The Descent Series Complete Collection

by S. M. Reine

  But they didn’t attack her. She reached into the bag and extracted something red and slippery, which she flung across the room. Most of the birds descended upon it, but one crow landed on her bare shoulder, lightly digging its razor-sharp claws into her skin. She smiled as she fed it a sliver of meat out of her palm.

  “Ariane,” Veronika said, relieved. She switched from vo-ani to English. Ariane had never gotten very good at the language. “Where’s the Inquisitor?”

  Ariane Kavanagh extracted another handful of meat and let the crow nibble at it. “He’s busy. What happened?”

  “No way to tell now,” said the coroner, exasperated. He was a wan, skeletal figure that had to stoop nearly twelve feet to prod the touchstone’s body with his wand. “I thought I saw a stab wound, maybe, but after those damn birds, I can’t tell you what the depth of the injury was, or what kind of weapon inflicted it, or if it even existed in the first place!”

  The gore crow on Ariane’s shoulder snapped more meat into its beak, swallowed, and then rubbed its skull against her cheek. She lifted a finger to stroke its bony foot. “Would you hold this, please?” She handed the bag of meat to the coroner.

  She knelt beside the body and arranged her sweeping black dress around her knees so that it wouldn’t fall into the blood. The change in posture made the crow on her shoulder fly away.

  “How long will this take?” Veronika asked.

  “A few minutes. Is there espresso, by any chance?”

  “I’ll check.”

  Veronika strode across the café to the kitchen. The employees had been taken elsewhere for questioning, but the food remained, and she checked the freezer and pantry. No coffee beans. Trade had been suffering ever since the Union seized several of the normal interdimensional frequencies. All Earth commodities were growing scarce, but none so much as the delicious, bitter drink that was only becoming more fashionable as it grew more difficult to obtain.

  “Death of a touchstone, gore crows inside the wards, no coffee left in the goddamn city,” Veronika muttered, slamming the cabinets shut. It must have been a Monday on Earth. She could always fucking tell. Those hours were the worst.

  When she returned to the cafe, she found that Ariane had pushed aside several tables to make room for ritual space. She extracted glass vials from the depths of her skirt and laid them out in a row—some round, some square, but all in a dozen shades of red and orange.

  “Well?” Veronika asked, sitting on the edge of one of the tables and folding her arms across her chest.

  Ariane held up a finger, indicating that she was still working.

  Veronika peered out into the courtyard. It was just another dark day in Dis, indistinguishable from any other. The flesh orchards were stretching and flexing in the heat. Demonic nobles from the various levels of Hell strolled together, deep in conversation. Probably talking bribes, corruption, underhanded deals. Normal business for politicians, topside or below. The walkways around the torture room were empty, so whatever was keeping Isaac from attending the murder scene was not his usual business.

  Ariane began chanting and gesturing. Veronika saw nothing happening, but she imagined that the witch must have been performing something powerful and elaborate by the way she moved her hands, like she was weaving on an invisible loom.

  A fog coalesced over the body, filling in the holes that the gore crows had torn, until it appeared that it bulged with translucent fluid. And then the touchstone’s ghost sat upright.

  “There we are,” Ariane said, sitting back. She looked suddenly tired. “Jeremiah Sohigian, I believe.”

  She was right. It was hard to make out his hazy features, but Veronika had seen the itinerary of the arriving touchstones, read their files, memorized their photos. Veronika had been studying the details when she was called to the murder scene, so she had been looking at his image just a few minutes earlier. She recognized his flat nose, thin lips, and broad shoulders.

  It was one of the witches that had been meant to attend James Faulkner’s trial.

  Ariane splashed a potion on the body, and all of her magic vanished instantly. All that remained was the corpse.

  She gathered her bottles and stood, tucking them down the collared neck of her bodice. It was little more than a collection of straps that covered her breasts and navel. “There,” she said, sweeping the thick brown curls over her shoulder. A silver butterfly sparkled in her hair. “I had no clue Jeremiah was visiting. He was a beautiful man.”

