Death's Avatar (The Descent Series) (6 page)

“I’ll kill you,” she said. It wasn’t a
threat. Just a statement of fact.

“Maybe. Alive or dead, I will come back for
you.” The flames outside flared, turning the smoke from purple to
orange before fading back to red. A blast of heat filled the
room.

Somewhere in the pyramid—somewhere
else—people were screaming. Human voices. Elise wasn’t the only one
trapped.

The goddess moved to block her view of the
window. In one hand, she held a staff of sharpened human bone; in
the other, a stone knife carved with symbols. The whites of her
eyes were consumed with the endless darkness of space.

“I didn’t expect anyone to find me,” she
said, “much less the greatest kopis. I’ve heard of you.”

Elise responded by twisting her wrists in
the shackles. They rubbed against the skin of her right wrist, and
she realized one of her gloves had been removed. She clenched her
fist.

The goddess must have seen what was on her
palm. She must have known what it meant. And she wouldn’t have been
there if she didn’t need Elise alive. “You’re missing something for
the clock—something that’s keeping you from tearing apart Hell and
Earth. It’s a sacrifice, isn’t it?”

“Astute,” the goddess said.

Elise shifted, and her chains rattled. It
wasn’t hard to be astute when she was tied up like a pig waiting
for the spit.

The woman knelt by her. She smiled.

Then she buried the point of the knife in
Elise’s shoulder.

Pain flamed down her skin. She grit her
teeth and took deep breaths, refusing to cry out. It only hurt
worse when the goddess pulled the knife free.

“You can’t think this will do any good,”
Elise said, her voice barely shaking. “You can’t kill me yet. Not
like this. Not without screwing up your apocalyptic plans.”

Her laugh was deep and throaty. From anyone
else, it would have been pleasant to hear. “Who says I plan to use
you?”

The goddess dragged the knife down her
chest, drawing a line of pain along her skin in crimson ink.
Elise’s blood swelled and dripped in a line down her ribs.

I won’t scream
.
I won’t
scream
.

Her resolve lasted for almost an hour. The
goddess lasted much longer.

Part Four: The Twelfth
Hour

James wasn’t sure if it was instinct or
Elise’s history of getting into trouble that told him something was
wrong, but he didn’t wait for her to return to the condo.

He stuffed what was left of his Book of
Shadows into a bag, slung it over his shoulder, and hobbled out the
door with his makeshift crutch. He could barely feel his knee as
magic knit the ligaments back together. Every time he took a step,
it tried to buckle under him.

Worse yet, it was still raining, and as dark
as night even though it was afternoon. The ground was slick and
muddy. But slowly, deliberately, he made his way toward town.

He tensed when he saw two figures coming up
the road toward him. When they drew close enough for him to realize
they were human, he still didn’t relax.

One of the men was built like a cinderblock,
and the other was a boy with a shotgun strapped to his back and
nervous eyes. “Where’s Elise?” asked the first without prelude.

“Who are you?” James asked, raising his
voice to be heard over the blasting wind.

“The name’s Bryce.” The cinderblock jerked
his thumb at the other man. “This is Diego. McIntyre said Elise
needs our help. Here we are.”

So they were kopes. Both of them. “I thought
McIntyre was coming himself.”

“He couldn’t make it,” Diego said with an
accent so thick that James barely understood him.

“Well, you’re too late. She’s already gone.
She’s gone into the undercity—looking for that clock.”

“So she’s dead,” Bryce said.

James’s fist clenched on his walking stick.
“No. She’s alive.” He would know the instant she died. It hadn’t
happened. Not yet. “But that could change quickly. We have to find
her.”

Bryce looked excited at the prospect of
going into the undercity. He grinned, and James saw that he was
missing most of his teeth. His skin had the tough, scarred look of
an old farmer even though he couldn’t have been thirty yet.

“Fucking fantastic,” he said. “Tell us what
to do.”

He opened his mouth to respond.

James
!

Pain flared down his flesh. Burning silver
spikes flayed his skin, baring his bones as the jungle blurred and
darkened around him.

With a roar of pain, James staggered. A pair
of hands kept him from falling.

“The hell—?” someone said.

But James was lost in a black pit of agony.
Smoke burned his lungs. Hot stone dug into his spine, and metal bit
his wrists, chafing until they went slick with blood.

No. Not
his
wrists.

A fist struck him across the face. His
vision cleared in time to see Bryce rearing above him with his hand
raised for another blow. “Stop,” James said with a shudder. Elise’s
silent cried echoed through him. He hadn’t even known she could
scream.

Bryce lifted him and set him on his feet
like he was a child. Diego gave James his dropped crutch.

“What’s wrong with you?” Bryce asked warily.
His hands flexed as he stared around at the trees, as though
waiting to be attacked.

“It’s Elise. Something is happening to her.
She’s—”

The pain blazed again.

James… James…

She was chained. Bleeding.

“What should we do? Tell us how to help,”
Diego said. His hands were trembling.

Help? They wanted to
help
?

He took a moment to size them up. Bryce
looked as dumb as the mud beneath his feet, but he was pure muscle.
Diego wouldn’t be nearly so useful—he was too scared. He wouldn’t
last long in the undercity, and James wouldn’t make it far with his
ruined knee, either. And he wanted that shotgun.

“Sorry about this,” James said.

