The Darkest Gate (32 page)

He glimpsed an image of a bloody skull and brain. James couldn’t make sense of it. He gripped his head in both hands as the images and voice grew stronger.

I can’t do this…

James tried to see over the heads of the angels, but they were taller than him—a novel experience. He couldn’t see anyone on the street. It didn’t sound like he was hearing with his ears anyway. He was hearing her inside of his mind.

And being close to the angels made his palms itch.

“Elise?” he said aloud. She didn’t respond.

He put his broken glasses back on his face. The left lens was fragmented into two pieces, warping the buildings. It was not nearly as dizzying as the mirrored cities.

A moment later, Mr. Black appeared on the other side of his angelic guards.

The air warped, and he dropped a few inches to the cobblestone street. He lost his balance and fell with a cry. The cane flew from his hand.

James seized the moment.

He stumbled to a standing position and ran. He made it about three steps before his heaving stomach brought him to his knees again.

An angel swept in and took his arm. It was a beautiful woman, elegant and slender, and he tensed with the expectation of being dragged to his feet. But she only offered him a hand. “Be careful,” she murmured. Coppery hair fell in soft waves around her shoulders.

After a moment of hesitation, he let her help him up. Something in her face was open and trustworthy. “Let me run,” he whispered urgently.

She shook her head. “We have a plan. Wait.”

By the time she guided him to their landing spot, Mr. Black had stood. Sweat drenched his brow as he clutched at his chest. “No,” he gasped. “Where did he go?” He spun, staring wildly at the ghost city around them. “Where is he? Alain? Alain!”

James didn’t see anybody on the street. “What are you on about?”

The kopis dropped his cane and seized James’s shirt in both hands. “He’s gone. Alain is gone. I can’t feel him!”

“Perhaps he’s not here,” James said.

But he suddenly knew that wasn’t true. He saw the bloody skull again, and could hear the faint blast of a shotgun.
Anthony shot him…

Mr. Black shook his head. “No! He came ahead of me! That can only mean he’s…”

His mind caught up to what he was about to say an instant before he said it. Horror dawned on his face.

Alain was dead. James couldn’t find any satisfaction in the realization.

Why could he hear Elise’s thoughts?

Mr. Black dragged James down the street. The angels drifted after them without being ordered to do so. “Impossible,” the older man muttered. “He can’t be dead.”

Have to find Mr. Black
…

The thought didn’t belong to James.

The angels followed him with those beautiful, expressionless gazes. They flanked him to either side as if he might run from them. Where would he go? The only way out would be to go through one of those gateways.

He closed his eyes for a moment, letting Mr. Black’s hand lead him on, and caught flashes of imagery in his mind’s eye. Even though he couldn’t see Elise, he felt like she should have been standing next to him.

An elevator. More angels. Parking garage.

She was close. He was certain of it. But he had no idea
why
.

He opened his eyes to search for her again. If she was that close, he was sure he would have been able to see her. He scanned the roofs of the nearby buildings as Mr. Black dragged him along.

Angels moved atop the nearest structures surrounding the dark gate. They were spreading long lines of cloth ribbon in rows. One strand had been laid across the street, and James took the opportunity to examine it when they passed. It was covered in magic symbols, like the pages in his Book of Shadows.

“Paper magic?” he said. “That’s impossible—I’ve never shown anyone how to do it.”

“Some of the spells you used to burn down my home never ignited.” Mr. Black bit out every word, shooting a glare over his shoulder. “Alain studied them. Deconstructed them. His aren’t quite the same, but they do the trick, and—my God!”

The exclamation made James look up. They had turned a corner to see a parking garage—the same parking garage he could see with his eyes closed, but from another angle. A ritual space had been established at the corner near a street light.

Alain’s body was a few feet away with blood and brain drying on the wall behind him.

“
Mon ami
,” Mr. Black murmured.

Before James even realized the older man was moving, Mr. Black swung his cane. It cracked against James’s skull.

