The Descent Series Complete Collection

by S. M. Reine

  James had forgotten that he was still in a memory. His heart fractured as he turned back to Elise and Betty. Their water fight was turning into a soap bubble fight. “She deserves that laughter, after everything you’ve done to her,” James said, and he didn’t bother trying to conceal his anger.

  “Then it’s fortunate that I’m looking for ways to make her happy, isn’t it?” Metaraon glared out the window. Wavering light reflected off the metal sink straight into his eyes, but it didn’t seem to bother him. “This…Betty. Hmm. She will do.”

  “She’s dead. You can’t do anything to her.”

  The angel shrugged. “Death is inconsequential.”

  “Take me to Elise,” James said, clasping his hands together—in prayer or begging, he wasn’t certain. “I don’t care what I have to do. I’ll kill Him myself. Just let her go.”

  “Don’t insult my intelligence,” Metaraon said.

  Motion and Dance faded again. It didn’t return this time.

  James shocked back to reality.

  Every sliver of contentment that Metaraon had dragged from James’s memory was gone in an instant. He was cold, damp, and kneeling beside Hannah’s motionless body. There was no hope left in the world.

  The only thing that had kept James functioning was the idea that Elise would be back soon. All she had to do was kill God, and she could come home.

  But she had failed. She hadn’t killed Him. Something had gone wrong, and she wasn’t coming back.

  Metaraon picked Ariane up. After all of the blood that James had seen on the angel’s hands, he feared that something terrible had happened to Ariane, but she looked unwounded—although something must have rendered her unconscious. Her hands were clasped protectively over her stomach, even in sleep.

  “Why Ariane?” James asked.

  “She is mine to do with as I please,” Metaraon said. “I’m grateful for your assistance today. It appears that you continue to have some use, young Faulkner, and I’m sure I will find use for you again.”

  He flapped his wings once. The buffeting air slapped James in the face, and he realized that Metaraon was leaving.

  James leaped for him, arms outstretched, but his foot slipped in Hannah’s blood. He dropped to his knees again.

  The light surrounding Metaraon grew impossibly bright, a gray burn that seared James’s retinas.

  When the light faded again, Metaraon and Ariane were gone.

  Through the space that Metaraon had vacated, James could see the trail again—and Nathaniel standing just a few feet away.

  “Mom?” he gasped. He splashed through the mud and fell beside Hannah. “Oh my God, what happened? Mom! ”

  “Metaraon,” James said, rubbing a hand over his burning eyes. “It was Metaraon.”

  Nathaniel didn’t seem to hear. He lifted her head into his lap gently, as though he were afraid of waking her up. “Mom,” he said again, touching her hand, her cheek, her neck.

  Hannah gasped.

  James almost jumped out of his skin. He had assumed that the blade in her chest meant that she was dead, but Hannah was still breathing, still bleeding—for the moment. Metaraon must have missed the heart and punctured a lung instead. But she was hemorrhaging quickly. Blood bubbled between the fingers clenching the dagger, and her eyes seemed barely able to focus.

  He gently pushed Hannah’s hands away to look at the wound. Metaraon’s blade was serrated—they couldn’t remove it without causing more damage. James stripped his sweater off over his head and packed it around the knife.

  “What did he mean?” James asked. “Why would Ariane be his to take?” When Hannah didn’t immediately respond, he swallowed down the foul taste of bile. “The father. Was it…?”

  “Metaraon,” she whispered. Her eyelids fluttered closed and didn’t open again.

  She needed medical care, and fast—but the nearest town was hundreds of miles away. She would bleed to death before James could reach civilization, much less a city with the kind of medical facilities she needed.

  But the Haven was close.

  James had no idea what was on the other side of that door in the cave. Wilderness? A village? A modern city with hospitals and surgeons?

  It was a gamble, but it was their last option.

  Nathaniel could have turned into a statue, and James wouldn’t have been able to tell the difference—he hadn’t moved an inch. His face was blank with shock. Tears streamed down his cheeks.

