The Descent Series, Books 1-3: Death's Hand, The Darkest Gate, and Dark Union (The Descent Series, Volume 1) (31 page)

“
—nunquam—suade mihi—vana—
”

His fingernails scraped her wound beneath the stone.

“
Sunt mala quae libas—
”

Elise
couldn’t
kill James, she couldn’t do it, and Death’s Hand knew it. Her blade cut him, but it hurt her far worse than it could ever hurt him.

But it’s not James, not anymore, it’s a demon—I can’t do it—

His face spasmed.

For an instant—no more—Elise saw James in there. His eyes softened. His smile faded.

The power of Death’s Hand lifted for an instant.

It was long enough.

“
—ipse venena bibas!
”

Bile rose in her throat. The power shut her throat and plugged her nose, roaring like drumbeats in her ears, snapping over her skin.

She tore the second sword from its hilt and plunged it into James’s heart.

And everything became silent.

Death’s Hand’s eyes widened until she could see white at the very edges.

Elise,” he said in James’s voice, sounding stunned.

And then he threw his head back, and a soundless explosion rocked the ruins of the casino.

Waves of raw energy slammed into her, one after the other. Elise was flung against the wall as if swatted aside by a giant hand. Bottles of alcohol rained down on her, knocking into her elbows, her hips, and she threw her hands over her head to protect her head.

The mirrored walls fell. Glass exploded on the ground. The shelves slammed into her shoulder blades and pinned her to the floor.

A wind rose, knocking over the last of the slot machines. Dark energy blurred around James. A seizure shook his body. He clawed at his arms with fingernails as the black symbols cascaded off his flesh and vanished into the air.

James screamed wordlessly as the power of the exorcism rushed Death’s Hand toward the passages between Earth and Hell.

His fists slammed into the ground and an invisible string drew him up by the solar plexus, arching his spine. His heels kicked helplessly against the ground. Her sword jutted toward the sky, lodged in his breastbone.

With a sick popping sound, Death’s Hand was wrenched completely from James.

He stopped screaming.

Elise could feel the bodies animated by Death’s Hand throughout the city. She could feel the demon in them, the little bits of
vedae som matis
left behind. She fought to push herself onto her elbows, gripping her first sword, but she couldn’t support her own weight.

“Servants,” she gasped, and the words were whipped into the tide of power. “Return to the Hell in which you belong. Be gone!”

The cord binding Elise to James snapped, whipping away from her body and lashing into the ether. Death’s Hand faded away with a piercing scream. Every servant standing in the streets outside collapsed.

The wind died, leaving the casino in silence.

Elise fell to the floor.

And just like that, it was over.

S
lowly, the city
began to awaken. Car engines came to life again. Pedestrians got to their feet and looked around in confusion.

Nobody moved in Craven’s. Not the sleeping gamblers, who died when Death’s Hand ripped the building apart. Not Elise, who was in too much pain.

What was left of the ground was cool beneath her cheek. Adrenaline drained slowly out of her in the space of many long minutes, leaving her muscles liquefied. The wall crushing her was heavy, and the shards of glass beneath her were little stars of pain in her stomach and thigh and arms.

She wasn’t inside herself at all anymore. That pain belonged to someone else.

Elise never wanted to move again.

She half-dozed, somewhere between asleep and awake. Elise thought there was something she still needed to do, but she wasn’t sure what. The casino was still.

Something dripped into her eyes. With a groan, Elise wiped it off, and then she planted that hand on the wall and pushed it off her body. One of her swords was near her leg. She picked it up as she stood. The blade was stained with blood—James’s blood.

She worked her jaw around, trying to clear the ringing from her ears. She evaluated her injuries as she leaned on what was left of the bar for support. Blissfully, she seemed to have gone into shock. She couldn’t feel her shoulder at all anymore. In fact, she couldn’t feel anything else, either.

Lights on the surrounding casinos flickered. All the jangling slot machines were dead now. There were too many bodies to count. Elise couldn’t seem to find it in herself to care.

