The Descent Series, Books 1-3: Death's Hand, The Darkest Gate, and Dark Union (The Descent Series, Volume 1) (8 page)

James made a list of supplies, and she collected everything from the village of the dead. The bodies were in the same places she had left them. Nobody was coming back to dig graves.

When she returned with the stones he needed—pried from cheap jewelry at a tourist shop—and some herbs, James had created a circle of power out of pillow feathers on the bed. “What next?” she asked, eyeing his circle dubiously. He was a powerful witch, but she wasn’t sure he was powerful enough to work with such a weak circle.

“I’m weak. Let me piggyback for strength.”

Elise didn’t hesitate to offer him a hand.

He took it, and his magic washed through her. It sent warmth cascading from the top of her skull to her toes. Her awareness of James’s senses came to her one at a time—first, the smell of rain grew stronger, and then she felt his knee (which hurt as bad as she imagined), and then she glimpsed her face as though peering through his eyes. Her cheeks and eyes were hollow. She looked skeletal.

His emotions came upon her last. He was tired. Worried. Relieved to have painkillers. Happy to see Elise. Angry at all the devastation. Once the power securely fastened around them, it faded, but Elise was left unsettled. James
felt
too much.

He leaned back against the wall with a low chuckle. “I didn’t realize I looked that bad.” Of course, he had seen through her eyes at the same time she saw through his.

She rubbed her own aching knee. “You’re fine.”

Elise followed his diagrams to apply the stones and herbs to his leg. James activated several spells from his Book and left them on the bedside as they worked.

“Careful now,” he said when she pulled out the bandages.

She closed her eyes to process the information coming silently from James. He showed her the motions to make, and she did.

When she was done, he eased back against the wall with a groan. “How long?” she asked.

“I’ll be dancing again by tomorrow.”

Elise could tell he was lying through the bond. It would be days before he was in service again—and with a crippled Book of Shadows.

Her knee throbbed. James looked sympathetic. “I can lift the bond.”

“No. You’ll heal faster while piggybacked.” She locked what was left of the Book in its case. “I called McIntyre again,” she said, just to change the subject.

“Is he coming?”

“Yes.”

“Good.”

There was nothing else to say, after that.

R
ain coursed down
the eaves of the condo. Ocean rushed up the beach like it was going to devour them, and then receded after lapping at the wooden supports. It made the condo feel just this side of dangerous, even though James sat back on the bed. He kept Elise in the corner of his eye. She stood on the edge of the porch, and it made him nervous. He could easily imagine an errant wave rising to slap her off the balcony.

The spray blew back her hair as another crest swept toward their temporary condo. A thin layer of water sloshed over her feet. She reached out a hand so the rain drummed on her exposed fingertips, and a thrill raced through his stomach when he saw that her glove dangled from the other hand.

“Careful,” James said.

She turned her hand over so the rain fell on her palm instead. “Who cares?” she muttered. “He can’t get me if the world’s going to end anyway.”

“Let’s not test the theory. Come in and close the door. Our room is getting wet.”

She pretended not to hear him. She did that a lot.

James traced the outline of a symbol onto tissue paper. He could feel the power vibrating in his wrists as he wrote it. He had filled almost the entire notebook with spells before it was damaged, one at a time. He could do it again.

His aunt had been the inventor of paper magic, but he was the innovator. There were things she taught him that nobody else knew—ways to store immense, unthinkable amounts of power; methods of copying spells without performing them again; how to distort a spell after binding it to the page—and the knowledge was so dangerous that he seldom used it.

The only person he trusted to have in the room while he worked was Elise, and she wasn’t paying any attention to him. She was staring at the ocean and getting soaked.

He wrote the final curl of the symbol. The page glowed with their shared power before fading.

James carefully stood, using a tall stick as a crutch to stagger to the patio. The wind gusted around him. He braced himself on the railing. “Come inside,” he said.

She trailed a finger along her palm. “Do you think He can see when one of my gloves is off?”

He didn’t even like discussing the subject. James grabbed her arm and slid the glove back on. “You only get this contemplative when you’re exhausted. And don’t forget, I can feel what you’re thinking.” He tapped his temple.

