The Descent Series, Books 1-3: Death's Hand, The Darkest Gate, and Dark Union (The Descent Series, Volume 1) (6 page)

“Money. Now. I take checks.”

It looked like he had many colorful words trapped between the spikes of his teeth, but he swallowed them down.

Fifteen minutes later, she trotted down the stairs into Blood again, flicking the check against the fingers of her free hand. David Nicholas slunk behind her, his arms wrapped tight around his body. He wasn’t going to fall apart yet—not if he could hold himself together long enough to feed. But Elise hadn’t made it easy on him. His shirt was in tatters, and the flesh beneath it wasn’t much better.

The amount on the check was more than what they owed her for six months of work. It would cover the next quarter, too—and two months of her office’s rent. She tucked it down her belt along with her dagger.

“Pleasure doing business with you,” Elise said over the thudding of music. David Nicholas’s eyes flashed.

A scream.

Elise twisted, facing the direction from which the scream had come.
The dressing room
.

David Nicholas was already gone, jumping shadow to shadow to disappear from the stool and reappear at the end of the hall. He vanished around the corner in a swirl of tattered clothing.

Elise grabbed the doorknob to the dressing room and shook it. Locked.

Neuma screamed again, and the door rattled in its hinges as something heavy slammed against the other side.

She took a step back and unleashed a powerful kick next to the lock mechanism. The door shattered around the handle.

Elise kicked again. It slammed open.

Neuma was pressed against the counter, her back smashed into the now-shattered glass of the mirror. A gray creature with branded flesh crushed her, its stubby hands locked on her wrists as its slavering mouth lowered toward her chest.

“Hey!” Elise shouted.

The demon turned. Its bulging eyes were almost all black. Opens slashes across his face wept blood and pus, and saliva dripped from its mouth.

It focused on her, and its pupils dilated.

Elise drew back her fist and punched, throwing her whole body behind the blow. The demon’s head snapped to the side. It toppled with a keening scream.

The half-succubus cried out as she got off the counter. Several shards of glass stuck in her back, and blood poured down her perfect spine.

The little demon clambered to its feet. Elise pushed the bartender behind her.

“What do you want?” Elise demanded. The demon’s thin gray tongue darted out of its mouth to lick where its lips should have been.

It lunged at Elise.

She moved into its attack and it slammed into her shoulder. They hit the ground, and she rolled with their momentum. Her entire body felt the impact. It was like getting hit by a raging bull.

The fiend recovered instantly. Elise wasn’t quite so fast.

It came at her with a roar, and a flash of inspiration struck—the black lights, the vanity bulbs, the demon’s huge pupils. Elise threw herself out of the demon’s way, and it hit the wall behind her instead.

She launched across the room. Elise fumbled in the darkness behind the rack of costumes. She heard the sound of clawed feet against ground, and shut her eyes against the impact—then found the switch.

Click
. The lights over the vanities blazed to life.

Her eyes watered from the sudden light, but it was nothing compared to the demon’s reaction. It screamed and clawed at its eyes, stumbling toward Elise. A stray swipe of its claws slashed her arm. Pain flared, and she jerked back with a shout.

The demon plunged into the dark hallway.

“Wait here,” Elise told Neuma.

She expected the demon to go make a break for the club—and the fresh meat the partiers could provide—but instead it went for a door she hadn’t noticed before. Elise began to follow.

“No!” Neuma cried, grabbing Elise’s arm. “Don’t! That door goes down to the Warrens. You’d get eaten alive.”

“Shit,” Elise said.

“Shit,” Neuma agreed, stepping back into the room. She twisted around to look at her back in the mirror. Some of the glass was still in her back, and the injuries streamed thin, watery blood.

Elise grabbed the bathrobe and moved to cover the wounds. “We need to get you to a witch right now.”

“No. I’m fine. I have a charm to accelerate my healing to human speed. You know, for when I’m playing submissive.” Neuma grabbed a shard of glass and jerked it out of her back with a sigh. “Jewelry box. Toe ring with a red stone.”

Elise shifted through the gaudy bracelets and necklaces to find the ring. She passed it to Neuma, who leaned against the wall to slip it on her foot. The blood thickened and grew sluggish as she watched, slowing to an ooze.

