Damnation Marked (29 page)

A woman sat beside him. Her weight didn’t make the bed sink.

Thank you for helping me, Anthony
, she said.
The knowledge you retrieved has told me so much. I know what to do next.

It felt like a hand had reached into his gut and clamped down on his stomach.

“Wait… what did I do?”

He almost put his finger on it—almost drew the memory of what he had done from the murky depths of his mind.

The woman rested her hand on his knee. A dark fog settled over his brain again.

You’ve been helping me
, she said, her crimson lips curled into a smile that didn’t touch her empty eyes.
Very bad men are coming after us. They’re not happy. They’re going to try to kill you.

That statement barely stirred him. He reassembled the shotgun. “Why?”

Because you tried to kill someone. And failed, I might add. He survived.

“Oh,” he said.

He jacked a round into the chamber.

They will be at your door soon. Don’t let them take you. I don’t want you to tell them anything—not when I’m so close to finishing here
.

“What should I do?”

Kill them,
she said.
Or kill yourself. Whichever is more convenient. But don’t let them take you.

There was something wrong about that, but Anthony couldn’t think of what.

His finger slipped over the trigger.

“Kill myself,” he said, facing the woman at long last. He recognized her face, the blond hair bobbed around her chin, the joyful smile. “Betty… it’s you.”

Who is Betty? Do you love me?

A hot tear slid down his cheek. “I’ve missed you so much. It hasn’t been the same since you died.”

This seemed to amuse her.
Am I so important to you?

“I killed him. The man who shot you—I shot him back.” Anthony reached out to touch her, to hug her, but the woman was suddenly out of his reach.

The men are here. It’s not too late for you to make amends. Protect me. Kill them.

“Kill them,” Anthony echoed.

Anger knotted inside of him. He marched into the living room with his gun at the ready, and the woman drifted behind him.

He heard footsteps thudding in the hallway an instant before the door slammed open.

Anthony shouldered the rifle and fired.

BLAM
.

The shot rocked him back on his heels. The first man through the door took it in the chest.

Crimson misted the wall. People shouted.

“Man down!”

“He’s armed. Spread out!”

Too much motion. More gunshots.

Anthony took cover behind the wall. He pumped the shotgun. Stepped out. Fired again.

An elbow drove into his side, and he fell. “Get the gun!” someone yelled.

Pain flared in his temple, sudden and bright and sharp.

For an instant, Betty stood over him again, arms folded and face twisted into a scowl of displeasure.

Then he saw nothing at all.

XV

N
euma was waiting
outside the vault when Elise and Jerica emerged. She was picking through the rubble and tossing aside empty cases, as if searching for something valuable to pawn.

When Itra’il didn’t step outside with them, her stenciled eyebrows lifted.

Elise spoke before she could ask. “You don’t want to know.”

Her sentence was punctuated by a pulse of energy. A silent gong resonated through the city, shaking the buildings around them and making the debris jitter. The wards surrounding another gate fell with an eruption of light, and every gate blazed with angelfire as bright as daylight. It drove away all but the blackest of Yatai’s shadows.

Elise flung up a hand to shield her eyes, but by the time she reacted, it was already over.

Another gate exposed.

“She’s going to open them all and kill us, isn’t she?” Jerica asked, bracing a foot on a chunk of concrete to rip a piece of rebar free. She hefted it in her hand like a sword.

Elise shook her head. “Yatai needs two marks, and there are no angels left here. She can tear down the wards all she wants. She can’t get through the gates.”

“So what now?” Neuma asked.

“Now I’ve got to kill her before she thinks of a way around that.” And she had to do it before the city was destroyed by tanks. She could have strangled Malcolm. “Reconvene with the other demons in the Warrens. The Union’s not going to distinguish between Yatai’s legion and the two of you. If they catch you on the streets, you’ll get shot.”

As if on cue, a car rounded the end of the alley—a big black SUV with the windows rolled down.

“Get down!” Jerica shouted.

A gunshot cracked through the air. Something sledgehammered into Elise’s chest.

She staggered with a cry, and her foot slipped on a piece of cement. She tumbled. Hit pavement.

