Read The Descent Online

Authors: Alma Katsu

Tags: #Fiction, #Literary, #Occult & Supernatural, #General, #Historical

The Descent

BOOK: The Descent
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THE DESCENT

The final novel in Alma Katsu’s “dark, super sexy” (
Cosmopolitan UK
) trilogy that began with
The Taker
and
The Reckoning
—the international literary sensations hailed as “imaginative, wholly original” (
Booklist,
starred review) and “beautiful, mesmerizing” (
Library Journal
). . . .

A
CCLAIM FOR

THE RECKONING

“Fascinating and thrilling. . . . Grips you from start to finish.”


Historical Novel Review

“It will utterly enchant you. . . . You won’t be able to stop thinking about it.”


RT Book Reviews

“Gripping, pulse-pounding. . . . A whole new level of suspense.”


Night Owl Reviews

“In this supernatural drama, the heartbeat between love and obsession is very faint.”


Genre Go Round Reviews

THE TAKER

C
HOSEN AS ONE OF
B
OOKLIST

S
T
OP
T
EN
D
EBUT
N
OVELS FOR
2011

“Alma Katsu’s searing tale will seduce you from page one. . . .
The Taker
is as irresistible as the hauntingly beautiful, pleasure-seeking immortals who scorch its pages. You have to experience it for yourself!”

—Kresley Cole, #1
New York Times
bestselling author of
MacRieve

M
ORE PRAISE FOR
A
LMA
K
ATSU AND
THE TAKER

“A frighteningly compelling story about those two most human monsters—desire and obsession. It will curl your hair and keep you up late at night.”

—Keith Donohue, author of
Centuries of June

“A spellbinding journey through time. . . . A rare and addictive treat.”

—Danielle Trussoni,
New York Times
bestselling author of
Angelopolis

“Seductive, daring, soaring, and ultimately gut-wrenching. . . .”

—Jamie Ford,
New York Times
bestselling author of
Songs of Willow Frost

“A dark, gothic epic. . . . Enchanting and enthralling!”

—M. J. Rose, international bestselling author of
Seduction

“Sexy, dark romance.
The Taker
never strays from this question: What price are we willing to pay to completely possess another?”

—Alexi Zentner, author of
Touch

“Marvelous. . . .
The Taker
will keep you turning pages all night.”

—Scott Westerfeld,
New York Times
bestselling author of
Goliath

“A haunting gothic historical with a searing modern twist that will captivate your imagination.”

—C. W. Gortner, author of
The Tudor Conspiracy

“Nearly impossible to put down. . . . Beautifully written, heartfelt.”


Fantasy Book Critic

“Like the hybrid love-child of a vampire novel and a historical classic,
The Taker
could be described as
Twilight
for grown-ups.”

—Steph Zajkowski, TVNZ

“Beneath the trappings of undead lore is a love story that’s deeply old-fashioned.”


Kirkus Reviews

“Every chapter pulls you deeper into its dark, luscious web of mystery and mythology.
The Taker
is at once gruesome and opulent, disturbing and enthralling, bitter and poignant. But most of all, it is utterly unforgettable.”


Diary of an Anomaly

“Full of suspense, twists and turns, and thrills.”


Just Another Story

“I kept telling myself ‘just one more page’ as I read deep into the night. I couldn’t tear myself away. . . . This is unlike anything else I have ever read.”


The Fiction Enthusiast

“Astonishing. . . . Brutal, wrenching, and ultimately moving.”

—Meg Waite Clayton, bestselling author of
The Wednesday Daughters

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For my husband, Bruce
.

Thanks for keeping things from falling apart
.

Hell is empty and all the devils are here.
—William Shakespeare,
The Tempest

PROLOGUE

T
he dreams came almost every night.

At first, I almost didn’t take notice of them. When they started, Luke had been gone only a few months and I was in that black fog that follows the death of a loved one. During the day, grief would fall on me suddenly. I’d look at the clock to find that an hour had passed and yet I couldn’t account for the time. Evenings were worse; I’d lie alone in the bed Luke and I had shared waiting for the night to inch by. Evening meant long hours of insomnia, listlessness, fitful snatches of sleep, and the pale lavender-gray of dawn coming too soon. The occasional nightmare could do little to impress me compared to that slow hell.

I first realized I was having nightmares when bits would suddenly bob to the surface of my consciousness: a flash of pale pink flesh, soft ochre candlelight, a streak of crimson blood.
It was only by the end of the fourth month, when I started to have something resembling rest again, that the nightmares bled through, and I couldn’t fail to take notice of them then.

