Oaths of Blood

by SM Reine

  Elise caught her wrist. “Don’t,” she said. “She doesn’t know what she’s doing.” Brianna didn’t fight when Elise gently pushed her away. The witch was still screaming hysterically, eyes rolled into the back of her head. “They bonded,” Elise said, showing Brianna’s sliced wrist to Rylie, and then flashing a matching scar on her own arm. “She’s Seth’s aspis. When he died…it broke her.”

  Elise could see that her explanation meant nothing to Rylie. Both women were equally hysterical, though in different ways; she would get no help from either of them.

  But the fissure was still open. In fact, it was widening, as if Brianna’s magic dump was only feeding into it and draining the color from the world. Elise stared into the depths of the fissure below. Through the smoke, she could see a massive demon floating past on the other side—a kibbeth, like a living Zeppelin.

  With a swift strike to the back of her skull, Elise knocked Brianna unconscious. The witch collapsed bonelessly on the ground beside Seth’s rigid body, instantly silent.

  It was too late. The damage had been done. The fissure was open wide, and there was no way to spare Earth from Hell now.

  “Drop your weapons and put your hands in the air!”

  Elise lifted her eyes to the top of the canyon on the opposite edge, where she had originally alighted with Rylie. In the distraction of Brianna’s crazed fervor and the widening fissure, she hadn’t noticed that the Union had come upon them. Dozens of men lined the edge of the canyon wearing full body armor, and they bristled with weapons. All of the guns were aimed at Elise.

  They were surrounded.

  The bullets—those wouldn’t be a problem. She was already processing the shot delivered by Seth’s weapon, and a few more hits would do nothing to her. But if Union kopides had arrived, then the equipment wouldn’t be far behind them. Equipment that would surely include lights and electrical charges, things that could actually hurt Elise.

  She spotted one man who wasn’t wearing full tactical gear at the center of them all. He was a squat man with a scarred face, clad in a flak jacket over business casual clothes.

  Detective Gomez.

  If he had been prepared to believe in Elise’s innocence before then, he wouldn’t now—not with Elise at the place where Hell spilled onto Earth, with bodies at her feet and a blood-stained altar at her back. They would electrocute her, drag her in front of federal court, make an example of her. And no matter how far she ran, she knew they would hunt her down for this.

  Elise looked down at Rylie.

  “Don’t let them have him,” Rylie whispered, barely loud enough for Elise to hear. She was half-collapsed on Seth’s body, still crying like her heart had been ripped out through her throat, blood smeared on her hands.

  Frustration, rage, grief—it was too much emotion for Elise to hold. She was going to break.

  “Get out of the way,” Elise said, picking up Seth’s pistol and jamming it in her belt.

  Rylie pressed her lips to Seth’s stone-blackened face. The sobs shook her harder than before.

  “Hands in the air,” ordered a man over the megaphone.

  Rylie wrenched herself away from Seth. She didn’t watch as Elise expanded, sinking into the shadows under the statue, spreading through the canyon, filling the places between the rocks that weren’t touched by Union lights or the flames of Hell.

  Elise looked at it all from above. She gazed at the growing fissure that bisected Nevada’s desert, the tanks rolling toward the statue, the destruction that used to be Las Vegas, and the sparks of distant light that indicated angels warring against demons on a mortal battleground.

  And at the center of it all, Rylie beside Seth, who Elise had killed with her own sword.

  It would have been easier to let herself vanish forever—never become corporeal again, never face the grief, or contemplate what she had done.

  But Elise gingerly picked up Seth’s body and took him to the only safe place that she knew.

  Epilogue

  Later, all that Rylie would remember was flying, the warmth of skin against hers, and the smell of buttered popcorn. That scent reminded her of long summer nights on the porch swing with her father, sharing popcorn between them, watching lightning bugs zip through the grass and laughing about silly, meaningless things. For some reason, Nash always smelled like those warm, happy memories. It was an angel thing, according to Summer.

