Damnation Marked (2 page)

Elise’s eyes flicked from one person to the next, and she planted her hands on her hips. Her biceps were as well defined as the line of abs that peeked over her jeans. “I’ll take all of you.”

The men laughed, but their laughter had grown uneasy.

“What’s going on?” Piotr asked in Russian.

“I think she’s a kopis. She wants to fight you.” Malcolm switched back to English. “You realize what you’re volunteering for, right?”

She stepped into the ring.

Piotr surveyed her as she lifted her fists and spread her feet in a wide stance.

“I’ll fight,” he finally said. No translation necessary.

Rules were rules. The sparring match was not a group fight, even if she had made the offer. Everyone backed off and spread out.

Piotr and Elise studied each other. He had several inches on her, but she was more muscular. “Well? What are you waiting for?” Brandon asked from his seat on the sidelines, gauze pressed to the injury on his face.

Piotr made the first move—a feint to the right.

It triggered a flurry of motion. Elise parried, ducked, and hit back.

Unlike the fight against Brandon, neither of them restrained their blows. It only took about ten seconds for Piotr’s fist to meet Elise’s face, break her nose, and send blood pouring down her lips.

“Hey!” Malcolm shouted over the cheers of the other men. “Careful! She’s a—”

Elise’s friend silenced him with a shake of his head. “Give it a moment.”

The fight was fast and brutal. But at some point—somewhere between Elise’s broken nose and Piotr’s broken hand—the tempo of it changed.

The girl went from defensive to offensive. The greatest kopis started blocking more than he attacked.

Finally, Elise jumped onto Piotr’s back, hooked her arm around his throat, and squeezed.

He did everything he could to shake her off. He tried to flip her over his shoulders, but her legs were wrapped too tightly around his midsection. His fingers weren’t strong enough to pry her arm free, either.

Piotr slammed her into the crates, and she only grunted.

Finally, he dropped to the floor to crush her against the cement with his weight. But still she hung on.

After a minute, his beating fists grew weak.

Then his eyes unfocused and he stopped fighting back.

She gave it a good thirty seconds more—during which everyone watched in stunned silence—and then let go, shoved his limp body off of her, and stood.

Malcolm rushed to his friend’s side. “Jesus, Mary, and Joseph!”

He slapped Piotr’s cheeks lightly, and then much harder, but the man was thoroughly unconscious and didn’t react. His broken hand was turning into a swollen purple mass, and his opposite elbow was bent in the wrong direction.

She had done more than win the fight. She had disabled Piotr for the next week.

Elise wiped blood off her upper lip, probed the bridge of her shattered nose gently with two fingers, and grimaced. Then she walked out of the ring. She didn’t seem to care that people were watching her, or that winning a match against Piotr meant she would be the greatest kopis when he died.

“Have a good afternoon,” the tall man called to the crowd as he hurried to follow her out of the warehouse.

The witch from the Council of Dis made a note on her laptop, closed the lid, and nodded to the men staring slack-jawed. She climbed into the waiting sports car and drove away.

Brandon shook his head. “American girls.”

“Bloody hell,” Malcolm said. “I think I’m in love.”

FEBRUARY 1999

W
hen Piotr died,
Malcolm had a hell of a time tracking Elise Kavanagh down to tell her about it. Every kopis he asked had seen her at some point, but she was gone every time he arrived at one of the places where they had been sighted.

He ended up having to hire a prophet to search for her remotely. Even then, she was gone from Bruges by the time he got there. A demon did report getting beaten by her outside a monastery the night before. It was the closest he had gotten to Elise in weeks.

Malcolm finally located her on the steps of a cathedral three days later.

The grounds of the monastery were layered in snow. Icicles hung from the branches of bare trees. High stone walls faded into foggy steel sky.

It was chilly enough to drive most people indoors, but Elise still wore fingerless motorcycle gloves and a pair of jeans with a hole in the knee. Her fur-lined jacket was more patches than leather. She carved symbols into the blade of a falchion resting on her thigh.

