Oaths of Blood

by SM Reine

  “How should I contact you if I need help?” Elise asked.

  James extended a business card to her. It was plain white, with ten digits in black lettering on it and nothing else. It was a phone number she didn’t recognize. “Call me.”

  “Does this have to do with Eden?”

  He lifted a hand as if to touch her cheek, and then dropped it. He sighed. “Doesn’t everything?”

  That wasn’t a surprise. She fired off the next question immediately, hoping that he’d answer it without thinking. “Are you trying to set me up for Senator Peterson’s murder?”

  Surprise flashed over his features. “What?”

  Damn. So much for that. “The Union’s trying to arrest me. They think they have evidence that I killed him.”

  “Help me fix my problems, and I’ll see what I can do about yours. I know people among the Union.” Of course he did. “I’ll ask questions and contact you again once I have more information.”

  James bent, brushing ghostly lips over her forehead. She felt a jolt of magic and jerked back.

  “I don’t want your help,” she said.

  But James had disappeared, and she was alone with the bodies and blood.

  When he was sleeping, James almost didn’t look like a total bastard.

  Brianna had assumed that the White Ash Coven’s new warehouse-loving branch would have some kind of special housing, the same way that they did back in Colorado. She was more than a little surprised when night fell and everyone started hunkering down in sleeping bags among the crates and makeshift ritual space.

  James, though, of course James wasn’t sleeping on the floor. He was sleeping on the futon in his special high priest office, one arm flung over his head, the other hand resting on his belly, feet hanging over the end of the mattress. His shirt was rucked up to reveal the soft white hair between his navel and belt. Guess he didn’t consider recoloring his body hair to be high glamor priority.

  Interestingly, there were brown geometric patterns peeking out from under his shirt. She never would have pegged him for the tattoo type.

  Her gaze trailed from the scruff of beard to the long-sleeved t-shirt stretched tight over his shoulders, down his bicep to the gloved fingers curled on his abs.

  She stood over him with a mug of tea cupped between her hands, the string dangling over her knuckles, feeling like a total creeper and yet utterly unrepentant. James had ruined her life at least, like, three different times before coming back for a fourth round. He was practically begging for her to screw with him.

  James breathed out a long sigh, head rolling to the side. Brianna tensed, but he didn’t wake up.

  If she tilted her head the right way, she could see a halo of magic limning his flesh. Some kind of sleep spell? It would explain the wards he had put on his office door. If he planned to be going under for a long time, of course he’d want to protect himself from intruders.

  Too bad for him, Brianna was almost as good at breaking spells as she was at identifying werewolves.

  Brianna set her teacup down and flexed her fingers.

  She wanted to know what was under those gloves. It was cold, sure—cold enough that her nipples could have cut through a bank vault’s door—but she had seen him wearing them on warm days, too, and every day in between. If he was under a sleep spell, then she could probably peel one of those gloves off without disturbing him, just for a quick peek.

  “No,” she whispered to herself. “Don’t think about it. Bad idea.”

  But she was thinking about it, and Brianna’s hands were under her control as much as her sense of adventure.

  She bent over him, hooking a fingertip under the wrist of his glove. His skin was surprisingly cold.

  James didn’t move, but the colors of magic flashing around him intensified.

  Brianna loosened the bottom edge of the glove then tugged on the cloth at the thumb and the tip of the pinkie.

  His palm was bared. She tilted it to catch the light.

  There was a black mark in the middle of his hand. It didn’t look quite like a tattoo. The marks seemed indented , more like it was a brand. And the mark itself wasn’t the weirdest part. It was the fact that the color of the skin on his palm was a couple shades lighter than the rest of his hand, and it looked like there was stitching around the pads of his fingers.

  Brianna’s stomach turned.

  Had he sewn someone else’s skin to his hand?

  She had an instant of warning—the magic swirling around him cut off—and then his hand clamped down on her wrist, and James jerked Brianna off of her feet.

