Damnation Marked (16 page)

He deflated, sagging against the windowsill and bumping his forehead against the glass. James gave his heart a few seconds to slow before lifting the phone to his ear. “Hello?”

“Where are you?” Elise sounded out of breath.

“St. Mary’s. What…?”

“Good. I need you to meet me at the Shell station, the one on Sierra. I think we’ve—”

The line went silent.

“Elise?” he asked.

James checked the screen. She hadn’t hung up on him; there was an “x” where the bars indicating his signal strength should have been.

He swore under his breath and moved into the hallway, lifting his phone to search for the network.

He bumped into Stephanie when he passed through the door. Her strawberry-blond hair was loose around her shoulders, and she chewed on her ponytail holder in the corner of her mouth. She only did that when she was really absorbed—like when she was losing to James at a game of Scrabble, or when she was worrying about one of her patients.

She waved the lab sheet. “You’re still here! Good. I have your results.”

It took him a moment to remember what results, exactly, she could be talking about. “Oh. Excellent. Could I borrow your cell phone?”

“Don’t you want to know what I found?” she asked, handing her smart phone to him.

“Of course. In a minute. My phone died in the middle of a call, and I think it was important.” James dialed Elise’s phone number from memory and pressed the button, but the call didn’t connect. Stephanie didn’t have any reception, either.

“Your results are a lot more interesting than I expected,” she said, resuming her chewing. “Did you know—?”

“Myostatin deficiency?” he asked, tucking her phone in the pocket of her lab coat again.

The hair tie fell out of her mouth. “Yes. Exactly. How long have you known about that?”

“Roughly three seconds,” James said. He held his cell phone over his head and paced to the end of the hall. Still no reception, although his email had already been downloaded, and the icon was blinking persistently. “I need to step outside.”

Stephanie followed. “What’s going on? Is there something you’re not telling me?”

“Yes. A great many things, as a matter of fact. I’ll see you at home.”

He dropped a kiss on her protesting lips, took the stairs to street level, and jogged across the parking lot.

Elise was waiting at the gas station, holding her cell phone over head the same way that James had a few minutes before. As he grew closer, he began hearing her thoughts as a rapid-fire undertone. Her brain was filled with a hum of distress.

City’s here…Anthony…Goddamn it, Yatai…

She spoke aloud. “Do you have any reception?”

“No. I think the network must be down.”

“I think I know why that is.” Elise pointed at the roof of a casino.

“Because of the Eldorado?”

She made an irritated noise. “No.
Look.
”

He scanned the sky. He still didn’t see anything. But then he thought of the myostatin deficiency, and the way Elise had begun to see magic in the same way that he did, and he stopped trying to see with his eyes.

James relaxed and stretched out his senses.

Opening himself made it impossible to tune out Elise, but she was focusing on the same thing he was, so it only amplified the new sense he had recently acquired—the one that could feel the proximity of infernal and ethereal powers. And there
was
something in the sky over the casino. It made his palms itch.

“What
is
that?” he asked.

Her mouth was drawn into a grim line. “It’s something bad. Really bad.”

As if on cue, the sign for the Shell station buzzed and went out.

James jumped, despite himself. The lights inside the station had turned off, as well, and a trucker who had been trying to fill his semi shouted as the pump failed.

Brakes squealed behind them, and there was a loud
crunch
as two cars at the intersection connected. One of them had been making a left turn onto the street. The other had tried to progress through the light at the same time, and they had collided.

The stoplight wasn’t working.

“No,” Elise said, running to the sidewalk, “no, no, no—”

What could disable the cell phone network and the power grid at the same time? It had to be the same thing that had his palms itching—a powerful ethereal presence, such as the one that would be suspended over downtown Reno.

All at once, the signs along the street turned off, and the traffic signals followed.

The honking of car horns filled the air. People began stepping out of buildings onto the sidewalk, staring around in bemusement at the perfectly clear day.

