by SM Reine
Elise felt the instant that McIntyre’s life ended. His heart stopped beating just as suddenly as Neuma’s had, ending the sweet flow of blood, silencing the healthy patterns of his brain. One minute, he was a normal mortal—alive and hale and full of thoughts—and then he was suddenly a blank spot in her senses.
Lucas McIntyre was dead, and she was vomiting bullets on the street less than a block away.
They surged from her stomach, slippery and black, as though her body was rejecting a diseased liver. Elise felt hot. Her muscles shook as they spilled out of her.
She’d only been able to toss McIntyre her sword before the sickness overtook her. And it felt like he’d emptied the entire magazine of one of guns into her back, so it was emptying from her system too slowly. She was helpless to react until the last of the bullets emerged, splattering in a sac of liquid on the broken street.
Worst fucking timing.
Now the military was drawing closer, their headlights spilling over the street, inching toward her as they approached. They’d heard the fight. They were coming to investigate far too late.
Elise wiped her mouth as she got up, and as soon as she was certain that she was done throwing up, she phased away from the headlights and back into the relative safety of the train shelter. So close, and yet distant enough that she hadn’t been able to help them when she heard the screams.
She reappeared on the edge of the platform and shielded her eyes from the sparking of electricity. McIntyre had cut the wire as she’d suggested—good for slowing Clotho down, but dangerous for Elise to approach.
There was no reason for her to risk getting near the cable now.
It was already too late for the McIntyres.
Two of the bodies were under the bench where Elise had left Leticia behind to fight Clotho, but it was difficult to tell that the woman was, in fact, Leticia McIntyre. There was too much blood. Elise didn’t bother looking closely enough to verify. There were only so many pink-haired women who had been carrying their toddlers through France.
She couldn’t look at Deb at all.
Elise had hated the way those children shrieked, hated how they pulled at her hair while trying to braid it, hated the constant cacophony. She hated kids. She hated that child in particular. Elise was shaking and her eyes were burning and she couldn’t seem to get control of herself.
She had told Nathaniel herself that everyone got one life and that it was better that way. Maybe it was true with Neuma. She’d been in her eighties, maybe her nineties; she’d had a good, long life. Even Leticia was in her thirties. But Deb…
It was too much.
So she turned to the train trench instead. Lucas McIntyre wasn’t recognizable, either. He was a charred mess of flesh that smelled like burned hair and fat. His victory rested inches away from him: a puddle of ichor that had been Clotho. Elise hadn’t seen one of the Fates killed before, but she felt no doubt that the sludgy mess was a dead demon, and that she wouldn’t be coming back.
Elise hoped that Belphegor had felt that death. She really hoped that he fucking despaired at it.
Masculine shouts, the rub of metal on cloth. The military was coming closer. Far too late to help with the fight.
A fluttering heartbeat drew her attention beyond the train tracks. There was still something alive nearby—something small. Faint enough that it might not even be human.
She phased past the cable, leaving McIntyre’s body behind.
The military would bury him, she hoped.
Elise reformed on the opposite side of the street, right in front of a brick house.
She was greeted by a gunshot.
Elise looked down to see a hole in her shirt. She felt the bullet settle in her gut almost immediately. She would have to expel it soon, but for the moment, it didn’t hurt.
Her eyes tracked back to the source of the gunshot. It had come from a small shape huddled in the doorway, knees tucked by her ears, gun held between her legs. Pretty good aim for such an awkward position.
It was Dana McIntyre. The girl looked up at Elise with tearful eyes, and there wasn’t a hint of hope in them. She knew what Elise had found in the train shelter. She had probably seen the murders herself.
Elise kneeled and held her hand out. Dana gave her the gun. It was still hot as she pushed it down into the waistband of her leather pants.
She thought that she should probably tell the girl that it was going to be okay. That she would be safe now, and she was fine, and there was nothing to worry about. All those comforting lies that you were supposed to tell children in times of sadness.
She couldn’t make the words come out.
“I have you,” Elise said instead, and she opened her arms.
Dana wasn’t crying as she crawled into Elise’s hold. She wrapped her arms around the child, and, together, they phased into the night.
Thirteen
After the angels’ attack and a few hours on top of the Himalayas, Elise’s camp of allies was looking pretty pathetic. They had all the coats from Russia, sure, but this wasn’t Russia anymore. This was freaking Everest. Or somewhere near it, anyway—Anthony had no idea where they’d been dumped this time.
It was a good thing Belphegor was clogging the air with smoke and ash and all that crap. The haze worked as insulation, keeping the temperature hovering above zero degrees. Cold, but not as cold as usual.
Anthony could still feel the icy fingers of wind creeping through his fur coat. He wasn’t sure if his shivering was because of the temperature or because of how few people remained with the camp.
Some of the werewolves were still hanging around, but the Alpha himself was not. There also were none of those spirit wolves Elise had made. Ariane had left on a secret mission, too. Now the only people hanging around were Abram, Levi, Summer, and Nash—not great company. They kept to themselves.
Guess they didn’t want to hang out with Anthony and Brianna at the gate to Eden.
