House of Ash & Brimstone Read online

He was laughing low and breathless, his face purpled and tight.

  Creepy. The place was definitely creepy.

  The two skirted around the government physician and her test subject, edging closer to each other despite their disagreement as they continued down the hallway. Gisele stole glances at Shade, considering his flushed face. He was agitated, and she couldn’t blame him.

  She’d never been caught in the crosshairs of a nullifier, but she’d heard it hurt. A lot. It didn’t strip a person’s magical abilities away, but it made it damn difficult to use them. Even a crudely built one had contained a minotaur for the Curators of the Cursed.

  “That’s why I brought guns,” she replied.

  Demons like Shade preferred to rely on their natural abilities and rarely relied on backup. It was a weakness in the modern age, and from time to time made her job as a bounty hunter easier.

  “Better stick close to me,” she teased, tossing his words back at him.

  8

  A few twists of the hallway later and they’d reached a large service elevator. It was plain with worn brass doors, set back into the wall, and didn’t match the rest of the office building’s modern sterility. Old and nondescript, the elevator was easy to miss. If Gisele hadn’t known exactly what they were looking for, she’d have walked right past it.

  “Going down,” she announced as she jabbed the call button and the elevator doors dinged open.

  “The office is in the basement?” Shade asked, looking uncomfortable at the thought.

  “Mm,” Gisele answered with a nod as the doors closed around them. The elevator was wide and deep enough to fit a gurney, but uneasy as they felt, they huddled next to each other in the middle of the back wall, the edges of their arms touching where they stood. It couldn’t be the only elevator down, but it was the only one she’d ever been shown. “Technically a sub-basement. Maisie likes to operate from the building’s bowels. Coroner humor.”

  They shared a look, and Gisele smiled at him.

  Shade’s body tensed, and he studied her face for a long moment before he said, “About last night, I know—” The pads of his fingers curled against her palm, a whisper of a touch. “I know I went about it all wrong.” When she didn’t flinch away, those fingers dipped between hers. Spread them slow and gentle.

  She thought about the way she’d imagined him holding her hand as a child. What was he…?

  “It’s just—”

  A strange feeling washed over her—tangy and metallic.

  For a moment Gisele looked down, stunned by the sight of their clasped fingers…tinged a bright and lethal red by the glow of her indicator ring.

  Then the elevator doors dinged open, and all hell broke loose.

  There in the doorway stood—no, floated—a remnant of a woman in a torn dress. Remnant was the best word Gisele could think to describe it, because the woman wasn’t whole anymore. Chunks of her flesh were missing. Her throat looked torn out, and her tongue was unnaturally long, lolling out of a mouth that was missing its lower jaw. Her arms and legs were sinewy, the skin saggy and discolored where it peeked from her tattered blouse and skirt. A corpse hovered in front of them, feet dangling in the air and bloodshot eyes darting around in circles.

  Gisele’s first thought was that something from the Office of the Paranormal had escaped, but it didn’t make any sense. The woman before her was too familiar.

  But Sister Maria had been dead for eleven years.

  “Vyx, no!” Shade yelled when he saw the Sister’s lifeless form, voice brimming with alarm. He surged in front of Gisele, an arm out to keep her behind him, shielding her with his body.

  Escape. They had to escape, she thought. But there wasn’t anywhere for them to go.

  Before Gisele could react, the woman—ghoul, whatever she was—stretched clawed fingers toward them and unleashed an ear-shattering, sonic blast of a scream. Fear slammed into her and she staggered, heart threatening to leap out of her chest. Oh God, she couldn’t breathe.

  Shade ducked his head against the attack, as if trying to stand tall under the thundering flow of a waterfall. She caught snatches of his fevered muttering; he was summoning a spell.

  Then the elevator’s alarm blared around them, and the lights cut out. The elevator groaned, rocked, and fell.

  Gisele shrieked until she ran out of air. She was weightless, falling in the dark, her stomach and heart in her throat. Shade grabbed her, gripping her to him so hard she thought she might break, and then the elevator crashed into the bottom of the shaft and the ground rushed up to meet them. Pain blossomed along the entire length of her body.

