The Darkest Gate (4 page)

Betty sighed again, as though that answer put her in physical pain. She was still sighing when Elise rocketed out the door. Sometimes Betty’s antics were cute, but this was not one of those times.

Her feet pounded a rhythm on the pavement that kept time with the incessant thoughts.

Landlord. Cleaning company. Insurance agent. The police, the security company, offsite backups…

She put on her own headphones and blasted Black Death’s latest album from the MP3 player on her arm. It couldn’t go loud enough to muffle her thoughts.

Life was so much easier when Elise hadn’t owned anything. There was a time when she hadn’t cared about coffee pots or the nice desk she bought as a treat for surviving her first year as an accountant. All she cared about was sticking close to James—and sometimes, she didn’t care much about that, either.

James was the only person she could imagine talking to. He always knew the right things to say. Conveniently, she kept her monthly backups on flash drives in the safe at his dance studio, so that was where she was heading anyway.

He owned a studio called Motion and Dance, which had two classes in progress and a full parking lot when she arrived. Business had been good lately. Demand for his classes spiked when he was contracted to choreograph a casino show, and with another Christmas show in the works, it was only going to keep improving.

But he wasn’t downstairs when Elise peeked into the dance hall. One of his employees, Candace, was guiding a group through hip-hop moves. The instructor waved at Elise. She didn’t wave back. She jogged upstairs to the apartment over the studio and entered without knocking.

Elise took off her headphones.

“James?”

His apartment was a disaster. The couch was shoved against the wall. The kitchen chairs were stacked on the table. He had pulled everything out of the closets and turned the floor into a cluttered mess. Even the window-mounted air conditioner had been unplugged.

Spring cleaning? He was usually anal about tidiness. It was quiet other than the music downstairs, so he wasn’t home to ask.

Disappointed, she went into the bedroom that used to be hers. Flat pack boxes were leaned against the wall, and everything else was separated into two piles. The belongings she left behind when she moved out had been dumped in a corner. “What are you doing, James?” she muttered, nudging the pile with her foot. She recognized her tattered sweatpants and a bottle of shampoo.

The only thing untouched was the safe against the wall, which had been bolted in place. Elise entered the combination, twisted the key in the lock, and passed her hand over the magical sensor. The door swung open.

She kept a pair of falchions and a back sheath in the safe, as well as a chain of charms she used for exorcisms. The envelope of flash drives nestled next to an old Book of Shadows was laughably mundane amongst everything else.

Elise selected the one labeled with the most recent date and moved to close the door again.

But she hesitated. Her fingers trailed down the long gold chain of her charms, and they whispered to her in a dozen voices, hissing with magic and ancient words. Her finger stopped on a single stone between the ankh and pentacle. It was white and soapy-smooth, like polished bone.

Another voice whispered to her, a voice from her dreams:
Elise
…

A chill rippled down her spine. She locked the safe.

Elise pocketed the flash drive and sat on the laundry to check her cell phone. She had missed three calls while jogging. One was from Anthony, but the other two were from her insurance company and landlord.

Landlord. Cleaning company. Insurance agent. The police, the security company, off-site backups…

She called the remote voicemail service she used for her business.

There were twenty-six messages.

After a week of camping, she expected to find a few things on her answering service, but the majority of clients contacted her by email. She had to brace herself to play the first message. “This is Frederickson Lane. We need to talk about terminating our contract. Call me back at…”

Elise pushed the “next” button.

“I’m looking for Bruce Kent. I’m from Crimson Mark Incorporated, and we need to transfer our accounts from…”

Her heart sped. Transfer?

The next one began. They wanted to discuss ending their business with her, too. More than a dozen of the messages were from different accounts about the same issue.

Elise turned off her phone and set it carefully on the floor as though it had been possessed.

She only had a few clients. Since Elise served a niche market—supernatural creatures with Earth-based businesses—there was no competition, but there also weren’t many accounts to take on. And it sounded like she had just lost half of them.

