by Reine, SM
“Don’t worry about him,” Zettel said. “He doesn’t have to know about it—and it would be better if Elise didn’t know about it, either. This is between you and me. A secret.”
“So you’ll let us go. You’ll send the two of us to Hell, and all I have to do is deliver a note to a demon named Abraxas.”
“That’s right.” Zettel held out a hand, offering it to Nathaniel. “So what do you think? Do you want to go to Hell? Are you brave enough to deliver my message?”
Nathaniel considered Zettel’s hand, brow furrowed.
They shook.
The light burned. Elise hugged her knees to her chest and buried her face in her legs to shield her eyes from the glare, but it wasn’t enough. It felt like she was unraveling piece by piece—skull severing from her spine, heart fragmenting into a thousand pieces, skin scorching and shriveling.
She needed the shadows. She needed safety. Her entire body longed for it, and if she could have a moment of shadow—just a moment—she could escape into the pleasant void of darkness.
But there were no shadows. Not with so many spotlights beaming down on her.
Relief flooded over her when a door groaned open a moment later.
Malcolm stepped into the ring of light, gun drawn. It might have been the first time that Elise had seen him without that idiotic grin, and one of the only times she had ever been happy to see him approach. Allyson Whatley stood at his back, a hand on the gun at her hip.
“Hi there,” Malcolm said. “Used the safeword already? Your tolerance has dropped.”
It wasn’t funny. Not when her skin was going to slide off of her bones.
“Get me out of here,” she said through gritted teeth.
“There’s a little problem with that. Namely, the fact that we have your corpse on ice at Union HQ. So forgive me if I’m somewhat skeptical about who you are—even if you do seem to have a weirdly intimate knowledge of Elise’s sex life.”
She couldn’t think of a response. Not when his blood was rushing through his veins, roaring like an ocean in her ears, rolling down the back of her throat. Her gaze fixed on the pulse beneath his jaw.
Hungry…
Elise’s tongue slid out to moisten her lips. All of his sweet, sticky juices were waiting to be tasted. His muscles were vibrating with fear. The joints of his fingers creaked on the gun. And every one of her slight motions made his heart beat a little faster, which sent the rushing blood thumping harder in his system, washing over the tendons and pinkening his flesh and—
“Is it really you, Elise?” he asked, interrupting her thoughts.
She finally remembered how to make her tongue work. “Yes,” she said, and then she added, “As far as I can tell.”
“What happened to you?” Malcolm asked.
If only she had an answer to that. “We can discuss my condition later. Right now, I need you to turn off these lights.”
“Why? So you can escape and steal more Union property?”
Anger flared in her chest, and it pushed away the haze suppressing her senses. Elise’s fingers dug into her shins. Better than digging them into Malcolm’s throat.
“I only took my ring and the swords. Those are my property.”
“I hate to break it to you, but you’re dead, darling,” he said. “The dead can’t have anything.”
She lifted her head and lowered her legs, spreading her arms wide. “Do I look dead? Listen—you have to let me go. There’s a problem. When was the last time you were in contact with James?”
“That was the morning after…” Malcolm’s throat worked. “I can’t exactly say the morning after you died, given the circumstances, but—”
“So it was in November,” Elise interrupted.
“It was shortly after he arrived in Sacramento. I called him. He hung up on me after I told him that you—you know, after what happened. Didn’t hear from him again.”
Elise rubbed a hand over her eyes. God, it was so bright. “You don’t know where he went after Sacramento?”
“The Union arranged for him to be transported to Colorado. I know he got on the plane. I know the plane touched down successfully. Beyond that…” Malcolm shrugged. “He missed his transport to the Haven. I assumed that he’d changed his mind.”
Elise didn’t get a chance to respond. Allyson shifted in the back of the room, putting a hand to her ear, as though listening to the earpiece. After a moment, she said, “Yes, sir,” and then, “Very well, sir.”
Malcolm glanced at her. “What is it, Allyson?”