Elise tucked her hands against her sides. “It doesn’t matter. The twelfth hour is coming soon. I should be searching.”

“You can’t do anything in this downpour.”

Another wave sluiced over the patio. She finally went inside, helping James settle in bed again.

They sat in silence with nothing to entertain them but the thrum of magic as his knee knit itself together.

He tried to remember the last time they had sat together in comfortable silence for longer than a few minutes. James couldn’t recall having ever done it before. They were always on the run. “This is nice,” he said, surprising himself.

He was even more surprised when a smile spread across Elise’s face. A real smile. “What if it was always like this?”

“What, if we were in a monsoon with a dislocated knee?”

“No,” she said, gesturing between them. “Like…this. You and me. Not fighting. Not running.”

James studied her for a long moment—damp hair stuck to her forehead, bruises on her jaw, bandages concealing her arm. “It can’t ever be like this. We can’t stop running.”

“I know. But…what if we could?”

The question gave weight to the air between them. James was tired, and it wasn’t just because of the healing. He was tired of having no home. He was tired of trying to stay a step ahead of the death that pursued them. In the past, he had imagined what would happen if he could stop, and it involved reconciling with Hannah and rejoining the coven, but James hadn’t dwelled on those thoughts long. The fantasies hurt.

He tried to imagine stopping with Elise. Living a normal life. He couldn’t fathom what that would be like.

“It would be nice to teach again,” he said slowly. “I could start a dance company.”

“I’ve always wanted to own a business.”

“Really? I didn’t know that.”

She shrugged. It wasn’t something they had ever discussed. “Maybe I could be in your company. I could be a professional with enough practice. I think it would be…fun.”

Those were the probably most words she had ever strung together that didn’t have anything to do with dying.

“You should sleep,” she said, tipping a couple more pills out of the bottle on the bedside. He swallowed them. “You’ll heal faster.”

She was right. His eyes fell closed, and he let himself relax as the painkillers kicked in. His breathing grew deep and even, keeping time with the ocean, and he thought he could almost hear Elise’s heartbeat. He could certainly feel the magic knitting his knee, even as he dozed.

The fatigue of healing and magic was powerful. It sucked him under.

He wasn’t sure how long he floated in the gray haze before he felt lips on his forehead. “Take care of yourself,” Elise whispered. It alarmed him on some distant level, but he couldn’t rouse himself enough to figure out why.

When James woke up, the active bond had been closed, and Elise was gone.

E
lise gave McIntyre
sixteen hours before calling him back. He was still in Las Vegas when he answered.

“I’ve sent two of my friends down to help you,” he said. “This guy, Bryce, and a kid called Diego—he’s already close. They’re going to meet you at the condo. They should only be four hours away, max.”

“You’re a goddamn bastard, Lucas McIntyre.”

He blew air out of his lips. “Maybe you’ll have a family someday. Maybe you’ll understand then.”

“Not a chance in hell,” she said.

Bryce and Diego. Elise didn’t know any kopides named Bryce and Diego, and she didn’t
want
to know them. Whenever she ran across other hunters, like her, they were always a disappointment—too weak, too emotional, or too fixated on her gender. She had never met another kopis she couldn’t hate, and that included her ex-boyfriend. She wouldn’t go into a fight with anyone but James or McIntyre.

So Elise armed herself and went into the undercity.

T
he entrance was
easy to locate. Demons left telltale marks to help each other find their dens: a stack of rocks, a symbol carved into a tree, a sign with demonic text written in graffiti on the back.

She found the trap door in the basement of a shop five miles away. It was dirty and smelled like a latrine, but the mark on the wall was unmistakable.

Elise descended the narrow steps. The air became still as the world above was blocked out, and soon, she only had her flashlight as a guide. When she finally reached the bottom, her legs were weak, her nerves were ragged, and one sword was drawn.

She took a deep breath and pushed through.

The undercity should
have been a home away from home for the horrors that lived on Earth. It
should
have been teeming with life.

But it was motionless. The buildings were rotten from time and mildew, and faced the path with open doors. Empty.

Where were the demons?

