CHAPTER FIFTEEN

Elise drifted over the wastelands of Hell. The air was warm as liquid magma; it buffeted her with gentle turbulence, carried her on its tides, drew her toward the obsidian slabs of the mountains. She watched gashes of flame spread below. Human hands stretched toward her, screaming for mercy until enveloped by curls of black smoke.

Herds of demons swept over yellowed earth, a creeping plague that left rot in its wake. Father , they said, it’s been too long.

Love us.

Be with us.

But Elise drifted on, as untouched by their pleas as she was the screams of the damned.

She knew peace, soaring above Hell. Serenity.

Elise wasn’t supposed to be there.

It should have only taken a moment’s thought to return herself to Earth. Waking up from Hell was unpleasant, but easy. Yet she thought, I need to get back to Earth …and nothing happened.

An electric shock jolted through her.

She was trapped.

Elise .

The wasteland fuzzed. Wind smashed into her, blasting her toward the ground.

Elise, come back.

That voice was familiar—more familiar to her than her own body. It was masculine, carefully-articulated, almost professorial. And he sounded as though he shared her fear.

I can’t , she thought. I’m trapped here .

I won’t allow that , he replied.

Another shock of electricity.

Hell blinked out of view. Trees reared above her, piercing a navy-blue sky with their jutting branches.

It was night. The moon had waxed to a fraction less than full, and its brightness bore down on her, a disapproving gray face that reflected sunlight onto her tender skin.

Her flesh solidified. Her bones became whole.

Elise had returned to Earth. Hours had passed, and it was night again. But something was wrong. Her corporeal form hadn’t been restored with her clothing and weapons intact.

Naked on the forest floor, Elise’s skin was bared to a merciless moon.

And she wasn’t wearing her warding ring.

Elise!

Another mind drove into hers like two cars colliding at high-speed. Magic blazed in her vision, illuminating the night with arcs of gold and blue and bronze. A lacework of veins traced through the trees, the earth, and climbed Elise’s flesh, patterning her skin with the images of lightning bolts.

She could see magic. But worse than that, she could see through another person’s eyes.

He was in the forest, too. He was running, beating away the branches that reached for him with pine fingers, desperately seeking Elise. The mud sucked his feet under with every step. He knew that she was close, because he could see through her eyes, too.

It was James.

Elise fought to sit up, struggling to make sense of what she saw around herself in the forest. She couldn’t separate her sight from James’s. The trunks swirled around her. Earth and sky inverted, spreading the clouds underneath her like a distant carpet, before everything righted itself again. Her head throbbed.

I’m coming, Elise .

It was meant to be a promise, but it sounded like a threat.

“Stay the fuck away from me,” she said aloud. Her own voice throbbed in her chest, her skull, making her eardrums pound.

I’m almost there …

The sun reflecting off of the moon burned her. She was coming apart.

And James was looking for her.

Elise had to get the ring back on her finger.

She spotted her clothing tangled in the high branches of a tree. Her charms were snagged on a lower bush. The falchion was on the ground, blade halfway out of the holster, obsidian gleaming in the moonlight. Magic was tangled around the sword.

Scrambling on her hands and knees, she fought against the tilt of the earth to reach the falchion. Elise clutched it to her chest.

What had happened to her? One minute, she had been in Father Armstrong’s mobile home behind the church, Rylie at her side, the Bible in front of her on the altar. And then she had opened the cover of the book, and…what? Somehow she had ended up in Hell, then snapped back to Earth without managing to reassemble herself properly.

But she had her sword. It was a start.

In her mind’s eye, she watched through James’s eyes as he scaled a cliff, hands swift and sure on the rocks. She could feel that he was less than half a mile away. Given how quickly he was moving, even with the obstacles between them, he would be there in no more than five minutes.

Where the fuck had the rings gone?

She wrapped the charms around her bare neck. James’s warding ring was tangled with them. She jammed her thumb into it, but it was much too large, and the ward wouldn’t stick.

Elise leaped to grab her shorts. They were stained with ichor, black and sticky. She pulled her underwear out of the tangle of cloth and donned them. The shorts were a loss. She discarded them.

