by Reine, SM
Then she saw the shape of the cavern stretching high overhead. She had never been able to see the roof of it before. It was always too dim. But the light filled every cranny, and she realized that the Night Hag had left tapestries suspended near the top. Dozens of them.
Finally, she saw the source of the light.
It was a man. He stood in front of the dark gate with his thumbs hooked in the belt loops of a pair of very snug leather pants. He was barefoot, bare-chested, and wore a thin leather collar with a ruby in the center. Black hair spilled down his shoulders to his lower back. His eyes were almond-shaped, and they tilted up at the corners as though he smiled, though it didn’t touch his lips.
“Elise,” he greeted.
It took her a moment to remember how to speak. “Thom?”
The man who called himself Thom Norrel sauntered toward her. With each step, the light dimmed, becoming more and more bearable until it was no more than a comfortable white glow.
The last time Elise had seen him, he had been pretending to be a witch in the service of the Night Hag, but he had vanished after Elise returned from the angelic city. James admitted that they had spoken once while she was unconscious, though he was vague about the details of that conversation. The only thing he would say was that he was certain that Thom was not a witch at all—probably not even human. Elise was inclined to agree.
“I was beginning to think that you might have been devoured in the Warrens. It’s good to see you’ve survived.” His voice was pure silk.
“Nukha’il told me he didn’t recognize the man by the gate.”
“I wasn’t recognizable when he found me,” Thom said.
Elise frowned. “What did you look like?”
He gave an elegant shrug. “Someone else. I wanted to get your attention. Would you have hurried here as quickly if Nukha’il had told you that I was the one waiting?”
“Maybe,” Elise said. “It depends on what you’re doing here.”
He circled her, his dark eyes scanning her from feet to face. She resisted the urge to turn and keep him in her line of sight. “Perhaps I wanted a few minutes alone with you.”
“Bullshit.”
“Such language,” he murmured.
“The gate is supposed to be locked. Nobody should be able to get in here.”
“I don’t care for locks.” Thom fluttered a hand at the cavern. “I also don’t care for shadows.”
Elise’s hand tensed on her falchion. “What do you know about that?”
“Everything, as a matter of fact.” He let the sentence hang in the air as he slunk back to the gate’s dais. Thom sank to the first step, lounging on it like a cat in the sunshine. He never took his eyes off of her. “You can put that away.”
Reluctantly, Elise sheathed her sword. She had fought Thom once—just once. She hadn’t won. He was about as impressed by swords as he was by locks and shadows.
“Tell me why you’re here, and feel free to skip the cryptic crap.”
He studied his fingernails. They were painted black. “I’m holding up my end of the agreement.”
“What agreement?”
“You agreed that the infernal and ethereal delegations would help you guard this gateway. I have watched as you and that angel bumbled for weeks, doing your best to bluster and intimidate petty demons while an enemy emerged unseen and unopposed. She approaches now, and I’m here to stop her.”
“How do you know about the agreement?”
“I am the father of all things that slink in the night,” he said. “I know everything.”
The last word slipped through the air and curled around her. Elise recalled the night of the summit, when she had stood alone in the desert with Nukha’il and a demon-possessed cat to discuss the guardianship of the gates. If Thom knew what they had discussed…
“The cat?” she guessed.
He smiled. “Come sit with me.”
Elise didn’t move.
“If you know what’s happening, this would be a great time to share.”
“We have little time. I shall make this brief.” Thom held up one finger. “You know the dark gate beyond this one can lead to your greatest foe. But for a demon to pass through the door would violate the quarantine, and the Treaty of Dis. The consequences could be disastrous.”
“Apocalypse,” Elise said, and he shrugged.
“Possibly.” Thom lifted a second finger. “A demon wants to pass through the gate. She wants to destroy the world, and everything in it.”
Her eyebrows lifted. “Including herself?”
A smile quirked at the corner of his mouth. “Especially herself.”
