by Reine, SM
“You know that you’re not my girlfriend,” Elise said.
She barked a laugh. “No shit. This ain’t jealousy. It’s practicality. You’re like a baby succubus right now, doll, and you just don’t know what you’re doing. I don’t want you fucking anyone to death. It’d tear you up inside. So if you’re gonna feed, feed on the bad guys, stay away from people you like, and don’t get naked unless you’re alone.”
“I just ate twice,” Elise said, shrugging her jacket on and pulling her hair out of the collar. “This won’t take long. I’m not going to feed at all until we come back.” She had used to go months without feeding. Just because she had recently become hungrier didn’t mean that she couldn’t go a few more days without refueling.
“Dunno,” Neuma said. “Be careful, is all I’m saying. Take good care of yourself. Come back to Dis fast if you gotta. I’ll be waiting.”
Elise felt a small knot of warmth in her heart. “I’ll be careful.”
Neuma kissed her on the temple. Her lips were warm and soft, burning away the icy-wet chill of winter’s breezes. “Come home soon, got me?”
“I got you,” Elise said.
She got on the motorcycle and turned the key. It growled to life between her legs. Elise curled her gloved fingers around the handlebars, feeling the vibrations of the engine all the way to her teeth. She caught herself smiling.
Abel wasn’t going to like it, but damn if she wouldn’t enjoy riding this beast again.
Elise reached into one of the saddlebags, pushed the lid of the black box aside, and felt around until her fingers landed on a notebook the size of her palm.
It was the book of spells that James had given her the last time that she saw him, when he had just helped her kill Aquiel, Prince of Nightmares. When Elise had, mistakenly, for a fleeting second, thought that things might be changing for the better between her and James.
There was a primitive locator spell midway through the pages. Elise traced it with a pen, muttering under her breath, coaxing it to life.
It peeled free of the page in a brilliant shade of crimson.
Neuma had grown used to Elise’s new abilities, but she still looked dubious as the spell lifted and crawled up to Elise’s bare wrist. There wasn’t any room under her gloves for more runes.
Elise didn’t let it settle for long. As soon as the magic contacted her flesh like a stinging brand, she activated it.
A red light zipped into the night, briefly illuminating the path.
“That going after Abel?” Neuma asked.
“Yes.” That was a lie. She couldn’t actually track Abel since she didn’t have any focuses that belonged to him. But she did have the warding ring that James had made on a chain around her neck. It was nestled in the right cup of her bra, warm and heavy. The red light was darting toward the ring’s maker.
West. He was to the west.
Rylie returned with a backpack on her shoulders, which made her look even more like a teenager than usual. “Ready?”
“Ready,” Elise said.
Neuma stepped back as Rylie sat sidesaddle on the back of the motorcycle. The werewolf hesitated before looping an arm around Elise’s waist.
Elise kicked off the brake, gave Neuma a last nod, and peeled into the night.
Elise hadn’t had time to spend on Earth since the Breaking. She had immediately retreated into Hell to do damage control, imagining that she could prevent the worst of the attacks if only she could seize the Palace, demand allegiance from the greatest Houses, and shut down the war machine. It had been a frustratingly naïve hope; the Houses had no interest in her demands.
Since then, she had been consumed by matters in Hell, oblivious to the changing Earth above. And she had become so used to everything in Dis that, at first, the severity of America’s condition didn’t hit her. It seemed normal enough to blow through empty cities coated in ash.
It wasn’t until they reached the space between the cities that it hit her.
The small towns and rural areas, occupied by occasional farms, couldn’t be mistaken for anything in Hell. Fields of swaying grass felt so unfamiliar to Elise that it was almost like she had never seen them before. And every house and grocery store they passed was dark.
“Bathroom,” Rylie said into Elise’s ear.
Elise pulled over at the next abandoned gas station, which stood alone at a juncture between two roads. Its pumps were so dirty that she couldn’t read the prices.
