Damnation Marked (18 page)

“We need to run,” James said, pulling her away from the puddle of shadow. She let him move her without responding.

A wind rose around them, lashing through the cathedral. What was the point in running? She had failed. Nukha’il was dead—another name on the list of people who her choices had killed—and the gate was opening. She could already see figures glowing on the other side.

Shadow fell over the church. The mighty serpent rose over the crumbling ceiling, more massive than ever before, like a mighty dragon grown out of night. Yatai’s empty eyes burned in its head.

The serpent arced over the wall and slithered into the cathedral, bringing the rising wind with her. It battered Elise and made her drop the Book of Shadows.

The notebook opened, and pages vortexed into the air. James shouted and dived, but half of the pages were already gone.

Yatai’s darkness smashed into the gateway. The barrier snapped. Elise’s mind split open.

It felt like a lightning bolt had struck her crown, cracking open her skull and ripping her body down the latitude. She screamed without screaming—her throat worked and her lungs emptied, but she had no air, no voice.

Reality peeled apart. The threads that bound everything together in burning golden lines were devoured. She saw through the buildings to the gates, and beyond. She saw the planes of Heaven, pale and glowing. And eyes looked back at her.

As quickly as everything had opened, it all slammed shut again. Elise was still standing on an island of white stone among the slithering shadows with Nukha’il’s corpse spread beside her. James’s back pressed against hers.

Yet something had changed. Elise wasn’t sure what, at first—the consistency of the air, maybe, or the way the all-consuming glow of the city had completely vanished.

It wasn’t until she looked up that she realized what had shifted. The hazy line separating the angelic city from the real city on Earth was…gone.

Wind blasted over the streets and through the front doors, whipping the obsidian dust into a thick haze. She covered her face with an arm as the debris pelted against her.

Elise flung out a hand without seeing, and fingers found hers. James yanked her into his chest. They dropped to their knees, sheltering behind a pew.

The walls fell down.

But down wasn’t
down
anymore.

Her braid lifted. There was no ground beneath her feet. She felt rather than heard James shout—the cry vibrated through his chest against her cheek, and she clung to him tighter, digging her fingers into the muscles of his back.

The axis of gravity reoriented itself to the city on Earth, and suddenly, they were the inverted ones.

Elise and James began to fall.

A rushing sensation filled her stomach as they slipped into the air. James swiped a hand at the nearest pew, and even though his hand brushed the top of it, there was nothing to grasp. They slipped.

The church dropped away from them, and Elise managed to grab a fragment of wall, stopping their descent with a hard jerk that nearly ripped her arm from its socket.

James’s grip around her slipped. She held on to him tighter with her other arm.

“Don’t let go!” she tried to yell, but even though her throat burned with the volume, all she could hear was the wind and her pounding heart.

Elise’s feet dangled over the patchwork of buildings in Reno, which was shadowed from the sun by having the ethereal city appear above. The wall of the cathedral dissolved in her fingers.

It slipped.

They fell.

Together, they plummeted through the air. The moist air froze the tip of her nose and her ears. She couldn’t draw in a breath, couldn’t see where they were going, could only feel the rushing air and James wrapped around her and the swords on her back.

The city grew quickly.

Red flashed past her eyes—the ruby Thom gave her drifted out of her pocket and tumbled through space.

Elise swiped at it. Missed. Grabbed again.

Her fingers closed on the choker, and she managed to squeeze out his name: “Yatam!”

They slammed into the pavement.

X

T
he impact shocked
through Elise’s entire body, like a steamroller blowing over her shoulder, her chest, and down her legs.

James landed on top of her, and there was a
crack
that might have been his elbow, or her skull, rupturing. She thought his knee drove into her gut, but with her every nerve exploding, she could barely tell.

He shouted. She couldn’t do the same. All of the breath had rushed from Elise’s chest.

She tried to breathe in again, but her lungs wouldn’t obey. They jerked and collapsed. She wheezed. Squeezed her eyes shut. Tried not to panic.