“That’s a new toy,” Elise said.

“My girlfriend gave it to me. She likes playing rough.” Neuma pulled another shard of glass out, and another, dropping them in the trash can.

“Why did that demon attack you?”

“I don’t know. Don’t even know what it was. Would you pick some of this out for me? I can’t reach it all.”

“I think that might have been a fiend,” Elise said, ignoring the request. Neuma would have enjoyed it way too much. “They’re lesser demons, but it takes a strong demon to control them.”

“It looks like it dropped something,” Neuma said, pointing at a crumpled scrap of paper on the floor. Elise smoothed it out on her thigh.

It was an Eloquent Blood staff photo printed off the internet, and the former manager was circled in pink highlighter. “You sure this was on the demon?” Neuma nodded, and Elise studied it more closely. Aside from the circle, there was nothing odd about it. “Maybe it wasn’t after you. Maybe it was after that witch. Why would it have wanted the old manager?”

“I don’t know. Dumb bitch could owe someone money. Where did you see one of those before, anyway? Those are hellborn, and I don’t think you’ve been hanging out in Hell,” Neuma asked.

No, she hadn’t. Elise found herself recalling her fight against the death goddess again—the feel of her swords connecting with demon meat, watching the bodies hit the ground, the stink of their final, sulfurous breaths.

She had tried hard for so long to forget it that she wasn’t sure if she was imagining it now, but she was almost certain that the demons had been fiends.

“Maybe I have,” Elise muttered.

P
ART
T
HREE

The Clock

MEXICO – MAY 2004

T
wo demons were
discussing the end of the world over crispy fish tacos. They sat in a shady corner of the patio to conceal their strange faces, and spoke Latin to prevent humans from overhearing.

“Hernandez says someone’s taken over the pyramid in the undercity.” The first speaker looked like a man whose eyes had been wrongly attached at the temples. His name was Vustaillo. He was a nana-huatzin, and he made his living trafficking slaves for the drug cartels.

“Who cares? Let them have it.” The second speaker was a woman named Izel. Sharp teeth filled her mouth in rows like a shark. “Nobody wants that dump of a den anyway.”

“But they said she’s a goddess.”

Izel dug into her fish and let the grease dribble down her chin. “Such a goddess must not have godly brains if she wants anything in the undercity. She’s an idiot and a fool. May she enjoy her blessed ignorance.”

Those kinds of insults made her companion uncomfortable. He toyed with his beer. “You heard the ninth bell ring,” he whispered. “The clock’s been wound again.”

“More suicidal humans fascinated with death. They won’t accomplish anything.”

A shadow fell across their table, abruptly ending the conversation. A dark-haired human took a chair from an adjacent table and sat down. He wore a white button-up shirt and slacks, like a tourist on vacation, but he had a bandage on his cheekbone and not an ounce of body fat. Vustaillo could smell the magic pouring off of him.

“Good morning,” said the newcomer. “I couldn’t help but overhear your conversation.”

He was speaking Latin fluently.

Izel’s eyes narrowed to slits. “Who are you?”

“My name is James. Forgive me for intruding, but I heard you mention the clock, and I hoped you could tell me where it’s located.”

“
Bistak
,” she spat.

James arched an eyebrow. “And you too.”

What kind of human understood insults in the demon tongue and spoke Latin with such ease? Not the kind of human Vustaillo wanted sitting at his table. Definitely not the kind of human that should be anywhere near a doomsday clock, either.

“You should move on,” Vustaillo said.

“Come, now. I’ll buy your drinks.”

Izel’s hand lashed out, latching onto his forearm. Pinpricks of red sprung up where her nails dug into his skin. Even though she hadn’t touched him, Vustaillo flinched. Izel’s touch was murder. Sometimes literally.

“He said that you should—”

Izel froze. A figure had appeared behind her and pressed a knife against her throat. A thin line of blood dripped down the blade.

The woman at Izel’s back was made of hard angles, from her Aquiline nose to the jut of her wrist. In the sunshine, her hair was like flame, and she looked furious.

“Get this blade off me,” Izel whispered, barely daring to move her lips.

The woman spoke. “Let go of my aspis.”

The color vanished from Izel’s face, and Vustaillo felt dizzy.