“Hey there, beautiful,” Malcolm said, flashing his most winning smile. “You are not an easy woman to find. I don’t know if you remember me, but—”

“How did he die?”

His grin faltered. There was only one “he” that Malcolm could imagine that Elise could be talking about, but there was no way she could have known about it yet. Piotr’s death had been kept a secret pending notification of the new greatest kopis.

“I was at the sparring match last summer,” he went on, like she hadn’t spoken.

She blew fragments of metal off her sword and tilted it to catch the light. “Yeah. How did he die?”

So she did know.

“Baphomet repaid him for what happened to her centuria. Snapped his neck. So that means you’re up next.”

Elise continued carving as though he wasn’t there.

He stood back with his arms folded to study her. She looked meaner than he remembered. A bandage covered half of her forehead, and the hunger made her appear older and angrier. He liked angry women.

“We should have a drink to celebrate. I’ve got a car waiting. It would be much more comfortable than sitting in the snow.” His proposition was made only fractionally less suave when he blew into his hands to warm them. He couldn’t feel his nose.

Her hand paused on the blade, and her look could have frozen the ocean. “Wasn’t Piotr your friend?”

Malcolm shrugged. “Ancient history.”

She got to her feet and drew a second falchion from her back sheath, holding both like they were extensions of her arms. Her stance screamed
I will stab you
, and his grin widened.

“You should go,” Elise said.

“Don’t you want to hear about the selection process? I could tell you all about it… while we get a beer.”

She said nothing.

“The delegate from the Council of Dis was too scared to give you the news herself. I’d love to hear how you made such an impression.”

She remained silent.

Malcolm sighed. “How old are you? Twenty? Twenty-one?”

“Seventeen.”

She was younger than he had expected. But hey, that was legal in most countries.

“Seventeen! You are much too young and much too beautiful to be that serious. Come on, now! You might be the first lady to be the greatest kopis. Don’t you think that’s exciting? Don’t you think we should celebrate?” He faked a playful punch at her arm.

That hard edge softened in her eyes. He thought she was going to respond, but someone else spoke first.

“What are
you
doing here?”

James Faulkner strode from the doors of the cathedral, bundled in a woolen pea coat and earmuffs. A wooden pentacle dangled from a chain at his neck. Pages protruded from his pocket.

Malcolm took a step back to appraise the witch. He’d asked around a bit—or a lot, actually, in kind of an obsessive way—after meeting them at the sparring match, and rumor had it that James was one of the most powerful witches in the world. “I was letting Miss Kavanagh here know about her new status as the greatest kopis.”

His brow drew low over his eyes. “What?”

“The last ‘greatest’ died.
She’s
the greatest now. Does that go over your head? Should I spell it out more clearly?”

“Oh, hell.” The witch glanced around the monastery grounds like he expected an attack.

Elise sheathed both of her swords. Somehow, she seemed equally dangerous unarmed. Malcolm could have just pounced on her.

“I’m going to pack,” she told James.

Malcolm jumped in. “Leaving so soon? You can’t go anywhere until you promise to have a drink with me. I have got to hear your story. Not now, maybe, but soon. Please?”

The corner of her mouth twitched. “Fine.”

“Elise—” James began.

She had already turned to leave. Malcolm jumped in front of her. “I’m going to hold you to that.” Then he swooped in and planted a kiss on her lips, seizing her face in both hands so she couldn’t escape.

He danced back with a laugh as her right hook swung harmlessly in the air.

“See you around,” he called as he jogged away. Elise glared at him with pink cheeks as James gaped.

But she almost smiled, too. Almost.

P
ART
T
WO

A Creeping Shadow

I

NOVEMBER 2009

R
ick used to
make a living selling medicine to plague doctors. He once watched a patron stuff his beak with camphor, rose petals, and laudanum using gloved hands, while explaining that the aromas would spare him from miasmatic air. The doctor had spoken with confident authority, and Rick believed him. It seemed to be as good an explanation for the plague as anything else.

The doctor slid the mask over his face, donned his fedora, and departed to treat the dying.

