The Descent Series Complete Collection

by S. M. Reine

  The first level of scaffolding was only two stories off the ground, no more than a bridge between buildings. But it gave James a perfect view of the fight below.

  The chaos stretched all the way up Sierra Street toward the university, where that dirigible was still floating. The fog of nightmares was gathering again. As black as the Union uniforms were, the nightmares were darker, sucking all light away from the surrounding world.

  Neuma was in the middle of it all. She had climbed on top of the tank. As James watched, she reached down the hatch to pull a man out. He was limp in her arms, staring, helpless to the full force of her succubus charms.

  He didn’t even fight back when she took his gun and shot him in the face.

  “Keep climbing,” James said, more to remind himself than Nathaniel.

  They had to scale fifteen stories’ worth of ladders to reach the bottom of the mirror city, and by the time they did, James’s sewn palm was burning, his legs were weak, and he was out of breath.

  Jerica met them when they stopped. She had lost her flail, but appeared to be uninjured. “You guys okay?” she asked, giving Nathaniel a hand up.

  “Sure thing,” Tania said brightly.

  The nightmare grinned at her, as if she knew what Tania had done and totally approved. “Great. Let’s keep going.”

  They ran across the scaffolds bridging the space over Virginia. A fog of nightmares swirled around them as they ran, tangling between their feet, but they couldn’t seem to amass with Jerica nearby—she cut through them like a plow.

  Even though they dispersed as quickly as they appeared, James could hear voices whispering again.

  You don’t deserve to get Elise back.

  Nathaniel is going to die.

  “We have company!” Jerica shouted, louder than the other voices.

  An entire unit of Union men had climbed to the scaffolding across the street. They were wearing full riot gear and carrying guns. The man leading them was the only one without a helmet, and James recognized Gary Zettel—the commander that he knew to be responsible for his arrest.

  And he looked furious .

  Zettel lifted his gun to aim.

  Jerica flashed across the scaffolding and reappeared in front of him. She slammed the heel of her palm into his nose.

  One of the kopides opened fire. Bullets swooshed through Jerica’s body and pinged into the metal around James. Tania grabbed Nathaniel, hugging him tightly to her chest, and turned so that she was between him and the men.

  She took three bullets in the back.

  Tania fell without so much as a scream. She fell into Nathaniel, knocking him to the scaffold.

  The gunfire stopped as abruptly as it had started. Jerica flashed between the men, ripping away guns, lashing out with fists and sneakers. She wasn’t much of a fighter, but she didn’t have to be when she was impossible to catch.

  James shoved Tania’s body off of his son. The bodyguard was dead. “Oh my God ,” Nathaniel said again. There was blood all over him, but none of it looked to be his.

  “We’re almost there,” James said.

  They jumped across a gap and climbed the next ladder toward the gate in the inverted train trench.

  He made it halfway up before he heard Jerica cry out. It wasn’t normal for nightmares to get injured. James had to stop so he could see what had happened.

  Zettel had rammed a Taser down her throat.

  The shock made her shake wildly as she flickered in and out of existence, normal one moment and transparent the next. A few seconds later, she vanished in a puff of smoke. She didn’t come back.

  It wasn’t enough to kill her, but there was no chance she’d be corporeal again in time to escort them to the gate.

  James and Nathaniel were alone.

  They climbed faster.

  Even though the mirror city didn’t have power, some of the lights still occasionally illuminated. The signal on the side of the tracks was flashing through each of the colors: red, yellow, green, over and over again, signaling for a train that would never come.

  The gate stirred as they approached, throbbing faintly with energy. The legs were planted on either side of the train tracks, and it hung over them in a U shape. It was two feet above their heads, barely within arm’s reach—they would have to climb through.

  “Where does it go?” James asked.

  Nathaniel reached up to brush his fingers against the apex. “Heaven, for sure,” he said, eyes going distant. “Uh…there are temples…and trees, and…”

  “Never mind,” James said. Zettel was scrambling onto the scaffolding at the end of the train trench, and he still had at least four men with him. “Open it. Quickly.”

  “But I need to do a ritual—”

  “There’s no time!”

  Nathaniel flung his hands into the air. “I can do magic, I can’t do miracles!”

  James swore and ripped off his glove. With only a few minutes to heal, Elise’s skin was still angry, swollen, and red. The redness was good. It meant that there was blood flow. He could only hope that it would mean the gate would recognize both of his marks, too.

  He held his breath as he pressed the stitched palm to the pillar. The symbols ringing the base illuminated, and the stone sang out. Gray light flooded the space between the pillars.

  The gate was open.

  “Stop!” Zettel shouted. He didn’t have a gun now that Jerica had attacked him, but James had no doubt that a man that angry could kill with his bare fists.

  James lifted Nathaniel high enough to grab the stone. The boy pulled himself inside and vanished with a flash.

  The Union was just feet away—only seconds behind him.

  James climbed into Heaven and left Earth behind.

  III

  The Secret

  Oymyakon, Russia – February 1998

  James realized he was in love with Elise Kavanagh less than a week after he dragged her body to Oymyakon.

