by Reine, SM
And you would do better?
“Yes,” she said. “Because I’m the person who most wants to keep the gates closed.”
Nukha’il rolled his shoulders, like his invisible wings were bothering him. “There’s truth to that. What of a compromise?”
Compromising is for the weak-minded, said the demon.
It was barely an insult, as far as Elise was concerned, but Nukha’il went rigid with fury. He strode forward and seized the cat from the ground. “Your choice of forms is a mistake, demon. I could break you.” His voice was calm, but his entire body shivered with fury.
The cat hissed and struggled in his grip, lashing its body wildly. It sank its teeth into his wrist and rabbit kicked against his arm. It was a pure feline reaction, but the demon’s response was equally poor. The night turned black around Elise. Her skin burned, like magma poured down the neck of her shirt.
She shoved through the thickened air to grab Nukha’il’s arm. Laying her hand on him burned through the glove, but she dug her fingers in and didn’t let go. “You know the rules of negotiation,” she said. “You can’t assault him. It’s immediate relinquishment of rights.”
His muscles quivered. “You heard what he said.”
The cat continued to thrash, but a chuckle like melted butter rolled over them. To be honest, I find this entire subject puerile. Regardless of what decision you two attempt to negotiate, I will supervise the gates. I cannot abide such a thing on Earth without watching them.
“And neither can we,” Nukha’il said.
“I can’t stop either of you,” she said in a level voice. “But if you’re going to be in my territory, I will be the one in charge.”
The angel and the demon remained locked in deadly anger for a moment before the tension dropped a fraction. Nukha’il’s hand opened. The cat landed, walked a few feet away, and began licking its fur vigorously as though it had never been touched.
Nukha’il smoothed his jacket down. “You suggest cooperation.”
No. There was no way in hell she would cooperate with anyone over the gates—not angels, not demons, not her own goddamn mother. But if there was one thing Elise had learned from her time dealing with the otherworld, it was that they didn’t give two shits what she wanted. Negotiation was a matter of who lied the best. The real issues would be worked out at the end of a blade.
“I know the demons in Reno,” Elise said. “They can help me with the gates.”
A kopis? Cooperate with demons? It sounded like the idea amused the cat. What would James think of that?
She stiffened, but quelled her paranoid urge to reach out to her aspis. Everyone knew they were a team. Mentioning him wasn’t necessarily a threat.
But, knowing demons, it probably was.
“So you will lead the infernal forces in Reno. We can send an angelic delegate to supervise.” Nukha’il bobbed his head. “They won’t like it, but it could do.”
The cat washed its face with a paw. Do what you will. It turned those black eyes on Elise, and there was far too much intelligence in them to look properly feline. When the summits began long ago, we met out of a desperate need—a need to stop the war between Heaven and Hell, a need to protect humanity from our battles. I sat with Metaraon and Teleklos, king of Sparta, and had the first civil discussion between factions. Much like today, it was brief, but it brought peace to a torn Earth. The full weight of shadow settled on her shoulders, curling around her throat like the cat’s tail, and she couldn’t breathe. This will be the last summit, sword-woman. It’s fitting that it should be between us.
Her skin crawled. “Who are you?”
I am the empty space between the stars in the night sky.
“Lucifer?” she guessed.
His laugh curled around her like cool fingers. No… I am no angel.
And then he was gone, although there was no way to tell by looking at the cat. It wasn’t impressed by its brief possession, or the voluntary exorcism. It looped around Elise’s ankles, rubbing its cheek along her calf.
Nukha’il shed his jacket and unfurled his wings. A few downy feathers drifted to the earth. “I hate that guy,” he said, throwing the coat over his shoulder hooked on one finger.
“Who was it?”
“He was a man, once. But the centuries do strange things to mortal minds in immortal bodies. I never know if he’s going to feel playful or murderous. We’re lucky to catch him on a good day.” He glanced around the trailer. “I don’t see a car. Did you run out here?”
