by Deanna Chase
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 opening 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 fear her a little more.
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.
“What’s the glory of the Apple? Explain.”
“Demon,” she rasped. She coughed again, spit blood onto her chin. “We’re summoning a demon. Opening a portal.”
That explained some of the runes around the pentagram, and why Elise didn’t recognize them. Her primary exposure to magic had been through James, who didn’t need to evoke demons for their knowledge or power. To a cult of more mundane people, blood and moonlight would be the only ways to harness enough magic to control a demon.
“I thought you needed to do the sacrifices on the apex and nadir of the moon,” Elise said. “We’re in between.”
“Werewolves—just diverting the OPA. Trying to confuse them. No werewolves here.”
Dickerson didn’t even know that Rylie’s pack existed. Probably for the best.
“Either way, your spell failed. I s
ee no portals,” Elise said.
“It was successful. We possessed him.”
Her heart fell. “Who got possessed?” But Dickerson was fading quickly. She spit up more blood. Her shaking became more violent. Elise gripped the robe in both fists, lifting the woman’s head off of the floor. “Who did you possess with a demon?”
Dickerson’s eyes slid shut. Her lips moved in two silent syllables.
Marshall.
“Oh my God.”
Elise looked up. Rylie stood, naked and human, in the open door of the basement. Her eyes tracked over the bodies, and her cheeks grew paler by the second. The surprise of discovering a massacre must have shocked her back to her human form.
Elise looked at her handiwork as well, seeing it for the first time with eyes untouched by adrenaline. The sacrifices were the worst of it, but the dead cult didn’t look much better. Half of them were rigid with obsidian limbs. There was blood everywhere. The air was thick with it.
Justice rendered.
Releasing Dickerson, Elise stood. “Freak out later,” she said. She pressed a hand to her stomach. One of the deputies had shot her, and her body was trying to reject the bullet. “Phone. Now.”
Rylie spread her hands. “Where would I have a phone?”
Good point.
Elise pushed past Rylie and shot up the stairs. Abel was in his hulking wolf form at the top. Seth must have been taking care of Stephanie somewhere else. Somewhere, hopefully, that was not the werewolf sanctuary.
The stairs to the basement had been hidden behind the confessionals—no wonder Elise hadn’t found it. She bolted across the church into Father Night’s office and ripped the phone off the desk. There was no dial tone.
An instant later, there was no light, either. With a buzz, a sting of magic, all power failed. The room went dark. Moonlight cast pale shapes on the stained glass windows.
Elise slammed the receiver down. “Fuck.” Her swear was punctuated by a hard clench of her abs, and she vomited mucus onto Father Night’s desk. The bullets glimmered in the center of the ichor she dispelled.
“What’s going on?” Rylie asked, hanging in the door of the office.
She wiped her mouth clean. No matter how many times she puked bullets, it felt awful.
“Lines are dead,” Elise rasped. “Power, too.”
Rylie dragged her teeth over her bottom lip, staring up the darkness of the bell tower. “The power goes out all the time here. There’s something wrong with the lines. That’s normal.” It sounded almost like she was trying to convince herself.
Elise hadn’t imagined the surge of magic that had preceded the power cutting out. And it was too convenient that it would have failed when she was trying to reach the werewolf pack.
“I want you to stay here, Rylie,” Elise said. “Make sure that nobody comes back to do more magic downstairs. This isn’t over yet.”
“Who’s going to do magic here? The cult’s all…” Rylie cut herself off by swallowing hard. The look she was giving Elise wasn’t nearly as friendly as the looks they had shared when they were building the fence together.
“Just watch it,” Elise said, addressing both Rylie and the shaggy wolf shadowing her. “I’m going to find a demon.”
The wolf nodded, butting his head into Rylie’s hands.
Elise forced herself to walk calmly out the back door of the church, keeping the growing panic off of her face. She didn’t want to tip Rylie off. The kid didn’t need to know what was probably happening to her pack at that moment. And Elise couldn’t bring herself to tell Rylie the truth, because then she would want to be there. Alpha or not, Rylie was too good, too sweet, too kind—if seeing the basement had bothered her, it was nothing compared to how she would react to what Elise was about to do.
She managed to keep calm for about six steps. But by the time she reached the threshold, she was almost running.
The instant she crossed the wards, she erupted into darkness.
The cult had been trying to possess Lincoln Marshall with a demon.
Elise had given Lincoln silver bullets.
And she had left him inside the werewolf sanctuary’s wards.
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
Lincoln dreamed of Hell. His visions were brighter and clearer than ever before. If he hadn’t laid down to rest in a cottage in the mountains behind Northgate, he would have believed that he was truly there. He could smell the smoke and sulfur. Breathing the air burned his lungs. He felt sluggish, as if the air were thicker than water, and it seemed to take him forever to turn.