What made them especially unsettling was that they were not about Luke but about Jonathan. I hadn’t thought about Jonathan in a long time, certainly not after Luke and I settled on the upper peninsula of Michigan, in that lovely cottage where we lived together for four years. It would’ve been logical for Luke to be the one haunting my subconscious considering what we’d gone through at the end: his long, lingering illness; months shuttling him through rounds of treatments that all turned out to be for naught; weeks in the ICU; and the final stretch in the hospice, where he waited to die. That living nightmare had consumed my days for our last nine months together, and I couldn’t see any reason why it shouldn’t consume my sleeping hours as well.

I remember quite vividly the dream that made me realize something unusual was going on. It started up like the beginning of a movie I’d seen before, and sensing that I was about to have the same nightmare I’d by then been having nightly, I tried to wake myself up. But that never works in dreams, does it? No matter how hard you try, you can’t make yourself wake up. Instead, it’s like you’re Houdini trussed up in a straitjacket and chains and submerged in a dread that’s numbing and deadly, like ice-cold water. There’s nothing you can do but struggle against the restraints in the hope of freeing yourself or just keep going until, by the mercy of God, you’re released from the dream’s stifling clutches.

The dreams always took place somewhere that was both familiar and yet unknown to me, in the peculiar way that
the subconscious works. Sometimes it was in a dark, shaggy forest that could almost be the Great North Woods that had surrounded my childhood home of St. Andrew, but was not; or a crumbling castle that I might’ve visited during my never-ending travels, but had not; or a dilapidated mansion with broken plaster walls and ruined woodwork that could’ve been one of the houses I’d lived in during my long, circuitous life, but was not. Strangely familiar, familiarly strange, these settings that tried to embrace me and push me away at the same time.

The dream that struck me as too strange to be simply the normal functioning of the unconscious mind started abruptly in a new setting, a dark, narrow passage whose walls were made of huge stone blocks. Those walls gave the impression that I was in a solidly made old fortress. From the cold dampness of the stone and the tang of mildew in the air, I assumed the passage was underground. It went on and on, turning and turning again, twisting in on itself like a maze. What’s more, the passage was disconcertingly narrow: a normal-size person wouldn’t have been able to fit, and small as I am I could barely squeeze through. I hurried along as quickly as I could, desperate to get out of the claustrophobic space.

Finally, I came to a door. It seemed to be as broad as it was tall and somewhat crudely made, its heavy wooden planks held together with metal straps. The wood stain had yellowed with time and almost glowed beckoningly in the darkness, but up close, the lovely patina gave way to a frenzy of scratches, as though the door had been attacked by frantic clawed animals.

Although this subterranean room was likely used for storage or perhaps as a wine cellar, the knot in my stomach told me that probably wasn’t the case. I knew from other dreams
on other nights what I would find behind the door; something bad awaited me and I didn’t want to go on. I wanted to wake up, to break the dream’s horrible spell, but once I’d entered the dream world, I was locked in, doomed to play out the dream to its end.

I opened the door. Air rushed at me, damp and foul, the way air smells and feels when it has been shut up underground. There was very little light and I could see only a few feet in front of me. I sensed movement in the darkness ahead and went toward it. You might even say that I went toward it
because
of what was waiting for me, something I was helpless to resist under any circumstances.

The first thing I saw were his hands: a man’s hands wearing heavy iron manacles. Then I saw his arms, drawn overhead by a chain attached to the manacles. There were nights in my dreams when the man had been forced to dangle at the end of his chain, and let me tell you, that was a horrible sight, tendons strained to the snapping point, his arms wrenched from their sockets. Tonight, he had been allowed to stand, though his feet could barely touch the ground. Even though I couldn’t see the man’s face, I knew who it was; I could tell by the broad shoulders and the long torso, the elegant natural arch to the small of his back. All I could see of his face was a cheekbone and part of his jaw, visible through a tangle of disheveled black hair, but that, too, was enough.

It was Jonathan, stripped naked and bound in chains. Every one of the dreams, regardless of where it was set or how it started, always ended the same way, with Jonathan being tortured and punished by someone I couldn’t see, for reasons I wasn’t told. As he hung from his manacles, he reminded me
of Saint Sebastian, his flesh pale and his head tilted sideways as though nobly resigned to his fate, ready to endure whatever punishment awaited him. There were bruises on his otherwise perfect body: a bloom of red and purple on one hip, a darker, larger one running the length of his right flank. His upper back bore crosshatched scrapes. He gleamed from head to toe with sweat and was flecked with grime. Needless to say, seeing him like this was a punch to the gut and made me violently ill. It also repulsed me to realize that despite his brutalized condition, I still found him beautiful—because it was impossible for him
not
to be.

I called his name but he couldn’t hear me. It was as though we were in two separate rooms and I was looking at him through soundproof glass. It was then that I realized his wounds weren’t healing instantly as they had when he was immortal, the same as I, and this meant he was again made of flesh and blood. And if he were mortal, that also meant it was possible for him to feel pain again. He was suffering.

BOOK: The Descent
8.65Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
ads

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