The Darkest Gate (30 page)

Elise stood. “Why?”

“I helped you. Free me.”

She nodded. He turned around. Her fingers tingled as she pressed the latch open, and the metal fell to the floor with a clink.

A sudden swell of ethereal energy rose around him. Nukha’il sighed and rolled his shoulders. “Thank you,” he said. “Finally.”

“What will you do now?”

“Find Itra’il and move on. I have wasted too much time in servitude.”

With a small bow, he turned to leave the cavern. Elise watched him go. The presence of an angel always left a sour taste in her mouth.

“Elise?” Anthony’s call drew her attention back to him. He was gaping at the Night Hag’s body. It seemed to have lost half its mass in death, but it was still terrifyingly huge. “Should we do something about the gate?”

“Sure. Why don’t you stay here for a second, Betty?” Her best friend nodded against her knees. She was pale and trembling. Elise collected her swords, sheathed both of them, and joined Anthony by the fallen overlord. She was impressive, even in death. “She’s dead, Anthony. We don’t have to keep an eye on her.”

“I just can’t believe…” He blew a heavy breath out of his lips. “That was terrifying.”

He probably was hoping for words of comfort. Elise didn’t have any.

She turned to face the gate. The light inside whirled and swirled. She stretched a hand toward the broken fragment that had come from her necklace, but getting too close made her fingers burn.

“Here,” Anthony said.

He plucked the stone out of the gate, and with a resounding clang like a heavy iron door shutting, the light went out. It sounded like the very gates of Hell swinging shut. But it was so much worse than Hell—and so much more satisfying.

A huge weight Elise hadn’t realized she had been carrying lifted off her chest. She sagged against his arm.

His fist clenched around the rock, brown eyes burning bright. “What now?” he asked.

Now she would take that rock and throw it into the deepest reaches of Lake Tahoe. Now she wouldn’t worry about anyone reaching those ruins again. Now the overlord and the brand on her shoulder were gone, and the city was hers. Now…

Relief thrilled through her chest, foreign and strange. She seized Anthony’s shirt in both hands. “Now this,” she said, pulling his head down to kiss her.

His empty hand pressed against the small of her back, crushing her body to his. It felt good. She could have done it forever, if they had the time. Forever turned out to be just a few short seconds, but when she broke free, Anthony pressed his forehead to hers.

“Wow,” he murmured. “That good, huh?”

“Yeah. That good.”

He laughed and swept her up in his arms, spinning her around. “Jesus, Elise! Thank
God
you woke up when you did. I was sure we were going to die!”

“You didn’t do too badly on your own.” She leaned on his chest when he set her on her feet again. “Remember when you asked if fighting was a little exciting in the desert?” she whispered, low enough that Betty wouldn’t be able to hear. She didn’t feel like being teased. Not when she was so relieved. He grinned.

But Betty wasn’t even listening to them.

“Hey, lovebirds! I think James is waking up!”

Elise broke free of Anthony. “Of course he missed all the good—” she began, facing her friend, who had pillowed James’s head in her lap.

Motion loomed in the darkness beyond Betty.

Alain entered from the hallway above, flanked by twin angels. They were statuesque and pale with the silvery ghost of wings sweeping from their shoulders. Both had swords that flamed with ethereal light.

And the witch’s pistol was drawn and aimed at James.

“Watch out!” Anthony shouted.

Three things happened at once.

First, Betty saw Alain and lifted one of James’s paper spells, bold challenge glowing in her eyes. Elise could see the confidence in her face. The surety that she could wield that kind of magic. But shifting to take the spell from his Book of Shadows put her directly between the gun and James.

Second, Elise shoved her boyfriend out of the way and drew her sword. The stone dropped from his fingers and clattered across the floor.

Third, Alain squeezed the trigger.

The explosion echoed in the great underground chamber, like two gunshots in quick succession. His muzzle flashed.

Betty fell.

Alain swung his arm and aimed at Anthony. He fired again.

Elise had moved fast to get him out of the way, but not fast enough. Her boyfriend shouted. Blood spurted on his leg.

