arms one more time, even though the air was clear. “Yeah, you run! Stupid little assholes.”
James was relieved to have the weight of fear lifted from him, but the relief was short-lived. Even once the shadows were gone, the sense of a nightmare nearby hadn’t vanished entirely. Once he got a good look at their rescuer, he saw why.
The woman that had saved them looked like she had been cut from a shard of glass. She had sharp elbows, knees, and shoulders. The eyes, hidden behind thick-rimmed glasses, were so black that the night must have been envious. She was a nightmare, but strong enough to maintain a corporeal form. She even wore high-tops and a studded belt.
“Thanks for the save,” Nathaniel said as he stood. His cheeks were wet with tears. “Guess we owe you.”
James shook his head subtly, trying to indicate to him that he should be silent.