She surveyed the bodies on the street, which she could see through what was left of the walls. One had been thrown to Elise’s feet during the exorcism, and she could see that what Death’s Hand had started earlier began to reverse.

The skin on the body’s scalp shrank as it dried out. His lips drew back from their teeth in a shriveled grimace. Muscle melted away underneath his skin, and then that too dried, flaking and crumbling to white ash. His skull appeared in white patches, and then a burning odor filled the air, and his bones began to crack.

A fine webbing spread from his eye sockets and took over his entire skull like a window shattering in slow motion. Elise watched in distant bemusement as he became nothing but puffs of dust.

One by one, each body decayed and blew away, leaving the street empty.

Except for one body, laying in the middle of the sidewalk and surrounded by cratered concrete.

James.

She climbed over the rubble, almost slipping on a rebar as she made her way to his side. He looked like he had been thrown, too, but he had gone through a window. Her sword was still in his chest. She wrenched it free with a sick slurping sound.

Pressing her fingers into his throat, she held her breath. It was stupid, it was useless to hope, but she had to be sure.

There was no pulse, of course. Nobody could survive getting stabbed in the heart—not even the vessel of Death’s Hand.

Elise bowed her head over his, pressing her mouth to the top of his head. His hair smelled like brimstone, plaster, and his shampoo. “I’m sorry,” she murmured, eyes burning. “I’m so sorry.”

Now she knew why she felt so hollow inside.

Was it supposed to hurt this bad? Was she supposed to feel like a fist had wrenched her heart from its chest, leaving a gaping void under her ribs? She had never felt such a thing. Not when her dog died as a child, nor when her parents left her with James’s aunt because they moved faster without her. Not even when Pamela Faulkner died.

Her shoulders shook. She couldn’t breathe. Elise tilted her head back, squeezing her eyes shut and gritting her teeth against the ache swelling inside of her gut.

A ragged wail tore from her, shattering the silence of the night.

Her fingers dug into James’s chest, slippery with his blood. Becoming bound as kopis and aspis was an oath: to stand shoulder-to-shoulder in their battles, to protect one another, and when the time came—die together. She was supposed to guard him. She wasn’t meant to kill him.

He gave up everything for her. Everything.

His skin cooled to the temperature of the air. Elise wanted to cover him in a blanket to give him the modesty in death Ann hadn’t given him for the last few hours of his life. He shouldn’t have to be naked and vulnerable when everything else had been stripped from them.

Elise’s chest hitched. “James,” she whispered.

And a voice whispered back.

Elise
…

Her eyes fell on the stone staff. It was a few feet away in the crater, no longer alive even though it steamed slightly in the damp air.

All the mighty power of Death’s Hand was gone, boiled down to a tiny flicker of demonic energy inside the cylinder. It gave a fraction of a roll onto its side, barely more than an inch.

Elise…

It was what was left of
vedae som matis
, but it sounded very much like James.

That tiny flicker of energy tugged at her.

Elise stepped away from James without thinking about it, sliding down one of the craters to reach for the stone cylinder. Her fingers hesitated just over its surface. She could feel the heat radiating from it.

It wasn’t just demonic power. It was necromantic power, too—a little bit of the demon, a little bit of Ann, a little bit of James.

She glanced up at his body again, and the grief sliced through her anew.

He would never cast another spell. They would never have Sunday breakfast together again. She would never see him smile again, that special soft smile that she never saw him aim at Stephanie.

Unless…

She closed her hand on the stone cylinder even as every bit of her common sense screamed
no
! Elise had been tortured by the death goddess using the stone as a knife. She had felt it wrapping around her flesh as Death’s Hand tried to possess her. It was the reason James was dead in the first place.

The flicker of light was fading fast.

She kneeled over James, gripping the stone in both hands as she studied him. His skin was gray. There had to be some way to use what was left of its power, but she didn’t know what to do with it.

How did James do magic? A circle of power. Incantations. Elise wasn’t a witch. She couldn’t do any of that.

She leaned over him. The stone vibrated, and she touched it very gently to the wound on his chest.

