Authors: SM Reine
They jumped in and slammed the double doors shut. Elise threw herself against it, bracing her back against the place in between the handles. The bodies crashed into the other side.
James dropped the flashlight to help, but she shook her head.
“Find something to hold the doors!”
He searched the room. There were potted plants, but none heavy enough to hold the door. He grabbed the edge of check-in desk and pulled experimentally, but it was bolted to the floor. James flung open the door labeled “janitor.”
Another heavy
thud
, and Elise grunted.
“Soon would be good,” she growled.
James snatched a steel-handled mop from the closet. “Push,” he said, trying to fit the mop through the handles. “I can’t wedge it in like this.”
Elise lost her footing, and the door opened partway. A hand pushed through the opening.
She grabbed it and twisted. Something snapped. The fingers went slack.
Her weight still wasn’t enough to close the door.
James threw himself into it. It smashed shut on inhuman fingers, and something on the other side gave a cry, jerking them out of the way.
The doors closed. He wedged the mop’s pole through the door handles.
She stepped back. The corpses slammed into the doors, and the hinges groaned, but the mop held.
He sighed and leaned against the wall.
“Don’t stop yet. Keep moving,” she said, grabbing his collar. She burst through the hall to the office, shutting the sliding doors behind them.
James scanned the office. The stormy half-light of night outside filtered through slatted blinds, casting faint barred shadows across a cheap desk and filing cabinet. The brown shag carpet broke off at the head of a tiled hallway, and another door stood closed nearby with a sign that said “lab.” A map of the building hung on the wall, with the fire exit routes marked in red.
The banging grew more distant, and more insistent. They jogged down the tiled hallway. Another set of doors stood at the very end.
“We might be able to get out and make a break for the car before they realize we’ve gone,” Elise said.
“I’m not sure—”
Shuffling.
They turned, falling silent as they faced the source of the noise.
Fiends crouched at the end of the hall. It wasn’t the small handful they had seen in the graveyard beyond the office walls—there were more, many more, perhaps a dozen. They shifted in the darkness, crawling over each other and halfway up the walls.
A pair scuttled forward and up, digging their claws into the stucco to scramble over James’s head. He ducked, but they didn’t stop. Instead, they dropped on the other side—between Elise and James and the exit.
On both sides, the demons waited, staring at them with luminescent eyes.
Elise gripped James’s wrist. She didn’t say what she was thinking, but he suspected it involved several expletives. He felt much the same. James shifted so his hand squeezed hers, and he hoped it was comforting.
The fiends growled softly. His heart raced, and adrenaline turned his blood to antifreeze.
Her body tensed. She was preparing to run.
The office door beside them slammed open.
James saw a flash of yellow claws and leathery skin. Small hands wrapped around his leg, and he jerked free, kicking it in the face. The little demon keened, reeling backward, but in its place came another.
Elise’s knife flashed, glinting through the air like a blade of moonlight. She cut, ducking low and slicing along arms, across faces, pulling away from strikes. She moved smoothly, quickly, a dance of fist and blade. He fought to get free, trying to break from the increasing crowd of fiends as they clambered to grab him.
And then the demons from the end of the hall leapt into the fray, and James was swarmed. He elbowed a face, pushed another away. The tide of small bodies pulled him toward the conference room, and inexorably away from the slashing blade that was Elise.
She reached for James. “Elise!” he shouted, throwing his hand toward hers.
Their fingers brushed. The fiends yanked. James lost his footing, and he fell, caught by clawed hands a heartbeat before hitting the ground.
“James!”
He tried to grab the doorframe, but the fiends released him before he could orient himself. His face hit the stripping at the bottom of the door. Elise’s sneakers moved—rising to strike a leathery body, pushing against the ground, fighting to get closer to James.
Then they jerked, dragging him down the floor. The carpet burned the side of his face.
“No!” Elise cried, struggling against the restraining arms of the fiends, pushing and hitting and scratching and doing no good whatsoever.
The door slammed shut.