“And that’s the shadow.” She paced along the edge of the cavern, giving the dais a wide berth. There had once been other paths into the cave, paths that led to other branches of the Warrens, but Elise had sealed them with Neuma’s help as soon as she had moved into the manager’s office at Craven’s. She had boarded them up and poured cement into the doorways.
They were all intact, and there was no reason to think they could have been opened. But she checked them anyway.
“Yes.” He lifted a third finger. “Finally, I am the only thing that has prevented her from achieving her goals. She is at your front door now, knocking in the only way she knows how.”
“Does this shadow have a name?” Elise called back to the dais.
“Yes.” Thom’s voice came from right behind her, and she jumped, spinning to face him. He loomed behind her. His irises were black, making his pupils seem enlarged, and he radiated heat. “She is Yatai—the oldest demon alive.”
His voice caressed down her body like a warm waterfall. Elise swallowed hard and tried not to stare at his bare chest.
A shimmer caught her eye.
One of the doorways in the very back of the room had collapsed. The boards Elise had nailed in place were shattered, tearing down part of the stone wall to bare, raw mineral.
The rocks sparkled with flakes of brassy yellow pyrite. Where water dripped over the stones, they were stained with sulfuric acid.
Elise had been on the other side of that collapse not two hours before.
As she watched, the rocks shivered again. The glint of pyrite had only caught her eye because it was vibrating.
Thom followed her gaze, and he arched one eyebrow.
“And now Yatai is coming,” he said, as calmly as though he were announcing his dinner plans.
He winked out of existence at her side.
Then the collapsed section exploded.
Concrete and wood showered around Elise. She jumped back, shielding her head with her arms.
Everything she had constructed to block the shaft was scattered across the ground. The hole yawned open, and there was nothing beyond it.
Silence fell over the cavern. The last of the dust and debris rained around her, settling on her hair and shoulders.
Something in the tunnel moved.
Exorcist…
Her heart leaped into the back of her throat. She held her falchion between her body and the tunnel like a shield, vulnerable without her second blade.
“You can’t have the gate, Yatai,” she growled.
Motion in the depths of the darkness.
The sound of scurrying was faint at first, like distant rats scrabbling in the walls. It could have been a breeze in the mines, whispering down the hole vacated by Rick’s Drugstore. But it quickly grew, and it rushed toward her, approaching impossibly fast.
It became thudding as it grew closer, and then it multiplied.
Bodies. Lots of them.
Her hand tightened on the hilt.
A shape launched from the tunnel.
It was like being blindsided by a car. Her back slammed into the floor with the full force of its weight, and all she could see were wide, rolling eyes—slicked over with oil—and a gaping mouth with teeth that oozed shadows. It shrieked at the sudden light, as though the brightness caused it physical pain.
She realized
with a shock that it was a fiend—one of Zohak’s minions. And it was possessed by the shadow.
Elise’s arm was pressed against her chest at the wrong angle for attack. She lifted her knees between them and launched the fiend into the air with a hard kick.
Before she could get to her feet, another jumped on her, and then another. They clawed at her legs. Their combined weight made her stumble.
She twisted away and danced back, jamming the falchion in the mouth of the one on her right. The blade plunged into the soft palate and erupted from the other side. Ichor splattered from the back of the fiend’s skull.
Elise jerked the blade free and whirled, cutting down the second fiend with an arcing blow.
The blade bit into its shoulder and sank into bone. Elise kicked it in the chest, forced it off her blade, and then stabbed it in the heart.
Elise searched for Thom, but it was too bright in the cavern to distinguish shapes or direction. There were more fiends—so many more. Their shapeless forms were a mass of screeching flesh draped in shadow, seething around her like a midnight ocean.
She crashed into them, letting instinct move her. She launched a kick behind her, cracking the skull of one fiend and sending it stumbling into another. Elise swooped low and drew her boot knife as she thrust the falchion into the gut of her latest attacker.
