by S. M. Reine
It was “I,” not “we,” and Elise knew exactly what she was saying.
“There is much to do,” Aliel said.
Elise turned back to her, hair blowing in her face, skin illuminated by the gray light pouring through the door. “I’ll take care of it,” she said. “I’ll restore balance.”
The first angel dropped to her knees, clapping her fist to her chest and bowing her head. The others followed one by one, bowing to Elise, accepting her control.
And then they vanished.
Alone, James and Elise crossed the bridge to stand in front of the gateway. It vibrated in recognition of their marks. It would take both of them to open the door.
She tucked both swords under one arm. He took her hand. The contact was enough to bring the bond to full strength.
He saw through her eyes—saw her contemplating the ethereal marks ringing the door, thinking about the way that she had been dragged through the arch unwillingly, but now prepared to cross through again of her own volition.
When James stepped in front of her, he saw himself as she did: handsome, familiar, and yet a total stranger. The surges of love and hatred were equally strong.
Above all else, she felt betrayed.
He didn’t have to say it out loud, but he did. “I’m sorry.”
Elise grasped his hand tighter. Their fingers were laced together, as tightly entwined as their destinies and souls.
She leaned toward him, and James’s eyes closed in anticipation of the kiss. But she only brushed her lips over his cheek. “If you love me, you’ll never speak to me again,” she whispered into his ear.
A fireball struck the ground beside them.
Elise reached out to push the door open without releasing his hand. Their combined marks opened the door easily, exposing gray light on the other side.
Together, they stepped through.
The shift between dimensions felt like it could have taken hours. Elise held James’s hand tightly, pinning him to her side, and didn’t let go.
Emptiness yawned between Araboth and Earth.
For an instant, Elise could see herself suspended between the two points of light that marked each dimension. The garden was pale, flickering, and dwindling rapidly. As she watched, its light guttered for the last time.
Then it was gone.
Nathaniel had moved Araboth.
Elise knew the instant that she had arrived on Earth again, before she even had her eyesight and hearing back. The constant scorching that had tortured her in the garden lifted from her flesh. The shadows of night soothed like aloe on a burn.
When she could see again, it was not through her eyes. She sensed a forest, the plane of the world below her, the vast sky above.
She was everywhere. She was everything.
Elise opened her eyes to face the hybrids.
Bullets ripped through the air over Malcolm’s head, and not a single one of them did a damn bit of good against the hybrids. They tore through the Union, and blood flowed like rivers over the earth.
In the chaos, Anthony and Lucas managed to escape. But Malcolm wasn’t about to run into the trees unarmed. He remembered the dead wolf that he had found—he wouldn’t be any safer under cover than he was in the meadow.
“Gun!” Malcolm yelled to the men guarding him. “Someone give me a fucking gun!”
But another cloven-hoofed hybrid swept over them. A single swing of its massive hand knocked the head right off the shoulders of his nearest guard.
Okay. Forget the guns.
Malcolm bolted for the trees as the hybrid turned for a second attack, hunched over to keep his head below the line of fire—and the line of sweeping hybrid claws.
Running felt just as futile as fighting would have been. Two-dozen hybrids was about twenty too many for even the collective force of the Union to kill.
They were so fucked. So goddamn fucked.
Malcolm caught a glimpse of Anthony and Lucas breaking away from their guards, too, but he completely lost sight of them when a BearCat rolled through his line of sight. A hybrid landed on the vehicle, crumpling it in the center.
I’m going to die, Malcolm realized.
He couldn’t help but laugh at that, just a little.
His laughter was echoed by a clap of thunder that made his skull feel like it had split. Lighting struck the earth just meters away from Malcolm.
He threw himself behind a tree, protecting his head with his arms. The concussion shook him to the bone. His eardrums popped. Every hair on his body stood on end, and he smelled something burning.
The silence that followed was so deep that he thought he had gone deaf.
But someone gasped.
Malcolm looked over to see Anthony sheltering behind a nearby tree, with Lucas nowhere in sight. He stared around the side of his shelter, cheeks pale. He had dropped a stolen AK-47 to the ground, as though his fingers had simply stopped working.
“Elise,” he whispered. The silence was so thick that the name, uttered underneath his breath, reached Malcolm’s ears as clearly as a shout.
He crawled around the tree on hands and knees.
Where the lightning had struck, the earth was cratered and black. Feathers drifted toward the ground. And a woman stood in the center of it all—but no woman that Malcolm recognized.
Her skin was pale radiance, the color of snow, with a slash of blood across her face that must have been lips. Hair drifted around her shoulders as it might in tepid water. And her eyes—her eyes—were smoldering coals that shot fear straight to Malcolm’s gut with a single glance. The entire effect made her look like the event horizon of a black hole. She devoured all light, distilling it to the pinpoint of her flesh.
She was inhuman. More god than woman.
One hand was extended, as though frozen in the middle of opening an invisible door. But the other was wrapped around the hand of a man at her side. Until Malcolm’s eyes traveled to her companion, he had assumed that she must have been twenty feet tall, when in truth she barely came to the man’s shoulders—no taller than five and a half feet, with an aura that suited a Valkyrie.