If the sword and charms had ended up close together, then the warding ring had to be somewhere nearby, too. It had to be.

“Come on, come on…” she muttered, searching through the bushes.

James was at the top of the cliff. He was only a short run away.

Elise’s heart pounded in her throat, and part of her was tempted to give up the search, sit down, and wait for him. But it would mean facing what he had done again—and the idea ripped her heart in half, making grief and anger and betrayal surge through her blood.

There was no way in any of the seven Hells that Elise was going to let him reach her.

But she didn’t dare fade into the darkness again. Her corporeal form felt tenuous, heartbeats away from shattering. She hadn’t been able to return to Earth on her own the first time. She wasn’t sure she’d be able to come back at all a second.

James’s guilt tasted bitter on her tongue. His thoughts were a constant stream tangling with hers. Stay where you are… Don’t move… Dark in the forest, people out here tonight, danger…

An engine roared. A motorcycle was incoming from the opposite direction as James.

Hide! he thought.

“Fuck you,” she said.

Elise jumped, catching her shirt where it hung from the branch with one finger. She ripped it down. Pulled it over her head.

The motorcycle’s headlight splashed over her, and Elise shoved her wrist in her mouth so that she wouldn’t cry out. If the moon made her ache, then the brilliant headlight set her on fire—she was seconds away from turning incorporeal again.

But the light turned off almost as soon as it hit her.

A man climbed off the bike, kicking the stand into place. Black hair, dark-skinned, leather jacket—Seth Wilder, the kopis with the werewolf pack. “There you are,” he said, swiping his bangs off of his forehead. “We’ve been looking all over for you.”

Elise knew that James was looking through her eyes. She knew that he saw Seth. His despair welled up inside of her as if it were her own, and Elise staggered, gripping her head in both hands. “Ring,” she said. “Find a ring, a gold band, it has to be close.”

Seth didn’t ask what it was or why he needed to find it. He grabbed a flashlight off of the bike and shined it on the ground.

She jumped behind a tree, clinging to the shadows, trying not to let the light touch her.

Get away from Seth, James thought. He was close—too close.

Seth exclaimed. “I found it!”

“Get on the bike,” Elise said, coming around the tree and pushing him toward the motorcycle. “Get me out of here.”

“Can’t you—?”

“No,” she said, snatching the ring out of his hand.

She jammed it onto her finger.

For an instant, James’s mind was sharper than ever. Magic swirled around her, and she sensed that he had new magic, incredible spells, greater power than he had ever possessed when they were working together. The kind of power that cost a high price.

Does it cost human sacrifice? Elise wondered.

But the wards slammed into place, severing her mind from James’s before he could answer.

The forest went dark. Her vision of magic disappeared, taking her sense of James’s position along with it. He could have still been at the top of the ridge or around the next tree—she had no way of knowing, and she didn’t want to find out.

Seth was on the bike. Elise climbed on behind him, grabbing his shoulders.

“Go,” she said. “Now!”

He kicked the stand up and released the brake. The engine roared as they lunged to motion.

Seth drove through the forest like a man who wasn’t afraid of dying—or a man used to having to keep up with werewolves in dense forest. Elise clung to him, hair streaming behind her, and threw a look over her shoulder.

She thought she saw a flash of pale skin, but the darkness swallowed it.

They drove into the night.

Seth stopped the motorcycle outside the sanctuary, leaving Elise to sit with the bike while he turned off the spotlights ringing the cottages. The lights flicked off one by one. When her eyes stopped burning from the light’s violation, she could see that the sanctuary’s streets were empty, and all of the cottages were dark.

“I called ahead,” Seth said, returning to Elise. “Abel and Rylie will meet us at her cottage as soon as they can. Let’s wait inside.”

He parked the motorcycle underneath the awning, then led Elise past the waterfall to Rylie’s cottage. The door was unlocked.

It was dim and quiet inside, and he had the good sense not to turn on any lights. Seth peered out the windows before snapping the curtains shut, leaving them in utter, blissful darkness.

“What happened?” he asked, shedding his leather jacket.

“There was something in Father Armstrong’s Bible, and I think it might have…” Elise frowned. “It exorcised me to Hell. That must have been why I had trouble coming back.” She rubbed her neck. The wounds were still unhealed, despite the foray to Dis.

