by SM Reine
“I never thought I would be happy to see you,” said a female voice from the shadows.
Elise hadn’t heard that voice in a long time, but she would never forget that cold condescension, no matter how long she managed to walk the Earth. It was the voice of a jealous woman, someone who didn’t believe that her boyfriend, James, wasn’t fucking Elise behind her back—a witch, a talented doctor, and an all-around bitch.
Stephanie Whyte emerged, hunched over in the uncomfortable space. Her strawberry-blond hair hung loose around her shoulders. She looked gaunt and wasn’t preceded by her usual cloud of Victoria’s Secret perfume.
“Stephanie…Armstrong,” Elise said. “You’re fucking kidding me. You’re the coroner?”
“The one and only, for the last three months,” Stephanie said. She managed to sound dignified, even as she all but collapsed in Elise’s arms. Elise hadn’t been expecting Stephanie to grab her, so she staggered under the doctor’s weight, sinking to the dusty floor. “The things I’ve done, Elise—the things I’ve seen—you’d be doing me a favor if you slit my throat where I stand.”
“You’re not standing,” Elise said dryly.
She had definitely contemplated slitting Stephanie’s throat a few times—well, spitting in her pancake batter, at the very least—but no matter how much they disliked each other, it wasn’t worth murder.
There were no stairs leading out of the crawl space, and Stephanie seemed too weak to climb, so Elise wrapped her arms around her.
“I’m going to do something that will make you uncomfortable. Close your eyes, hold your breath, and don’t breathe until you hear my voice again,” Elise said.
She expected argument from Stephanie, but the doctor must have been even worse than she looked. She curled against Elise’s chest. Her eyes fell shut.
Elise bled into darkness, wrapped her misty form around Stephanie, and dragged the woman to the first floor. It only took an instant, but she knew from what Anthony had told her that it felt like a lifetime. He hated being transported by Elise—he had only voluntarily done it once since they moved to Las Vegas together, and that was because they had been about to fall off of the top of the MGM Grand. Anthony preferred Elise’s embrace to death. That was about the only thing he preferred it to.
Stephanie was gasping when she reappeared on the kitchen floor, clutching her throat.
“You can open your eyes,” Elise said. She pressed her hand against Stephanie’s forehead. The skin was clammy.
Her eyes flew open. “What did you do to me? How did we get up here?”
“Remember the demon apocalypse?” Elise asked. Of course Stephanie did. There was no way that anyone who had been in Reno at the time could have forgotten. “Long story short, it changed me. Can you walk?”
Stephanie found the strength to stand—probably motivated by the urge to never have to be carried by Elise like that ever again.
“Is that Richard?” Stephanie asked when she looked over the counter to see the body.
“No. But he’s dead, too.”
“Good,” she said fiercely.
Elise pulled Stephanie’s arm over her shoulder and helped carry her through the living room. “You were the one modifying the cadavers, weren’t you?”
She gave a hollow, mirthless laugh. “Modifying. Nice word for mutilation. Yes, it was me. I couldn’t bring myself to join their circles of power, so I desecrated the bodies instead. Heroic, don’t you think?” Stephanie’s calm front was cracking. She sounded like she was on the verge of breakdown.
“You survived,” Elise said. She wasn’t going to judge whether or not Stephanie could have done better, escaped, or even stopped them. It didn’t matter. What had been done was done. No point in regretting what couldn’t be changed. “How did they get you?”
“I was coming to meet someone in Northgate. They intercepted me. Forced me to take Richard’s name and claim to be his sister, though he didn’t treat me like one.” Stephanie’s eyes burned like coals. “Tell me he died painfully.”
He had died instantly, probably without ever realizing he was attacked. Elise said, “He suffered.”
Stephanie looked all too pleased by that.
Elise pushed the front door open. Rylie and Abel’s werewolf energies were approaching, which meant that Seth and the pickup had to be getting close, too. She could let him take Stephanie somewhere safe. For now, she sat the doctor on the front step.