  Her back hit the concrete floor with James’s weight on top of her. His arm pressed into her throat.

  “Elise?” he hissed, eyes bright but unseeing.

  “Brianna,” she squeezed out. She tried to force his arm off of her, but damn, that guy was strong. She decided in that moment to add “never get in a fistfight with James Faulkner” to her to-do list, assuming that he didn’t choke her to death in his sleepy confusion.

  His eyes focused on her. “Oh,” James said, and he sat back on his heels. The weight lifted from her throat. Brianna gasped, clutching at her neck as he assessed his surroundings, including the fact that her mug of tea was on the table, and his glove was halfway off. James didn’t need to be a genius to realize what was happening. She burned with embarrassment.

  “I believe my door was locked,” he said.

  Brianna gave him her multipurpose smile. “Oops?”

  James got to his feet, rubbing a hand through his sleep-tousled hair. “Impressive. You broke my wards.”

  There didn’t seem to be much of a point in trying to pretend she hadn’t. “What kind of spell was that?” she asked. “The thing that you were doing while you slept.”

  “I told you that I’ve been scrying.” He immediately changed subjects. “Do you know the time?”

  “Uh…three in the morning.”

  “Is your car packed?” James asked.

  “Well, yeah, but why?”

  He dressed quickly, donning a peacoat and scarf. “You and I are running late to catch our flight. Quickly now, there’s a back door to the left of the office. We don’t want to wake the rest of the coven.”

  They were bailing out on the White Ash Coven?

  Wait, no, it was better than that: James Faulkner, he of the stupidly powerful magic, wanted to run off with Brianna to get up to trouble. Excitement thrilled through her stomach. “Where are we going?” Brianna asked. She drained her tea.

  The back door opened. Brogan was waiting on the other side—he had already known that James had plans, and was ready to escort them.

  “We’re going to Las Vegas,” James said.

  Seven

  The motel was swarming with black SUVs when Elise returned. Men with battering rams were opening the rooms one by one as others blocked off the street with orange cones, redirecting traffic away from the scene of the conflict. “Fuck me,” she muttered, watching from the roof of a gas station across the street. She lit a cigarette and took a long drag. It wasn’t enough to quell her annoyance. An entire fucking carton of cigarettes wouldn’t have helped.

  The Union had already gone into the room Elise shared with Anthony. Its door stood ajar, but she was too far away to tell if they had seized anything. She definitely didn’t see Anthony around, but that didn’t mean he wasn’t cuffed in a car somewhere, or already removed from the scene.

  A trio of crack whores were dragged from another room and kicked into a ring of spotlights. Two of them looked confused. The third began shrieking the instant that the light touched her flesh.

  Elise tensed, preparing to jump over and save her, but a man in a uniform had already slammed his booted heel into her head. He pinned her down as he leveled a gun at her gut and fired. A hollow pop echoed over the street.

  Her screams intensified. Electricity arced over her sallow flesh.

  Electrically charged rounds—that was new.

  “Fuck, fu
ck, fuck.” Elise paced along the edge of the roof, trailed by cigarette smoke. The Union had arrived at the motel prepared to arrest her, judging by the lights and ammunition, and they obviously hadn’t intended on giving her an opportunity to slip away this time.

  If Anthony was still around, she couldn’t stage a rescue attempt on her own.

  A helicopter beat out a rhythm overhead, trailing a spotlight along the nearby roads. She waited until it passed before leaping to the parking lot behind the gas station.

  “Shit, Lara, you should see this,” said a man at gas pump number three, speaking into a cell phone as he worked the nozzle. “There’s a whole fuckin’ fleet of those men in black here. Think it’s gotta do with the senator?”

  Elise plucked the phone out of his hand.

  “Thanks,” she said, ignoring his protests. She lifted it to her ear as she walked away. “Lara? Hi. I’m taking this phone. He’ll have to call you back.”

  She hung up on Lara’s spluttering voice.

