Damnation Marked (4 page)

Rick’s heart beat a panicked tattoo. Forget the humans. Forget their technology. Forget their goddamn
cars
.

The nightmare leaped to his feet and ran.

II

“H
oly mother of
demons, what the hell is
that
thing? Is that a body bag?”

“Clear off the desk, Neuma,” Elise grunted, staggering up the stairs to the manager’s office in Craven’s Casino.

She held Zohak by the shoulders, and Nukha’il had his feet. Even wrapped tightly in trash bags and twine, he was strong enough that they were both sweating with the effort it took to hold him.

Neuma shoved the paperwork to the floor, placed the laptop on the filing cabinet, and watched anxiously as Elise lowered the body to the desk. She wasn’t in her stripper costume that night, and might have passed for a normal girl if not for the glowing skin and black eyes.

Zohak arched and roared. He nearly threw himself to the floor. Only Nukha’il’s hands pressing into the demon-king’s shoulders kept the bag pinned down.

“Ropes,” Elise said, “get the ropes!”

Neuma vanished.

Elise ran to the closet behind the desk. The charmed lock didn’t open the first time she tried to open it. It didn’t respond to the second or third attempts, either.

Finally, she gave it a swift kick and yelled, “Goddamn it, it’s me! Open up, you moron!”

Somewhat begrudgingly, the lock clicked, and she opened the closet.

The walls were filled with rows of hooks and dangling tools—mostly torture devices left by the last manager of Craven’s. Her belongings had begun migrating to the closet ever since she had taken over: a few knives with the mark of St. Benedict stamped on the blade, some free weights for when she got bored, and several looping golden chains with dangling medallions.

She took the chains and shut the door, which locked itself again with an offended
click
.

Neuma returned carrying an armful of heavy silver chains. “Will this work? These are the thickest ones I’ve got. I only had time to run to the play room.”

“That’s fine,” Elise said.

The angel restrained Zohak as the women tied him to the desk, wrapping the chains all the way around the heavy oaken furniture. There were metal rings welded to the floor too—probably for the same reason that David Nicholas had kept torture implements in his office closet. Elise clamped the chains to the rings.

Nukha’il stepped back, and the demon struggled in vain. He was secure.

“Did the ichor touch you?” she asked the angel.

“No, I’m fine.”

Neuma bent to pick up the boot knife. The inky shadows had moved to consume the entire blade, joining with the metal and turning it obsidian.

“Don’t touch that!” Elise barked, and the half-succubus froze. “Don’t touch
anything
black right now. Even if you think it’s just shadow.” Neuma glanced around the office, and Elise knew what she had to be thinking. The previous manager’s aesthetic tastes ran toward the dark. Aside from the tacky casino carpeting, which was patterned with red geometric shapes,
everything
was black. The walls, the furniture—even the tinted windows overlooking the floor of the gaming room. “Now stand back. Both of you.” She eyeballed Nukha’il, who made her palms itch. “Especially you.”

He politely backed into a corner, and she closed her hand around the charms.

It had been months since she had attempted an exorcism. In fact, she hadn’t done one since she sent David Nicholas back to Hell. And something had definitely changed. It was as though her center wasn’t quite so… centered.

She had to try.

“
Crux sacra sit mihi lux,
” she began, voice quavering. She cleared her throat. “
Non draco sit mihi dux. Vade retro, Satana—
”

Zohak heaved and jerked. He was spitting with laughter.

The bastard had spent weeks trying to take over Elise’s city, and he kept mocking her after she killed him.

Heat swelled within Elise’s ribcage.

There
was her strength.

She slammed her fist into his chest, and the charms blazed. “
Crux sacra sit mihi lux. Non draco sit mihi dux
.” Elise envisioned reaching her power into the hole in his chest, beneath the bag and beyond his shattered breastbone. “
Vade retro, Satana. Nunquam suade mihi vana. Sunt mala quae libas
—”

A shadow passed her closed eyelids, as though something huge had blocked out all of the light in the room.

Elise’s eyes flew open.

And she saw nothing.

