by S. M. Reine
In any case, she didn’t need to go far to be able to tell that there weren’t any truck smells, like exhaust and metal. The Apple’s stolen SUVs hadn’t been around lately. There wouldn’t have been enough of them to remove the entire pack quickly anyway—not unless the Union had gotten involved, which seemed unlikely.
There were so many potential enemies, and yet so few possibilities.
Abel’s warm presence appeared at her back. She turned to see that he had removed his leather jacket and held it over her head like an umbrella.
She smiled at him. “Thank you.”
He grunted.
They walked to the trailers that had once belonged to the priests, feet slurping in and out of the wet, muddy grass. Stephanie’s presence was also conspicuously absent from the homes. And the smell of lemon was even stronger.
“These were cleaned more recently,” Abel said.
But why? Everyone had gone missing from within town, hadn’t they?
“Let’s go back to the square,” Rylie said.
It was strange and unsettling to walk through Northgate now that everyone was gone. Rylie had seen the town through a lot of transition: when it was originally populated by good, conservative, God-fearing people; when it had been taken by her pack after the Breaking; and most recently, when the Apple had taken charge. But she had never seen it so uninhabited before. The emptiness resonated within her.
Even Abel holding the jacket up for her wasn’t enough to distract her from how unpleasant it was.
They prowled around the statue of Bain Marshall together. There wasn’t as much lemon smell outside, and if there was, it had already been washed away by the rain—just like most of the odors.
Rylie couldn’t even smell her son anymore, and she would have been able to detect him anywhere. Or so she’d thought.
The smell of soap and latex caught her attention. Rylie stepped around a pylon to see Stephanie Whyte carrying a box down the street, shuffling with its weight.
She darted over to help the doctor.
“Let me take that,” Rylie said, grabbing the box.
Stephanie resisted. “They’re just supplies. I can carry them.” She wouldn’t look at Rylie.
“Give them to me.”
A werewolf and a pregnant witch in a fight over a box wasn’t much of a fight at all. Rylie yanked it into her grasp and stuck it under one arm. It probably weighed at least fifty pounds, filled with dry rice and beans as well as filtered water.
Stephanie hung back, glancing nervously at Abel. She smelled fearful. “I didn’t do anything to them.”
“I know,” Rylie said. Her heart ached.
“If this is Levi’s fault, I just want you to know—I tried to talk to him. I tried to stop him.”
“I know,” she said again. With her free hand, she wrapped Stephanie in a half-hug. “I’m just glad to see that you’re safe. Where are you going? Back to the church? I’ll drop off the box for you. You shouldn’t be carrying this much weight right now.”
“Good God, girl,” Stephanie said. “Have I ever told you that you’re so much better than this life?”
Startled, Rylie released her. “Thanks?”
Abel called out for Rylie. “Look at this,” he said, nudging the grass with his toe.
“I’ll be right back,” she said, hurrying to Abel’s side with the box propped against her hip.
Abel was looking at a part of the lawn that was alive. Strange, since the open fissure had killed everything around it. Yet it was green and lush in a broad, curving stripe, and a full inch longer than the grass surrounding it.
“Someone’s been selectively fertilizing,” Rylie said with a faint smile, hefting the box against her waist. “Probably some weird Apple thing, you think?”
“A cult of selective fertilization? Really?”
“I don’t know what cults like to do. I’ve never been in a cult before. Unless you count chess club in middle school—they were pretty intense.”
“Chess club,” Abel said. “You’re such a fucking dork.”
“Yeah, well, you’re in love with a dork, so what does that say about you?”
“It says I’m a dumbass,” he said, and he kissed her. There was none of his earlier hesitation in it. It was a confident, claiming gesture, denying all of his teasing, telling her that she belonged to him.
She liked this Abel much better than the alternative—the teasing, possessive Abel that she hadn’t seen much since Seth died. The grass wasn’t the only thing starting to heal.
“We didn’t do it,” Stephanie said. She had finally ventured closer, regaining some of her usual confidence and attitude. “Believe it or not, the Apple has no interest in gardening.”
“Yeah, that’s way too constructive for you assholes,” Abel said.
Rylie leaned on his chest, hiding her smile against his shirt. “Be nice.”
From this new angle, she could see that stripe of too-green grass wasn’t alone. A second stripe extended around Bain Marshall in the other direction. There were even little white flowers budding close to the fissure.
It hadn’t been like that when Rylie last walked past, had it? She would have noticed something living that close to the heat of Hell. It should have been impossible.
She stepped away from him. “Do you see a pattern?”
Abel was instantly serious, following her as she walked around the lawn of the town square. “Yeah. I do.”
It was a big pattern. The grass had flourished in a design that reminded Rylie of crop circles.
Or one of Elise’s magical runes.
She rubbed her hand on the grass and sniffed her fingers. It smelled like buttered popcorn.
“I think Elise is searching in the wrong place,” Rylie said. “I don’t think this was a demon thing.”
Abel sniffed the grass, too. “Why? Because these flowers smell like a wood-burning stove?”
“More like a forest fire, really,” Stephanie said. She looked disturbed. She knew where this train of thought was going.