“This isn’t right. This can’t be caused by angels.” Elise showed her cell phone to him. It still had power. James felt a small jolt of surprise to see that her wallpaper was an old photo of them dancing together at a competition. “Angels disable electrical devices. We should have lost power to our phones before losing reception.”

“But the ruins—”

“That’s a different problem. I don’t know what this is.”

A man behind them spoke. “I believe I can take you to the ethereal city now.”

James spun. The man standing behind them had long hair sleeked into a ponytail, flawless skin, and a white formal suit that was unbuttoned at the throat to reveal a ruby choker. His eyes were entirely consumed by black, from the irises to the sclera.

Elise didn’t register surprise at seeing Thom Norrel waiting for them, but James felt an unpleasant lurch. She spoke first. “What’s changed? Why can you phase now, if you couldn’t earlier?”

“The barrier between dimensions is thinning.”

She extended a hand. “Fine. Great. I’m ready to go when you are.”

“Does someone want to tell me what the hell is going on?” James asked, stepping forward before Thom could give her his arm.

“An extremely powerful demon has gotten into the ethereal city,” Elise said, moving around him. Thom took her gloved hand in his. “And she has an angel.”

“I’m coming with you,” James said, seizing her opposite wrist.

“James…” she began.

She didn’t get to finish.

“Prepare yourselves,” Thom said.

He shifted his weight to the side, stepped off the sidewalk, and disappeared from the dimension.

IX

T
hom blinked them
back into reality about three hundred feet above the street.

For an instant, they hung on the glimmering edge between Reno and the ruins. Elise had a heartbeat to realize that they had entered the ethereal city in midair, on the same level as the highest floor of the tallest casino, which was followed immediately by the second realization that the formerly bone-white streets were rotting beneath her. Ichor was slicked over the surface, and the stones crumbled into dust.

Then they began to fall.

The hotel tower blurred as they rushed through the air, and the roofs were suddenly
right there
and they were going to hit—

Thom’s arm tightened around her. Elise squeezed James’s hand.

She blinked.

Cobblestone connected with her knees, but it was from a fall of inches rather than hundreds of feet. The shock of the impact rocked through her legs and up her spine. Elise gave a sharp cry.

Her abs clenched, her back muscles strained, and what little remained in her stomach burned up her throat. She spit a few drops of bile onto the ground with pink-tinged saliva. It had been hours since Elise had eaten—she didn’t have anything left to throw up, and it hurt to try.

Her stomach quickly settled. She rolled onto her back with a groan.

Vertigo rushed over Elise as she saw the streets of Reno inverted over her head. Everything seemed serene through the shimmering veil between dimensions. There was no way to tell that the power had failed, aside from the clogged intersections. She could barely pick out the car accident they had left behind.

She sat up and wiped her mouth clean. Thom’s second jump had dropped them by the gas station’s mirror image, one block from the north edge of the ruins, where gray void severed the bridge over the freeway.

The last few yards weren’t made of the same white cobblestone as the rest of the street anymore. They had been devoured by shadow, and the edge of the gas station rotted, sending black ash swirling into the air. The ground was stable and untouched beneath her knees, but the line of darkness was inching—slowly but surely—in their direction.

Beside her, James was also throwing up. His vomit was red. Fear hit Elise like a punch to the gut, and she crawled to his side. “Are you okay?”

“I’m fine,” he rasped, wiping his mouth with the back of his hand.

“The blood—”

James looked embarrassed. “I ate a Jell-O cup at the hospital.”

Thom seized her arm and hauled her to her feet. Her pulse quickened at his touch. “What are you doing?” she demanded, twisting out of his grip.

“Look.”

He pointed to the buildings surrounding them. Heavenly light had once filled every inch of the ruins, keeping the insides of each building as bright as the streets, but the empty windows were dim. Not even a hundred feet away, the mirror of the hospital was crumbling. Its supports were exposed, the foundation was sinking, and the grass was dead.

And there were shapes moving in the shadows of its towers—not only Zohak’s possessed fiends, but more humanoid forms, too. Nightmares, basandere, incubi. Demons that Yatai had taken from under Elise without her noticing.

