The Darkest Gate (22 page)

Elise turned on the sink and stuck her head under the faucet, scrubbing her hair until the steaming water ran clear. Then she rinsed off her cracked knuckles, patted her face dry with a towel, and bound her hands in fresh bandages. The damage almost looked worse once she was clean.

Either Thom was too polite to remark on her appearance when she returned to the bar, or he genuinely didn’t care. “Come.” He strode off, ponytail floating behind him, and she realized belatedly that he wasn’t wearing shoes.

Elise’s head spun as she followed him, unsteady from the transition. The floor tipped under her feet as she walked.

The long, slow elevator ride and journey through the mines left her nothing to think about but James’s guilt trip. She couldn’t push away the memory of his last plea:
Don’t do this
.

Ungrateful bastard.

“He will come around,” Thom said, stopping in front of the doors to the Night Hag’s chambers.

“What, is mind reading another one of your super-witch skills?”

“I don’t need to read your mind when I can read your hormones. The cortisol, the oxytocin—not to mention your heart rate. The flush in the cheeks. The longing stares.” He sneered. The lines on either side of his mouth were strange on his blank, beautiful face. “Always the same, you people. So predictable.”

Elise realized her jaw was hanging and clapped her teeth shut. “What are you talking about?”

He pushed the doors open.

“As you requested,” Thom said, entering the room like a herald in front of royalty.

The Night Hag was in bed again, but she wasn’t propped up by pillows anymore. Instead, she sat with a straight back and her arms resting on the bars like it was a throne.

Thom moved to attend to a bag of saline on her right, regarding the valve with the same impassive gaze he used on everything else. The rubber tubes on the overlord’s other arm led to metal drums tucked behind the bed, where a whirring motor pumped something sludgy and black through the needle. There was no way her veins should have been able to accommodate so much fluid. Her skin was flushed with crimson.

She snapped her fingers. “You. Come here.”

Heat stabbed through Elise’s shoulder brand. Clenching her jaw, she limped to the chair at which the Night Hag pointed.

As she moved to the other side of the bed, a bloody pile writhing on the floor came into view. It looked like several thick, twisted worms draped in shreds of cloth.

A daimarachnid? She froze.

“Sit. Sit!”

Elise sank into the chair. “The payment…”

“Yes, I’ve heard what David Nicholas did, even though I explicitly told him not to fuck with you. I also heard about his little game with the cage. Funny. Very funny.” Her lips peeled back in a grimace. “Unfortunately for his sake, I have no sense of humor.”

She glanced at the pile of flesh when she spoke.

Oh no
.

Elise’s stomach flipped. She could see it now: the yellow hairs, the leather jacket, the shredded black jeans. It was as though David Nicholas had been turned inside out. Nightmares didn’t have bones and organs and muscle the way humans did, so he was barely more than a rubbery mess of skin.

He moaned from a hole that might have once been his mouth. A ruined black tongue lashed between shattered fragments of teeth.

“Kill him,” Elise said. “This is…”

“Lose the sentimentality. He knew the consequences of challenging me.”

Sentimental? That was one adjective Elise had never heard used to describe her before. Was it sentimental to find the destroyed nightmare’s agony nauseating? Was it sentimental to prefer quick, clean deaths to…
that
?

“You should know that I volunteered for the cage fight.”

The Night Hag’s skin shivered. The flesh over her shoulders rippled as though something pressed against it from the inside. “And
you
should be thanking your beloved God that I need you more than David Nicholas, or I would do the same to you.”

Elise gripped her chain of charms. “You’re awfully confident you would win.”

“Keep that mouth shut, kopis, or I’ll rip it from your face. Remember who is branded by whom! Now. We have two things to take care of. Firstly…” She lifted a hand. Elise tensed.

Thom stepped forward to offer Elise an envelope. Her skin crawled when she took it.

There was cash inside. She took the time to count it without caring if it was rude to do so. “Five hundred dollars? I brought you a semi full of angelic artifacts.”

“No, you brought a semi
partly
filled with angelic artifacts. That’s a failure in my book. Don’t pull faces; you can earn more—much more. I’m not done with you yet.”

