by S. M. Reine
Elise rammed the point of the falchion into the librarian’s desk, spearing the center of a paper. The two witches working on decrypting Onoskelis’s books, Aniruddha and Isaiah, were accustomed to Elise’s temper—they only flinched and leaned back in their chairs.
Lincoln wasn’t used to her, and she watched his adrenaline spike like TNT exploding in his skull. He put a hand on his gun but didn’t draw.
She pointed at the sword. “What the fuck is this, Lincoln?”
“What are you talking about?” he asked.
“Aniruddha. Isaiah. Leave.”
Isaiah grabbed the other witch’s sleeve and hauled him out of the Great Library. The door echoed when it slammed behind them.
Lincoln remained on his side of the desk, and Elise on hers. She glared at him, waiting for him to explain, and he stared back with the look of a man who had been cornered by a tiger escaped from the zoo.
“I found this in my bedroom,” Elise finally said.
“Isn’t that…” He took his hat off and squinted at the falchion. “That’s your sword, isn’t it?”
“It used to be. But I got rid of it. There is no way that it could have returned to me unless someone put it there.” Elise sidestepped, edging around the chair. Lincoln moved at the same time, keeping the desk between them, hand still on his gun.
“What makes you think it was be me?”
“Because I tossed this sword into a flaming chasm in the wastelands while you were still possessed by a nightmare. It somehow reappeared on Earth after you were exorcised. Now it’s come back to Hell at the same time that you did.”
Redness climbed up his neck and jaw, flushing his cheeks. “You don’t think I’m still possessed.” His hands pulsed bright orange as though filled with fire.
“I don’t know what to think,” Elise said. But after a beat, she added, “No. I don’t think you’re possessed. I don’t feel any of that inside of you, and you’re not demonstrating the signs.”
“I’m not planting swords in your rooms.”
She shook the paper at him. “What about this list? Are these more missing people?”
“How would I know? Calm your tits, woman. You’re acting insane.”
Calm your tits?
Elise phased across the library before Lincoln could run, shoving him against an empty desk. He twisted free. Swung a fist at her. She caught his wrist and used it as leverage to bend his elbow the wrong way—not far enough to break, but enough to make him pay attention.
She shoved the paper into his chest.
“Read the list,” Elise said.
“I told you, I didn’t put it there!”
“Read it.”
She allowed him to shove her away. He snatched the paper out of her hand. “Damn it, Elise. I came down here to help. What’s wrong with you?”
She clenched her jaw and waited.
Without Elise taking up the other end of the argument, Lincoln reluctantly scanned the page, rubbing a hand over his jaw. Coarse blond hair was beginning to grow around his mouth.
She watched as the muscles in his face went slack and his mind whited out with shock.
“Tell me,” Elise said.
He shook his head. “I don’t know.”
“You do know. I can tell.” She could also tell that he hadn’t seen the list before—he was much too surprised when he read it.
“The thing is…I do recognize these names,” Lincoln said with no small hint of reluctance. “These folks are from Two Rivers.”
“Two Rivers?”
“Small town down in Georgia.” He paused, considering what he said. “Well, guess it’s up there, now.” He pointed toward the sky. “Clayton Gregg…he’s the mayor. Stuck around, decided to go down with the ship after the fissure opened. The name underneath is his wife’s. Lisa Gregg.”
Elise’s fist crumpled the edge of the paper. “When were you in Two Rivers?”
“Not even a month ago,” Lincoln said.
Had they gone missing since then? And what did the people of Two Rivers have to do with her falchion?
Easy way to find out.
Elise phased and reformed into her corporeal body, setting Lincoln beside her. He hit the ground on hands and knees. Vomit splattered on the pavement.
She studied the surrounding street as he emptied his stomach, polite enough not to watch him do what most mortals did when being carried between dimensions.
