by S. M. Reine
Relief thrilled through her chest, foreign and strange. She seized Anthony’s shirt in both hands. “Now this,” she said, pulling his head down to kiss her.
His empty hand pressed against the small of her back, crushing her body to his. It felt good. She could have done it forever, if they had the time. Forever turned out to be just a few short seconds, but when she broke free, Anthony pressed his forehead to hers.
“Wow,” he murmured. “That good, huh?”
“Yeah. That good.”
He laughed and swept her up in his arms, spinning her around. “Jesus, Elise! Thank God you woke up when you did. I was sure we were going to die!”
“You didn’t do too badly on your own.” She leaned on his chest when he set her on her feet again. “Remember when you asked if fighting was a little exciting in the desert?” she whispered, low enough that Betty wouldn’t be able to hear. She didn’t feel like being teased. Not when she was so relieved. He grinned.
But Betty wasn’t even listening to them.
“Hey, lovebirds! I think James is waking up!”
Elise broke free of Anthony. “Of course he missed all the good—” she began, facing her friend, who had pillowed James’s head in her lap.
Motion loomed in the darkness beyond Betty.
Alain entered from the hallway above, flanked by twin angels. They were statuesque and pale with the silvery ghost of wings sweeping from their shoulders. Both had swords that flamed with ethereal light.
And the witch’s pistol was drawn and aimed at James.
“Watch out!” Anthony shouted.
Three things happened at once.
First, Betty saw Alain and lifted one of James’s paper spells, bold challenge glowing in her eyes. Elise could see the confidence in her face. The surety that she could wield that kind of magic. But shifting to take the spell from his Book of Shadows put her directly between the gun and James.
Second, Elise shoved her boyfriend out of the way and drew her sword. The stone dropped from his fingers and clattered across the floor.
Third, Alain squeezed the trigger.
The explosion echoed in the great underground chamber, like two gunshots in quick succession. His muzzle flashed.
Betty fell.
Alain swung his arm and aimed at Anthony. He fired again.
Elise had moved fast to get him out of the way, but not fast enough. Her boyfriend shouted. Blood spurted on his leg.
She leaped over Betty’s prone body, which had folded protectively over James, and buried her falchion hilt-deep in Alain’s stomach.
He was still unbalanced from the second shot and couldn’t protect himself. The impact of body against body brought her to a halt face-to-face with the witch, so close that she could smell the beer on his breath and see the hate deep in his eyes.
Her free hand bit into his arm, digging her nails in until he dropped the pistol.
But he was smiling. Why was he smiling?
“Mr. Black sends his regards,” he hissed. His tongue was stained with his own blood.
The angels whirled with motion—not to attack Elise or defend Alain, but to snatch the stone from the ground and slam it back into position on the gate. The ringing of chimes roared through the chamber as the gate swept open once more. Wind lashed Elise’s braid around her head.
She withdrew the falchion. Alain stumbled back, gripping his wound. Off-center. She may not have hit anything important, but it would slow him. Blood dribbled through his fingers.
Still he laughed, shrill and delighted, and when Elise turned she saw why.
Betty had been shot in the face.
She was slumped to the side on top of James. Her forehead was a ruined mess, though the injury was only as wide as a coin. From this side, the wound almost looked too neat to be fatal. But there was nothing in her eyes and her muscles were slack. Elise had seen the emptiness of death more than enough to recognize it without needing to check for a pulse or the rise and fall of breath.
One corner of Betty’s lips was still spread in the tiniest smile.
Dead.
A ringing filled Elise’s ears, drowning out the gate and the heavenly choir and even her own heart. She was frozen to the spot. Her fingers suddenly didn’t have the strength to hold her falchion.
Translucent feathers swirled around her. An angel wrapped his arm around Alain’s midsection. He mouthed words Elise couldn’t hear: “Go! Now, go!” And both angels, with the witch in tow, leaped through the gate.
Her knees connected with the ground. She didn’t realize she was scrambling over to Betty until she took the woman’s shoulders and turned her gently onto her back. Something warm and sticky met her fingers. The exit wound at the back of Betty’s skull was low, almost at her spine—Alain had shot from above and gone all the way through—and it dribbled down her neck.
Her blood was sprinkled on James’s cheek like tears flicked on his skin.
“Betty,” Elise whispered, taking her friend’s hand. Her fingers were still closed around one of James’s spells.
Someone was screaming.
Anthony limped over and collapsed. He was shot, too, but Alain had only hit him in the thigh. Shock turned him white and shaking.
“Betty—Betty—oh my God, Betty, you can’t—”
His fingers clenched too hard on her shoulders. She was dead weight when he shook her.
“Stay with her,” Elise said.
Anthony turned wide, helpless eyes on her as she stood. “Where are you going? You can’t leave us! Betty needs help, she has to—”
“Betty is dead.”
Her voice broke on the last word. Elise took up her sword with blood-sticky fingers and sheathed it. “Elise—”
“When James wakes up, tell him I’ve gone through,” she said.
