Authors: SM Reine
“Piggyback,” Elise said. “
Now
.”
“Elise—”
“Just do it!”
The blast of the shotgun roared above them. One of the daimarachnids had skipped the slope and climbed beside Anthony and Betty instead.
James swore and held Elise’s face between both of his hands. A bolt of power shot through her. “Hang on,” he said. She felt him open himself to her. Magic pulsed around them. He extended it to her, pale eyes glowing, and she opened herself to take it.
And then they both blacked out.
XVI
A
nthony thought he
coped pretty well with the whole demon thing. He didn’t have a nervous breakdown after the zombie attack, which was pretty good considering he hadn’t even believed in ghosts before that. When he went camping with Elise, he took a spider down on his own. Mostly. And he’d become pretty good with the shotgun. As far as “people who can’t turn paper into fireballs” went, he would definitely say he was a useful team member.
But nothing could have prepared him for the moment Elise and James went limp on the ground and left him alone with his wheezing cousin, a demonic overlord, and a gateway into an angelic city.
He stared at their bodies.
“Oh no,” Betty said.
They didn’t have long to be shocked. A dozen daimarachnids reached the bottom of the ramp, which gave them about twenty seconds before they were overtaken. Anthony pumped his shotgun and stood over his cousin while she examined their friends.
“She’s not responding!” Betty cried, jamming a knuckle into Elise’s breastbone. The pain from that should have been enough to wake the dead.
He stepped around her, angled the shotgun down, and fired off a shot. The spider-demon in the front lost its eyes in a cloud of blood. It collapsed and tripped the spider right behind it.
Anthony didn’t get a chance to fire again.
“Bring them down.”
The spider-demons lifted James and Elise’s bodies in their mouthparts. Their gentleness was surprising.
But the demons didn’t try to be nearly so gentle with Anthony and Betty. They drove into the back of his legs and shoved him down the path. “Hey!” he protested, twisting around to aim. They rewarded him with another, harder shove. He lost his balance and fell onto all fours.
The shotgun flew from his hands and dropped over the side of the path.
The spider-demon that had pushed Anthony seized him with its forelegs to lift him over its head. Its grip dug into his back and sides. When he was seventeen, he had body-surfed at a music festival after too much weed, and it felt a lot like that—except nobody in the mosh pit had pincers. He stared at its glistening eyeballs as it hauled him toward a woman he was pretty sure planned to kill him.
“It’s okay, Betty, we’ll be okay!” he yelled, trying to comfort his cousin. When she didn’t respond, he twisted in the spider’s legs to see what she was doing.
Betty was still at the door, kicking and punching and generally making herself impossible to grab. “Fuck you! Yeah! And fuck you, too! Ouch—hey!” Two of them finally jumped and pinned her to the ground. They dragged her down the slope. “Let go of me, you ugly bastards!”
At any other time, he would have laughed.
Each step of the spider beneath him was uneven and jolting, like riding a horse with too many legs. The demon holding Elise drew level with him. The hilt of the falchions jutted over each of her shoulders, and blood dripped from underneath the gloves. Her arms and legs dangled uselessly. So much for hoping she was only pretending to be asleep.
“Anthony? Anthony!” Betty wailed.
“Don’t worry, it’s going to be fine. We can—”
“Optimism. How sweet,” said the Night Hag as the spiders dropped all four of them in front of the dais and stepped back to form a loose circle.
Anthony eyed Elise’s swords. They were the only weapons left now, but he hadn’t even touched them before. He played baseball in elementary school, though. How much harder could it be to swing a sword?
Before he could decide if he wanted to make a move, the Night Hag descended to examine him like he was a piece of dog shit on her kitchen floor. Her nose wrinkled.
She snapped her fingers, and a beautiful man appeared at her side. He had full lips, long black hair, and no shirt. Anthony found himself gaping and had to shake free of it. The new guy had to be Thom.
“What is this?” she demanded. “What are they doing here?”
“They are friends of Elise’s.”
“Idiots. Amateurs! You would think a kopis would know better than to bring children with her!”
“Hey!” Betty complained.
The overlord ignored her. “At least she came at all. Strip her gloves and open the gate.”