The confirmation of what Rylie suspected made shivers wash down her spine. “And I smell popcorn.”
She’d explained to him before that angels always smelled like buttered popcorn to her. It was a comforting scent that reminded her of her late father. She was the only one who smelled that—everyone seemed to get something different out of the presence of the ethereal.
Abel’s gaze sharpened. “You mean everyone was abducted by angels.”
And someone was trying to conceal the smell.
Rylie’s heart sank into her stomach. “We have to tell Elise.”
For once, Abel didn’t argue with her. He grabbed her arm and hauled her back toward the fissure.
But someone was in their way.
Summer stood on the edge of the bridge wearing yellow rubber gloves and carrying a bucket of soapy water. The distinct smell of lemon Pine Sol hanging around her. Her wild curls were pulled back into pigtails. A clear plastic poncho sheltered her from the rain, keeping the white, knee-length dress underneath dry.
“Hey, guys,” she said. “I can’t let you go back to Hell and tell Elise what you’ve found. You can’t tell her anything at all.”
Rylie was slow to catch up. She was too shocked to see her daughter in empty Northgate when she should have been having romantic flights around the Eiffel Tower or something.
Abel caught on much faster. “Summer, what did you do?”
“I’m preventing a war,” she said, lifting her sponge between them as if to illustrate. “And if you have any interest in saving countless lives, you guys are going to help me.”
Sixteen
THE THIRD TIME that Elise visited the House of Volac, she didn’t wait to be allowed inside. She also didn’t attempt to sneak past Volac herself.
It was showtime again, and the demon was Elise’s audience for the night.
“The soul links have been disabled,” James said. He hadn’t moved or cast any spells that Elise could see, bu
t she trusted that he had, somehow, removed the supposedly inviolable spells that prevented intruders from breaking into a House.
Elise nodded at Azis.
Her guards blasted open the locks.
The gates opened with a bang, revealing the plantation-style House of Volac at the end of the long, spiked path. There was no waiting army to clash with them. There were no ancient spells to smother them where they stood. Only an open, dusty plain, and the path past the flesh farms into the canyon beyond.
“Go,” Elise said.
The first century hustled through the gates in rows of three, and Elise and James stood aside to allow the century to pass. They were all fiends, controlled by a nightmare demon named Terah—a narrow-faced female with dark skin, luminous eyes, and a chilling calm. She followed them inside, mounted on a fell beast, spurs dug into its leathery flanks. The beast danced on the brink of the gates.
“I will clear your path, Father,” Terah said, slamming her fist to her chest as she passed. She was impressive in her armor. She had declined leather and taken scale mail instead. Her elbows, shoulders, and spine had gold spikes jutting from them. She looked like she could kill just by bumping into someone.
She barked orders in the infernal tongue, and the fiends split, approaching the house from two sides.
The last of the fiends bled through, and Elise swept a quick look over the remaining army. She had left most of the centuries holding Dis under Gerard’s command, but had brought the ninth and thirteenth with her—enough nightmares and gibborim among them to raze an entire town. A dozen of her personal human guard stood between her and the centuries.
Her guard, and James.
He had also refused to wear her livery, or any armor at all. He was a splash of white against the teeming, leather-clad army, in slacks and a loose shirt with the sleeves rolled up to bare the brown tattoos curled around his forearms. James wasn’t wasting energy on a glamor. White-haired and blue-eyed, he looked every inch the angel. All he needed was one of Nash’s flaming swords. Instead, he had more power hidden under his gloves that any human should have been capable of wielding.
James was watching her army, too. He hadn’t complained about them since they left the Palace, but she could see it on his lips. “Elise…”
She lifted a fist. “Ninth century! Move!”
The gibborim rolled forward on their knuckles, following the fiends through the gates. Terah had almost reached Volac’s doorstep. It was quiet now, but Elise knew that Volac was only waiting. She didn’t want the fiends eaten too quickly.
“Elise,” James said again.
“Not now,” she growled.
“Leave the humans here.”
It wasn’t what she had expected him to ask. She had thought he was going to say—again—how wrong it was to command a demon army, or that he had changed his mind about guiding her. Elise turned to look at him. “Why?”
“Malebolge is no place for mortals. Don’t make them go there.”
Elise’s lips thinned. She couldn’t rely upon a single living soul that she had brought with her—none but the human guards, vetted by Gerard and Neuma, whose judgment Elise trusted beyond all else. If she sent them away, she might as well plan to end her journey alone.
Terah shouted from within. “It’s clear, Father!”
Now two centuries were inside the House, and Volac still hadn’t shown her mask.
She was still waiting.
“Ready?” Elise asked James, knowing that there was no way to be ready for such a thing.
But he tugged on the wrists of his gloves, checking that they were in place, and he nodded.
Elise gestured for the remaining centuries to follow her and headed inside.
Terah was admiring the destruction of the plantation, her fell beast dancing on its splayed feet. It stepped on the spiked path and didn’t seem to care. “Was this your work, Father?”