Two Rivers, Georgia was a ghost town, but it looked nothing like the other ghost towns that Elise had seen in post-Breaking America. The downtown district was old and preserved. Lots of antique shops, a few restaurants, not a lot of broken windows. It was far enough from the fissure that the trees and grass were still alive.
Why is it empty?
Lincoln sat back on his heels, wiping his mouth clean. “Gone.” He coughed. Spit. Spoke again. “Everyone’s gone.”
“What do you mean?”
“When I visited, there were hundreds of people living and working around here.” He nodded to a breakfast place advertising chicken and waffles on the corner. “Madge was still opening every morning.” Lincoln’s gaze swept up the street. “They had meetings in the town hall almost every day.”
And now there was trash blowing down the street, tangling between the wheels of parked, uninhabited cars. The breeze smelled like blossoms. Elise stepped up to the side of the road and looked at the creek on the other side. It was still running with clean water.
No reason for people to have disappeared. It was, by all accounts, still a very beautiful little town.
Elise headed for town hall. The doors were propped open. A chalkboard outside read, “Mayor Gregg talks utility power, 3pm on the 14th of April.” What date had Rylie said it was? The seventeenth? Someone had been there to change the sign just a few days earlier.
Lincoln pushed past her, heading inside. “Hello? Clayton? Lisa?”
Nobody responded to his calls. Lincoln crossed himself, shut his eyes, whispered a prayer.
She clenched her jaw to keep herself from telling him what a waste of time that was. When he turned back to face her, worry lined his face. His prayers hadn’t comforted him at all. “They were here. This was their base of operations, so to speak.”
Elise stepped into the hall, pushed the door to the ladies’ room open. Empty. She checked the men’s bathroom too, and found nothing but foggy mirrors and dry sinks.
There were offices in the back. She passed the unmarked doors and approached one with another sign outside. This one read “Mayor Gregg, Office Hours: 8am to 6pm.” It had the same handwriting as the one on the front steps.
Lincoln pushed past her, entering first.
“Clayton?”
The room was unoccupied. Mayor Gregg’s office looked like it had been abandoned in the middle of a workday; his shutters were opened to allow cloudy daylight to penetrate the gloom, and his desk was covered in papers.
There were chalkboards and whiteboards positioned around the room, each covered with addresses, names, and phone numbers. Mayor Gregg had obviously been making a big push at keeping track of everyone in Two Rivers and organizing them to recover.
An area rug muffled Elise’s steps as she crossed the room slowly, skimming the shadows for signs of intruders. She didn’t sense anything behind the chairs, under the desks, or in the closets—the office felt as hollow as the rest of the town.
Elise wiped her thumb along a word written on a whiteboard in marker. It came off easily. The ink hadn’t been there long enough to dry. “Do you know what’s missing, Deputy?”
Lincoln didn’t respond with the obvious answer, and it made her like him better for it. “A struggle.”
“When demons abduct humans, they don’t do it quietly. There are portals in Dis that can rip people across the dimensions and drop them in the Screaming Forest, but that’s messy. I’d expect to see broken furniture. Blood.”
“Bodies of people who didn’t let themselves be taken,” Lincoln said grimly.
“That too.” She watched him from the corner of her eye. How much did he remember of his time being possessed by one of the most important demons in Dis?
A hint of mirth flashed over his mouth. “I always take you on the best dates, don’t I? First chewed-up bodies in the morgue, now towns where the entire population’s gone missing.”
“Keeps the relationship thrilling,” Elise said. “Lincoln, why were you in Two Rivers, Georgia?”
“Because I kept thinking about it.” He rubbed his temples hard. “I’d never been here before, but the names kept coming to me. Two Rivers, Georgia. Portola, California. Nissa Falls, Maine. I figured it was something that I did when I was…out of it. When she had me.” He meant Judy, the innocuously named nightmare demon that had possessed him. “If she had these towns on her mind, I figured she was doing something for Abraxas here. So I went looking for answers.”
Elise thought that she could guess the questions. Why was his demon heritage manifesting now? What had he done while possessed? Why had the demon that ruled him been interested in nowhere towns like Two Rivers?
