by S. M. Reine
She wasn’t going to let him escape again.
“Hold the fissure! Don’t let anything else through!” she shouted to the werewolves.
Elise still couldn’t turn incorporeal. Aquiel’s influence was too strong, even through the fissure. Instead, she ran as fast as she could, fists pumping and chest heaving.
Lincoln was as fast as she was. By the time she reached the end of the block, he had already vanished around the corner and made it to the next turn.
“Fuck,” she hissed.
Elise chased him down to the next stoplight, and then through a park toward the church. He doubled back after that without even looking to see if she was still behind him.
Where was he going? Shouldn’t he have been running back to the fissure to try to help Aquiel? There wasn’t any apparent pattern to his turns—he was just running.
She was almost to the edge of town when he disappeared completely.
Elise skidded around a corner to realize that she couldn’t see Lincoln anywhere. He hadn’t gone back the way that they had come, nor did he seem to have taken the only other street, which led toward the grocery store. He was just…gone.
She pounded her fist into her hand, turning to look in each direction again.
He had to have gone somewhere. Maybe into one of the buildings, or down an alley that she hadn’t noticed—
The world turned white with pain.
Elise hit the ground before she even realized that she was falling. Her skin was transparent. She could see her bones through the skin of her wrist, the veins seeming to float around them in a tangled web, pulsing with every beat of her sluggish heart.
Her chest wouldn’t go flat to the ground. It felt like she had fallen on something—like a spike thrusting into her breastbone.
She looked down.
No, she hadn’t fallen on something—someone had driven one of the electrified spears through her back. They had pushed it in hard enough to break through her ribs and emerge from the other side just underneath her breastbone. The metal wire had loosened from the spear and caught on her skin. That was what she was propped up on. A spear. She had been skewered.
Elise groaned as she pushed against the ground, trying to dislodge the spear from the earth, but it had been pushed in too far and the angle was bad. The handle was a good four feet long. She couldn’t lift herself off of it. Every little motion sent shocks of pain through her again.
The pain wasn’t as bad as the electricity had been, and that had only been a momentary jolt. If she could just find Neuma to help her break free…
Boots stepped in front of her, leather-clad legs, a pair of cleavers strapped to muscular thighs.
Damn.
Lincoln hadn’t been running randomly. He had been leading Elise away from her allies.
“I haven’t gotten to tell you yet that I like your little toys a lot,” Lincoln said, crouching in front of her so that Elise could see his face. “They’re clever. Nice way to use my peoples’ weapons against them. I should have known better than to equip them with something that could hurt them, but it seemed like the only way to be prepared for you. I did come prepared for your puppies, though. So I guess we’re even.”
Elise’s knees and toes kicked uselessly against the street. She swiped at him and missed. He was too far away. “You’ve lost,” she growled, which didn’t sound very convincing when she couldn’t even get her feet under her. “I’ve got the Palace. The werewolf pack is holding the fissure. Nothing else is coming over that bridge.”
“Nothing that wasn’t already in the Palace, and only until we take the soul links back. Once Aquiel kills the other two links, the walls will be easier to breach.” A sultry smile crossed his lips. “And once you’re dead, there will be nothing stopping us from taking the Palace back.”
“You can’t kill me,” Elise said. Warm fluid dripped out of her mouth, down her lip, splashed on the dirt. It was the color of amber.
Lincoln grabbed the top of the spear. “Why don’t we see if that’s true?”
Click.
Electricity poured through Elise’s body.
She was nothing but pain. Her every cell felt like it was being ripped apart, fragmenting, turning her into shattered glass. It was like paper cuts, like being skinned, like broken bones and having her fingernails ripped out all at once.
And still, Aquiel wouldn’t let her turn incorporeal.
When the shock ended, Elise felt herself being dragged across the asphalt. Lincoln was still holding the spear. He was pulling her along with it like the way she sometimes dragged Ace along for walks, except that its flanged point was still caught on her breastbone.
