The Descent Series Complete Collection

by S. M. Reine

  He swore in every language he knew as the train pulled away.

  On the other side of the platform, where another train was just pulling into the station, stood a slender young woman in a white shirt, jeans, and a yellow scarf covering her hair. She wasn’t wearing a jacket. Probably an attempt to disguise herself. James wouldn’t have even recognized Elise if not for her bony figure, the way she jerked at every odd sound, the warm feeling that built in his chest the instant he saw her.

  He hadn’t missed Elise after all—but he was only moments away from losing her.

  James jumped into the train trench and scrambled onto the other side. Guards shouted at him. Someone in a uniform was striding toward him. He ignored them.

  Elise slipped through the doors, and James was just moments behind her.

  He leaped onto the car as it closed.

  James scanned the seats, but there was no sign of Elise now.

  The floor lurched under his feet, and he had to grab onto the wall to keep from falling over.

  He pushed through the people standing near the windows, making his way toward the back of the train. He walked from car to car, watching for Elise as the train built momentum and the station disappeared from view. They chugged through town, steady and sure, and James made his way all the way to the back of the locomotive.

  He peered through the window before entering. The last car was almost empty aside from a Chinese couple sitting at the back door and one girl across from them.

  Elise had lost the yellow scarf. She must have been freezing in nothing but a t-shirt, but she showed no sign of discomfort. She was slumped in her seat, legs extended in front of her, almost lazy-looking. But James recognized the position for what it meant: she was ready to leap. To attack. And the young couple across from her had no idea.

  There was nowhere left for Elise to go. James straightened his jacket. Pushed the door open.

  Her eyes lifted to his.

  He had an instant to register the knife in Elise’s hand before she lunged.

  James threw himself backward. The knife swished millimeters from his shirt.

  Elise slashed again and again as the Chinese girl shrieked. The man wrapped his arms around his girlfriend and steered her out of the car. James barely noticed. He was too busy ducking, jumping, knocking Elise’s arms aside with his own.

  It was luck that disarmed her, rather than James’s efforts. The train turned a corner. The car jittered and bumped. She lost her footing, fell into a seat, and dropped the dagger.

  When she reached for it, James kicked it to the end of the car. Elise leaped for it. He grabbed the back of her shirt.

  Big mistake.

  She whirled, and a fist connected with his jaw. The car exploded with lights.

  They exchanged blows. James should have had the advantage—he was a full head and shoulders taller than her, easily fifty pounds heavier, and much older. Yet he couldn’t even begin to keep up with her speed mentally, much less physically. Whenever he swung, she had a way of vanishing and reappearing behind him again.

  He didn’t know what was hitting him. Elbows, fists, feet. It was all punishingly painful. The fact that it was a sixteen-year-old girl that he was losing to—well, that definitely didn’t make him feel any better.

  But her fighting style was inelegant, and James realized that she telegraphed her moves with her eyes. She always looked where she was attacking.

  When she looked to the knife, he knew his moment had come.

  She dropped beneath the swing of his fist and rolled to the back of the car. He could tell in advance that when she swung again, it would be aimed at his neck.

  James caught her arm in his fist.

  She twisted free. The knife flashed toward James’s chest. He barely seized her wrist in time. Her other fist swung at him, and it was all he could do to catch that one, too. Both of her arms were trapped. Unfortunately, so were his.

  This time, he didn’t let her escape. They were braced between the seats of the swaying car, locked in each other’s grip, and James’s teeth ground together with the effort it took to hold her.

  “I’m not trying to hurt you,” James said.

  “I won’t go back,” Elise said, her voice still raw, as though she had been screaming. Though her eyes were fierce and the point of her dagger was only an inch from his heart, there was something vulnerable in those words. Genuine fear.

  James’s arm muscles trembled with the exertion of having to hold her back. He wasn’t going to be able to hold her off much longer. “I came to help you.”

  The pressure against his arms lightened. Just a little. Elise had eased up—barely.

  But even though the shift in her posture was slight, the change in her expression was far more drastic. She had dropped her guard, and it was the first time that he felt like he could see her—really see her. There was raw fear on her face. Wide eyes, pale cheeks, a tremble in her jaw. She wasn’t a weapon that Metaraon had developed to kill God.

  She was a girl—just a teenage girl, barely older than a child, so fragile and small and filled with terror.

  “I can’t go back,” Elise said. “I would rather die.”

  The lie slipped out of him before he could stop himself.

  “I’ll protect you. Nobody can make you go back,” he said.