The gate’s condition was impressive, considering it was subject to constant winter at the top of the mountain. This one was in the shape of a statue memorializing some snake woman. She was three stories tall with a thin-lipped smile, bare breasts, and a coiled tail where legs should have been.
Brianna had made a few half-hearted jokes about snake boobs and Anthony hadn’t laughed. There wasn’t anything funny about the end of the world.
“What are you doing?”
Anthony looked up at the sound of James’s voice, but Brianna didn’t. She ignored him and continued to draw an elaborate circle on the ground in front of the statue.
James stormed toward them. He looked pissed.
“What’s it look like we’re doing?” Anthony asked.
James’s eyes searched the site of the ritual. Brianna was trying to replicate magic that was well beyond her ability, but she was doing pretty well at it. She’d gotten everything together on her own. She’d duplicated the circle. She had assembled the altar. She was almost done.
All she needed was to finish drawing the details on the circle and a little bit of Adam’s blood.
Anthony thought that it was pretty goddamn impressive. James didn’t seem to agree.
“It looks like you’re trying to do something incredibly foolish,” he said, jerking the glasses off of his face. “And I’m wondering why.”
“You know why,” Anthony said.
James’s jaw clenched. “Elise.” He rounded on Brianna, stepping over the lines of her delicately drawn circle. “You’ll kill yourself doing magic like this.”
Brianna grinned at him. “It’s not like you can do it anymore.”
“And you’ve never been capable. You’re too weak,” James said.
Anthony stepped between them. “You don’t talk to her like that.”
Confronting James would have been a dangerous proposition earlier. Now, Anthony liked seeing the wariness in James’s eyes, trying to decide which of them would win in a physical confrontation.
Easy question. Anthon
y was a young, fit kopis, and he would definitely win. He’d be more than happy to work out a decade’s worth of annoyances against James, too. Who cared if he was some ordinary old guy now? It would feel good to bash his face in. Really good.
But darkness descended on them, dimming the outside of the circle, and Elise appeared with the fluttering of invisible wings.
Killjoy.
“Problems?” Elise asked.
James whirled on her. “You have them opening the gate to Eden.”
There was no denying it now, not when the evidence was clear as day on the ground in front of the gate. Elise hooked her thumbs in the belt loops of her leather pants. “Yeah. That’s the plan.”
“How? Why?”
“Belphegor’s body is in Eden. I can’t kill him if he comes out. I have to go in after him. I’m going in now, whatever it takes, and he is going to die in agony.” She sounded unusually angry, even for her. Something was wrong.
Anthony frowned. “What happened, Elise?”
She gripped Anthony’s shoulder and turned him.
Summer Gresham was kneeling at the bottom of the crevasse, holding a girl’s hands as she cried. The kid was about seven years old, maybe. Pretty big for a girl her age. Big enough that Anthony had already taken her to the shooting range a couple of times.
Dana McIntyre.
If Dana was there—if only Dana was there—then that could only mean one thing.
Emotion struck him in a wave, twisting his stomach and making his hands go numb.
It mostly felt like anger, at first. The grief came second.
“Fuck,” Anthony said.
Elise’s fingernails dug into his shirt. Her lips tightened as she fisted the material. She was shaking.
James still looked confused. He hadn’t visited the McIntyres since the time before Dana had been born. He didn’t recognize her wispy blond hair, her stocky stature, her flat nose.
Anthony grabbed Elise’s hand, and he held it as tightly as she held him, watching the evidence that their friend was dead. Their friend, his wife, and their other little girl. McIntyre’s death had been inevitable. All of their deaths were. They were kopides—that was just what happened to them sooner or later. Usually sooner.
But the others…
“Fuck,” Anthony said again, with more heat this time. He was squeezing Elise’s hand so hard that anyone else would have suffered broken bones.
Brianna got up. “What?” she asked, looking down the ridge. “Who is that? What’s got you all freaked out?” Her eyes narrowed. “She’s human. Just plain old human.”
For some reason, that made Anthony angrier. “Finish the ritual, Brianna,” he said. He didn’t look at her. “We’ve got to open this fucking gate.”
James had spent a lot of time preparing to argue with Elise when she came back. He’d taken shelter, worked on the spell Elise requested, and fumed, rehearsing the conversation in his mind a thousand times.
He had plenty to say about Nathaniel, Benjamin, and the end of the world, but he’d narrowed it down to a few key points.
Elise did not seem interested in an argument.
Whatever had happened in the hours that she had been gone, her mood had been profoundly changed for the worse. “You and I need to talk,” Elise said curtly, yanking him across the camp.
“There’s a building,” James said. “It’s up the mountain. We’ve been using it to—”
She didn’t let him finish. She gripped his collar and hauled him up the narrow, winding trail.
They didn’t have to climb very far to spot the building’s sloped roof, the wooden walls, the large windows. There were no doors to this building. But when they rounded the corner, they found a wall of shattered windows that the pack was using to get in and out of the building.
Elise missed a step when she saw the broken wall. She had destroyed those windows to escape the building months earlier.
It was the former retreat that James had used to cage Elise.