His ears rang and his vision blurred. But he was ready for it when Mr. Black swung again.

James caught the cane and tried to wrench it from his grip. They struggled. James was a good twenty years younger and several inches taller—it shouldn’t have been a fight at all. But even an older kopis was much stronger than the average human.

Mr. Black shoved him to the ground and seized a fistful of cloth ribbon.

“She killed him,” he said, voice thick with tears. “My aspis—my companion—”

“Karmic justice,” James said.

“Justice?
Justice
?”

He didn’t even see the strike coming this time.

The force of the blow made James black out. It was only for a few moments, but that was enough time—when he roused again, he was dangling upside down over the shoulder of an angel as they ascended in an elevator. He watched the hazy mirror-world slide outside the window.

When the door opened, the angel carried him outside and threw him to the floor.

James stared up at the towering column of the gate. It was so much bigger than anything he had seen before. The very top almost brushed the real city, and light swirled between the pillars like a tear in existence. The symbols at the base were already glowing. It was almost open. All it needed were the matching marks.

Mr. Black knelt over James with a fistful of ribbons, blocking his view. “Activate it.”

James’s eyes traced the path of ribbon. The angels had completed the circles—all nine of them, each one slightly smaller than the last and nested within each other. It encompassed the entirety of the gate.

He could see the spells for entrapment in the line, which had been Alain’s specialty. It was relatively harmless—if one considered trapping a god harmless.

“I won’t do it,” James said.

“Hold his arms!”

An angel pinned him down. There was no fighting against its grip.

Mr. Black threw the rope of ribbon around James’s head and tightened it on his throat. Pressure crushed against his esophagus. He gagged and gurgled, tongue bulging from his mouth.

“Activate them!”

James would have said no again if he could speak. He fought against the restraints of the angel’s hands to no avail.

And Mr. Black pulled harder.

His skull began to fill with white noise. The older man’s face blurred in his vision. Elise’s voice echoed in the back of his mind:
He’s here… where is he? James?

Such pain.

He stretched out a finger to touch the ribbon as Mr. Black tightened the ligature.

The symbols flared to life.

Magic flowed from him into the ribbons, stretching out over the city. James moved through his magic. He raced through every line and saw the angels with their hopeless stares as if he walked past them himself.

And he saw Elise running toward Mr. Black’s back.

She jumped on the other kopis, knocking him off James. They bumped into the angel. The pressure vanished from his throat and arms.

Freed.

James ripped the ribbons off his throat, sucking in a blessed lungful of air. Anthony raced from the stairwell. “Stop the magic!” he cried, waving his arms.

But it was too late to take it back. The entire city was aglow with the symbols on the ribbons.

Elise and Mr. Black rolled across the roof, trading blows. They ended up on their feet on the other side of the pillar, just beyond the barrier of the ribbon.

She lunged toward him, but Mr. Black side-stepped her, moving out of the way as though she had telegraphed her move. She swung again. His arm struck hers, knocking it aside.

Mr. Black slapped her other hand when it rose to strike him. He twisted, capturing her arm, and bent her elbow the wrong way. She cried out.

He finally gave a hard shove, launching Elise over his head, and she stumbled over the line made by the ribbons. “Finally,” he spat.

“Don’t start celebrating yet,” she said, striding toward him again.

But when she reached the ribbon line, it was like striking a wall. The shock of it resonated through James. She couldn’t pass the magicked runes.

“I’ve envisioned this moment for years,” Mr. Black laughed. “Years! And what a satisfying moment it is.”

Anthony tried to rush the barrier of ribbons, but an angel snagged him in its arms, holding him back. “Elise!” he shouted.

She faced the gate.

Elise
…

This time, it wasn’t her voice that James heard, but another entirely—something great and terrible that rang through his entire being, vibrating down to the marrow of his bones.

She held up her ungloved hand. Blood streamed from the symbol again.

The marks
wanted
to open the gate.

Her legs moved of their own volition. She stepped toward the pillar, rooted deep in the concrete of the parking garage.