  It was no ordinary infatuation. She had spent the entire time unconscious, so they hadn’t held a single conversation. It also wasn’t lust. She was a skeleton on the verge of death, and her features were strong, masculine, almost ugly. Far too much like her father. Yet she had a way of appearing in his every idle thought, swelling to the surface of his brain like bodies in the ocean after a shipwreck—the shape of her lips, ice crystals frozen to her eyelashes, the beak of her nose, her hands swaddled in bandages.

  He paced outside the room while Babushka changed Elise’s sheets. She was still sleeping in the tiny closet that had been converted to a bedroom, and James was determined to remain close until she woke up.

  Who knew what she might do if she opened her eyes to find a stranger standing over her? She had been raised and trained by Isaac, and James suspected her first instinct would be one of violence.

  James’s nearness was for Babushka’s safety. Not because he couldn’t stop thinking about seeing Elise’s eyes open and look at him for the first time.

  For the love of all that was holy, he had just left behind his fiancée in Colorado. The last time he had seen Hannah, he had been about to go into the dance studio for lessons and she had tried to stop him so that they could talk about something. James had still been too angry at her to listen, though he couldn’t recall now why they had been fighting. All of the arguments blurred together after a few years. So he had silenced her with his lips, made love to her against the front door, and then left when he was done without saying goodbye.

  Elise was sixteen years old, barely more than a child, and James suddenly couldn’t remember what Hannah’s body had felt like under his hands.

  Pacing past the door for a fourth time, he glimpsed the hands folded over Elise’s chest. The girl must have been bleeding from the marks on her palms again, because Babushka was replacing the bandages. A shift to the right, and he could see Elise’s throat, her jaw, her smooth cheek.

  Trying to remember gripping Hannah’s hips in his hands gave way to other thoughts. Instea
d, James remembered lifting Elise from the frozen ground, pushing the hair out of her face, wrapping her body in his parka.

  Hannah, think of Hannah.

  James had stopped walking without realizing it, transfixed by his glimpse of Elise.

  He eased the door open another inch. He was entranced with Elise’s shape, even shrouded by a fresh blanket. Babushka began to brush out the girl’s tangled curls, a shade of dark red like blood on the mattress, and James couldn’t seem to look away from the way her hair gleamed in the cold winter light.

  When would she wake? Would she ever? He wondered what it looked like when she smiled.

  Babushka looked up, her hands stilling in mid-brush. She said something in Russian, something that James probably should have understood, but his head was filled with the girl.

  Why couldn’t he remember Hannah?

  He backed up two steps, shut the door, and fled to the bathroom.

  It was a little easier to think with three walls and two doors between James and Elise. But making it easier to think only gave him room to hate himself.

  James gripped the sink so hard that he thought it might shatter under his fingers. He pressed his forehead to the glass and stared at the blurry shape of pale blue irises, far too bright and clear to match his dark hair and olive skin.

  Was he sick? Had he gone insane? How could he love a girl he had never even spoken to?

  Someone knocked on the bathroom door. James opened it. A woman stood on the other side, one of Babushka’s nieces—who was still twice as old as James—and she held a steaming bowl of soup cupped in her hands.

  “She’s stirring,” said the woman.

  It was a thousand-mile trudge through fear to get back to Elise’s room, and he wasn’t the first to arrive. Some of the other village women had beaten him there, and they all bore soup, blankets, utensils. It looked like offerings meant to appease Elise, as if she were some kind of angry god. If they had known how close that was to truth, they would have surely brought guns and knives instead of food.

  Babushka guarded the door. She pressed tobacco into her pipe with a gnarled thumb and bit the stem. When James attempted to enter, she caught his arm. “Wait. The girl’s still lost in the dreams, but she will be back soon.”

  He looked over the heads and backs of the women placing the food on the table beside Elise’s sleeping form. Her eyelids fluttered.

  A chill washed over him. “I don’t understand,” James said. It was easier to pretend that his Russian was too poor to discuss the subject than acknowledge that they both knew that Elise’s mind was slower to return to this world than her body.

  Excitement stirred through the women in the bedroom.

  “She’s awake,” one of them said.

  Their backs and shoulders were pressed together, obscuring James’s view of the bed. His heart thundered in his chest. He needed to see her.

  The women shifted, and he leaned on the doorframe to peer around them.

  Elise’s eyes opened.

  Good God, she’s beautiful.

  Babushka gave him a knowing look and lit her pipe. “Shame on you,” she said, blowing a cloud of smoke into his face. “Shame on all of you.”

  Elise escaped James in Yakutsk while he was reserving a hotel room. She had been awake for a week and hadn’t spoken to him once during their trip, so he didn’t realize at first that she had gone missing.

  One moment she had been standing beside him, sullen and silent, and the next she was gone, and cold air was blowing through the front door as it drifted shut again.

  James ripped his credit card out of the clerk’s hand and plunged into the street. The girl’s scarf whipped behind her as she vanished around the corner. He jerked his jacket around the bottom of his face.