There was no floor beneath her feet, no chains around her hands, no air in her lungs. She was blinded, disoriented. Elise tried to gasp and didn’t find any oxygen.

The shadow gripped her throat.

She clawed at it, but there was no breaking from the grip of immense
nothingness
.

And a voice rose from the darkness. It was silky, feminine, and furious.

Exorcise me?
You must be kidding
.

Pain exploded in the back of her head. Elise shouted—which meant there was air, blessed air—and her forehead was pressed to the ugly red carpet.

Her vision cleared. She had been thrown clear across the manager’s office and was crumpled on the floor by the door.

She couldn’t see Zohak’s body on the desk because Nukha’il had thrown his wings wide, filling the entire span of the office.

Neuma was screaming. Once she could breathe, Elise snapped, “Shut up!”

The bartender clapped her mouth closed, smothering her cries with both hands as Elise struggled to her feet. The chains burned with heat, and she flung them to the carpet. The instant they touched the ground, a fire sparked.

Elise stomped the flames out before they could spread, and Neuma ripped the extinguisher off the wall. A white cloud of flame retardant chemicals blasted over the chains.

“Elise!” Nukha’il called. “You need to see this.”

Neuma remained poised with the fire extinguisher, eyes wide and chest heaving. Elise edged around Nukha’il’s wings. Her palms burned, and there was no way to tell if it was from the charms or the power of his angelic energy. But she forgot all about it once she saw Zohak.

He had stopped thrashing. The ooze had melded with his skin in much the same way it had with Elise’s knife, and he was frozen in obsidian.

His mouth was spread in a frozen cry. His eyes had been sucked into his skull, leaving empty pits.

“What did you do?” she asked.

Nukha’il’s eyes widened. “Nothing. I thought you did this.”

Elise recalled the voice she had heard from the darkness.
Exorcise me?

It was suddenly too hot in the office. She wiped sweat from her brow. “Damn.”

“I think I missed something,” Neuma said, voice shaking. “Weren’t you going out to find Zohak and get rid of him, for good this time?”

“We just did.”

Nukha’il folded his wings against his back and stepped aside. Considering his impressive wingspan, they could be folded down comparatively small, and they vanished completely with a moment’s thought. He looked like any other man who was well over six feet tall, androgynous, and ageless, with blue eyes that glowed in the dark.

Neuma clung to Elise’s shoulder and got on her toes to peer into the garbage bag. “That doesn’t look like him.”

“It’s him,” Elise said. “What’s left of him.”

The bartender dropped the fire extinguisher and inched forward. “What killed him?”

“I did. I stabbed him in the chest with one of my falchions.”

“Oh,” she said.

Elise located a knife and sliced open the trash bag over Zohak’s gut. The shadow didn’t spill forth and consume her knife a second time.

Elise tapped the point of the knife against his stomach. It sounded like stone.

“We need to get rid of this.”

Neuma blinked rapidly, trying to process the order. “Shouldn’t we… investigate? Do an autopsy?”

“No,” Elise said, and it came out more forcefully than she intended. She kneeled and unclipped the chains from the rings in the floor. “I’ve learned everything I’m going to from Zohak. Someone needs to take him out of the city and drop him down a mineshaft—a
closed
shaft, preferably, that doesn’t lead into the Warrens.”

“So shall it be done,” Nukha’il said.

She shook her head. “Not you. Neuma, could you find a volunteer?”

“Sure thing.”

The stripper scurried downstairs again. As soon as the door shut, Elise stopped undoing the chains.

She drew her sword.

When the shadow had spilled from Zohak’s chest in the alley to devour her falchion, she had wrapped it in trash bags and jammed it into her spine sheath for later study. Now she held the sword in both hands without unwrapping it. Elise wasn’t sure what would be worse—if she opened it and her sword was destroyed by the same obsidian that had taken Zohak, or if the shadows were still seething.

She hefted its weight in her hands and swallowed hard.

Nukha’il noticed her silence. “Is there a problem?”

“No.”

Elise climbed to her feet, opened the closet after a short argument with the locking charm, and set the sword on a suitcase inside. Her back felt unbalanced with only one sword. It wasn’t the first time she had lost a falchion, but after months of using the pair together again, she hated to lock one away.

