by SM Reine
And then Nathaniel hit him in the face.
Stars sparked at the corners of James’s vision as he reeled. It was a lucky shot—almost hard enough to knock him off of his feet.
He touched his bottom lip. Blood glistened on the fingertips of his gloves.
James dropped his hands and stood before his son, unguarded, prepared to take whatever else he wanted to deliver.
Nathaniel lifted the phone over his head.
His arm wavered. His features crumpled, and the phone dropped to the floor, bouncing near his foot.
He sank to his knees.
Nathaniel gasped for air like his lungs had collapsed, gripping his chest in both hands as his spine bowed. His head tipped forward until his bangs brushed the floor and his tears left wet circles on the carpet.
James sat beside him. He leaned back against the desk and didn’t speak.
The rage ebbed from Nathaniel. He sank to his side on the floor, staring at the clawed feet of the desk.
Aside from the occasional hiccup, he fell silent.
James tried to imagine how Hannah would have comforted him, and then immediately banished the idea. He wasn’t Nathaniel’s mother. He was barely even his parent.
He began to speak, letting the words flow from him without thought.
“I met your mother when I was younger than you are now,” James said. “She terrified me on some level. She was beautiful and passionate—very smart, too. Stubborn. I enrolled in dance classes to be near her. We went professional together. Before her injury, she was the most graceful dancer in our company. The urge to dance left her, eventually, but the grace didn’t.”
Nathaniel remained still.
James didn’t know what he was trying to say, so he stopped. There wasn’t anything else that he wanted to share anyway.
How could he describe all of the years of love they had shared? The push and pull of a comfortable relationship—all of the compromises, the dreams, the sense of being settled in the last place he would ever want to be. That was all the stuff of being an adult. Nothing that a boy Nathaniel’s age could understand.
When Nathaniel eventually sat up, his face was splotchy and red. He took off his glasses and rubbed his face. “I’m going to kill him. That angel is going to die at my hands.” He shook his fists, and all that James could think was that his hands were so small. “Not just for my mom. For everyone. For Elise.”
“Elise is capable of handling her own retribution.”
Nathaniel glared at him. “I hope so,” he said, and it was obvious whom he thought deserved Elise’s revenge the most. He swiped his arm over the mucus on his upper lip. “We’ve both lost people. At least you’ve still got a chance to get Elise back.” His chin trembled. “You don’t deserve that.”
Those four words hurt so much more than every one of Nathaniel’s blows.
The door slammed open.
“Time to go,” Neuma said. She had replaced the metal bikini with a mesh shirt, cutoff shorts, and sneakers—not much of an improvement, considering she wasn’t wearing a bra.
James stood. “What? Already?”
“But I’m not ready!” Nathaniel scrambled to grab a fistful of the papers around him. “I haven’t mapped out the whole route.”
“Too bad,” Neuma said. “We’re about to get raided.”
“What?”
“Union’s moving in, and that means we need to be gone, like, yesterday. C’mon.”
James shoved Nathaniel ahead of him, and he dropped half the pages on the first flight of stairs. Neither of them dared to take the time to go back.
Neuma ran from floor to floor, butt hanging halfway out of her shorts. James tried not to watch the pleasant way she jiggled on every step, which, for once, wasn’t too hard—the growing panic helped a lot.
They weren’t the only ones panicking. When they reached Eloquent Blood again, they found the dance floor emptied. The staff was all getting ready for a fight. They had found weapons, too—barbed wire whips, the shattered ends of bottles, rebar.
It was a small army: more than three-dozen demons and Gray, by James’s quick count.
He turned his shocked stare on Neuma.
“These ones are all loyal to Elise,” she said, misinterpreting his expression. “They’ve got your back. You can trust ‘em.”
A beefy man with fangs punched his fist into his other palm. A low growl rumbled through his throat.
So this was what Elise had been doing when she hadn’t been speaking to James. Had she been deliberately pulling together an army? He couldn’t imagine that she had been making friends.