“Just control checking in with us,” she said, and even though her face and voice were smooth, there was a spike in her heart rate that said she was lying.
Malcolm didn’t pick up on it. He faced Elise again. “I can’t let you go, darling.”
But Elise wasn’t listening to him—she was watching as Allyson drew her gun behind Malcolm, gripped it by the muzzle, and raised it over her head.
Allyson whipped her pistol across the back of Malcolm’s skull.
Elise saw the damage unfold the instant it happened, as though in slow motion: the way the brain bounced against the inside of his skull, the rupture of minor vessels, the sloshing of fluid. She saw a jump in his thoughts, and then total failure.
His mind blanked. Malcolm collapsed to the floor, unconscious.
“Get up,” Allyson told Elise, holstering her gun again. The spotlights turned off at once, as though a switch had been flipped in another room. It took all of her concentration to hold her skin against the muscles and keep from vanishing into the sudden darkness.
“Why did you do that to Malcolm?” she asked. She was standing, but she didn’t remember getting to her feet. All it took was a thought, and she had phased through shadow to the witch’s side.
“Who cares? Just be grateful that we’re getting your ass out of here.”
The door opened again, and Zettel appeared on the other side. He was a squat, ugly ape of a man, and he was followed closely by Nathaniel, who was still dwarfed by his camel jacket, still holding onto his Book of Shadows. Strange, powerful relief swept over Elise at the sight of the boy.
“Is he dead?” Zettel asked, delivering a swift kick to Malcolm’s side.
“He’s alive,” Elise said.
“Then we’d better move before he wakes up.”
Elise followed Nathaniel into the hall. Zettel locked the door behind them, leaving Malcolm unconscious on the concrete floor.
Zettel strode ahead, leaving them no choice but to follow. He whispered to Allyson as they walked, too quietly for Elise to hear them. Zettel and Allyson were bound as kopis and aspis, and it was almost like they shared unified brain signals. It filled Elise’s senses with white noise that she couldn’t seem to shake.
In the middle of the morning, the hallways of the Union warehouse were busy. Kopides hustled from one place to the next without stopping to talk, much like Elise had seen Army soldiers do on base. It was easy to tell which ones were bound to an aspis, because she couldn’t read their minds. There was white noise everywhere, a buzzing like flies. It felt like steel wool against the inside of her skull.
“What’s going on?” she murmured to Nathaniel, who was hanging a few steps behind the others.
He had to take two steps for every one of Elise’s. His cheeks were pink. “I asked Gary to let us go, and he said okay.”
“That’s it? You just…asked him to let us go?”
The boy’s mind was smooth and unreadable, like he had put a wall of opaque glass between them. “Yes.”
“You’re lying to me.”
“No, I’m not. I think Gary likes kids,” Nathaniel said.
She shot a look at Zettel’s back. She was pretty sure that he only liked two things: shooting people and being a dickweed. She couldn’t fathom him showing a soft spot for a child, especially one that was allied with her. But why else would he let them go?
Allyson split off near the exit, rushing up a flight of stairs. “Follow me,”
Zettel said.
“Where’s she going?” Elise asked.
“Doesn’t matter. She’ll be back in a minute.”
Zettel led them to the ground level, walked past the garage, and headed outside. Snow drifted from the steely gray sky. A thin layer of white covered the desert.
Fortunately, they didn’t have far to go. Zettel took them to a second, smaller construction behind the warehouse, unlocked the doors, and ushered them inside.
The building was one large room, filled with huge monitors and terminals like NASA’s ground control. The equipment surrounded a low basin constructed from crumbling stone, which looked centuries old and horribly out of place among the best and newest Union technology.
Elise had seen such a thing once before. Just once, when she was a child.
It was a portal.
A man and two women sat at desks to the side of the basin. A pair of them were playing a game of twenty-one. The other was browsing the internet at her terminal and scrolling through pictures of women wearing bikinis.