  The coroner whirled a finger through the air impatiently, prompting her to go on. “And the murder weapon?”

  “My ability to reconstruct is limited. You’ll have to resort to traditional methods of investigation.” Ariane held out a delicate hand. “I want the files for the touchstones. I know you must have them. You’re not surprised to see him here.”

  Damn perceptive mortals.

  “You don’t have the clearance,” Veronika said.

  “My husband does.”

  “And you’re not your husband.”

  The door to the café opened again. Grateful for the distraction, Veronika turned to face the incoming figure, hoping that it would be the cleanup crew. But then she saw the red robes, the shadowed hood, the aura of darkness.

  The entire flock of gore crows took to the air, screeching and cawing. They swept out the door before it could swing closed again.

  Veronika dropped to one knee, and the coroner followed suit. It took a moment for Ariane to do the same.

  “Judge Abraxas,” Ariane murmured, head bowed.

  “What have you determined?” Abraxas asked, voice echoing from the depths of his robes. It was resonant and chilling, even to Veronika, and it made her briefly contemplate phasing away into shadow. Just having him nearby made her feel as though she were guilty and on the brink of execution.

  “Jeremiah Sohigian,” Ariane said. “Why would Jeremiah Sohigian be in Dis without my knowledge? I attend to the matters of all human guests.”

  Veronika got to her feet, certain that she was about to watch the Inquisitor’s wife get thrown across the room, or disemboweled, or something else equally unpleasant. The apology formed on her lips immediately. “Judge Abraxas—”

  She fell silent when the darkness in his hood angled to face her.

  Veronika wondered, not for the first time, what was waiting inside those robes. Abraxas was older than she was by at least a thousand years, and she had only been the head of security in Dis for a mortal century. She hadn’t glimpsed the judge even once. Not since he took on the role.

  “Veronika—notify the alternate touchstone, incinerate the body, and check on our newest prisoner,” Abraxas said. “Ariane, follow me.”

  The coroner gaped. “Incinerate? But—”

  All it took was one look from the hood to shut him up.

  The judge turned. Ariane got to her feet and followed him, gown trailing behind her. Its tail dipped in the puddle of blood.

  Veronika glimpsed a gore crow landing on Ariane’s shoulder before the door shut.

  Ariane Kavanagh followed the specter of red robes through the halls until they reached Judge Abraxas’s rooms in the west tower. That floor had been occupied by many judges over the years, and each of them applied a personal touch; Abraxas’s customizations were massive murals on every wall of the hallway depicting bloody wars between towering beasts. The paintings were no less ugly than the last hundred times Ariane had seen them.

  She waited to speak until they were in front of his door. “Do you want to tell me what is going on here?”

  “It’s not your concern.”

  “Jeremiah Sohigian was a human touchstone. That’s my only concern.”

  He opened the door to his quarters. The foyer served as a receiving room and office, and only Belphegor was in attendance at the moment.

  “Sir,” Belphegor said, standing from his desk in the corner.

  A single word emanated from beneath the hood: “Leave.”

  The attendant ducked
his head, pressed his fist to his chest, and left.

  “You told me that you would keep no more secrets from me,” Ariane said.

  “I told you what you wanted to hear.”

  She threw her hands into the air. “Of course I know that, but I had hoped…”

  “It’s for your protection.” It almost sounded gentle. He stepped across the room to the window and folded his hands behind his back as he surveyed the city below.

  “Isn’t it always ‘for my protection?’ Everything has supposedly been for my protection, and yet nothing has changed.”

  “James Faulkner has been brought to Dis for high trial.”

  Ariane felt as though she had walked face-first into a wall. “James?”

  “I’m surprised Isaac didn’t tell you,” he said, although he didn’t sound surprised at all. “All touchstones and Council members have been summoned. We’ll have a full Palace soon. Very soon.”

