by Reine, SM
It was the name of the street they were standing on.
Elise joined them, carrying both of her swords and her spine sheath under her arm. A ring glimmered on her right hand.
“Check this out,” Anthony said, holding up the page so that she could see it.
She glanced at the spell drawn on the page and the address written at the top, and her face darkened. She rounded on Nathaniel. “You have about five seconds to explain this,” Elise said, jabbing her finger at the page. “Or else I’m going to have to assume you’re evil.”
He took a step back. “Okay. Um. My name is Nathaniel Pritchard. I came here because my mom went missing—and my dad. I know where they are, but I need help getting them back, so I came looking for Elise Kavanagh. I mean, I came looking for you.”
“You’re looking for me? Why?”
“Because my dad’s your aspis. And two weeks ago, James Faulkner—and my mother—were both taken to Hell.”
IV
Elise Kavanagh stared in the mirror and didn’t recognize the face staring back. She had spent her entire life looking at the same woman in her reflection. Freckles had marked the tops of her cheekbones. She had thick eyebrows, wide lips, and a bend in the bridge of her aquiline nose that was the result of a poorly healed break. Her hair should have been soft and red-brown and curly.
That was the woman she knew. This…this was a stranger.
Now when she looked in the mirror, Elise saw a woman with flawless, porcelain skin. That familiar bend in her nose was gone. Her lips were just as wide, but they were fuller and redder, like they became after kissing her boyfriend and flushing with blood. Her hair was sleek and straight and well past her elbows—several inches longer than the last time she had seen herself.
And she had black irises, as deep as pools of ink splashed across the darkness of space.
It was though an artist had picked out her flaws and smoothed them down. Sculpted her from ivory, moonlight, and marble.
She looked like a demon.
Elise sat on the lid of the closed toilet and covered her face with her hands so she wouldn’t have to see it anymore. That didn’t help, either. Her hands had changed, too—or, at least, one of them had. Both of her palms had borne ethereal marks before she died, but Yatai had taken one of them, along with her entire right arm. Elise had been reborn with only one of the marks intact.
Her shoulders began to tremble. Once she started shaking, it was hard to stop.
Elise shuddered and clenched her hand into a fist.
“Are you okay?” Anthony asked outside the bathroom door. “You’ve been in there for almost an hour.”
Had it really been so long? She had become lost while staring into the pit of her own eyes, trying to find some familiar feature and failing.
She fought against the surge of panic that rose inside of her. Elise twisted the thumb ring that James had given her as she struggled to find the usual emotional silence that she found so comforting. But reminding herself of James didn’t help at all. Not when a boy that claimed to be his son was sitting in the kitchen, just a few feet away, with the worst news that Elise could imagine receiving.
“I’ll be out soon,” she whispered, unsure if Anthony would be able to hear her.
Her hand found the faucet. She could feel the pores of metal under her fingers as she twisted it. The water that came out was brown. A pipe must have broken somewhere.
Flipping her hand over, she looked at her bare palm, where there should have been a mark.
Nothing was right. The water, the city, her body, her emotions—wrong, it was all wrong.
Elise turned off the faucet, pulled her hair back into a messy knot, and pulled a scarf over it. She stepped out of the bathroom just as Anthony was about to knock again.
“Hey,” he said. “Are you okay?”
A pulse thudded in Anthony’s throat. She could watch the blood flowing beneath his skin, and the subtle shift of shades as his heartbeat sent fresh fluids pulsing over his face, down his shoulders, and to his hands. The blood fed into his brain, where neurons sparked and flashed. She couldn’t quite see them through his skull, but she was aware of them. It was like closing her eyes, putting her fingers into a dark box, and stroking whatever was inside.
Elise thought that maybe—just maybe—if she could figure out the patterns in the dancing electricity, in the waves of blood and the way his muscles sang as they tensed and released, she would be able to read Anthony’s mind like reading musical notes stamped onto a page. Yatam had been able to do it. Surely she could, too.