  It was the second time she’d fallen on Shade in as many days. He’d cushioned the blow before the impact had torn them away from each other, but she still felt the sharp twinge of a snapped collarbone beneath the dull throb of the left side of her body. “Help,” she moaned. “Shade, are you alive?”

  She was met with no answer, but in the silence she could hear his breathing. Maybe he was unconscious? She started to drag herself across the floor of the elevator—he couldn’t be more than a few feet away—but then she heard it: a low scraping sound. For a moment, she nearly wet herself at the thought that the wraith-like woman had followed them down, was above her in the darkness, clawing into the top of the elevator, but the thought quickly evaporated. The sound had come from the floor, and had been long and slow, like a heavy cable sliding around. Or a python. Or a demon’s tail.

  She was trapped in a crumpled elevator with an injured demon. Shade had shifted.

  In the pitch black, all she could see was the faint red glow of her magic ring, a warning: danger.

  “Shade?” she ventured again, disliking the quiver of fear in her voice.

  “It’s me,” he answered, but his voice sounded strange—guttural. He moved and she could make out the scrawl of claws scraping against metal. He was pressing away from her, dragging against the panels of the walls as he crawled. “Don’t come near me,” he warned her, darkly.

  “Are you okay?”

  “Just stay on your side. Thing’s small as a godforsaken cage. It’s like an underground cell.” With a bang, he pounded a fist against the wall. “Like I never got out.”

  She held her breath, tried and failed to slow her pulse. When had Shade been locked in a cell? He’d gone to prison? No, something worse than that. Something he’d left behind in Hell.

  “There’s probably a floor right above us,” she tried to reassure him. “We’re not stuck yet. I’ll climb through the top and take a look around.”

  Of course, she wasn’t sure how she was going to do that. She couldn’t lift her right arm over her head, and her left knee was swollen stiff.

  “Did you break the elevator? To get us away?”

  He grunted an affirmation. Magic. He’d unleashed a spell of mass destruction in the time it’d taken her to breathe. After a pause she added, “Is it coming after us?”

  Last thing she wanted to do was crawl up into the elevator shaft with that nightmare waiting for her.

  “Yes.”

  The word chilled her to the bone.

  “What do we do?” She didn’t know why she was asking him. Except that he’d known what the creature was—he’d called it by name. “Shade, what do we do?”

  She needed him with her, focused, if they were going to escape. She reached for him and her hand touched scales. They were jagged and hard, covering his forearm. He recoiled, thumping the sides of the elevator in a clatter of claws and tail and—wings? She grabbed for him again, refusing to let go of his steel-cable-strong forearm when he thrashed against her.

  The fact that he’d lost control of his humanity, slipped and retreated into his true nature, meant he was teetering on the edge. He was either hurting bad or he was just as frightened as she was.

  If he lost himself to his survival instincts, he might turn against her. But right now he was all she had.

  “Shade! What do we do? That thing, I’ve had real nightmares abou
t it before.”

  When she kept her grip on his arm, he relaxed against her a little. “I know,” he confessed. “The elghoul, she’s marked you. It’s just like it sounds—they’re elder ghouls that terrify their victims to death. This one’s name is Vyx; I know her from—it doesn’t matter. She’ll keep picking forms that scare you the most. I’m guessing this particular nightmare is one from your childhood?”

  She wondered how he knew so much.

  Swallowing hard, she breathed, “Yeah. When I was a little girl, the nuns used to tell us when we misbehaved that a Devil would come to rip our souls out through our throats if we kept it up. Around that time one of the younger Sisters went missing, Sister Maria. She didn’t wear a full habit. She was always nice to me. But they found her body eventually. Found her killer, too. I never saw it—her body, I mean—or what happened to her, but I had nightmares about it for weeks.”

  “You thought one of the archdemons of Hell got to her?”