“That was Volac herself,” Elise said, skimming the horizon for any signs of the demon. She didn’t see anything. It shouldn’t have been easy to find a near-invisible creature, but she thought that Volac would probably be hard to miss.
The fiends of the first century scrambled around the empty building. Elise followed the right flank as they headed around the wing. James kept up silently.
The canyon stretched ahead of them, twisting sinuously through Volac’s vast property. But between the edge of the canyon and Elise stood the first of the flesh farms. The fields were much like the flesh gardens at the Palace, but with tens of thousands of hands jutting from the soil instead of dozens.
Other seemingly disembodied limbs were embedded in the rock as well: elbows and knees and the occasional curve of hairy skull. A harvester stood motionless on the side of the field, its hopper filled with twitching fingers and scraps of rotting flesh.
Volac’s staff had abandoned the harvest days ago, and in the middle of work. There were bloody stumps where fresh hands should have been growing. Entire severed muscles had been abandoned, uneaten and untreated.
The House hadn’t been working for a long time. Maybe even weeks.
“Elise,” James said, voice filled with warning.
She turned.
Darkness surged alongside the plantation, and Elise followed the rising shadow with her eyes as it lifted to tower over the army.
Volac had been watching. She’d just been waiting for Elise to walk so deep into the House that she couldn’t escape easily.
She swelled from the earth behind the shattered building, even larger than Elise remembered. The curve of her back, only a shade darker than the sky behind her, reared above like a skyscraper. Volac’s transparent foot crushed the dusty ground only a few feet in front of Elise.
The puppet of a body descended in a swirl of skirts.
Elise jumped back, jerking her sword from its sheath. But Volac’s human-like body wasn’t attacking. It crumpled to the ground, empty. Volac had shed the puppet. No more need for deceit.
This was battle.
The air thrummed. Elise felt Volac’s massive body moving.
“Get into the canyons!” she roared.
The fiends didn’t escape in time. The foot lifted and then fell on top of the right-flanking demons. Because Volac was transparent, Elise could watch their gargoyle bodies pulverized into a bloody pulp of meat and shattered bone. Four of them died simultaneously. Two had run, but not fast enough, and their lower bodies were crushed under the edge of her foot.
Elise thrust her blade into the shadow. Her falchion connected with something thicker than air, and a gash opened in front of her, baring meat underneath. Ichor splattered from Volac’s injury.
It was a paper cut on a demon her size. The poison from Elise’s blade spread slowly, engulfing the shadow in tendrils of black that just barely outlined a heel the size of a school bus.
The remaining fiends leaped at Volac, catching on to her ankle, scrabbling up her calves.
She swatted them off. They fell around Elise.
Albrinck, the centurion of the ninth century, wasn’t even bothering to engage with Volac. He drove the gibborim through the fields of the flesh farms, onward to the canyon. The nightmares and their centurion, Endi, weren’t far behind.
They knew that there was no point in fighting something the size of Volac. More importantly, there was no point in fighting something that didn’t really exist in this dimension as more than a shadow.
Terah seemed to disagree. She was directing the fiends to regroup.
“Into the canyons, Terah!” Elise ordered again.
The demon wheeled around on the fell beast, firing her crossbow at Volac’s shadow. “You heard her! Move!” The surviving fiends struggled free and pounded toward the canyon.
Hopefully, Volac would be too large to follow. But Elise wasn’t going to count on it. Nothing about the demon’s form obeyed the laws of physics.
She had to hold Volac off long enough for the others to escape.
“Hey!” Elise shouted. �
��You’re in my hierarchy! This attack is not in my best interests!”
The limp doll on the ground seemed to speak. The tongue attached to the mask thrashed. “Isn’t it? You’re attempting to circumvent a system put in place by Aquiel’s administration—a system that benefits your administration as well—and it’s not in the Palace’s best interests for you to stop us. Even Belphegor wouldn’t want you to destroy my flesh farms, I don’t think.”
“How do you know? Have you spoken to him?”
That irritating giggle was no less obnoxious now that the demon was a giant, shadowy Zeppelin of a monster. “No, but I’m capable of making very educated guesses.”
The foot swung and connected with Elise. She went soaring past James. In a blink, she crashed inside the rubble of the plantation, surrounded by fragments of wood and showering dust.
Volac loomed over her. Elise could almost make out a face high in the shadow—two massive eyes and a gaping mouth with teeth like rusty nails.
“Let’s not play at civility anymore, shall we?” Volac asked.
She slammed her hand down on the building.
Elise phased just in time. The roof collapsed where she had been lying a moment before, but she was already standing outside the building, clutching her obsidian falchion in both hands.
Volac turned slowly. The instant the demon’s eyes fell on Elise, she felt her skin contract.
She wasn’t going to be able to phase again.
“Fuck,” Elise said.
She started running.
James was still standing outside the flesh farms, watching the army pour into the canyon. Elise grabbed his arm as she passed. “Move, James!”
“Excuse me,” he said, brushing her hand away.
He stepped between Elise and Volac and pulled off his glove.
One of Volac’s fists swept through the air, blasting a torrential wind over the grounds. James’s scarves whipped around him. She was going to crush him, too.