  “We need to take your mother to the Haven,” James said. “It’s the only way.”

  The boy sucked in a hard breath through the tears. Straightened his spine. Nodded once.

  Together, they lifted Hannah into the van, and she cried out at the change in position. There was blood, so much blood—the slightest shift made it gush over her chest again. Nathaniel crouched over her, holding the jacket in place.

  James threw the van into gear and slammed his foot down on the gas.

  It chugged up the hill slowly. Every rock they bumped over made Hannah whimper and writhe. It took ten minutes to reach the gate that blocked the path, and there was no way to drive around it.

  They would have to carry her the rest of the way.

  Nathaniel scooped Hannah into his arms. The sweater he used to try to stem the bleeding had already started to soak through.

  He staggered up the trail.

  “Just hang on, Mom,” Nathaniel grunted. She didn’t respond.

  They were running out of time.

  “I’ll go ahead and open the door to the Haven again,” James said.

  He sprinted up the trail to the cave. James lost his footing on the steep tunnel heading down, and he slid to the bottom.

  He slammed the door open with his shoulder hard enough to make it bounce off the wall.

  James rushed through the terminal’s menus, but he couldn’t seem to find the right commands. Nathaniel had made it look so easy the first time. Like it was just a few quick clicks away. But he could barely make sense of the menus, and through his panic, they may as well have been written in another language.

  Somehow, he found the button that opened the door. James clicked it, gray light flashed, and the archway reappeared.

  It must have taken several minutes to find the command, but Nathaniel still hadn’t brought Hannah down the tunnel.

  A hard knot of dread gathered in James’s throat as he rushed to find them.

  He didn’t have to go far. Nathaniel sat on the muddy ground just a few feet outside the cave. Tears streamed down his cheeks, and he didn’t seem to notice that they were dripping off his chin onto Hannah’s face—and neither did she.

  “Why are you just sitting there? The door’s open!” James said, dropping beside them.

  Nathaniel stared at him blankly. His Book of Shadows was discarded in the mud beside his knee, soaking up rain and mud.

  James pressed his fingers to Hannah’s neck, searching for a pulse, but there was none. Her heart was no longer beating. Her lungs didn’t draw breath.

  “I tried to help her,” Nathaniel said. “I had a healing spell. I used it.”

  What did that matter? Nathaniel was just a boy. He couldn’t be expected to harness enough power to heal someone.

  James pushed up his sleeves and looked at the spells that remained on his skin. But even if he had the power to heal Hannah, he had no healing magic on him now—he had never figured out how to transfer it to his flesh.

  But he still looked. And there was still nothing.

  “It was the best magic I could do. I spent weeks making that spell,” Nathaniel went on in an empty voice. “I can’t fix her. I’m too weak. And now she’s…she’s already…”

  He didn’t have to finish the sentence.

  Hannah was dead.

  13

  Allyson Whatley was given a hero’s funeral. Everyone at the Union base lined up to watch the processional carrying her coffin into the cemetery, while cannons fired and music played over the base’s PA system.

&nbs
p; Zettel delivered the eulogy in front of the cemetery gates. He said every nice thing about Allyson that he could think of, and made up a few others to pad the speech.

  She was determined, he said, she was smart, and she advanced the Union’s understanding of magic by decades. But there was little to be said for her personality beyond a professional level, and he felt that it was better not to remark upon it at all.

  Staring out into the sea of black uniforms, indistinguishable from any other Union gathering, Zettel wondered what his funeral would be like, and how many people would be there.

  He hoped that there would be no burial. He wanted to die fighting and leave nothing behind but a legacy.

  When he was done, he gave a flag to Allyson’s partner. He told her that he was sorry for her loss, but as he stared into her tear-streaked face, he felt no grief.

  He had worked with Allyson for six years, and she had been the closest thing to a friend he had in the organization. Certainly, she was the only person he trusted.

  But her death only left him angry.