Oh, Lincoln…I’m ready for you.
The Devil was there. She was always there, waiting for him to gaze upon her bloody smile. He had been inside of her. Lord have mercy, he had spent himself with her legs locked around his waist and her breasts slick against his chest.
She wore a necklace of bones. A spine was curled around her waist with the tailbone flat against the inside of her thigh. Skeletal fingers gripped her breasts, leaving imprints on her skin, allowing the nipples to peek between the rotten tendons of the knuckles.
Lightning arced through the smoky haze. For an instant, she didn’t look like Elise. She looked sallow, decaying, bloated. There was a towering, black-skinned beast behind her, with the wings of a bat and cloven hooves. It was waiting for her to take Lincoln so that it could act.
When the light cleared, she was standing closer to him. Lincoln only needed to wrap his arms around her sumptuous curves.
Taste me, she said, fingers tracing the lines of her abdominal muscles, dipping along the furrow of her thighs until she reached her nether lips. Her long strokes drew his gaze along the path of her fingertips. She slid one finger between her legs, inside of herself, then touched the juicy tip to his mouth.
Lincoln sucked on the finger. The taste of copper stung his tongue.
He wanted her. He needed her.
Let us be one, said the Devil. At her back, the black beast chuckled.
She placed a black-nailed hand against his chest and shoved. Two steps back, and the ground vanished underneath him.
He was falling, tumbling down the pits of Hell, the air heating with crimson flame. Screams beat at him. Hands tore at his naked body. His fall was slowed by the thick air, and when the Devil followed, she soared on its currents like a dark angel clad in death.
The Devil caught him in her arms. The hard edge of teeth grazed his throat.
Just say yes, she said, a serpentine hand curling around his erection, stroking him until he was so turgid that he thought he might break.
She slid onto him. Her cunt was sweet fire.
Say yes, Lincoln.
Her limbs tangled around his body. Her mouth crushed his. Her maw was growing, blacking out the sky. He inhaled her breath and saw only her eyes and tasted her blood.
Let me take you. Just say yes…
The orgasm crashed over him. His body plunged into the pits of Hell.
“Yes,” Lincoln said.
Near-instantaneous travel through Northgate’s night wasn’t nearly fast enough. The moments that Elise floated over the town felt as endless as the time that she had spent trapped in the garden.
She wasn’t the obsessive type, yet she couldn’t shake the images that flashed through her: the smiling faces of the pack, the laughter of a family sharing jokes, even Nashriel’s frustration at being forced to do the dishes. A murderous demon walked among them. It was Elise’s fault, and she was the only one that could save them.
Elise plunged into the mountains, darted between the trees.
And she smashed headlong into magical wards.
She shocked back into her human form as she bounced onto the forest floor, flat on her back. Elise stared up at the tree branches stretching toward the stars and couldn’t feel her fingers or toes. Whatever she had hit, she had hit it hard—and it had hit her back.
“I told you to leave,” James said.
Elise’s blood ran cold. She sat up to see him standing with his arm
s folded a few feet away. He was still wearing the glamor that made him look young. His hair looked black, his eyes were piercing blue, and his crow’s feet were tightened into disapproval.
He was also standing on the other side of the wards, where she apparently could no longer reach him.
“You can’t be in there,” Elise said, as if denying what she saw could make it truth. “You can only get in there if the pack takes you.”
“Wards that I constructed can’t keep me out,” James said simply.
Everything fell into place.
That was what had bothered her about Seth calling Stephanie “family.” Rylie had said a member of her pack’s family had referred them to a witch, who had created the wards. Stephanie was related to one of the werewolves. She had asked James to protect the sanctuary. And James had forced Lincoln to get building permits for the pack—not the White Ash Coven.
His fingerprints were all over Rylie’s pack, and Elise hadn’t seen them. More patterns that she had failed to put together.
It was too late now. James had locked her out of the sanctuary, revoking her right to enter and strengthening the magic that protected them.
And Lincoln was on the wrong side.
“You have to let me in,” Elise said, getting to her feet. “Open the wards now.”
James gave her a pitying look. “Leave, Elise. It’s past time.”
She stepped as close to him as she could without getting slapped by his magic again. Six inches apart, separated by a chasm of wards, she pinned him with her black gaze. “You don’t understand. People are dying in the sanctuary. Lincoln’s been possessed by a demon, and I have to exorcise him.”
“I told you that some things require taking a stand,” James said. “I will not let you interfere with the pack any longer.”
“Even if that means letting some of them die?”
He didn’t respond, but his silence was answer enough.
She clenched her hands into fists at her sides, digging her fingernails into her gloved palms.
Violence boiled in her skin. Elise couldn’t hold it.
