Authors: SM Reine
The sun was high in the sky when she parked in the hospital parking garage. Elise found McIntyre in the third floor hallway. He had taken a chair in the corner and stretched out with his eyes shut. He appeared to be asleep, but she knew he wasn’t—kopides weren’t wired to sleep in public areas.
“What do you want?” he asked when she approached, voice gravelly with fatigue. He had been unkempt the day before, but after the stress of his morning, he looked downright indigent.
“Who is Michele Newcomb?” she asked. He paled, ducked his head, and scrubbed a hand over his jaw without responding. “As soon as I arrived in Silver Wells, I got arrested by the Union for murder. Apparently, Lucas McIntyre was the last person to see her alive.”
“I don’t know what you—”
She dropped her voice to a growl. “Give me one good reason to keep up this idiotic charade. One reason. I’ve dropped everything to help you keep your territory, and I find myself accused of
murder
?”
McIntyre waited for a nurse to shuffle past with a cart before responding. “We can’t talk about it here. Listen—they’re going to do a c-section tomorrow if this induction doesn’t work, and—”
“I don’t care if your wife is getting lobotomized tomorrow. Did you kill Michele Newcomb?” Elise leaned forward with her elbows on her knees. She held a hidden blade against her arm, and his gaze dropped to the glint of silver.
McIntyre swallowed hard. “Let’s walk. Cafeteria’s downstairs. Hungry?”
“No.”
“I am.”
She tailed him to the cafeteria without putting the knife away. Walking beside another kopis was always a weird dance—two paranoid people trying to keep the other in their sights.
The cafeteria was a gray, unpleasant place built of linoleum and concrete. McIntyre piled a plate high with stale pizza and joined Elise at one of the tables. He dropped a cup of coffee in front of her. She didn’t touch it.
“You recognized her name,” she said. “You reacted when I said it.”
“Michele Newcomb’s some Union recruiter. She was the one sending enlistment materials before the summit.” McIntyre dug into his food.
“They found her car a few miles away from your trailer.”
He slowly chewed his pizza. Elise wished that James were there—he would have been able to read that strange expression on McIntyre’s face and know what it meant. Other peoples’ body language meant little to her; it was a foreign language she didn’t speak. He could have been admitting guilt with that frown, and she would never have been able to tell.
“There are a lot of demons around for the summit,” he finally said. “Anyone could have killed her. What happened to your hand?”
Elise held it up. Just acknowledging the break was enough to make it start hurting again. “The arrest wasn’t gentle.”
He swallowed like the pizza was a rock and grimaced. “I figured the Union would be a pain in the ass. They always are. I didn’t think they’d break your hand.”
She emptied her coffee in one gulp. “If I find out you knew more than you’re letting on, I’m going to come visit you again. And it won’t be a little talk over lunch.” Elise dropped the cup on the table. “If I find out that you killed Michele Newcomb, I will give you to the Union.”
McIntyre wiped his mouth on a napkin. His lips drew into a frown. “Would you? Really?”
Elise really, really wished she could read his facial expression.
She dropped her eyes to the empty cup. “Come on, Lucas. Cut me a break. You are telling me the truth, right?”
His nod was slow. He didn’t look at her when he did it.
She shoved her chair back and left the hospital.
VIII
T
he first meeting
was held below an abandoned silver mill outside town. It stood on the side of a hill with shattered windows and exposed beams where the cement had crumbled away.
The Union bused kopides from Silver Wells to the site, and it took three large vans to do it. Anthony was assigned to a twelve-seater next to a man with red-brown skin and a big grin. “This is very exciting,” said the kopis with a thick accent that Anthony didn’t recognize. “All this open space. Isn’t it marvelous?”
There was yellow emptiness outside the window as far as Anthony could see. The van’s air conditioning wasn’t powerful enough to reach the back seats, so he was drenched in sweat. “Marvelous. Yeah.”
The other man stuck out a hand. “I’m Ramelan. What’s your name?”
They shook hands. “Lucas McIntyre,” Anthony said with only a slight stutter. “Where are you from?”