She leaped over Betty’s prone body, which had folded protectively over James, and buried her falchion hilt-deep in Alain’s stomach.

He was still unbalanced from the second shot and couldn’t protect himself. The impact of body against body brought her to a halt face-to-face with the witch, so close that she could smell the beer on his breath and see the hate deep in his eyes.

Her free hand bit into his arm, digging her nails in until he dropped the pistol.

But he was smiling. Why was he smiling?

“Mr. Black sends his regards,” he hissed. His tongue was stained with his own blood.

The angels whirled with motion—not to attack Elise or defend Alain, but to snatch the stone from the ground and slam it back into position on the gate. The ringing of chimes roared through the chamber as the gate swept open once more. Wind lashed Elise’s braid around her head.

She withdrew the falchion. Alain stumbled back, gripping his wound. Off-center. She may not have hit anything important, but it would slow him. Blood dribbled through his fingers.

Still he laughed, shrill and delighted, and when Elise turned she saw why.

Betty had been shot in the face.

She was slumped to the side on top of James. Her forehead was a ruined mess, though the injury was only as wide as a coin. From this side, the wound almost looked too neat to be fatal. But there was nothing in her eyes and her muscles were slack. Elise had seen the emptiness of death more than enough to recognize it without needing to check for a pulse or the rise and fall of breath.

One corner of Betty’s lips was still spread in the tiniest smile.

Dead.

A ringing filled Elise’s ears, drowning out the gate and the heavenly choir and even her own heart. She was frozen to the spot. Her fingers suddenly didn’t have the strength to hold her falchion.

Translucent feathers swirled around her. An angel wrapped his arm around Alain’s midsection. He mouthed words Elise couldn’t hear: “Go! Now, go!” And both angels, with the witch in tow, leaped through the gate.

Her knees connected with the ground. She didn’t realize she was scrambling over to Betty until she took the woman’s shoulders and turned her gently onto her back. Something warm and sticky met her fingers. The exit wound at the back of Betty’s skull was low, almost at her spine—Alain had shot from above and gone all the way through—and it dribbled down her neck.

Her blood was sprinkled on James’s cheek like tears flicked on his skin.

“Betty,” Elise whispered, taking her friend’s hand. Her fingers were still closed around one of James’s spells.

Someone was screaming.

Anthony limped over and collapsed. He was shot, too, but Alain had only hit him in the thigh. Shock turned him white and shaking.

“Betty—Betty—oh my God, Betty, you can’t—”

His fingers clenched too hard on her shoulders. She was dead weight when he shook her.

“Stay with her,” Elise said.

Anthony turned wide, helpless eyes on her as she stood. “Where are you going? You can’t leave us! Betty needs help, she has to—”

“Betty is dead.”

Her voice broke on the last word. Elise took up her sword with blood-sticky fingers and sheathed it. “Elise—”

“When James wakes up, tell him I’ve gone through,” she said.

She felt calm. Composed. Total clarity descended upon her in a silent, crystal moment of realization: Alain and the angels had gone to the other side. She was going to follow him, and she would kill him.

Elise stood in front of the gate. It seemed so much bigger now that she knew she had to pass through it. The darkness beckoned to her with slender fingers.

Elise…

That voice. It had been calling to her for weeks.

Now she would answer its summons.

She glanced over her shoulder at Anthony, James, and Betty. So much blood. She clenched her jaw, tightened her fists, and took a deep breath.

Elise jumped through the gate.

XVII

T
ime and space
had no meaning. Elise floated through the void without a body, without sensation. There was… nothing.

She came back to herself in downtown Reno.

Much like when Thom transported her back to Craven’s, her mind wasn’t prepared to make sense of the shift in setting, and she initially rejected everything she saw. The light post standing over her. The bare branches of a bush. Traffic lights blinking red. A parking lot with no cars.

There was concrete under her fingers, and buildings to either side of her… but no sky.

Instead, she stared at a distant road a mile below her.

