by S. M. Reine
Meanwhile, Ariane had dropped to her knees and was crying against the wall.
“Get up,” he said. He had wiped off most of the ichor, but a line of black was still caked around his fingernails. “I’ll get you to Pamela.”
“No!” she hissed. “I won’t go back there—they’ll take her from me!”
“You know the agreement,” Isaac said.
“I’m not going!”
It was an argument they had been repeating incessantly all month. Isaac had already struck her for talking back twice, and Ariane should have known better than to keep pushing at it. But she feared what the coven might do to her unborn daughter more than she feared Isaac’s fists.
“I’m not going to tell you again,” Isaac said. “I’m not taking you to a hospital. Get in the fucking truck or I’ll leave you to shit that thing out in the alley with the succubus.”
“A corpse has more sympathy than you do!”
Isaac shoved Ariane in the chest. She fell into the bloody snow beside the demon’s body. “You’re pathetic,” he said, and he spit on her.
He splashed through the slushy snowmelt to climb into his truck.
Ariane hadn’t believed that Isaac would actually leave her until his taillights retreated, leaving her alone in the alley. Something about the succubus’s raw, skinned thighs made Ariane’s heart twinge with sudden sympathy. Or perhaps it was just the beginning of another contraction.
“Wait,” she called weakly, “come back.”
He didn’t turn the truck around.
Ariane wasn’t familiar with Denver. She didn’t know where any hospitals were located, and in the early hours of Christmas morning, the streets were empty of locals that she might ask. She shuffled past windows sprayed with fake snow, whimpering.
The contractions were powerful enough that she had to stop walking when they hit, and each one was closer than the last.
“Please,” Ariane said to nobody, a snowflake stuck to her eyelash.
She stumbled over a gutter and landed in the street. Cold snow seeped through her skirt. Now she was soaking wet on top of humiliated and exhausted, as if being lost weren’t bad enough on its own.
Ariane struggled to stand. A man appeared in front of her, and he picked her up by the elbows. “Thank you,” she began to say, until she realized who was holding her.
He wore a snug white t-shirt and well-fitting jeans. Though he wore no jacket, he was unperturbed by the snow. Angels weren’t bothered by petty things like the elements.
She tried to pull away from Metaraon, but his hands were iron shackles. He lifted her from her feet and half-carried her onto the sidewalk as a car sluiced through the intersection where she had been sitting.
“How did you find me?” she asked. Ariane had been avoiding the coven, but Metaraon was even worse than those witches.
“I detected your distress and responded.” His narrowed eyes scanned the street. “Where is your kopis?”
The urge to bear down suddenly struck her hard. Ariane crumpled. Metaraon picked her up again. “No,” she said weakly, but he wasn’t listening.
“Hold on,” he said.
The world turned to gray. Her skin warmed.
When she could see again, she was beside a bed that looked like it was carved from marble. The floor was a mosaic of glimmering glass tile. Filmy white curtains fluttered over the window, stirred by a pleasant-smelling breeze. Is that chocolate chip cookies?
Metaraon placed her on the bed.
“Just a moment,” he said, disappearing from view.
Ariane hadn’t wanted him to stay with her until he was gone. In this beautiful, unfamiliar place, she felt even more alone than she had in the snowy streets of Denver.
The contractions felt endless. There was nothing but one wave of pain after another, and it was all Ariane could do to keep breathing through them. The pain was unlike any she had experienced before—she wouldn’t have been surprised to learn that Elise was trying to cut free of her womb.
When Metaraon returned, he brought another angel with him. She was as tall as he was, with waves of soft brown hair and forgiving eyes.
The angel climbed into bed and kneeled in front of Ariane. “My name’s Leliel. You’ll be all right, dear heart. I’ve helped birth thousands of children.”
Ariane was too deep into labor to protest.
Leliel removed her skirt and underwear. Both of them were soaked, but it wasn’t all snow. Ariane’s water had broken. The angel cast the skirt aside and helped Ariane roll onto her side with gentle hands. “You’ll be more comfortable this way. It won’t be much longer.”
