Oaths of Blood

by SM Reine

The kitchen. The rest of the marks were in the kitchen.

  “Why do you think that demonic possession was involved in this, Detective?” Elise asked, stepping around the blood, ignoring the assholes in the living room. At some point, she had dirtied the plastic covering her loafers; her first two steps left brown tracks.

  “It was the staff for the cocktail party,” Gomez said. “They attacked out of nowhere. They had inhuman strength. Did most of the killing using eating utensils. Butter knives, a fork.”

  There was a bloodstained spoon on the floor next to the dining room doorway, encircled by tape and marked by a yellow tag. Elise could repurpose most things into a weapon, but she would have gone for a dozen other things in the room to kill before a spoon: the silver candlesticks, the ceramic vase, even the bar stool with its sturdy wooden legs. A spoon required creativity and determination. Worse, it required being comfortable with taking one’s time.

  She kneeled beside the father’s blood-soaked body. Like the mother, his arteries had been ripped apart to provide paint for the runes. He was also missing an eyeball. It explained the spoon.

  “Do you smell that?” Anthony asked. “The sulfur?”

  Elise sniffed. She couldn’t make out any sulfur, but that was probably because she had spent her day drifting in Hell, where the air was rich with brimstone.

  “Possession often smells like brimstone,” Elise said.

  He looked troubled. “Yeah. I guess.”

  The police may not have moved any of the victims, but someone had; there were obvious trails of blood leading from the places that the family and their guests had been killed to their current locations. The adults were spread out like spokes of a wheel, aligned with the cardinal directions. The dead son, perhaps seven years old, was crumpled under the table, forgotten.

  The bodies weren’t nearly as interesting as the runes surrounding them. They were scrawled even more messily than on the stairs, and seemed to have burned around the edges—as though drawing the symbols had set the walls on fire.

  Her gaze tracked from the bodies to the runes, which formed a perfect circle around the dining room. A circle that she had already stepped into.

  Everything clicked into place.

  Shit. I never should have let Anthony come here.

  A demon had somehow gained access to James’s newest innovations in magic. He or she was using those runes to open doors to Hell. The people that attacked hadn’t been possessed, because they had never been human in the first place; it wasn’t the Bloomfields’s carelessness that had killed them, but a demon posing as a waiter.

  The whole house had been turned into a doorway to Hell, which still stood open, vibrating with infernal energy. That part, the police would already know. The Union had told them.

  Just like the Union had told them that Elise wouldn’t be able to escape the wards in the kitchen.

  “I can already tell you what this is, Detective Gomez,” she said, pacing along the inside perimeter of the runes. She could feel her shoulder brushing against a hard wall of magic, stinging against her skin. “In fact, I could have told you what this is from the pictures. I didn’t need to come to the location.”

  Gomez rubbed a knuckle over his bushy eyebrows. He was sweating. The smell of his fear would have been intoxicating if not for what it meant. “We weren’t sure what you’d need to know. Better to see the intact scene. We thought maybe there’d be some kind of spirit left in the house, something that would need to be—”

  “When are they getting here?” she asked.

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  “Elise?” Anthony asked. He hadn’t caught on yet.

  Elise shut her eyes, stretching out her other senses beyond the walls of the house. The buzzing of minds filled with white noise continued on the street. There were kopides within the Golden Vine Villas aside from the one so-called detective.

  The blood she had smelled upon arrival hadn’t been from the crime scene. It had been the freshly spilled blood of witches casting a spell outside the house. Most witches used herbs, crystals, the occasional mouse. To require an actual blood sacrifice meant that it would be powerful.

  Maybe powerful enough to contain a demon like Elise.

  She had walked right into it.

  “This is a trap,” she told Anthony.

  That was when the windows shattered, the floodlights outside slammed to life, and a dozen men with submachine guns entered the dining room.

  The light scalded her, punching through her body. It was like being thrown into a pit of magma. Elise hit her knees, trying to shelter in the shadow behind the table. Her hand landed on the little dead boy. His skin was tacky and cold.