The numbers raced through her mind. Three percent from Crimson—that would mean thousands of dollars if they bailed. A half percent from Plymouth. Another few hundred dollars from Frederickson. She had already been on narrow margins after Craven’s took their accounting in house…

Craven’s.

Anger bubbled inside her. Who would have the nerve to call Elise’s clients and tell them to find a new accountant? Who knew where her office was located, and had motive to vandalize it? The manager and owner of Craven’s Casino, David Nicholas, was exactly the kind of bastard who would do both. And more, if given the chance to fuck with her.

Maybe it was time to pay him a visit.

III

C
raven’s was a
cesspool of a casino wedged in a dark corner downtown. Tourists didn’t go there. They visited the big hotel casinos that hosted touring Broadway shows and served fancy buffets. The only people who visited Craven’s were demons—and angry demon hunters.

Elise had contacts at Craven’s that offered a steady stream of information, but she hadn’t visited since David Nicholas fired her as their accountant and tried to beat her to death. To be fair, she had beaten him up first, and she ended up killing one of his cronies in his attack. She thought they were even. But apparently he didn’t agree.

An incident in the spring had destroyed half of the casino. It had been a chance to rebuild it newer and better than before, but instead, they rebuilt it to look exactly as old and outdated as it had been before Death’s Hand’s attack. It meant that Elise still knew the way to David Nicholas’s office, which was on the ninth level overlooking the poker tables. She navigated through the dimly-lit casino floor, where people gambled away their savings and drowned in alcohol, and headed up two sets of escalators.

A cocktail waitress spotted her. Her face might have gone pale if it hadn’t been caked in so much makeup. She dropped her drink tray and ran in the other direction.

So much for surprising them.

She hurried up the stairs, found the door labeled MANAGER, and shoved it open. David Nicholas looked up from his desk.

“We need to talk,” she said.

David Nicholas was a full-blooded, Earth-bound nightmare that hadn’t been powerful since the Middle Ages and wasted the centuries since trying to recapture his old glory. He smoked like a factory and usually looked like a greasy scarecrow. But he had filled out in the weeks since Elise had last seen him, as though a layer of fat had developed beneath his papery skin. His yellow hair was cut to the chin and had been washed. His office wasn’t even covered in garbage and tobacco ash anymore.

In another time, his strong nose and chin might have been considered handsome. But that foul grin sickened Elise. She would never mistake him as anything but dangerous.

“Yeah, we do need to talk.” He returned his attention to the schedule for the cocktail waitresses on his desk. “Heard what happened at your office. I knew you’d come crawling back for a job.”

“Is that what you were trying to do? To get me to ask you for work?”

He stabbed the point of his cigarette into the ashtray and opened a desk drawer. Elise tensed, but he only took out another cigarette. “What are you talking about?” he asked out of the corner of his mouth as he lit it.

“Someone’s been calling my clients and telling them to leave. Likely the same person who started the fire.”

“And you think that was me? That’s precious.”

She drew her knife. “Precious?”

He stood, shoving his sleeves above his elbows. His forearms had the illusion of being muscular now, but a nightmare’s strength had nothing to do with its physical form. “You’ve been away too long, cabbage. The game’s changed. You barely matched me last time—think you could take me now?”

“Yes.”

He vanished with a swirl of smoke and reappeared inches in front of her, shoving his beak of a nose into hers. She held her ground.

“Want to try me?” His breath smelled like tobacco and rot.

She grabbed a fistful of his shirt. “You’re in my space.”

The stress of the morning built in her muscles and desperately wanted to be unleashed on his ugly face.
Give me an excuse. Just give me an excuse
…

His phone rang.

For the first two rings, David Nicholas didn’t move. His eyes flicked to the desk and back to Elise.

She released his shirt.

He grabbed the receiver. “What?” he snapped. Whatever response he received wasn’t good, because he pulled a face. “Okay.” A pause, and then again, “Okay.” David Nicholas hung up and held both hands out in a gesture of peace. “Game’s up for the night. You’ve been summoned.”