Elise tried to shout. “Rylie,” she said, and it only came out as a gurgling rasp. Her lungs wouldn’t expand. She wondered if the spear had punctured them.
“Fun fact about being a nightmare of my prestige,” Lincoln said in a conversational tone. “You learn that there are a lot of ways to skin a cat. When nightmares are young, the way they evoke fear is primitive. They have to brute-force it with their powers. You’re immune to that, of course, and you somehow made your pitiful army immune to it, but it doesn’t mean you can’t feel any fear. It doesn’t mean I can’t feed off of you.”
He glanced at her over his shoulder and winked a bloody eye. Ichor oozed fresh from his tear duct and slid down his cheek.
“It just means I have to find some other way to inspire you. And I have plenty of ideas. There’s really no rush to kill you—we can take our sweet time.”
Elise wasn’t afraid—she was pissed—and fear wasn’t among her standard emotions, so she didn’t see that changing anytime soon. But something about Lincoln’s words made her think of Devadas in the cell.
Just because she wasn’t afraid didn’t mean she wanted to see how creative Lincoln could get with her.
She twisted on the end of the spear. She should have been strong enough to snap the handle, but the two shocks had drained a lot of energy out of her, and it didn’t work. So she wrapped her hands around the sharp point and tried to push it down so that it wouldn’t be caught on her breastbone. The force from being dragged was too much.
“Fuck,” she groaned.
“That’s the spirit,” Lincoln said.
Hinges whined. The sidewalk under Elise turned to linoleum. A door swung shut behind them.
She strained her head back to see that Lincoln had dragged her into a restaurant with dust-covered stools, dingy booths, and walls decorated with quirky memorabilia. It was Poppy’s Diner. Elise and Lincoln had gone there together before. They had shared pie and milkshakes for breakfast. Elise didn’t eat human food for fuel or fun, but Lincoln liked it, and she had been enjoying his company.
That was before he had become a spear-toting madman, when he had only been a deputy with dubious ethics whose blood and body Elise craved.
Things had changed.
Lincoln tossed her onto Poppy’s counter. The spear turned inside of her, squeezing against her bones. Her back arched from lying on the handle.
“Do you want to share a cherry pie?” he asked, hopping up to straddle her pelvis. His leather pants creaked. He had unwound the cables from the handle of the spear and held the electrical switch. “I know how much you love pie and milkshakes.”
“Sure,” Elise said through gritted teeth. She grabbed at his hands, but he swatted them aside easily. “Take your spear and go get me a pie.”
He chuckled and pinned her hands under his knees when she kept grabbing for him. “I bet you want this out, don’t you?”
Lincoln grabbed the end of the spear and shoved. Its hilt snapped inside of her.
Elise clenched her jaw and didn’t make a sound, but she couldn’t keep from jerking. Her spine bowed. Her heels drummed against the counter.
With a wet slurp, he pulled the point of the spear out of her. It left a gaping hole in her stomach. The tank top was destroyed. Hell, her skin was destroyed, and Elise suspected she’d be able to see bone if
she could lift her head enough to look inside.
Removing that half of the spear made the rest of it slide out of her back, inch by inch. She could feel its splintered point move through her body. Lincoln watched her face closely as it continued to slip, his breathing growing choppier, a devilish smile splitting his face. The handle clattered to the linoleum.
“Too bad I’m not a megaira that feeds on pain,” he said, tugging on the electrical cable still embedded in Elise’s wound. She could feel it threading all the way through her. “This would taste amazing.”
Elise sagged flat against the counter, panting and sweating. The pain was better without the spear, but the foreign object had only been an annoyance, not the real trouble. The problem was that he had shocked most of her energy away, and she needed to feed.
“Pain won’t make me fear you,” Elise said.
“Maybe the right kind of pain,” Lincoln said with a shrug. “Let’s find out.”