“Something like that,” Elise said.
“I’ll take you back. Here.”
Nukha’il stretched out a pale hand. She stepped back. “I would rather walk.”
“A hundred miles?”
Reluctantly, she placed her fingers in his. Nukha’il’s wings brightened.
They vanished from the desert.
XII
Benjamin had a vision that afternoon. It was the barest of glimpses, for once: he saw Elise and an angel on a long, empty highway with the swollen moon just over the horizon. The image was so brief that didn’t even trip the Union sensors. His collar remained silent.
He waited until he was certain Allyson was asleep, and then waited for Elise on the edge of town at midnight.
She was there exactly when he expected, and she didn’t seem surprised to see Benjamin sitting on the side of the road. “It’s over,” Elise said. She pulled a feather out of her hair and grimaced. “If that’s what you’re wondering.”
He wasn’t. He had already seen how the summit would unfold. “Can I talk to you?”
She sighed, pulled her braid over her shoulder, and worked her unbroken fingers through the curls to loosen it. She came up with two more feathers. “Sure. Let’s go to the motel room.”
The shower was running when they reached room twenty-nine. Benjamin swept through the room and removed all the monitoring devices, which were easy for him to find. The Union tried to be sneaky, but their all-encompassing regulations made their practices predictable. He peeled wires off of the bottom of a lamp, crushed a black box he found on top of the dresser, and popped the battery out of a device under the sink.
Elise watched his actions in the mirror as she peeled the glove off her left hand and washed it in the sink. The water swirled pink down the drain. “You’re not with the Union willingly. Are you?” He shook his head and dumped the devices in the trash. “Are you a prisoner?”
“Yeah,” he said, and then, “but not really. My parents sold me.”
She didn’t react to that news. She tugged the glove back on. “And you’re, what, sixteen?”
“Seventeen.”
“Do you want me to break you out?”
The question startled him, but in a good way. Warmth spread through him to the tips of his fingers. It was short-lived—an itch on his neck reminded him of his chains, and he tugged on the collar. “You can’t. They always know where I am.”
“What if we got that off of you?”
“Then you’d have done something I haven’t been able to. I’ve tried for months,” Benjamin said.
Her lips pursed. “I’ll give it a shot.”
Elise gestured to the floor, and Benjamin sat in front of the bed. He felt the mattress sink behind him as she took position at his back. Her left knee rested against his shoulder.
She tipped his head first to one side, and then the other, with a hand that was firm but gentle. Then she drew a slender-bladed dagger that had the mark of St. Benedict stamped near the handle. “Hold still,” she said. He barely breathed as she picked at the lock awkwardly with her left hand. “How did you know my name?”
“I know everything about you.”
Elise’s eyes flicked to his in the mirror. There was an edge to her that said maybe, just maybe, he wasn’t safe sitting between her knees. Her hand stilled for a moment. “Enlighten me.”
He gave a shuddering laugh. “Where should I start? Uh… God, I don’t know. Elise Kavanagh. You attended the Univ
ersity of Nevada. You worked for an accounting firm for a little while, until that argument with your boss. They still send you angry letters sometimes. You’ve got a tattoo on your hip—it’s this black thing you picked out of the artist’s flash because you felt like getting something done, and didn’t care what. I think it’s supposed to be a thorny flower or something. I never saw it too closely.”
She didn’t move. It was like she had become frozen.
“I don’t like to look at the private stuff,” he added, like that would help. “But I can’t always help it.”
It took her two tries to speak. “Mind witch?”
“Precognitive. Sometimes I have retrocognition, too, and it’s hard to tell which is which. The Union says it’s like the fourth dimension’s all rolled up and stuffed in my head.” Benjamin picked at the hole in the knee of his jeans. “I’ve been seeing you for years.”
Metal on metal gave a soft tink as she went back to picking the lock. “What else have you seen?”