“Shit,” she breathed.

Where could they run? The street was rotting only a block away. Everywhere else was void.

“The sewers,” Thom said. “Go!”

James didn’t wait to be told twice. He jammed his fingers into the holes on the manhole cover, levered it open, and set it aside as easily as he might have moved a skillet. The shaft that opened into the sewers was the same bone-white material as the street.

“Elise?” he asked, poised over the hole.

The line of fiends swept toward them, and Elise moved between them and the sewer. “I’m right behind you, James.”

He threw his legs over the side and dropped.

Elise drew the obsidian sword. Its blackened blade was a fraction heavier than its twin, making her feel strange and unbalanced.

The nearest fiend rushed her, and she swung. The possessed blade cleaved right through it. A halo of dark energy rippled through the air, and the fiend splashed to the ground in two pieces, like a water balloon sliced in half.

Ichor gushed over the sidewalk. Elise had to jump back to keep her feet from getting hit.

“I never should have come here,” she grunted, impaling another demon. “There’s no way to get through the city. Yatai’s already taken the whole thing.”

Thom whirled and darted over the street. His bare feet touched Yatai’s ichor and came away unscathed. “Not the gates. Not yet.”

He slammed his hand into the mouth of a fiend. It gagged. He jerked its slimy tongue out of its mouth, and she plunged her sword into its eye to finish the job.

“Where is Yatai?”

He caught the last nightmare standing by the throat and twisted. Its head popped off. Shadow splashed over his hands. “The cathedral.”

St. Thomas of Aquinas Cathedral was several blocks south of their position—and there were a lot of fiends and shadow between them.

Elise nodded, clenching her jaw. “Okay, let’s go.”

“I’ve already faced the serpent and drank her venom today. I won’t be with you.”

“What? Then how am I supposed to get home?”

“Take this.” He tossed her a ribbon. A ruby matching the one on his choker dangled from the end. “When you reach Nukha’il—if you survive—speak my true name, and I will get you back to Reno.”

She shoved it into her pocket. “What’s your true name?”

The corner of his mouth twitched. “Yatam.”

Yatam?

A second wave of demons scrabbled toward them, emerging from the depths of a casino’s rotten husk.

Thom shoved her. She lost her footing and slipped into the open manhole.

Her elbow smacked into the edge as she fell, wrenching her arm over her head.

She tried to catch the ladder. Slipped.

She landed on a soft body—James.

Her momentum carried them both to the ground. They splashed into water at the bottom of the sewer.

The shock of hitting the ground wasn’t as terrible as the shock of her body being pressed fully against his. The flimsy barrier between their minds evaporated at the contact, and everything Elise had been struggling to avoid for weeks crashed over her.

Betty with a gunshot wound in her forehead.

The funeral. Her sobbing family.

Carrying the box of ashes through the forest at Lake Tahoe.

Holding McIntyre’s premature newborn at the hospital. The way Anthony had looked when she told him that she was incapable of having children.

James strolling through an orchard hand-in-hand with Stephanie, talking about marriage.

Elise gave a cry and scrambled away from him, pressing her back into the wall. He reached toward her, concern rippling through the bond, but she held up a hand to stop him. “Don’t touch me!”

He froze. “Sorry.”

She shut her eyes and took a few deep breaths, trying to compose herself.

Betty’s face floated behind her eyelids. Not the way she used to look, slathered in lip gloss and smiling impishly, but the way she looked after she got shot. A trickle of blood down the bridge of her nose. Slack face. Colorless lips.

James hovered over Elise, hand hesitantly outstretched. She shoved him. “What the hell were you thinking, following me to the ruins?”

“I came to help you.”

“You can’t help me. And I can’t fight with you in my head.”

“But I’ve made a solution for that.” He took a box out of his pocket. The corner was dinged, and magic seeped out of the gap. James gingerly lifted a pair of rings from the box, and Elise flinched. They were bright—too bright. “I designed the charms on these. They’re wards.” James pocketed the box. “This one should be your size, I hope.”

“What does it do?” she asked.