Elise stuffed the money in her back pocket. At least it was more than David Nicholas had tried to pay her. “What else?”

A smile grew on the Night Hag’s lips. It wasn’t a happy smile, and it made her gut clench like she was going to throw up again.

“The second thing, yes. Finish David Nicholas.”

He groaned.

“Nightmares can’t be killed,” Elise said.

“Exorcise him. Send him back to Hell. Let him float in a mire of souls for a few hundred years.”

Even though Thom didn’t move or speak, Elise suddenly felt compelled to look at him. Indeed, his absolute stillness was what drew her attention. His eyes glimmered. They were completely black, from pupil to iris and consuming the whites.

She had exorcised nightmares before and would do it again. But she didn’t want Thom to see her do it.

Elise thought of her empty checking account. The insurance company. Her landlords.

“Fine,” she said, unspooling the charms from around her neck as she stood.

She considered David Nicholas at her feet. This was the creature that had irritated her like a fly she couldn’t swat for months. He had refused to pay her. Treated her like shit. Abused his employees. Gathered his friends, jumped her in a parking lot, and tried to beat her to death.

He twisted, rolled over, and oozed a few inches to the right. His body left an imprint of blood and ichor. A fingerprint of misery.

A single eyeball rolled in the mass that was his skull. She thought it was glaring at her.

“Hurry up,” snapped the Night Hag. “I have better things to do than watch this.”

Elise wrapped the chains around her fist, then drew one of the falchions on her back and rested the flat of the blade against him. He thrashed weakly. “
Crux sacra sit mihi lux
,” she said, closing her eyes and focusing on her other sense. Those shattered yellow teeth were burned in her skull. “
Non draco sit mihi dux.
”

A light flared through her eyelids. The St. Benedict charm had illuminated.

She reached out with her mind to grasp the sense of the nightmare in front of her—a once-powerful demonic force that had begun fading like a dying heartbeat. He fought, of course. They always did.

Elise gripped him tighter. The mass on the floor grunted, bubbled, and fell silent.

“
Vade retro, Satana, nunquam suade mihi vana
.” A shriek. A twitch. “
Sunt mala quae libas. Ipse venena bibas
.” Elise envisioned the gates to the infernal planes, and all the pain that would be waiting for him there. “Return to the Hell in which you belong, David Nicholas. Begone.”

It wasn’t as much of a struggle as it should have been. The light flared brighter for an instant, blotting out the shadow David Nicholas cast upon her senses. But when she opened her eyes, all that remained in front of her was the ichor stain. Her charms were smoking.

He was gone.

“The flame of a thousand years quenched in an instant.” The Night Hag grinned. “Fantastic.”

Elise sheathed her sword and stood, trying not to look at Thom even though she could feel him watching. She shook the charms loose from her hand and hung them around her neck again. “Five hundred dollars won’t last long.”

“Yes, yes. David Nicholas’s suffering has put me in a good mood, so I’ll send along your winnings from the cage fight. Does that mollify your greedy soul?” She didn’t wait for an answer before waving her hand again. “Get out of my sight.”

Thom glided to the door, and Elise followed him. She felt odd without David Nicholas’s taunts to follow her—odd, but satisfied.

The Night Hag called out.

“Remember, kopis. If you piss me off, that will be you next time.”

And with that friendly reminder, Thom closed the doors.

She strode briskly toward the elevator.

Thom stepped close, blocked her path, and stared at her with gleaming eyes. No, not at her—at her charms. “Interesting,” he said.

“I want to go home.” She took a quick step back when he reached for the chains. “I told you not to touch those again.”

His hand dropped. “I suppose I would be defensive if I had a critical piece of angelic ruin around my neck as well.”

Elise clenched her fists.

He knew.

The soapy white stone was the size of her thumbnail, suspended between an ankh and a Star of David, and completely innocuous. There was no way to tell that it was part of the bowl she had retrieved for Mr. Black a decade before. A kopis might have recognized it, if he knew what he was looking at, but a witch?

“Have you told her?” she asked.

“No. But she will seek it when her gate does not work.”