Neuma gestured, and a woman stepped out from among the demons. She looked too normal to be among the clubbers in Eloquent Blood. She had green eyes, brown hair with red streaks, and a black blouse—James wouldn’t have looked at her twice on the street.
“This is your new bodyguard, kid,” Neuma said. “Meet Tania. She’s going to keep you alive long enough to perform whatever magic you gotta do. ‘Kay?”
Nathaniel was too pale to respond.
Bodyguard? James couldn’t believe that someone as unassuming as this “Tania” could face down the might of the Union, much less the swarming nightmares.
But there was no time to argue. A serpent of darkness the size of James’s leg shot onto the floor of Eloquent Blood, coalescing into Jerica’s figure. She was still wearing the thick-framed hipster glasses, but now she also held a one-handed flail that looked like it had been made from a fistful of rusty nails and a bike chain.
“They’re here,” she said.
Her announcement was punctuated by the sound of gunfire on the street above, igniting instant chaos within Eloquent Blood.
Neuma faced her small army and pumped her fist in the air.
“Get those fuckers!”
They roared and charged up the rubble, shoving past Nathaniel and James. He grabbed his son to keep from being dragged along, but Nathaniel shook him off with a look of disgust.
Neuma, Jerica, and Tania the bodyguard stood back until the last of them were on the street.
“Get them to the gate,” Neuma said, grabbing Jerica by the back of her neck. “And don’t you even think about dying on me.”
They kissed swiftly, and then Neuma was gone, charging up the destroyed street.
“We’ll go around back,” Tania said with a thick Australian accent. She led them to a dark hallway that had used to be the human entrance to Eloquent Blood.
They emerged into an alleyway between casinos. Jerica took the lead, and Tania watched the rear.
When they emerged, James could see the Union marching on the other side of the chain link fence protecting the alley. A black tank rolled past them, treads crushing the rocks beneath it. The cannon swiveled to aim down the road, and James realized that someone had stamped magical runes on the side.
The entire damn tank was an enchanted weapon.
They rushed through the empty first floor of Craven’s to emerge on the opposite street, a block away from the fighting between the Union and the employees of Blood. At that distance, it was impossible to tell who was winning. The writhing mass of bodies was just as indistinguishable as the clubbers had been in Blood, but they danced in time to the pounding of bullets instead of a bass rhythm.
The enchanted cannon fired with a whomph.
Bodies went flying.
A leg landed near James, skittering across the pavement. Instead of a foot, the ankle terminated in a cloven hoof. The aatxegorri bartender, he realized, feeling sick.
“We have to keep moving,” Tania said. She hovered behind Nathaniel like his own personal shadow.
The fighting was so loud that James didn’t hear the roar of an engine until it was on top of them. He turned to see a fleet of black motorcycles bearing down Sierra Street. There were five of them in a line, blocking the entire road.
Jerica saw them coming, too. She launched into shadow and reappeared in front of the center motorcyclist. The flail slamme
d into his helmet.
James heard the crash, but he didn’t stop to watch the aftermath. Tania was half-pulling, half-carrying Nathaniel down the street, and it was all James could do to follow.
A broken helmet bounced past him.
They ran past the fight between the Union and demons. It was so chaotic that James’s brain processed the images out of order—flying bodies, staggering Gray bleeding from wounds, the flash of gunfire. The white UKA logo was everywhere, white letters on black, splattered with red.
Tania cut across an alley, blocking his view of the fight.
“Where are we going?” James panted, chasing after the others. His son didn’t reply. “Nathaniel! Which gate are we going to?”
The boy stared between the gates, eyes wide and cheeks pale.
“Uh—I don’t know, maybe—”
“Pick one!” James said.
“Okay, okay! That one!” Nathaniel pointed up at the train trench.
