The Darkest Gate

by S. M. Reine

  “Get inside,” Elise said.

  The confusion drained from Betty’s face. “What’s wrong? Did something happen?”

  “Don’t argue.”

  Her roommate’s mouth shut. She grabbed her blanket and fan and carried everything into the duplex.

  The wine dribbled into the sewer. Bitter anger rose in Elise’s throat.

  The gift of her mother’s necklace could only mean one thing.

  This was war.

  V

  If James were to list “signs of impending apocalypse” from least worrisome to most, he would rank mundane things at the bottom—scrambled eggs, golden retriever puppies, a topiary in the shape of a dinosaur—and move up from there to slightly more worrying indicators. Earthquakes. Locusts. Raining blood. Dead cows.

  Finding nine missed calls from Elise might not have been at the top of the list, but it was close. Perhaps directly below “death of all firstborn children in the nation.”

  He hadn’t moved the power cord for his phone to Stephanie’s house yet, so when his battery died, he couldn’t recharge it. When he finally plugged it in his car to find a single terse text message from Elise (“Get back to the studio”), his stress levels shot through the roof. She had a way of doing that to him.

  Twilight was falling when James arrived. Dry heat hung in the air, barely any cooler than it had been at midday. The pavement caught the heat and radiated it long after the sun disappeared behind the mountains. Leaving the air conditioned confines of his car was almost suffocating.

  Hints of violet and orange touched the hills, painting the desolation in shades of sunset. Pink clouds faded to blue toward the east, where stars were already beginning to appear. The fading sun made the brick walls of Motion and Dance glow. His neighborhood was quiet that time of evening. The sprinklers kicked on at a dentist’s office on the corner, a dog barked a few blocks away, and the illuminated sign for his studio buzzed faintly.

  He parked beside Elise’s car and jingled his keys in one hand as he headed for the stairs.

  The back of his neck itched. He paused at the bottom of the stairs and glanced around the yard. “Elise?” he called. His hand slipped into his pocket where he kept a small notebook. “Is that you?”

  A figure stepped from the darkness behind the sign. The light caught Elise’s legs and left her a silhouette above the waist.

  “I’ve been waiting for you all afternoon.”

  “Sorry. My battery died. What’s wrong?”

  She stepped onto the sidewalk to peer around the street. Elise was dressed for jogging in shorts and a tank top, but her posture made it look more like battle armor.

  The street light flickered on and cast her in stark yellow light. She looked tired and grim and about five years older than the last time he saw her. “I’ve already checked your apartment. It’s safe. Let’s talk inside.”

  “Checked it for what?”

  “I’ll explain when we’re off the street.”

  She tailed him up the stairs like a bodyguard waiting for attack, and watched the parking lot while he unlocked the door. Once they were inside, she put on the deadbolt, peered out the windows, and shut the curtains.

  Elise hadn’t been subtle about searching his apartment. The doors were open, every light was turned on, and his remaining belongings were more scattered than before. She didn’t try to explain what was going on once everything was secured. Instead, she handed him a small blue box.

  He tipped the lid open. The cross inside looked familiar, but it took him a few minutes to recognize it. “Isn’t this Ariane’s necklace? I thought you lost it years ago.”

  “It was returned to me today.”

  He tried to remember the last time he saw Elise wearing it. An image of her at a younger age came to mind, when she still had short hair and skeletal features.

  And then everything fell into place, and the box slipped from his hand.

  Neither of them moved to pick it up.

  “Impossible,” James said. “We killed them.”

  He sank onto the couch. Elise took the seat beside him. She didn’t have to say anything else. The silence of the night felt heavier than before, and the shadows seemed too dark. He understood why she had turned on all the lights. James had warded every inch of the studio with spells, but it suddenly didn’t feel like enough.

  James’s throat was too dry to swallow. “He’ll want to play with us first. That’s why we haven’t been directly attacked.”