He dropped his walking stick, pulled a slip
of paper from the Book of Shadows, and seized Diego’s arm.

Electricity leaped between them. Diego’s
skin turned ashen gray, and he collapsed, dragging them both to the
ground. Bryce shouted and drew his gun, but James held up his
hands.

“He’s fine,” James said. “He’ll be okay.
He’s unconscious.”

Careful to stay out of arm’s reach, Bryce
checked Diego’s pulse. “What did you do to him?”

“I borrowed his strength to heal myself.”
And to prove it, he stood—slowly, no need to tempt the trigger
finger—and stripped the bandages from his knee. It didn’t hurt
anymore.

James expected him to argue. There were so
few living witches that rivaled his power that most people weren’t
aware such healing was possible. But Bryce looked angry, not
disbelieving. “Are you nuts?” he asked. “Now there’s only two of
us!”

“And I wouldn’t have been able to go
anywhere without healing first. Tell me: would you rather descend
toward almost certain death with a scared boy, or the aspis who
just defeated him with a single touch?”

Bryce couldn’t seem to find a reason to
argue.

Elise had no idea she could hurt so much
without passing out.

Time made no sense. Had it been minutes?
Hours? Years?

Had the clock struck twelve yet?

Brilliant white pain burned through her arm,
down her body, through her bones. Blood raced down her skin from a
thousand shallow cuts.

She was a roast pig on a spit. She was a
rabbit being skinned. Pillars of fire raced along her spine, arced
through the sky, scorched the earth.

When she thought it couldn’t hurt worse, the
knife dug in somewhere new, and it did.

“Amazing how well kopes heal,” a voice said.
“You may not scar.”

The words jangled in her ears. She screamed
and screamed. Blood swirled past her head, filling the cracks in
the stone, and flashes of black blurred her vision.

The tip of a stone knife scraped against her
breastbone.

You may not scar
.

Her head swam. She had no blood. No
skin.

The goddess of death held something over
her, and it dripped warmth on her face, and Elise thought she
recognized the strip of pink dotted by freckles and—
oh
God.

The world couldn’t end soon enough.

James ran through the jungle. He didn’t see
with his eyes; he saw with Elise’s. He saw a limp hand on the
floor. He saw pooling blood. He saw iron chains and bare, dirty
feet.

Pain. So much pain.

He muttered under his breath as he ran on
his repaired knee, though he wasn’t sure she could hear. “I’m
coming—hold on—stay awake—”

Bryce crashed gracelessly through the trees
behind him, panting and swearing. Like many bulky, muscled men, he
didn’t seem to have focused on his cardio health. He couldn’t keep
up.

The rain poured around them, salty-sweet
like the ocean. Trees swayed in the wind. James’s shirt stuck to
his back, and he hugged the shotgun to his chest to keep from
catching on the foliage.

Where was she?

James tried to follow the feelings Elise
radiated, but it was difficult. Her mind made no sense to him.
Maybe if they had been piggybacked—maybe if she wasn’t in so much
pain—

A mark on a tree caught his eye. “Wait!”
James called.

Bryce stopped and leaned on his knees,
gasping for air. “What?”

A signpost was carved into the trunk of the
tree. It was a marker from one demon to another, indicating the
direction of the undercity.

His eyes tracked the signpost to the next
tree, and the next. There were small marks all around him. They led
back toward town. How could he have missed them?

“This way,” James said.

He doubled back, climbing toward the road.
Bryce followed as best he could. “Hey!” he shouted. “We got
company!”

James turned. It was hard to see through the
motion of the trees in the wind, but something was moving higher on
the mountain. Dark shapes.

“Demons?” James called back.

“A whole fucking century of ‘em!”

He ran faster, the Book of Shadows bouncing
on his back in its bag. He didn’t like his odds against a centuria
of demons—over eighty of them—not even with Bryce’s help.

As he followed the marks closer to town, he
began to hear yelps and howls. They were getting closer.

“It’s in there,” he shouted, pointing at a
shop the markers indicated as the entrance. Bryce was hurrying to
catch up, but he was still a hundred meters back. “I’m going down!
Can you hold them off?”

The kopis responded by drawing his gun.

James dove into the shop and went into the
basement. There was a trap door. It was open, but the stairs had
collapsed.

James!

Elise was screaming again. She wasn’t far.
He could feel her through the earth, through the collapsed paths,
just a couple miles away but completely unreachable.

Gunshots fired outside the shop. Bryce
shouted.

Fear dragged on James’s heart. What was he
supposed to do? How could he get to Elise when the only entrance to
the undercity was blocked?

He shut his eyes, trying to see through
their bond again.
Where are you? How can I reach you?

Through her pain, he glimpsed a bone scepter
and a stone knife. James fought to push back the sounds of fighting
above him and focus on her vision, trying to see beyond the bare
knees of the goddess.

A wall. Smoke. Window. And beyond that,
pyramid. It was tall. The chamber, and the clock inside of it, was
huge.

James’s eyes flew open. She wasn’t at the
end of a labyrinth of demonic undercity—she was just under the
surface, in the jungle not far from him.

He quickly paged through his Book of
Shadows, seeing how many battle spells he had left. There weren’t
many. The simple ones—casting fire, blasts of air—were almost gone.
Only the powerful spells his aunt told him not to mess with
remained, and they were both horrible and deadly. He’d been
carrying them around for years.