  Another light turned on, and another, until there were no shadows in the dining room.

  Nowhere to shelter. Nowhere to hide.

  A voice boomed over a megaphone, making the fragments of glass shiver. “Elise Kavanagh, pseudonymously known as the Godslayer, you are hereby under arrest for the murder of Senator Peterson. Surrender immediately or you will be executed.”

  Two

  Pennsylvania — September 2013

  It was a hot night for hunting. Between the guns, ammunition, and other supplies, Seth Wilder was schlepping about thirty pounds in gear. It had to be even harder for Abram; at his mother’s insistence, he was also wearing a metal-plated vest under his jacket.

  Seth was more minimalistic. Black tank top, black jeans, black gun. He wore a loose shirt unbuttoned over his shoulder rig. It didn’t conceal his weapon well, but if they got stopped by the police, they would be in deep shit anyway.

  There was no way to make it look like they weren’t hunting a werewolf.

  He crouched behind a car parked across from a bar, and Abram took position beside him. He felt the presence of a werewolf in his chest as surely as he could feel the beating of his own heart. The werewolf had gone inside the bar about an hour earlier. Now it was just a matter of waiting for it to emerge.

  This was the third werewolf that they’d been forced to put down that year. The population was supposed to be dwindling, but Seth had never seen a year with so many werewolf murders before. Most new werewolves could be redeemed—he had recruited several for the pack. But these ones were far beyond anyone’s help. Even his.

  The doors of the bar opened, and people began to pour onto the street.

  “Watch,” Seth said, pointing at his eyes, and then at the bar across the street. “Tell me which one is our guy.”

  While Abram watched the bar, Seth watched Abram, and he tried for the thousandth time to wrap his mind around the idea that this was his nephew—a man his age, but taller, and a fellow kopis. They didn’t look very much alike. Abram had a white guy’s nose, Rylie’s eyes, and the Wilder family lips. His skin was a few shades darker than Rylie’s, but he probably could have passed for white if he dressed for it.

  Abram didn’t seem to care about passing as any race, black or white. All he cared about was the hunt. He had the laser-sharp focus of a hunter and a no-bullshit grip on Abel’s handgun that made it clear he was ready to shoot.

  His concentration made him easy companionship, since he didn’t like idle chat, and he didn’t ask a lot of questions. Abram embodied “strong and silent.”

  If Seth had been a werewolf, he would have found Abram terrifying. Hell, even as a fellow hunter, Seth was a little intimidated.

  His nephew. Unbelievable.

  With his free hand, Abram pointed. “That’s the werewolf.”

  Seth followed his finger to a group leaving the bar. Three white women in tiny skirts and precarious heels. Two bros with muscle tees and spray tans. And one other woman behind them who wasn’t dressed for clubbing—or for being in public, for that matter. She wore sweat pants and a baggy t-shirt without shoes.

  Abram was right. They hadn’t been hunting a guy after all.

  She followed the group down the street, scrubbing at her face as her shoulders jerked. It had been years since
Seth saw symptoms that advanced.

  “Why is she twitching?” Abram asked.

  “Well,” he said, swallowing hard, “she probably doesn’t know what getting bitten has done to her. She probably wasn’t avoiding silver the way she should have been. Maybe she has a silver alloy wedding ring, earrings, or body jewelry, and she didn’t think to remove it when it started to itch. She’s been exposed too long. It’s made her…sick.”

  “Can we take her back to the pack? Can Rylie fix her?” Abram asked.

  Rylie was Abram’s mother, and the Alpha of the werewolves. She had an ability that only one other werewolf possessed: the ability to control the transformations of others of her kind. But she couldn’t heal a brain rotted by silver poisoning, nor could she strip the sins of this woman’s past.

  The werewolf that Seth and Abram hunted that night was a mass murderer. She had killed a librarian who had been jogging at three in the morning, and then the police officers who had tried to stop her.

  The Union had already started investigating her. Seth had seen their black SUVs crawling the streets at night, forming deadly caravans under the light of the moon. If the killings didn’t stop, then the Union was going to redouble its search efforts for werewolves.