She felt calm. Composed. Total clarity descended upon her in a silent, crystal moment of realization: Alain and the angels had gone to the other side. She was going to follow him, and she would kill him.
Elise stood in front of the gate. It seemed so much bigger now that she knew she had to pass through it. The darkness beckoned to her with slender fingers.
Elise…
That voice. It had been calling to her for weeks.
Now she would answer its summons.
She glanced over her shoulder at Anthony, James, and Betty. So much blood. She clenched her jaw, tightened her fists, and took a deep breath.
Elise jumped through the gate.
XVII
Time and space had no meaning. Elise floated through the void without a body, without sensation. There was… nothing.
She came back to herself in downtown Reno.
Much like when Thom transported her back to Craven’s, her mind wasn’t prepared to make sense of the shift in setting, and she initially rejected everything she saw. The light post standing over her. The bare branches of a bush. Traffic lights blinking red. A parking lot with no cars.
There was concrete under her fingers, and buildings to either side of her… but no sky.
Instead, she stared at a distant road a mile below her.
Her entire body revolted when she realized what she was seeing. Elise gasped and grabbed behind her for something to grab before she fell. She was hanging over the city. Nothing held her to the ground. She was going to fall and hit the road and—
No.
Her thudding heart skipped a beat.
Elise lifted her hands and didn’t fall. Nothing was holding her up. Or rather, nothing was holding her down—except gravity. Slowly, carefully, she sat up to see where she had found herself.
She had somehow reappeared beside the El Cortez Hotel. It was an old brick building with an art deco sign on its roof. There were other motels to her right, and casinos just a few blocks down. She wasn’t far from the river and the train trench. She had walked down that very street a hundred times on her way to Craven’s and on her morning jogs. It was as familiar as her neighborhood.
There were no ca
rs. Nobody walked their dogs. No bicycles. She had never seen the downtown area so empty.
A ghost town.
But…
Elise braced herself and lifted her eyes again.
Each building stretched toward a shimmering line in the sky, as though a sheet of water was somehow suspended in a bubble around her. The street she initially thought she would fall onto was actually a reflection of where she stood. The very top of the Eldorado’s hotel tower brushed its mirrored roof. Silvery light radiated from everywhere and nowhere, even though there was no sun to cast it.
She was in the angelic city.
Elise got to her feet carefully and turned in a small circle, cupping her hands around her face to shield her eyes from the radiant light. It was like a hazy, fog-filled morning, unlike any the desert had ever seen.
She knew that angels didn’t like to walk on Earth. She had never dreamed that they would build their city as a reflection of reality in a parallel dimension atop hers.
But the duplication was almost perfect. The buildings in the angel’s city were nearly identical to their counterparts in reality above her. Everything around her looked a little more wind-worn and crumbling, the streets were paved with cobblestone instead of asphalt, and all the trees and grass were dead—but it was otherwise indistinguishable.
She had to brace herself to look up again, holding onto a fence so she wouldn’t be overcome with vertigo. The streets above were filled with cars. People walked from building to building. That was reality.
Then she faced the casinos to the north, and a chill settled over her.
White stone arches rose above the center of the city with no reflection in the real world. Nine of them. One was taller than the rest, and it glowed with dark energy.
If she wanted to find Alain, she would want to start there. She was certain.
Her shock at finding herself in the angelic city was enough to make her forget, for a moment, why she had jumped to the other side in the first place. A wave of grief struck her as she remembered Alain’s laughter, the gunshot, and Betty’s blank face.
He needed to die.
Elise found her falchions a block away, as though they had been flung away from her when she jumped through the doorway. One was on top of a planter, and another was in the middle of the shimmering white cobblestones that made up the street. She moved to pick up the one between the bushes, but hesitated.
The symbols she had carved into the blade were glowing. Her hand itched when she reached for it.
Elise turned over her bare palm. Most of the bleeding had stopped, but the mark underneath was raised and irritated. She didn’t need to check the other hand to know it was the same. They were reacting to being in the angelic city.
She picked the falchion up with her gloved hand and sheathed it before retrieving the second.
Elise skirted around the downtown blocks with the gates, trying to find the city’s boundary. She didn’t have to go far. When she walked three blocks east, she found the new baseball stadium severed in half. The street ended in a white void with nothing but clouds beyond it. The break wasn’t clean. The sidewalks were jagged and crumbling and a telephone pole’s wires dangled uselessly into oblivion.
She could hear the river passing nearby. She approached the edge, hooked a hand around the light post, and peered over the edge.
The mirrored Truckee River roared as it emptied into a star-filled void, spraying foam in every direction. A sliver of moon danced in the sky. Her stomach flipped with vertigo. The wind gusted around her, almost blowing her off her feet, but she held tighter to the post.
“What the hell?” she whispered.
A chime split the air. She turned to see the darkest gate glowing.
Alain was opening it.
Elise swore and broke into a run.
As she sprinted toward the arches, she saw other figures moving toward it as well. It wasn’t the two angels that had accompanied Alain—these were different ones. The angels she had seen in Mr. Black’s penthouse. They seemed oblivious to her as they drifted toward the gates.
