Death's Hand (6 page)

“Bullshit. We paid you.”

“You paid my retainer a year ago, and nothing since,” Elise said. “That’s six months of outstanding fines. I’ve sent you three notices.”

He rolled the cigarette between two of his fingers, contemplating the glowing end. “Haven’t seen anything. Maybe the Night Hag got them. Did you hear she’s waking up?”

“She’s not going to stir and you know it.”

David Nicholas spread his hands wide in a helpless gesture. “Yeah, if that’s what you want to think, but I can’t pay anyone that much money without getting it approved. Rules are rules.”

Elise set her jaw. “You want to do this fast? We can do it fast.”

“Oh no. Don’t hurt me,” David Nicholas said in a tone of mock horror. “I’m so afraid of the accountant.”

She drew her boot knife. “I need to get paid. I’m going to make that happen one way or another.”

“You don’t even know what to do with that.”

She stabbed. It sank into David Nicholas’s stomach as though he was made of putty rather than flesh, and she jerked the knife across his torso, tearing it out the side. Black smoke puffed from the wound.

He lurched out of his chair, spidery hands clutching the entry point. “Fuck! What the hell?”

“I can force you to insubstantiate, and I can make it hurt. Believe me, I know which buttons to push.” She lifted the knife again, and he tripped over a pile of trash trying to backtrack. He hit the floor and pushed himself away from her with his heels. “Or you can pay.”

“I don’t need the Night Hag to wake up to ruin your fucking week,” he hissed. “Some dark night, you're going to go to sleep, and I'll be waiting. And I'll be there the night after, and the night after, and every other night of your life until you die shitting yourself. You'll learn to fear sleep, and to fear me.”

Elise gave a little laugh. “The first night I dream of you, David Nicholas, I'll tip off Aquiel. He’d be happy to know where you’re lurking these days, and I'd enjoy watching you get ripped apart. I wonder if there’s more cigarette smoke or drugs inside of you.”

He stared at her. She stared back. A challenge.

“You'll fear your dreams yet,” he whispered. He spoke so quietly that Elise shouldn't have been able to hear him over the music, but she did. His voice was dead fingers scraping down her neck, and she couldn’t help but shiver. She didn’t show it.

“Money. Now. I take checks.”

It looked like he had many colorful words trapped between the spikes of his teeth, but he swallowed them down. “Boss could kill me for cutting a check without approval.”

“Bullshit. She’s been sleeping for thirty years, and she isn’t here now.” Elise tossed the knife from one hand to the other and then back again. “I am. And I’m not going to put up with your shit.”

Fifteen minutes later, she trotted down the stairs into Blood again, flicking the check against the fingers of her free hand. David Nicholas slunk behind her, his arms wrapped tight around his body. He wasn’t going to fall apart yet—not if he could hold himself together long enough to feed. But Elise hadn’t made it easy on him. His shirt was in tatters, and the flesh beneath it wasn’t much better.

The amount on the check was more than they owed her for six months of work. It would cover the next quarter, too—and two months of her office’s rent. She tucked it down her belt along with her dagger.

“Pleasure doing business with you,” Elise said over the thudding of music. David Nicholas’s eyes flashed.

A scream.

Elise twisted, facing the direction from which the scream had come.
The dressing room
.

David Nicholas was already gone, jumping shadow to shadow to disappear from the stool and reappear at the end of the hall. He vanished around the corner in a swirl of tattered clothing.

Elise grabbed the doorknob to the dressing room and shook it. Locked.

Neuma screamed again, and the door rattled in its hinges as something heavy slammed against the other side.

She took a step back and unleashed a powerful kick next to the lock mechanism. The door shattered around the handle. Elise kicked again. It slammed open.

Neuma was pressed against the counter, her back smashed into the now-shattered glass of the mirror. A gray creature with branded flesh crushed her, its stubby hands locked on her wrists as its slavering mouth lowered toward her chest.

“Hey!” Elise shouted.

The demon turned. Its bulging eyes were almost all black. Opens slashes across his face wept blood and pus, and saliva dripped from its mouth.

It focused on her, and its pupils dilated.

Elise drew back her fist and punched, throwing her whole body behind the blow. The demon’s head snapped to the side. It toppled with a keening scream.