“I know about Malcolm. I know about Anthony now—I’ve been seeing him all day. I also know about James.”
“And?”
She was pushing for a specific answer. Some people wanted to know their future when they found out what Benjamin could do, even though the Union forbade him from doing what they considered “petty fortune-telling.”
But he didn’t think that was what Elise wanted to know.
Benjamin reached up to touch her hand, hoping that it would soften the blow a little. “I know about the garden.”
The blade slipped. It nicked his neck.
He jumped to his feet and clapped a hand to the injury. Elise was frozen on the foot of the bed, and she seemed to have forgotten the knife in her hand.
The shower was the only sound that broke the silence for a long minute. When Elise found her voice, it was hoarse. “Nobody knows that.”
“I wish I didn’t,” Benjamin said. “I wish I didn’t know so much. Like, how Isaac gave you the swords for your seventh birthday. Falchions aren’t meant to be dual-wielded, but he didn’t want you to use a shield, so you got two of them. But that’s not what he meant, did he? He never wanted you to have an aspis—never wanted you to have James—and he’ll be angry when he finds out what’s happened to you. He will blame James.” Benjamin could already see it, as he had seen it a dozen times before. Red sky, red earth, her father so tall.
Elise seemed horrified. That was how they always looked.
He pushed on. “You really liked James’s aunt. When they killed her, you felt bad that you never told her that. But not for long. You didn’t feel anything for so long. The garden broke you and reformed you, like a cracked china doll. You don’t think you’ve been put together right. James agrees. He would never tell you that, but he agrees, and he fears for you—but sometimes he’s afraid of you, too. Anthony… well, he doesn’t know enough to fear.”
She got to her feet slowly. So slowly.
“That’s not true,” she said.
“Which part?”
“James isn’t afraid of me.”
He shouldn’t have said that. He changed the subject. “I know everything, so I know you want to know what happened to Michele Newcomb.”
“McIntyre did it.” Elise’s hand tightened on the dagger. “I found the evidence.”
“But that’s not the whole story. The thing is, Michele… I loved Michele.” His voice cracked. Benjamin didn’t bother trying to hide it. “She wanted to know the future, so I gave it to her. I told her what’s coming.”
“What’s coming?”
“No,” he said. “I can’t tell you that. I shouldn’t have told her, either. What’s coming is bad, it’s really bad, and Michele was really good. She wanted to stop it, and… it’s hard to explain why, but she thought that killing Lucas would prevent everything.” His gaze went distant as he recalled the vision. He had seen it as it happened. “She met him at his home. Dana was playing out back, and Leticia was in the kitchen. As soon as Lucas let her in, she…”
Benjamin shuddered. What details did Elise need? Did she need to know that Michele was a pyrokinetic witch, and that she tried to burn Lucas’s house down? Did she need to know that Lucas was so scared for his family that he pissed himself? Did she need to know the way he was pushed through a window, and how certain he was that he would die?
“Michele tried to kill him,” he finally said. “She almost did it.”
“So he killed her instead,” Elise said.
“Leticia shot,” Benjamin said, holding out a finger. The wife had come out of the kitchen with Lucas’s gun raised, her feet planted, her baby kicking a foot into her ribs. “Bang. Michele’s face went…” He sucked in a hard breath at the memory. “Michele didn’t die—so Lucas drew the knife. He couldn’t let her tell the Union what his wife tried to do.”
The shower shut off. Anthony would be out soon, so Benjamin hurried to finish.
“You have to understand, Elise—everything you think about your friend is true. Lucas is good. He’s so good, and the world needs him. But I made a mistake. I told Michele things she didn’t need to know, and it made good people have to kill another good person.” His hands were shaking. Tears burned hot down his cheeks. “If they took Lucas away, he would die. They would investigate and find the truth of the story, so Leticia would die, too. And their children would have no parents.”
Elise’s face had gone stony. “Why haven’t you told the Union this?”
