Authors: SM Reine
“How’s Leticia?” she asked. He could tell she was just trying to be polite. That was new for her, too.
“She’s in a good mood,” McIntyre said. He threw the truck into gear.
Elise arched an eyebrow. “At least that’s one of you.”
He hadn’t been in a good mood since the doctor told him that fluid levels were low in his wife’s womb—whatever the hell that meant—and that her cervix was opening. Those two things were bad, apparently. She’d been on bed rest for weeks, and they had an induction scheduled if she didn’t “stabilize,” even though she wasn’t due for another month.
She hadn’t stabilized. Her induction was in five hours.
It was silence in the truck as they got on the highway. Elise’s supposed boyfriend was staring out the window with puffy red eyes. She hugged the backpack to her chest and picked at her thumbnail.
The road out of Vegas was long, and they had to go through a lot of suburbs to get there, but traffic was pretty much dead. It wasn’t long before the downtown lights receded.
“Thanks for coming,” McIntyre said after a few dozen miles of listening to static-filled country on the radio.
Elise gave a slight shake, like she was clearing her head. “You called in a really big favor to drag me down here. I had to borrow three hundred bucks off James to even make the flight. So let’s get to it—what do you need?”
“I emailed all the info I have to you.”
“Anthony and I got on the plane an hour after you called. I didn’t have time to read your six attachments,” she said. “Give a recap and save me a few minutes.”
McIntyre blew a breath out of his lips. “Okay. The summit runs tomorrow through Sunday afternoon. You sign in at—”
“What summit?” Anthony interrupted. He sounded more annoyed than interested.
“It’s this thing they hold every fifty years,” Elise said. “Angels and demons hash out their issues while kopides make sure nobody dies. It’s between the Reno and Vegas territories this year, but I wasn’t invited. I didn’t plan on going.”
“That’s because everyone thinks you’re dead,” McIntyre said. “Anyway, they only invite the best of the demon hunters.” He shrugged one shoulder. “I’m think I was invited because I know most of the kopides alive right now. But Tish is going into the hospital in the morning.”
Out of the corner of his vision, he saw Elise watching him. Her skin glowed in the street lights as they soared past. “So what? You want me to go to the hospital and hold your wife’s hand?”
“I want you to go to the summit and pretend to be me.”
She laughed. He didn’t think he’d ever heard her laugh before, and it turned out that it wasn’t a particularly nice or happy sound. “Are you serious?”
“You’ve got to do it. There’s these guys at the summit called The Union of Kopides and Aspides—’The Union’ for short. They’ve taken over the whole thing.”
“Great. If the Union’s got things covered, you don’t need to attend.”
“These guys are trying to become a big player. They got half of the European territories under control in the last couple of years, and now they’re taking over of all of goddamn North America. They’re turning kopides into soldiers. You surrender your territory, get enlisted, get trained, and get reassigned to somewhere new. And they’re matching every kopis who doesn’t have an aspis to a witch.”
She frowned. “That’s impossible. I would have heard about that happening.”
McIntyre took the exit off the freeway. The road noises grew softer as he slowed, and it filled the car with ominous quiet. “You’ve been out of it too long. They’ve got Mexico. French Canada, too. The US is a big nut to crack, so they’re starting with this summit. If I can’t make a good show and get them to back off, they’ll take Vegas.”
“Can they make you enlist?” Elise asked.
“I hear they’re pretty convincing.” McIntyre stopped at a four way intersection. It was completely dead, but he didn’t go through. He took his hands off the wheel. “They could take everything I’ve got. You’re the only one who can help me.”
“They’ll know I’m not you.”
“Sure, they would. But this guy can pretend to be me, and he’s nobody. He won’t be recognized,” he said, waving at Elise’s boyfriend. “I get around with the local demons, but I’ve never met the Union; as far as I know, they don’t have any pictures on file. So your boyfriend is me, and then you say you’re Leticia.”
Elise’s mouth twisted like she tasted something sour. “It’s a bad idea.”
“It’s all I’ve got.”
Anthony didn’t seem concerned about Elise’s decision. He went back to staring out the window, even though there was nothing to see—they were beyond the last of the manicured suburbs, and there were trailers on one side and empty desert on the other.