  Elise walked briskly toward the lights of the Strip without glancing behind her, even though she heard more gunfire echoing off the walls of the buildings. A homeless woman gasped from behind the bus shelter. The Union had shot another demon or two. Not Elise’s problem.

  Tapping out the only phone number that she had memorized, Elise stopped on the street corner. Two more black SUVs were approaching from Paradise Way. She turned, ducking her head and letting her hair fall over her face as she listened to the phone ring.

  The line clicked.

  “Has Anthony checked in with you?” Elise asked without prelude.

  McIntyre’s gruff voice responded. “No. Problem?”

  “Maybe. Union hit the motel.”

  “Fucking hell,” he said with heat.

  She agreed completely. “Are you sure he didn’t leave a message on one of your machines?”

  “Just checked all the drops a minute ago.”

  “Fucking hell” was right. If he hadn’t checked in, then Anthony was most likely dead or arrested. There was a small chance that he was on the run, but she wasn’t sure that she liked the idea of Anthony fleeing from the Union with his injuries much better than the alternative. Vegas wasn’t as bad as Reno—not yet—but there were still more demons native to its streets than humans.

  “We don’t have time for this,” Elise said, glancing through the sheet of her hair at the passing headlights of the SUVs. “Did you see the murder in Monterey?”

  “Already got the footage. Bad shit, Elise.”

  “Was there a recording of the demon?”

  “No,” McIntyre said. “Whenever it entered the frame, it blew the chips on the cameras.”

  The Union had moved on. Elise didn’t wait for the stoplight to change—she jogged into traffic, darting behind a car and pausing on the median to keep from getting hit. “The demon’s going to attack again, somewhere south of Monterey, possibly Los Angeles. A gateway to Hell will open. There should be a surge of infernal energy shortly beforehand, and I need you to be watching for it.”

  Elise had to give credit to McIntyre—he may have been getting old and fat for a kopis, but he wasn’t remotely bothered by the pronouncement that Hell was bleeding onto Earth. “We don’t have the equipment for that,” he said. “Union’s watching the same thing?”

  “Yes.”

  “Then I’ll watch where they’re watching. You coming back here?”

  She broke onto the Strip near the casino that used to be Treasure Island. The lights made her skin prickle. She jerked her jacket closed around her neck and stuffed her free hand in her pocket so that nobody would see her skin turn semi-transparent. Even though Vegas was overrun by demons—some refugees from Reno, others simply born and bred in the undercity below the sewers—the number of tourists hadn’t waned. It was Saturday night, and the streets were packed.

  “I’m going down to see if Anthony’s hiding out,” Elise said.

  McIntyre gave a low whistle. “Visiting the demons?”

  “Not a lot of options,” Elise said. “It’s the only place the Union wouldn’t follow Anthony.”

  Music blasted around her as she jogged toward the Mirage, ignoring the street show on the pirate ship and the crowd that had gathered to watch. When she had moved to Las Vegas a year earlier, a full half of the female dancers had been succubi. Now, almost all of the cast members were half-breed Gray or hellborn. They cast a spell over lesser mortals with their movement and song.

  Elise was a lot more powerful than the performers were; she wasn’t worried about being drawn in by their energies. She was more worried about hurting the humans that were watching them. Their entire bodies pulsed with lust and adrenaline, hearts pounding as they poured pheromones into the hot September air.

  She moved past them quickly enough, but they weren’t the only ones that smelled like food. Vegas was filled with prey. And the sheep delivered themselves to the slaughter.

  McIntyre was still on the line, but he had put Elise on speakerphone. She could hear echoing tapping sounds as he worked at his computer.

  “I’ll hang on to this phone,” she said. “Text me if Anthony reaches you first. I’ll try to surface before sundown.”

  “How long do you think we have until the next attack?”

  From the sounds of it, James was pretty confident that they would be occurring every day. Elise pulled a face. “Grab some Red Bulls. You’re not going to bed for a while.”

  “Got it.”

  He hung up, and Elise dropped the phone into the pocket of her leather jacket.

