Authors: SM Reine
Alain’s body was a few feet away with blood and brain drying on the wall behind him.
“
Mon ami
,” Mr. Black murmured.
Before James even realized the older man was moving, Mr. Black swung his cane. It cracked against James’s skull.
His ears rang and his vision blurred. But he was ready for it when Mr. Black swung again.
James caught the cane and tried to wrench it from his grip. They struggled. James was a good twenty years younger and several inches taller—it shouldn’t have been a fight at all. But even an older kopis was much stronger than the average human.
Mr. Black shoved him to the ground and seized a fistful of cloth ribbon.
“She killed him,” he said, voice thick with tears. “My aspis—my companion—”
“Karmic justice,” James said.
“Justice?
Justice
?”
He didn’t even see the strike coming this time.
The force of the blow made James black out. It was only for a few moments, but that was enough time—when he roused again, he was dangling upside down over the shoulder of an angel as they ascended in an elevator. He watched the hazy mirror-world slide outside the window.
When the door opened, the angel carried him outside and threw him to the floor.
James stared up at the towering column of the gate. It was so much bigger than anything he had seen before. The very top almost brushed the real city, and light swirled between the pillars like a tear in existence. The symbols at the base were already glowing. It was almost open. All it needed were the matching marks.
Mr. Black knelt over James with a fistful of ribbons, blocking his view. “Activate it.”
James’s eyes traced the path of ribbon. The angels had completed the circles—all nine of them, each one slightly smaller than the last and nested within each other. It encompassed the entirety of the gate.
He could see the spells for entrapment in the line, which had been Alain’s specialty. It was relatively harmless—if one considered trapping a god harmless.
“I won’t do it,” James said.
“Hold his arms!”
An angel pinned him down. There was no fighting against its grip.
Mr. Black threw the rope of ribbon around James’s head and tightened it on his throat. Pressure crushed against his esophagus. He gagged and gurgled, tongue bulging from his mouth.
“Activate them!”
James would have said no again if he could speak. He fought against the restraints of the angel’s hands to no avail.
And Mr. Black pulled harder.
His skull began to fill with white noise. The older man’s face blurred in his vision. Elise’s voice echoed in the back of his mind:
He’s here… where is he? James?
Such pain.
He stretched out a finger to touch the ribbon as Mr. Black tightened the ligature.
The symbols flared to life.
Magic flowed from him into the ribbons, stretching out over the city. James moved through his magic. He raced through every line and saw the angels with their hopeless stares as if he walked past them himself.
And he saw Elise running toward Mr. Black’s back.
She jumped on the other kopis, knocking him off James. They bumped into the angel. The pressure vanished from his throat and arms.
Freed.
James ripped the ribbons off his throat, sucking in a blessed lungful of air. Anthony raced from the stairwell. “Stop the magic!” he cried, waving his arms.
But it was too late to take it back. The entire city was aglow with the symbols on the ribbons.
Elise and Mr. Black rolled across the roof, trading blows. They ended up on their feet on the other side of the pillar, just beyond the barrier of the ribbon.
She lunged toward him, but Mr. Black side-stepped her, moving out of the way as though she had telegraphed her move. She swung again. His arm struck hers, knocking it aside.
Mr. Black slapped her other hand when it rose to strike him. He twisted, capturing her arm, and bent her elbow the wrong way. She cried out.
He finally gave a hard shove, launching Elise over his head, and she stumbled over the line made by the ribbons. “Finally,” he spat.
“Don’t start celebrating yet,” she said, striding toward him again.
But when she reached the ribbon line, it was like striking a wall. The shock of it resonated through James. She couldn’t pass the magicked runes.
“I’ve envisioned this moment for years,” Mr. Black laughed. “Years! And what a satisfying moment it is.”
Anthony tried to rush the barrier of ribbons, but an angel snagged him in its arms, holding him back. “Elise!” he shouted.
She faced the gate.