Flinging her arm out straight, she launched the slender knife into the throat of a shadow and was rewarded with a strangled, bubbling scream.
Teeth sank into her arm. They were blunt, but the force crushed against her bone. Hot pain bloomed through her arm. Blood dribbled down her elbow.
She jammed the falchion into the fiend’s eye. Her sword ripped free as the demon fell, taking a hunk of skin with it.
No time to stop.
Instinct kept her light on her feet. She cut down one fiend after another, and their oily blood slicked the floor beneath her boots.
It was only a diversion. Over their heads, the shadow in the tunnel seethed.
A column of darkness extended from the mineshaft beyond the collapse, as thick around as Elise’s torso. It seemed to emerge from the rock itself. It was no longer mere shadow. It had taken on form, like a serpent with scales that caught no light.
The infernal power radiating from it was immense, and Elise felt it burn straight through her skull. The snake was Yatai embodied.
And she was carrying a body.
Yatai swept over her head, and Elise’s heart dropped as she saw the dangling limbs, the head rolling on the shoulders. It was a man, lanky and longhaired. His wings were lifeless at his back.
The shadow clamped tight around Nukha’il’s midsection and shoved him toward the gate.
Elise kicked a fiend off of her sword and ran toward the gate, but clawed hands gripped her shirt and jeans to hold her back.
The symbols ringing the gate glowed with brilliant white light against Yatai’s shadow, which flung Nukha’il to the dais. He slid and bumped into the base of one of the columns.
At his touch, the humming intensified. Energy raced up the pillars. Elise’s palms burned.
The column of shadow descended, ready to seize Nukha’il again.
“No,” she growled, kicking free of the fiends and launching herself up the steps.
Thom got there first.
He appeared between the angel and Yatai, and he faced the darkness with no fear. Elise had never seen him angry before—she didn’t think that he could be anything but detached and, occasionally, vaguely amused. But his eyes blazed, his lips were peeled back into a growl, and he flung his arms wide with his fists clenched.
The shadow blasted into his chest and deflected. He took a single step back.
Thom roared, and white light burst from his flesh, crashing into Yatai like fire blazing over the surface of water. The smell of ozone and burning hair crackled through the air.
A shockwave blasted from the contact. It struck Elise, and her feet slipped from beneath her. The steps of the dais rose to meet her face. Pain cracked through her forehead, and stars sparked at the edges of her vision.
The power of Thom and Yatai’s clashing energies toppled the fiends and struck the walls of the cave.
The rocks groaned. Debris showered around them.
Yatai slithered back and struck again, pounding into Thom. Elise could only watch sideways, crumpled against the dais, stunned and limp.
Come now. You don’t care about the gate. Let me pass.
That silken voice was simultaneously softer and louder than the responding shudders of the cavern.
Thom didn’t respond except to take a step forward, pushing into the shadow.
Elise dragged herself over the steps, belly flat to the shuddering dais. The air grew thick as she crawled to Nukha’il, who was sprawled behind Thom’s legs. The gate responded to her proximity—it vibrated harder, and the cavern on the other side of the pillars vanished, replaced by bright gray fog.
She didn’t have to lay her palm on it to open the gate a second time. It was as though the stones remembered her touch, though it had been months since she was last there. Maybe the gate had never fully closed.
Her fingers fell on Nukha’il’s wrist. One wing was crumpled beneath him.
The angel stirred, eyes opening to slits. His blue irises had turned to gray. “Get away,” he whispered. “She’s here.”
Elise tried to drag him away from the gate. But he was immensely heavy, her bitten arm ached, the air was so thick, and Yatai spotted them.
This has been fun, she said, but I will wait no more.
“You’re lost to madness.” There was a quaver in Thom’s normally empty voice.
And when you favor the light, you are weak.
The serpent reared. Elise saw it thicken over Thom’s shoulder, becoming dragon-like and vast. It crushed the light radiating from his skin. Tendrils oozed over the back of the gate.