The fiends wrenched James to his knees. He had an instant to see tiled floors, a drain, metal tables, and then the fiends pulled again. Nails dug into his arms. James didn’t have to count the fiends to know there were too many to fight.
One of the demons clawed its way up his slacks until it stretched tall, almost up to his chest. Its fingers ran over his cheeks, his jaw, his nose.
The other demons jerked on his legs. James lost balance and his knees struck the carpet. The fiends made slurping, hungry noises deep in their throats, staring at him like a slab of meat.
Claws slid down his neck, catching on the hem of his shirt with a ripping sound. His chest was suddenly cold. His shirt had been torn open in one long line down the center, baring his chest and stomach.
He felt the sharp press of teeth against his hip and gave a shout.
“What are you doing?”
The other door opened. His heart leapt when he saw a feminine figure enter—but it wasn’t Elise. The newcomer was swathed in a long jacket and a formless skirt. The fact he couldn’t make out her face, or even her body type, didn’t disturb James so much as the feeling of sheer
power
that poured off of her.
It wasn’t the normal power that James got from other witches, like those in his coven. This feeling was unmistakably
evil
.
The witch drew a knife from behind her back.
“Oh,” James said.
She touched the blade to his skin, and after that, all he could do was scream.
“N
o!” Elise threw
herself against the door. Locked.
Something scuffled behind her, and she spun, dagger raised for a blow. But the fiends had dispersed—gone from the hall as quickly as they had arrived in the first place. They had what they wanted, and it wasn’t Elise.
The air shifted, and motion from a fiend she had killed caught her eye. Blood dribbled sluggishly out of the slit on its neck. And then…something changed.
In her biology for non-majors college class, Elise had watched a time lapse video of a decaying rabbit. Its skin had rippled and exploded with maggots, the flesh disappearing as tiny fragments were carried off by numerous insects. The decay of the fiend was similar—one moment, it was whole and complete, and the next, its skin crumpled and peeled and flaked off, baring bone that burned away as well.
She watched, stunned, as invisible flame spread from the brands down its back and devoured the entire body, leaving nothing but dust.
Only very strong master demons could destroy its minions after they died.
And it had her aspis.
He screamed on the other side of the wall.
“James!” she yelled. She shook the doorknob again, harder. “James!”
She took a step back and threw all her strength into a single kick. Her blow landed beside the doorknob.
Crack
.
His screaming grew strangled. She kicked again.
The door was made of heavy oak. It barely shook.
“Shit,” she muttered. The room number, mounted on a gold placard beside the door, said
6B
. If there was a 6B, there must have been a 6A.
She left James’s screams and scanned the map on the wall, trying to make sense of it in the dark. Finding the red dot marking her position, she traced the hall around the building.
6A. There was another door in the opposite hall.
Elise ran. Her feet pounded against linoleum, each step a clap of thunder.
James’s screams suddenly silenced.
She skid around the corner and almost lost her balance, catching herself on a door. 6A. Elise tried the doorknob, and it turned smoothly.
She threw the door open, ready for a fight—but she was met by an empty room.
The embalming room was dark and windowless. Every surface was tiled or clean steel, from the table affixed to the wall to the sinks and ceiling. A sign read, “Danger: Formaldehyde Irritant and Potential Cancer Hazard. Authorized Personnel Only.” A row of locked refrigerators for bodies lined the wall, and a pump sat on a desk next to the table with liters and gallons measured on the side of its barrel.
Elise picked her way through the shattered debris of the embalming fluids. The scent made her gag. She covered her mouth to keep from vomiting as she rounded the table.
Her breath caught in her throat. “James…”
He was slumped in the corner, limbs twisted like a ragdoll. James’s shirt was torn open to reveal his torso. Elise didn’t need much light to recognize the black smears staining his chest: blood.
She felt his neck for a pulse. His throat pulsed in a slow, weak rhythm under her fingers.
“Thank God,” she murmured, pushing his shirt aside to examine the wounds.
Someone had begun to skin a patch of James’s stomach over his solar plexus, but it wasn’t a random, messy job. The looping lines were deliberate and strangely neat. The knife must have been incredibly sharp.