  She didn’t move, but there was a tremble in her arms, and her chin gave the faintest of quivers.

  He wanted the lies to be true—that she really could be safe with him. And when he spoke again, it was with total sincerity. “I swear I will protect you,” James said softly.

  She relaxed, just a fraction more.

  There was still mistrust in her eyes when she stepped back, but she didn’t try to attack him again. His biceps trembled from the effort it had taken to hold her off. The weight advantage didn’t seem to matter when he was battling a girl with a temperament like a wild animal.

  The door slid open behind him, and a conductor stormed into the car.

  James understood just enough Mandarin to realize that the conductor was asking if they had a problem. There would be railway police not far behind, and James weighed his chances—if Elise protested, would the police believe James, the adult man, or the teenage girl? With neither of them fluent in the local language, they would both probably be in trouble.

  Elise responded to the conductor. James was stunned to hear her speaking Mandarin. In their week together, he hadn’t even heard her speak that much English.

  They exchanged a few words. The conductor looked offended, rounding on James, and he braced himself to be ejected from the train—or worse.

  “Ticket,” the conductor said in Russian.

  James gaped for a minute before his brain managed to translate the request. He patted down his jacket, trying to remember if he had thought to buy a ticket at the platform. He had. It was tucked in his breast pocket.

  He held the ticket out, the conductor punched it, and then Elise and James were alone in the car again.

  They stared each other down, several feet apart.

  He wasn’t sure if he should relax or worry even more now that Elise had somehow talked them out of trouble. Maybe she just wanted to kill him in private.

  “Does this mean that you’re coming with me?” James asked.

  Elise responded by sitting down exactly where she had been before. She propped her arm against the window and stared out at the tundra.

  She didn’t react when James sat down across from her, so that had to be as good as a yes.

  They rode the train for some time. When James got off at the first airport, Elise got off with him, and she didn’t try to escape again.

  James stretched out as much as he could in his airplane seat with a flimsy blanket covering his lap and Elise stiff in the chair beside him.

  Their flight had two layovers between Changchun Longjia International Airport and Denver. In eighteen hours, they would arrive in Colorado. James would surrender her to Landon. And he would never th
ink about Elise Kavanagh again.

  Colorado – March 1998

  After two uneventful layovers and one long drive, James and Elise arrived at Pamela’s house.

  He was home. It was over. It was all over.

  He climbed onto Pamela’s porch the same way that he had a thousand times before. The key to her door felt heavier than usual now that the house belonged to him. But even though James held the key in his hand—the key to the end of his journey—he didn’t insert it into the lock.

  All he needed to do was walk inside, and all of his problems would be solved.

  Landon would be waiting. He would make some excuse, take Elise back to his house, and lead her to the doorway in his basement. He would push her back into the garden. She would never be James’s problem again.

  He glanced over his shoulder at her. Elise was scanning the forest surrounding the house, tense and alert. Watching for enemies real or imagined.

  She wouldn’t anticipate the real attack yet to come.

  He inserted the key. Opened the lock. The hinges whined as the door swung inward.

  Someone must have cleaned Pamela’s house since the last time that James had visited; there was no dust on her shelves, the couches had been rearranged, and the air smelled like lemon. He pulled open the curtains to let light in from outside. The windows had been scrubbed, too. Everything was so immaculate that he almost expected to see his aunt come storming out of her office, annoyed that James had let himself in without calling ahead.

  But Pamela didn’t come—and neither did Landon.

  Elise walked through Pamela’s living room, and James hung back to watch her wander. Her motions always looked so careful, like she had choreographed them in advance. He could practically see her contemplating escape routes, possible makeshift weapons, hiding places. There was no sign of the vulnerable girl he had glimpsed on the train.

  James made sure that he was in her line of sight before calling out. No need to startle the insane teenager.

  “Hello?” he shouted. “Landon?”

  He wasn’t surprised at the lack of response, but he was annoyed. The high priest had promised to meet him there. He was supposed to take Elise away immediately. And James was itching to escape before those warm, confusing feelings started creeping up on him again.

  “Wait here,” James said. “I’ll look around.”

  He stepped down the hall, peering into the bedrooms. All of the beds were turned down and the pillows were fluffed.

  Pamela’s office was similarly tidy. He rounded the desk to find no bloodstains on the floor, no hint that this was the place where his aunt had been killed by Metaraon. All of the books were ordered on the shelves. A lifetime of information left intact by the coven.