“I’m fine,” she said, even though it had been too long since he’d asked her the question, and it was a complete and utter lie.
Elise wasn’t fine. Nothing was fine.
She should have been dead.
Anthony followed her into the living room. “What happened at the warehouse?”
Elise paced across the carpet. It felt strange under her bare toes. Synthetic grass. A million tiny fibers. Sensory overload.
She stepped back onto the tile.
“I broke in. I found where they keep the things they consider to be dangerous. I took the box with my stuff.” Elise lifted the hand with the ring to show him. “It set off alarms.”
“Oh,” he said, and that was all.
Flashing neurons, the shift in his brow. He still thought that there was a good chance that she wasn’t who she claimed to be. That maybe she was a ghost, or a demon pretending to be Elise. He didn’t feel safe around her. She plucked the thought out of the air, but it was gone as soon as she sensed it.
So many emotions coming from him, so many hormones.
“Stop it,” Elise said. “Stop thinking. Stop…feeling.”
Anthony held out his hands, like he was trying to soothe a spooked horse. “Just take a deep breath.”
Anger surged in her, a black fist between her ribs. “Breathe? That’s your answer? That’s fucking stupid.”
Anthony gave a shaking laugh. “Okay, I guess you haven’t changed all that much.” His eyes flicked down to her chest. Flicked back up. She had replaced her bullet-riddled shirt with a button-down taken from James’s hamper. It was much too loose on her, and the collar gapped to bare the curve of one pale breast.
His blood pressure increased as the flow of blood redirected toward his pelvis. Arousal.
Elise’s physical reaction to it was more powerful than she expected. She responded in kind: heat gathered between her legs, her heart sped up, and her mouth went dry.
Hungry.
Blinking rapidly, she tried to clear her head of the thought.
“I don’t know what’s happened, but I’m still Elise,” she said in a voice that was as level as she could make it. It was hard not to scream. “I’m not going to hurt you, so you can stop thinking about that.”
Saying that she knew what he was thinking only made the fireworks in his brain double. “Nathaniel’s still waiting in the kitchen,” Anthony said, voice shaking. “We should do something about him.”
She nodded. If there was a problem with James, then that was something she could handle. There would be enemies to fight and kill. Facing the tangible issues was a hell of a lot easier than dealing with the intangible ones.
“Let’s see what he has to say.”
Elise let Anthony take point down the hallway.
Anthony went in and sat down on the stool across from Nathaniel while she hung back in the hallway to study their visitor. He was seated at the kitchen island eating granola bars.
Nathaniel Pritchard was ten years old, almost eleven. Not yet in puberty. Still very childlike—soft skin, soft hair, that childish musk of sweaty feet and hair. But growing quickly. She could feel the stretch of his bones and muscles. She could hear the blood rush as it flooded to his cheeks. She could smell the rush of hormones.
He may have been a child at the moment, but his body was a time bomb; it would be about twelve months, perhaps eighteen, before his growth exploded and he would
begin sweating like an adult and growing all of that ancillary hair.
“So you said that you’re James’s son,” Anthony said, and Elise picked up a hint of suspicion. Worry. He was mistrustful of children now, since he had been possessed by a demon that wore a mask of innocence.
Elise inched around the corner, peering at the boy without leaving the shelter of the shadows. His hair was dark brown and tousled. He wore thick-framed glasses over puppy-brown eyes, and a blue cardigan with jeans. The notebook stuck out of his pocket. A silver pentacle protruded from the neck of his shirt.
Every inch of him said “witch.” A child witch.
Now that she was away from the Union and had had a few minutes to settle down, she realized that she had seen him before. James had a photo of Nathaniel on his cell phone. Elise had been too distracted when she had first seen it to consider the shape of his mouth and nose, and what those features meant.
Plastic crinkled. Teeth sank into granola. Saliva slopped over a tongue as he chewed. The boy swallowed before speaking.