“You got my message, didn’t you?” Stephanie asked. “About Lucinde?”
“I got it.”
“I won’t lie to you. I had hoped James would get it.”
Elise’s mouth twitched. “Well, he’s here, too.”
Stephanie’s face softened. “Is he?” She looked around, as if expecting to see him there at that moment. When she had left Reno, James and Elise had still been a somewhat functioning partnership. She probably had no clue that they were enemies now.
A mean part of Elise wanted to say, Yeah, but James didn’t come for you. Maybe it was Eve’s kindheartedness coming out, maybe Elise had grown up since their petty rivalry, but she kept that thought to herself.
But Elise still wasn’t mature enough to comfort Stephanie the way she obviously needed. She set the doctor down, backed away, and said, “Do you know what happened to the priest in there?”
“I heard some kind of argument, a scuffle,” Stephanie said. She shuddered. “They had kept me under there for two days. I thought the racket meant that had finally decided to sacrifice me, but they left an hour before you came. I have never been so relieved to hear your foul mouth in my life.”
Eve’s niceness must have really been creeping up on Elise, because she didn’t remark on that snide comment, either. “Where did they go?”
“I don’t know. It sounded like they planned to perform a sacrifice tonight, so I imagine they’ve gone to one of the other ritual sites.”
“Tonight?” She knew that it wasn’t the full moon, but she had to look up and double-check anyway. “All of the other murders have been on the full and new moons.”
Stephanie shrugged weakly.
A pickup pulled alongside the curb. The doctor tensed, but Elise said, “Don’t worry. It’s a friend.”
Seth jumped out. It was too warm for the baggy winter coat he wore, so she imagined that he must have been heavily armed. He moved nimbly despite the added weight.
He stopped at the end of the sidewalk, eyes widening at the sight of the woman sitting on the step. “Stephanie?”
“Seth,” she sighed, “thank God, someone sane. Help me stand up.”
Elise had run out of the ability to be surprised for the week. “You know each other?”
Seth grabbed Stephanie. “Yeah, she’s family,” he said, earning a shaky smile out of the doctor.
Distant alarm bells were ringing in Elise’s skull, telling her that she should be worried about this—there was some connection there, something she was missing, something that was going to come back and bite her in the ass. But she didn’t have time to dive into her alarming instincts.
“Where are the other ritual sites, Stephanie?” Elise asked, helping Seth carry her to the pickup.
“There’s a cabin in the mountains—”
“We cleared that one,” Seth said.
“—and the basement of the church in Northgate, St. Philomene’s Cathedral.”
“Shit,” Elise swore, ignoring Stephanie’s icy look. She had just left Northgate. Who knew how much damage the cult could have done while she was gone? “Seth, will you tell Rylie that we need to turn back?”
“I’m on it,” he said.
Elise vanished.
The stained glass window was a picture of an apple. Elise had been in Father Night’s office twice, spoken to Rylie about Cain’s cult, and walked laps around St. Philomene’s while searching for Richard Armstrong. Yet she hadn’t given a thought to the fact that the window behind Father Night’s desk was a red apple, bordered by the branches of a tree, until
she broke in to search for a murderous cult.
Patterns. Elise’s job was to find them, break them, understand what they meant.
She’d completely missed this one.
“Anthony’s going to laugh his ass off at me,” she muttered, kicking aside Father Night’s rugs in search of a warded trap door like the one in Dickerson’s pantry. His floor was smooth. There wasn’t a single trap door in the entire damn church, and Elise had been looking for twenty minutes.
Where was the entrance to the basement?
She sure as hell could have used Rylie’s nose to speed up the search. Unfortunately, the werewolves were still looping back from Woodbridge, and it would be a while before they managed to catch up with her.
But someone might be getting sacrificed under the church at that moment. Elise couldn’t wait to get in—she had to find it now.
She tried to flash through the cracks in the floor, but it was like slamming face-first into a brick wall. The basement was warded in much the same way as the sheriff’s office.