  The body was never put on display—the damage to her corpse was too severe for a mortician to conceal. The onlookers dispersed shortly after his speech. Once they were gone, Allyson was removed from the cemetery again, because she wasn’t being buried. She was being put into the Vault.

  Zettel had sent a message to his superiors asking why. She wasn’t a demon—she wasn’t going to be resurrected. She was dead. Gone forever.

  They never sent him an answer.

  Zettel pushed her drawer closed himself. The lock clicked.

  A young commander caught up with him when he tried to leave the Vault.

  “Sir,” he said.

  Zettel kept walking. “Not right now.”

  “I apologize, sir, but it’s urgent. When the staff came in to prepare the drawer for Allyson Whatley, they found one of the other refrigerators open.”

  He stopped.

  “Which one?”

  Together, they walked down the aisles until Zettel reached a row of refrigerators that he knew all too well. He had personally supervised the storage of the bodies there after the devastation in Reno.

  One of the drawers had a red light over the door, indicating that it was unlocked. Zettel pulled out the table and stared into the dead face of Elise Kavanagh.

  James Faulkner hadn’t just destroyed half of Fallon, hijacked an airplane, liberated a prisoner, and killed Allyson Whatley. He had also broken into the Vault to visit the body of his former kopis.

  Why? What was Faulkner trying to accomplish?

  Zettel had too many questions and not enough answers, but he knew one thing: he was going to make that bastard pay.

  On a hunch, he opened the adjacent refrigerators. The father of all demons hadn’t been touched, but the mother’s hand had been skinned. Her palm was nothing but raw meat.

  A seed of an idea planted in the depths of Zettel’s mind as he stared at that hand.

  “Cancel the rest of my meetings with the OPA,” he told the other kopis. “And prepare a unit for transport. No—three units. Fully armed.”

  “Yes, sir. Where will they be going?”

  Zettel grimaced.

  “We’re going to Reno.”

  James and Nathaniel found shovels in the outbuilding and dug graves in silence. The kopides went into a single trench. They made no ceremony out of pushing the bodies into it.

  Once they were covered, James began to dig another grave for Hannah under the trees. Nathaniel stopped him.

  “Not here.” He pointed at the ridge. “Up there.”

  They climbed to the hill, which was just tall enough to see over the entrance to the Haven and the forest stretching below. Nathaniel jammed the end of his shovel into the ground and began to dig. He was soon drenched in sweat and rain, pale with exhaustion, wavering on his feet.

  “I can do it,” James said.

  Nathaniel set his jaw and kept digging.

  He dug until the sun began to set.

  “Lower her down,” Nathaniel said, climbing into the grave and holding his hands up.

  James handed Hannah’s body down to him. She was so light, still every inch the ballerina.

  Nathaniel didn’t set her down immediately. He wiped his runny nose on the back of his hand and said, “Go away.”

  James sat on a rock nearby, watching the stars inching across the sky and listening to his son’s quiet sobs drift over the trees.

  The owls were hooting already. James spotted a few bats emerging for a twilight hunt.

  It was an hour before Nathaniel climbed out again. A long, miserable hour.

  “We can go now,” he said.

  The van’s engine failed on the freeway about a hundred miles north of the Haven. James hadn’t been driving with any particular destination in mind, so having their progress stopped was not much of a hindrance—it barely even registered as an annoyance at this point.

  James opened the hood to find the problem. He knew enough about cars to fix common problems, but it all looked unfamiliar to him now. He couldn’t make any sense of the pipes, the metal, the hissing steam.

  It didn’t matter all that much anyway. He guessed that the engine block had cracked, and that wasn’t the kind of thing James could correct on the side of the road. Sixty years after Thistle bought that damn van, and it waited to die until they were hundreds of miles from any town.

  James thought about kicking the bumper, but that seemed like too much effort.

  He got back into the driver’s seat.

  Nathaniel was sleeping on the bench that hadn’t been drenched by Hannah’s blood. He had passed out from exhaustion almost the instant that James took the van onto the road, and stopping hadn’t disturbed his sleep.