The companion looked normal, relatively speaking, although he had a shock of white hair and blood smeared down his bare chest.
It’s James Faulkner, Malcolm realized with a jolt.
He rubbed his eyes. If that was James, then Anthony was right. The woman had to be Elise.
Everything had frozen around her arrival. The hybrids, arrayed around the meadow, had stopped to stare at her.
“Holy fuck,” Malcolm said.
Elise dropped James’s hand and stepped away. His eyes rolled into the back of his head. He collapsed at her feet, and Elise didn’t even look down at him.
“Get down,” Anthony said, running at Malcolm.
“What?” he asked. Anthony grabbed him, dragging him behind another tree, farther away from the clearing. Malcolm struggled. “What are you doing? Where are you going? This is what we were waiting for!”
“And we don’t want to be here for it,” Anthony said. “Something’s wrong. Trust me.”
But no matter how hard he pushed, Anthony couldn’t uproot Malcolm. Elise was walking now—gliding, really—toward the line of hybrids, and Malcolm had to see what she was doing.
Muzzles flashed among the line of tanks. A mortar round launched straight at her.
It vanished inside of Elise.
Anthony was letting off a steady stream of curses now. He gave up trying to drag Malcolm away and bolted.
Elise frayed at the edges. She grew and grew, hands outstretched, to consume every hint of remaining light. The black Union uniforms and vehicles looked ashen gray next to what she left behind—an absolute darkness that wiped out the tundra, the distant towns, the stars in the sky.
Her mouth opened and peeled away at the corners.
In an instant, she was gone. All that remained was tangible, absolute shadow.
The hybrids attacked her as one, but there was nothing left to
confront. Muffled gunshots popped through the air. The muzzle flashes distorted, extending into long lines of yellow light, which were sucked into the darkness as surely as everything else.
Somehow, the screaming wasn’t as muffled as the gunfire was. Malcolm could hear everything—dozens of hybrid voices shouting, wailing, cracking with shock. And he kept listening as each and every one of them cut off.
His feet stung. Malcolm looked down to see the oozing blackness creeping toward him like fog, curled around his ankles.
“Hey!”
He kicked it loose, and was surprised to find that there was something to kick. It had substance. Like long, smoky fingers.
Maybe Anthony had had the right idea.
But Malcolm still couldn’t move, and it was no longer his choice. The harder he fought against the shadow, the tighter it gripped him. It coiled around his chest.
Through the shadow, he could hear the sounds of the hybrid’s voices—still screaming, but rapidly fading.
He was being sucked in with them.
“Oh, come on, Elise,” Malcolm cursed, kicking at the shadow.
Lights slammed on around the clearing.
The coil of shadow around his body vanished instantly. A high, piercing scream ripped through Malcolm’s skull—a scream that didn’t belong to the hybrids.
A spotlight had been mounted on every tree and vehicle in the meadow. And now they were aimed at Elise. The Union hadn’t just brought a portable cage for her. They had rigged the entire damn meadow to contain her.
Malcolm was human, and the light was still bright enough to burn his retinas and leave green shapes dancing in his vision. He cupped his hands around his face, squinting through the glare.
Elise had reformed into the shape of a woman without a hint of shadow. The lights burned everything away to a sheet of white. Her back arched as she screamed, clawing at her own skin, like she wanted to rip it free of her muscles.
The generator roared on the opposite side of the clearing. Dark forms circled around it, preparing to move in and take her.
“Shit,” Malcolm said.
The hybrids were gone. Elise was contained. Malcolm could leave, heroic kopis urges satisfied, and nobody would ever blame him.
But he couldn’t let the Union win.
He slipped through the trees toward the generator.
A half-dozen men with guns ringed around Elise, barking orders into Bluetooth headsets, and Malcolm picked up his pace as he sliced through the bushes.
A witch was guarding the generator. He grabbed her when her back was turned, slamming her head into a tree hard enough to knock her out. Nobody noticed. They were too busy closing in on Elise, guns aimed, victory on a hundred human faces.
Elise thrashed, still screaming, skin flickering. Her skull was visible through her cheeks.
Malcolm found the lever that would turn the generator off.
“Get closer,” he whispered, watching as the commander followed the surviving members of her unit into the meadow.
Now there were a dozen people within a few feet of Elise. Malcolm could see motion on the opposite side of the clearing—soldiers moving the BearCats in to transport her. He wasn’t going to wait long enough for that.
He flipped the switch. The generator died with a pathetic whir. The lights turned off.
Elise stopped screaming.
A hand clapped onto Malcolm’s arm. “Duck,” Lucas said, dragging him behind the shelter of the generator.
Oh God, the screaming.
Malcolm squeezed his eyes shut and didn’t look, but he didn’t need to in order to imagine what was making those splattering noises, all of that squelching, the shrieks. He knew the sound of Union soldiers getting devoured by demonic shadow, just as the hybrids had been. It was a very colorful noise.
Lucas trembled beside him. “Shit,” he whispered under the cacophony of screams. “Holy fucking shit.”
Silence settled over the clearing.
