by SM Reine
She found the right rounds for Lincoln’s sidearm, haggled over prices for a few minutes, and deflected a few more unwelcome invitations.
Then she returned to Northgate.
Elise rematerialized near Lincoln's duplex and stood in the center of an empty two-lane highway. The moon had risen early that night. It hung huge over the mountains, as if swollen by the lingering summer heat. Its light bathed her skin, a mere reflection of the sun’s painful rays, and the sensation ached.
There were myths that said that the gods of animals lived on the moon, in much the same way that the gods of man dwelled in ethereal realms. Inaccessible, distant, and detached. Maybe there were werewolf gods interested in how Elise would address their children that night, stirred from a centuries-long slumber by her hunt.
She had taken the time to look at a map of the county again while she was at Walmart. Northgate was positioned at the crook of the river, which swept wide around an uninhabitable patch of the Appalachians—a place where there were no roads, no towns, and not even any trails. According to the elevation maps, there should have been a deep, craggy valley between two of the peaks, occupied by nothing but trees.
Werewolves were flesh-hungry monsters, but they were flesh-hungry monsters that liked their privacy. They denned in seclusion between moons, hiding out for two weeks until the next transition occurred. They were vagrants, outcasts.
Even if this werewolf, this handsome guy wandering around town with his kopis brother, had yet to shun society completely, he would instinctively seek out safe places to create a den. There was nowhere safer than the inhospitable valleys of the Appalachian Mountains.
It narrowed her search area to a few hundred square miles. Not a bad place to start.
Elise peeled back her skin and poured into the darkness.
There was too much wilderness in the Appalachians for Elise to cover on foot. That meant spreading herself over the dark canopy of deciduous trees, suffusing the space between the branches, clinging to the trunks, and opening her senses to every scrap of information the night had to offer.
As she rushed over the forest, she processed the location of thousands of squirrels, rabbits, and hikers camping near human trails. She saw towns on the outskirts of the uninhabited land that she had picked out on the map. She saw sleeping birds, sleeping mortals, sleeping towns.
And then she saw a wolf.
It was gray, dappled with hints of brown—the perfect camouflage for the forest. But Elise’s vision didn’t stop at its fur. She saw the pounding of its heart, the magic-rich blood streaking through its arteries, and, most importantly, its gold-rimmed eyes: a werewolf.
Elise drew her attention away from the rest of the forest, narrowing it upon the point of the wolf. She watched the places that its paws kneaded the soil. She studied the flick of its tail-tip as it darted through the underbrush. She inhaled the air it exhaled and savored the taste of animal blood on its breath.
There was nothing mundane about the creature. The average wolf was slightly larger than a domestic dog. This was the size of a small pony.
She followed it.
The werewolf darted through the underbrush as easily as the night carried Elise on its back, and she followed, slithering between the leaves as a black mist. She chased the flash of paw pads and white rings on its hind legs without ever touching it.
Together, Elise and the werewolf ran along the trail, then angled into the valleys, following a deer trail. The musk of fur and feces hung in a rich haze near the ground. Nose to the earth, the wolf tracked the smells as Elise tracked the wolf.
As impressive as the beast was, she had a hard time reconciling the shaggy gray wolf with the young man she had seen outside the sheriff’s department. She would have expected him to be larger. Meaner-looking. This wolf was kind of beautiful, in a way. Elise struggled to imagine its face fur stained with blood, shreds of human flesh dangling from its jaws, murder in its eyes.
The wolf leaped off of a ridge of rocks and landed lightly beside a spring. Elise lingered on the rocks. Let it have a head start—as long as night shrouded the mountain, it couldn’t escape her.
Here it was: a murderous beast responsible for six mostly-masticated bodies. McIntyre had said that there was no human left inside by the time they fully shifted into wolf form, and this creature was well past its sixth moon. The soul—such as it was—would have been replaced by beast.