The white light shattered.
Yatai slammed into Nukha’il, ripped his arm from her hand, and shoved him against the gate as the gray curtain parted. Together, the serpent and the angel passed the threshold—and vanished.
A boulder dislodged from the wall and crashed into the other side of the gate. Elise rolled away from the showering detritus and slipped down the steps, thudding into the cavern floor. The floor vibrated, and a mighty crack rent the air.
A boulder the size of a train split from the ceiling. It tumbled toward her end over end, almost in slow motion.
Elise rolled, protecting her head and knowing that it wouldn’t be good enough.
Thom blinked into existence at her side long enough to fold his arms around her shoulders. She felt reality bend and realized what he was about to do.
“No!” she shouted, but her cry never reached the cave.
They disappeared an instant before the boulder crashed into the dais.
VII
Elise blinked. The crumbling cavern disappeared and was replaced by white walls and wooden floors. The air turned from dusty and hot to air-conditioned cool, and the seething energy of angels disappeared, leaving her palms cold under the gloves.
Instead of being far below the city, she was suddenly in the entryway of a condo. Her mind bucked, rejecting a reality that could so easily shift.
Her cramping stomach was the only warning that she was about to vomit. Thom allowed her to fall to the floor and empty her stomach on the parquet. It burned up her throat and tasted ashen on her tongue. The puddle of bile was black, but not with blood.
Her arm throbbed, and she pushed back her sleeve to see the bite wound. She sucked in a hard breath.
What should have been nothing more than the imprint of a fiend’s dull teeth was exposed, bleeding flesh. But she was bleeding ichor—the same shadows that had dribbled from Zohak when she had stabbed him.
The same shadows that turned him to obsidian.
As soon as she saw it, the pain intensified and swept up her shoulder. She lost balance and sat back against the wall.
>
Elise gasped, and every time her breath wheezed out, it was with a small cry. She hated to whimper, but it was pain unlike any other. So much worse than when Death’s Hand had ripped her shoulder open, worse than having her leg shattered under falling rock, worse than getting grazed by a bullet.
Ice spiked through her heart, gripping her chest with cold fingers. Where the pain spread, so did shadow. Her skin grayed and hardened. She clenched her teeth and slammed her head back against the wall.
Thom disappeared and then reappeared in front of her a heartbeat later. White dust puffed around him, as though he brought the air with him when he phased back from the cavern. He held a sword in his hands—the falchion Elise had dropped by the gate. Shadow oozed over its blade.
“This won’t do,” he said. He peeled the darkness off of it as though it was no more than plastic, leaving her blade clear and clean.
Her instant of relief was fleeting.
“Thom—my arm—”
He set down the sword. “Is there a problem?”
Thom lifted her wrist to inspect the wound. The lightest touch shot spikes of fire into her ribcage, and her chest heaved as she fought to breathe. She couldn’t fill her lungs. Elise whined through her teeth.
“Ah, I see. You would die of this.” There was longing in his eyes, and his voice was husky. “It will turn your blood to oil and your flesh to stone. And it will hurt—oh, it will hurt.” He traced a finger around the edge of the wound, and she kicked her leg against the floor. She couldn’t wrench her limb free. His hands were gentle, but unyielding. “You should feel death marching on you now, I think.”
“James,” she panted, “take me to James, I need him—”
“Your witch cannot heal this.”
“I’m not dying from a fucking bite!”
He hummed low in his throat. “Yes, you would. If I allowed it.”
Thom lowered himself over Elise, sitting in her lap. His face loomed, beautiful even as her vision blurred and darkened. He cupped her face in both of his hands. He was so close that the tip of his nose brushed hers.
“You don’t know what a gift it is to die.” His lips tickled against her mouth. “It pains me to watch you beg for life when I would do anything—anything—for the blessing you deny.” His tongue darted out and wetted Elise’s bottom lip. “Let me drink your death, sword-woman. Let me have a taste…”