She fought it. She fought it hard. But there was no way to stop the inevitable march.

Before she even touched it, the gate began to open.

A gust of wind roared across the top of the parking garage, ripping through them and nearly blowing James off his feet. Electricity sparked and danced in the air around the pillars. A rumbling shook the entire structure, from the top of the gate to the very earth, and the angels backed away as white light erupted from the arch.

He flung up a hand to shield his eyes, but it did nothing for the painful brilliance that burned through Elise’s skull.

Her hands were stretched toward the pillar, dragging her forward inch by inch.

James and Elise’s eyes met through the light. He knew she could see and feel the way he did, sharing every thought and sense between them. Something had happened when they piggybacked—something wrong. She shared his sore neck. He felt her grief at Betty’s death, and the marks on her palms burned on both of their hands. He felt the pull as strongly as she did.

And he felt the moment she made a horrible decision.

“He can’t have me,” she said. “I’ll never go back to Him.”

“No,” he whispered. He didn’t have to raise his voice for her to hear it.

Elise drew one of the falchions. “Sorry, James.”

She plunged it into her gut.

Pain ripped through him as though he had been stabbed, too. A scream tore from his throat. He fell to his knees. At the same time, Anthony yelled—but it was all so distant, so meaningless. James’s palms burned and the gate throbbed and he could feel the blade scraping bone.

Mr. Black ran to the edge of the ribbon. “No!”

Elise hit her knees. Fell onto her side. Released the sword. The power rushing through the gate immediately faltered.

James felt death creep toward them.

Her vision dimmed, and she felt
satisfied
.

He didn’t stop to consider the ramifications. He shoved past Mr. Black, jumped over the ribbon line, and fell to his knees beside Elise. She swatted weakly at his arm, as if to push him back, but there was no strength in it. She was bleeding out too fast.

His Book of Shadows was still in the Night Hag’s cavern. There was no time to cast a spell. James was one of the most powerful witches in the world, and yet his kopis was dying in front of him, and there wasn’t anything he could do. “Goddamn it, Elise!”

She smiled to see him. “Hey,” she said. Her vision snowed.

Elise’s eyes unfocused. Her chest hitched.

No
.

He ripped the second glove off her hand, baring both bloody marks, and pressed them to the angelic stone.

Energy shocked through them. A mighty bell chimed.

The gate opened.

XVIII

D
ying was a
lot more painful than Elise expected.

She had given the subject a lot of thought over the years. Kopides seldom lived past thirty, so it wasn’t a question of whether she would die a violent death or not—it was a question of
when
.

Since fights were seldom painful while she was in the midst of it—the adrenaline and endorphins took care of that—she expected the act of dying to be relatively painless, too. She thought she would go into shock. She might even be dead before she knew it was going to happen.

All of that was completely wrong.

The sword hurt as it was punched in, and it hurt just as much coming out the other side. Elise felt a twinge of sympathy for all the demons she had killed in that fashion.

But then she was falling, and she didn’t really feel much of anything except the pain.

There was a commotion around her. People yelling. The towering bone pillars of the gate beginning to shake. She could see it all through James’s eyes—including Mr. Black’s horror as he rushed to the edge of the circle.

Good. Let him despair.

The blood loss caught up with her a few moments later, making the last vestiges of rational thought fade. A gray haze filled her vision.

Scraps of random thought flitted through her mind. She wasn’t in the angelic city—she was buying the studio with James, bumping her shoulder against his and enjoying the glow of companionship. She was meeting an incubus in her new office, hoping to acquire her first client. She was taking a test with Betty in a lecture hall at the university. She was sinking deep into the snow…

Cold.

She was so cold.

E
lise remembered running.

Her bare feet slapped against white cobblestone as a pale dress streamed behind her. Angels flanked her to either side. “Help me!” she had cried, and they rushed in to take her hands. She was a little smaller, in those days. Thinner and less muscular. Younger. But not weak.