  She nodded. Lowered her eyes.

  “We knew this would happen. When we fought Death’s Hand. We knew that would draw attention to us.”

  Something bothered him about the jewelry box on the floor. He leaned over to pick it up again, and then he saw it: a faint blur of magic around the crucifix. Elise’s mother had been a witch, but not the kind that enchanted jewelry. It was something new.

  “There’s a spell on this,” James said.

  Elise frowned. “What is it?”

  He focused. It certainly felt like the kind of spell Alain would cast. There was no finesse to his magic. It was blunt and raw, almost jagged on the edges, like shattered glass. “It’s a locator charm,” he said, tracing his fingers in the air over the cross without touching it. “So they can tell where the necklace is at any time.”

  “That’s pointless,” she said. “They already know where I live and work. They don’t need magic to track me if they have eyeballs.”

  “And it would do them no good to follow you here anyway. Alain could never get through my barrier spells.” James shut the box and set it on the table. “Unless…”

  “What?”

  “They might have wanted to know when you left your house.”

  She sucked in a hard breath. “Betty.”

  They couldn’t drive fast enough.

  James and Elise raced through the back streets toward her duplex. They saw the plume of smoke before the fire—black, billowing clouds that blotted out the stars.

  Sirens screamed. A fire truck blew past them and turned onto Elise’s street.

  Their building was engulfed in flame. A smoky column rose from the roof on the right side, exposing the building’s skeleton. The dry lawn Betty had been sunning on earlier that day had caught fire, too, and was creeping up Anthony’s side of the duplex. Even the front door was swallowed by live fire, leaving no way to get inside. Firefighters blasted their hoses at the neighboring houses, which smoldered, but didn’t burn—yet.

  Elise didn’t wait for him to stop the car before leaping out. People had spilled onto the sidewalks to rubberneck, and James had to park at the end of the street. It was too full to get any closer.

  James could feel the radiant heat when he jumped out of his car. It slapped him in the face and took his breath away. “Betty!” Elise shouted, shoving through the crowd. He hurried to catch up with her as she snagged a neighbor by the elbow. “Hey! Have you seen Betty?”

  The man she had grabbed shook his head. “She was inside, I saw her cleaning—”

  She didn’t wait to hear anything more than that. Elise flew up the sidewalk.

  A firefighter blocked her path. His gear was black with ash, and his face shield was tilted back to show his grizzled face. “You can’t go in there.”

  “That’s my house!”

  “It’s not safe to enter,” he said. “Please step back so we can—”

  “You don’t understand! My roommate is in there!”

  James stepped back while Elise had them distracted. Something was nagging at him—something similar to what he had felt from the necklace, but much more powerful.

  Alain must have started the fire. And if that were true, nothing would stop it until the entire place burned.

  “Let me go!” Elise yelled, waving her arms in an uncharacteristically panicked way. She caught James’s eye over the shoulder of the firefighter and jerked her head toward the house. “I have to help her!”

  The firefighter gave a long-suffering sigh as he tried
to guide her away. Elise shoved him. It wasn’t nearly as hard as she could have.

  “Ma’am, I’m going to have to ask you to step away…”

  James edged silently around them, slipped behind the neighbor’s house, and climbed the fence into Elise’s backyard.

  The damage wasn’t as bad on the other side. The vinyl siding had melted with residual heat in some spots, but there was no active fire. Elise’s window was shattered, and smoke poured out of it as flames licked the walls. He felt a pang of fear. There was no recovering from that. She had probably already lost everything.

  Alain’s aura was so powerful that James knew he must have stood back there to cast the spell on Elise’s room, but the witch himself was long gone. He hadn’t waited to see the damage. And it hadn’t traveled to Betty’s room yet.

  The other window was cracked. He ripped the screen off and tried to see inside, but even though the air was clear, the power had failed. It was too dark to see anything.

  “Goddess help me,” he muttered.