“I know—Rylie told me about what happened at the church today. I’m actually asking about out there. Tonight.” He pointed at the window, indicating the forest beyond. “What were you running from? Was something out there?”

“No,” Elise said.

“But you said—”

“Where’s the rest of the pack?” she asked, interrupting him.

Seth folded his arms. “Elsewhere.”

“What’s an entire pack of werewolves doing ‘elsewhere’?”

“Hiding from you,” he said. “Look, Rylie might trust you, but you’re some kind of demon, and you messed with Nash, and…” He frowned, carving deep lines on either side of his mouth. “You can’t blame us for protecting our family. I don’t trust you yet. Nothing personal.”

Her eyes narrowed. Funny—she had been thinking much the same thing about Seth and Abel.

James had lured Elise to Northgate for a reason. No matter what she felt about his methods, or the fact that he was interfering with her life again, she knew that he wouldn’t have come back unless he was utterly convinced that he had a good reason. And James had panicked when he saw Seth.

Was Seth why James had brought Elise to Northgate? Could he be the one killing people?

“How does a kopis end up with werewolves, anyway?” Elise asked, circling him slowly, studying him through the darkness. He leaned against the back of the couch, staring at the opposite corner. He couldn’t seem to see Elise at all.

“Abel’s my brother,” Seth said, like that was any kind of explanation.

“Cain was your brother, too.”

He jerked as if struck. “How do you know about Cain?”

“Rylie,” Elise said.

Seth raked a hand over his hair. “Jesus. I can’t believe she told you about that.”

The door opened that moment, letting the smell of rain wash through the house. Rylie strode in with the blanket from the backseat of the Chevelle under her arm, Abel shadowing her. “Are you okay?” she asked, lifting her nose to the air, as if she could scent Elise’s health.

“Yes,” Elise said.

Rylie looked relieved, though she only said, “Okay.” And when Abel reached for the light switch, she said, “Don’t do that.”

Elise didn’t thank her, but she did give Rylie a small nod.

“What was in the Bible?” Elise asked.

Rylie opened the blanket, letting the Bible spill onto the couch. It had been tied closed with bungee cords. Elise lifted an eyebrow, and Rylie gave her an apologetic smile.

“It was strong enough to banish you, so I figured it was worth having,” Rylie said. “We won’t open it until you leave, but I got some pictures of what’s inside. I figured you’d want to see it.”

She handed her cell phone to Elise, who swiped through the most recent photos. Seth peered over her shoulder. She tilted it so that he could see.

The Bible’s pages had been glued together, and then carved out, creating a hollow book. What lie inside was hardly Christian: a brass bell, a wooden pentacle that would have fit in Elise’s palm, and sticks of incense. Symbols were inked into the inner border of the Bible’s rigid pages.

“What is all that?” Seth asked.

“Those are typical ritual items used by a witch. It’s all the basic things you need to cast a circle of power, which is the foundation of any ritualistic magic,” Elise said.

A mere glimpse of them was enough to fling her on a trip through memory. She had spent so many humid days sprawled out on a couch, watching James spread salt in a circle, using the pentagram to place his candles around the perimeter, ringing the bell to summon the spirits.

Bell, book, and candle. They had been James’s bread and butter.

The memories filled her with a bittersweet feeling—a sickening mixture of warm nostalgia and apprehension, fondness and fear.

James hadn’t needed any of those tools to cast magic. His blood had carried greater power than Elise could have ever imagined. But he had pretended that he was a normal witch to lure her into a false sense of security.

His specialty had been trapping magic within written runes. The symbols in the Bible looked to have been designed using a similar mechanism. And one of those symbols had been enough to toss Elise out of the dimension just by looking at it. James would have known which one it was, but she didn’t plan on asking him.

“After you disappeared, the air smelled funny,” Rylie said. “There was this loud noise, too. Like…kind of a sucking sound. We didn’t stick around to see if anything else would happen.”

Abel snorted and shoved into the bedroom, slamming the door behind him. Rylie flinched.

“The fuck?” Elise asked.