There was no point in hesitating. It was a murderer. Elise could swallow it on the spot without guilt.
But the girl was still missing. Lucinde Ramirez.
What would a flesh-crazed werewolf do with a nine year old girl?
What were the odds she was even alive?
The wolf stopped to lap water out of the spring. When it lifted its head, crystalline water hung on its neck ruff.
It would be so easy to wrap herself around it. Suck it out of existence.
Then she heard the howl.
It pierced the night, echoed over the trees, bounced off of the rocks in the shadowed valley. It was a haunted cry, the wail of a lonely beast searching for its brethren.
There was another werewolf.
This beast stood on a ridge overlooking the spring. It was smaller than the other wolf, almost more feline than canine, with sleek golden fur. Despite its delicate bone structure, power poured off of it. The wolf’s eyes burned with the fury of the sun.
The moment of shock quickly dissolved to annoyance, then resignation, as Elise realized she had made a huge mistake.
She had come to Northgate expecting to hunt a lone werewolf. Instead, she had found a pack.
A human stepped onto the ridge beside the gold-furred werewolf, resting a hand on its flank with comfortable familiarity. He was dark-skinned, short-haired. It was the kopis, Seth, and he barely even looked at the wolf at his side, much less acted like he was afraid of it.
It greeted him by nudging its muzzle into his arm. He scratched its side.
Concealed among the trees, Elise pulled her physical form together once more, reassembling her toes, legs, hips, breasts. It took a conscious effort to piece herself into a solid figure. But it was easier to think on a human level, a mortal level, when she wasn’t drifting through the forest in a black fog.
Once Elise had two arms, two legs, and a physical brain, she struggled to sort through the puzzle presented to her.
Seth, the kopis, was traveling with a werewolf pack.
He was petting one of the werewolves. It wasn’t trying to maul him.
There were at least two of them—probably three, since Elise didn’t think that the gray wolf was Scarface after all.
And one or all of them might be murderers.
“What the hell have I found?” Elise whispered, clinging to the tree with human hands. It didn’t make any more sense to her in corporeal form than it did as an omnipresent shadow.
She drew one of the silver knives from her boot, balancing it on two fingers. Elise had been practicing with throwing knives. All it would take is a flick of the wrist, and she could slide its blade into the gray wolf’s flank. It wouldn’t get far with silver poisoning. Elise could get all the answers she wanted after that.
Elise narrowed her eyes, poised to fling the knife.
“Drop it,” said a voice behind her.
She hadn’t heard anyone approach.
Elise spun, raising the knife. She turned in time to see the missing werewolf, Scarface—still in human form, despite the full moon—shoot her point-blank in the face with a handgun the size of a small cannon.
Getting shot was an experience that Elise ranked on the “unpleasantness” scale right around “trying to survive a week without coffee.” It was an annoyance, but not deadly, and definitely not as difficult as walking around in full daylight.
But it sure as hell pissed her off.
She felt the metal enter her near the inner corner of her right eye. It slid through her sinuses, entered her cranium, and rattled around for a moment before finding its way in
to the back of her throat. Elise swallowed down the hard lump of the slug and felt it drop into her belly.
Later, her body would reject the metal, and she would throw it up with whatever tissues had been damaged by the gunshot. Elise would feel shitty until she ate enough to heal, and then life would resume its normal routine.
There were benefits to being a godlike demon, even if she couldn’t go tanning anymore.
So it wasn’t getting shot that made Elise have a really, really bad night. It was the blaze of white light that followed.
The light filled her skull with the chorus of a thousand voices. It slammed into Elise, ripped apart her flesh, and made her incorporeal before she could scream.
She tasted apples.
And then she came back to consciousness in a cage.
NINE
“GODDAMN, LOOK AT that thing. What is it? Is it another megaira?”
“I don’t know. Go in there and ask.”
“Are you fucking crazy? You go in there and ask.”