Elise recognized that knife work. She still had the scar on her chest. “Oh, James,” she said, brushing his bangs out of his closed eyes.
Something moved.
Her gaze snapped over. A shape snuck out from behind the door Elise had left open.
Launching to her feet, she barreled into the intruder. The person screamed in a woman’s voice. She gripped a short stone staff, dirty with blood and mud, and there was a pentacle charm on her bracelet.
It was a human—not a demon at all.
“Help!” she cried before Elise could smother her mouth.
She slammed the woman’s hand into the wall until she cried out. Her fingers lost their grip, and the stone hit the floor.
Hands buried themselves in Elise’s jacket and ripped her away.
She sprawled to the ground, catching a brief glimpse of a fiend as it pushed at the witch’s legs. The jacket flared behind her as they ran from the room. Elise scrambled to the doorway in time to see the exit swing shut behind them.
Elise hesitated, casting a glance at James. She couldn’t chase them without leaving her partner behind.
“Damn it!” she swore. James made a sound of pain, and Elise dropped to her knees at his side. “We need to get you out of here before someone shows up.” His eyes half-opened at her voice, and she gave him a tight smile. “Come on. I’ll help you up.”
She lifted him carefully under the arms. He gave a weak attempt at getting his feet under him…and then went slack.
He was unconscious.
XI
T
he door to
James’s bedroom banged open.
Elise rushed through the doorway with James draped over her shoulders. She tried to roll him onto the bed gently, but he slipped and hit the mattress hard. He made a small pain noise in his sleepy delirium.
“Sorry,” she said. James didn’t react to her apology.
She cut his shirt open along the sleeves and tugged it out from underneath him, chucking it in the trash. The bandages she had packed over his wound in the car had already soaked through with blood.
Elise searched through James’s desk drawers for gauze and bandages, returning once she located them amongst a secret stash of Milk Duds. Blood welled up in the cuts as soon as they were bared to the air as though he had been sliced open anew.
She had suffered enough wounds to know that a little cutting shouldn’t have knocked James out, nor should it have bled so much. Poison, or magic? Either was trouble.
Summoning first aid experience from the musty corners of her memory, Elise bandaged him carefully. Her gaze wandered to the phone on the bedside table as she worked. She couldn’t call Stephanie. Even though the doctor would be all too happy to nurse James back to health, she would have questions Elise didn’t want to answer.
But she couldn’t give him the help he needed herself.
Muttering a terse prayer, she called Stephanie on James’s cell phone. “James,” the doctor breathed on the other end. “It’s about time you called me.”
“This is Elise.”
“Oh. Really. What are you doing calling from his number at this time of night?”
“He’s hurt. He might be poisoned.”
“Poisoned?” Stephanie’s voice sharpened. “Why are you wasting your time calling me? Hang up and call the poison control center, he needs—”
“We can’t call anyone, go to the hospital, or attract any attention,” Elise snapped. “He needs you. Are you going to come help him or what?”
“What are you doing, you stupid bitch? Call an ambulance! I’ll meet you at the emergency room.”
She counted slowly to ten, and then said, “Stephanie. I’m not messing around.”
“What happened?”
Elise glanced at her prone partner. His face was ashen gray. “James is unconscious but breathing fine. He’s bleeding from a shallow wound on his chest. I would guess that he’s stable for the moment.”
She cursed. “You did this to him, didn’t you?”
“Now isn’t the time for blame.”
The doctor gave a disgusted sigh. “You’re going to have to call someone else anyway. I was volunteered to take the directors to Sacramento International, so I’m still at least two hours away. If you care about him at all, you’ll get proper medical attention.”
“We have to wait for you.” A grimace, and she added, “Please.” She choked out the last word with no small amount of pain, but it made Stephanie pause. There was silence for a long moment. When the doctor spoke again, the venom had left her tone.
“If he dies…”
“I would care a hell of a lot more than you do. James needs to be looked at, and I can’t do it myself.”