“Did you find what you were looking for?” she asked.
“No. But I found good Christians. Great people. People who didn’t recognize me, so I know I hadn’t been here before.” Lincoln flipped the light switch by the door. Nothing happened. “They had power here, sometimes. In the middle of the day, and an hour after sundown.”
A strange smell itched in Elise’s nose. It reminded her of burned hair.
She bent down to look at the lamp on Mayor Gregg’s desk. The bulb was black on the inside, filaments broken. He hadn’t lost power. His bulb had blown.
A quick check of the other lights showed her more of the same. There was no struggle, and yet all of Mayor Gregg’s light bulbs had exploded, most likely at the same time.
It didn’t look like a demon abduction at all.
While Elise was standing on the chair to look at the light hanging from the ceiling, she noticed a strange smear behind one of the chalkboards. She pushed it aside.
There was a single bloody handprint on the paneling behind it.
Lincoln spanned his fingers over it. His hand was glowing again, highlighting the bones through his flesh. “Dainty. Looks like a woman’s.”
Elise searched the room with new eyes, looking for something that could have inflicted a bloody wound. She pushed the rest of the chalkboards aside, shifted Mayor Gregg’s desk, and peered behind the curtains. Nothing.
All that left was the area rug.
Elise grabbed the edge, whipped it aside.
Lincoln crouched to examine the floor underneath. He scrubbed his forefinger on the line between two boards.
“Look at this,” he said, lifting his hand.
There was coppery, flaky powder on his skin. Elise knew it was blood by the way it made her hungry body recoil. Blood was good—blood was life—but old, wasted blood was offensive to her senses.
Dizziness struck her at the sight of it, and she pressed a hand to her forehead, taking a deep breath to steady herself.
“You okay?” Lincoln asked.
“I’m just…hungry.”
His eyes darkened. Elise hadn’t been drinking blood to feed herself when they’d last been together, but she had offered to open his veins for much more carnal reasons. He had been as repulsed by it as he had been aroused. Nothing had changed.
His blood pressure rose. He looked away, back down at the floor, but not before she saw the warmth on his cheeks. “I’m hungry, too,” he said, surprising her.
“When did you last eat? I expected Aniruddha to make sure that the kitchens were serving you.”
“I don’t mean like that,” Lincoln said. “I’m not craving food.” He clenched his fist and the red glow brightened. “I don’t know what I’m craving, but whatever it is can’t be eaten.”
It was her turn for her heart to accelerate. “Demon hungers,” Elise said. He didn’t respond, but she could tell that was what he was thinking by the way he flinched. The idea of feeding together—drawing on Lincoln’s energies as he drew on hers, the same way she did with Neuma—was far too appealing.
What kind of demon blood was in the Marshall heritage? He was handsome, but he didn’t look anything like an incubus; most of them resembled Yatam, the demon that had given Elise her powers. He couldn’t have been a nightmare, either.
“I keep thinking that you taste good,” Lincoln muttered without looking at her. “I’m…drawn to you, somehow. Mostly when you get pissed. I want to be close when you’re mad at me.” He blew a breath out of his lips. “I liked it when you attacked me in the library.”
Surprise blossomed within her, warming her deep in her belly. “You want to feed on my anger. You must be a megaira.”
His throat worked. “I don’t even know what those are.” After a beat, he said, “Snake heads. Like Medusa. Never mind—I remember them from when I was possessed.”
“You probably won’t grow snakes,” Elise said. “If physical changes manifest in part-demon Gray, it’s during puberty. Your changes will only be in power.”
It didn’t look like the idea comforted him. He rubbed his fingertips along the floor again, clearing his throat. “Someone tried to clean this up. There are sponge marks.”
She bent close to the floor. Sniffed. In addition to the sour smell of wasted blood, she picked up the scent of lemon pine.
Demons didn’t clean their murder scenes.