“Where are we?” Elise asked, propping up the motorcycle and dismounting.
Rylie smoothed her hair down with both hands. She hadn’t bothered grabbing a helmet, and her hair was a wreck from the wind. “Um, I think this is…Friedville? Somewhere near that.”
Friedville. Elise wasn’t familiar enough with the area to know the town. It sounded like one of thousands of small, unremarkable dots on a map that had only served as a pit stop for travelers.
“Keep your ears open,” Elise said, resting a hand on the gun at her back as she gazed around at the empty pumps. Her senses said that they were alone, but something felt amiss.
“Ears and nose,” Rylie agreed. She stepped around the side of the building, following the bathroom signs.
Elise wiped a window clean and looked inside the attached convenience store. The sign behind the counter said that gas cost ten dollars per gallon. When she had left, it had been less than four. It was a price driven by intense demand—people trying to fuel up for an escape. The corner of her mouth lifted at the idea of the gas station owners taking the evacuees’ money. She wondered what they could have possibly done with it.
The shelves were empty of everything but pieces of trash. The station had been ransacked. Elise didn’t have to imagine the panic as people had torn through the gas station; she could see many of the signs just looking through the window. The broken racks. The blood smear on the corner of the counter. The shattered window behind the untouched rack of DVDs.
The sound of metal breaking echoed over the parking lot. Rylie must have had to snap the bathroom lock to get inside the bathroom. The Alpha werewolf’s mental signals were still relatively neutral—she hadn’t been attacked.
Elise hooked her thumbs in her belt loops and gazed across the fields on the other side of the road. There was a harvester near a silo that had its doors standing wide open without any grain inside. It had been ransacked, just like the gas station.
All of this chaos had been preventable. It was her fault. Hers and James’s.
After saving the world so many times, this was what had become of it all.
How far they had fallen.
“Hey, Elise,” Rylie called. “Check this out.”
Elise followed the sound of her voice around the side of the gas station. There was a pickup with a camper shell in the employees-only parking lot. Rylie was staring at it like she had just found a nest of cockroaches.
“We should get back on the road if we hope to catch up with James soon,” Elise said. “Daylight’s coming and we’ll be out of the chase for eight hours.”
“But there’s something in there.” Rylie jerked her chin toward the truck. “You can’t smell that?”
“What is it?”
“Gasoline,” Rylie said. “And something is rotting.”
Something rotten was unremarkable. So much had been forgotten when the country emptied. But gasoline—that would be useful.
Elise opened the camper shell. There were a dozen red gasoline canisters inside.
She lifted them to see if any were filled. Only half had any weight to them. Elise grabbed the heaviest and unscrewed the cap to look inside. She was surprised to see cash, not gasoline. Rolls of bills had been wrapped in rubber bands and stuffed inside.
“That’s not going to fuel the motorcycle,” Rylie said, peering over Elise’s shoulder.
Elise tossed it aside. At another time she might have taken the money for McIntyre’s daughters, but American currency was probably useless now. “Do all of these hav
e money in them?”
“Not this one,” Rylie said, grabbing a canister in the back without needing to check the others. It had a couple inches of gas at the bottom.
“Good. Top off the motorcycle.”
Rylie went to do as she was told, and Elise slammed the camper shell shut again. She watched Rylie walk toward the road. She was so tiny among the vastness of the farms, a pinpoint of white against the silhouetted silo. Hard to believe someone so young could be so deadly, yet still fail to miss important details.
There hadn’t been anything rotten under the camper shell.
The windshield was just as opaque with ash as everything else at the gas station, so Elise couldn’t see inside. When she wiped some of it off with her sleeve, she found that the inside was covered in condensation.
Elise tested the handle on the passenger’s door. It was unlocked.
With a final glance at Rylie to make sure she wasn’t paying attention, Elise opened the door.
She had found the gas station’s greedy owners.