“A village called Gobang in Indonesia. It’s nothing like this.” Ramelan’s teeth were very white against his dark skin. “Our villages are full of rice farms and fishing, and not nearly so vast. I have never seen anything like it.”
“Guess you don’t get around a lot.”
“Oh, I’ve been many places,” he said. “But not on Earth.”
Where could a kopis go that wasn’t on Earth? The only options that came to mind were Heaven and Hell, and that was subject matter he preferred to avoid. It was a weird enough pronouncement that Anthony decided not to ask about it.
Ramelan turned to another kopis—a young man with brown hair and a big nose—and they talked for the rest of the ride to the silver mill.
The Union lined everyone up outside the building before letting them enter the elevator in groups. Ramelan was in the same group as Anthony. He was extremely bright and outgoing, and Anthony wished he would go away. Elise must have been rubbing off on him.
A Union witch closed the elevator’s cage and pressed a button. They descended into the mines.
The mill looked abandoned, but the elevator was well-oiled and smooth. They dropped beyond several shafts that had been encased in solid concrete and kept dropping. Anthony lost count of how many levels they passed around eight or nine. Somewhere beyond that—where the air began to grow hot again, and they had to pump cold air in to keep it breathable—they reached a shaft like every other, and the elevator stopped.
Another Union witch opened the door. The men piled out.
In Reno, the demons inhabited gold mines that had been abandoned in centuries past, so they were filled with exposed wood and crumbling rock. The silver mine was much more recent. The towering machinery was plated with steel, and the offices they passed even had beige computers from the nineties.
There was less cement so deep underground. The walls were raw stone supported with steel I-beams. The kopides were led to a dark, cavernous room with a rock tumbler, where three separate seating areas had been arranged among the machines. Their footsteps echoed off the walls as they moved to take chairs.
Anthony hung back to let the other men select their seats. The front row was marked by “reserved” signs, but he wanted to snag a spot there. If he was going to have to speak up during the meeting—a wholly petrifying idea—then he wanted to be somewhere prominent.
Fortunately, Ramelan saved him from having to pick a spot. “Nervous?” the kopis asked cheerfully. “You can sit with me!” And he took a seat in one of the reserved chairs. It left Anthony next to the Union’s desk, which was elevated on a platform. A huge pump whirred behind it, sending water sloshing through overhead pipes.
He leaned around to see who was up there, and a chill rolled down his spine. Zettel and his aspis, Allyson, were already positioned above everybody else. There were a few other people there, too—the red-haired man named Boyd, a petite woman with silver rings on every finger, and a Black boy who couldn’t have been older than sixteen.
“I’ve been excited about this summit for months,” Ramelan confessed, drawing his attention away from the Union. “I expect to meet so many interesting people. Demons, I see demons all the time—in fact, I just had lunch with Aquiel last week—but I seldom meet other kopides.”
Anthony was too nervous to respond. His hands shook.
After all of the kopides occupied the seats around him, the demons started to file in. They came from the opposite direction as the humans, as though they approached from deeper within the mines. A few passed for human, superficially, but Anthony would never mistake them for anything but demonic. He had run into enough nightmares and incubi to recognize that luminous skin and black hair.
Only a half dozen of them emerged and sat in the front row of their section. Considering the most powerful demons were supposed to be invited to the summit, they looked pretty innocuous. None of them even gave Anthony a headache.
“This is a bad sign,” Ramelan murmured.
“Why?”
“The infernal delegation is thirty strong. These are only the servants—not the overlords or masters. And I see no angels yet.”
Anthony glanced around. Ramelan was right. The third section was empty.
They weren’t the only ones who had noticed the absence. Zettel and his team on the platform were getting antsy.
He checked the clock on the wall. The meeting was supposed to have started five minutes ago. “What’s going on?” Anthony wondered aloud. Ramelan didn’t have an answer, but he didn’t really expect him to.
Another fifteen minutes passed quietly. And then fifteen more.
The angels never arrived.
E
lise reached Silver
Wells at the same time that the Union returned from the meeting. She lurked across the street from the school to watch as they unloaded the vans—each of which blazed with so much red magic that they were hard to look at.