“You know, when I was in Mr. Black’s penthouse, there was a map of old mine shafts,” Elise said. “He’s found a way into the Warrens. The gate isn’t safe here. She shouldn’t assemble it.”

“Interesting. But hardly my concern.”

“Why did you send me there if you don’t care?”

He bent down to whisper in her ear. “Because I wanted to see what you would do.” His mild tone sent shivers down her spine.

She stepped around him and set a fast pace to the elevator. She hated having that witch behind her, but her urge to leave overruled everything else. He was so quiet at her back that she thought he had fallen behind, but when she turned to shut the elevator door, he side-stepped in before she could close it.

Thom pulled the lever. The elevator lurched into motion. He never stopped staring at her.

They ascended slowly, inch by inch, and the rock slid past them outside the cage. The lone bulb flickered. It cast strange shadows on Thom’s face, making him look more like a statue than a human.

Her back hit the railing. She didn’t realize she had moved away from him.

“Careful,” he said in that mild voice.

“Stop looking at me like that.”

“Like what?”

Elise’s hand tightened on her mother’s cross, where it dangled beside the charm of St. Benedict. “Like you’re going to eat me.”

He hooked his thumbs in the loops of his slacks. Jutted his hip to the side. Tilted his chin. It was a look of pure seduction, but those eyes—those black eyes—completely ruined it. “Would you prefer this?”

She drew her sword in response.

The elevator shuddered. The light went out.

Her heart pounded and her nerves rang like a cracked bell struck with a mallet. It lasted only a second, maybe two.

When the light came back on, Thom had vanished.

Elise whirled, searching for him in the little six foot by six foot box. There was nowhere to hide. He had transported himself away again.

The lift stopped, and she kept her sword at the ready as she opened the door and moved into the hall behind the DJ booth. Someone had turned off the house lights in Blood again. Only a thin neon strip by the floor lit her path.

She couldn’t see Thom, but he spoke. His voice came from the end of the hall. The only way out.

“Accelerated heartbeat. Vasoconstriction. Auditory exclusion. Loss of complex motor control.” He gave a low chuckle. “I see how you move, hunter, I read your body signs. That is fear. Arousal.”

Another step forward. There was nowhere else to go.

“Don’t touch me,” she said. “I said I’m leaving, and I’ll go through you if I have to.”

“It takes so little to disturb humans. Nothing more than a few tricks of light. After what I heard of you, I expected you to be different.”

Elise reached the end of the hall. She eased around the corner, back to the wall, and faced the DJ booth.

Nothing.

“But you are what you are. There’s no mistaking that.” Thom’s voice dropped, assuming that husky tone again. “I need you, and I will have you.”

She didn’t bother responding. Instead, she drew her other sword and stepped around the DJ booth.

Thom lounged by the cage, studying his fingernails. He didn’t look the same as he had in the earth below. The shift was subtle, but distinct. A strange glow had come over his flesh, and his hair had turned to ink. It was as though he was airbrushed smooth, a dream walking on earth, and it was hard to look at him for very long.

“What the hell are you?” she whispered.

“That isn’t relevant. What matters is that I know who you are.” He pointed to her gloved hand without touching it, and his lips formed a single word: “
Godslayer
.”

Elise stiffened. “Where did you hear that?”

Thom pointed to the sky.

There was nothing above him but a roof painted black, smeared with sticky fluids that might have been cooking grease or blood or both. But she knew what he meant. And she felt cold, so horribly cold, like the chill that accompanied death had settled upon her.

Such knowledge was dangerous. Too dangerous.

Elise lunged.

The blade sliced through empty air. Thom darted to the side, and she spun and swung the sword again in a wide arc. But he was gone again, and again. Elise twisted and jabbed, sinking her falchion into nothing every time.

When she missed her third thrust, she unbalanced and staggered. Her left knee connected with the ground. The impact jolted up her hip.

Thom stood just out of reach, arms folded, completely composed. “You would kill someone for simply speaking that name.”

“I have before.”

“You could never kill me. You are weak.”

Elise gritted her teeth. She threw her entire body into her dive, slashing and swinging. Thom stepped aside. The breeze ruffled his hair. Jerking her second sword free, she brought them both in a high arc. Elise cut across his body.