“Because then they will want to know what I told Michele,” Benjamin said. “But I can’t tell them. They get pieces of it through this fucking collar, but not the whole story, and they can’t have it. Nobody can.” He could see the question in her eyes, so he said, “Not even you. And definitely not James.”
They stared at each other for a long, long time.
Benjamin wasn’t psychic, so he couldn’t tell what Elise was thinking. But he knew her well enough to guess. He had seen so much of her life, from the times her mother carried her as a fragile infant into Isaac’s battles, to the first time she held a knife, all the way through to the time she would die—not so far from where they stood in time. He had witnessed her first kiss and first heartbreak and first job out of college. He had seen her in the garden and watched her spill blood on the earth again and again and again.
He loved Elise, just as he had loved Michele. She had no secrets from him.
And he saw her considering the story. Trying to decide if he might lie. Hoping it was true, so that she could trust McIntyre again.
The bathroom door opened. Anthony emerged naked, with a towel wrapped low around his hips. When he realized he wasn’t alone, he went rigid. “What’s going on?”
“You,” Benjamin said. His eyelids drooped half-closed, and he took a deep breath in. Anthony had been flitting in and out of his mind for hours.
Anthony set a hand on the lamp, like he was thinking about attacking Benjamin. “Who is this?”
“A precog,” Elise said. “He sees the future.”
“You do?” A light sparked in Anthony’s gaze. “Really?”
“The Cubs will never win the World Series. But I don’t need to read the future to know that,” Benjamin said solemnly. It was his standard, half-joke response to someone announcing his special abilities.
“If you know that, then… what do you see for me?”
Benjamin almost felt bad for him. Almost. “You’re not in her future.”
Anthony looked like he’d been slapped.
“I’ll save McIntyre,” Elise told Benjamin, ignoring her boyfriend.
Of course she would. “The night guards switch at four in the morning,” Benjamin said. “I shouldn’t help you. Gary’s already going to be mad at me.”
She nodded slowly. “I understand.” Elise waved the knife at his collar. “I can’t open the lock. But you knew that.”
He smiled weakly. “Even when I know the truth, I still have hope.” He took a step toward Elise—he wanted to hug her an
d apologize for everything, especially the things she didn’t know yet—but she took a step away from him, shielded Anthony with her body, and raised the knife.
So much for hope.
“Thanks for telling me,” she said. Her voice was cold.
Benjamin opened the front door and gave her a small smile that wasn’t happy. “I’ll see you around, Elise.”
PART THREE
Hero
XIII
Elise waited outside the Union compound and watched the guards patrol the perimeter. Like Flynn promised, they changed shift at four o’clock. When the nearest kopis stopped to speak with his replacement, she used the opportunity to sneak inside.
She stayed low and beelined for the center of the compound. She avoided illuminated tents, ducked around shadows, and found McIntyre’s trailer guarded by the kopis named Boyd. He had a gun nestled under one arm, but his hands were occupied with a cup of coffee while he read a magazine. He clearly wasn’t expecting trouble. Not so deep in the compound, and not from the outside.
Elise crawled behind him and stood silently.
He hummed to himself, turned the page, and rocked gently back on his heels.
She slammed her fist into the back of his head.
It didn’t take much force to bounce the brain against the skull, and it dropped him in an instant. She snatched the gun out of the air before he hit the ground. His cup bounced with a hollow thunk and spilled coffee across the dirt.
Boyd didn’t get up.
A quick search of his pockets yielded zip ties, and she bound his wrists before dragging him into the shadow underneath the trailer.
Then she slipped inside.
McIntyre hadn’t been black-bagged again, but he was still naked and bound, and he slept upright against the wall. He stirred when she opened the door and light fell on his face.
He flinched. His eyes opened. They were puffy, swollen, and bloodshot. Two days of beard growth shadowed his face, and his lips were cracked. “Took you long enough,” he said.