Oh God.

With a moan of pain, she rolled over, curling her knees into her chest. It was like being crushed underneath an anvil. The throbbing in her ribs and chest blinded her.

Her fingers traced over the place she had been hit. A flat metal disc was pressed into the bulletproof vest, and it scorched the tips of her fingers when she traced its edges.

The Union had shot her. They had fucking
shot
her.

A hand seized her arm. “Elise!” Through the haze of pain, she recognized Neuma’s touch and voice.

She pushed the bartender away and struggled to her feet. “Run!”

Neuma and Jerica bolted. Gunshots sprayed through the alley, smacking into brick and pinging into the van.

She took the distraction of the other women fleeing to move into the spotlight and reveal her branded ballistics jacket. Elise lifted her hands over her head. “Don’t shoot!” she yelled. “I’m human!”

A masculine voice responded. “Witch on the ground! Stop shooting!” She jogged to the SUV unharmed. “Who are you?” asked the driver, lowering his gun. He had been steering with one hand and popping off shots with the other.

Elise reached through his window and jerked him halfway out of the SUV. “You shot me. You
asshole
!”

He kicked and struggled as she hauled him to the pavement. Supporting his weight hurt her bruised ribs, but his exclamation was satisfying enough to make up for it.

The backdoor opened, and a familiar woman with red hair and broad shoulders jumped out: Allyson Whatley. She was Gary Zettel’s aspis, and was equally intimidating without her partner present.

She leveled a pistol at Elise. “Watch yourself.”

Elise didn’t drop the driver, though he beat against her arms. She shook him by the coat. “You guys can’t blow through here shooting at everything that moves. You’re going to kill the wrong demons!”

“We’ve got orders to secure the area for the safety of the citizens,” Allyson said.

Elise tossed the driver to the ground. He rolled. “These
are
citizens!”

“I’d heard the rumors, but I didn’t think it would actually be true. You’re with the demons now.” Allyson holstered her gun and took handcuffs off her belt. “I’m going to have to take you into custody.”

“Like hell you are. Malcolm sent me back into the city,” Elise said. Allyson faltered. Doubt flashed across her face. “Check with him.”

The witch turned away, putting two fingers to her earpiece. “Malcolm?” She lowered her voice so Elise couldn’t hear her. The driver scrambled into the open door of the SUV.

After conferring with Malcolm, Allyson faced her again. Her mouth twisted like she had gotten shit on her tongue. “I’m under orders to give you any…
assistance
… you might want.”

Elise shielded her eyes, seeking the remaining gates warded in the city above. The ones Yatai had exposed were rapidly darkening, but a glow emanated from the north, where one of the casino gates would still be standing. “I need an escort to that gate.” She pointed. “I have to get to the roof.”

Allyson climbed in the driver’s seat. “Walk. I’ll follow you.”

Elise jogged down the street with her path illuminated by flashes of lightning and the SUV’s headlights. Another one of those black tanks blew past a block away. Distant thuds suggested another blasting its cannon to the south.

There was no sign of the demons Elise had taken from Craven’s, but as they approached the casino with one of the remaining gates, signs of Yatai’s other demons quickly began to appear. The sidewalks were black with ichor.

She passed a hole in the ground where a pawnshop used to stand, and recognized it as one of the Night Hag’s businesses.

The fiends themselves were destroying a casino.

They climbed the outside of the hotel tower, claws digging into the walls and leaving ichor in their wake. It began to crumble in the same way that the mirrored casino had, and as Elise watched, a fragment the size of a car broke off near the roof and tumbled toward Earth. It bounced off the side of the building, struck a fiend, and dislodged its claws. The demon fell with a shriek to splatter on the sidewalk.

Above, the white gate pulsed with light as a thick shadow serpent whirled around it.

“I’m going in,” Elise told Allyson through the window. “Careful where you shoot. I’m going to be pissed if I get hit again.”

The witch immediately peeled off, circling around the street.

Elise moved for the entrance, skirting a patch of ichor on the sidewalk.