  “Yeah, well, there was a time when I tried to file my horns away. It didn’t work, obviously. They grew back. But that home made sure I knew I was unclean.”

  “I’m sorry.” His voice was full of pity and something else—regret. The sound of his voice had softened, was back to normal, and she realized his arm under her hand felt human again. She ran her fingers across the smooth skin, stopping when she touched slick blood.

  He was hurt badly.

  “Stay here,” Shade said. “I’ll get rid of her.”

  He was still trying to protect her even after he’d been wounded? She hadn’t thought he’d risk himself for another, but here he was hurting himself for her.

  “No, boost me up. We need to get to a floor in case we have to run for it.”

  She felt his fingers brush her face, a quick caress stolen in the darkness—far too tender an exchange for her comfort—and then he huffed his assent. Pain stabbed through her arm when he lifted her toward the emergency escape in the ceiling, and the thought that the elghoul was up there waiting for her was almost enough to make her pass out. But the top paneling was clear once she’d forced her way through it.

  “How’d you know it was after me?” she asked when Shade struggled up through the hole after her. She felt around for the entrance to the floor above them and pried at the closed doors. With only the use of one good hand, it was awkward and slow going. “Why am I being targeted?”

  She could hazard a guess, but she wanted to hear Shade say it. She wanted him to admit his tie to all of this—how he’d known about the curio she’d stolen, and how he’d known someone would come after her for it. Why else would Vyx be hunting her? And were the Curators of the Cursed the ones behind this?

  “And why are you helping me?” she added, suspicion returning in full force.

  “I can only answer one of those,” he said, helping her to pry at the hall divider. They had two good arms between them, barely enough to get the job done. At last the metal doors grated open, bathing them in the glow of emergency lights. Now that they were no longer shut off from the rest of the building, she could hear a muted alarm, the slow pulse of a siren that signaled to every department in the building that the premises were under lockdown.

  Great. This could only go well.

  “Which one can you answer?” she asked as they crept down the hall, keeping watch for the elghoul. Shade had abandoned his jacket in the elevator. His shirt was slashed open across his shoulder blades in two long rents, and blood stained the front across his abdomen. Everything had happened so fast; it was a blur of a moment. Had he taken a hit for her?

  Shade didn’t injure easily—she knew that firsthand. The fact that he’d been wounded so badly by a single attack made her even more frightened to encounter the elghoul again. Without a second’s hesitation he’d moved in front of her, had taken the brunt of an attack meant for her. A wave of guilt struck her for having been suspicious of his intentions.

  “The elghoul’s after you because you have something her master wants, but getting rid of it won’t help you. She won’t stop until she’s told to or until she’s dead.”

  So the elghoul was after the Mardoll—and it had a master it answered to. Strange. Lots of demons served other, more powerful demons, but if someone out there was more powerful than the elghoul, why didn’t he or she just come after her directly?

  There was only one reason she could think of: The person couldn’t risk having Gisele discover who they were.

  “So how do we kill it?” she said, cutting to the chase. She doubted her thigh pistols would do much to stop the elghoul—what had Shade called it, Vyx?—but next time she saw it, she was unloading both clips into its chest.

  They loped into a lab at the end of the corridor, skirting examination tables and expensive machinery as they made their way to an adjoining room with walls painted a dull, chipping blue.

  “It’s not that easy, believe me.” Shade shoved a rolling tray of medical supplies away from him. “Her last form was ineffective, so I doubt she’ll appear to you that way again. She scared you, but not enough to make you do something stupid. Keep an eye out for anything that’s frightening specifically to you—a dream, a memory—but don’t try to confront her. If she manages to overwhelm you, your weapons will be more of a threat to you than her.”

  She thought back to the night she’d been chasing Samuel—how after they’d discovered his body, she’d been hit by a sense of terror so strong she’d almost shot herself.

  She was lucky Shade had been there to stop her, to pry her from the elghoul’s deadly magic.

