The Descent Series Complete Collection

by S. M. Reine

  She tried to breathe in again, but her lungs wouldn’t obey. They jerked and collapsed. She wheezed. Squeezed her eyes shut. Tried not to panic.

  Was she bleeding? Was she about to die?

  She tried to breathe in through her nose but only gasped for breath like a fish flopping on the deck of a boat. Her hands clawed at her chest.

  Her lungs drew a staccato breath before emptying again, and the second time she breathed, she almost filled them. The influx of oxygen made her head swim and the stars disperse from her vision. It hurt—oh God it hurt.

  Yet they were, impossibly, alive.

  James held himself over her on both of his arms, blood cascading down the side of his face. One of his eyes was swollen shut. She thought she heard him utter a few colorful swear words, but it was impossible to hear over the whine of her throbbing eardrums.

  He flopped onto his back beside her.

  There was air above. Empty air. Clouds of ash plumed overhead, as though a volcano had erupted in the nearby mountains. She couldn’t see the ethereal city.

  Elise finally expanded her chest fully. A spike of pain drove through her side.

  Skin brushed against hers—James’s hand. She clenched it tightly. He spoke, but she was slow to understand the words. “Pocket. Right side. Get the Book.”

  She braced herself before getting onto all fours. It felt like gravity had tripled, and Elise’s muscles shook with the effort. Her wrists wouldn’t support her. She rocked back on her heels and nearly fell over.

  James’s arm was curled against him, the hand crumpled and useless. The Book of Shadows protruded from his right pocket. It almost had fallen out.

  “Last page,” he gasped. “Put it in my hand.” Elise did as he asked, and James squeezed his eyes closed, took a deep breath. “Take off our rings.”

  She pulled hers off, and then his. Dropped them on the asphalt.

  James spoke a word of power. It didn’t boom through them so much as whimper—more like the pop of a cap than the usual atom bomb of his most powerful magic. But it was enough.

  Magic showered over her. The pain in her side eased. The cut on James’s forehead stopped bleeding as she watched. Her muscles strengthened and the ringing in her ears subsided. When the magic faded, she wasn’t healed—not completely. She was still bruised and battered.

  But nothing hurt, nothing bled, and she had the strength to get onto her knees.

  They hadn’t fallen onto the street of downtown Reno. Instead, they had somehow reappeared in James’s suburb, north of the city. His house was twenty feet away.

  As far as Elise could see, all of the grass, bushes, and trees on the street had died. Tens of thousands of dollars of landscaping pulverized in an instant.

  All magic had a cost. Especially the kind that saved lives.

  James sat up. “Are you okay? I landed on you.”

  She scanned the street, using his shoulder to get to her feet. “I’m fine. I think our fall must have been broken by…”

  Yatam.

  A body lay a few feet away, folded into the fetal position. The ruby stone she had used to summon him was on the street between them.

  She scooped the choker off the ground as she ran to him.

  The entity called Yatam may have been one of the oldest surviving demons, but he wasn’t impervious to damage. He had been pale the last time she saw him; now he was purpled and swollen with ruptured blood vessels, his gray suit was dirty and torn, and his hair was spread around him like a cloak.

  Elise had been wrong—she hadn’t taken most of the impact. Yatam had. There was a crack in his skull, and what oozed out was black.

  Against her better instinct—and everything she knew from first aid training—she put an arm under his shoulders and lifted. He didn’t react.

  “What are you doing?” James asked, hovering nearby. She could feel him holding the golden rings in one hand. After being isolated by the magic of the bands for an hour, it was a relief to be able to hear him again within her skull.

  “Getting him inside your house. We have to do something—we need to heal him.”

  “Him ?”

  “He’s the only reason we survived.”

  “My spell—”

  “Your magic would have done nothing if we had pancaked,” Elise snapped. “You can agree or disagree—that’s up to you—but you’d better get out of my way.”

  James pocketed the rings, took Yatam’s legs, and helped her lift him. The demon sagged between them, limp and useless. Elise almost missed the step onto the curb. They took quick, shuffling steps past James’s white picket fence, his dead lawn, and onto his door. The potted flowers on the patio were wilted.

  She staggered inside and set him on the floor harder than she intended. His eyes remained closed. Even with half of the skin on his face stripped off, he was beautiful.

  James flicked a light switch. Nothing happened. The power was out there, too.

  “Damn. I’ll have to find candles.”

  She stepped in his path before he could leave the room. “Heal him.”

  “I don’t have it in me to perform magic of that magnitude again today. I could kill myself.”

  Yatam groaned. His skin shimmered, and Elise glimpsed the lacework of veins in his arm and chest, as though his flesh had turned to a transparent jelly. He was going incorporeal, like so many demons did when catastrophically weakened.

  “Then give me your Book of Shadows. I’ll try to heal him.” At his stare, she went on. “You’re sensing demons and growing the muscles of a kopis. I sense magic—who says I’m not getting witch muscles, too?”

  He raked a hand through his hair. “Elise…” She held out a hand. He removed the notebook from his pocket and placed it in her hand, but didn’t immediately let go. “I’m going to walk you through it.”

