by S. M. Reine
“Just visiting my old stomping grounds in Northgate. I’ve been so homesick. It’s nothing for you to worry about.” Some of his bravado returned. He bared his teeth in a grin. “Unless you’re worried about your precious puppies.”
Her heart skipped a beat. “What did you do to the pack?”
“I was hoping to decorate my new quarters in the Palace with animal skin,” Lincoln said. “And I look so good in fur.”
Elise was about ready to rip the nightmare out of him with her teeth if she had to. She drew with new fervor, and there it was—darkly outlined, the shape of the exorcism rune. She knew it was right. It resonated with her.
She could do it now. She could free him.
Elise took a moment to drink in Lincoln’s changed features. With his rugged jaw and cheekbones that looked like they had been crafted with a talented surgeon’s knife, he would have been attractive under any circumstances.
They had practically lived together in Northgate for a week, investigating murders and sharing cherry pie, and Elise hadn’t noticed the signs of demonic possession in him. She had thought she was better than that. She had thought that she could protect her allies.
She had been wrong.
Now she was going to rectify that oversight.
Elise stepped out of the room to activate the rune. James might have been selfish in most things, but he was right to try to hide his techniques from others. What was dangerous in his hands could be outright catastrophic in others’. It was bad enough that Lincoln knew that Elise could cast magic—he didn’t need to see how she did it.
Setting the parchment on the desk, she leaned over it and began to trace the symbol darker than before.
She began to speak to herself, letting ethereal syllables spill from her lips. She reached out to James, and even through the closed walls of their bond, she felt herself drawing on his strength, his knowledge, his angel blood. The word came to her easily.
Her skin ached, as if she were trying to stand in full sunlight. Her heart raced. Sweat pricked her flesh and her vision blurred.
Exorcise, she tried to say, but what came out was unlike any word she had ever spoken before. It wasn’t even like the other ethereal word. It was more lyrical, almost like singing.
She could taste apples.
The symbol on the page glowed.
Crash.
Elise dropped the pencil and turned. Lincoln stood in the bathroom doorway radiating anger. Nothing became angry quite like a demon, and his fury seemed to darken the air around him, making the walls shiver. The shackles were still on his wrists. Broken chains dangled from them.
Possessed people tended to be strong because the inhabiting demon could push them beyond their normal tolerance of pain. It wasn’t supernatural, not really.
Either way, he was free.
Lincoln rushed at her.
His body slammed into hers. His skin was scorching-hot, like being struck by pavement burning under the noonday sun. The small of her back hit the corner of the desk. Pain erupted through her spine.
“When I first saw you, I wanted to feed from you,” Lincoln breathed into her neck, “but I think I’ll just settle for making you hurt the way you hurt me.”
She stomped on his instep. He doubled over but didn’t fall. He shoved Elise into the opposite wall.
When he ran at her, she ducked. Elbowed him in the gut. Dodged out of the way.
Once there were a few feet of space between them, Elise ripped off one glove, crumpled the paper in her fist, and let the exorcism rune slide over her skin. It burned brighter than starlight and her arm shook at the new magic. She could feel the light of it sapping her strength, almost as much as creating it in the first place had—she needed to use it, and fast.
And then Lincoln was rushing her, on top of her, and Elise was flat on the floor.
They rolled. Elise punched at him, but every strike she landed on him was a strike against her, too. Lincoln didn’t have that problem—he whipped her across the face with the chains at his wrist, and her vision darkened. Elise tasted metal.
She closed her twitching hand around his throat.
He had a hand around her throat, too, and the edge of the manacle felt like it might be slicing into her skin.
“Let Lincoln go,” she croaked—and then she released the exorcism rune.
He cried out and reared back, lifting the weight from her neck. He clutched at his face. He screamed.
After a moment, she realized that strange choking sound wasn’t pain. It was laughter. “Was that supposed to hurt?” Lincoln asked, eyes burning bright through all the blood.
The spell hadn’t worked.
Elise lifted her fist, now empty of a glowing rune, and wondered what she had done wrong. She knew she had drawn the symbol correctly. The word had felt right, too. “You were supposed to be exorcised.”
“You can’t exorcise me to Hell,” Lincoln rasped. “I’m already here.”
Shit.
She swung a kick at his temple. He tried to grab her ankle, but she was twisting, aiming the next kick for his side. She drove her heel into the floating ribs at his waist.
Lincoln toppled back, and Elise staggered to her feet as the room spun around her.
“Lincoln, if you can hear me in there…” She clenched her fists at her side, frustrated and sick. “This isn’t done.”
She erupted into shadow, shot down the stairs, and left him behind.
Elise spirited Jerica out of the Palace, and the wards shrieked in a high-pitched whine that would be audible across the city. It was a warning that something was leaving that shouldn’t be. But the spells that were intended to keep incorporeal demons from breaking in weren’t as effective at containment; the magic slammed shut behind Elise, but she was already gone.
It wasn’t until she landed in the walls of the House of Abraxas that she realized her hands were covered in Lincoln’s blood.