  They had to stop her before the Union stumbled on the pack while looking for a murderer.

  “This one can’t be saved,” Seth said, easing the safety off his gun.

  Their quarry was still following the group, who were waiting for a bus. One of the spray-tanned men stepped away to talk on his cell phone and smoke a cigarette.

  The werewolf called to him. “Help me,” she said.

  “Shit,” Seth breathed.

  He and Abram jogged across the street. As they drew closer, Seth could make out their voices over the thudding bass from the nearby bar. “You all right?” the man asked. “Can I take you to a hospital or something?”

  “I don’t know,” she said, dropping to her knees in front of him. “I’m so hungry. I’m just—I need food, I’m thirsty, and I don’t—”

  “It’s okay, I’ve got you,” he said, helping her to her feet again. Nice guy. Without intervention, he would probably hook her up with a hot meal and a place to sleep for the night, then wake up with teeth in his throat.

  “Aunt Sandy! There you are,” Seth called, running over to them with Abram at his back. It was dark enough that he didn’t need to put away his gun. He held it behind his back. “I’ve been looking everywhere for you.”

  She tried to focus her teary eyes on Abram as he took her arm. “Sandy? Who’s Sandy? Who are you?”

  “Thanks, man,” Seth told the tanned guy. Up close, Seth could see the crust of gel in his hair and the pale circles around his eyes where he had been wearing the tanning goggles. “We’ll take it from here.”

  “Is she okay?” he asked.

  “Not really,” Seth said. He forced himself to smile apologetically. “She’s off her meds.”

  A look of understanding crossed his face. “Oh, man. That sucks, dude. Need help getting her home?”

  “We’re good,” Seth said.

  The werewolf was too confused to argue with him. He and Abram walked her two streets down before ducking into the privacy of an alleyway. Seth felt heavier with every step he took toward that dark corner of the city, weighed down by the thought of murdered librarians and cops. He was all too aware of the silver bullets in his gun, and what he was going to need to do with them.

  Two big bad men dragging a woman to her death. It was wrong. Just fucking wrong.

  Abram looked at Seth over the woman’s head. He was obviously thinking the same thing.

  “Rylie could at least try,” Abram said.

  “Try what? Who are you?” the woman asked, struggling weakly. Her heart wasn’t in it. She could have thrown both of them through the brick wall if it was.

  Seth sat her down on a stack of pallets in the shadow between two buildings.

  “Flashlight,” he said, and Abram dropped a penlight in his hand. He thumbed the woman’s eyes back and shone the light in them. She flinched away, but not before he saw her irises. They were bright gold. The sclera was veined with red, like she hadn’t slept since becoming a werewolf.

  Seth’s mother, Eleanor, had taught him to hunt werewolves, and he knew what she would have told him to do about this woman. Eleanor would have said, “Take the werewolf home, chain her up, wait for her to change. Then shoot her in the skull.” One shot between the eyes with a silver bullet—bang—and this werewolf would be dead.

  His mom had always told him that the spirit of the wolf devoured the human’s soul and left nothing but monster behind. If you shot a monster, it wasn’t murder. Seth had done it a half dozen times before. No big deal.

  But that had been before Seth had fallen in love with a werewolf.

  “Should we do it now?” Abram asked.

  The woman shuddered, drawing her knees to her chest. “Do what? Do I know you?”

  God, she was addled. She probably didn’t even remember killing.

  Just shoot her. Put her out of her misery. Just do it.

  But when Seth looked down at this murderer, this silver-enraged monster, all he saw was a shaking woman no more threatening than any other vagrant off the street. Someone who didn’t need death, but help.

  “Let’s take her to the pack,” he said, feeling exhausted and heavy. “Maybe Rylie can help.”

  Seth drove into the mountains with the Chevelle’s windows rolled down, letting the summer wind beat through the car. He cranked up the AC/DC tape so that it blasted louder than the roaring air and dangled one arm out the window.