Rylie hung her head, picking at her thumbnail. She shot a sideways look at the closed door through her hair. “Abel panicked,” she said softly, as if trying to keep him from hearing.

Apparently, this wasn’t a normal behavior for Abel, because Seth looked even more shocked than Elise felt.

“Yeah. Like a panic attack.” Rylie flung her hands into the air. “I don’t know. He’s not scared of anything, but he ran like the Devil was chasing him, and he won’t tell me why. He’s been shaken up ever since.”

Elise rubbed her jaw. She half expected to feel stubble on her chin, but that was the lingering remnants of James’s mind, not hers. “Were you afraid, too?”

“A little,” Rylie said. “Not like he was. I grabbed the Bible and followed him.”

What kind of magical rune could evoke fear in a brave, blustering man, then exorcise Elise to Hell?

It was hard to think when her skin ached so badly. Elise had spent too much time awake during the day that week, and the exorcism had wiped her out; she needed to rest, smoke a cigarette or six, and do some hard thinking.

She forwarded the images to McIntyre’s email, then returned the camera to Rylie.

“So what does this have to do with the murders?” Rylie asked.

Elise wasn’t entirely convinced that it was related. Father Night was an experienced exorcist; maybe he had given tools to Father Armstrong that Elise didn’t recognize. She was going to have to ask Father Night himself.

“I’m not sure,” Elise said. “I’ll let you know as soon as I do. For now…”

Rylie nodded, wrapping the Bible in the blanket again. “You can sleep here, if you want.”

“What?” Seth asked. “Seriously?”

Elise didn’t feel up to arguing with him. “I don’t sleep, in the strictest sense. I’ll head back to base and get dressed.” She was still in her underwear, and while partial nudity might not mean anything to a pack of werewolves, she couldn’t exactly walk around Northgate like that.

“I’ll walk you out,” Rylie said.

She led Elise outside. Seth stayed behind.

There was still no sight of the werewolf pack, although Elise could feel them nearby. The energy of the wolves was a low, humming buzz, almost indistinguishable from the weight of the moon through the clouds. The undercurrent implied that they were in human form, watching nearby. Maybe inside all of the darkened cottages, staring out at Elise and their Alpha.

“How much do you trust Seth and Abel?” Elise asked as they strolled down the road. The asphalt was shiny with rain.

Rylie didn’t hesitate to respond. “I trust them with my life.” There was such conviction in her words.

So why had James despaired when he saw Seth through Elise’s eyes?

Too many questions, not enough answers.

“I’ll be in touch soon,” Elise said. She hesitated. “Can I borrow a car? I don’t want to go incorporeal again.”

“Sure. They’re over here.”

Rylie led her back toward the river, where they had built the carport. All of the vehicles looked to be in place.

Nashriel stepped out from underneath the awning when they approached.

Even with his wings concealed, there was no mistaking him for anything but an angel. There was no human man that walked with such grace. He moved as though he always had twenty feet of wings draped over his back, ever-conscious of their presence behind him.

He moved to the center of the path and stopped. They would have to pass Nashriel to access the vehicles.

Elise stopped, reluctant to get within arm’s reach of him.

“You shouldn’t be out here,” Rylie said softly, touching Nash’s sleeve.

He jerked at the contact. The marble features crumbled. “I felt her here,” he said.

Nashriel was still struggling with his memories, Elise realized. He was trying to reconcile the demon standing in front of him with Eve, mother of all angels, and failing.

“She’s leaving,” Rylie said. “She’s not going to bother you again.”

He didn’t move. He looked at Elise over Rylie’s head. “What happened to them? All three of them?”

Elise could only think of three people that he could be talking about: Adam, the first man; Eve, the first angel; and Lilith, the first demon. If Nashriel had been imprisoned during the first war, he wouldn’t have known what had happened to Eve.

“They’re all dead,” she said.

He sagged. Deflated. “I feared as much,” he said. “Did you kill them?”

There was no point in lying about it. “Two of them. The other one had already been gone for millennia.”

“That’s why Eden burned,” Nashriel said softly.

Elise nodded.

Rylie stared between them, brow furrowed, lip caught between her teeth, as if they were speaking in code and she was trying to interpret.

“Metaraon?” the angel asked.