Light erupted from the stone.

Shocked, Elise tried to let go, but her fingers stayed welded to its surface. Heat rushed through her fingers, up her arms, and into her body.

The symbols tracing the stone doubled and split from its surface, one set rising from the vessel in burning white lines. They swirled over her body and ruffling the little hairs at the back of her neck. The golden light filled her vision until she couldn’t see anything around herself.

It wasn’t
vedae som matis
she felt in that moment. It was something more, so much more, like staring into eternity, and the only anchor keeping her from spilling out into nothingness was her grip on the vessel. Some great beast pulsed in the beyond, rubbing past Elise through the marks. It wasn’t demonic, or even angelic. It was something greater still.

The golden fire shifted from Elise’s arms to her palms, glowing through her gloves. The power beat in time with her heart.

God, the
power
.

She felt as though she had never lived before. Wouldn’t anyone kill to feel this energy for any length of time—to gaze into forever and clutch it in her grasp?

Through the light, she could see James sprawled on the ground, but she could see the dead for miles and beyond. It wasn’t the corpses themselves—those had all dissolved with the exorcism—but a vast, endless ocean of souls, animal and demon and otherwise. They formed the Earth beneath her, and Life roared above her as the sky.

She could resurrect anybody. Elise could put her hands upon someone laid to rest a millennia ago and bring them back at a whim. She could touch any number demons she had sent to Hell and reanimate them as her own. She might even be able to improve upon what Ann had done—she could make them as alive as she was. Their hearts would beat for Elise.

James brought Elise down from her high. The instant she thought of him, the souls around her came into focus, and she could feel him clearly. His soul glowed brighter than any other in the vast ocean.

The power began to slip from her grasp.

She gazed down at his face, and even through the light, she could see the triangle of his jaw, the day-old stubble, the well-defined cheekbones.

Elise didn’t really want power. She just wanted James.

Her hands overflowed with the symbols needed to call a soul into a body, to make the heart beat and the brain function. The magic wanted to be used, so Elise didn’t try to resist. She laid her hands upon James’s temples. She opened to him like a flower’s petals parting to the sun, and the symbols from the cylinder flowed from the sword into her shield.

James’s soul, torn apart so violently by
vedae som matis
, began to mend as Elise watched.

His heart beat once. Twice.

The rhythm sped until its steady beat matched her own. Elise’s lungs expanded, and his inflated as well, drawing air through his lips and into his chest. It was strained, difficult at first, and she labored to breathe for them both, but it became easier with every breath.

The blood began flowing. Color faded into his skin, and warmth spread into his muscles and tendons. Electrical impulses sparked in the air between them, and something seemed to click on in his brain.

Her heart beat with his, one muscle in two chests. Slowly, so slowly, Elise’s heart became her own again, but even as she left, his continued to beat. It wasn’t as clean a cut as she would have expected. Some of Elise remained in James, and some of him remained in her, but when he kept breathing it wasn’t her life that made his lungs work.

Only when his body functioned did his soul return. It drifted into him, as softly as a feather fluttering into the ground. It settled into his body with a soft sigh that curled through the room, and she suddenly felt as though a hole inside of her had filled. She was complete again.

James…

Eternity shut down, withdrawing from Elise. The burning glow of her hands flickered, then disappeared. The power blew out of her again. The gold light emanating from the stone died, leaving nothing but rock in its place.

The world went dark.

Elise sagged, suddenly weak. Her eyes cleared and she could see the casino once more. Everything was still.

And James coughed.

He rolled onto his side. His legs drew up into his chest, curling around the sword wound. Every cough brought a fresh groan of pain, punctuated with another cough when he sucked in the dusty air. “James,” Elise said, reaching out to roll him onto his back again. Her hands were shaking.

He frowned up at her, brow furrowed with pain, confusion. His eyes were clear now the poison was flushed out of his system, but the stab wound in his chest trickled blood. “Elise?” James’s jaw chattered as he spoke, his skin clammy underneath her bare fingertips. “What happened? What’s going on?”