“Witches, maybe,” she mused aloud, shoving her hands in her pockets so that Lincoln wouldn’t see that they were shaking. She was even hungrier now that she knew that Lincoln was unconsciously feeding off of her bad temper. She wanted to return the favor.
“What’s that about witches?”
“This might be a witch behavior. They’re known for cleaning up the scenes of their crimes. They’ll return to a site after the fact and wash away any indication of a ritual, murder, or…whatever else they might have done.” Witches were almost as creative as demons when the situation called for it.
“Do you sense magic?” Lincoln asked. His blood pressure was dropping again. The mention of crimes and murders didn’t faze him. This was his element—being on the scene of an investigation. Even Elise couldn’t shake him up enough to change that.
She would have to take off her warding ring to be sensitive enough to detect magic here. Since she was on Earth, taking off the ring would give James a direct route into her mind. Elise didn’t want James to see whom she was spending time with.
“No,” she said. “I don’t sense any magic.”
Elise lifted the phone’s receiver on Mayor Gregg’s desk. To her surprise, she got a dial tone. The artificial sound was painfully loud in the house’s silence.
“The mayor was trying to get everything back online,” Lincoln said. “He was doing a fine job. A damn fine job.” Past tense. He was already convinced that everyone was dead.
Nothing that Elise saw suggested otherwise.
She sat on the edge of the desk and dialed the only phone number she had memorized. It rang twice before McIntyre answered. “Hey,” he said. “‘Sup?”
Anyone else would have had questions about Elise’s whereabouts for the last several months, but not McIntyre. The sound of his voice was almost as good for her mood as a hot bath. “I need anything you can find about our anonymous benefactor.”
“Already looked him up. Haven’t found anything. The email he used leads back along a trail of empty email addresses that doesn’t go anywhere. Same with the bank account.”
“What about tracing his IP address?” Elise asked.
“There wasn’t one in the header info.”
“Proxy?”
“Nope. Just…missing. Wasn’t the only thing missing. The whole trail was weird.” McIntyre sighed, like he dreaded having to say anything else. “The bank account that deposited the money—it had gotten three thousand and sixty-two microdeposits in one hour before it transferred to us
.”
“Three thousand…”
“You’re not going to guess who owns the accounts.” Without even a pause for her to answer, he said, “The missing people. Three thousand and sixty-two of them, anyway.”
Chilly frisson settled over Elise’s shoulders. She gripped the handset harder and said, “I don’t like any of this.”
“Me neither. I’d return the money and take you off the case, but…”
“Yeah,” Elise said. She wasn’t going to be able to drop it now, but she was going to need help. It had been a big enough mess before impossible bank account activity and people washing away crime scenes. “What’s Anthony’s ETA?”
“He doesn’t have one. I haven’t been able to reach him.”
Tendrils of fear sneaked into her heart. Not the kind of fear that a nightmare demon evoked, but the fear of realizing she had missed something—maybe something big.
Anthony would never have gone so long without contacting McIntyre or Elise.
“You didn’t tell me that,” she said, trying not to make it sound accusatory and failing. How could one of their trio go missing without the other two realizing it?
“Until I saw your email, I thought he was with you. Guess not.” McIntyre’s voice shook with frustration. He’d come to the same conclusion that she had.
She swallowed hard before speaking. “Is he on the list, Lucas?”
A moment of silence followed the question.
A very long moment of silence.
“No,” McIntyre said.
Anthony had been with her for years. Before she had been a demon, before he had known that he was a kopis, back when the world was normal and good things sometimes happened. He was the one who had pulled her body from Lake Tahoe when she was resurrected as a demon. He had stood at the gates of Heaven to wait for her return after killing Adam. He had remained her friend and confidant when she had nobody else to trust—nobody but McIntyre.
For all she knew, he had been missing for months.
“We need him,” she said, forcing herself to uncurl her fingers from the phone before she shattered it.
“I’ll put out the word.”
“Good. I’m going to come see you in a few hours.”