“I’m afraid I can’t do that,” Thom said.
She spun on him. “Are you challenging me?”
“I have obeyed your every other order, but I will not expose her hands.” He hooked his thumbs in the waist of his slacks. “Make of it what you will.”
Several tense seconds passed.
Surprisingly, it was the Night Hag who looked away.
“Nukha’il!” she snapped. “Come here!” The chains fell away from the man on the other side of the gate. He stood slowly, as though he had been forced into a kneeling position for so long that he could barely move. He joined her on the dais. His wrists, rubbed raw by metal shackles, looked like they had delicate bird bones inside. “Grab the kopis. Remove her gloves. Open the gate. Do I have to spell it out for you?”
He glared, but he stepped down from the gate without arguing and knelt to grab Elise. Betty shielded her body.
“Don’t touch her!”
He shoved Betty with one hand. It was the smallest of gestures, but she went flying as though he had thrown his whole body into the punch. She cried out. Anthony barely caught her before she hit the ground.
Nukha’il scooped Elise from the ground, propping her awkwardly against his shoulder so he could peel off one of her gloves. Crusty blood made the material stick to her hand, but when he ripped it free, Anthony saw that the black symbol wasn’t black anymore. It glowed with the same faint, silvery light as the gate. Fresh blood dribbled from the center, as if she had been stabbed.
“Hurry,” the Night Hag said, gesturing impatiently. “Do it now.”
With an arm slung around Elise’s waist, he lifted her hand to the gate.
Anthony had to do something. Before he could reach the first step onto the dais, he caught the beautiful witch watching him. Thom gave an almost imperceptible shake of his head. The intent was clear:
Don’t do that
.
Nukha’il pressed the mark on Elise’s hand to the mark on the stone with his fingers spread behind hers.
The glow went out of the stone.
He stepped back, leaving a bloody handprint where Elise’s fingers had been.
Anthony was suddenly face down on the floor and had no idea how he had gotten there. He felt the pain an instant later—a splitting in his skull so much worse than having a wrench dropped on his head, worse than getting smacked in the nose with a baseball bat in Little League, worse than being tackled by spider-demons. It blinded him with white light.
He couldn’t see. Couldn’t think.
“Anthony!” Betty gasped, dropping at his side. “Oh my God, what—?”
The Night Hag was cackling, but Anthony couldn’t focus on her. He could barely see past Betty’s feet. “It works! Now, my angel, go through the gate. Make sure it’s safe.”
“No,” said a soft voice that had to belong to Nukha’il.
A cry of pain.
“I am getting sick of all this defiance!” she spat. “Go through the gate! I will kill you if you don’t. Make your decision.”
Anthony squinted at the dais. There was so much light pouring from the stone arch that he could only make out the shadowy backs of the overlord and her minions. Why wasn’t Betty screaming? It hurt so much.
Nukha’il dropped Elise. She tumbled down the steps and rolled to a stop beside Anthony.
“As you demand,” said the angel in a low growl.
With an arm lifted in front of his eyes, he passed through the pillars and disappeared.
Everyone was focused on the gate. Anthony saw his moment. He took one of the falchions out of Elise’s spine sheath, gritted his teeth against the pain, and got to his feet. Betty gaped at him as he ran onto the dais.
The overlord heard him coming and turned. He drove the falchion into her stomach.
Black blood spurted from the wound. The Night Hag cackled shrilly. “It stabbed me!” she said to Thom, turning to face him as though Anthony wasn’t even there. “That little boy
stabbed
me!”
He shrugged. “That happens.”
She shoved Anthony off the dais. The overlord was stronger than she looked, but not strong enough to throw him. He stumbled back to Betty as she jerked the falchion out of her stomach. “And to think I just finished improving this body. What a waste of time.”
She wriggled her fingers into the stab wound and began to pull. Her flesh tore away like rubber. There was something underneath, something black and crimson and not quite blood.
Her body shuddered. She heaved. The skin on her face loosened. The mouth-hole stretched until all her teeth were visible in a skull’s grin, and then they fell out one by one in sparkling shards of bone.
