by Reine, SM
“What are you doing?” She heard his voice vibrating through his ribs.
Elise dug her fingers into his chest. God, his beating heart—it pulsed under her palms, sloshing blood just on the other side of the bone. All she had to do was push, and she could grip that beating muscle, twist it free of the tendons, drink its sweet juices.
Anthony made a strangled noise.
“Elise—”
The fear was delicious.
“Let me have a taste,” she whispered, burying her fingernails into his shirt.
That voice—it didn’t sound anything like her. It sounded like Yatam.
The dissonance of having the wrong voice come from her body was enough to shock Elise free of her reverie. She pushed away from Anthony. It was hard to tear her hands free without taking his heart with them.
She took three steps back, and then another three, until they were on opposite ends of the hallway. It wasn’t enough distance.
Anthony panted as he sagged against the wall. He pulled out the neck of his shirt to peer at his chest. She couldn’t see what was underneath from that distance, but she caught a flash in his mind. He had red bruises in the shape of her hands.
“That hurt,” he gasped, gripping his chest. “That fucking hurt.” He straightened, rubbing a hand over his heart. “You want to know why I’m not going with you? Because there’s a line, Elise. There’s a place where I can’t follow you. And you are so far over that line now that I can’t even see where you’ve gone.”
His pulse throbbed in her ears. Her tongue was dry and swollen. Her throat tasted like a desert.
“Get out,” she said.
“I think I should take Nathaniel back to his family.”
“No.”
“Elise, he’s just a—”
“A witch that can write and perform paper magic? The son of James Faulkner, most powerful witch in the world? The only person who knows what happened to James?”
“A child,” Anthony finished. “You remember your childhood, right? Running around in the street? Christmas with family? Homework and—and puppies and shit?”
She could see the memories he was trying to evoke dance over his brain like lightning, but it didn’t summon anything for her. That wasn’t the childhood Elise remembered.
“I was slaughtering demons when I was ten. I’d already had my falchions for years.”
He barked a laugh. “Yeah. And look at you now.”
Elise wasn’t insulted. It was hard to get angry over the truth.
She pressed a hand to her forehead, trying to contain the ache of hunger. “You can leave, but you’re not taking that child with you. Do you understand me?”
He went into the kitchen. Elise remained as still as the statue of Nügua as he exchanged brief words with Nathaniel. When the front door opened and closed, he exited alone, and the child remained in the house.
Anthony was gone.
It was easier to concentrate once Anthony was gone. Elise could stop thinking about blood, pounding hearts, and the dancing electrical currents inside of his skull. Instead, she could focus on the first of many impossible tasks: figuring out how to get inside James’s office so that she could find his Book of Shadows.
She was still inspecting his locked door when she felt a new life approach her from behind.
“Where did Anthony go?”
Elise glanced over her shoulder. Nathaniel was standing at the edge of the hallway with his arms folded and a quizzical look. “Anthony left. He’s not coming back,” she said.
“Oh.” He contemplated this fact with a tilted head, and seemed to come to the conclusion that it didn’t matter. He and Elise were of a mind on that subject. “So now what are you doing?”
“I’m trying to get into this office,” she said, running her hands over the doorway. “James has locked it down with wards.”
Nathaniel came to her side with a reverent expression.
After Elise had performed an exorcism on James in the spring, they had exchanged some of their abilities. He had acquired the strength of a kopis, and she had become capable of seeing spells. The wood of the door frame rippled in the corner of her vision, like it was underwater, but magic made the barrier as hard as stone. She couldn’t even touch the doorknob without burning her fingers. All of his magic was elegant, but the spells around the door were doubly so.
Judging by Nathaniel’s expression, it must have been pretty impressive to him, too. “Why do you need inside?” the boy asked, pushing his glasses up his nose and leaning close.
“I want to find James’s Book of Shadows so I can cast a tracking spell.”