Women did not have aspides. Only a kopis could have an aspis—but there were no female kopides.

Except one. And she was known as the greatest.

Demons whispered about her. They said she had no name and that she was as tall as a gibborim. She had become the “greatest” by slaying angels, which was something most mortals would not dare to do, even if they could. Obviously, the first two things were not true, but if the third was, then Vustaillo feared he and Izel did not have long.

“I don’t want to die,” Vustaillo said, and he wasn’t ashamed to be on the verge of tears.

It was James who replied. “Then you might want to tell your friend to let go of me.”

Vustaillo begged for her to comply with his eyes. One at a time, Izel’s fingers uncurled. She slid her hand back across the table.

The kopis’s blade did not budge.

“Release me,” Izel said.

A single word from James: “Elise.”

She sheathed the knife and took position at his back. He lifted his arm to show it to her. The demon’s hand had left a red imprint burned on his skin, but he was not seriously injured.

Vustaillo pushed his plate away. The sight of food suddenly made him want to retch. “I’m sorry. For both of us. We didn’t know.”

“The clock,” James said, voice mild.

“It’s in the undercity—south of here, very far south. In Guatemala. The entrance is hidden. You would never find it.”

“You might be surprised,” he said, pushing aside the plates to clear space on the table. He spread a map in front of them. “Where should we go?”

The eyes of the demons met over the map. What would be more profitable—a truth or a lie?

Elise unfolded her arms and folded them again. Her biceps made Vustaillo suspect she could pop off his head with a pinky finger.

He pointed at the map. “There. I can’t be more specific. I haven’t seen the entrance myself.”

“How close do you think that is?”

“I don’t know.” Vustaillo fidgeted under Elise’s stare. She hadn’t moved since almost slitting Izel’s throat. “Within five miles.”

“And how certain are you about that?” James asked.

“I said I’ve never been there, didn’t I?”

He marked it with a pen, folded the map, and put it back in his pocket. “Are you going to eat that?”

Vustaillo couldn’t think of a response. James ate the tacos, and he seemed to enjoy them despite the uncomfortable silence around the table. Music played at a restaurant down the road, the wind breezed through the trees, and the witch chewed loudly. He offered chips to Elise, and she shook her head.

“What else do you want?” Izel spat, fists clenched atop the table. She was trembling. “Our money? Our lives? You think you can threaten us without recourse because…what? You’re
famous
?”

“If you’re offering, we could use a guide to the undercity.”

Izel barked out a laugh, but Vustaillo perked up a little. “For how much?”

James stood, wiped his mouth with a napkin, and dropped it on the empty plate. He was a full head and shoulders taller than Elise. Definitely not bigger than a gibborim. “From what we’ve heard, everyone dies if this clock strikes twelve. Humans. Demons. Anyone on Earth when Hell crashes into us. It’s in your best interests to help.”

“For how much?” Vustaillo pressed.

Elise turned to leave. The message was clear: They would not pay. He may not have been a demon of much prestige, but he didn’t work for free. Even the cartels wouldn’t be so insulting.

With a roar, Izel shoved the table. It exploded in front of Vustaillo. He flung himself to the ground and screamed as margarita glasses shattered around him.

Izel leaped over the table, lunging for James’s throat with clawed hands.

She stopped short with a gasp.

Something crimson spattered on the back of Vustaillo’s hand. He looked up to see a silver blade jutting from Izel’s back. The exchange had taken a half a moment—no more. The only sound had been Izel’s shout.

Vustaillo’s heart shattered when she sagged against the kopis. Elise lowered her to the ground.

Nobody sitting outside the restaurant reacted. They continued eating and chatting, completely oblivious. Izel had picked the most discrete table, after all. Her body cooled beside him.

Elise stepped back and sheathed her dagger again. James put the table back in its place, picked up the plates they had spilled, and glanced uneasily at a waiter watching from the doorway.

“Get your friend out of here,” James said. Disgust curled his upper lip. And then they were gone again, as silently as they arrived.

The tenth bell chimed two weeks later.

JUNE 2004

E
lise killed fourteen
demons on the day that the clock struck ten. She knew this for a fact because she counted the skulls while piling the bodies.