A kopis rounded the scaffolding at the end of the block. He dropped to one knee and braced his rifle against his shoulder. “Freeze!” he yelled.
Tania may have been a good bodyguard, but she wasn’t good at obeying orders. She launched down the street and barreled into the kopis. Her momentum carried them both to the ground.
Screams pierced the air as she ripped into the kopis with a wet crunch, like snapping celery.
“Oh my God,” Nathaniel said. “Oh my God, oh my God—”
James shoved him. “Don’t watch!”
They clambered up the nearest ladder, hand over hand, as quickly as they could move. Tania rejoined them before they reached the top, her chin and chest drenched with blood. She wiped her lips off with a dainty gesture.
The first level of scaffolding was only two stories off the ground, no more than a bridge between buildings. But it gave James a perfect view of the fight below.
The chaos stretched all the way up Sierra Street toward the university, where that dirigible was still floating. The fog of nightmares was gathering again. As black as the Union uniforms were, the nightmares were darker, sucking all light away from the surrounding world.
Neuma was in the middle of it all. She had climbed on top of the tank. As James watched, she reached down the hatch to pull a man out. He was limp in her arms, staring, helpless to the full force of her succubus charms.
He didn’t even fight back when she took his gun and shot him in the face.
“Keep climbing,” James said, more to remind himself than Nathaniel.
They had to scale fifteen stories’ worth of ladders to reach the bottom of the mirror city, and by the time they did, James’s sewn palm was burning, his legs were weak, and he was out of breath.
Jerica met them when they stopped. She had lost her flail, but appeared to be uninjured. “You guys okay?” she asked, giving Nathaniel a hand up.
“Sure thing,” Tania said brightly.
The nightmare grinned at her, as if she knew what Tania had done and totally approved. “Great. Let’s keep going.”
They ran across the scaffolds bridging the space over Virginia. A fog of nightmares swirled around them as they ran, tangling between their feet, but they couldn’t seem to amass with Jerica nearby—she cut through them like a plow.
Even though they dispersed as quickly as they appeared, James could hear voices whispering again.
You don’t deserve to get Elise back.
Nathaniel is going to die.
“We have company!” Jerica shouted, louder than the other voices.
An entire unit of Union men had climbed to the scaffolding across the street. They were wearing full riot gear and carrying guns. The man leading them was the only one without a helmet, and James recognized Gary Zettel—the commander that he knew to be responsible for his arrest.
And he looked furious.
Zettel lifted his gun to aim.
Jerica flashed across the scaffolding and reappeared in front of him. She slammed the heel of her palm into his nose.
One of the kopides opened fire. Bullets swooshed through Jerica’s body and pinged into the metal around James. Tania grabbed Nathaniel, hugging him tightly to her chest, and turned so that she was between him and the men.
She took three bullets in the back.
Tania fell without so much as a scream. She fell into Nathaniel, knocking him to the scaffold.
The gunfire stopped as abruptly as it had started. Jerica flashed between the men, ripping away guns, lashing out with fists and sneakers. She wasn’t much of a fighter, but she didn’t have to be when she was impossible to catch.
James shoved Tania’s body off of his son. The bodyguard was dead. “Oh my God,” Nathaniel said again. There was blood all over him, but none of it looked to be his.
“We’re almost there,” James said.
They jumped across a gap and climbed the next ladder toward the gate in the inverted train trench.
He made it halfway up before he heard Jerica cry out. It wasn’t normal for nightmares to get injured. James had to stop so he could see what had happened.
Zettel had rammed a Taser down her throat.
The shock made her shake wildly as she flickered in and out of existence, normal one moment and transparent the next. A few seconds later, she vanished in a puff of smoke. She didn’t come back.
It wasn’t enough to kill her, but there was no chance she’d be corporeal again in time to escort them to the gate.
James and Nathaniel were alone.
They climbed faster.
Even though the mirror city didn’t have power, some of the lights still occasionally illuminated. The signal on the side of the tracks was flashing through each of the colors: red, yellow, green, over and over again, signaling for a train that would never come.