A few weeks later, Rick passed a pyre of bodies and saw his former customer at the top of the pile. The doctor’s neck below the mask was riddled with buboes. His robes curled with flame. The mask’s long beak was cracked.

It was about then that Rick realized that humans were deeply stupid creatures.

He avoided Earth for a few hundred years after that. The market for human trinkets was good in Hell at the time, considering that there was no reliable way to travel between the dimensions, and he eked out a decent living.

The next time he set foot in a mortal city on the planes of Earth, those deeply stupid animals had somehow created heavy machines that could drive at unimaginable speeds, and they allowed
anyone
to do it. It was lunacy. Or idiocy. Or very possibly both.

He wanted nothing to do with them.

But his passport had expired, so it was too late for Rick to go back to Hell. He picked a town, bought a shop, and hadn’t left it since—not once.

Rick watched through the window as his newest assistant accepted a shipment, gnawing on his claws with jagged teeth. Jerica was taking her sweet time signing for those crates. She was a nightmare too, though much younger than Rick, newly substantiated and still marveling at the wonders of her corporeal form. She seemed to enjoy using it to flirt with the delivery driver.

What if that blasted truck rolled over and killed her? It had been hard enough finding one assistant. He didn’t want to find a replacement, too.

The shopkeeper kept an eye on the empty street as Jerica continued to talk with the driver, who didn’t seem concerned about the possibility of being killed on the sidewalk, either. She pointed at the boxes, then tipped her head back and laughed. Laughed!

Rick couldn’t watch. He just couldn’t. It was too much for his constitution to handle.

He returned to the counter of his drugstore and took a shot of cactus juice to settle his cramping gut. It tasted like ass, and Rick knew ass. They considered human anuses to be a gourmet treat in Hell. The cactus was definitely worse. But it did good things for his stomach.

Moving away from the window didn’t keep him from worrying over his assistant. He could watch Jerica on the blurry monitor hanging over the locked case of condoms. And watch her he did. Rick worried about that girl.

Eventually, after what felt like hours, the bell over the door chimed. His nightmare assistant backed into the shop carrying one of the crates on her shoulder.

“What is this? It’s heavy.” Jerica crouched to set it on the cracked linoleum.

He wrung his hands. “Do you think you took long enough?”

“What, are you having a rush of business in here?” She popped a bubble of gum and sucked it into her mouth again. “Relax. Being nice never hurt anyone.”

“You would be surprised,” Rick said darkly, thinking of plague doctors and blackened extremities. Jerica moved to open the crate, but he slammed a hand on the wood to stop her. “What do you think you’re doing?”

“Checking the shipment. Don’t you want to make sure we’ve got everything?”

“Not up here, where we can be seen through the windows,” he hissed. “Downstairs!”

Rick took the first crate to the basement while Jerica retrieved the other two.

The space beneath his shop was dim, narrow, and had a low ceiling. He still occasionally smacked his forehead on the beams, even after seventy-five years. His desk and reclining chair occupied one corner; the rest of the floor was filled with boxes of inventory.

He kicked a space clear for the crates and directed her to stack all three on top of each other. Then, and only then, did he lift the lid on one to examine the contents. It was filled with egg cartons, each of which protected twelve small, glowing cubes.

“Lethe?” Jerica asked, sounding wholly unimpressed.

“Mind yourself. This is a special order.”

She jutted a hip. With her asymmetrical haircut, scalloped tunic, and cocky stance, she looked more like an abstract geometric painting than a teenage girl. “Rick, man, you know I love you…”

He smashed the lid onto the crate again. “Ha.”

“…but anyone making special orders of lethe is not someone you should be dealing with. I mean, drugs?
Demon
drugs? You know what this stuff does to people?”

“It does nothing to
people
,” he said, unfazed by her attempt at showing concern for him. “Only demons. I don’t question the orders, and neither should you.”

A quick scan showed that every cube was in its proper place, and in good condition. Rick still had an intake bracelet somewhere, probably at the bottom of his laundry pile. Maybe the client would want to drop a couple together. He hadn’t been on a trip in a long time—literally or figuratively.