  She nodded and took the Book. “Which page?”

  “Find it yourself. If you can do the magic, you should be able to see it. Hang on—we’ll need a sacrifice.”

  James hurried out of the room and disappeared down the hall. “We don’t have time for you to test me,” Elise called after him.

  “Just do as I say!”

  She thumbed through the pages, starting in the back where the other healing spell had been located. She found one that glowed with a similar red light, like blood and roses, and removed it.

  Yatam’s skin flickered again. She could see his teeth through his cheeks.

  James returned with a cage of mice. Living energy was the fastest way to gather strength for a spell, and they had already killed all of the flora on the street. Elise held up the page she had picked out. “This one?”

  He nodded and set the cage on the floor by Yatam. “That spell is dangerously powerful if wielded improperly. It requires immense focus.” James cupped his fingers around hers. His skin was warm and rough. “Words of power are not spoken, strictly speaking. It comes from the mind, the chest, your core —you only open your lips as a focus to direct it.”

  When Yatam’s skin faded a third time, it didn’t come back. He was a mess of twisted muscle with slivers of bone peeking through.

  James folded his arm around her and pressed a fist into her solar plexus. It still hurt after their fall. “Bring it from here. Gather the power. See the magic on the paper. Speak the word.”

  “What word?”

  “The word on the paper.”

  “I can’t read the spell,” she said. “Help me out.”

  “Look .”

  At his insistence, she lifted the spell in front of her eyes. It blazed at their joined touch. “All I see is light.”

  “There are words within. Incantations. Pages upon pages of painstaking inscription. You only have to find it.”

  Focusing on it brought the magic welling up inside of her, like water overflowing in a cup. But she couldn’t direct it. “I feel it, James, I do—but I can’t read the words.”

  He spoke a word into her ear.

  And then she saw it.


  The word of power rose from her throat unbidden, coming from a core that was not within herself, or within James, but somewhere between them. Her voice didn’t make a sound, but it scraped her chest on the way out as though she had screamed it.

  The magic unfolded.

  Ropes of energy bound her—from the mice and the demon in front of her to James’s arms wrapped about her body. Elise was connected to the earth and air, the fire in the core of the earth, the clouds in the sky. The house around her fell away, and she saw only the golden shimmer of life, and the gloom of impending death.

  And it hurt . It was like peeling the veins from her forearms and tugging until it ripped at her heart.

  With a sickening lurch in her gut, the magic ended.

  She could see the house again. The mice in the cage were dead, and Yatam’s skin had reappeared.

  Elise dropped what was left of the paper. All but a scrap had burned away.

  She sagged against James. “That didn’t feel good.”

  “No,” he agreed, “it often doesn’t. It’s worst when I perform magic that asks too much of my abilities.”

  “How do you survive it?”

  “With a lot of practice.”

  An hour later, Thom was still asleep. James cleaned the mouse cage, helped Elise move him to the couch, and watched his unconscious body from the doorway. “Who is this man?” James whispered, arms folded across his chest. “I mean, who is Thom really?”

  She sighed. The dark circles under her eyes had only deepened since performing her first spell. “His name—his true name—is Yatam.”

  Of course. Elise couldn’t have made friends with a thousand other demons. She had to have somehow picked up the most ancient demon who had fathered every single incubi, succubi, and nightmare on Earth. Why wasn’t he surprised?

  James glanced down the hall. “Let’s talk somewhere safer.”

  Passing through the doorway to his private office felt like stepping through a wall of pure electricity. He barely dropped the warding spells, just in case. Of course, even if James was one of the most powerful witches in the world, he was still nothing against a demon as ancient and powerful as Yatam.

  James set his empty cage by the back window, moved a fallen statue of the Goddess, and picked up the books on his futon. Elise watched him tidy without moving from the doorway, and he wondered what she saw. If she was developing like a fledgling witch, she wouldn’t know how to ignore the common signs of magic, and his room would be colorful. Everything his hands touched sparked, like striking a sword on the anvil. The room was attenuated to his presence.

  She stopped in front of the mirror hanging over his desk. The hairs that had come loose from her braid stuck straight out in every direction. He took the opportunity presented by her distraction to scoop up a few more books on apotheosis and the concept of deity, which she didn’t need to see.

  “What happens now?” she asked.

  “Relative to what, exactly? Having the city devoured by Yatai and brought into our dimension? The part where the oldest demon on Earth is sleeping on my couch? Or do you mean the fact that you—a kopis—just performed magic using one of my spells?”

  Elise shook her head. Her curls stuck out in every direction, tacky with sweat. “Any of it. All of it.”

  “Well, Yatai failed,” he said simply. “We’re still alive, and the world is intact, so we can be sure of that. We can also be sure she’ll try again.” He began sorting books on his shelf. He glanced at her. “Perhaps with the help of her brother.”

  “Brother?”

  “If he’s Yatam, as you say, then he’s her twin. They are ancient and immeasurably powerful.”

  “But he tried to keep her out of the city in the first place. He healed me when one of her fiends bit me. Yatam wants her to fail.”