  “My God,” she said. “You’re doing it. You’re finally doing it, aren’t you? But…how? Now that Elise is—”

  “We work in mysterious ways.”

  She planted her hands on her hips. “You think you’re hilarious.”

  “I am many things, Ariane Garin. Hilarious is not one of them.”

  “What do I need to do?” she asked. “What’s the plan?”

  “You’ll do nothing. I didn’t tell you about this for a reason, so you will trust in that.”

  Ariane pressed a hand to her temple. “If you won’t tell me the truth, then why did you bring me here?”

  He faced her. His hand cupped her jaw. “You know why.”

  Ariane sighed. She did. Of course she did, and she could never deny him.

  She leaned into the darkness of the hood and pressed her lips against his. His skin was cold—he was always a little cold. He was also stiff, unrelenting, and completely unresponsive in comparison to a human man. He smelled like cut grass and dandelions.

  When Ariane stepped back, he still hadn’t responded to her kiss, nor did he attempt to touch her. But he surveyed her from the depths of his robes with a gaze that made her skin prickle with heat. When he spoke, the voice wasn’t unkind.

  “Discard your dress.”

  Ariane didn’t hesitate to remove her collar. She unhooked the buckle and peeled the straps to her hips, revealing pendulous breasts and a flat stomach marked with the spidery imprint of healed stretch marks. Ariane allowed the cloth to puddle around her feet with no shame. She wasn’t wearing underwear—she had been expecting to meet him.

  The judge gave no sign of a reaction.

  Ariane kicked aside her gown, stepped into his private bedroom, and climbed onto the bed. It required a set of wooden steps to reach the top of the mattress, which was caged inside ribs of black iron. She sprawled onto his multitudinous pillows, arms spread and ankles crossed.

  “Judge,” she said in a too-serious voice, though a smile played across her lips.

  He stepped into the bedroom and closed the door, sealing the rest of the world away.

  Done. James sagged against the corner of the cell as it spun around him. He could no longer tell the difference between the floor, the ceiling, and the walls. They flipped and whirled and fuzzed in and out of his head.

  Every side of his cell was painted. Every inch was covered in a symbol, some as large as his chest and others as small as his fingernail. The story it illustrated was immense: the collection and release of energy from his surroundings, the separation of the atoms in the stones, the dissolution of mortar. The explosion.

  All it needed was a word of power, but he could barely move his injured mouth.

  James tried not to think about what would follow once he activated the spell. It would release him from the cell, yes, but what then? He could crawl out onto the surface of Hell. A lone mortal with no strength, no clothing, no protections.

  None except the one he had drawn onto his left fist and forearm with a fingernail.

  That was the process of paper magic: the initial spell had to be designed, and then the energy could be channeled into a single icon. James had always drawn that icon on paper and saved it for later. Never before had he tried to draw it on living flesh. Especially his own.

  But he needed some defense once he escaped, and he had no paper in his cell. So he had drawn the magic on his arm. He was bleeding from the lacework of lines, but he couldn’t even tell the difference between that pain and the rest of his body. Not anymore.

  He was so tired.

  James’s eyelids dragged closed. His shallow breaths roared in his ears, like a frozen ocean rolling in and out at high tide, lapping at the beach of his skull.

  He dozed.

  Whisk, whisk, whisk…

  Dreams flitted through his mind. Distant oceans, the crack of ice, soft lips and callused hands and a sword melted in the forge.

  The sound of his door opening woke him up.

  James should have panicked. It was dark in his cell, but not so dark that an intruder wouldn’t be able to tell what he had done. All it took was smearing one symbol, or washing off a single rune, and all of his hard work would be destroyed.

  But he couldn’t panic. His heart couldn’t seem to beat fast enough.

  His eyes opened a fraction, and he saw the nightmare guard standing in the doorway. She wore her leather uniform with butcher knives sheathed at her hips and held a bottle of water in one hand.