Elise laughed in disbelief. “Summoned? If you’re trying to distract me—”

“I want nothing more than to see you broken on my floor,
accountant.
” He bit out the last word like an insult. “The day you die is the day I’m a happy demon. I’ll throw parties with hats and trumpets and streamers. But today’s not that day.
She
wants to see you.”

“Who?”

“The Night Hag.”

She scoffed. “This bullshit again?”

David Nicholas bumped his shoulder into hers as he left the room.

Elise almost didn’t follow him. He had been foretelling the return of the Night Hag for as long as she had been in town, but it had always been a lie. And that was a good thing. Part of the reason she had chosen to live in Reno was its lack of a demonic overlord. They didn’t like having kopides in their territory.

But he walked with confidence, like he expected her to follow, and Elise sheathed her dagger. What did she have to lose?

They took a different path through Craven’s than the one she used to find his office. They went down, down, down a set of stairs with walls painted black, and the thump of music began rising around them.

Eloquent Blood was a demon bar in the basement of Craven’s, and during the afternoon, it was completely empty. The pit of a dance floor stood bare. All the neon was turned off, and the brimstone droppings were swept into a corner by a cleaning crew. Someone was cutting off the music and switching songs as they ran sound checks. A demon with horned shoulders wiped down the tables. It was… ordinary.

“Where’s Neuma?” she asked. Being able to speak without yelling was strange. It felt like a cavern without partiers packing it to the brim.

David Nicholas shot her a sideways look. “You think we live here or something? The dumb bitch has an apartment. If she’s not sleeping, she’s shooting up.”

Elise hadn’t given the living situation of local demons much thought. In most cities, overlords kept their subjects close. They stayed in dens and rarely emerged.

The reminder of why they were going into Blood was sobering. She traced the edges of the leather sheath hidden at the small of her back. She had killed an overlord once in a surprise attack, but this time, she was the one taken off-guard. Elise wished she had worn her swords.

Tension built in her skull as they descended to the bottom floor of the club. It wasn’t nerves. It was infernal power, and lots of it.

“Believe me now?” David Nicholas asked with a sneer when he saw her expression.

She checked her knives for a third time. “Take me down.”

They got into an elevator behind the DJ booth. It was an old mine lift, rickety and rusted, and a shaft extended endlessly beyond the grate under Elise’s feet.

It rattled, squealed, and began to move.

Rough stone walls slid past them. Lights marked every few feet, but they were weak, and the shadows between them were immense. Every time they slipped into darkness, David Nicholas flickered out of view. But he always reappeared, yellow-haired and sweaty, with one hand on the lever.

The pressure in her skull grew too strong as they dropped, and when they reached the bottom and stepped onto solid ground, there was no ignoring the sensation of eyes on the back of her neck. A dark corridor stretched in front of them.

It looked empty, but they weren’t alone. Elise could feel it.

David Nicholas strode ahead, shooting a nasty smile as he passed. She considered knocking the smug look off of his face. But she wasn’t in her own territory anymore. It was the Warrens—the place demons dwelled far below the city. Even she wasn’t confident enough to think she could fight her way out alone.

He led her to a door, but paused before opening it. “Be nice. Or don’t. Maybe today can be the day you die after all.”

Elise stepped through.

The room beyond was like being inside a hollowed-out ribcage. Webbing as thick as her arms stretched from ceiling to walls to form a low canopy, and the black ground crunched with every step. It was too dark to see what she was walking on.

A man with shimmering brown hair sat on the floor by the door with his ankles chained to the wall. Pieces of white rock were scattered around him, and it looked like he was trying to piece together a puzzle the size of a small car. When he saw Elise, he dropped one of the stones. It rolled across the ground.

David Nicholas delivered a swift kick to his ribs. “Keep at it!”

He groaned and went back to work.

She moved deeper into the room. Tapestries hung from the supports that kept the sagging mineshaft open. Colorful threads glimmered in the darkness.