Elise
…
This time, it wasn’t her voice that James heard, but another entirely—something great and terrible that rang through his entire being, vibrating down to the marrow of his bones.
She held up her ungloved hand. Blood streamed from the symbol again.
The marks
wanted
to open the gate.
Her legs moved of their own volition. She stepped toward the pillar, rooted deep in the concrete of the parking garage.
She fought it. She fought it hard. But there was no way to stop the inevitable march.
Before she even touched it, the gate began to open.
A gust of wind roared across the top of the parking garage, ripping through them and nearly blowing James off his feet. Electricity sparked and danced in the air around the pillars. A rumbling shook the entire structure, from the top of the gate to the very earth, and the angels backed away as white light erupted from the arch.
He flung up a hand to shield his eyes, but it did nothing for the painful brilliance that burned through Elise’s skull.
Her hands were stretched toward the pillar, dragging her forward inch by inch.
James and Elise’s eyes met through the light. He knew she could see and feel the way he did, sharing every thought and sense between them. Something had happened when they piggybacked—something wrong. She shared his sore neck. He felt her grief at Betty’s death, and the marks on her palms burned on both of their hands. He felt the pull as strongly as she did.
And he felt the moment she made a horrible decision.
“He can’t have me,” she said. “I’ll never go back to Him.”
“No,” he whispered. He didn’t have to raise his voice for her to hear it.
Elise drew one of the falchions. “Sorry, James.”
She plunged it into her gut.
Pain ripped through him as though he had been stabbed, too. A scream tore from his throat. He fell to his knees. At the same time, Anthony yelled—but it was all so distant, so meaningless. James’s palms burned and the gate throbbed and he could feel the blade scraping bone.
Mr. Black ran to the edge of the ribbon. “No!”
Elise hit her knees. Fell onto her side. Released the sword. The power rushing through the gate immediately faltered.
James felt death creep toward them.
Her vision dimmed, and she felt
satisfied
.
He didn’t stop to consider the ramifications. He shoved past Mr. Black, jumped over the ribbon line, and fell to his knees beside Elise. She swatted weakly at his arm, as if to push him back, but there was no strength in it. She was bleeding out too fast.
His Book of Shadows was still in the Night Hag’s cavern. There was no time to cast a spell. James was one of the most powerful witches in the world, and yet his kopis was dying in front of him, and there wasn’t anything he could do. “Goddamn it, Elise!”
She smiled to see him. “Hey,” she said. Her vision snowed.
Elise’s eyes unfocused. Her chest hitched.
No
.
He ripped the second glove off her hand, baring both bloody marks, and pressed them to the angelic stone.
Energy shocked through them. A mighty bell chimed.
The gate opened.
XVIII
D
ying was a
lot more painful than Elise expected.
She had given the subject a lot of thought over the years. Kopides seldom lived past thirty, so it wasn’t a question of whether she would die a violent death or not—it was a question of
when
.
Since fights were seldom painful while she was in the midst of it—the adrenaline and endorphins took care of that—she expected the act of dying to be relatively painless, too. She thought she would go into shock. She might even be dead before she knew it was going to happen.
All of that was completely wrong.
The sword hurt as it was punched in, and it hurt just as much coming out the other side. Elise felt a twinge of sympathy for all the demons she had killed in that fashion.
But then she was falling, and she didn’t really feel much of anything except the pain.
There was a commotion around her. People yelling. The towering bone pillars of the gate beginning to shake. She could see it all through James’s eyes—including Mr. Black’s horror as he rushed to the edge of the circle.
Good. Let him despair.
The blood loss caught up with her a few moments later, making the last vestiges of rational thought fade. A gray haze filled her vision.
Scraps of random thought flitted through her mind. She wasn’t in the angelic city—she was buying the studio with James, bumping her shoulder against his and enjoying the glow of companionship. She was meeting an incubus in her new office, hoping to acquire her first client. She was taking a test with Betty in a lecture hall at the university. She was sinking deep into the snow…
Cold.