“Yeah, because I am feeling totally suicidal right now, I’ll do that. Great idea, asshole.”
Elise opened her eyes.
Then she immediately closed them again.
In the half-second that her eyes had been open, she had seen that she was chained to a wall with two large spotlights aimed at her. The details of the room itself were kind of interesting—the shelving made her think that she was in some kind of pantry—but not nearly as interesting as the fact that her captors knew to keep her under lights.
Sunlight was the biggest problem for Elise, but enough artificial light was bad, too. Bad enough to keep her from sliding away on shadows, anyway. The chains on their own would have been useless, but they prevented her from walking over to unplug the spotlights, so she was, effectively, caged.
There was one door beyond the two lights. The men spoke on the other side.
“You know what? I’m going to get Rylie. She’ll want to see this.”
“No, don’t bother her. What about Nash? He took it down in the first place; maybe he’ll want to question it.”
“He says he’s not going anywhere near it, either.”
Every time they called Elise “it,” her level of annoyance climbed a few more degrees.
She thought she recognized those voices. The casual banter sounded like the brothers she had seen outside the sheriff’s department on the night of her arrival.
Which meant that the man that had shot her still hadn’t changed into a werewolf—gold eyes, full moon, and all.
Elise fingered the locks on her chains. It was fairly basic, and reinforced with silver, which had no effect on her. She could probably break free. But she didn’t try to escape. She was exactly where she wanted to be.
The bullet was still heavy in her stomach. Elise felt a telltale surge of nausea that meant her body was about to reject it.
Her abs clenched. Her vision blurred. Two short heaves, and she had vomited the bullet. It emerged from her throat encased in slimy black tissue, like she was vomiting a liver, and it burst when it struck the floor. Ichor sloshed over the wood, sank into the cracks between boards.
“Do you think it’s what’s killing everyone?” one of the men went on, oblivious to Elise’s activity inside the room.
“There’s an easy way to find out. ‘Hey, are you Satan? And did you kill six people and try to blame it on us? What’s your problem with the fur, huh?’” A pause, and then he said, “What? Stop looking at me like that. It’s worth a try.”
“Fuck. Look…okay, fine, I’ll talk to it.” That one sounded like Seth, the younger man, the kopis. His voice wasn’t as deep as his brother’s. “Come with me, Abel.”
The werewolf’s name was Abel. Seth and Abel. Two of Adam’s three sons from the Bible.
“Wittle baby scared by the big mean demon?” Abel asked. Apparently, Abel was kind of a dick.
“Ever heard of backup, douchebag?” Seth shot back.
Definitely brothers.
Elise pulled her legs underneath her so that she was sitting on her knees. If she needed to attempt escape, she could break the chains and stand in one swift motion. It also kept her from getting her pants soaked with black vomit.
“If one of us isn’t going to be able to stand up against it, you think having two of us there’s going to make a difference? Nash says to leave it locked up until morning. You don’t have to like the guy, but you’ve got to admit he knows what he’s talking about.”
A long pause.
“Yeah, all right. We’ll wait until morning.”
Shuffling footsteps. The men had walked away.
After everything Elise had seen and heard during her time in Northgate, she had been forming a mental narrative of these brothers: A pair of hunters, one of them a kopis, that had been fighting werewolves together. One of them had been bitten. Changed. They stayed together. Now the kopis was trying to cover his bloodthirsty brother’s tracks—maybe by removing the hands and other identifying features of the corpses. He had also stolen files from the sheriff’s department to make sure they were doing a good enough job.
It was a tidy narrative. A family in collusion. Sweet, really. It would be no harder to swallow two murderers than one.
But that was quickly falling apart now that she had realized there were more people involved. Someone named Rylie, someone named Nash. An entire pack of werewolves.
Did you kill six people and try to blame it on us?
They might have known Elise was listening, but she doubted it. These weren’t the evil mutterings of bad men.
Of course, good people could kill by accident, too.
