by S. M. Reine
“The knife!” he yelled, reaching out a trembling hand.
At the edge of Rylie’s vision, she saw Uriel throw him a blade too short to be one of their flaming sabers.
A heartbeat later, Uriel was simply gone. A black shape had hurtled out of the darkness and struck him in the side, carrying both of them over the side of the stairs into oblivion.
Abel had come to save her.
In her instant of distraction, Makael adjusted his grip on the knife. Hilt up, cutting edge down. The flaring light from the fissure to Limbo glinted off the silver blade.
It plunged toward her face. She twisted aside and the knife bit into the vertebra beside her head, burying inches deep. Rylie stared at the blade. The smell of it overwhelmed everything else, sour and powerful, filling the air with the stench of death. That was true silver.
They had come prepared to kill werewolves.
Makael struggled to extract the knife from the vertebra again, putting his arm right beside Rylie’s head. She sank her teeth into his flesh.
With a hard jerk, she ripped the muscle away from the bone. It wasn’t that much different from taking down a deer. Just like a deer, she thought, trying not to consider what a monster she had become.
Makael was bigger and stronger than her, but she didn’t need to outweigh a prey animal she could outlast. His shredded arm was too weak to draw the knife now. All she had to do was keep him distracted until he’d lost too much blood to chase her—or until Abel could come back.
She lunged, knocking into Makael. The spine underneath them and the darkness above inverted as they rolled, sliding on the ice, battered by the wind.
Rylie pushed with her legs in his gut, harder this time.
Makael’s face flashed with shock as he slipped toward the side of the spine, hands scrabbling wildly for traction he didn’t find.
Then he fell, following his sword down into nothingness.
Struggling to her feet, hunched over against the cold, she stepped up to the edge to look for Makael. He was gone. So were Uriel and Abel. There was no way to tell if there was a floor below that they could have struck, or an icy ocean, or even a pit of fire. It was too far below. All she could see was darkness.
Abel would be fine. He had to be.
She turned to look for the rest of the pack—and pain stabbed through her stomach.
Rylie looked down. The silver knife had been wrenched from the bone and buried in her navel. Its blade was long enough that she thought she could feel the point in her back. She was bleeding. Oh God, she was bleeding from her stomach, the knife had been driven into her womb, and it was silver.
Her mouth dropped open, but she couldn’t manage to make a shocked sound.
Rylie’s gaze traveled up the fist holding the knife to the face of the angel who had stabbed her. It was some female that she didn’t know. Her expression was remorseless.
The angel withdrew the knife from Rylie’s stomach. It hurt just as much coming out as it had going in. Rylie tried to step back but her body didn’t obey.
“Hold still,” the angel said, gripping Rylie’s shoulder. She thrust the knife in again, and again, and each time hurt a little bit less.
The wound was cold but her veins ran with fire. Her muscles were no longer responding to her thoughts.
She had consumed silver before. She had been shot by silver. She had never had it cut through her intestines and sever her organs.
When she fell to her knees, the angel fell with her, holding the knife in place. It scraped against something inside of Rylie. Some kind of bone.
Rylie’s vision blurred. The angel’s face swam in her vision.
Silver.
She would never heal a wound from silver.
Rylie fell to her back, staring up at the dark sky within Coccytus. Not a sky at all. Just darkness.
The angel loomed over her, knife uplifted.
“Forgive me, Mother,” she whispered.
But then she vanished.
A more familiar face appeared, but Rylie couldn’t seem to focus on it. She knew that broad nose and dark eyes. She knew the deep, vibrating voice that seemed to be saying her name.
“Seth,” she said. Her mouth was human again. The wolf was slipping from her, receding from Hell to return to the Earth where she belonged.
The sensation of hands on hers faded until she couldn’t feel anything.
Rylie smelled pine trees. She smelled icy rivers. She smelled her own blood, in great amounts, and watched her wolf trot away into the trees, tail flicking in invitation. Asking Rylie to come along, leaving that cold and miserable place behind.
She drifted after it, following her beast into a place without pain. A place of endless forest and shining moonlight.
She was home.
Abel’s howl cut straight through James’s heart, leaving behind a chill colder than any icicle in the depths of Hell. That wasn’t the sound of a wolf doing battle. It was the sound of a wolf who had lost the fight.
James took two steps toward the stairs before remembering that Elise wasn’t battle-ready. He gritted his teeth in frustration, glancing between her and the glow of light that indicated angels higher on the spine. His kopis still looked frightened. She would be useless to fight—and helpless to defend herself if someone attacked.
But Abel howled again, louder than before, and James couldn’t leave the pack to die.
“If anyone approaches you, hide,” he said, reaching over Elise’s shoulder to yank the obsidian falchion from her scabbard.
Her mouth worked soundlessly at the sight of the sword he’d taken. There was no sign of recognition in her eyes—she didn’t know her own blades anymore. She hadn’t managed to put together a coherent response by the time he vaulted over the portal and rushed up the first of the stairs.
The pack was caught in a skirmish with angels just above the site of the portal. James couldn’t tell what was happening. The angels were nearly as fast as the werewolves, and the fight was a blur of limbs and wings and flaming swords.