She was so cold.
E
lise remembered running.
Her bare feet slapped against white cobblestone as a pale dress streamed behind her. Angels flanked her to either side. “Help me!” she had cried, and they rushed in to take her hands. She was a little smaller, in those days. Thinner and less muscular. Younger. But not weak.
“He will be so angry when He realizes you’ve gone,” one of the angels told her. “He will tear apart the world to find you. He will destroy
everything
to bring you back.”
“Let him,” she said.
So they ran—Elise and twelve angels.
She had only been sixteen years old. She hadn’t deserved what He did to her. She didn’t deserve to be trapped in a black garden where light and hope did not exist.
There was a gate then, too. The angels took her there.
She had put her bandaged hands upon it. Her palms bled, the gate opened, and she jumped through to the other side.
Those were the facts. She understood that was what happened. But she didn’t remember any more.
Hazy memories. Scraps of time drifting on the wind.
She could see the pale hands reaching for her and hear His voice as He shouted for her.
Elise!
And when she awoke again—only for a moment—it was in the depths of snowy winter with James kneeling over her.
At the time, she thought he was another angel who had come to rescue her from His grip. She had been trapped for months—month upon month of torture, insanity, and pain under the guise of loving care. It only ended when James took her away.
She tried to forget. It was better to forget.
The concerned face of her aspis loomed overhead. “Goddammit, Elise,” he muttered from a million miles away. He was turning her over, helping her face a sky filled with white light.
She wished he wouldn’t look so sad. She reached up to touch his cheek, but her hand was too heavy.
“Hey,” she said. She wanted to add,
It’s okay.
Feathers drifted through space.
It was so very cold.
J
ames saw the
instant that Elise lost consciousness. Her eyes went empty. The lids fell shut.
A moment later, the world flipped upside down.
For a horrifying moment, he dangled from the roof of the parking garage and stared at the real city beneath him. His stomach rose into his throat. His feet lifted from the cement, and he clutched Elise’s limp body to his chest as if he could save her from the fall. But then pressure built within the barrier of the ribbons that pinned him in place.
A fissure appeared in the air between the gate’s columns like a lightning bolt suspended in midair.
It split open.
Black, yawning darkness waited on the other side of the gate. It was pure nothingness, colder and emptier than the void of space. Like staring into the nonexistence of death.
He is coming
.
Although He was pure energy—and inconceivable to the human mind—James knew the instant that He stepped through the door. Everything within the ribbons turned to white fire. The air scorched his flesh. He folded himself over Elise to protect her, but she was burning, too. All of the oxygen vanished. James tried to suck in a breath—and failed.
The magic on the ribbons flared with power, straining to contain Him.
Beyond the ribbons, Mr. Black had fallen to his knees. He mouthed words that James could not hear.
James gathered Elise in his arms and struggled to stand. She should have been light. He always thought of her as hollow-boned, like a bird, and through a thousand rehearsals and a hundred thousand dance lifts, he had never had to fight to lift her. But now he couldn’t breathe. Couldn’t think.
Ridiculous thoughts to have in the face of their greatest enemy.
His muscles trembled. “I have Elise,” he gasped. He felt the voice in his throat, and the spasm of his lungs as they struggled to breathe, but his words were sucked into the abyss. “Now heal her!”
The light faded as he rushed toward unconsciousness. James fell, unable to support Elise’s weight.
Heal her… save her life…
He wasn’t sure if it was his thought, or if it belonged to the vast entity surrounding him. The light faded as He realized he was trapped. He wouldn’t cross the gateway into a cage.
“You can’t go until you heal her,” James croaked, doubling over. “You can’t…”
Another figure moved behind Mr. Black’s shoulders. It wasn’t one of the enslaved angels. It was a man that burned with inner light, despite the overbearing light of God, with broad silver wings stretching behind him.