Metaraon stood by as Ariane panted, knees clenched tightly together, trying to spare Elise from the cold world that demanded her entry.
Her resistance was fruitless. The baby emerged from her in three hard pushes, falling into Leliel’s hands with a wash of blood and birthing fluids. Ariane screamed—not in pain, but in fury at what the birth meant. And then she sagged against the bed, wasted.
“Oh, well done. She’s so lovely,” Leliel said fondly, swiping fluid from the baby’s mouth with her pinky finger. The infant didn’t cry. “Would you like to see her?” She was asking Metaraon, not Ariane.
He lifted Elise into the moonlight with his hands under her arms. He turned her this way and that, inspecting the wrinkled body covered in vernix, and nodded. Ariane had no idea what Metaraon saw, but whatever it was satisfied him. She could only see a tiny baby—her tiny baby—and longed to hold her.
As Metaraon inspected Elise, Ariane birthed the placenta, which Leliel handled with the same casual air that she had done everything else. Then she placed fresh, dry sheets on the bed.
“There. Do you feel better?” Leliel asked, sliding a sheet over Ariane to conceal her nudity.
Ariane sobbed.
“This one will do fine,” Metaraon said, passing Elise back to Leliel one-handed, more like she was a new puppy than a human child. “Clean the filthy thing.”
Leliel left with the baby while Ariane still struggled to sit up. She was too weak. The labor had been fast but forceful, and every inch of her body ached.
“Let me have her,” Ariane said.
He sat beside her on the bed. “Soon.”
“But she’s taken Elise away!”
“You will leave here with your daughter.” Metaraon touched her arm comfortingly, and Ariane was surprised by the show of sympathy until he spoke again. “She will need a few years of training from Isaac before she’s prepared to face her fate.”
Whether now or in years to come, Elise would be taken.
It had never seemed as real as it did now that Ariane’s belly was deflating. Tears trickled down her cheeks.
“You may recover here with your daughter for a few days,” Metaraon went on, either uncaring or oblivious to Ariane’s crying. “Shamain is a safe place. You will be safe.”
Shamain . Metaraon had carried her to birth in the ethereal metropolis. At any other time, Ariane would have been excited by the prospect of exploring it. But once she began crying, she couldn’t stop.
Isaac would have scorned her, but Metaraon did not. He stroked his hand down her cheek, catching the tears on his fingertips. “Tell me, Ariane Garin,” he said, “what made you agree to conceive a child that you clearly wish to keep?”
She had to struggle to remember her reasoning. It seemed like so many years had passed since Metaraon had asked her to produce a child with Isaac. “Because I believe in the cause,” she said. “Because I hate Him, and what He has done to our world. And the sacrifice is worth it.”
This seemed to be the right answer. Metaraon’s eyes warmed to her. “For a human, you are exquisite.”
Ariane’s cheeks warmed. She was no longer crying. “What of Isaac?”
“I will kill him. Not today. Not until he’s done with his duties. But later, he will die.” His fingers lingered on her chin. “While you rest, I will inform him of your news. And I will make sure he doesn’t dare
abandon you again.” The threat in his voice made Ariane’s heart skip a beat.
Leliel returned with Elise. She glided across the floor, absorbed with the bundle of blankets in her arms.
“Lovely little lady,” the angel cooed, tickling the baby’s stomach. “It has been so long since there was a baby in the capital. A baby, Metaraon!” The look of adoration on Leliel’s face was intense—frighteningly so.
Ariane was afraid that the angel might not surrender Elise after all. She opened her arms. “Give her to me.”
Leliel hesitated.
“Now,” Metaraon snapped.
Elise settled against Ariane’s chest, warm and soft. Her eyes were open, revealing irises that were a warm shade of gray. It seemed appropriate, given the setting.
“I’m sorry,” Ariane whispered to her daughter. “I’m sorry for everything that is to come.”
“Don’t be,” Metaraon said.
