The Darkest Gate (26 page)

He spread his fingers out to show he had no weapons. “My name is Nukha’il. The Night Hag sent me to watch you.”

“That’s not a job I would volunteer for,” Elise said. “You know what I did to him?”

“Have mercy on me.” He sank to his knees and bowed his head so sheets of shimmering hair fell over his shoulder. “I know who you are and what you can do. We whisper your name and carry it through light and shadow. You are—”

She raised a hand before he could say it.

“Shut up. Right now.”

He crawled toward her, and she reacted on instinct. She drove her knee into his face with a crack. Angels didn’t bleed like humans did, and he didn’t cry out. His elbows hit the floor. His head hung between his shoulders.

“Why would you want mercy from me?” Elise demanded, voice cracking. “Don’t you know that He’s after me? Don’t you know I’ve killed dozens of you to escape Him before?”

When Nukha’il looked up, she aimed the falchion at his face. But he didn’t fight back, and his expression was not as subservient as his posture. The hands he stretched toward her were clenched into fists. “I know, and don’t care. Mr. Black has clipped my wings and made me a demon’s slave. The things the Hag does to me for amusement… I don’t want to know this life anymore. I hate the earthen planes. I hate them! I need your blade to give me mercy.”

Her blade wavered. “I won’t kill you.”

Surprise sparked in his gaze. “I’m not asking for my death. I’m asking for theirs. That demon, Mr. Black, his aspis—all of them dead at my feet.”

Elise nodded and sheathed the falchion. “That’s the plan. You don’t have to beg.”

“Restore my wings. You have her brand; you can release me. I can liberate the other angels and collect an army one hundred strong. We will kill them all together.” He clawed at the necklace on his throat.

A hundred angels. That would be an incredible army. With that many ethereal creatures at her back, she could take down a lot more than the Night Hag. She could take down civilizations. And the whole time she marched, the angels would stare at her with those desperate eyes.

Her stomach twisted in on itself. “Sorry. I don’t ally with angels.”

“Then let me go, at least. Free me to exact revenge.
Please.
”

Elise hesitated. She didn’t want to have anything to do with anything ethereal—not those ruins, not the things that lay beyond, and definitely not angels.

He gave her such a wretchedly hopeful look when she stood over him that she almost reconsidered her decision. But when she spoke, her voice was hard, and it didn’t waver. “Don’t follow me. Stay here until sundown, and don’t tell the Night Hag I saw you.”

Horror dawned in his eyes. If Elise could remove the collar, then she could also give him orders. The muscles in his back flexed as though he was going to stand, but he didn’t budge. He couldn’t.

“Mercy,” he whispered.

“I’m all out of that for the day.” She took a step away, but paused. “You should know… Itra’il is alive.”

He sucked in a hard breath, gripping his chest as though his heart hurt. “She’s
alive
?”

“Yeah.” Elise brushed past him. “Sorry.”

T
he police allowed
James a courtesy call when eight o’clock rolled around. He drummed his fingers on the desk by the phone for almost five minutes before deciding what number to dial.

It took Anthony two hours to show up with a stack of money fished out of James’s safe at Motion and Dance. He stared around at the police station like he couldn’t quite believe he was there. “Thank you,” James said. “I can explain.”

“Yeah, I think you’d better.” The beaten old Jeep waited outside in the parking lot. It was a welcome sight after a night trying to sleep on concrete. “Where should I take you?”

“The parking gallery, please. My car was left there overnight. You can go back to work afterward.”

“It’s fine. I should check on Betty anyway.” He put the Jeep into gear and shook his head. “You know, I’ve seen some weird stuff since I started dating Elise. Zombies. Giant spiders. Exorcisms. But when I’m halfway through rebuilding the transmission on a VW and I get a call from you—you, of all people—asking me to bail you out of jail… that’s got to rank at the top of my ‘shit I never expected to deal with’ list. You don’t even
like
me. Why didn’t you call Elise?”

“And that would be part of the story. I’ll tell you everything. Later.”

It was the longest, most awkward ride possible back to the parking garage, even though they were only a few blocks away. And true to his word, Anthony followed James all the way to the suburbs north of Reno.