They had been an overweight couple, possibly middle-aged, though it was hard to tell underneath the bloat of rot. The man was slumped over the steering wheel. His stomach had split open, and there was something writhing inside the glistening flesh. His wife was holding another one of those red canisters in her lap.
There were tiny bullet holes on the driver’s window that Elise hadn’t seen from this side. The owners had paid for their greed.
Elise stared at the open wound on the man’s belly. The blood was cold. The meat was being devoured.
She could clearly imagine reaching over and taking a bite of the ragged flesh. Sinking her teeth into the spongy fat. Swallowing down the adipose tissue, maggots and all.
“Ready to go,” Rylie called.
Elise slammed the door shut and pressed her back to it, staring up at the cloudy sky.
What the fuck?
She had deliberately eaten a cadaver once. Just once. And she had accidentally eaten the bodies of the dead humans by the fissure earlier that night, but only because it was too difficult not to. But it had made her feel sick every time, like she was poisoning herself.
She had never craved it before.
Rylie waved the red canister at her. Even in the darkness, her pale hair was so bright. “Hey! Did you hear me? I’m all done.”
Elise phased to her side, as far from the pickup as she could get without leaving the Alpha behind.
“Are we full?” she asked.
Rylie blinked and stepped back, startled by the sudden movement. “Yeah, to the top.”
“Good.” Elise’s mouth felt sticky with saliva. She swallowed hard. “Thanks.”
“Maybe we should take the pickup instead,” Rylie suggested. “We could carry more supplies that way, and I bet we could still fit the motorcycle in the back for later use.”
Elise pushed her sleeve up her wrist and activated the tracking spell again. Her stomach lurched with vertigo and she tasted blood on the back of her tongue.
A red light darted toward the west.
“Forget the pickup,” Elise said. “Let’s go.”
Seven
They came upon the first abandoned city shortly before dawn.
With no speed limits, no traffic, and no police, Elise and Rylie tore through the night as if they were flying above the pavement. Rural roads became an interstate highway. Highways became freeways. And then the farms became homes.
The fringes of suburbia were unsettlingly quiet in the glow of false dawn. There were no engines, no commuters lined up outside coffee shops. The snow was three inches deep without a single tire tread or footprint.
Elise felt the weight of the light on the back of her neck. They were too far from the fissure for the ash layer to protect her from the sun, and she didn’t trust the rising wind; it would blow away the fog before midmorning. Elise wasn’t going to risk pressing on. Even though James had a strong head start, she would only delay the hunt further if she broke herself beyond the ability to reform.
“We’ll spend the day here,” she shouted over the sound of the engine.
“Here?” Rylie didn’t sound happy about it, but there was no way for her to stop Elise as they slipped off a freeway exit.
The motorcycle’s grumbles echoed off of the towers downtown. The glass-walled offices reflected their faces back at them as they slid past. There were cars parked on either side of the road, askew as if hurriedly abandoned, and all of the parking meters had their flags standing.
Elise slowed to search for a good hiding place—somewhere that good-intentioned witches wouldn’t have warded, yet still comfortable enough to house Rylie for the day.
“Do you see that?” Rylie asked. There was a tremor in her voice.
Elise didn’t respond, but she watched out of the corners of her eye as they passed an art museum. There were shadows in the courtyard behind the modern art sculpture. They flashed behind a brick wall and disappeared.
Those weren’t human shadows. She didn’t sense human minds, either. It was like there was a hissing void where the shadows stood.
“What do you smell?” Elise asked.
“Soil,” Rylie said after a moment. “Dark places. Caves.”
“You don’t recognize it?” Elise asked.
She wrinkled her nose. “No, but I’ve been smelling it on and off since Northgate. Would it be paranoid if I said that I think it’s following us?”
Not paranoid enough. She should have mentioned it earlier.
They needed somewhere really secure.
Elise’s eyes fell on the building she needed when they turned down C Street. It was a hotel with gothic architecture, all gray slate and relief carvings with the kind of front door that belonged on a cathedral. The ground floor was old. The tower rearing above it was new. A sign in front said “Crane Hotel: A Historical Site” in bold, modern letters.