The Elise he used to know would have refused. She wasn’t one for sympathy. He could only hope that saving her ass a half dozen times would be enough to coerce her.
But she didn’t need to be coerced. “Fine,” she said. “I’m already here anyway.”
He didn’t thank her. He knew she wouldn’t like that. But he nodded, and she nodded back, and that was more than enough. McIntyre stepped on the gas and everyone in the truck went back to ignoring each other.
M
cIntyre’s plot of
land was in the hills at the end of a long, narrow dirt road flanked by the silhouettes of Joshua trees. When they pulled up in his truck, a cat darted out of the space under the stairs and disappeared beyond the pool of light from the spotlight over the door. Even at night, Elise could tell that their mobile home had been through a lot of battles since her last visit. The side panels had been replaced and patched several times. The lattice skirting was broken in a few places. One of the windows had plastic over it.
Leticia waited for them on the front steps. She had to grip the rail to haul herself to her feet. Her hair was a faded shade of pink that had grown out to show natural dirty blond at the roots, and her belly was so big that it stuck out of the bottom of her tank top.
“Hey!” She waddled over to hug Elise, but faltered mid-step when she saw Anthony. “That’s not James.”
The very mention of his name made Elise’s forehead ache, and for a confusing moment, she was no longer in the Nevada desert. Instead, she saw the vaulted ceiling of a moonlit condo in California, and a pair of hands much larger than hers cupping the leather spine of a book as gently as an infant. James was on vacation to meet his girlfriend’s family, and he wasn’t sleeping.
She had gotten used to the disorientation of having her mind split by her aspis’s consciousness. She recovered faster every time. “James is busy,” Elise said with a small shake to clear her vision. “This is Anthony. Anthony, this is Leticia McIntyre.”
He grunted as he grabbed the suitcase out of the truck.
“Nice guy,” Leticia said dryly. She stretched up on her toes to peck McIntyre’s cheek. “Dana’s sleeping in our bed. We can put them up in her room.”
Sleep in a child’s room? It sounded about as much fun as trying to have a decent conversation with Anthony. “I don’t need to sleep,” Elise said.
Leticia rolled her eyes. “Don’t pull that kopis ‘constant vigilance’ bullshit on me. I don’t think it’s as cool as you do. Come on, get inside. Walk quiet. If we wake Dana, she’ll be up all night.”
Although the mobile home was small and old, Leticia kept the inside tidy. Their sixty-inch flat screen took up one entire wall and played a superhero movie on mute. It smelled like new paint inside the trailer, and the paneling was a cheerful shade of gold.
Leticia leaned her massive girth against the arm of a white leather couch backed by ram horns. It looked recent, too—there were imprints in the carpet where an older, smaller couch used to sit.
“You’re doing well,” Elise said.
McIntyre almost looked embarrassed. “We get pretty good tithes.”
“You’re tithing from the local demons now?”
He shrugged by way of response. “Put your stuff in there. That’s where you’re sleeping,” he said, pointing at a door as Anthony entered.
Anthony took the suitcase into waiting bedroom, shut the door, and didn’t come out again.
Both of the McIntyres looked at Elise. She didn’t feel like trying to excuse him—he had been like that for weeks—and remained silent.
She moved to sit on the couch, but changed her mind when she noticed there wasn’t any room. Leticia had taken over half of it with a nest of pillows and boxes of leftover Mexican food.
“How much are the tithes?” Elise pressed.
McIntyre just shrugged again and got two beers out of the fridge. He opened both of them with his pocketknife.
“Two and a half percent,” Leticia said. “Those demons were always harping on us for mediation. I figured we might as well get paid for it, so we set up a contract. Now when we broker a deal with a demon that wants to build a new casino or something, we get paid, too—and then some off the top of their profits. Protection money sounds mercenary, but we earn it.”
Elise took one of McIntyre’s beers and cupped it between her gloved hands. “That’s a good idea.”
“Good idea? James talked shit about kopides that tithe last time you were down,” McIntyre said, flopping into one of the kitchen chairs. “‘Unethical,’ James said. Something about organized crime, too.”
Elise could see that James had set down his book, and was no longer pretending to ignore them. He stared at the moon through the window as he listened to their conversation.
“James and I don’t agree on a lot of things,” she said, knowing he would hear it.