She shut the door. Her fingers were shaking, so she shuffled through the desk drawers and came up with a half-empty pack of cigarettes and a lighter.

It took two tries to get a flame. She sucked hard on the cigarette and sighed out the smoke.

That was all she needed—just a taste. If David Nicholas had seen her smoking his leftover cigarettes, he would have thought it was the greatest joke ever. He probably would have laughed himself to death.

Good thing he was already dead.

“You know that could kill you,” Nukha’il said.

Elise ignored him and stubbed it out in the ashtray, which was filled with barely-smoked cigarettes. All hers. She stuffed the box in her pocket.

Back to business.

Elise continued releasing the silver chains. “I need you to go into the Warrens. You have to go to the gate.”

That got his attention. His hands stilled on a clamp on the other side of the desk.

“Why?”

“Because you’re the ethereal delegate and it’s your job, that’s why,” she snapped. “Zohak said that there’s something underneath the city. I need to be sure that the gates are still safe. Still secure.”

“Very well,” Nukha’il said with an edge to his voice that hadn’t been there before.

He had remained in Reno to ensure the safety of the gates, so they had been working together toward those ends for over a month. But neither of them had found occasion to go that deep into the Warrens. In fact, they had both been doing their very best to avoid them.

She opened her mouth to speak again, but her ringing phone interrupted her. She glanced at the screen.

It was James. Of course it was James.

Elise pressed the button to deny the call and scrolled through the history. He had already tried to reach her three times since midnight. Nothing like a failed attempt at an exorcism to wake up her aspis.

“What if the gate has already been compromised?” Nukha’il asked, drawing her attention back to the task at hand.

What if the gate
had
been compromised? What could an infectious shadow do to an ethereal city suspended in a second dimension over her territory?

Elise grimaced. “Just go check.”

B
y the time
Neuma found “volunteers” to discard Zohak’s body in the desert—which happened, in this case, to be two very nervous basandere—dawn was approaching, and it was much too late for Elise to try to get any rest.

For weeks, her nights had been dedicated to unearthing the roots that Zohak had embedded in her territory. He had trafficked drugs, used his fiends to bully other demons, and had managed to destroy one of Craven’s subsidiary restaurants on the south end of town.

Tracking him meant hitting the streets for hours on end, every single night. It meant that she hadn’t slept more than two hours at a time since September. It meant that she could rest, now that Zohak was dead.

So why did she feel so unsatisfied?

Elise loosened her fraying braid, retied it into a ponytail, and threw on her jacket before heading out onto the streets for a jog in the dim blue light of false dawn.

That was the time when she liked the city the best. Most demons had crawled into the Warrens to sleep for the day, and it was before shifts changed for the human casino workers. All that Elise faced on her jog was empty streets and blissful silence.

The guard she had posted at the front door of Craven’s gave her a polite nod as she passed. “Good morning, ma’am.” Sharp teeth flashed between his lips when he spoke. He was a real teddy bear, but he
looked
scary as hell, and he was meant to deter Zohak from sending fiends through the front door.

Elise paused. “Go home, Ed. Enjoy the day.”

She didn’t have to tell him twice. His shark-like mouth split into a grin, and he loosened the top button on his Craven’s-branded polo shirt. “Thank you, ma’am.”

“And stop calling me that,” she yelled over her shoulder as she jogged away.

Even at five in the morning, the casinos hadn’t turned off their lights, so gold and green and red strobes splashed on the sidewalk beneath her pounding feet. She dodged patches of black ice as she crossed the street and headed down to the river, which was never quite empty. Not since the economy had crashed and dumped the jobless onto the streets. They made their camps on the path that ran the length of the Truckee.

Elise slid down the embankment to the trail, careful not to disturb three men sleeping under heavy jackets and reflective blankets.

She didn’t see the trail beneath her feet as she ran. Her mind was back in the manager’s office.

Exorcise me?

Zohak wasn’t the only demon that had visited the city with unsavory intentions. Everyone knew that there was no overlord left in Reno. Elise had been forced to quash a few other uprisings, none of which had been very effective.