  James shoved a book between two others with a sigh, pushed his glasses onto his forehead, and pinched the bridge of his nose. “An entity as old and as evil as Yatam is immensely clever. The route he would take to accomplish his agenda would be…circuitous.”

  Elise planted her hands on her hips. “I’m not easily tricked, James.”

  “No. I suppose you’re not.” He sighed. “Just because Yatai pushing through the gate didn’t destroy us doesn’t mean the consequences won’t be catastrophic.”

  She peered through his window, and he leaned around to find out what she was staring at. It was hard to see through the plants growing in his greenhouse—which hadn’t been damaged by their spell on the street—but they could make out the cloudy haze billowing from the city. It was creeping over the desert and blotting out the sun. James’s office grew darker by the minute.

  “The Treaty of Dis is a tricky thing,” he went on. “Some laws are utterly inviolable. For instance, a demon cannot be born with the ability to use magic. But there are a few laws that simply cause reality to reform to make the Treaty hold true. Yatai seems to have found one of those.”

  Elise sank to the edge of his futon. “She’ll keep trying. There are still eight other gates. And a reality that bends can still break.” Her eyes were distant, and for once, she didn’t seem to be in the mood for fighting. It was like all the strength had drained from her.

  James chose his words carefully, hesitant to broach the subject of the Union again. “I don’t think that we can handle her. Not a demon like Yatai. Not alone.”

  She didn’t seem to hear him. “I should have been able to heal Nukha’il.”

  “We can’t save everyone.”

  Elise’s face dropped into her hands. “Some days, I don’t think I can save anyone , James.”

  He moved to put an arm around her, but she slid away and shook her head. He sighed. “It’s getting dark in here. I have boxes of candles in the garage. Wait here. And…don’t touch anything.”

  She didn’t look at him.

  His cell phone alarmed as he stepped out the door, warning him that the battery had less than five percent of its charge remaining.

  The sound was like a spike of crystal driven through his heart. Between everything that had happened in the city and healing Yatam, he had forgotten that there were other problems looming on his horizon. And with no utility power to the city, it might be his last chance to check his email.

  James glanced at the living room to make sure Yatam wasn’t stirring before opening the message. His phone had downloaded it before he had lost the connection.

  It was from an address he didn’t recognize, but it was signed by Hannah. All it said was, “I guess we should talk,” with a new phone number at the bottom. There was also an attachment to the email—a photo.

  In the thumbnail, he could make out his ex-fiancée’s tall blond figure standing next to someone shorter, someone who barely reached her shoulder. Someone the size of a child, perhaps ten years old.

  All the gravity in the world seemed to have suddenly been inverted, like when he stood in the cathedral with Elise.

  James tried to download it, but a “no network connection” message flashed on the screen.

  He hit the button again. The message flashed a second time. “Oh, come on!”

  His battery died, and the screen went out.

  Anthony was sleeping when Hell arrived in Reno.

  He twitched awake and almost fell off the couch. Betty’s album dropped from his lap, hit the floor, and bounced closed.

  The right side of his face was tacky with drying saliva, and he winced as he tried to wipe his cheek clean. The spot where his head had been resting was a damp circle. His muscles ached, his back cracked, and it hurt to sit upright.

  The apartment was dark. Even the microwave clock had gone out, which meant he didn’t have power. But even without the lights, it was too dark, as though the sun had gone into hiding. How long had he been sleeping? It couldn’t have been night yet.

  He stumbled to the window, stiff and graceless. He had to press his face to the glass to see the sky beyond the bars and between the buildings behind them.

/>   And he looked straight up into a city suspended over his own. Ash fluttered and wheeled through the wind. The mirror of Anthony’s apartment building was decaying.

  For an instant, he felt fear. He registered that something was horribly wrong, and that he needed to call Elise.

  Calm blanketed him. It’s just a bad dream.

  “Yeah. I’m dreaming again.” He went to the kitchenette sink and splashed water on his face. He had been dreaming of the city a lot—every night, in fact.

  He dreamed of being lost among empty buildings on white cobblestone streets, of pulling the shotgun’s trigger and watching brains spray against the wall, of seeing angels wheeling overhead as madness overcame them.

  You should go for a walk.

  He needed air. The apartment was too small.

  Anthony turned to leave.

  A young girl, barely a teenager, stood in the center of the room. Her blond hair was looped around her head in a milkmaid’s braid, framing a face that was still round with baby fat. She wore pale blue capris and a white shirt tied at her midriff. And her plump lips were red—very red.

  She hadn’t been there a few minutes before, but he was certain that she had been waiting for him in the apartment for a long time.

  Anthony realized she had been watching him sleep, and felt nothing.

  Her mouth didn’t move when she spoke.

  Could you help me?

  The question sent sadness lancing through him. She was so lost and alone. She needed his help—needed him —so much more than Elise ever had.

  “Yeah, of course,” he said. “Anything you need.”

  She followed him to the front steps of his apartment building. Cars were jammed against each other in every lane, bumper-to-bumper, with nowhere to go.

  The hellish, rotting mass of the ethereal city loomed overhead. Anthony heard screams—but none of that mattered.

  The blond girl held out a hand. He took it.

  Together, they walked into the city.

  V

  Shielded

  February 2000