“He’s dead, too.”

“So there will be no war.” Nashriel actually sounded hopeful.

For a long time, angels had been severed into two dominant factions: those that supported Adam, and those that revolted. The revolution had been led by Metaraon. Nashriel had been one of the supporters. But without Adam, and without Metaraon, there was no reason for civil war within the angels.

Just because the war wouldn’t be civil didn’t mean that there would be no war at all.

“I hope not,” Elise said.

Nashriel nodded once.

Then he lunged.

He moved like a streak of lightning, and Elise didn’t have enough time to realize that he was attacking, much less try to defend herself. His hands fisted in her shirt. Nashriel carried both of them over the lawn, and they smashed into the lake together.

Frigid water consumed Elise, stinging the wounds on her throat and bicep.

The shock of the cold made her reflexively suck in a breath—but there was no air to breathe, and the water surged down her yawning mouth, filling her chest.

Nashriel’s face was twisted into a mask of anger as he shoved her deeper into the lake. His wings blazed behind him. They churned the water to a white froth that scorched Elise’s flesh. Ethereal chimes gonged through her head as she struggled to free herself of him, beating her fists against his back, his face, his neck.

She kicked herself free. Swam for air.

Her head broke the surface, and she gagged, gushing water out of her throat. She only got to suck in a single breath when Nashriel erupted from the water, too.

They struggled, a tangle of fists and kicking legs.

Rylie shouted from the shore. “Nash, stop !”

But the Alpha’s commands held no sway over him. Elise swung around to his back, looping her arm around his neck, and squeezed tight. His wings beat on either side of her, unable to dislodge her grip.

“I’m not your enemy,” Elise grunted, struggling to hang on.

Nashriel blasted his wings at full bore, lighting up the night with his power. It seared Elise’s flesh. Her muscles liquefied. She dropped off of his back, sinking into the lake.

It was deeper than it had looked from the perspective of the sanctuary. Elise had assumed that it was no more than a shallow pond that fed into the river. But she sank and kept sinking, tumbling into bottomless darkness, chased by Nashriel’s radiance.

She jerked the falchion out of the sheath, but didn’t get a chance to use it. Nashriel slapped her with his wing, knocking her sword free, and she could only watch as it dropped out of reach.

He grabbed her by the throat, digging his fingers into the bite, and powered them through the lake. Water frothed around them.

Nashriel shoved her under the waterfall. It battered her, made her suck down water.

And then he was lifting her again. He shoved her into the cliff face behind the sheet of mist, hard enough that her vision blurred.

After all of the battles Elise had fought, the enemies she had killed, she was helpless against the glow of Nashriel’s wings. She couldn’t fight or flee. All she could do was let him punch her across the face, again and again, and wait for him to stop.

“You killed them and stole their power,” Nashriel said, slamming her into the rocks again. Her entire body rang with pain like a cracked bell.

“You have no idea what you’re talking about!”

Another hard slam. Elise’s head bounced. Her vision swirled, skull filling with the roar of the waterfall.

“Enlighten me,” Nashriel hissed.

She wasn’t sure what would be worse—being forced to relive her past by telling him, or letting Nashriel destroy her again, ripping her apart with his energy and sending her back to Hell.

Elise wasn’t sure she’d be able to claw her way back to Earth if she went to Hell again.

No more Anthony and McIntyre. No way to absolve the werewolves. No way to unpack the mystery of Lucinde Ramirez.

“Adam killed Eve,” Elise blurted.

Nashriel’s face darkened with rage. “You lie .”

“He killed her, and Metaraon trapped Him in Araboth to contain Him. You don’t believe me? You didn’t see that omnipotence was driving Him insane?”

“He was struggling to adjust to godhood,” Nashriel said. “But he loved her. He never would have hurt her.”

“He killed her,” Elise said, putting every ounce of conviction she could muster into those words. “So Metaraon trapped Him in Araboth. And then he started sending women in to pose as Eve so that Adam wouldn’t know what He had done. Human sacrifices, Nashriel. All of the women went insane from being trapped with Adam, too. They were raped and tortured and tossed aside like trash, just to be replaced and start the cycle over. Adam never knew He was imprisoned. He thought everything was normal.”