  James wished he could do the same, but even though his body was willing, his mind was restless.

  His plan had been to take Hannah and Nathaniel to the Haven, then wait by Landon’s door until Elise returned from the garden. Now that neither of those things were an option, he wasn’t sure what to do. Especially not with Nathaniel his sole responsibility. Damn it all, James had never planned on fatherhood—much less when it involved a twelve-year-old that hated him.

  He sat in the driver’s door with his legs dangling over the side, watching the rain patter on the mud beneath his feet.

  James wanted to feel angry. He should have felt angry after everything Metaraon had done. But all he felt was a growing sense of helplessness.

  He covered his face with his hands, struggling to keep the despair from consuming him.

  All of his failures rolled through him like one blow after another. He had surrendered Elise to Him. Metaraon had taken Ariane—and Lord only knew where he had taken her. Hannah was gone, leaving Nathaniel motherless.

  James couldn’t have failed worse if he had been trying to do it on purpose.

  “Where are we?”

  Nathaniel had woken up. He took off his square glasses, rubbed his face, and then jammed them back onto his nose to squint out the window.

  “We’re still on the highway. The van’s not working,” James said.

  His son squeezed between the seats to join him up front. “Can we fix it?”

  “No.” James’s head fell into his hands. “I can’t fix anything.”

  Nathaniel stared at him hard. “So, what? You’re just giving up? Sitting here until the world ends?”

  “If you have better ideas, I’m willing to hear them.”

  “We find the guy who killed my mom, and we kill him,” Nathaniel said. “That’s what we need to do.”

  “Do you have any clue who Metaraon is? He’s the greatest of angels, barely a step below God Himself. Even if we could reach him—which we most likely can’t—we can’t kill him. It’s impossible.”

  “Let’s get Elise,” Nathaniel said. His voice broke, and a fresh tear slid down his cheek. “Elise can kill him.”

  The suggestion was like a punch to James’s gut. “She’s not available.
She’s already on a job, and we can’t bother her.”

  “So you sent her to kill God—that’s what you’re saying, isn’t it?”

  Of all the responses he could have expected out of his son, that hadn’t been one of them. James’s jaw dropped open. “What do you know about that?”

  “Enough,” Nathaniel said. “I can read, you know. And I’ve had access to all of Pamela’s journals for my entire life. I know that Landon gave Ariane to Metaraon so that she could make Elise, I know that Elise was made to kill God, and I know that you’re the one who’s supposed to make sure she does it.”

  Despair bubbled up inside of James. He gave a mirthless laugh. “I did,” he said. “I gave Elise to God. Are you happy to hear me say it? It’s not as though I had a choice in the matter, Nathaniel. It’s what our coven has always done. We groom brides and send them to Him. It’s a service to the goddamn world!”

  “But Elise isn’t just some bride,” Nathaniel said.

  “No. She’s the Godslayer. She was designed to kill Him. She should have crossed over to the other side, slaughtered him, and been back by now. The fact that she hasn’t—the fact that Metaraon was here at all—means that she’s failed, and everything has gone so very, terribly wrong.” James’s voice rose in volume on every word until he was almost shouting. “And that means there is not a single thing we can do!”

  Another tear slid down Nathaniel’s cheek, and then a third. But he looked angry, not sad. “There’s one thing we can do. We can save her.”

  Save Elise? That would mean infuriating God and Metaraon, breaking James’s oaths, and undoing over a decade of work. Even if they could reach the garden, it would be suicide. But Nathaniel couldn’t possibly understand that. It didn’t matter how much he had read.

  “You have no idea what you’re suggesting,” James said dully.

  “I can open portals that go anywhere. Maybe I can even get to her in—into the garden, in Heaven. We can bring her back.”

  But even though he didn’t want to consider what Nathaniel suggested, the idea had been firmly planted in his mind.

  Go to the garden. Find Elise in the Tree. Bring her back.