Wards might not stop a physical penetration. Elise slammed her heel into the floor. The wood groaned.
Magic roiled, burning through the air, filling her nose with the scent of burning ozone.
She kicked the same part of the floor again, two more times. It didn’t break. Kopides were supernaturally strong, and some demons even stronger, but she lacked adequate leverage to shatter the floor.
Her eyes traced up Father Night’s door frame to the spiral of stairs inside the tower and the darkness at the top.
It would be a long way to fall.
In a flash, Elise appeared at the top of the tower, momentarily merged with the darkness. She could see the entire office through the shadows: the empty leather chair, the bundle of petrified twigs on his bookshelf, the old Bible under the window. But she couldn’t see beyond the door. Whatever wards the cult had placed on the cathedral blocked the rest of the church.
Elise reformed herself into a corporeal human form at the apex of the bell tower’s arches. For an instant, she was suspended in air, unmoving, almost hovering.
Then she fell.
Twenty feet of spiral staircase flashed past her. She pulled her knees to her chest, crossed her arms over her face, and hit the ground.
She might as well have shot a cannonball through the floorboards. Wood exploded around her. Dust and plaster and soil showered to the ground.
Elise landed on one knee, hand to the ground for balance, and looked up.
The ritual space under St. Philomene’s was the largest of the three. The bloody pentagram had been painted across the floor from wall-to-wall, creating a circle large enough to accommodate a coven’s full company of thirteen. A dozen equidistant points had been demarcated by candles, and robed figures stood over each one. The center of the pentagram held a half-dozen shiny steel tables with an elevated pulpit overlooking them.
Each table had a body on it. Bloody, mauled, daggers jutting through the mouths as if penetrating the soft palate. Already dead. Sacrifice over. Ritual complete.
Elise made quick inventory: only one exit, besides the one she had made, no windows, solid concrete walls. The cult wasn’t going anywhere. All twelve of them were trapped with her.
Twelve.
She counted them twice while they stared at her, stunned, shrouded in heavy robes with the hoods pooled around their shoulders. She recognized Brick among them. His wasn’t the only face that Elise recognized; she knew others from the murder files, and as Lincoln’s coworkers.
They were in on it. They were all in on it.
If Richard Armstrong had been lucky thirteen, then that meant the coven had no room for Father Night. Had he been among their number, or another victim of a cult’s blood thirst?
It was too late to ask him. But it wasn’t too late to ask his friend, Sheriff Dickerson, who stood on the pulpit with blood to her elbows and a look of shock on her face.
Elise had questions. The sheriff seemed to be high priestess and would likely have the answers.
The sheriff would live for now, Elise decided.
Everyone else? Fair game.
“Get her,” Dickerson said, a moment too late.
The cult erupted into motion at the same moment that Elise did. She tried to evaporate into the deep shadows of the candlelit room, only to find that their wards prevented it; instead, she drew her sword, and met the first cultist head-on.
Bob Hagy’s fist swung at her, clutched around a knife. Elise leaped back. The point of metal whizzed millimeters from her abdomen, slicing a long gash open on her shirt. Damn it, she had just bought that tank top.
Elise’s foot lashed high, catching Hagy in the chin. His head snapped back. He dropped the knife. Collapsed.
Another cultist broadsided her with the force of a linebacker. They slammed into the wall together.
“Out of the way! I need a clear shot!” shouted a hoarse female voice—the sheriff.
Elise didn’t look to see what the sheriff would be shooting with. She pushed off of the wall and slammed the bony ridge of her forehead into her attacker’s nose. She heard the bone snap, the squish of soft tissue, and knew that the cultist would die shortly.
She turned her attention to the others. They were trying to flee.
The inability to fast-travel through darkness didn’t prevent Elise from being the fastest person in the room. She reached the door first, slamming her back into it.
The members of the cult attempting to escape stopped at the bottom of the stairs, reluctant to fight her as the others had.
“You aren’t leaving here,” she told their round, frightened faces. “You assholes are never leaving.”