A huge, slippery limb pushed from the stab wound. It slid out like a tree branch birthed from her gut and felt around for the floor. When it touched down, the tip of a second limb joined it and ripped the hole wider. Her entire ribcage was bared as a third leg pushed through, and then a fourth. Each was as thick as Anthony’s body.
The Night Hag’s flesh sagged. Her arms and legs emptied into wiggling sacks.
A hulking spider rose from the remains of her human form—larger than the dais, larger than the gate itself, far larger than the semi Elise had hijacked. Anthony fell onto his back. The Night Hag loomed overhead.
Red eyes glistened on a brown and tan head. Brands blazed down her belly and legs. Her flesh was mottled with patterns meant to blend in with one of Hell’s deserts.
Anthony had seen the picture of the giant spider next to the gate. But he hadn’t imagined it would be quite so…
big
.
“Uh,” Betty said. She couldn’t seem to process any bigger words than that.
They exchanged a glance. He didn’t have to read her mind to hear the unspoken motto they usually shared in jest, but now with complete sincerity:
What would Elise do?
There wasn’t time to strategize. He let his mind return to their week in the desert—he killed his spider by running it over with the Jeep, but he would need a really big Jeep for this one—and thought of how Elise always went for the eyes, the joints, the comparatively soft underbelly.
The underbelly on this thing was about two feet over his head.
“This really sucks,” Anthony said, and then he grabbed the second falchion.
“Kill the humans,” said the Night Hag. Somehow, she sounded completely normal, like there should have been a woman standing in front of the dozen smaller daimarachnids.
Oh yeah. The other spiders.
Anthony swung the falchion into the mouth of a demon rushing Betty. She threw her hands over her head with a shriek. Ichor splattered on both of them.
It stumbled back, but a second spider took its place immediately. He swung again, and again. There were so many of them. He couldn’t tell which legs belonged to which body. The only way he knew he hit anything was that the blade would stop, something would shriek, and venom would splatter burning hot on his hands.
“Get out of the way!” Betty shouted.
“What?”
“I said, move it!”
Anthony sidestepped.
Something hot blasted past the side of his head and set fire to a spider-demon.
All those wiry hairs ignited simultaneously. The hard carapace shriveled as it screamed and flailed and kicked. All the other spiders stopped to stare, too—like time came to a complete halt as one demon burned to death. Something inside its shell popped as its innards cooked.
It flopped onto its side and stopped moving.
He whirled on Betty. She was clutching a notebook decorated by pink flowers and an ephemeral white unicorn.
“I told you I can cast magic missile!”
“Perhaps I spoke too soon about children,” said the Night Hag.
Her leg swung over Anthony’s head as she took a huge step. It only took one to reach them. The stink of rot and age overwhelmed him. Each one of her fangs was half as tall as he was. She hunched over, bringing that giant mouth toward their faces.
Anthony wrapped an arm around Betty’s shoulders and launched into a run.
The pincers snapped shut where they had been standing a moment before.
“What else do you have?” he asked, swinging and hacking their way through the crowd of spiders. They all were trying so desperately to obey the Night Hag’s orders that they stepped on each other, toppling and clumsy.
“Uh—just a second, I don’t—”
“We don’t have a second!”
She flipped through the pages and ripped one out from the back.
“Okay! Here!”
Betty ducked around him with a sheet of perfumed pink paper between her thumb and first finger. Her lips moved, but Anthony didn’t hear anything.
The air popped.
A firestorm blasted around them and blew through the crowd of demons. The three daimarachnids closest to them caught fire like the first one had, shrieking and twitching and falling all at once.
Anthony had never been scared of Betty before. Never. Even when they were kids, and she was five years older, and her idea of babysitting was to literally sit on him. But watching the demons burn made fear thrill through his stomach.
“I traced that one straight out of James’s Book of Shadows,” she said. Her lips were pale. Her knees buckled.
Anthony had to let her fall. A particularly ambitious daimarachnid climbed over its burning friends, scuttling toward him like an attack dog. He dodged to the side and sliced, but missed. It twisted. Pain whipped through his calf as one of its pincers scraped him through his jeans, and then those fangs hooked on his shoe and jerked him to the ground.