  Rylie assumed that those sensations meant that Nash had somehow rescued her from that canyon after Elise had vanished with Seth’s body. But she didn’t actually remember how he had gotten her out of there. She had been staring at a lot of men with guns. And then, somehow, she had found herself on the edge of the werewolf sanctuary, falling at Nash’s feet in the mud and rotting leaves.

  She thought Nash had said something like, “Stay here, I’ll be right back,” but it was difficult to distinguish through the ringing in her skull.

  Seth is dead.

  He had been the one to hold her after her father’s heart attack and tell her that she would survive it. Rylie had never forgotten what Seth had told her after her father’s funeral. “Dying is as natural as being born, and all of us have to face it someday,” he had said. “Some sooner than others. It’s difficult to understand the meaning of it all. The question isn’t, ‘Why do we die?’ The correct question is, ‘Why do we live?’”

  At the time, it had made so much sense. Why do we live?

  But it wasn’t Rylie’s sick, aging father who had died this time. It was Seth. Young, strong, brilliant Seth, who had led the pack without ever becoming a wolf. He was the glue that bound everything together. The man that had never finished medical school, even though he spent his entire life wanting to save people.

  Rylie was on all fours in the mud with the towering trees watching her, and she knew she should probably stand, but she didn’t want to. She couldn’t think of a compelling reason why she should bother.

  Why do we die?

  Time passed, and people joined her. The angel had brought her mate.

  Abel pulled Rylie into his arms. He said things, asked her questions, shook her hard when she didn’t respond. She stared at him blankly, trying to read his lips. Are you okay? he was asking, and Where’s my brother?

  Rylie showed him her palms. They were covered in blood and ichor. Her fingers were shaking, and the tremors grew until she was shivering too hard to speak.

  Abel shook her again. He spoke; Nash replied. Something like, Seth was killed.

  “No,” Abel said. “No, he fucking wasn’t.” The words cut through Rylie’s haze like nothing else had.

  “Seth was killed,” Rylie whispered, and there was a note of finality to it.

  Horror dawned on Abel’s face. He released her and took a step back.

  “No,” he said again.

  But now that Rylie had said it, the truth settled into her bones.

  Seth was dead, and he wasn’t coming back.

  The Union knew how to treat a witch that had recently lost her kopis. They had the procedures down to an art—a speedy intubation to ensure she would continue breathing, a swift warding spell that prevented her from causing more magical damage, and then a saline drip to keep her hydrated through the long coma to come. Brianna Dimaria, the tiny sprite of a woman, was absolutely dwarfed by the number of tubes leading in and out of her body. The hospital bed at the Union facility seemed to consume her.

  James stepped out of the corner of the room. Because of all the wards canceling out magical noise in the wing for recovering aspides, it had been easy to slip into the Union hospital to see her undetected. Now that James was there, he regretted it. Warded or not, she looked like a black hole of magic to his mind’s eye. The same potential for power that had led him to choose her as his high priestess had made her a death trap after the bond snapped.

  Without his runes, James hadn’t been able to return to the Metaraon site in time to supervise Brianna’s spell. When he finally walked back—three long hours of
walking through snowing ash—the Union had already secured the perimeter a mile away from the canyon. But even at that distance, he had felt the gaping emptiness of magic that had been stripped away by Brianna’s breakdown. He would have been able to feel it from the other side of the world.

  And now this, seeing her comatose in bed…

  James sank into a chair against the wall. He stared at Brianna without really seeing her.

  The TV in the corner was turned to a news station. He didn’t need the noise to understand the pictures they displayed. They were showing dramatic footage of the battle between angels and demons within Las Vegas. Nobody seemed certain what the outcome of that fight had been—there were no human survivors to report back.

  And the battle was spreading, too. Demons emerged from the fissure at multiple points. Lists of afflicted cities scrolled down the screen: Tacoma, Miami, Los Angeles.

  Hell had arrived on Earth.

