by S. M. Reine
“Ready?” Nathaniel asked. James could barely hear him over the song that poured from Ba’al’s maw, chillingly beautiful and strange.
The answer was no, of course. James could never be ready to return to the garden, especially not when it meant trying to murder the most powerful entity in existence.
He opened his mouth to reply.
A gunshot rang out behind them.
Nathaniel jerked with a gasp, clutched his chest, and the fading glamor vanished in an instant. He was suddenly visible.
And bleeding.
His feet slipped on the edge of the fang. James snagged him out of the air and dragged him to safer ground. But Nathaniel was heavy, and it was all he could do to keep from dropping him.
James slid to his knees with his son in his lap. Nathaniel’s hands fell away, and he saw the bullet’s exit wound—a perfect circle that had punctured a lung at best, and punched through his heart at worst.
Gary Zettel stood on Ba’al’s horned chin, both hands still grasping the gun. His face was smeared with blood, dirt, ash. If not for the flak jacket with a UKA logo, James might have thought him to be any one of a million tortured souls that had wandered from Malebolge.
The gun slipped from his hands. Clattered against the bone.
“My God,” Zettel said.
Zettel must have meant to shoot James, but Nathaniel had been standing behind him while he looked over the edge. And he had still been half-invisible from the glamor. Zettel wouldn’t have had any idea that he was there.
It was an accident. A cruel accident.
And yet it wasn’t James’s blood puddling over Ba’al’s chin. It wasn’t James gasping for breath, drowning in the fluid that filled his lungs. It wasn’t James with a fearful stare and shuddering body.
Nathaniel was dying in James’s lap.
“What have you done?” James asked, lifting his eyes to the commander.
Zettel floundered. “I didn’t—you weren’t—” He lifted his hands, which shook wildly. He had finally caught his quarry and had missed his one shot. Whether the tremors were due to physical weakness or nerves blown by a trip through Hell didn’t really matter.
Nathaniel stared up at James, incapable of speaking. He looked so afraid.
“Help me!” James called to Zettel. “He’s dying!”
It was a stupid request. There was nothing the kopis could do—there was nothing that anyone could do. James hadn’t been able to tattoo any healing spells on his body, Nathaniel had emptied his Book of Shadows , and there were no healers or hospitals in Coccytus.
But James was the most powerful witch on Earth, for fuck’s sake, and he had already lost Hannah, he had lost Elise, and now he was going to lose his son, too. It wasn’t fair .
Zettel bent to pick up his gun, then seemed to think better of it.
“I can’t,” the kopis said. He shook his head. Scrubbed a hand down his face. “I can’t.”
“Don’t you dare run, you—you goddamn coward !”
But Zettel was already backing away, scrambling for the horn that he had climbed to reach them.
One more time, he said, “I can’t.”
Then he vanished down the ridge, headed back up the spine to Malebolge.
Nathaniel tried to speak again. Blood bubbled over his lips, staining the spaces between his teeth.
Maybe if the wound hadn’t been so dire, James could have found a way to heal him. As long as Nathaniel’s heart beat and his blood flowed, he could be healed. But James would need to find ingredients, cast a circle, perform a ritual. All of that took time. More time than Nathaniel had.
James couldn’t use magic. They needed a miracle.
He ripped the leather glove off with his teeth. Elise’s mark was healing well on his palm, despite the abuse it had taken on their flight through the dimensions. The seam was fading along his thumb already. It was far from completely merged with his body, but it was good enough—it would have to be.
He pressed the mark to the star-shaped scar on his shoulder without letting go of his son. And for the first time in many, many years…James prayed.
The air around him thrummed with power. A chorus of bells shattered over them as a thick fog gathered around James and Nathaniel. Combined with the song drifting from the maw, a mixture of sharps and flats, it formed a foul discord that was like razors raking down James’s spine.
Metaraon stepped from the radiance as calmly as he might step through a kitchen door.