Still holding on to the switch, he jerked a cleaver out of his sheath. Elise watched the motion of his hands. If he dropped the switch, or if she could take it from him, she could turn it on him. It wouldn’t have the same effect on Lincoln as it would on a nightmare outside of a human vessel, but it might fuck him up enough for her to escape.
He began wrapping the conductive wire around his cleaver. She wiggled her fingers under his knees, trying to get her hands free.
“You know, I’ve been thinking about what I’d want to do to you when you came back. You were a big problem last time we fought. You ruined months of preparation and embarrassed me in front of Aquiel.” Lincoln tied the wire off just short of the handle of the knife, giving himself something to hold on to without being shocked himself. “I decided that I wanted to mutilate you. Sort of like the cult was doing, you know? With the dog bites? And I’ve been practicing on bodies to get it right.”
He clicked the battery.
Another shock jolted through Elise’s body. She forgot about her hands—she forgot she even had hands—and lost herself in the pain.
When sensation returned, she felt sharp pain in her arm. She looked down to see that Lincoln had started digging fake tooth marks into her arm with the point of the knife while she was electrified, damaging her the way he had Devadas.
The incisions healed slowly as he worked. Much more slowly than usual. Electricity was how Elise had pierced her eyebrow, with a friend’s help, so she knew it was possible to shock her enough that she wouldn’t heal at all. And that battery still had a lot of charge.
She felt the first tingle of fear.
“There we go,” Lincoln said, pressing his knees harder into her hands. “That wasn’t so hard, was it? Now we should—”
An explosion rocked the diner.
His weight was suddenly gone. Elise saw him hit the shelves behind the counter out of the corner of her eye as if someone had thrown him, though she believed that they were alone. Everything hanging on the walls rattled with the tremors. The bar stools shivered. A bolt of silver-blue magic left a negative imprint on her vision as if lightning had struck.
She felt a flare of infernal energy, and then that, too, was gone.
The diner was quiet.
Elise had no idea what had happened to Lincoln, but she wasn’t waiting to find out. She rolled onto her side to peel the electrical wire out of her wound. It sort of tickled. She wasn’t used to having her innards tickled. The relief of having it out liquefied her muscles, and she was too weak to hold herself up. She slipped off the counter to the floor.
After all the electrical shocks, a three-foot fall didn’t hurt.
The bell over the diner door jingled. The hinges whined again.
A moment later, a hand appeared in her vision. It was covered in a leather glove, but there was a gap between the glove and sleeve, and through that she could see warm, dry skin marked with the faint imprint of tattoos. There was blood flowing under the surface. Blood.
Elise seized the arm, digging in her fingers. She was fading. She was going to lose herself, vanishing into the smoke of Hell, far from the battle where she was most needed. But if she could just have the blood—if she could just feed—
“I have you, Elise. Hang in there.”
That voice.
Her gaze traveled up the sleeve—he was wearing a white cable knit sweater that brought out the olive tones in his skin—to the pulse throbbing at his throat, and then the sharp jaw covered in white five o’clock shadow, the angular cheekbones, the straight line of his nose.
James wasn’t wearing his glamor. He was silver-haired and ageless. His blue eyes cut through Elise.
She was too surprised to see him, and too weak, to attempt to fight against him as he gently lifted her to her feet. She knew she must have been staring at him slack-jawed, but couldn’t seem to stop herself.
He peeled the pieces of her shirt aside to look at the wounds. “How did he manage this?”
She swallowed hard. “I made a stupid mistake. He jumped me.”
His eyes traveled over the wreckage of the diner. “And he had an electrified spear, I see. You’re lucky you’re still in this dimension.”
“Aquiel won’t let me turn incorporeal,” Elise said.
He leaned her against the counter. She could see Lincoln on the floor on the other side with blood oozing from a wound on his forehead. It wasn’t spraying with the usual force of a wound on a possessed person. His veins weren’t bulging anymore, either.