The half-succubus cried out as she got off the counter. Several shards of glass stuck in her back, and blood poured down her perfect spine.

The little demon clambered to its feet. Elise pushed the bartender behind her.

“What do you want?” Elise demanded. The demon’s thin gray tongue darted out of its mouth to lick where its lips should have been.

It lunged at Elise.

She moved into its attack and it slammed into her shoulder. They hit the ground, and she rolled with their momentum. Her entire body felt the impact. It was like getting hit by a raging bull.

The fiend recovered instantly. Elise wasn’t quite so fast.

It came at her with a roar, and a flash of inspiration struck—the black lights, the vanity bulbs, the demon’s huge pupils. Elise threw herself out of the demon’s way, and it hit the wall behind her instead.

She launched across the room. Elise fumbled in the darkness behind the rack of costumes. She heard the sound of clawed feet against ground, and shut her eyes against the impact—then found the switch.

Click
. The lights over the vanities blazed to life.

Her eyes watered from the sudden light, but it was nothing compared to the demon’s reaction. It screamed and clawed at its eyes, stumbling toward Elise. A stray swipe of its claws slashed her arm. Pain flared, and she jerked back with a shout.

The demon plunged into the dark hallway.

“Wait here,” Elise told Neuma.

She expected the demon to go make a break for the club—and the fresh meat the partiers could provide—but instead it went for a door she hadn’t noticed before. Elise began to follow.

“No!” Neuma cried, grabbing Elise’s arm. “Don’t!”

“It’s escaping—”

“You can’t go in there!”

“Why? Where does that door lead?”

“It goes down to the Warrens,” Neuma said. “You’d get eaten alive.”

“Shit,” Elise said.

“Shit,” Neuma agreed, stepping back into the room. She twisted around to look at her back in the mirror. Some of the glass was still in her back, and the injuries streamed thin, watery blood.

Elise grabbed the bathrobe and moved to cover the wounds. “We need to get you to a witch right now.”

“No. I’m fine. I have a charm to accelerate my healing to human speed. You know, for when I’m playing submissive.” Neuma grabbed a shard of glass and jerked it out of her back with a sigh. “Jewelry box. Toe ring with a red stone.”

Elise shifted through the gaudy bracelets and necklaces to find the ring. She passed it to Neuma, who leaned against the wall to slip it on her foot. The blood thickened and grew sluggish as she watched, slowing to an ooze.

“That’s a new toy,” Elise said.

“My girlfriend gave it to me. She likes playing rough.” Neuma pulled another shard of glass out, and another, dropping them in the trash can.

“Why did that demon attack you?”

“I don’t know. Don’t even know what it was. Would you pick some of this out for me? I can’t reach it all.”

“I think that might have been a fiend,” Elise said, ignoring the request. Neuma would have enjoyed it way too much. “They’re lesser demons, but it takes a strong demon to control them.”

“It looks like it dropped something,” Neuma said, pointing at a crumpled scrap of paper on the floor. Elise smoothed it out on her thigh.

It was an Eloquent Blood staff photo printed off the internet, and the former manager was circled in pink highlighter. “You sure this was on the demon?” Neuma nodded, and Elise studied it more closely. Aside from the circle, there was nothing odd about it. “Maybe it wasn’t after you. Maybe it was after that witch. Why would it have wanted the old manager?”

“I don’t know. Dumb bitch could owe someone money. Where did you see one of those before, anyway? Those are hellborn, and I don’t think you’ve been hanging out in Hell,” Neuma asked.

No, she hadn’t. Elise found herself recalling her fight against the death goddess again—the feel of her swords connecting with demon meat, watching the bodies hit the ground, the stink of their final, sulfurous breaths.

She had tried hard for so long to forget it that she wasn’t sure if she was imagining it now, but she was almost certain that the demons had been fiends.

“Maybe I have,” Elise muttered.

IV

James posed beneath a spotlight in a vast void.

The studio floor reflected his visage back on himself again, two Jameses touching foot-to-foot as the one atop mirrored the one on the bottom. He was dressed as he did for exhibitions—a plain white shirt, plain black slacks. His dress jacket lay over his shoulder, hooked on a single finger. The top button of his shirt was undone.