“Lord help us,” one whispered.
He wanted the Lord to help them?
They were the ones that had kidnapped innocents. They had caged people, slaughtered them, forced Stephanie to bloody her hands, fed Ace the remains.
Better yet, their families already believed them to be dead.
Elise was happy to make it truth.
She slid the falchion between the ribs of one man, penetrating his heart, and then kicked his body off to chop at another. Where the black blade of her sword had wounded him, a sickness spread, turning his flesh to stone. It didn’t make it far—he died too quickly. Her falchion sang at the taste of blood.
Elise hacked through the rest one by one. Half dropped before the others had time to react. Some died so quickly that her sword couldn’t even poison them.
A gun discharged, thundering in the concrete box of the basement. One of the surviving deputies—was his name Saldana?—was firing at Elise. She looked down to see bullets disappearing into her chest, leaving neat holes in her already-ruined shirt.
She drove her sword into his eye. The socket blackened, and the rest of his face went with it.
A fireball burned past Elise, singing her hair, striking the wall with a shower of molten magic.
She whirled to see who had cast such magic and found Sheriff Dickerson holding a Book of Shadows open in both hands. One of the pages was still smoldering. The high priestess had fired straight out of the cult’s holy text. Elise was almost amused to see a cross necklace dangling from the sheriff’s neck. She clung to God now, even after all these murders.
There was a time that James had been the only witch capable of containing magic within written symbols. But he and Elise had gotten sloppy about protecting the technique, and an enemy had found it; a few years later, it had spread to the masses. Most witches were still too weak to make use of it. The fact that Sheriff Dickerson could cast paper magic made Elise respect her a little more. Respect, and fear.
It was not in the sheriff’s favor for Elise to fear her.
The deputy’s bullets would come out later. Elise didn’t care about those. The magic might be an actual threat—especially if Sheriff Dickerson had another exorcism spell inside the book like the one Richard Armstrong had possessed.
Elise didn’t plan on giving
her the chance to find it.
She sprinted at the pulpit and plowed into the sheriff, knocking her into the tables. They weren’t affixed to the floor. The last one slammed onto its side, spilling a freshly-killed body on top of Dickerson. The sheriff screamed at the horror of being underneath a corpse.
“You fed them to your fucking dog,” Elise growled, slamming her fist across Dickerson’s face. That one was for Ace. She struck again—that was for Stephanie.
Hands seized her shoulders, ripping her away from the sheriff. Elise whirled. It was one of the other supposed murder victims, a woman with bleached blond hair that looked like she should have been begging donations at a church picnic. Brave of her to attack Elise. Brave, and idiotic.
It took two swift gestures to kill her. A blade in the stomach, a slash across the throat. The falchion drank deep.
And the only one left alive was Sheriff Dickerson.
Elise dropped on top of her, sheathing the sword in a swift motion. She crouched on the sheriff’s chest like a raven perched on a grave.
Elise took a moment to page through the Book of Shadows. It was a large, heavy book, and it looked like witches had contributed to it for decades, though the written spells were fresh. Given Northgate’s appreciation of its local church, Elise had expected that the cult was something new—bored people dabbling in black magic. But this implied something more premeditated.
“Are you with the Apple?” Elise asked, tearing pages out of the book by the fistful. Dickerson’s eyes watered as she watched Elise shred them.
“Please,” she croaked.
“Talk to me. Are you with the Apple?”
“Yes,” Dickerson said, lifting a weak hand to her chest, tapping her heart with one finger.
Elise ripped open the robes. The sheriff was wearing her uniform underneath, so Elise ripped that, too. She found a bleeding apple tattooed on Dickerson’s bare breast, where it would always be concealed by her modest clothes.
“What was the spell meant to do?” Elise asked.
“The glory of the Apple,” Dickerson said. She coughed, body shaking under Elise, and blood stained her teeth. It seemed that Elise had given her some kind of internal wound in the fight. Such a shame.