She didn’t go through the wall. She stopped just outside of it, most likely realizing at that moment that James had caged her near one of the gates. That he had planned on keeping her close so that he could return to her quickly after he got into Eden.
He was still angry with her, but anger quickly turned to guilt.
“Elise, I don’t—” he began.
She started walking again, striding across broken glass, and she dragged him along with her. The werewolves parted when Elise moved between them. They didn’t try to stop her. In fact, the way that they looked at her was almost fearful—like they thought that she might exorcise them if she noticed that they were there.
Inside what had once been a very nice bathroom, the remaining shattered glass had been swept into a corner and the snow scraped off of the floor. It was cold inside. Very cold. All of the wards that James had erected to maintain the temperature had broken when Elise escaped.
It was equally cold inside the atrium where Abram, Levi, and Nash were gathered. They seemed to be planning something. There were boxes of supplies from the trucks scattered around the room. Folding tables had been erected, papers spread everywhere.
“Elise?” Levi called, breaking away from the rest of the wolves. One glance from Elise stopped him in his tracks. “What’s wrong?”
The question of the day.
She kept walking.
Elise pushed James into the bedroom. Everything was exactly as they had left it: the furniture she had broken in her rage, her clothes piled in the corner, the bed’s linens stained with James’s blood. Neither the snow nor their dwindling army had reached that room. James had gotten there first and cordoned it off for his personal use.
He’d been working in that bedroom to assemble the spell to heal Nathaniel—or at least, he’d been assembling pieces of a spell. He had no idea if any of them would work.
“You can’t blame me for what I did in pursuit of Eden anymore,” James said, trying to hold up his end of an argument that Elise didn’t seem to be interested in. “You’re doing the exact same thing. You’re trying to get into the garden and—”
Elise slammed the door and shoved him into it, fists gripping his shirt, and she kissed him. Her lips tasted salty. She felt desperate, urgent. Like this was her last chance to kiss him.
He was momentarily too shocked to respond. Then he was tempted to let her do whatever she wanted.
Sanity caught up with him a moment later.
James pushed her off of him. “Elise. What are you doing?”
“We’re not talking right now.” She kissed him again, harder this time, straining up on her toes to reach him even though he was too stunned to be cooperative.
Was this about feeding? Trying to heal her damaged arm?
Her hands came up to grip his hair so hard that it felt like she was going to pull it out. She kissed as aggressively as she fought, like she was putting all of her anger and accusations into the nip of her teeth and flick of her tongue on the roof of his mouth.
James wanted to forget the “why” of it all and lose himself in the sensation of her body against his, thighs pressed to thighs, belly to belly, chest to chest.
But he made himself grab her wrists, pull her gently away.
“Elise, why?” James asked. It was hard to breathe.
Her cheeks were damp. “That girl.”
He blinked. The girl? The child? “You mean…”
“That’s Dana McIntyre, James.”
The name sank in slowly. Dana McIntyre—the older of the McIntyre daughters—had appeared at their camp, carried by Elise, without her family. Hadn’t there been two children? A second daughter? And then McIntyre, and Leticia…
Belphegor’s words seemed even more hideous now. You have to despair.
“My God,” he said.
Elise dug her fingernails into the back of his neck. “Belphegor’s not going to stop until he kills you, too. You’re next. You’re all that’s left.”
“Why? I’m human. I
’m not a threat anymore.”
She shook him. Not hard, but not gently, either. His back banged into the door again. “Do you really have to ask?”
Belphegor had pushed Elise past her breaking point.
“No,” James said, his voice coming out gravelly, “he’s not going to kill me, I’m not going to let that happen.” But how could he stop a demon with the powers of a god? He had surrendered his powers.
When she kissed him again, he didn’t try to fight her.
There were too many things that they needed to talk about, but for the moment, there was only this. Elise’s hands ripping down the neck of his shirt, popping the buttons off, shoving it over his shoulders to bare him to the freezing air inside the resort.
It was his only shirt, now destroyed. A ridiculous thing to be worried about. If Belphegor was going to come after James next, then shirts were the least of his issues.
He actually laughed at that thought, chuckling against Elise’s lips. Funny what looming death did to one’s sense of humor. And then he mumbled, “Sorry.”
She silenced him by ripping his belt off.
James tried to lift her shirt, but Elise shoved his hands away. Her lips traveled from his lips to his cheek, up to his ear, tickling against the fine hairs of his sideburns.
“Relax,” she said. “Let me do what I want.”
“If you think that I have the self-control not to touch you…”
She bit his earlobe at the same time that she popped the button off of his pants. Another article of clothing ruined. He wasn’t going to have anything to wear after this.
Elise’s hand slipped into his waistband and curled around him. James wasn’t a young man, and it wasn’t the first time that he had been with a woman—not by far. Yet he found himself instantly, dangerously close to losing control, just feeling her fingers cupping his erection.
“Careful,” he said warningly.
She bit his bottom lip this time, pulling on it until it stretched to the limit, almost to the point of pain. Then she released it. “Tell me again,” Elise said, stroking him with much more gentleness.
He made a strangled sound. “Which part?”