  “Goddamn it all,” he muttered.

  When he made it to the other side of the building, she was gone.

  A pair of young women walked past a shop on the other side of the street, but there were no other people in sight. It was cold beyond imagining, and he could feel his fingers numbing through his gloves. Most people had the common sense to stay inside.

  A flash of motion. James looked up in time to see booted feet kicking over the ledge of the two-story building.

  She had climbed the damn hotel.

  The street-facing wall was too smooth for James’s clumsy gloves to get traction. He rushed into the nearby alley, searching for something that he could scale, and found nothing.

  Elise jumped from one building to the next, soaring over his head.

  He broke into a run, struggling to keep up with her on street level as she launched from one roof to the next. Elise seemed to soar, unaffected by petty things like gravity. But she would run out of roofs at the corner—he could catch her there.

  James reached the street before she did, and he kept his eyes to the roofs.

  No sign of her.

  A shout from behind him.

  He turned to see that the pair of girls that had been shopping had fallen to the sidewalk. Elise’s form retreated in the opposite direction, flying down the other street like a tornado. “Are you all right?” James asked the girls, who had been unlucky enough to be standing in Elise’s path.

  It sounded like they responded in the affirmative, but he didn’t wait long enough to make sure.

  He chased, but it was even harder trying to pace Elise when she was on the street. Two blocks away, she lost him completely.

  Anger surged in his chest as he stood, alone, on an empty street corner with no clue where he could go next.

  But with the anger came relief.

  Elise was gone. That was his chance. He could go back to Colorado, tell them that he had lost her, and that it wasn’t his fault. He could go back to his life and forget everything. Hug Hannah, kiss her, apologize for the fight, remind himself of what it was like to love her.

  But even if his oaths had permitted him to give up and return—and the burning of the scar on his left pectoral was a reminder that they did not—he knew that he wouldn’t have been able to let Elise go. Not anymore.

  He had been lost the first time she had laid eyes on him. He couldn’t stand the thought of never seeing those eyes again.

  James Faulkner hated Elise Kavanagh just as much as he was in love with her, and he couldn’t wait to send her back to the garden from whence she came.

  James located Elise again three days later in Harbin, south of the border. The city looked like the bastard child of Paris and Moscow, though China had long since claimed it from Russia.

  It was hard to find someone who spoke a language James understood who would also admit to having encountered Elise. He thought that the bakery owner must have run into her, judging by the suspicion in his eyes when James showed her photo to him, but he only spoke Mandarin. He shoved James out of his shop, yelling incoherently and waving his hands.

  Tracking spells eventually led him to a hostel, and one of the staff onsite spoke Russian—wonder of wonders. They had caught her in the closet. She had probably sneaked in before the door was locked the night before , but she had been cooperative about leaving once caught. It was only in the morning that they had realized that she had stolen a lot of yuan.

  They wouldn’t let James leave without paying for what Elise had taken. He stuffed a fistful of rubles into the hands of his informant and left before they could ask for more.

  James didn’t need another tracking spell to tell him that she was doing her best to escape as quickly as possible. Her persistent southward journey on the M56 Kolyma highway had made her intentions clear enough, and the hostel wasn’t far from the Jingha railway station.

  It was easy to find her among the crowd milling on the train platform. Her paranoia gave her away. She refused to stand with anyone at her back, so all James had to do was watch for the girl who had backed herself into the most hidden corner possible.

  Elise was a bundle of jackets and scarf wedged between two benches. Her gloved hands were buried under he
r arms, and he suspected that she had armed herself again.

  Her eyes darted over the crowd. Was she watching for James or some other enemy?

  There were too many possible escape routes from the Jingha station, which was outdoors. James didn’t dare approach her yet.

  He grabbed a newspaper, melted into the crowd, and pretended to read. The hànzì was illegible to him. He could pick up a relevant word here and there, the kinds of things he needed to get around—references to food, for instance, and transportation. He might have been able to pick up more if he hadn’t been watching Elise out of the corner of his eye, too.

  A train pulled into the station. The crowd shifted as the car emptied and others took the passengers’ place.

  Elise didn’t move from between the counters. James sat on a bench, ducked his head, and continued pretending to read.

  The next few trains didn’t make her move, either. His legs and back grew stiff from sitting too long, but he didn’t dare try to walk to loosen his muscles. He wasn’t going to let her out of his sight.

  His eyelids grew heavy. His head drooped.

  When was the last time that he had slept? He had been trying to stay awake since Elise escaped, and chasing her across what felt like half of Russia had stolen what little energy he had left.

  His brain filled with the warm, buzzing fog of voices among the crowd, the announcer on the stereo, and the hiss of train wheels on rails.

  James jolted awake when the back of his head bumped against the bench. His eyes shot open.

  Elise was no longer between the booths.

  He bolted upright, heart pounding, blood roaring through his skull like the wind blowing over empty tundra.

  There was a train in the station, and the doors were sliding closed.

  James flung the newspaper aside and launched himself toward the train, but stumbled over his feet. He crossed the yellow line in time to bang his fists on the closed doors.