“You can’t get in there.” The boy pointed at one of the symbols. “This means that the wards are bound to the spell crafter’s bones. And this one over here means the spell is self-healing, so it would reseal after a few minutes.”
“Move over and shut up so I can concentrate,” Elise said.
“I might be able to open it.” Nathaniel pulled out his notebook again. He glanced at her under his bangs as he flipped through the pages. “Kopides can’t cast spells.”
“You know a lot about kopides,” she said, and she didn’t bother trying to hide her irritation.
The conceited tilt to his chin was entirely James. “I know a lot about a lot of things. The Treaty of Dis says that kopides, demons, and angels can’t cast magic.”
“I’m a special case,” Elise said.
Nathaniel kept flipping through the pages. “I think you’re lying.”
She caught sight of a familiar rune and held up a hand. “Wait, go back. That was a tracking spell.”
“So?”
“So if you already have a tracking spell, then we don’t need to break into the office.”
He gazed longingly at the door. “I guess.” Nathaniel ripped the page out and offered it to Elise with an expectant look. He was testing her. Fine.
Elise took the page into the laundry room. There were two baskets of clothing—heaven forbid Stephanie let her dirty underwear mingle with James’s. She plucked a t-shirt off of the top of his pile. It smelled like James’s skin, his hair, his sweat.
Nathaniel drifted behind her. “I can cast the spell if you can’t.”
“I already told you that I can,” she said as she twisted the warding ring off of her finger, trying to keep the doubt out of her voice. She hadn’t attempted to cast any magic since her rebirth. She assumed that it was still possible—she was seeing magic like she had before. But a lot of other things had changed.
Better to find out what she could and couldn’t do before they went to Hell.
Elise hoped that she wasn’t about to make herself look like an idiot in front of a ten-year-old, and blew on the edge of the paper.
The magic unfolded.
It wasn’t like the magic Elise had previously experienced. The spells that James wrote drew off of the energy of the Earth and all its life, leaving Elise feeling drained. But when she activated the paper spell that Nathaniel gave her, she felt like she was reaching her mind into an entirely new world.
Her vision darkened, and she heard a distant chime. Stars whirled through her mind—galaxies and suns and stardust and black matter. The ground was above her, and the sky below.
And then she saw something red.
Mountains. Red mountains.
Elise was suddenly drifting over a vast, dark city isolated in the center of a massive desert. Smoke plumed into the hazy air, where there was no sun, no moon, no light.
Her vision blurred again, and she saw shining towers—like no skyscraper she had ever seen before.
Another blur, and she was underground. Somewhere dark. Somewhere hot and dry.
A man was sitting in the corner of a stone cell, completely naked except for a gold band on his finger. He hugged his knees to his chest. His face was covered in gray stubble and blood, and his expression… Elise had seen that expression on the faces of a hundred demons right before she killed them. It was utter despair.
He
r aspis was in Hell, in more ways than one.
Just as suddenly as she had found herself spinning through the universe, Elise’s vision cleared, and she saw Nathaniel gaping at her.
She braced herself on the washing machine and dropped the ashes of the paper spell on Stephanie’s perfectly clean tile.
“No way,” Nathaniel said.
Elise couldn’t respond. She still didn’t feel like she was back in her skin. There was nothing anchoring her to the earth and air, to her blood and bones. She felt like losing concentration for an instant would make her lose her entire body.
“You were right,” she said, voice ragged. “He’s in a prison in Dis. He must have been arrested.”
“How did you do that?” Nathaniel asked. He was astonished, like the foundations of his entire world had been shaken. But even as his mind processed the shock, she could see him analyzing it, too—adjusting his perceptions, considering the implications, analyzing the benefits.
“I told you I was special.”
“No,” he said. “Not the magic thing. I mean the part where you disappeared.”
She had disappeared? Elise glanced down at herself, half-expecting to see that she was fading out of reality into shadows again. But she felt solid enough. “Well, I’m special in other ways, too.”