“So?” Anthony demanded as soon as they met at the front door.

James sighed. “Is now really the time?”

“I missed half my shift at the shop because of you. This is a
great
time.”

His upper lip twitched. “Fine. Let’s go inside, at the very least.” It was a small mercy that Stephanie was nowhere to be found, and that Betty was still sleeping on the couch. James brewed a pot of coffee, uncomfortably aware of Anthony leaning against the opposite counter with his arms folded and an expectant look. “Do you take cream?”

“No, but—”

“You would take an explanation. Yes. I get it.”

“I was going to say I take sugar, actually. But sure. How
did
you land in jail?”

“Elise. Elise got me arrested. Happy?” He poured two cups and sat down at the kitchen table, which was topped with rare Indonesian agarwood to match the paneling on the island, at Stephanie’s insistence. James massaged a hand over his brow. “Of course it was Elise. That should go without saying, shouldn’t it?”

“It’s not like she’s not a criminal,” Anthony said, grabbing his mug. He didn’t sit down.

“Your defensiveness is charming. It’s lovely not having to be the one doing it, for once. I hope you get to enjoy many, many years of making excuses for Elise.”

“Do we have a problem?”

James barked a laugh. “No. Of course not.”

“Good, because whatever you think, I just went through all the trouble of calling Milo into work to cover for me and opening a magical safe with one of Elise’s gloves. I’m going to catch so much shit for leaving early. And you—you and me—” Anthony gestured between them with the mug, “—if we’ve got a problem, then I don’t know why I would have bothered.”

James pinched the bridge of his nose and shut his eyes. It was hard to open them again. He was going to pass out for a few years as soon as he got horizontal.

“Then why did you bother?” he asked dully.

“Because you’re Elise’s…” Anthony wiggled his fingers in what was probably supposed to be a rough approximation of casting a spell. “I thought she had to be dead or something, if you were in jail.”

“She’s not. Not until I get at her, anyway.” James snorted at how offended the younger man looked. “That was a joke.”

“If you’re going to—”

The front door opened. Elise appeared in the space between the formal dining room and the kitchen like a ghost. Yellow, splotchy bruises covered the entire left side of her face. It wasn’t as bad as her expression—that exhausted, miserable look of someone who hadn’t slept or eaten in a week.

She looked so terrible that James forgot to be angry. He shoved his chair back and stood.

Anthony pushed past him. “Elise!” He wrapped her in a hug. Her arms stayed limp at her sides. “Jeez, are you okay? What happened?”

She handed him an envelope wordlessly. He removed a couple of pictures. James wanted to see them, but he remained frozen by the kitchen table instead. Elise’s expression was telling enough. Whatever was in those photos would be very terrible, and very likely mean a fight.

Instead, he studied her as Anthony studied the photos. It was the first time she had set foot in James’s new house, and she looked like a snake surrounded by mongooses. Her upper lip curled as she took in the nonporous countertops, the backyard, the framed photo of James and Stephanie waiting to be mounted in the hallway.

“Are these those spiders that we fought?” Anthony asked. Elise put a finger to her lips and shook her head. “What? Why are we being quiet?”

She pointed at James and Anthony, then at the floor. The message was clear:
Stay here.
And then she drew her sword and moved to the back door, peering into the yard. It hadn’t been landscaped yet, although stakes with yellow flags marked where empty dirt was destined to become brick paths and grass.

“You don’t need your sword. Stephanie isn’t here,” James muttered.

Even that couldn’t make her laugh. She slipped into the living room, and he took the photos from Anthony.

James didn’t recognize anyone in the pictures. The old woman had a distinctly inhuman appearance—the Night Hag?—and he was sure that the spiders were the same demons that Elise had been hunting in the desert. But that wasn’t what gave him pause. The gate in the third picture made a chill wash over his body.

“What is that?” Anthony asked.

James dropped the envelope and followed Elise.

She was kneeling under one of the bay windows to glare at the neighborhood through a crack in the blinds. Betty was so buried under blankets and pillows that only the top of her blond head stuck out. She didn’t stir when James crouched by Elise.