Kansas – June 1989
Elise received her first mortal wound when she was eight years old. It happened during her second hunt without Mom, which should have been an easy fight; they had another local kopis backing them up, and chupacabras that migrated so far north were more of a livestock threat than a human one. But Dad had made a mistake. Since he had thought they were on the trail of a goat-eating monster, he didn’t have any silver weapons ready when the werewolf attacked.
“A werewolf in Kansas ?” he muttered as he dragged Elise’s bleeding body out of the line of fire. He set her next to the back wall of the restaurant. Fidel, the territory’s local kopis, was still grappling with the beast. “There are no damn werewolves in Kansas!”
The six-inch gashes on her stomach begged to differ. Elise clutched her falchions to her chest, gasping for air. The leather-wrapped hilts and steel blades weren’t as soothing as usual.
Dad shoved her arms out of the way so that he could look at the injury. Her eyes were too blurry to make out his expression, but she could tell that the damage was bad by the way he clicked his tongue. If it had been anything less than fatal, he would have told her to walk it off.
“I’ll be back in a minute,” he said, closing her arms over her chest again. She hugged the falchions like teddy bears.
“Where are you going, Dad?” Elise asked, craning around to watch him stepping around the Dumpster. “Dad? Don’t leave me—it hurts!”
“Don’t whine,” he snapped.
He was right. She was whining.
Her mouth closed, fists clenched on the hilts of her swords, and she practiced the breathing exercises he had taught her to get through pain.
The fighting could have been miles away, as far as she could tell. The werewolf’s claws sounded like chisels digging into the pavement.
Men grunted. A beast growled.
Then she heard a gunshot—and everything went silent.
It was quiet for so long that Elise thought that her father must have been killed. She acknowledged that possibility with a calm sense of inevitability. He had warned her it was likely to happen sooner rather than later, and her instructions for that scenario were to stay calm and focus on escaping. She needed to make sure that Mom was safe.
Elise hurt too much to want to move, but Dad never accepted injury as an excuse for failure. She rolled onto her stomach and crawled out from behind the Dumpster, seeking confirmation of her father’s condition.
Dad wasn’t dead. He stood over the immobile body of the werewolf, Fidel’s gun in hand. A pool of blood spread underneath the furred beast.
She would always remember how he looked framed by the light of the full moon, the long muscles of his arm taut as he continued to aim. He was waiting to ensure the werewolf was dead. It didn’t move.
“Madre de Dios ,” Fidel said. He sat beside the furred corpse with a hand pressed to his shoulder. “That was no chupacabra, Isaac. You were fucking lucky I had silver bullets with me, else I woulda gotten a lot more than bitten.”
“It bit you?”
“Yeah. Look at this.”
Dad bent to look at the other kopis’s wound. Fidel’s borrowed gun was a small cannon—a Desert Eagle. It glistened in the moonlight, as graceful and deadly as Elise’s swords. It was strange to see it in Dad’s hand. He said that guns were beneath them. Inelegant. He preferred to kill with his bare hands.
Elise’s vision blurred with pain. She grunted and pressed a hand to her stomach. So much blood .
When she looked up again, it was just in time to see Dad shoot Fidel in the head with his own gun.
Mom was waiting for them in the truck. It had been parked outside a 7-Eleven a safe distance away, where Dad’s quarry wouldn’t be able to hurt her. She cried when she saw Elise, drawing her into her lap like she was a much smaller child. “What happened to you?” she sobbed, pressing her lips to Elise’s cheek.
“Don’t coddle her,” Dad snapped. He was drenched in his daughter’s blood with Fidel’s gun at the small of his back. “Every kopis does this a few times. She’ll be fine if we’re fast enough. You know that, Ariane. I can’t believe I have to tell you again.”
He pushed Elise into the backseat, tossed a jacket over her, and gunned the engine.
Elise was embarrassed by her mother’s show of weakness, even as much as she longed to be in Mom’s arms. She tried not to make any noise.
“The hospital is that way,” Mom said.
“We can’t afford it. You know where we have to go.”
“Please, Isaac. We can’t take her there yet. She’s too young.”
If he replied, Elise didn’t hear it. She drifted in and out of consciousness, alone with the pain.