  “Got it. Shoot first, ask questions later, or just run screaming like a little girl,” she joked, but as they burst into another room, this one lined with whirling centrifuges and tanks filled with floating, carved-up body parts—a bisected head, six legs, and a scooped-out torso—her words died in her throat.

  Shade was already there, waiting for them.

  The new Shade, the doppelgänger, stared at her with a dark gleam to his eyes and a grin that promised violence, terror, and pain. He wasn’t injured, but otherwise, he was a mirror image of her coworker, right down to the shirt and jeans. The new Shade cocked his head to the side and took in the sight of the one hunched before her. Then a bright splotch of blood bloomed fresh along the imposter’s stomach, soaking his white Henley shirt.

  “Oh my God,” she breathed as the fake Shade moved a hand to press against the phantom injury, wincing in a convincing act of pain.

  “Gigi,” he called to her, voice strained.

  This couldn’t be real. Horror crept coldly up her spine.

  “You’re afraid of me?” Shade—the one next to her—turned a haunted expression her way as he rubbed his fingers over his heart. He dug at his chest, and his jaw muscles locked. “Go back the way we came and find the stairs. I’ll deal with her.” When she didn’t move, he snapped, “Go! Get out of here!”

  But her focus slid back to the elghoul, unable to tear herself from its pull. Its skin was rippling, about to change. It was like watching wasp larvae wriggle from inside a caterpillar—she didn’t want to see it, but she couldn’t bring herself to look away. It felt like drowning in hot water, trying to take a breath but only burning her lungs. She was paralyzed.

  Wings burst from the doppelgänger’s back, massive and talon-tipped and tensile. They billowed, leathery and black as the forelimbs of a giant bat. Shadows shifted behind them as they spanned, making them appear to fill the width of the room. Patches of skin darkened and pebbled before ripping into tiny, hardened scales that gleamed in the soft glow of the containment tanks lining the walls, and bones elongated, protruding at knuckles, elbows, and clavicle, hulking the creature in both muscles and height until it towered over her. Two thickly ridged, ebony horns cut from its temples, banked in loose ash-brown locks that roiled about its shoulders. A long tail whipped against a tank, shattering glass.

  She wanted to scream but couldn’t, numb, frozen like prey before a monster.

  Shade
’s demonic form speared her with eyes blacker than the depths of Hell, glistening with pure evil. They were the eyes of a creature that would suck out her soul and sanity and laugh at the corpse it left behind. This was what she’d always known in the back of her mind, that Shade was dangerous. That he was a born killer, a full-blooded Devil from the deepest regions of Hell.

  No, wait. That wasn’t right. Sure, she was scared of Shade’s true form—he was a powerful and nightmarish-looking beast. But she also had flashes of him smiling and protecting her, worried and protecting her, laughing and crying and screaming her name, all while baring those same obsidian wings.

  A gun was in her good hand, but she didn’t remember having drawn it. It wavered, trembling where it was outstretched.

  Shoot, shoot to kill, a whisper pounded in the back of her head, incessant. Shoot him before he turns on you, then shoot yourself.

  With a start, she realized she’d aimed her sight at the real Shade’s back. She was a breath away from firing.

  “Forgive me,” she begged. Then she turned and ran.

  As soon as she was out of sight of the elghoul, Gisele felt better—less afraid and more like she had her wits about her. She could breathe.

  But she couldn’t get the image of those wings out of her mind. There was no mistaking what the elghoul had shown her. But how much of it had been real and how much a lie? Did the elghoul know Shade’s true form, or had it plucked the image from her own existing fear? If the elghoul did know, if it had shown her the truth, that meant Shade had been there at the Curators’, that he knew this demon who was now targeting her life. That he was lying to her…still.

  She sank to her knees, feeling weak—then used a lone gurney to pull herself to her feet, shoving it banging into the wall after. Fuck! She should go back. She was used to meeting her problems head on, but how did you face something that could make you turn against yourself? How was Shade able to face the elghoul? Was it because he was a full-blooded demon? There was no denying he was stronger than her, but if he died, it would be her fault for leaving him alone with that thing—a thing that was there to kill her.