As soon as the technicians saw Zettel enter, they hurried to hide what they had been doing.
He snapped his fingers. “Everyone out.”
The technicians rose from their desks. Each of them wore pentagram pins on the lapels of their black polos, marking them as witches. “What’s going on?” asked the male witch, gathering his playing cards into a pile.
“You’re all done for the day. Return to the barracks.”
One of the other witches lifted a hand to her ear. “On whose orders? I should contact Malcolm to verify.”
“Malcolm’s been put on temporary leave. I’m in charge in his absence.”
The door opened again and Allyson stepped through, propping it open with her foot. She cradled a shotgun in the crook of her arm. “Move!” she barked.
An order backed by a gun was a lot more effective than Zettel’s shout. They dropped the playing cards and filed out quickly, muttering among themselves.
As soon as they were gone, Zettel locked the door behind them.
“We have to hurry,” Allyson said. “I think Malcolm’s out. People are moving this way.”
“Shit,” Zettel said, and he rushed to the nearest terminal.
“You have a portal to Hell outside my city,” Elise said. “That’s what this is, isn’t it?”
He began typing on the keyboard. “It’s not your city anymore.”
“We keep lines of communication open with the Council of Dis,” Allyson explained, steering Nathaniel to the side of the portal by his shoulders. “The only way to do it is via interdimensional portal. We open it every hour, on the hour—an Earth hour—and transmit updates to the Council. It’s a secure path. You might be able to get in unseen if we transmit between the usual hours.”
Elise circled the basin, giving it a wide berth. She could almost read the infernal writing scrawled across the crumbling stones, even though she had never been able to read it before. Danger. Fire. “Where does it lead?” she asked.
“To the top of the grand tower,” Zettel said. “All traffic enters there, so you’ll have to move fast. When they realize that something living has gotten through, they’ll kill you.”
“I can carry us out unseen,” Elise said.
The memory of her shadow in the warehouse flicked across Zettel’s mind and then vanished. “I suppose you can.”
“I’ll need a map, though. I need to know where I’m going.”
Allyson went to another terminal and brought up a detailed schematic of the Palace and surrounding areas. She pointed to the left side of the map. “There. That’s where you’ll pop in.”
As Zettel continued to work, Elise drank in the map, trying to memorize as much of it as possible.
She recognized a few of the towers on the 3D schematics. When she was six years old, her father had taken her on a short trip to Dis. Even though she had been very young and they hadn’t even stayed there for a full day, it had left quite an impression on her.
That box indicated the courtyard—that was where the flesh orchards were grown and prisoners were tortured. Elise had witnessed a cambion being flayed as she walked past, and she could still remember how much everyone had cheered when its spraying blood was funneled into the orchard. She still wondered what was on the other end of the arms, buried deep in the earth.
“Where do they keep prisoners that aren’t being interrogated?” she asked.
Allyson pointed to the base of another tower, and Elise’s eyes traced the path between the Union’s portal and the prison. They were on opposite ends of the Palace. “Under there. It’s guarded. A direct approach would be suicide.”
“What’s the indirect approach?” Elise asked.
The witch smiled unpleasantly. “There isn’t one.”
“We’re ready,” Zettel said as the humming around the basin intensified.
Nathaniel moved to step into the portal, but Elise caught his arm. She addressed Zettel. “Can you get this kid back to his family?”
“What?” Nathaniel asked, his mouth dropping open. “But you said—”
“There’s a portal here. I don’t need your help to cross into Hell, and it’s too dangerous for you to come.” She shrugged and stepped over the portal’s ledge. “You should get back to your grandparents in Colorado. They’re probably worried.”
His whole face crumpled. “Then how would you get back?”
The door to the room rattled. Fists pounded on the other side. “Open up!” shouted Malcolm, his voice muffled by three inches of steel.
“Nathaniel is going,” Zettel said curtly. “End of discussion. Allyson?”
She pushed the boy into the basin. Nathaniel almost tripped over the side.
“Wait,” Elise said.