He glimpsed werewolf fang—golden eyes—an open, gushing wound—and realized that one of the four angels on that vertebra was about to decapitate Hank.
James lunged, drove the obsidian falchion into the angel’s back.
He didn’t stop to watch the ichor spread over its skin. He jerked the blade free and continued to run, halfway up the next vertebra before the angel had even hit the ground. Behind him, he heard the growls of wolves and shredding flesh. The pack, without Alpha guidance, was feasting on the flesh of angels.
One of the angels broke away and landed in front of him.
“Mage,” she said, looking pleasantly surprised to see him. “We’re supposed to take you alive if we find you. Lower your weapon and join us in paradise, brother.”
“Never,” James said.
She flared her wings and slammed one into his gut. He knew it was coming, but he was still too slow to dodge, and it forced the breath from his lungs. He gasped for oxygen.
The angel locked her arm around his throat.
“Never is a long time, mage,” she said.
Her wings beat against the wind and she lifted off of her feet, dragging him underneath her without releasing his throat. His vision swirled. He watched his feet dangling, his fingers slipping on the hilt of the sword.
A snarl from below, and the angel screamed. A werewolf had grabbed her.
Her arm disappeared from James’s throat. He fell. They’d only lifted fifteen feet off the ground, but the impact still hurt.
When James pushed up onto all fours, he saw the female angel pinned under a werewolf—Hank again, already healing from his wounds—as he ripped into her belly with his teeth. He was barely recognizable as the quiet soldier that had guarded James in Dis multiple times. He looked like a monster far worse than anything that had come out of Hell.
But when he lifted his head, baring a bloody muzzle, there was recognition in his eyes. He knew James.
“Thank you
,” James whispered.
He scrambled for the falchion he had dropped, scooping it up and returning to his search for Abel.
The sounds of battle receded behind him as he climbed. The air grew colder and the wind harsher as he approached Ba’al’s dangling clavicle.
James hauled himself onto the next segment of the spine and nearly tripped over an arm.
There had been another fight here. Pieces of a female angel’s body were scattered across the ground. She was already beginning to freeze with her eyes crusted open.
A human kneeled on the opposite edge of the body, dark-skinned and furless. James slipped as he stepped over the body to reach him.
“What are you doing?” James began to ask, but the words failed when he realized that Abel was pressing his blood-slicked hands against Rylie’s stomach. He was attempting to stop up a wound even worse than those that wolf jaws had inflicted on angel bones.
Rylie had crumpled with one leg twisted uncomfortably underneath her. The fiend-skin jacket was blackened with her own blood. Her eyes were closed.
James’s eyes tracked back to the angel, whose severed hand was clenched on a knife. The blade was silver.
“Dear Lord,” he said.
Abel turned to him, desperation in every line of his face. He only managed to growl. He was human in body, but panic and fear had left his mind animalistic.
James dropped beside them, setting the sword down so that he could peel the jacket away and inspect Rylie’s wound. It was messy. Each puncture was in a different place, angled toward various organs—an angel’s best attempt at butchering a werewolf.
Rylie was already dead. There would be no healing something like this, not from a silver knife.
He pressed wet fingers against her throat. No pulse. She was cold.
The sound of wind dimmed around James. Instead, he heard a high, whining note. It was a little too sharp to be a pleasant tone. He felt it driving through his forehead like a spike of ice.
Use the falchion.
James’s head jerked up. He looked over his shoulder, expecting to see that one of the new werewolves had approached from behind. But they were still alone. The only nearby members of the pack were still fighting lower on the spine.
The world blurred around him. The tuneless song grew louder inside his skull.
His eyes dropped to the obsidian falchion that he had set beside Rylie.
Use it. I brought it back just for this.
The soft voice sounded like it belonged to someone James should have known.
“Nathaniel?” he whispered.
A man suddenly stood behind Abel. It wasn’t his son.
It was Benjamin Flynn, the missing precognitive.
He didn’t seem touched by the cold. The wind didn’t stir his hair. Golden light rimmed his shoulders and neck, darkening his face until all James could see was his eyes—his pale, pale blue eyes, glowing from the shadows. The light twisted around him as though he were the central point of a black hole.
“Why the falchion?” James asked. It was the easiest question of the thousands of others he needed to know. How did you get here? How are you doing this?
Benjamin didn’t speak. He only lifted a hand to point at the sword, moving in slow motion.
Use it…
He blinked, and the precognitive was gone, as though he’d never been there at all.
The roar of the wind returned at the same instant that the note vanished from James’s skull. The world snapped back into clarity. Abel didn’t show any sign that he had heard James speak; he was still staring at Rylie, his whole body trembling.
James curled his fingers around the falchion, hefting its weight in his hand. Benjamin had said that the falchion had been brought back for this. For what? To avenge Rylie’s death? Or to save her? How? She was already dead.
Seth’s ichor-black body in the mausoleum flitted through James’s mind.
“Okay,” he said, and then, “okay, I’ll try.” He wasn’t sure who he was trying to reassure. Rylie certainly couldn’t hear him now.