“I didn’t expect you to summon me anytime soon,” the angel said coolly. He glanced around Coccytus with an amused tilt to his mouth. “Especially not down here.”
James lifted Nathaniel’s body a fraction of an inch. “He’s going to die,” he said.
“Why do you think this is any of my concern?”
“Because he’s my son , goddammit!”
The change in demeanor was immediate. “Your son, is he?” Metaraon asked, gazing down at Nathaniel with an impenetrable expression. “Interesting.”
“Save him,” James said. He was begging. He knew he was begging, and he knew that it wouldn’t impress Metaraon, yet he couldn’t stop himself. “He’s just a child.”
“Hardly,” the angel said. “A grandchild of mine is not ‘just’ anything.” He sank to his knees in front of James, holding his hands over the wound. Metaraon considered him for a moment. Then he nodded. “Very well. I will rectify this.”
Metaraon scooped his arms underneath Nathaniel’s knees and neck, lifting him effortlessly. James battled with the wild urge to stop him, to rip Nathaniel from his grip. Metaraon was responsible for Hannah’s death. More than that, he was responsible for the deaths of thousands of humans—and there would only be more to come. Surrendering Nathaniel to him hurt, as if James had been the one shot in the chest.
Metaraon turned to walk back to Malebolge.
“Wait,” James said. “What’s going to happen to him?”
Metaraon barely spared a glance for James. “He will live. He’s too valuable to die.”
The angel strolled away, and James stared at his bloody, trembling hands.
Losing Nathaniel meant that he wouldn’t be able to find his way back through the dimensions, much less open the doors, yet he couldn’t bring himself to care. Not now. Being trapped in Coccytus seemed like such an insignificant thing in comparison to what he had just done to save his son’s life.
Maybe it was just the light in Hell—a strange trick of the fires that boiled beneath him—but James almost thought that Nathaniel’s blood was tinged with silver.
Metaraon only took a few steps down the skull before stopping. As if a thought had struck him, he turned back again. Nathaniel looked pale in his arms, shrunken, like a much younger child.
“I was skeptical when Landon told me of you,” Metaraon said, “and more so when you vanished with the Godslayer. Yet you delivered a finely honed weapon to us, as promised. You gave me the knowledge I needed to motivate her. Now I hold the first natural born mage that has been birthed since the formation of the Treaty. I am grateful to you, my son. You seem to have served your purpose.”
Metaraon approached him, and James drank in the sight of Nathaniel’s face: the pale lips that were shaped very much like Hannah’s, the dimpled chin, the round cheeks.
Then the angel planted a hand in the center of James’s chest…and shoved.
His feet slipped on the edge of the fang. For an instant, his arms spun through the air, seeking balance. He failed.
And James fell.
The flames at the bottom of Ba’al’s maw couldn’t have been farther than a hundred feet below, yet James felt as though the fall was endless. The air was hot—so impossibly hot for such a cold place—and the last thing that he was able to see with mortal eyes was Metaraon with Nathaniel limp in his arms.
James loathed the righteous satisfaction in the ice shards of Metaraon’s eyes.
I shouldn’t have given him my son.
But after everythin
g else, what was one more life surrendered to God?
James fell so slowly. Memories slipped through his skull, like wisps of smoke from the fires below.
Time reversed.
Nathaniel took the bullet in the chest again. The jerk, the tiny gasp, the wide eyes—it was just as terrible to behold a second time.
But then he was whole again, and they climbed through the new Haven together. The rocks scraped James’s palms and knees as he climbed after Nathaniel. The Union soldiers’ distant shouts were only susurrus on the breeze.
His memories blurred, skipping backward faster as he approached the flames.
He walked through an empty, dusty Motion and Dance, thinking of Elise. He found the warding rings under the piano.
He held Hannah’s dead body in the Union outpost.
He held Elise against him, naked and panting, her fingers locked in his hair and shared saliva glistening on her lips.
The heat grew around him, and time moved slower, slower, slower.