Was she bleeding? Was she about to die?

She tried to breathe in through her nose but only gasped for breath like a fish flopping on the deck of a boat. Her hands clawed at her chest.

Her lungs drew a staccato breath before emptying again, and the second time she breathed, she almost filled them. The influx of oxygen made her head swim and the stars disperse from her vision. It hurt—
oh
God
it hurt.

Yet they were, impossibly, alive.

James held himself over her on both of his arms, blood cascading down the side of his face. One of his eyes was swollen shut. She thought she heard him utter a few colorful swear words, but it was impossible to hear over the whine of her throbbing eardrums.

He flopped onto his back beside her.

There was air above. Empty air. Clouds of ash plumed overhead, as though a volcano had erupted in the nearby mountains. She couldn’t see the ethereal city.

Elise finally expanded her chest fully. A spike of pain drove through her side.

Skin brushed against hers—James’s hand. She clenched it tightly. He spoke, but she was slow to understand the words. “Pocket. Right side. Get the Book.”

She braced herself before getting onto all fours. It felt like gravity had tripled, and Elise’s muscles shook with the effort. Her wrists wouldn’t support her. She rocked back on her heels and nearly fell over.

James’s arm was curled against him, the hand crumpled and useless. The Book of Shadows protruded from his right pocket. It almost had fallen out.

“Last page,” he gasped. “Put it in my hand.” Elise did as he asked, and James squeezed his eyes closed, took a deep breath. “Take off our rings.”

She pulled hers off, and then his. Dropped them on the asphalt.

James spoke a word of power. It didn’t boom through them so much as whimper—more like the
pop
of a cap than the usual atom bomb of his most powerful magic. But it was enough.

Magic showered over her. The pain in her side eased. The cut on James’s forehead stopped bleeding as she watched. Her muscles strengthened and the ringing in her ears subsided. When the magic faded, she wasn’t healed—not completely. She was still bruised and battered.

But nothing hurt, nothing bled, and she had the strength to get onto her knees.

They hadn’t fallen onto the street of downtown Reno. Instead, they had somehow reappeared in James’s suburb, north of the city. His house was twenty feet away.

As far as Elise could see, all of the grass, bushes, and trees on the street had died. Tens of thousands of dollars of landscaping pulverized in an instant.

All magic had a cost. Especially the kind that saved lives.

James sat up. “Are you okay? I landed on you.”

She scanned the street, using his shoulder to get to her feet. “I’m fine. I think our fall must have been broken by…”

Yatam.

A body lay a few feet away, folded into the fetal position. The ruby stone she had used to summon him was on the street between them.

She scooped the choker off the ground as she ran to him.

The entity called Yatam may have been one of the oldest surviving demons, but he wasn’t impervious to damage. He had been pale the last time she saw him; now he was purpled and swollen with ruptured blood vessels, his gray suit was dirty and torn, and his hair was spread around him like a cloak.

Elise had been wrong—she hadn’t taken most of the impact. Yatam had. There was a crack in his skull, and what oozed out was black.

Against her better instinct—and everything she knew from first aid training—she put an arm under his shoulders and lifted. He didn’t react.

“What are you doing?” James asked, hovering nearby. She could feel him holding the golden rings in one hand. After being isolated by the magic of the bands for an hour, it was a relief to be able to hear him again within her skull.

“Getting him inside your house. We have to do something—we need to heal him.”

“
Him
?”

“He’s the only reason we survived.”

“My spell—”

“Your magic would have done
nothing
if we had pancaked,” Elise snapped. “You can agree or disagree—that’s up to you—but you’d better get out of my way.”

James pocketed the rings, took Yatam’s legs, and helped her lift him. The demon sagged between them, limp and useless. Elise almost missed the step onto the curb. They took quick, shuffling steps past James’s white picket fence, his dead lawn, and onto his door. The potted flowers on the patio were wilted.

She staggered inside and set him on the floor harder than she intended. His eyes remained closed. Even with half of the skin on his face stripped off, he was beautiful.