Somewhere, a piano began to play. First, a single note, and then a chord, and another.

James stretched out a hand. He reached toward the edge of the light, almost touching the darkness. “Dance with me,” he said, but his lips didn’t move.

“No.”

“Dance with me. I won’t teach you to fight until you know how to move.”

She was sixteen again. James was a stranger to her. They were in Saudi Arabia, and the heat pressed on their lungs and flesh. There was no air conditioning here; only the open windows letting in more oven-hot air. The sparse furniture was stacked against the wall, clearing a dusty eight foot by eight foot space of floor.

He was holding his hand out to her. Elise wanted to learn to fight. James wanted her to dance.

She stared at him in a silent challenge. She rarely spoke back then.

“Trust me,” James said, his skin brown with dust.

She reached out, and laid her fingers in his. In the black room, he grasped her hand.

The piano reached a crescendo.

Elise felt her armor peel away, dissolving to a simple black halter dress with a low back. Another spotlight clicked on above her, and she tried to turn away so he couldn’t see.

His arm slid around her waist, covering her lower back. James caught her right hand with his left.

“I’ve already seen,” he whispered. His eyes were kind, but only because he didn’t understand.

And they began to dance.

He led, and she followed. He took a step and she mirrored. When Elise tensed, he responded, moving in time to her whims but never ending the dance. They began with a simple box step, but it grew into more.

At sixteen, she had awoken in the Russian wilderness to find herself saved by James. She loathed him. She wanted to die. But he took away her weapons and forced her to rely on him, and she eventually grew to accept his presence—if not his attempts at friendship.

It wasn’t long before she accepted James’s challenge to dance. Even though she never became very good at it, it laid the groundwork for the way she fought today. The man she had started out hating became her friend, and only a couple years later, he had undertaken the ritual to become her aspis.

Their friendship didn’t surprise her anymore. Some things were meant to be.

But where were they now?

She pulled away, and he let her go until the rhythm of the piano brought her to him once more. His posture was perfect. Except for their hands, they never touched.

Closed telemark. Cross hesitation.

“Your cold demeanor is a defense,” James whispered. Reverse turn. “You used to be passionate about fighting. You used to be passionate about life. But now you’ve left it all behind, and what remains once the passion is gone? A cold shell.”

She kept her head turned to the side, her hand light on his shoulder as she stared into the darkness.

Feather step. Open telemark.

“What drives you now? Certainly not accounting.”

Cross chasse.

James dipped his head low, his lips brushing her ear. “What makes the fire in you burn? Does it thrill you to be so selfish?”

“No, James,” she said, barely able to speak.

“You miss the hunt.”

“No.”

A running right turn. The piano thundered. It echoed off walls that were not there, reverberating in the floor beneath them. The spotlight followed them, ever-obedient, illuminating them like a lonely star in an endless night sky.

“I just want to be happy,” Elise said, helpless to fight.

“What makes you happy?”

“I don’t know. I don’t know what that means yet.”

He released her, and she spun away from him, barely able to keep her balance. James watched her, and the piano went on undisturbed as though they hadn’t stopped dancing.

“Elise,” he said.

Her heart fluttered in her chest. Her dress swirled around her knees.

“Where are we now?” she asked.

James shook his head. “We don’t know.”

He stepped forward, and she let him pull her forward. He was always so much warmer than she would ever be. “We can never know,” he said

And then he bit her earlobe hard.

Shocked, she jerked back. The face that stared down at her didn’t belong to James.

Elise tried to pull out of his arms. “Who are you?”

He pressed his face into her neck. His breath was hot, flames licking the curls behind her ears and scorching her tender flesh. “You’ve forgotten me already,” he murmured, his hands tightening on hers until she could feel the bones break like celery under the knife.

She cried out and it made no sound. Her breath was swallowed by vacuum.

“Go about your life like nothing’s wrong, as though nobody is looking for you,” he said. His voice raked down her spine, metal blades scraping down the bone, nails on blackboard. He trapped her arms at her sides. “Forget if you want. Be my guest. I can’t see you from afar, but I have eyes everywhere. I will find you.”