Nathaniel grabbed his jacket and rushed after Elise when she swept into the entryway. “Did you see my mom?”
“No. James was alone in a cell.” Just saying the words made fear rise inside her. James in the hands of demons.
She would kill every last fucking one of them.
Nathaniel gripped the notebook in both of his hands, his knuckles white. “Why would he have been arrested?”
“You tell me,” Elise said.
She pulled her spine sheath on over the shirt she’d borrowed from James like a backpack. Blood was caked on one of the straps and she picked at it with a fingernail. Was it her blood, or was it Yatam’s? It didn’t seem like there was much of a difference anymore.
Elise slipped the falchions into the scabbard as Nathaniel watched.
“Can I have one?” he asked.
“No.”
“Then can I have another weapon?”
She almost said “no” again, but then she stopped to give him a critical look. His hands were smooth, unscarred. That didn’t mean much. Elise had started out unscarred, too.
“Maybe later,” she said. Elise had to let out the buckles around the chest on her sheath to clip it in the front. She was a lot more voluptuous than she used to be, and it didn’t sit right on her back. “What do we need to jump dimensions?”
“A lot of stuff. Some of it might be hard to find, but I can make a list.”
“Then we’d better start getting everything together,” Elise said.
She opened the front door.
Spotlights blazed to life, shining brilliant beams through the windows of the house and blinding her. Elise flung up a hand to shield her eyes. She could just barely make out the shapes of SUVs on the street—at least a half a dozen of them.
Men in black uniforms vaulted over the white picket fence and kneeled on the dead grass to aim at Elise. The nearest one had shaggy hair and an eye patch.
“Freeze!” he shouted, aiming his firearm straight at her chest.
Malcolm had found them.
V
The creature calling herself Elise Kavanagh was a very, very convincing liar.
The Union had captured her at James Faulkner’s house, transported her to the warehouse, and put her in the secure area where they kept semi-corporeal demons: a cavernous cement room with twelve spotlights aimed at a spelled circle. There wasn’t a single shadow in the entire room.
After her hurried exit from the warehouse earlier in the day, Zettel hadn’t been confident that the room would be able to hold her. But she hadn’t escaped, and she had been trying. She had been trying very, very hard.
Zettel didn’t pretend that it made him happy to see the demon fight and fail. He felt a powerful sense of smug satisfaction when she tried to phase out of the lights and stopped with a cry.
“It looks a lot like her,” Malcolm said, leaning in close to the monitors. They were one level above the demon, where they could watch through the six cameras focusing on her from every angle. There was also a switch on the wall that would electrify the floor. It was one of the few ways in which the Union was able to injure an otherwise untouchable demon.
“Shapeshifter?” Allyson asked, drumming a wooden pentagram against her knuckles as she paced.
A soft voice piped up from the back of the room. “That’s not a shapeshifter. That’s Elise.”
Zettel faced the boy that they had seized along with the demon. He was a human child who had refused to identify himself, although he hadn’t shut up on the entire ride out to Fernley about how the Union needed to give his notebook back to him and let him go—or else they would “regret it.”
“How do you know her?” Zettel asked. He had the Book of Shadows that he had confiscated from the child in his back pocket, and hadn’t told Malcolm about it yet.
The boy’s mouth shut. He folded his arms.
Malcolm turned from the monitors and sat down beside the boy like a friendly uncle. “You see that thing on the monitor there? That looks like Elise, but it’s not Elise. Whoever you think she is—however you’ve been unlucky enough to get to know her—you’ve made a mistake.”
“It’s not a mistake. You have to let us go so she can help me get to Hell.”
“And why would you want to go to Hell?” Malcolm asked.
He folded his arms. “That’s not your business.”
A tinny voice came over the speakers. The demon was speaking.
“Where’s Malcolm?” she asked. “I want to speak with the commander.” She even had Elise’s obnoxiously demanding tone of voice.