Elise spread her fingers to look at them. It was harder with her magicked hand; the fingers wanted to clench into a twitching fist, contorted by James’s runes and totally out of control. The opposite hand still had a glove on it. But both of them were slick and red. It was more than she should have gotten from punching him in an oozing eye. She must have really hurt him in the fight.
She had phased across the city and kept his blood the same way that she had kept the clothes on her body. And he was one of the generals that Aquiel had used to bind the Palace links to himself.
Jerica was on her knees beside Elise, looking shocked by the change of scenery. She must not have seen Elise coming.
“I need a vial,” Elise said, clenching her hands on the blood. It was already growing tacky and dry. “A glass, a plastic bag, any kind of vessel. Now.”
Jerica was smart enough by now not to question the order. She scrambled to her feet and darted into the House.
Elise turned to glare at the outline of the Palace against the sky. From the side of the mountain, she could see across the whole city, and the bridge in progress glimmered in a flash of sunlight from Earth. Lincoln was still there. Dammit, she had failed to save him again.
But at least she had his blood. The trip hadn’t been a total failure.
After a minute, Jerica returned with an empty herb jar from the kitchens. Elise scraped its rim over her bloody hands and wrists until she had a tiny pool at the bottom. Not much, but it was enough to shatter his soul link to the Palace wards.
It would have to be.
Elise retreated to Abraxas’s room. Ace met her at the door with a wagging tail. His mood seemed to be improving the longer they were in Hell, like it suited him fine to be among such violence. She still didn’t trust him not to bite her if she tried to pet him, but when he rolled onto his side, Elise rubbed his stomach briefly with her foot. His tail thumped against the ceramic floors.
She locked Devadas’s hand in the desk with the whiskey then grabbed the X vial. She held one in each hand, Lincoln’s blood and her own, considering w
hat they meant.
“It’s always about the blood,” she muttered, setting them on Abraxas’s shelf above Seth’s body.
There was also a small mirror on the end of the shelf. She caught her reflection in it. She was pale-skinned and black-haired again, back to what had become normal. James had been right. Phasing had broken the glamor. A moment of disappointment guttered through her, but she pushed it aside.
These two vials were a good start, but she needed more. She needed Aquiel and Belphegor’s blood, too.
And then she could make the Palace hers.
Elise folded the shroud back, revealing Seth’s face. She leaned on the slab next to him and stared down at his frozen features.
Lincoln had been in Northgate again. The implication that he might have done something to the pack made her blood burn with hate, and a powerful sense of protectiveness surged through her. The thought of nightmares sweeping down the quiet street of the sanctuary—the thought of Rylie, tiny and shivering in the shower, afraid of what she had become and what kind of violence dwelled in her wolfish heart—made Elise want to break through the fissure and guard the pack against the hellish onslaught.
The idea of Lincoln going after Rylie and the pack made Elise furious.
“Shut up, Eve,” she muttered.
But it wasn’t Eve, was it? Eve didn’t hate. She might feel protective toward the pack, but she’d feel protective toward Lincoln, too, and all of the demons serving him. Eve had been a font of boundless love. All she wanted was her children, and the children of Adam and Lilith, to live in harmony.
Elise didn’t feel loving. She felt furious.
She pressed her hand to Seth’s chest. It was as warm as the stone of the mountain, as if the fires of the pits burned within his belly and radiated to fill him with heat.
“I’m going to go get Belphegor, and then I’m going to take the Palace,” she told his rigid features. “I won’t let them hurt your family.”
Promise made, Elise pulled the shroud over him and left Abraxas’s office.
Thirteen
Elise stood at the mouth of the mine and stared into its depths. The tunnel was taller than the main building of the House and almost as wide as the entire west wing, and she felt tiny in front of it. The wind rushed past her to whistle through the stalactites as though the cave was trying to inhale, and the echoes within the tunnels sounded like a beast groaning in restless sleep.
Tracks had been run down the center of the tunnel, and metal carts waited at the nearest end. Elise reached into one cart and pulled out a handful of shattered rock. It had naturally broken with edges sharp as an arrow, and ripples from the pressure that had formed it were permanently imprinted on the flat edge. It looked like the same material that Elise’s falchion had been made of, but uncut.
There was no value to that rock. It was simply what Mount Anathema was made of. Sharp, yes, but without any aesthetic appeal, and too brittle for most uses.
That was all that Abraxas seemed to have mined from the tunnels—that glassy black rock and the red dust that coated everything in Dis.
Elise dropped the rocks and wiped her palm off on her pants. She had another of Jerica’s glass jars tucked in her shirt, a bottle of water, a gun, and James’s magic. Elise could be no readier to face Belphegor than she was at that moment.
“Ready to go?” she asked Ace. He was sniffing the ground near her feet, tail lashing from side to side.
Elise unclipped his chain and Ace took off into the mines. She followed.
The air immediately began to grow hotter as they walked down the broad tunnel, following the mine tracks down a steep slope. The ground was relatively smooth near the surface, but the tooling of the dark tunnel grew rougher as it became steeper.
Within a few hundred feet, all light from the surface faded. Elise found a lantern abandoned by the tracks and lit it, lifting the lamp high to let Ace see.