He gazed upon Nathaniel’s face for the first time again. He marveled at their resemblance with a strange mixture of pride and fear.
James was in the prison in the Palace of Dis for an eternity, and grieving Elise’s death even longer. He wished again that he had died with her. But that faded, too, as all things must, and he stood on a parking garage roof drenched in starlight, reading prophecies about his life, and wondering if he might have had a son.
The most peaceful moments seemed to disappear too quickly, while the misery dragged endlessly. Finding Betty’s corpse with a gunshot wound in her forehead lasted so much longer than dancing in the darkness with Elise, his arms around her waist and a smile on her lips. The memory of fighting Death’s Hand in Guatemala could have been a lifetime.
Time flitted past.
Helping Elise slaughter a fallen angel again.
Their first kiss on the frozen beach of Copenhagen.
Burning Mr. Black’s mansion, and finding Elise in Oymyakon.
Everything before that seemed so dull in comparison. The fear, the adrenaline, the constant sense of death—those were things that filled his memories with color. Hannah, as beautiful as she had ever been, was nothing more than a woman that he fought with and fucked and loved with some tiny corner of his heart.
Yet when he reached his early, idle years with the coven, his life paraded on before his eyes. The short years of childhood dragged into eons.
His first crush. His first spells. The first time he told his mother he was too big to sit in her lap.
James glimpsed himself born from his mother’s womb. He didn’t scream when he entered the cold world. He also wasn’t set in his father’s arms upon delivery. Instead, he was offered to a man wearing a plain white t-shirt, tailored jeans, and a frown.
“He will do,” Metaraon had said. As with everything he said, he sounded as though this were more of an insult than approval.
With those three words, the course of James’s life was set. Destiny determined.
And somewhere else, so many years later, Elise’s lips brushed against his.
“How long?” she had asked.
“Always,” James replied.
He had plenty of time to wish that he could take it all back. He wanted to fix the mistakes and lies. He wanted to take away those words from Metaraon that meant he would never know a life free of fate’s heavy hand. He wanted a life where he could have loved Elise for who she was, instead of what she was.
At the nadir of the flames, deep in the throat of Ba’al’s maw, all time was one. James’s life, condensed to a pinpoint, was suspended in front of him.
Then it vanished.
Everything was gray.
James didn’t realize he had opened his eyes at first. He thought that he had to be seeing faint light through his closed eyelids. But when he lifted a hand to feel his face, he could see his fingers, as flat and colorless as the indistinct landscape beyond them.
He was in Limbo.
The fissure was above him, well beyond reach. Its light was only a fraction paler than what must have been the sky—a gray plane above him that was almost indistinguishable from the gray plane below.
He looked down at himself. All of the color had leeched from his jeans, his shoes. Even Nathaniel’s blood looked like ink on his hands. It was the magic that was lacking—James couldn’t see or feel even the faintest hint of magic, within himself or in the surrounding world. Limbo was barely more than a void. Just a detour outside of time, light, and space.
James would never find the fissure to Araboth without Nathaniel. He was trapped in that miserable gray place. And Elise would be lost forever.
He threw back his head and tried to scream his failure into the emptiness. But he didn’t have the satisfaction of the sound. The ragged sobs never reached his ears, consumed by Limbo as surely as all color and magic had been.
Maybe he fell, after that, but collapsing to his side felt no different than standing without gravity to orient him.
James wasn’t sure how long he wallowed in all of his failures. It didn’t seem to matter. Not anymore. Not when he had failed every single person that had relied on him.
He stared at the pale, flickering light of the fissure. It lit a final spark of hope within him.
Whether or not he had Nathaniel, there would be one other juncture just like this one somewhere in the wasteland of Limbo. If he found it, he could reach Elise. And once he had her, the other problems would be insignificant.
They could still rescue Nathaniel together, kill God, kill Metaraon, and escape the garden forever. The fissure had to be somewhere. Separation from Nathaniel only meant that James would have to find it alone.