  “Are you comfortable?” Abram asked, turned in his seat so that he could address the passenger sitting behind them.

  Katja visibly jerked at being spoken to, like human voices startled her. Seth watched in the rearview mirror as she rubbed the side of her face with her knuckles. “I’m fine,” she said. “This car. I like it. It’s…nice.”

  Abram nodded gravely. “We’re almost there. Do you need anything?”

  “No,” Katja said. Her shoulders jerked. Her lips twitched. “No.”

  God, this was insane. Taking a silver-poisoned werewolf back to the pack? The idea sounded worse by the second.

  But there was no turning back now. They were less than an hour from the sanctuary. Abram had already warned his sister that they were coming. Even if he’d had the balls to do it, Seth couldn’t exactly shoot Katja now.

  He took an exit off the freeway that plunged into a dark valley, weaving between broad, mossy tree trunks that never saw sunlight. The air in the valley was cold and humid. A river ran alongside the road, frothy with winter melt.

  This was meant to be home—at least, as close to home as Seth got anymore. Rylie had bought all of this land. More than two thousand acres. But while the pack began settling into their sanctuary, marking trees and digging holes and claiming their favorite hideouts, Seth felt more and more unsettled. He didn’t belong in this dark, mountainous place of trees and ice.

  Seth could feel Abram watching him from the passenger’s seat.

  “This is the right thing to do,” Abram said, quietly enough that Katja wouldn’t be able to hear him. That wasn’t what Seth had been thinking about, but the reminder snapped him out of his morose thoughts into the immediate moment.

  “Yeah, I know,” he said, flipping down the rearview mirror to glance at Katja. She was blinking slowly, taking shallow breaths. Either about to fall asleep or pass out.

  Seth slowed as the road grew steeper. The valley opened into a meadow, where the knee-high grass was dotted with golden flowers and bees buzzed through the air. The familiar pinging of dirt against the Chevelle’s undercarriage soothed his nerves a little. It meant they were back in the safe zone.

  They reached the first “No Trespassing” sign where the pavement turned into a dirt road. Seth slowed, but didn’t stop.

  A lot of things had changed with the werewolf pack in th
e last few months. Rylie had come into her trust fund—the kind of money that Seth couldn’t begin to wrap his mind around—and she had used that money to purchase a huge swath of forest and build a collection of cottages for the pack at the middle of it. Eventually, she hoped to turn it into an entire village, complete with schools and shops. It would become a place that werewolves could be safe and happy for generations.

  All of that was great. But there were a few changes that Seth wasn’t quite so sure about.

  To be more precise, he wasn’t sure if he thought that the newest member of the pack was great…especially since he wasn’t a werewolf at all.

  When they arrived at the fence marking the boundary of pack territory, the newest pack member greeted them in front of the gate. He was a tall, imposing man who wore a business suit without the jacket. Seth couldn’t advance the Chevelle without running Nashriel Adamson over, so he didn’t attempt it. Not because it would have pissed off half of the pack, who had come to regard Nash as one of their own, but because Seth was pretty sure it would have destroyed the Chevelle.

  “Great,” Abram said. “Just who I wanted to see.” Seth couldn’t tell if he was being sarcastic. Abram was always straight-faced, whether he was serious or joking.

  Their one-person welcoming committee looked like a normal man, if Seth considered someone who looked like an ancient Roman statue to be “normal.” But there was nothing normal about Nash. Even when he didn’t reveal his true form, being within a few feet of him made Seth’s head ache. He resonated with inhuman power.

  Rolling down the window, Seth leaned out to address him. “What’s wrong?”

  “Summer said that you’re bringing company,” Nash said. “I needed to make sure that she’s safe.”

  Safe? Of course Katja wasn’t safe. She was wasting away from silver poisoning, for God’s sake. But Seth didn’t say that, not with the woman listening in the backseat. “Everything’s under control,” he said, which was as close to the truth as he could get.

  Nash bent over to look in the backseat. His nostrils flared, and his pale blue eyes sparked with fire. “I’ll warn the Alpha that you’re coming.”