“That’s right,” said Nathaniel in the carefully patient voice of someone who was tired of repeating himself. “My parents are James Faulkner and Hannah Pritchard. They were going to get married, but he left before I was born. I’ve never met him.” A wrapper crinkled. She heard him swallow again. “I’m still hungry.”
Elise struggled with alien emotions, unable to tell what the twisting in her stomach might mean. Was that a feeling of betrayal? Was she jealous, or angry? Or was this a normal feeling that demons always carried around, like coals burning in their belly?
She didn’t trust herself to control those emotions around a child, and especially not that child. She took another step back, receding into the hall.
Her body wanted to melt into the darkness, uniting with the late evening gloom. It felt like she had no bones, no muscle. Her skin barely contained the vibrating energy in her core.
Anthony spoke. “Well, everything in the fridge is bad. There’s cereal—oh, no, there’s no cereal. It’s really stale. Well, do you like vegetables? They’re canned, so they should still be okay.”
“What kind of vegetables?”
“There’s green beans, and…yeah, just green beans.”
“That’s gross,” Nathaniel said.
“I’ll open it anyway. It’s all that’s left.” Drawers opened and closed. Metal rattled. “So tell me again how you got to Reno.”
“I took an airplane to Salt Lake City. And then I caught a ride on a truck heading toward Fernley.”
“Are you alone?”
“Yes,” said the boy.
“What makes you think that James and your mom got taken to Hell?” Anthony asked.
“Grandma told Grandpa that James was going to visit. She was really excited, so I heard them talking about it. My mom left to get him from the airport a couple of days ago, and they never made it back to the house.”
That made Elise stop pacing. She peered into the kitchen again.
Nathaniel peeled the wrapper of another granola bar open. There were already three of them scattered across the counter top, and the empty box lay on its side. “I had felt a portal to Hell open, so I did a seeking spell and couldn’t find them. They’ve been taken. I know it.”
He popped the rest of the granola bar into his mouth.
“You felt a portal to Hell open,” Elise said.
He nodded. His cheek was pouched with food. “That’s what I’m good at—interdimensional manipulation.” Nathaniel swallowed. The slurping of saliva and responding swoosh of stomach acid was thunderous in Elise’s ears. “I’m only the second witch on record that can do it. Pretty cool, huh? It means that I can jump into Hell if I have the right tools—I did it once before, on accident. But once I get there, I’m going to need help to save my mom and James.”
His neurons were flashing, too, and his brain was full of color and light. It was all bright. Uncomplicated. Elise wouldn’t have known how to spot a lie, but he didn’t seem suspicious.
“So you came looking for me,” she said.
“Pretty much.”
“How did you even know where to find Elise?” Anthony asked. His brain wasn’t quite so uncomplicated. He had chosen to sit down between Elise and Nathaniel, just in case she tried to attack the child. She would have been offended if she hadn’t been worried about doing the same thing.
“My mom doesn’t talk about James—ever. But the rest of the coven talks.” Nathaniel’s face brightened. “He’s bound to the most powerful kopis in the world because he’s the most powerful witch in the world. He saves people. So I asked Landon—the high priest—where I could find James’s kopis, and he wouldn’t tell me. But Landon has journals. I read them.” Nathaniel touched the notebook sticking out of his pocket. “That’s also how I learned paper magic. My grandaunt, Pamela—she invented it before she died. She had a lot of journals, too. I learned a lot of things that nobody wanted to teach me.”
That was less surprising. Elise had stayed with Pamela for a few months, and the main thing she remembered about that woman was that she wrote everything down—everything. She put James’s meticulous level of organization to shame.
“How certain are you that James and your mom are in Hell?” Elise asked.
“One hundred percent.”
Elise and Anthony exchanged glances. His suspicion had been replaced by panic. Fear.
She made up her mind about what to do, even as he came to the complete opposite decision.