Malcolm stared into the monitor. “She knows my name.”
“Demons, sir,” Allyson said. “They know a lot of things.”
But Elise wasn’t done speaking. “I know you’re watching, Malcolm. The Union is always watching. And I also know that I don’t look the way you expect, but I am Elise. You need to let me out of here.”
He stood from the chair. His hand hovered near the button for the intercom—not far from the switch to electrify the floor.
“Sir,” Zettel said sharply.
Malcolm’s hand dropped. The expression that crossed his face was a mixture of fear and admiration. “It looks just like her,” he said again.
On the monitors, the demon folded her arms and stared at the ceiling, as though counting silently. “The safeword is ‘cricket,’” she said, as if the words pained her.
Malcolm burst into laughter. Zettel’s hand made it halfway to the gun in his shoulder rig before he realized what Malcolm was doing.
“Oh God, woman. I had forgotten about that.”
“What’s a safeword?” the boy asked.
Malcolm ruffled his hair. “It’s like a password for a lockbox or…something. Anyway, I’m going to go talk with our visitor. Allyson, I want you with me. Gary, keep an eye on the kid.”
“Sir, that’s not a good idea,” Zettel said.
But Malcolm dismissed his worries with a wave of his hand. “I’m just going to talk with her. Allyson won’t let me get eaten. Right, Allyson?”
She gave him a hard stare.
The locks buzzed as they left the room. The door closed, and Zettel was alone with the child.
“I want my notebook,” he said.
Zettel took the Book of Shadows out. “You mean this?” The boy reached for it, but Zettel held it just out of reach. “You said you want to get to Hell.”
“Yeah, and I’m not going to tell you why, so don’t bother asking again.”
“That’s fine. I don’t care.” Zettel pointed at the monitor. “Is that really Elise Kavanagh?” The kid nodded. “Let’s say I believe you. Let’s say that’s Elise Kavanagh, who has magically come
back from the dead, and for some reason you two are heading down to Hell. It wouldn’t have anything to do with James Faulkner going on high trial, would it?”
The boy’s mouth dropped open. “You know about that?”
“I have contacts in Dis,” Zettel said. “If you’re traveling with Elise Kavanagh and going to Hell to chase after James Faulkner, then that means that you can only be the prodigal son—Nathaniel Pritchard. Is that right?” He didn’t really need the boy to verify that. The Book of Shadows was more than enough.
But Nathaniel did nod, slowly and reluctantly. “Does everyone know?”
Zettel pulled a chair in front of the boy and straddled it, holding the Book of Shadows in both hands. “Probably not. Malcolm’s an idiot.” And it was a good thing that he was—Nathaniel Pritchard was on the Union’s most wanted list.
If Malcolm realized what a treasure he had stumbled across, the boy wouldn’t have been sitting in one of their observation rooms. He would have been on the first transport to HQ, along with the demon pretending to be Elise.
But Zettel had a much better plan for the boy.
He held out the Book of Shadows. After a moment of hesitation, Nathaniel took it. “Thanks,” he said, hugging the notebook to his chest.
Zettel forced himself to smile, and he tried to make it as friendly as possible. Kids were idiots. “I can break you out of here and send you to Hell. You and Elise. But I need you to do something for me when you get there.”
“What?”
“I need you to give a message to a demon called Judge Abraxas, preferably while he’s visiting the portal room. He’s expecting this note. Allyson has already written it down on a piece of paper for me, so all you have to do is hand it to him. I would do it myself, but I need someone…” Zettel’s smile faded a little. “Someone that the Union won’t notice has gone missing.”
“That sounds dangerous. Why would you help me?”
“Because I need someone brave to deliver this message. Someone crafty.”
That made Nathaniel’s eyes brighten.
Before he could respond, the speakers crackled to life again. Malcolm had entered the secure room with Elise.
Nathaniel frowned. “What about the commander?”