Malcolm and Lucas stared at each other. The only sound left was their breathing—both of them were panting as if they had just collapsed after a marathon. The quiet was eerie.
Was it safe?
Malcolm peered around the side of the generator.
There was no sign of Elise’s shadow now. She simply stood in the middle of an empty field, on the edge of the crater that James had passed out in, picking at her teeth with a fingernail.
Not all of the Union soldiers were dead yet—she hadn’t killed the ones in the BearCats, the tanks, the SUVs, and they were still moving on the other edge of the meadow—but Malcolm was slightly less worried about them attacking when Elise looked so calm and composed.
Malcolm emerged.
“Hey,” he said, hands extended in front of him, as if that could possibly keep her from eating his face. “It’s me.”
Elise gave him a half-hearted grin. “You turned off the lights. Thanks.”
“My pleasure,” Malcolm said. “Any time you want to kill the Union. Speaking of which…”
He turned to watch the retreat of the remaining units.
But they weren’t retreating.
The vehicles advanced, and Malcolm realized that the flare of orange light was a muzzle flash—the kind of light that came from a tank firing at night.
He didn’t see the shells flying at them.
And Malcolm didn’t feel anything when he died.
Elise felt the instant that the life was snuffed from Malcolm Gallagher. She hadn’t stepped in front of him in time—she had consumed the mortar rounds, but not the bullets, and Malcolm took at least six shots to the chest.
She stared at his blank face as the Union continued to fire, pelting Elise’s gut with bullets and tearing the earth apart with mortar rounds.
Among kopides, surviving until one’s thirties was considered a victory rather than a tragedy. Malcolm had been one of the older hunters remaining, and he bore more than enough scars to show what he had lived through.
But he would still be alive if he hadn’t come back to save Elise.
She dropped to his side and touched his bloody lips with her fingertips.
“I’ll have a drink for you,” Elise said, only distantly aware of the fact that she was still being attacked. It stung, vaguely. Her anger built. “I hope they’ve set the good vodka out for you in Valhalla, mate.”
Elise rubbed his slick blood between her fingertips and thumb as she faced the Union.
They were struggling to bring the generator back online so that they could contain her again. She could hear the panic in the thudding of their hearts.
She killed them all.
It only took a thought, a wink, a twist of her wrist. She faded into the night, and then drew into her body again.
Mere moments passed.
When Elise stood in the clearing again, only two lives remained: Anthony Morales and Lucas McIntyre, neither of whom she would have ever expected to find coming to her rescue. They were among the trees, beyond her line of sight, but she recognized the individual pattern of their beating hearts.
“It’s okay,” she said, clutching Malcolm’s unmoving hand. “I won’t hurt you guys.” She wouldn’t have hurt the Union, either, but they had asked for it.
Wait—two lives?
With a chill, Elise turned to search for James.
He was no longer in the meadow. The crater where they had arrived was empty.
She stretched out her senses to search for him.
James was alive, and in the forest somewhere. She could feel through the bond that he was running. He must have left shortly after reaching Earth to have gotten that far. But hadn’t she seen him pass out?
A sense of wrongness filled her. It wasn’t just the fact that he shouldn’t have been running, not after everything he had been through in the garden—it was the sense of power that haloed him. The air in the forest broiled. The horizon rippled. The burned-hair smell of ethereal power filled her sinuses, mingled with the blood on her tongue.
>
James was powerful, but not that powerful. He wasn’t a god.
Anthony and McIntyre emerged.
“Elise?” Anthony asked.
“Stay here,” she said, and she followed James.
Elise struggled to hold on to her skin as she ran. The tundra pitched around her, more like the deck of a ship in a storm than solid earth. Her stomach roiled. Her ears buzzed.
A thousand screams rattled in her skull—the memory of all the lives she had destroyed in a few swift minutes.
But, above it all, she thought a single name: James.
His figure darted between the trees ahead of her. James’s back disappeared and reappeared in fleeting glimpses.
Elise burst from the trees to find herself standing on a ridge. White mountain peaks marked the horizon. A river twisted below.
James stood on the edge.
But it wasn’t James, not really. Shirtless, battered, and white-haired, he stood like a king looking over his domain.
He had been possessed, and there was only one entity that could have done it.
Adam’s smile curved over James’s lips.
“Hello, darling,” He said. And at the same time, a quiet voice whispered around her: You thought you were rid of me. Adam’s voice rippled underneath James’s, like an echo of His thoughts.
“How?” Elise asked. “How did you escape?”
“What do you mean? We walked through the gate together.” I watched you trying to leave with him.
Her stomach lurched again. “I killed you.”
“I attached myself to one of your swords while you were distracted with Lilith.” He extended a hand toward her, as if He was going to touch her cheek, but He stumbled when He tried to step forward. Adam groaned and fell.
Elise stepped back, just out of reach.
“Let him go,” she said.
“My bishop betrayed me. He’s earned his death.” Blood stained James’s teeth, though Elise hadn’t seen him getting injured. Being possessed by Adam was tearing his body apart from the inside out. “But if you allow me to stay, James will heal, and I’ll remain within.”