Anthony must have seen what she was thinking on her face, because he started shaking his head. “No, Elise. No. That’s a really, really bad idea.”
“What’s a bad idea?” Nathaniel asked.
Elise strode toward the hallway, pushing Anthony’s trepidation out of her mind.
“I’m going to Hell,” she said. “And James’s son is going to take me there.”
Before moving in with another roommate, Elise had cohabitated with James in the apartment above his dance studio for months, so she knew exactly where he liked to keep everything. His bedroom had been packed with books and smelled like a library. If Elise closed her eyes, she could still see his shoes neatly lined up on the side of his bed, could smell the incense on his altar, and could still hear the ticking of the clock over his mirror.
But nothing in James’s new bedroom was where she expected it to be. It didn’t feel like somewhere he had even visited before, much less lived. There were no books—only decorative candles on geometric shelves. The closet didn’t even have his clothes in it. The master bathroom was filled with makeup, hairbrushes, and bath oils. Everything reeked of Stephanie, James’s girlfriend.
So where did he keep all of his belongings?
Anthony caught Elise stepping out the door. “What are you doing?” he asked.
“I want to confirm if James is really in Hell, so I want to try a tracking spell. Help me find a Book of Shadows.”
“No.” The word was absolute and final. Weighty silence followed.
Elise stopped in the middle of the hall and turned to face Anthony. He hadn’t taken so much as one step to follow her out of the room. “You want to go to Hell? Fine. But I’m not following you.”
Elise planted her hands on her hips. “Are you afraid?”
“You know what? Maybe I am. I’ve always been scared shitless, and I’ve gone ahead and done everything you wanted anyway, but…” Anthony shook his head. “This is dangerous, and not a normal level of dangerous. Nathaniel is just a kid, and you’re…” The rest of the sentence hung between them, unspoken.
“So you aren’t going to help me recover James,” Elise said.
“He’s in Hell. You’ve realized that, right? Have you even thought about what that means?”
“He’s not dead.”
“Hell, Elise,” Anthony said. “You’re not going into the mines to stop a demonic overlord. You’re not flying to Las Vegas to confront the Union. You’re going to the City of fucking Dis to save someone w
ho probably isn’t even alive, as if your last attempt to kill yourself wasn’t good enough.”
She advanced on him, avoiding the shadows at the edge of the room. A fist of anger gripped her heart.
“I could easily have left you for dead when Yatai possessed you,” Elise said. “This—this thing that’s happened to me?” She swept her hand down the line of her body. “This was for you, Anthony.”
“So you think I owe you my life now?”
She circled around him. Anthony’s spine stiffened, but he continued to face the door. His hands clenched and unclenched.
“You could show some gratitude,” Elise said.
“I’ve done a lot for you. I’ve given up everything. My scholarships, my life, my—my cousin.” He hesitated. Wavered on his feet. “I think we’re even.”
She stepped up to his back and took a long smell without touching him. She remembered Anthony smelling like aftershave and toothpaste, but her nose didn’t detect any of that. Instead, she picked up the spicy odor of fear, and it made her abs clench with hunger.
Elise stepped away. “Fine. I don’t need you anyway.”
But even as she said it, her body was disagreeing. Moving away from Anthony when he looked so delicious was like trying to escape the gravitational field of a dying star. She wasn’t strong enough.
She pressed herself to his chest.
Anthony’s breath hitched and his warm brown skin went pale. She could hear blood redirecting from his head to his hips again. Fear rapidly becoming sexual. He was responding to her proximity like Elise had always reacted to Neuma’s—with reluctant, unintended arousal.
In the two days since Elise had woken up in Anthony’s motorboat, she had been subject to a lot of bizarre instincts. Everything that she had witnessed nightmares and succubi doing for years as she’d hunted and killed them, Elise found herself mimicking, even when she wasn’t sure how she did it or why.
But this…this hunger. It was like she was waking up after being asleep for years.
She pressed her cheek against his chest and inhaled.