He tried to see what she was seeing through the window. Trees baked in the hot summer sun. His new neighbor gardened in a pair of purple Crocs.

And then—a flash of movement. Something darted past the back fence.

Elise hurried out the front door, which she had left cracked open. By the time James got to his feet, grabbed his notebook off the coffee table, and followed her onto the front step, she was wiggling onto the roof. All he saw were her feet kicking as she disappeared.

He swore under his breath and stuffed the notebook in his belt before leaping to grab the gutter.

The ceiling tile blazed under his hands. Stephanie had insisted on a white roof to reflect heat, so walking on it was like being trapped atop a range set to ten. He jerked his scalded fingers back.

Elise’s hair was just visible over the slope of the roof. She was already crouched on the other side.

He squatted beside her. “What—?” he began, but she cut him off by pointing.

The house James and Stephanie bought was a recent addition to the neighborhood. The only thing at their back was empty hillside, which had been leveled into terraces and marked for future development. From their elevated position on the roof, they could see over the hill, and all the way to the highway. But Elise wasn’t pointing that far.

His eyes fell on a hulking shape behind the fence. A daimarachnid.

“The Night Hag said she would have you guarded,” Elise murmured. “I thought she meant by the Gray.”

“Those photos—the old woman—”

“That’s her. She’s had the spiders this entire time. She’s the one who tried to kill Betty.”

The daimarachnid scuttled to the corner of the fence, and Elise pulled James behind a gabled section of roof. It was a half a degree cooler in the shade underneath. Sweat dripped from the back of his neck down his spine. “It’s logical, in some sick fashion. How do you cement the allegiance of a reluctant warrior? Do you give them promises of safety and money, or do you take away the people to which they already hold allegiance?”

“Why not both?” Cold fury glowed in Elise’s eyes. “We’re killing her today. Right now. And I’m starting with that spider.”

Without warning, she leaped to her feet, rushed around the gable, and launched from the roof.

James couldn’t help it. He gave a little shout of shock and fear as she plummeted to the other side of the fence. It was barely a half second of warning, but it was enough—the spider attacked while she was still on her knees.

She brought up her sword. It connected with the mouthparts of the daimarachnid with a meaty thump.

Elise cried out.

The fence blocked his view, so his mind was immediately flooded with a thousand horrible thoughts of huge bite wounds and pulsing venom. James dropped to his belly—the roof burned even through his t-shirt—and slid down feet-first.

But when he got to the other side of the fence, the daimarachnid was already dead in the dirt. Elise stood over it, sweaty and panting with ichor caking her shirt to her chest. Relief swamped him. “I thought you got bitten. Those spiders—you know they’re venomous.”

“Yeah, I know. We have to move fast. The Night Hag is going to feel its death, and we have to get there before she realizes what that means.”

She took a step toward him and staggered.

James tried to catch her. Elise’s arms were so slick with the demon’s juices that she dropped to the ground anyway.

“What—?”

“It’s fine,” she said, but then he saw the ragged flesh on her thigh, and he realized that she had been bitten after all.

He wiped some of the blood away with his fingers for a better look at the wound. From somewhere in the musty depths of James’s memories of academia, he recalled the word “necrosis.” It should have taken hours to develop, especially with Elise’s robust immune system, but there was nothing normal about bites delivered by demons. The injury was already as big as his fist and blackening around the edges. It didn’t bleed so much as ooze.

She grabbed his wrist when he pulled the Book of Shadows out of his belt. “Save it.”

“We can’t leave that,” he said. “I have a spell—”

She pushed him back and shook out her leg. “I said I’m fine. It just burns. We’ve got to kill an overlord and shut an ethereal gate, so I can’t let you drain your magic.”

“How do you plan on fighting like that?”

“With this,” she said, picking up her sword and sheathing it again. Her cheeks were pale. “Now help me push this body over the fence before someone sees it.”

XV

A
nthony was waiting
at the back door when they shoved the daimarachnid into the yard, and he hurried over to help them drag the body under the shelter of the house. Elise wished she could see how Stephanie reacted to finding a dead demon in her yard. That would have been a popcorn-worthy conversation.