She turned the corner and skidded to a halt.
The base of the gate wasn’t on ground level. Its two columns straddled a movie theater and a parking garage, leaving the space beneath it all the way to the street rippling.
The angels that came with Alain unspooled ribbons in a circle around the pillar. Even at a distance, she recognized the black icons inscribed on them. Those were the ribbons she had seen in the penthouse.
The witch stood between four crystals on the corner beside an inoperative stop light, muttering to himself as he spread salt. He was casting a circle of power—probably to activate the ribbons. “Alain!” she yelled.
He turned. From behind, she hadn’t noticed that he was pale and hunched over his stab wound. He had pressed a poultice of herbs against it. Most witches didn’t have the healing powers James did, and Alain was no exception, but he was doing his best to repair himself and finish the ritual.
His eyes darkened when he saw her. He reached into his jacket.
Elise threw herself behind the corner of the building. An instant later, the cement shattered with a gunshot inches from her head.
She shut her eyes to think back on what her father had taught her about guns years before. Pistols like that had twelve bullets in a magazine—thirteen, if he’d loaded one into the chamber before. One shot for Betty. One shot for Anthony’s leg.
Three down. Maybe ten to go. Not good.
She took a deep breath and sprinted across the street.
Alain fired another two shots. One pinged off the cobblestone. Then she felt a bee sting on her shin and fell with a shout, tumbling behind an elevator into the parking garage.
“Come out!” he called in French.
Elise hissed as she inspected the wound. The bullet had grazed her leg, leaving a red stripe on her leg that trickled blood. It felt like getting snapped by a whip.
Why had he aimed so low? He had to know to shoot for the center mass.
She peeked around the wall. Alain staggered toward her, barely able to hold the gun straight. Elise drew her sword again and listened for his footfalls.
Just before he turned the corner, she threw herself around the other side and into his legs.
Elise knocked him to the ground. The gun fired as he fell.
She knelt over him, grabbing his arm and slamming the back of his hand into the street. He tried to twist it to aim at her. She gritted her teeth and struck his hand again.
It took three hits before his fingers loosed enough to release it. Elise threw the gun into the open door of an empty shop.
Alain shoved her off of him. She stepped between him and the door. Fury flashed through his eyes, but he didn’t try to fight her again.
Instead, he ran for the elevators, trailing blood in his wake.
Elise was torn. Follow Alain, or stop the angels? The mental image of the exit wound at the back of Betty’s skull was enough to make the decision for her.
She slammed into the elevator doors too late, unable to force her foot in the way. Elise cursed and launched herself up the stairs, taking them three at a time to beat him to the top of the garage.
The energy flowing from the gate was so thick that it was hard to run through it. It felt like she was swimming. The angels glanced at her when she rushed toward them, but didn’t stop spreading the ribbons across the cement in long lines. The symbols glowed like the ones on her sword. Her hands bled anew as she forced herself through the thickened air to the lift.
She managed to reach the elevator just as it chimed. The doors slid open. Alain lurched out. Elise grabbed his jacket in both hands and smashed him against a window. He groaned and gripped his side.
“Help me!” he yelled, throwing a hand toward the angels.
They continued to unspool the ribbon, ignoring his cries.
Elise punched the elevator button. The doors opened again, and she shoved him inside.
“You’re going to tell me what Mr. Black is planning,” she said. “And you’re going to tell me how I can deactivate the ribbons.”
He snorted and spit a wad of bloody phlegm on her face.
She punched him in the stab wound. He cried out, but didn’t fall.
When the doors opened on the bottom level again, he jumped at her. It was a pathetic escape attempt. He was so slow that he didn’t get far. Elise caught up to him in three long strides and slammed the back of his head into the restaurant’s wall.
“You’re going to pay,” she spat, tightening her hand on his esophagus. He gurgled. She pulled him toward her and slammed him back again for good measure, and was rewarded with a flash of pain in his eyes.
“The angels—” he squeezed out.
“You’re on your own.”
He shoved her arms off of him, but didn’t make another break for it. Instead, he groaned and slid to the ground. He parted his jacket. The wound was bleeding worse.
Elise drew a sword.
“Wait!” Alain said, lifting his hands over his head. “Kopides protect humanity. I am human.”
“Yeah? Well, your kopis is doing a good job of that.”
“You can be better than him.”
Elise raised the sword a fraction. Her skin was flushed and hot. It was hard to draw in a full breath of air with the pain stabbing in her chest.
She should kill him. She should do it.
The aspis’s hands spread wide in a gesture of contrition, and his fingers were sticky with his own blood. There was no color in his face. “What would James want you to do?” he asked. He flashed red-stained teeth when he spoke.
Do it. Just do it.
“Fuck you,” Elise said, but the falchion drooped. She was light-headed and queasy. He was right—James would probably spare Alain. She might not have been better than Mr. Black, but he was.
Would it be better to kill him now, or make him bleed out on the street?
He opened his mouth to speak again, but his eyes focused on something over her shoulder and the words died on his tongue.