  He had thought that there was a chance that tearing open the walls enough to make a door to Eden might also open a fissure again, but he had believed it to be a small risk. Insignificant in comparison to what he stood to gain from the door opening. James had dismissed that danger, and he had completely failed to anticipate the rest of it. Seth’s death, Brianna’s reaction.

  The machines beeped softly as they breathed for her and monitored her sluggish heart. The bed inflated gently and sighed as it deflated, helping her blood circulate. If not for the Union’s swift detainment, she would be dead. As it stood, she might never wake up.

  James gazed at her impassive face and felt sick.

  “What have I done?” he whispered into the quiet room.

  Elise was home.

  The City of Dis loomed behind her. The Palace’s central tower had fallen years earlier, but they were constructing a new one—a tower far taller and more glorious than the black-spired monstrosity it was replacing. It was cut from the shining black glass of the mountains and decorated with bone. Scaffolds climbed its sides, but Elise was too distant to see the workers building and engraving.

  A kibbeth drifted beyond the tower, long legs swaying. Its semi-translucent body swirled with gases. If she were closer, she might have been able to hear the muffled cries of the demons trapped in its belly; at this distance, she heard nothing but wind whistling through the pits. Domesticated kibbeths were typically used as transportation across the wasteland outside Dis, but this one was a ferry between the city and the fissures above.

  Even as Hell leaked onto Earth, Earth was leaking onto Hell. A jagged gash marked the stormy, red sky of Dis like a wound in the darkness. Elise couldn’t see much in the gash through the smoke. But sometimes a wind would stir, and she would glimpse stars.

  The worlds were joined, and there was no way to close them.

  Already, the demons had begun building a bridge to the fissure, creating an easy footpath onto Earth. No human would be safe once they finished it.

  That would have to be Elise’s first order of business—destroying the bridges.

  But first things first.

  Elise turned back to the pit. She stood on the brink, toes hanging over the edge, and gazed down at the twisting fires. There were no crying damned in this pit. Only hot fire, too hot for even cursed souls to survive in. The stink of rotting eggs poured out with the smoke. It smelled wonderful and familiar, like wrapping herself in a warm blanket.

  One step forward, and she could plummet into endless fire.

  Elise didn’t take the step.

  She drew her sword and weighed it in her hands. It felt so much heavier than usual, as if all the strength had been sapped from her muscles. The familiar marks on the blade gleamed.

  The falchion had been a present from her father, now dead. She had carved the marks on its blade herself. Over the years, she had sharpened it, shaped the blade to perfection. It had become infected with the ichor at the same time that Elise had become a demon.

  Elise and the falchion shared a history. It was as dear to her as she imagined family would have been, had she any family that she truly loved.

  She wound her arm back, then hurled the sword into the pit.

  It spun through the air, flipped end over end, and diminished to a tiny point of black against the fire. She might have been imagining it, but she thought she felt the moment that flames consumed her falchion like a twinge in her heart.

  Turning, Elise faced Dis, hair whipped back by a wind that smelled faintly of sagebrush and Earth soil. She gazed up at the new tower of the Palace and the high walls she would have to climb to get there. Seth’s pistol was still tucked in the back of her belt, heavy and cold against her skin.

  There were millions of demons within the city that were eager for a leader—someone to take them to Earth and lay claim to the lands they believed that they should have possessed. Many of them remembered the last war against angels. They hungered for retribution and would follow the first creature brave and stupid enough to give it to them.

  Many demons would try to guide that fury onto Earth. But Elise had a better idea.

  If the demons wanted a Father, she would give them a Father.

  Dear reader,

  Thanks for joining me for yet another story. The next book, Ruled by Steel, will be available in December 2013.

  If you’d like to know when Ruled by Steel comes out, visit my website to sign up for my new release email alerts. I hope you’ll also leave a review with your thoughts on the site where you bought the book—this was a really difficult book to write, and I’d love to hear what you think.

  Your ongoing support means the world to me. Thanks so much.

  Happy reading!

  Sara (SM Reine)

  http://authorsmreine.com/

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