It was quiet in the tunnels—the kind of quiet that only came from having miles of mountain above and below, with nothing to prevent collapse but a few metal beams supporting the ceiling. She could almost feel the weight of rock above her. It wouldn’t kill her to have the tunnel’s roof fail, but she also wasn’t sure that she would be able to get out if it did. The idea of being trapped under a mountain in perfect darkness and perfect silence, compressed like the fragments of rock in the mine cart, was as close to dying as Elise could imagine.
Ace drew her toward the right side of the tunnel, claws clicking as he stepped over the tracks.
“What is it?” Elise asked, thrusting the lamp over his head.
The light gleamed on the ridged floor but cut off abruptly a foot ahead of her, dropping off into an open pit so steep and dark that her lantern couldn’t begin to penetrate it. Elise’s eyes were good without light, but not that good. It was impossible to see the floor below.
She hurled a loose rock into the darkness.
After a long moment of silence, she heard the rock hit. Judging by the length of time it took the sound to echo back to her, she guessed that the nearest wall had to be a few thousand feet away. Large, but not endless.
A weak breeze stirred around her, cooling the air a few degrees and making the deeper tunnels groan again. Was there another way out through that pit? An airshaft, an emergency exit, a crack in the mountain?
She found something that resembled an elevator a few feet farther along the edge of the pit—though it was little more than a platform with low railings. From the look of the chain, it needed to be manually operated. She let Ace on before joining him, closing the swinging gate behind them. She hung the lantern on the railing and took hold of the chain.
Elise loosened the chain, and they dropped slowly toward the floor of the cavern.
It was a long way down. They squealed along slowly, inch by inch, as she unspooled more of the chain. Her enlarged shadow was projected on the wall beside them.
As soon as they hit the floor, Ace jumped off of the elevator and darted into the darkness. She had to jog to keep pace with him.
There were metal plates stacked along the wall, each several inches thick and twenty feet wide. They looked like they were meant to connect to each other like puzzle pieces. What could Abraxas have wanted with the plates? A road? A platform? A bridge? She could only guess.
Elise put a hand over the torch to dim it and let her eyes adjust. From the bottom of the pit, she could see that the cavern was at least large enough that it could have devoured a city block with room left over. An empty basin occupied the center, blackened by scorch marks. Small gargoyles lined either side of it at regular intervals. The style of carving on the sculptures seemed primitive—not an emulation of medieval or Renaissance art as she had often seen in the City of Dis, but something that predated that.
The only way through the room was to pass through the basin. The other sides were filled with razor-sharp igneous cones, as if waiting to bite anyone who tried to cross.
Ace trotted toward the basin, sniffing the air. He set a paw on the first step.
Stone groaned. The floor sank under him.
Something began grinding in the walls.
Elise reacted on instinct. She leaped for Ace, grabbing him around the midsection and hauling him off of the step just in time for magma to gush out of the furious faces of the gargoyles. It splattered over the basin and stairs—exactly where Ace had been standing.
She hauled him back as he thrashed and snapped, growling like a demon himself. His muzzle battered uselessly against her arm as he tried to bite.
“Sorry, you ungrateful mutt,” Elise said, dropping him.
She had scared him with the sudden touch. He backed up to the wall, hackles raised. His snarl sounded like an accusation.
The basin was a trap—the gargoyles were still pouring magma over the floor, quickly pooling into a scorching lake that reeked of rotten eggs. The brightness of it made Elise’s eyes ache. The hairs on the back of her arms curled at the proximity, and she backed up
a few feet, keeping her distance from Ace so that he wouldn’t think she was going to grab him again.
“Guess that’s what the metal plates are for,” she muttered. The fiends had been using them as a way across the lake of magma.
Why the fuck was there a lake of magma in Abraxas’s mine, anyway?
She didn’t need to build a bridge to cross to the other side. She phased into shadow, wrapped herself around Ace, and jumped them across to the other side. His ears were flat to his skull when they landed, and he slunk away from her with his tail between his legs. He was not thrilled by the transport.
“Deal with it,” Elise said again to his retreating posterior. “I could have just let you burn, you know.”
The look he gave her was almost sullen.
The opposite end of the magma lake led to several tunnels, all of which were dark. The fiends had painted the floors in front of them. Elise stepped up to read what they had written.
Their clumsy handwriting was barely legible. The one on the left said that it was a dead end, leading to impenetrable bedrock. The center tunnel said something about roads. But the third was the most interesting. All it said was “temple,” and then, below that, “caution.”
“This was never meant to be a mine,” Elise said. Ace wasn’t interested in her observation.
He followed her down the tunnel toward the temple.
Remembering the pressure plate that had activated the gargoyles, Elise kept an eye on the ground as they walked. There were more sculptures mounted on the wall of the tunnel. Their open mouths were filled with gaping darkness through which Elise could smell brimstone.
Once she knew what she was looking for, the traps were easy enough to avoid. She just had to walk around the offset stones. She guided Ace with a hand on his collar, too, which he just barely tolerated. They had to move slowly, using the few feet of light that the lamp gave them to spot the triggers—of which there were many.