She replayed the fight against the werewolf in her dreams.
It had moved like lightning—a blur of fur that was impossible to focus on, much less attack. Elise had been shocked to stillness at the sight of it. None of her practice fights against Dad could have ever prepared her for a beast the size of a horse that moved with supernatural speed.
So she had failed. She tried to jump left too slowly; the werewolf’s claws had been waiting for her. Elise hadn’t gotten a single blow in before it knocked her down.
No wonder Dad was so disappointed.
It hurts so much.
“Ma fille ,” Mom whispered, smoothing her hand over Elise’s forehead. She murmured words of comfort, separated from Elise by the seats of the truck and Dad’s will. None of Mom’s French made any sense to Elise in her dazed condition, but it was nice to be touched.
She slipped into unconsciousness again.
What if she had jumped right instead of left? What if she had brought up her falchion in time, the way that she had originally intended? The blades weren’t silver, but surely a werewolf couldn’t survive decapitation.
If only Elise had gone right, she wouldn’t be pouring blood all over Dad’s truck. He wouldn’t be so annoyed with her. Mom wouldn’t be crying.
“Je t’aime, ” Mom said, her words punctuated by Isaac’s grunt of irritation.
Elise wished that Mom would stop babying her. Real kopides didn’t get babied by anyone.
Failure.
She drifted. She bled.
Elise woke up fully healed with the sour aftertaste of magic lingering on her tongue. “There,” said the witch, sitting back on her heels. She was an elegant older woman with gray-streaked hair sleeked into a bun, and she wore a silk bathrobe, like she had just stepped out of a spa.
“Thank God for you, Pamela,” Mom said.
Pamela grimaced. “Well, don’t do that. You never know who’s listening these days.”
Elise peered at her mother through bleary eyes. Mom’s cheeks were wet and her nose was running, but she still managed a grateful smile for the witch named Pamela. “I would have taken her to the hospital. I know we should have. But Isaac thought that—”
“You did the right thing. We’re far too invested in Elise to allow her care to fall to mundane doctors.”
“Will she become a werewolf?”
“No. Claws don’t transfer the curse. Many kopides are immune anyway.” Pamela finally noticed that Elise had opened her eyes. She wiped the blood off of Elise’s stomach with a damp cloth, and the skin underneath was undamaged. “How do you feel, Elise?”
“Fine,” she said, because Dad would have hated it if she had complained about her sore back and the strange taste in her mouth.
Elise pushed her mother away and sat up on her own. She was surprised to find, as her senses returned to her, that she was outside in a forest. The only light came from a bonfire that Elise glimpsed through the trees. Silhouettes of dancers flitted around the flames to the slow beating of drums.
“It’s Litha,” Pamela explained at Elise’s confused expression. “Midsummer. My coven is celebrating the sabbat tonight. Would you like to see?”
“But the hunt,” Elise protested. “The werewolf’s body—I have to get back.”
“Your father has returned to take care of the dead,” Mom said, smoothing her hand down Elise’s hair. “We have nothing else to do there.”
Elise hung her head.
Isaac had left them rather than wait for his daughter to be healed. He must have been even more disappointed than she feared.
She nodded, resisting the urge to wallow. Dad wouldn’t have wallowed.
“I’m going to join the circle,” Mom said. She stood and—to Elise’s surprise—began to strip.
She abandoned her skirt and blouse on a tree, like the branch was a hanger. She fluffed out her curls, smiled at her daughter, and stepped into the clearing.
Pamela washed Elise’s blood off of her hands with the remaining water.
“Many rituals are performed skyclad,” the witch explained. Pamela sounded like what Elise imagined a teacher would sound like, though Elise had never been to school. “It helps witches feel connected to the elements. Young and old alike participate. Strange as it seems to the uninitiated, it’s not sexual.”
The idea hadn’t even occurred to Elise, but having Pamela mention it brought heat to her cheeks.
“I’m not getting naked,” she said, folding her arms tightly across her chest. She didn’t have any of her mother’s physical features yet—and, hopefully, never would—but she wasn’t prepared to advertise their absence, either.