He took her hand and lifted it, preparing to cut.
Abel’s hand clamped on James’s throat. “What are you doing?” he growled, digging his fingertips in until the bright sting of claws drew blood. The fluids almost immediately froze on James’s skin.
“Trust me,” he squeezed out. Abel didn’t immediately move, wasting precious seconds. “Abel, please. We don’t have any time left.”
The werewolf didn’t respond for a moment, and James feared that the animal had taken over his mind again. But then Abel said, “There’s nothing left at all.”
The hand relaxed.
James made several small cuts: one in Rylie’s wrist, one near her injuries, another over her heart. He wasn’t sure which would help the ichor flow best. He wasn’t sure any of them would work at all.
When the blackness began creeping over her body, it was too slow—there was no way that it could entirely consume Rylie before her blood stopped. Her heart was no longer beating. There was nothing to push the ichor through her now.
Yet it continued to creep, turning her skin to obsidian a fraction of an inch at a time. It hardened her arms. It turned her stomach rigid. It oozed over her face in tendrils that gripped her jaw, her cheeks, and then slid over her eyelids.
Her hair hardened last, and then she was preserved—a perfect statue of the person she had been.
Just like Seth.
Abel was beyond words. His entire body shook as he stared at her, skin still steaming, hands hovering inches from her arms as though he wasn’t sure he could touch her. She looked peaceful aside from the strange twist to her leg. James wished that he had put her into a more comfortable position before cutting, though he knew there was no point in trying to make a dead woman comfortable.
He also wanted to tell Abel that there was a good reason for his mate to have become this thing, this horrible monument to herself, but there was none. Just a voice and a whim.
“Please, let there be a reason,” James whispered.
The surviving angels were dropping back down the spine, approaching from above. Abel whirled on them. Veins bulged from his face, corded his arms.
He unleashed a roar that drowned out everything—James’s heartbeat, the wind, the beating of wings. It was a sound of pure fury.
“The portal is open,” James said, trying to get to his feet. “Come with me—we can still get to New Eden, but there isn’t much—”
Abel whipped around to stare at him. There was no man in his eyes at all now.
Everything but the wolf was gone.
Then his skin shredded and the wolf leaped from where his body had been. James had never seen a werewolf change so fast before. He almost felt sorry for the pair of angels that were approaching—they would not die quickly.
“Abel—” James began.
The wolf butted into him.
James wasn’t prepared for it. He slipped backward off of the vertebrae. His stomach lifted into his throat as he fell through darkness, momentarily without gravity, rushing through dark nothing.
Impact.
An angel slammed into him, wrapping strong arms around his midsection. They spiraled through the air. His stomach lurched at the dizzying flip of Ba’al’s fiery mouths and the exaggerated length of the spine, glimpsing flashes of wing as the angel struggled—and failed—to gain altitude.
They slammed into the chin of the skull.
James kicked the angel away, trying to break free. The angel was still too disoriented to fight back. He slipped on the ice, pitched backward off his knees, and vanished into Ba’al’s open mouth.
The light of the fissure to Limbo flared like a volcano, searing James’s retinas.
He clutched the falchion as he returned to Elise. She was sitting against a ridge of bone, knees hugged to her chest, staring in horror at the portal.
“Are you okay?” he asked, pulling her to her feet.
Her wrist was slick under h
is fingers. Elise had pulled off one of her gloves, exposing the warlock runes and baring her skin to the brilliance of the gaean magic. Her skin was almost melting away. He couldn’t tell if the fluid smeared over his fingers was blood or sweat or just dissolved flesh.
Damn it.
James found her glove on the ground and shoved it over the fragile bones of her fingers.
“What’s happening to me?” she asked with wide, watery eyes.
“You’re sick,” he said, squinting through the haze to try to spot the remaining werewolves. Was Abel coming? Should he wait and hold the portal?
James couldn’t see the fight, but he could hear it. Judging by the echoing screams of angels, Abel was quickly getting his revenge, and he had help. But there was still at least one angel in the air, circling Ba’al’s skull. Now that James had been spotted, they would come for him.
And the portal hadn’t been meant to stay open this long. It was wavering, rippling, on the verge of collapse.
He couldn’t wait for Abel.
James kicked the duffel bag of ritual supplies into the portal and wrapped his arm around Elise’s waist. She didn’t try to fight against him now. “Hold your breath,” he said, because that was what she always said before ripping her friends across dimensions.
Instead of obeying, her eyes rolled into the back of her head. Her knees liquefied. She sagged in his grip.
James tightened his arm and leaped through the portal to Araboth, leaving the werewolves behind.
Nineteen
COCCYTUS VANISHED, AND for an eternity, the world didn’t exist at all. James fell through nothing. A graceful swan dive in zero gravity.
He didn’t strike the other end of the portal so much as sink into it, welcomed by invisible arms that pulled him gently back into reality.
And then he awoke and everything hurt.
His extremities burned at the sudden heat—not that the air was particularly warm, just that it was far warmer than Coccytus, and it hurt to acclimate. Something prickly was jabbing James in the cheek. He tried to swipe it away, but it just scratched at his hand, too.