“No,” Nashriel said.

“I was one of the human sacrifices. One of the brides.”

“You’re a demon.”

“Lilith changed me,” Elise said. “I was different than the other brides—intended to be Lilith and Metaraon’s weapon. I was meant to kill Him.” She swallowed hard. “So I did. I killed God.” It was the first time she had ever said it so bluntly, and it hurt. “I did it to save myself. I did it for the other women, and for Eve, and…and for me.”

Nashriel didn’t move, didn’t speak. His hands remained tight on her arms.

Elise searched his eyes, looking for a hint of understanding.

“When I was done, Lilith wanted to die. Immortality was too much for her.” She couldn’t look at Nashriel anymore. She closed her eyes. “I helped her die.”

She had taken her falchions—twin blades, at the time—and severed Lilith’s head from her body. Lilith had died smiling.

It hurt so much to remember.

Nashriel’s hands relaxed on Elise’s arms, releasing her.

His eyes flicked down, tracking along her cheek. Elise brushed her face dry and looked at her fingertips. She had thought that her face was wet because the waterfall was splashing her, but she was crying black tears—demon ichor.

“You look like the enemy,” Nashriel said abruptly, his voice still cold and unsympathetic. “You look like Lilith and her children. I made assumptions.”

It was probably the best apology he would give. Elise accepted it with a small nod. He stepped back, sloshing through the lake to disappear on the other side of the mist.

Elise staggered to the shore. She was drenched and sore, but her throat burned with tears, not pain.

She was composed by the time she reached Rylie, who looked stricken. Nashriel hadn’t come back yet. “You didn’t kill him, did you?” Rylie asked, stepping into the shallows, as if about to swim after him.

Before Elise could respond, the water stirred again. Nashriel emerged from the lake, streaming water from his hair, and extended his fist toward Elise. His fingers were wrapped around the hilt of her falchion.

Her nerves leaped. If he had accidentally cut himself with it, then their tenuous ceasefire wouldn’t matter. He would be dead.

She took it carefully. “Thanks.”

He nodded once.

It took three tries for Elise to thread the sword through her hair and into the spine sheath.

“What were you thinking?” Rylie demanded as the angel pulled his shirt off, squeezing the water onto the grass. His torso was sculpted perfection.

“Sorry,” Nashriel said. “Please don’t tell Summer of our conflict. She would be…frustrated with me.”

Rylie rolled her eyes. “As long as you’re done being a jerk, your secret’s safe with me.”

Footsteps rang out in the night. Seth and Abel jogged up the road together, stopping at Rylie’s side. “Look at this,” Seth said, shoving a piece of paper into her hand.

The Alpha unfolded the paper. It was a typewritten table, with the gridlines drawn in ballpoint pen. There were dates down the first column, names down the second, and locations on the third.

“Is this a schedule?” Rylie asked.

Elise plucked it from her hand and read the names. She didn’t recognize most of them, and several had been scratched out, but one of them was both legible and recognizable: Bob Hagy, the most recent murder victim. “Where did you guys find this?”

“It was inside the Bible, tucked underneath the pentacle,” Seth said.

Elise’s eyes dropped to the bottom of the list. There were still two dates left. The last date had three names—three people that Elise didn’t recognize, because they hadn’t been killed or kidnapped yet.

No, wait. She did recognize one of the names on the final date. Brick Gere was the cashier at the gas station that she had visited when arriving in the county.

The next date was less than two weeks away. It only had one name on it.

“Mikhail Night,” Rylie said, reading out loud. “Hey, isn’t that one of the priests at St. Philomene’s?”

Father Armstrong had a list of victims, the dates they had been killed, and the name of his fellow priest at the bottom.

“It’s a hit list,” Seth said.

Elise was already moving toward the vehicles. The motorcycle’s key was still in the ignition, so she climbed on and started the engine. “I’m going to find Father Night,” she said. “Rylie? You coming?”

The girl nodded, but she didn’t climb on the motorcycle. She shucked her sweater, kicked off her shoes.

“I’ve got your back,” Rylie said.

She shifted, ignoring Seth and Abel’s protests.

Elise peeled out of the sanctuary, and Rylie chased.