Nash.
That name stuck in her skull like a thorn. Why did it sound familiar?
Elise struggled to think. It was difficult to clear her thoughts with spotlights aimed at her. She felt sluggish, prickly, uncomfortable.
They had said that Nash was the one who had taken her down. He was the one with the bright light, the one that had tasted of apples.
Elise’s memory was crystal-clear. But her own memories weren’t the only ones that she carried. She had another woman’s memories locked deep in the back of her mind, and it was from those suppressed memories that she recalled a name: Nashriel. An angel, and one of God’s most loyal soldiers.
But it couldn’t be. Why would a hunter, a werewolf, and an ancient angel be colluding with each other?
This was bigger than six murders. Much bigger.
It was time to escape.
Elise had many names. Her friends that had known her as a human called her by “Elise,” which was the name that her parents had given her. Ariane, Elise’s mother, had picked the name because it was pretty; she had hoped that its beauty might impart some small measure of grace to a life that was fated to end quickly and violently. It didn’t work.
After Elise died and returned as a demon, many hellborn called her “Father,” since she had come back to life in the image of the father of all demons, whose blood ran through her veins. She still wasn’t sure if they called her Father as an homage to her origin, or if they genuinely couldn’t tell the difference between her and Yatam.
But everyone else called her “Godslayer.”
Elise had earned that name.
She had been designed by Metaraon, the Voice of God, to be a weapon. An assassin. Three years earlier, she had walked the cobblestone paths of the garden, stood on the roots of the Tree, and drunk deep the waters of Mnemosyne. In order to survive. Elise had been forced to surrender herself to the garden, merging her soul with that of Eve’s—the first angel.
Elise had walked away with Eve’s heart. And she had spent three years avoiding every goddamn angel on the planet.
But the time for avoidance was over. If Seth and Abel did have an angel with them, Elise wouldn’t need to break herself free. She could walk out of captivity.
She closed her eyes and let her mind drift in the way that her body could not, bound to the earth by spotlights. Eve
n now, as a demon, she retained a kopis’s ability to sense preternatural creatures. She could feel Abel, the werewolf, like a weight in her belly. She could feel Seth, the kopis, on the tip of her tongue, like a forgotten word.
And Elise felt Nashriel, the angel, like the buzz of electricity at her crown.
She reached out to him.
“Nashriel,” she said, and it wasn’t her voice. It wasn’t the voice of a mortal woman, a kopis, or a demon. It was the voice of the mother of angels—the voice of Eve.
Nashriel heard her, and the door opened.
Like all angels, Nashriel was tall—well over six feet. He was handsome. His hair was brown, cut in a modern style, with short bangs that shadowed his eyes. His skin had olive undertones, more Middle Eastern than Mediterranean. And his eyes were blue, pale blue, shockingly so. Only a darker ring of color delineated the irises from the sclera.
He wore a gray suit, the kind that skilled Italian tailors cut with razor precision. He had been doing well for himself. It pleased Eve to see him in such good health, even when she last remembered him with long, unkempt hair, and blood on his hands.
Nashriel dropped to one knee in front of her.
“It is you,” he said. His expression was pained. His mind was probably trying to tell him that they were strangers, while his heart said that he loved her more than anyone he had ever known.
Eve would have wanted to soothe him, taking away his hurts.
But Elise just wanted to escape.
“Open the shackles, Nashriel,” she said.
“But you died. You died so very long ago. I was there when the garden burned.”
“The world’s always changing,” Elise said, trying to keep the impatience out of her voice. The love Eve felt for him made Elise’s teeth ache. “Open the shackles.”
Nashriel’s eyes tracked over her face, but he didn’t seem to see her. Not really. He was seeing Eve: a woman with long, auburn curls, olive skin much like his, and a gentle grace that suffused her every motion. Not a black-haired, white-fleshed demon that shattered at the touch of sunlight.