  James hauled himself over the ledge and squirmed inside.

  Her bed was empty. Smoke crept through the cracks around her door and turned the carpet black. “Betty!” he yelled into the hazy air. Shouting made his throat burn. He coughed, hacked, and tried again. “Betty! Where are you?”

  She didn’t respond.

  He felt her doorknob with the back of his hand. It was hot.

  He wrapped a pink cotton sheet from her footstool around his face, then grabbed another blanket to open the door.

  Smoke erupted into the room with a gust of heat. He staggered back, throwing an arm over his face. His eyes watered. He took a last gulp of clean air through Betty’s window, and then pushed through.

  Flames had devoured Elise’s bedroom door, and he felt his arm hairs scorch as he jumped past it. It was like stepping into a pizza oven. He stepped over a burning patch of carpet to get into the living room—he couldn’t see further than a few inches in front of his face—and kicked aside a table that had tipped over. One of Elise’s protein powder plants was a shriveled crisp. Their couch smoldered. He glimpsed a burning wall through the smoke.

  Hot. So hot.

  “Betty!”

  No response.

  He could barely see or breathe. Their duplex wasn’t large, but there was no sense of direction in the darkness. He had to get out.

  James kicked open the bathroom door. Empty.

  The change in air pressure sucked smoke toward him. He stumbled over a chair and landed on all fours in their dining nook. He didn’t bother getting up. The air was too hot, too close. He could almost breathe on the floor.

  He crawled into the kitchen and saw a bare leg.

  Betty.

  She had collapsed in front of the refrigerator and scattered food across the floor. There was a tub of cream cheese by her head. Her bleach blond hair was thick with ash. The counter next to her was burning—he grabbed her ankle and dragged her away from it.

  He would have gasped at seeing her arm in the dim light of the fire if he could breathe better. The skin was raw and peeling from residual heat.

  She didn’t wake up when he lifted her into his arms and tried to stand.

  A mighty crack split the air.

  Elise’s bedroom wall collapsed, and half the roof went with it. Burning wood exploded around him. The fire swept across the carpet, and a gust of heat swept past him. He fell to his knees again, coughing and wheezing.

  He had to set Betty down and lay beside her to keep breathing. “This was a terrible idea,” he rasped.

  Where were those firefighters?

  It was all he could do to pull the notebook out of his pocket and squint at his symbols in the smoke. A spell to stop fever. A spell for broken bones. A spell that created flames—he didn’t need more of that. And then he found what he was looking for: a spell that made wind.

  “Hang on,” he gasped to Betty.

  He crumpled the page in his fist and spoke a word of power.

  Magic ripped out of him. A blast rocked the building.

  Metal screamed and windows shattered as a massive wind rushed around the room, like the hand of God punching through the walls. Everything on the counters was blasted aside. James threw himself over Betty to shelter her. Pain lanced through his back as a plate shattered against his shoulders.

  A second gust followed the first, even more powerful than before. Fire funneled from the back of the duplex toward the front.

  Something huge snapped. What remained of the roof crashed into the counters with a groan, and for an instant, the world was impossibly hot. His hair burned. His neck blistered. Coals showered around him, stinging his arms and back.

  And then the third wind extinguished it all.

  With a whisper of a breeze, the house went silent.

  James looked up. The counters had taken the brunt of the collapse, leaving them framed with smoking wood and sheltering him from the worst of the debris. He couldn’t get up without moving it, so he didn’t try.

  Groaning, he rolled onto his side and brushed plaster dust off his shirt. Chunks of wood crumbled at his touch. He could see stars through what was left of the walls, and the summer breeze felt cold on the places his skin had burned. Betty was still unconscious. He pressed fingers to her throat and found a pulse.

  “Thank the Goddess,” he whispered, and then he let himself go limp, too.

  Every breath burned his lungs. The chill on his neck had to be bad. And he didn’t care at all.