But Zettel had already gone back to his terminal and flipped the switch.
VI
It was very dark, and Elise was sharpening her swords again.
Whisk, whisk, whisk…
A light.
James walked down a long, empty beach as the wind roared over him. Chunks of ice floated on an ocean the color of molten steel, cracking and crunching and popping with the tide. The water sluiced toward his feet with foamy fingers.
Elise sat on the dock, feet dangling into the ice. She had one of her swords across her lap and a sharpening stone in her hand. She wasn’t dressed well for the cold. She was in a black dress, like the ones she had worn at dance competitions after they had retired from hunting, and her hair hung over her neck in a loose, elegant knot.
“You could ruin the geometry if you file that much more,” he said.
Elise stood with the sword, swinging it easily through the air in a figure eight and then driving it through an invisible enemy. Her bicep rippled.
“Don’t worry about it so much, James. Sometimes swords break. They have to be melted down, reforged, refolded. But they’re sharper the second time. Stronger. Better.”
“What are you talking about?” James asked.
“Destiny. Inevitability.” She offered the hilt of the sword to him. It was covered in blood.
“I don’t want that.”
“Who better to wield it than you?” She tilted her head to the side and gave him a thoughtful look. “I don’t think anyone understands me. Other than you, anyway.”
He gave her a warm smile. “I’m not sure I would say that I understand you. Your layers of mystery are one of your greatest charms.”
Elise stretched up onto her toes, balancing herself against his chest with a careful hand.
She kissed him—a light brush of her lips against his.
James froze where he stood, and the reality of how he reacted warred against the way he wished he had responded. Memory and regret clashed.
In reality, he hadn’t reacted at all. Elise had stepped back, disappointed, and he had apologized. In less than thirty seconds, the way they interacted was changed profoundly, for the rest of Elise’s too-short life, and probably for the worse—and
good God, did he wish he could take that back.
He didn’t want to make that mistake again.
A voice spoke from behind him.
“Maybe I wouldn’t have died if you hadn’t been so selfish,” said the other, older Elise as she stepped around them, just out of sight. “Maybe if you had trusted me with the truth, we could have found a solution together. Maybe I would be alive. But it’s too late now, isn’t it?”
He released the girl in his arms and realized with a shock that she was already stiff and blue-lipped.
Elise fell to the dock. Her gloved hand flopped over the side. Dead.
“I’m sorry,” he whispered to her corpse.
James backed away from Elise. Even though she wasn’t moving, she was still sharpening her swords somewhere. Still running the stone along the blade of the falchion, honing the edge to a deadly point. Still preparing to hunt and kill, even in death.
Whisk, whisk, whisk. It pulsed in time with his heartbeat.
He opened his eyes.
There was no sound inside of his cell. Everything glowed a very faint, very nauseating shade of red.
So he hadn’t dreamed that part. He really was in Hell.
James groaned in the dry air. His stomach knotted with hunger, his tongue was thick and heavy, and his very eyeballs felt like they were shriveling. He needed water. Desperately.
But there was nothing to drink or eat in his miserable cell. In fact, there wasn’t even a bed, or a latrine. The stone room was six feet wide by six feet long, with a narrow inset for the door. A small cell—but it was private, if nothing else. Small mercy. He wouldn’t have wanted to be confined with the denizens of Hell.
The door opened, startling him out of his groggy haze.
A human entered, but James’s instant of relief was short-lived as his eyes skimmed up the legs of his captor, to his narrow shoulders, and then to the brush of flaming red hair atop his head. The man had a goatee with blond stripes on either side of his lips, as well as a scar running from the edge of his eye to the corner of his mouth. His eyes were green, and slanted in such a way that they probably always looked angry.
Those were Elise’s eyes.
It had been a long time since James had seen Isaac Kavanagh—maybe twenty years, although his brain was too sluggish to work out the math. Yet the kopis had barely aged a day. He looked like a very grizzled thirty-year-old.