“Here?” Rylie asked.
Elise nodded once.
Rylie slipped off the motorcycle and approached the motion-activated doors. They didn’t react to her presence. She wedged her fingers between the cracks of the doors, forcing them open with as little effort as it took an average person to open a jar of pickles.
“Come on,” she said, standing aside to let Elise pass. Her eyes were on the street around them, cheeks pink with cold.
Elise put the engine into a low gear and half-walked the motorcycle into the lobby of the hotel, leaving a streak of brown snowmelt in her wake. The floor was marble with gold accents, and an open archway at the far end of the bell desk led into what had once been the main body of the cathedral.
But there was no magic here—what had once been hallowed, consecrated ground had been violated by a corporation. It had the shape of a magical fortress without the actual magic intact. Perfect.
“We still have a few hours until the sun comes out, I think,” Rylie said, peering through the doors that she had forced to shut once more. “I don’t want to stop in this city. Not if something is following us.”
The kickstand made an unpleasant scraping noise against the marble as Elise dismounted. She didn’t like the idea of stopping at the Crane Hotel much either, but she could make sure that whoever was following wouldn’t be able to get at them. She tugged her right glove off with her teeth. “You want to spend the day down here or in a hotel room upstairs?”
Rylie turned to take in the impressive sight of the lobby. She shivered and rubbed her upper arms. “Hotel room.”
Elise slung the saddlebags over her shoulder and they went upstairs.
The rooms were modest, obviously intended for business travelers—not fancy, but with all of the appliances that would make extended stays comfortable, assuming there had been electricity. There was a kitchenette, a bathroom, a separate bedroom. Elise tossed their belongings on the desk.
“Stay in here and don’t come out until I return,” Elise said, flicking spells at the windows, the door, even the walls. She didn’t activate them ye
t.
“How long will you be gone?” Rylie asked, gazing around the room with frightened doe eyes.
“Until nightfall.”
Fear rolled off of Rylie in waves. She nodded and hugged herself tighter, taking a big step back as Elise passed her to tag the bathroom with another warding rune.
“I don’t want to feed on you,” Elise said over her shoulder as she affixed the rune to the ventilation duct.
Rylie looked startled. “What?”
“Every time I’ve looked at you since you walked in on Neuma and me, your brain signals have gone insane. You don’t need to be afraid. I don’t want to feed off of you, sexually or otherwise.”
Rylie exploded into laughter.
It wasn’t the reaction Elise expected. She stared hard at Rylie as the Alpha tried to smother her giggles with her hands.
“I’m not afraid you’re going to hit on me,” Rylie said after an awkward minute, once she became coherent again. “Oh my God. Really? Even if you did, do you think it’s hard to say ‘no thanks’ or something?”
Elise kept her expression carefully blank. The runes on her twitching fingertips hung in the air, momentarily forgotten.
Rylie swallowed down more giggles. “I am afraid, but it’s not about the—the sex thing. I know you’re not going to try to feed on me. You’re not like that.”
“But you are afraid of me.” Elise flicked an extra rune at the front door, just to make sure. “And you don’t like Neuma.”
“I’m not used to demons. She’s weird.”
“And I’m not?”
Rylie’s laughter cut off. Tears streaked her cheeks. “The last time we tried to save the world, we killed Seth, and I keep remembering it when you’re around. I’m so afraid of losing Abel that sometimes it’s like I can’t breathe. But…it’s not because you, not like that.”
And now she was crying.
Elise stood back, utterly baffled by the swing in moods, every muscle tense.
Rylie cried with her whole body. Like every fiber of her being was committed to experiencing her emotions. It was as off-putting as though if Rylie had peeled off her skin and stood in front of Elise with the muscles and blood vessels exposed—maybe even more so. She would know what to do with a skinned zombie. Emotions, not so much.