The gate stirred as they approached, throbbing faintly with energy. The legs were planted on either side of the train tracks, and it hung over them in a U shape. It was two feet above their heads, barely within arm’s reach—they would have to climb through.
“Where does it go?” James asked.
Nathaniel reached up to brush his fingers against the apex. “Heaven, for sure,” he said, eyes going distant. “Uh…there are temples…and trees, and…”
“Never mind,” James said. Zettel was scrambling onto the scaffolding at the end of the train trench, and he still had at least four men with him. “Open it. Quickly.”
“But I need to do a ritual—”
“There’s no time!”
Nathaniel flung his hands into the air. “I can do magic, I can’t do miracles!”
James swore and ripped off his glove. With only a few minutes to heal, Elise’s skin was still angry, swollen, and red. The redness was good. It meant that there was blood flow. He could only hope that it would mean the gate would recognize both of his marks, too.
He held his breath as he pressed the stitched palm to the pillar. The symbols ringing the base illuminated, and the stone sang out. Gray light flooded the space between the pillars.
The gate was open.
“Stop!” Zettel shouted. He didn’t have a gun now that Jerica had attacked him, but James had no doubt that a man that angry could kill with his bare fists.
James lifted Nathaniel high enough to grab the stone. The boy pulled himself inside and vanished with a flash.
The Union was just feet away—only seconds behind him.
James climbed into Heaven and left Earth behind.
PART THREE
The Secret
Oymyakon, Russia – February 1998
James realized he was in love with Elise Kavanagh less than a week after he dragged her body to Oymyakon.
It was no ordinary infatuation. She had spent the entire time unconscious, so they hadn’t held a single conversation. It also wasn’t lust. She was a skeleton on the verge of death, and her features were strong, masculine, almost ugly. Far too much like her father. Yet she had a way of appearing in his every idle thought, swelling to the surface of
his brain like bodies in the ocean after a shipwreck—the shape of her lips, ice crystals frozen to her eyelashes, the beak of her nose, her hands swaddled in bandages.
He paced outside the room while Babushka changed Elise’s sheets. She was still sleeping in the tiny closet that had been converted to a bedroom, and James was determined to remain close until she woke up.
Who knew what she might do if she opened her eyes to find a stranger standing over her? She had been raised and trained by Isaac, and James suspected her first instinct would be one of violence.
James’s nearness was for Babushka’s safety. Not because he couldn’t stop thinking about seeing Elise’s eyes open and look at him for the first time.
For the love of all that was holy, he had just left behind his fiancée in Colorado. The last time he had seen Hannah, he had been about to go into the dance studio for lessons and she had tried to stop him so that they could talk about something. James had still been too angry at her to listen, though he couldn’t recall now why they had been fighting. All of the arguments blurred together after a few years. So he had silenced her with his lips, made love to her against the front door, and then left when he was done without saying goodbye.
Elise was sixteen years old, barely more than a child, and James suddenly couldn’t remember what Hannah’s body had felt like under his hands.
Pacing past the door for a fourth time, he glimpsed the hands folded over Elise’s chest. The girl must have been bleeding from the marks on her palms again, because Babushka was replacing the bandages. A shift to the right, and he could see Elise’s throat, her jaw, her smooth cheek.
Trying to remember gripping Hannah’s hips in his hands gave way to other thoughts. Instead, James remembered lifting Elise from the frozen ground, pushing the hair out of her face, wrapping her body in his parka.
Hannah, think of Hannah.
James had stopped walking without realizing it, transfixed by his glimpse of Elise.
He eased the door open another inch. He was entranced with Elise’s shape, even shrouded by a fresh blanket. Babushka began to brush out the girl’s tangled curls, a shade of dark red like blood on the mattress, and James couldn’t seem to look away from the way her hair gleamed in the cold winter light.