Elise took a step forward and her foot connected with something soft. She knew without having to look that it was a body, and once she recognized the first, she saw the rest—lumpy shapes spread across the uneven ground of the cavern.

She kneeled to examine the body at her feet. It had the same marks as the corpses of the humans on the surface. Bones gnawed by dull teeth, missing flesh, shattered skull. The tolling of the bells had struck underground, too.

Stomach acid soured the back of her mouth as she slipped through the undercity, stepping around bodies and avoiding sinkholes. Something smelled like brimstone.

She strode through the city, focusing on the path. Elise didn’t want to see the racks where they hung slaves for sale. She didn’t want to see the demons—many of which were indistinguishable from humans—that lay in bloody piles.

It looked so similar to Dis. There were even skulls over the doorways. They grinned at her with missing teeth and dusty eye sockets.

Many of the homes had pens in front of them, too. In Dis, it was where they kept their more docile slaves. In this undercity, there were strange, grotesque skeletons instead—unholy things that looked like a mix of pig and human. Chills rolled down her spine. She refocused on the street.

So many dead. The air was thick with it.

Elise ducked out of one cavern into the next, following a short tunnel that had been carved by a stream. It let out into a murky pool.

Something scraped on the shore. She lifted her swords, gripping the hilts so tightly that her arms trembled.

A dark form on the ground moved, then groaned. A survivor.

Elise made a wide circle around it, squinting through the dim red glow. It looked like a human, but no human had skin so papery-thin that the outlines of its bones were visible. Its eyes twitched open. They were completely black.

“
Tikest vo
,” it whispered in a quavering voice. That was the demon language. James spoke it, but Elise didn’t.

“Don’t move,” she said.

It gave another groan, and spoke again, this time in Latin. “Help me.”

Cautiously, she sheathed one of the swords and kneeled at its side. The young nightmare was dying. Its skin faded in and out of Elise’s vision. For a few seconds it looked like a skeleton with a tangle of innards; then it faded back.

Nightmares couldn’t be killed by physical means—it could suffer for centuries without disappearing.

“I need to find the clock,” she said.

A pale hand reached for her. She jerked back. “It hurts,” said the nightmare. “Help me. Please.”

Elise set her jaw. “Do you know where it is?” After a moment, it nodded. “I need to find it.”

The skin faded. The nightmare shivered. “This path goes down,” it said. “Down. Beyond the Temple of Yatam—a stair. Down, down, down.”

“Is that where the chamber is?”

Its skeletal hand touched her arm. Elise’s skin crawled. “The door is behind the statue.” Its black eyes begged. “Please.”

She didn’t have her exorcism charms, but the blade of her sword was carved with some of the same symbols. She slid the falchion between two of its ribs. “
Crux sacra sit mihi lux. Non draco sit mihi dux. Vade retro, Satana, nunquam suade mihi vana. Sunt mala quae libas. Ispe venena bibas.
” The sword glowed briefly. The demon’s eyes fell closed.
“Return to the Hell in which you belong. Begone.”

Its hand slipped off her arm, and a moment later, the body was gone. She stood over the place it had rested and stared at the empty ground. Killing demons was usually satisfying, but this time, she felt nothing.

“Be at peace,” Elise said to the empty chamber, sheathing her sword. She was surprised to mean it.

There was only one other path leading down from the cavern. Elise took it. It sloped into darkness, away from the red glow of the undercity, and she followed it down, down, down.

It took her an hour to reach the Temple of Yatam. The path opened into a quiet chamber with smooth walls. A stream spilled down the rocks to her right in a frothy mist, illuminated by the flickering glow of blue flame.

The only thing that made the room look like a temple were nine columns surrounding a faceless statue. It stared at her without eyes. Elise edged around it. As the nightmare said, there was a stair behind the statue, spiraling deeper into the ground. The air grew warmer and warmer as she descended.

Distantly, through the earth, Elise could hear the clock. Every swing of its pendulum gently rocked everything around her. Rock groaned. Dust showered from the roof of the stairwell. The stairs felt like they swayed from side to side—the slightest motion that made the entire world vibrate.