  The voices of men approached as firefighters moved in. James slipped his notebook into his pocket before they grew close.

  Then he heard a woman’s voice.

  “James!”

  He swallowed, coughed, and took a deep breath. “Over here.”

  The debris on the counter shifted. Elise threw everything aside, forgetting to pretend she wasn’t preternaturally strong. “Betty!” She dropped beside them. “Is she…?”

  “She’s alive.”

  Elise let out a sigh. “Good.” And then she turned on him. “What did you think you were doing? Are you suicidal?”

  He held out a hand, and Elise helped him sit up. The debris at the back of the house was still burning where Alain’s spell had started it, and judging by the amount of smoke, Anthony’s side of the duplex was on fire, too. “Betty was inside. I had to do something.”

  “Like dive into a burning building? Why didn’t you stop the fire from the outside?”

  “Alain’s magic—”

  “Forget it,” Elise interrupted. She threw her arms around him and almost knocked him into one of the smoldering beams. Her grip made his ribs creak and the burned skin on his back ache. “You are such an idiot, James.”

  “Ouch,” he said helpfully.

  “I’m thanking you for saving Betty. Shut up.”

  “Right. Sorry.” He patted her on the back.

  “Hey! Over here!”

  A firefighter had found them, ending the conversation. Elise stood up. “We’ll talk about this later. Let’s get Betty to the hospital.”

  VI

  The checker behind the counter swiped Elise’s debit card again. “I’m sorry. This one has been denied, too.”

  She pulled a credit card out of her wallet. “Try this one.”

  The hospital cafeteria was empty in the middle of the night. Several quiet hours had elapsed since loading Betty into an ambulance, and nothing had happened since the police finished asking questions. The sudden change of pace left her feeling restless, but with her office and home burned, there was nowhere else to go.

  Now she was trying to buy a salad for a late dinner, and it was much harder than it should have been. Both her personal and business debit cards had already been denied twice. She could tell by the apologetic look that her credit card wasn’t coming up any different.

  “Sorry,” he said, handing it back. “Maybe it’s a problem with our system.”

  She gave him a ten dollar bill and took her sal
ad back to the waiting room.

  The lettuce tasted like tissue in her mouth, dry and flavorless. Maybe it was the dissatisfaction of having her cards denied, or the lingering taste of ash, but she dumped it in the trash after two bites.

  She stretched out between two chairs, pillowed her head on her arms, and tried to focus on the television mounted in the corner. She had never been able to sleep in public before—in fact, she didn’t even sleep when Anthony spent the night with her—but fading adrenaline and stress mingled to overtake her.

  She could barely find the energy to fill her lungs. Every breath was slower and deeper than the last.

  The news was reporting on the fire. Pundits discussed rising crime rates.

  Elise’s eyes drooped. The figures blurred.

  She stretched with a yawn, trying to force her eyelids open. What if someone found her? What if she was attacked?

  But she sank into her chair again as the news flickered in front of her, and her eyes fell closed. A dark and endlessly vast space settled around her. It sank into her skin and weighed upon her bones. Air ruffled the hair at the back of her neck.

  Someone was calling her name.

  Elise…

  Fear thrilled through her stomach. She could still see the dim light of the news and hear them discuss investigations and arson. But the room wavered around her.

  A pillar grew in front of her like a stone tree sprouting. It was wrapped with thick lines and glowing symbols at the base. It was soapy-white, unnaturally smooth. The pillar arced over her head, and she watched as the other end touched the earth and formed a gateway.

  Not here. Not again.

  She struggled to focus on the TV, but her eyelashes were glued shut.

  “A home in downtown Reno burned last night in an incident the police suspect to be arson…” The newscaster’s smile stretched and blurred. Her eyes sank into her skull, leaving black pits in their place. “You deserved it, didn’t you? You’re going to lose everything.”

  Her hand reached through the gateway, grin huge and looming. Pale fingers filled her vision.

  “I see you, Elise.”