“He’s exorcised,” James said, pulling off one of his gloves and using his bare hand to gently inspect her wounded arm. The brush of his skin against hers hurt like sunlight. Like he was too bright, too dangerous, for her to be close to him. “You’re safe.”
She didn’t feel safe—not when she could tell Aquiel was still near, and especially not with James touching her like that. “How did you exorcise him that fast? I can’t even do that without some ritual.”
“Hmm.” He made sure that she was steady on her feet with the counter’s help, then took a small notebook out of his back pocket. He started to draw a rune, glancing occasionally at her wounded stomach, as if evaluating what kind of spell he should cast. “It seems that my magic is stronger when I, ah…panic. I merely pointed at him through the window and let loose.” He gave an embarrassed shrug. “It seems to have worked.”
It seemed to have blown Lincoln across the room. Hell of a power boost.
And it was for her.
Elise shut her eyes against the dizzy spell that struck her at that moment. “Forget the healing spell. We have to get back to the fissure. The pack—”
“Has everything under control, last I saw. You’ll be useless in a fight until you’re healed.” He looked the rest of her over for wounds with clinical briskness, feeling her scalp, the back of her neck, her other arm. “Considering how terrible you look, you’re mostly unharmed. The only issue is…this.” He gently pressed a bare hand to the wound in her stomach, the runes on his trembling fingers brightening her skin. She flinched.
He caught her eyes. The look of concern was so familiar, even if his pale features weren’t. It was the same look he had given her after a thousand other nearly fatal wounds.
“What are you doing here, James?” Elise asked, pushing his hand off of her stomach. “You were in Ireland.”
He resumed drawing. “I was diverted.” He whispered an ethereal word, making the rune glow. It was a convenient excuse not to give a real answer to her question. “This might hurt,” he said, peeling the rune off the page so that it danced over his fingers.
“It’s not going to work on me, James.”
He activated it anyway. The magic flared through her with a cold shock, almost as painful as the electricity. She dug her hands into the countertop behind her. His hand was the only thing that kept her from falling completely.
When the magic faded, she wasn’t healed.
If not for the excruciating pain that remained, the look of shock on James’s face would have been extrem
ely rewarding. He looked down at the blank page, and then back at Elise. “Why…? But I healed you the last time we were in Northgate.”
Elise’s knees refused to hold her up. She could smell Lincoln’s blood from the other side of the counter and wanted to go to him—not to make sure he was okay, but to drink. “I healed because I fed. The fact that you tried to heal me at the same time was coincidental.”
“Fed?” James asked. “What do you mean? What do you need, exactly?”
He didn’t know. It hadn’t occurred to him that Elise, as a demon, would need to feed like demons did. She didn’t have the strength to explain it. She couldn’t even manage to tear her eyes from the faint throb of his pulse in his throat.
“James,” she breathed, digging her fingernails into his shoulders. “All I need from you right now is food.”
“Food? You mean…?”
“Blood,” Elise said. The delicious, powerful angel blood just under the surface of his skin.
His eyes widened.
Elise pressed her lips against the pulse in his throat and his spine stiffened.
Blood.
A distant thudding broke through the air. James jerked away from her, and Elise was torn between relief and annoyance. “Wait here,” he said, helping her sit on a bar stool so that he could look out the window. Whatever he saw on the other side filled his eyes with grim anger. “Something’s happening at the bridge.”
Elise limped back to the statue of Bain Marshall, James bent low to half-carry her with one of her arms gripping his shoulder and his arm looped around her waist for support. Every step was a fresh shock through her fragile skin. She clenched her jaw.
“I have to ask something before we return to the fissure,” he said. “Have you spoken to Anthony lately?”
Was he joking? She cast a sideways look at him, but he looked completely serious. “Not since I went to Hell. Have you?”
A pause. “No, of course not. I’ve just been wondering—are you all right?”
A bitter laugh escaped her. “I’m breathing through a hole the size of your fist in my abdomen.”