The automatic doors didn’t react to her approach. She wiggled her fingers into the crack between them and tried to force them apart.

The gate pulsed with energy. Sparks showered around her as the wards opened.

Burning ribbons drifted to the street as Elise watched. The symbols stitched into the cloth were aflame as the spells unraveled.

Broken.

White light flooded the street again. Elise flung an arm over her eyes.

The shadow serpent plunged through the roof of the casino tower with a
thump
that shook the entire building. “Oh, shit,” she muttered, stumbling backward. The ground beneath her feet trembled, and she felt a thudding that could only mean that the floors above were collapsing.

She abandoned the doors and ran.

Halfway across the street, asphalt rose underneath Elise. She lost her balance and slipped to her knees as a spike of earth erupted from the road. She clung to its side.

It shoved higher and higher and jerked to a halt twenty feet in the air.

Her gloves lost traction. She slid, scraping her chest down the rock. Elise landed on broken fragments of pavement, which had been reduced to rubble beneath her feet, and she stumbled off of the asphalt hill. Yatai had ripped through the ground underneath the street like an earthworm through soil.

Sharp cracks rent the air. Windows in the hotel tower shattered, and glass showered down the sides of the buildings.

The remaining fiends scattered, scrambling around to the other side of the building, and the sound of gunfire a block away was drowned out by the roar of the casino’s collapse. One by one, the floors of the building began to fall in like a house of cards. Clouds of dust rushed through the street, blasting over her face and turning everything to white.

The street pitched underneath her. Pain flared in her knees and shocked up her hips. She landed on all fours, and her stomach rose into her throat as the pavement split and fell.

She jumped onto the sidewalk just in time for the place she had been standing to collapse.

Debris showered around her, pounding into the street and exploding like small bombs. The glass doors into the casino burst, and white clouds of plaster and concrete gusted over the entire block like a sandstorm.

She threw herself over the hood of a truck and rolled onto the ground. Her side hit hard. Her breath rushed from her mouth. A chunk of concrete the size of a couch smashed into the sidewalk behind her, and Elise scrambled under the truck, belly to the ground.

Elise watched as the casino crashed around her, bracing herself for the blow that would crush the vehicle on top of her.

But it didn’t come.

The earth yawned open to devour the building first.

The ground was falling away—sucking in the casino the way Rick’s Drugstore had been taken. And a line of darkness swept toward her hiding place under the truck.

“Fuck, fuck,
fuck
,” she cursed under her breath, digging in her fingers to wiggle free again.

The highest floors of the casino vanished. Emptiness roared toward her, and she scrambled to her feet to run. Yatai’s ichor licked at her heels.

Her shoe caught on a rock.

She fell.

The ground disappeared beneath her.

Elise shrieked as the pavement crumbled away, scrabbling at the rocks with both hands and finding nothing to grip.

Her weight jerked on her shoulder as the ground disappeared. Her feet dangled over void.

But she wasn’t falling.

She looked up. Yatam’s fingers were closed around her arm, and his beautiful face was peaceful and calm. “Do you need assistance?”

Elise searched for traction with her other hand, but the road crumbled away everywhere she tried to grab, and her feet couldn’t seem to find rocks that weren’t falling either. She swallowed hard. The hole was so deep that she couldn’t see the bottom—it must have opened into the Warrens.

“Sure,” she said through hard, heaving breaths. “Assistance would probably be good.”

The demon hauled her up with a single arm, stepping back until she was on solid earth.

He wrapped an arm around her waist. Yatam’s eyes traced over her face, and his lips curved into a half-smile that was more reminiscent of hunger than friendliness.

Elise pushed away to stare into the hole.

The casino was completely gone. All that remained was an empty, gaping chasm in the street and some fragments of glass sparkling on the pavement. Hot air and a sulfur stench gushed from the earth.

It felt strange being able to stand on the main street and look past the block to the hospital beyond.

Elise clenched her fists.

She took a mental tally of the body count. Anyone who hadn’t evacuated the casino would be dead. Depending on the hole’s depth, hundreds of demons might have died with them. She had told the Craven’s employees to hide down there.