She squinted into the magical glow. Her ability to see magic was so new that she still had no idea what any of it meant, but James—who was talking to a silver-haired man over a lunch of caprese salad and doing his very best to ignore her—would have known the spells at a glance, if he hadn’t been busy. Considering that Leticia’s car had died on the approach to town again, she could only assume the magic was to counteract the interference of ethereal energy.
Anthony was completely oblivious to anything strange about his transportation. She waved when he emerged, and he jogged over to join her. “That ended fast,” Elise said.
“It never started. The angels didn’t show, and the demons only sent their servants.”
Her eyebrow quirked. “Really.”
“Yeah. What does it mean?”
The Union closed the vans. Most of them headed back to their private compound, while Zettel and his team stuck around to argue in low voices. That strange boy with the dog collar was with them, although he stood a few feet away without joining their conversation. She wouldn’t have pegged him for a Union member. He didn’t look anything like a kopis.
Zettel was obviously distressed. His face was purple, and spit flung from his mouth as he spoke. Allyson wasn’t any happier. They talked over each other like a very old—and very angry—married couple.
A smirk played on Elise’s lips. “It means we aren’t the only ones pissed that the Union’s taken over the summit.”
“Good,” Anthony said forcefully. He leaned against the rotten boards of the wall beside her, kicked off a shoe, and shook pebbles out. “Did you find McIntyre?” She nodded. He stuffed his foot back into the sneaker. “And?”
“Something is going on. I still don’t know what.”
Another black SUV approached. It didn’t come from the north, where the Union had their compound. It came from Las Vegas instead.
The kid in the collar turned to watch the SUV pass. He looked so worried that Elise had to watch it, too. The windows were tinted black. She couldn’t see inside, but she suddenly had a bad feeling.
Why would the Union have been in Vegas?
“What’s wrong?” Anthony asked when he saw her expression.
Her gaze fell on the boy across the street, and she realized with a jolt that he was already staring at her. “Hang on,” she said.
She met him halfway across the road.
“They have McIntyre,” the boy said without preamble. “They’ve arrested him.”
The shock of it was so powerful that, for a moment, she stared at him with her mouth agape.
A hundred questions cascaded through her at once—how he could know that Anthony wasn’t McIntyre, how he knew about the arrest, what he was doing with the Union—but she finally settled on, “Who are you?”
“I’m Ben,” he said. “Um, Benjamin, actually. Flynn. That doesn’t matter right now. The team followed you to Vegas, waited until you left the hospital, and arrested McIntyre. He was in that car.”
“What the hell?” Elise asked.
“My thoughts exactly,” Allyson interrupted.
Zettel and his aspis had noticed the conversation and joined them in the street. The commander snapped his fingers at Benjamin. “You. Get in the car. Now.”
Elise instinctively stepped between them. There was no reason to feel protective of a total stranger like Benjamin—he was with the Union, after all—but she couldn’t resist the compulsion.
Allyson reached around Elise and grabbed Benjamin’s arm. “You heard Gary. Get in the car.” She ushered him to one of the SUVs, and he gave Elise one last desperate look before the door shut on him and the witch.
“What are you going to do with McIntyre?” Elise asked.
“We’ll interview him,” Zettel said with an unpleasant twist to his lips, which meant that McIntyre was going to get the same strip search they had. “And as soon as we’re done with the summit, we’ll take him back to Union HQ for prosecution.”
“Prosecution? Seriously? What is your problem?”
Zettel gave a cold laugh. “My problem? What’s my problem? My problem is that you concealed a killer, lied to me about your identity—”
“You can’t arrest McIntyre,” she said. “His wife is in the hospital.”
“He killed one of my people. The only place he’s going is to a Union trial. You should just thank your lucky stars that I’m not dragging you in for interfering with our investigation—whoever the hell you even are. There’s no way you’re a witch. You’re not even married to that guy.” He jabbed his thumb at Anthony.
Elise shoved her face into Zettel, gathering all of her five and a half feet to make herself as intimidating as possible. It worked on most people. In fact, it worked on everyone. But Zettel didn’t budge. “My name is Elise Kavanagh. I’m a kopis, and I’ve known McIntyre for years—he’s a hell of a man to have at your back. He would never kill someone who didn’t deserve it.”