Her entire body revolted when she realized what she was seeing. Elise gasped and grabbed behind her for something to grab before she fell. She was hanging over the city. Nothing held her to the ground. She was going to fall and hit the road and—

No
.

Her thudding heart skipped a beat.

Elise lifted her hands and didn’t fall. Nothing was holding her up. Or rather, nothing was holding her down—except gravity. Slowly, carefully, she sat up to see where she had found herself.

She had somehow reappeared beside the El Cortez Hotel. It was an old brick building with an art deco sign on its roof. There were other motels to her right, and casinos just a few blocks down. She wasn’t far from the river and the train trench. She had walked down that very street a hundred times on her way to Craven’s and on her morning jogs. It was as familiar as her neighborhood.

There were no cars. Nobody walked their dogs. No bicycles. She had never seen the downtown area so empty.

A ghost town.

But…

Elise braced herself and lifted her eyes again.

Each building stretched toward a shimmering line in the sky, as though a sheet of water was somehow suspended in a bubble around her. The street she initially thought she would fall onto was actually a reflection of where she stood. The very top of the Eldorado’s hotel tower brushed its mirrored roof. Silvery light radiated from everywhere and nowhere, even though there was no sun to cast it.

She was in the angelic city.

Elise got to her feet carefully and turned in a small circle, cupping her hands around her face to shield her eyes from the radiant light. It was like a hazy, fog-filled morning, unlike any the desert had ever seen.

She knew that angels didn’t like to walk on Earth. She had never dreamed that they would build their city as a reflection of reality in a parallel dimension atop hers.

But the duplication was almost perfect. The buildings in the angel’s city were nearly identical to their counterparts in reality above her. Everything around her looked a little more wind-worn and crumbling, the streets were paved with cobblestone instead of asphalt, and all the trees and grass were dead—but it was otherwise indistinguishable.

She had to brace herself to look up again, holding onto a fence so she wouldn’t be overcome with vertigo. The streets above were filled with cars. People walked from building to building. That was reality.

Then she faced the casinos to the north, and a chill settled over her.

White stone arches rose above the center of the city with no reflection in the real world. Nine of them. One was taller than the rest, and it glowed with dark energy.

If she wanted to find Alain, she would want to start there. She was certain.

Her shock at finding herself in the angelic city was enough to make her forget, for a moment, why she had jumped to the other side in the first place. A wave of grief struck her as she remembered Alain’s laughter, the gunshot, and Betty’s blank face.

He needed to die.

Elise found her falchions a block away, as though they had been flung away from her when she jumped through the doorway. One was on top of a planter, and another was in the middle of the shimmering white cobblestones that made up the street. She moved to pick up the one between the bushes, but hesitated.

The symbols she had carved into the blade were glowing. Her hand itched when she reached for it.

Elise turned over her bare palm. Most of the bleeding had stopped, but the mark underneath was raised and irritated. She didn’t need to check the other hand to know it was the same. They were reacting to being in the angelic city.

She picked the falchion up with her gloved hand and sheathed it before retrieving the second.

Elise skirted around the downtown blocks with the gates, trying to find the city’s boundary. She didn’t have to go far. When she walked three blocks east, she found the new baseball stadium severed in half. The street ended in a white void with nothing but clouds beyond it. The break wasn’t clean. The sidewalks were jagged and crumbling and a telephone pole’s wires dangled uselessly into oblivion.

She could hear the river passing nearby. She approached the edge, hooked a hand around the light post, and peered over the edge.

The mirrored Truckee River roared as it emptied into a star-filled void, spraying foam in every direction. A sliver of moon danced in the sky. Her stomach flipped with vertigo. The wind gusted around her, almost blowing her off her feet, but she held tighter to the post.

“What the hell?” she whispered.

A chime split the air. She turned to see the darkest gate glowing.

Alain was opening it.

Elise swore and broke into a run.

As she sprinted toward the arches, she saw other figures moving toward it as well. It wasn’t the two angels that had accompanied Alain—these were different ones. The angels she had seen in Mr. Black’s penthouse. They seemed oblivious to her as they drifted toward the gates.