“I’m coming, Elise,” he tried to say, but the sounds never reached his ears.
Then he picked a direction and started to walk.
He walked for a very, very long time.
Dying Night
A Short Story
It was inevitable that someone would eventually use the Grand Canyon for evil. That was why it had been made in the first place, after all.
Sometime in the dark early years of existence, primitive demons cracked Earth in an attempt to route directly to the boiling river of hell-blood known as Phlegethon.
Many hundreds of years later, that crack would be known by mortals as the Grand Canyon.
The natural juncture between Earth and Hell occurred at a point in the south rim of the eventual Grand Canyon, below a rock formation later known as the Tower of Set. The ancient warlocks who created the canyon failed to burrow to that natural juncture despite many years of magical labor. They progressed to within a thousand feet of the fissure before angels, annoyed by all the commotion on Earth, slaughtered the warlocks and let their bodies rot in the sun.
That was why the Grand Canyon existed, and such inauspicious origins had a way of leaving a mark for millennia into the future.
Furthermore, the boiling blood of Phlegethon sensed the nearness of Earth’s air. It sensed light and mortals and food .
Those warlocks had failed to free it, but that didn’t mean that Phlegethon forgot how close it was to being unleashed.
It never forgot.
That lurking evil spent more than six thousand years building enough resentment, strength, and pressure to snap.
Anything twisted up with that much tension will always snap sooner or later.
September 8th, 2000 — The Grand Canyon, Arizona
In a stone vault under the earth, a portal opened.
The rocks shifted, groaned, cracked.
A fissure the width of an arm spread in the darkness.
Hot blood sprayed from it as if from an artery sheared by a razor. Fluid gushed over the opposite wall, splattered the cave floor, and instantly steamed the air near to boiling.
A hand thrust through the fissure. Unharmed by the blood, the arm stretched across dimensions to claw at Earth, feeling the freshness of the atmosphere and the waiting prey.
&nbs
p; Then that hand began tearing the fissure wider.
On the surface, approximately a mile away, Elise Kavanagh was in a gift shop filled with many incredibly tacky keepsakes—slightly less horrible than the blood gushing from Phlegethon, but only slightly.
The knickknacks intended to look like they were Native American were the worst, with “Made in China” stickers plastered under totem faces. She sneered at the flimsy arrowheads that couldn’t have cut through paper. The XXL tourist clothing in garish colors were almost as bad as those inauthentic artifacts, though. Nothing in the store verged on displaying the slightest sense of taste.
“Ooh,” said Malcolm Gallagher, lifting a pair of fringed leather chaps to measure them visually against Elise’s hips. “Very cowgirl.” He affected an imitation American accent, which he was not getting better at despite traveling with Americans for several months. “I’d like you to ride my bucking bronco with these on, partner.”
Elise trailed her gloved fingers over leather satchels, looking for one pouch just large enough for a wallet or makeup.
“What do you think?” Malcolm asked, resuming his usual Irish accent. He swapped out the chaps for a smaller size and lifted them in front of Elise again. He seemed to find this size more satisfactory than the first one. “Should I buy them? You’d look great in these things. In just these things. Eh?” He thrust his hips against the hanger of the chaps, which was probably meant to indicate bending Elise over something.
Elise picked a leather satchel with turquoise fastenings. They looked genuine. The turquoise was a must; it would help cancel out the effects of the moonstone artifact they would soon carry into the depths of the Grand Canyon. The thick leather flap would allow a protection rune to be imprinted into it, too.
“Whoa doggy,” Malcolm said, now miming swinging a lasso over his head.
The corner of Elise’s mouth tugged into something that was the distant cousin of a smile.
Over Malcolm’s shoulder, she realized that there was another man standing in the doorway to the gift shop. He leaned his arm against the doorway. He was so tall that the top of his head nearly brushed the upper frame, and the harsh sunlight cast a yellow halo over his charcoal-black hair.