  She gaped soundlessly at the walls, mouth hanging so low that he could see every tooth and all the way to the back of her throat. Nothing emoted quite like a nightmare.

  At any other time, he might have taken her shock as a compliment. But James only saw the bottle in her hands. It was a small, plastic, ordinary thing—the kind of bottle he might have paid six dollars for at a baseball game. Not something he expected to find in Dis.

  But it was water. Real water.

  “What have you done?” she asked, her hard face drawing into furious lines.

  James’s injured hand crawled up the wall.

  He touched one of the radial points and spoke a word of power.

  All of his bloody symbols caught fire instantly, illuminating with black fire that drilled into his eye sockets.

  The opposite wall vanished. He heard the explosion a second after it had actually happened, and the shock of the blast came even later. It ripped from his chest, rocked through his muscles, and tore into the stone.

  James could see everything he had written come to pass, one instruction at a time.

  The mortar melting. The atomization of rock.

  The shock traveled through the earth to tunnel a path leading to the surface. The flames raced up the rubble and disappeared, but he knew they would spread out at the top in a fireball that would melt everything within twenty feet—a preemptive strike to clear his path.

  What remained was an easily climbed tunnel to the surface, through which relatively fresh air rushed.

  Everything had happened exactly as he had planned.

  But he didn’t anticipate the way that the cell would pitch around him, making the ground rock underneath his body. He didn’t expect the nightmare guard would fall to her knees and almost slip through a crack that appeared in the floor. There had been no way for him to know that his cell was situated on top of one of those flaming pits, either, so he was surprised when fire leapt out of the gap and turned his cell into a brick oven.

  The nightmare screamed as her leg slipped through the spreading crack and fire raced up her hip. She had dropped the water bottle and it rolled across the floor.

  That got him moving.

  James grabbed for it. Almost missed. Then his fingers closed on warm plastic, and he stumbled to his feet.

  It was worse than an ordinary pit beneath his cell: they were suspended over a deep, endless chasm. Distant fires smoldered in the hazy darkness. He could hear screaming. He was fairly certain that it wasn’t his imagination.

  “No!” the nightmare shouted, trying to scrabble to he
r knees so that she could chase him.

  Another rumble, and the crack split further. She dug her nails into the stone to keep from falling.

  He hugged the bottle to his chest and stepped over her arms. He crossed the crumbling cell in two steps, stumbled into the tunnel, and began to climb. The earth had been melted into a hard, shiny tube by his fire, and it was already cooling—as much as anything in Hell could cool.

  But it was shaking, too. Just like the cell.

  Everything was going to fall into the pit.

  He didn’t stop to drink the water, even though every inch of his desperately parched flesh ached for it. James hauled himself up the tunnel’s slope, leaving behind the screams of souls and the nightmare that was about to join them.

  He rolled onto the cobblestone courtyard with a groan. The harsh light immediately bore down upon his ragged, exposed flesh.

  Something was shrieking on the surface, too.

  James pushed onto his hands and knees and blinked, trying to clear his hazy vision. His fireball had done more damage than he expected. A shriveled corpse lay nearby with blister-riddled flesh, and a pile of something indeterminate was still burning just beyond that. A demon—some kind of succubus—stood just outside the range of the damage. Her hands were plastered to her face as she shrieked.

  It was hard to focus further than that, but he saw a glistening tower over her, and a wall encompassing him and the building. He was still in the Palace. The city—and relative freedom—was just beyond.

  James got to his knees. Unscrewed the bottle. Splashed a few drops on his face.

  Relief flooded through him as he licked the moisture off of his cracked lips. It was sweeter than the best cider, more satisfying than a steak dinner, and easily as pleasurable as any of his long nights with Hannah when they were teenagers.

  He recapped it and stood.

  “Guards!” the succubus screamed. “Guards!”

  James staggered toward the outer wall, barely able to keep his footing. He focused on taking one step at a time.

  Footsteps thudded behind him. Men approaching.