Leticia chuckled. “Ain’t that the truth. So where is your witch? He never lets you out of his sight. I can’t believe he wouldn’t have come along.”
“He’s alive, if that’s what you’re asking.”
The McIntyres exchanged glances. After a moment, Leticia sniffed. “Then you tell him he’s in trouble for avoiding us.”
“Yeah. Sure. I’ll do that.”
In California, James picked up his book again.
Leticia glanced at the clock and turned off the TV. It took her two tries to lower her bulk enough to set the remote on the coffee table. “I guess I better sleep if I’m having a baby today.”
Elise helped her stand upright again and hovered as she shuffled into the bedroom. The witch’s waddling motions and giant belly were worrying.
The blond head of a five year old girl poked out of all the sheets in the McIntyre’s bed. “Night,” Leticia whispered, careful not to make a noise when she shut the door again.
With nobody left to entertain, Elise joined McIntyre at the table. “Aren’t you going to sleep?” he asked, and she shook her head. “Of course. I remember that.” He waved his knife at Dana’s bedroom. “What’s up with your boyfriend?”
She ran a finger around the moisture on the rim of the bottle. “His cousin died recently.”
“Was his cousin a friend of yours?” he asked. She nodded stiffly. “Sorry.”
“Yeah.” She threw back a long swig of beer and banged the empty bottle on the table. “Is there more?”
He leaned back on two chair legs, grabbed another beer out of the fridge, and opened it with his knife. McIntyre slid the bottle across to Elise. She caught it and drained the bottle in three long swallows.
“Did the demonic overlord kill her?”
“So you heard about that,” Elise said. Her head was getting warm.
“Everybody heard about it.”
She snorted out a short, mirthless laugh. “Great. No, it wasn’t the overlord who killed her.” She didn’t want to talk about Betty anymore. Preferably not ever again. She changed subjects. “What are the issues at the summit this year?”
“There was all this stuff when they sent out the first papers—territory disputes in New Zealand, something about undercities getting eaten by sentient shadows, accusations of demons trying to break into the lowest level of Heaven. You remember how that goes. But they wiped that off the schedule a few weeks ago. There’s only one item now.”
She arched an eyebrow. “More important than an attempted assault on Heaven?”
“Check this out.”
He grabbed a packet of information and pulled out the agenda, which was marked with a Union logo at the top. There were only two lines on the page.
Priority Item: Violation of Quarantined Dimension
Access to quarantined supra-ethereal dimension violated via gate rifts. Coordinated intervention requested. Negotiation supervised by Union kopides in all slots.
Elise realized she was about to tear the paper in half and forced her hand to relax. “Violation? When did this happen?”
“A few weeks ago, I guess.”
“Which dimension?”
“I don’t know. They’ll talk about it at the summit,” McIntyre said with a shrug. He noticed her expression and set his beer on the table. “What’s wrong?”
She stared at the words on the page.
Quarantined supra-ethereal dimension
. There were a few quarantined levels of Hell—mostly because the atmosphere was deadly to non-natives—but she only knew of one quarantined level of Heaven. It was supposed to be completely blocked to all traffic.
Elise had been there before. It was quarantined for a reason.
Her response took too long, so McIntyre asked again, “What’s wrong, Kavanagh?”
“Nothing,” she said, trying to blank her mind before her stress drew James’s attention again. Elise also wasn’t going to discuss the quarantine with McIntyre. Not with anyone. She changed subjects. “So you still talk to half the kopides in the hemisphere, right? What does everyone know about me? Do they know I’m back?”
“The word is that some new kopis has taken over in Reno, but nobody knows who it is. Nobody except me. So it’s not like anybody’s going to expect to see you at the summit.”
“What if someone does recognize me?” she asked.
“Then we’re fucked, and we deal with it.” McIntyre finished his beer and sighed. “I should curl up with the wife for a couple hours. She gets pissy if I stay up long. I’ve got all the stuff I emailed stuck in this binder, if you want to catch up.”
“I’ll read it.”
“Summit check-in starts at eight, and it’s three hours out of here, so you guys should probably be out of here by five. You can take Tish’s car. Keys are on the hook.” He stood and stretched. “Good to have you back, Kavanagh.”