James flicked a light switch. Nothing happened. The power was out there, too.

“Damn. I’ll have to find candles.”

She stepped in his path before he could leave the room. “Heal him.”

“I don’t have it in me to perform magic of that magnitude again today. I could kill myself.”

Yatam groaned. His skin shimmered, and Elise glimpsed the lacework of veins in his arm and chest, as though his flesh had turned to a transparent jelly. He was going incorporeal, like so many demons did when catastrophically weakened.

“Then give me your Book of Shadows.
I’ll
try to heal him.” At his stare, she went on. “You’re sensing demons and growing the muscles of a kopis. I sense magic—who says I’m not getting witch muscles, too?”

He raked a hand through his hair. “Elise…” She held out a hand. He removed the notebook from his pocket and placed it in her hand, but didn’t immediately let go. “I’m going to walk you through it.”

She nodded and took the Book. “Which page?”

“Find it yourself. If you can do the magic, you should be able to see it. Hang on—we’ll need a sacrifice.”

James hurried out of the room and disappeared down the hall. “We don’t have time for you to test me,” Elise called after him.

“Just do as I say!”

She thumbed through the pages, starting in the back where the other healing spell had been located. She found one that glowed with a similar red light, like blood and roses, and removed it.

Yatam’s skin flickered again. She could see his teeth through his cheeks.

James returned with a cage of mice. Living energy was the fastest way to gather strength for a spell, and they had already killed all of the flora on the street. Elise held up the page she had picked out. “This one?”

He nodded and set the cage on the floor by Yatam. “That spell is dangerously powerful if wielded improperly. It requires immense focus.” James cupped his fingers around hers. His skin was warm and rough. “Words of power are not spoken, strictly speaking. It comes from the mind, the chest, your
core
—you only open your lips as a focus to direct it.”

When Yatam’s skin faded a third time, it didn’t come back. He was a mess of twisted muscle with slivers of bone peeking through.

James folded his arm around her and pressed a fist into her solar plexus. It still hurt after their fall. “Bring it from here. Gather the power. See the magic on the paper. Speak the word.”

“What word?”

“The word on the paper.”

“I can’t read the spell,” she said. “Help me out.”

“
Look
.”

At his insistence, she lifted the spell in front of her eyes. It blazed at their joined touch. “All I see is light.”

“There are words within. Incantations. Pages upon pages of painstaking inscription. You only have to find it.”

Focusing on it brought the magic welling up inside of her, like water overflowing in a cup. But she couldn’t direct it. “I feel it, James, I do—but I can’t read the words.”

He spoke a word into her ear.

And then she
saw
it.

The word of power rose from her throat unbidden, coming from a core that was not within herself, or within James, but somewhere between them. Her voice didn’t make a sound, but it scraped her chest on the way out as though she had screamed it.

The magic unfolded.

Ropes of energy bound her—from the mice and the demon in front of her to James’s arms wrapped about her body. Elise was connected to the earth and air, the fire in the core of the earth, the clouds in the sky. The house around her fell away, and she saw only the golden shimmer of life, and the gloom of impending death.

And it
hurt
. It was like peeling the veins from her forearms and tugging until it ripped at her heart.

With a sickening lurch in her gut, the magic ended.

She could see the house again. The mice in the cage were dead, and Yatam’s skin had reappeared.

Elise dropped what was left of the paper. All but a scrap had burned away.

She sagged against James. “That didn’t feel good.”

“No,” he agreed, “it often doesn’t. It’s worst when I perform magic that asks too much of my abilities.”

“How do you survive it?”

“With a lot of practice.”

A
n hour later,
Thom was still asleep. James cleaned the mouse cage, helped Elise move him to the couch, and watched his unconscious body from the doorway. “Who is this man?” James whispered, arms folded across his chest. “I mean, who is Thom really?”

She sighed. The dark circles under her eyes had only deepened since performing her first spell. “His name—his true name—is Yatam.”