  A ring of street vendors had set up shop between two casinos, hawking candles and shirts for strip clubs and silver jewelry. They looked like humans, but not one of them looked at Elise twice as she pushed past a booth selling incense and decorative rugs.

  There were a dozen entrances into the infernal undercity, and this one was the closest to her current position: an open drainage pipe that was filled with impenetrable shadow. It was unguarded. The demons weren’t worried about being discovered. In fact, they relied on confused humans stumbling onto their streets.

  But there was a shrunken grotesque crouched by the side of a pipe, eyes bulging and ash-gray skin oily with sweat. It was skeletal, frail. It grinned at Elise when she passed.

  “Vohach nati?” it asked, speaking the infernal tongue. Its brittle fingers flew as it whittled at a piece of sagebrush bark with one claw.

  “No,” Elise said. “I’m not eating tonight.”

  Then she slipped into the pipe and left the human world behind her.

  All of the major cities in the western United States had demons living underneath them—sometimes in abandoned mines, or in vast systems of tunnels that the demons had carved out as living spaces.

  Las Vegas was unusual in that it had two different cities beneath its streets. The first was in the massive sewer system, which the casinos had built to redirect rainwater during the occasional desert storm. Meth-addicted humans that had made those sewers their home, sharing space with Gray strippers that couldn’t make rent on the surface and the nightmares that were too thin-fleshed to pass for mortal.

  Every time it rained, the sewers flooded. Any inhabitant that didn’t scramble to an exit fast enough drowned. The gamblers above would get to enjoy their craps and twenty-one uninterrupted while the forgotten impoverished died beneath their feet.

  Different people lived there every time Elise visited.

  It wasn’t safe—not exactly—but the Union seldom visited the sewers. The inhabitants weren’t a threat to anyone but themselves.

  That first city, the one hidden in concrete canals, was where Elise and Anthony had arranged to meet in an emergency. Should they become separated without a way to contact one another, they would reconvene underneath the juncture of Fremont and Las Vegas Boulevard—a juncture that Elise knew to be safe enough for Anthony to shelter, since she routinely killed all of the demons that lurked there.

  The second city was deeper still with
in the earth: the Warrens, a place of empty mine shafts and sulfur pits and sunken graves. The Union didn’t go there, and neither did Elise.

  If Anthony was stupid enough to hide down there, he was already dead.

  The heels of her boots rang out sharply on concrete as she walked toward Fremont, the sound echoing against the low, sloping ceilings. The trickle of effluence at the bottom of the sewers stunk of rot; Elise walked along the sides to keep from soiling her knee-high boots. She had already soaked herself in blood. She didn’t need to add shit to the mix.

  “Looking for something?” asked a bundle of cloth against the wall. Elise could barely make out the pale circle of an incubus’s face among the dreadlocks.

  Elise ignored him and moved on. He wasn’t the last to call to her. Murmuring voices lifted from the shadows as she passed the various tunnel junctures, shifting to reveal faces and limbs in the darkness. All of the demons pinged at her senses. It had been months since the last decent rain; the population seemed to have grown into the hundreds again.

  They all watched, but none of them approached. They knew better.

  She found the first of the graffiti on the wall at the end of the tunnel. Someone had spray-painted a huge black X, each arm five feet long, with short slashes through the legs.

  She had seen that X all over Vegas lately—sprayed on alleys and sidewalks, on bathroom walls and the dividers surrounding casino parking lots. But she had never seen it so prominently displayed. She had assumed it was a human gang sign. Demons tended to prefer displaying their allegiances on their bodies, not their territory.

  But it didn’t look like a gang sign. No, with the melted stubs of candles ringing the ground in front of it and the chicken bones scattered between them, it looked more like an altar.

  Hesitating in front of it, Elise tilted her head to study the X. What could it mean? It could have been an initial, the numeral ten, or a representation of Christ’s name—maybe another cult related to the Apple, which would be exactly what she fucking needed to deal with on top of everything else.