  James crouched in front of her desk and unlocked the bottom drawer. He slid it open. Pamela’s personal Book of Shadows was inside—the one with the most secret of spells.

  Tucking it into his back pocket, he returned to the living room. Elise twitched at his approach, nostrils flaring, jaw tightening. Like a skittish animal.

  He wasn’t the only one who had been exploring the house. She had found a pair of fingerless motorcycle gloves and a pair of swords, each of them the length of her forearm, with curved, wicked blades that shimmered in the sunlight. She lifted both of them when he approached.

  Unarmed or otherwise, she always looked like she was on the verge of murder—but slightly more so with twin swords in hand.

  James held out his hands in what he hoped would come across as a soothing gesture. “I think the house is empty. We must have beaten Landon here. Are those, um…are those your swords?”

  “Falchions,” Elise said. “Yes.”

  The idea of waiting with her sounded less appealing by the moment, and it hadn’t sounded like a good idea in the first place.

  “I’m going into the kitchen. I’m not leaving. I’ll just be around the corner,” James said.

  A tiny nod.

  He stepped through the doorway, keeping Elise in the corner of his vision. The counters were washed, the cabinets were empty, the table had a fresh vase on it.

  And Landon was leaning against the far wall, invisible from the living room.

  James sucked in a gasp. “Why didn’t you answer when I called for you?” he whispered, ducking behind the wall with the high priest.

  “Didn’t want the kid to see me,” Landon said. “Sorry, James. Change of plans. She’s not going back yet.”

  “What do you mean , she’s not going back?” James hissed.

  Landon took him by the shoulders. “Calm down, son. She’ll go back, but this isn’t the time. Metaraon says that she’s not ready.”

  “She was ready the first time she went in!”

  “If she’d been ready, she would have done what she was supposed to do.” Landon shrugged. “Don’t ask me. Metaraon’s not exactly…chatty. All he said was that she’s not ready, and you need to keep an eye on her until she is.”

  Through the kitchen doorway, he could see Elise lingering over a photo of Pamela. Though her features were as cold and hard as always, he thought that it almost looked like Elise was sad.

  And there were those warm feelings again. That overpowering sense of love.

  Adoration.

  “What am I supposed to tell Hannah?” James asked. “I was supposed to go back to her.”

  “You won’t tell her anything. This is coven business. She’s not in the coven.”

  James shut his eyes and tried to summon the memory of his fiancée’s face. He couldn’t. It was like being in the same house as Elise instantly wiped every other woman from his mind. It was foul, horrifying, perverse—and he was supposed to be escaping her.

  Desperation built within him to near-panic levels.

  “Elise won’t stay with me. She already escaped. I can’t hold her captive, I can’t just—this wasn’t part of the oath, Landon!”

  The old man put a comforting hand on James’s shoulder. “It was part of the oath if He says it was, and this is the message that Metaraon has passed to us. You’ll die if you break your promises. I’m surprised that I have to remind you of that.”

  Maybe death would be better than this insanity.

  “I can’t stay with her,” James said hoarsely.

  “You’ll find a way. Pamela made the girl trust her somehow, and Elise never tried to escape this house. You’re a clever man, James. Give it some thought.” Landon patted him on the back. “Just a few more months. Metaraon will come around.”

  Months. Months .

  He felt dizzy.

  But the star-shaped scar on the left side of his chest was aching, reminding him of the oaths he had made and the consequences he would face if he tried to betray them. James had sold his soul for power, and there was no giving that back. Not anymore.

  His life was over. It belonged to Metaraon, to God, and—worst of all—to Elise.

  “I don’t have any choice,” James whispered.

  Landon gave him a sympathetic look and another pat on the shoulder. It was probably meant to be paternal, but it came across as condescending. “Tell me where you want to go and I’ll buy the tickets.”

  Elise swung one of her falchions through the air, battling an invisible enemy. James wanted to stop and stare at her grace, and he hated himself for it.

  Just a few months.

  Reno, Nevada - January 2010

  Twelve years later, Elise and James were still together—twelve years without returning to the garden. But the Treaty of Dis had fallen. Their idyll was about to come an end.

  Now, all God had to do was reach out and pluck Elise from the Earth.

  And that meant that the carefully constructed distance between James and Elise was crumbling. The line dividing their bodies and hearts was gone. There was nothing between them now—nothing but the secrets that James had been carrying for years.

  It was Elise who said that they should pull the exercise mats out of the closet after they had sex for the fi
rst time. The apartment above the studio would have beds in it, but she didn’t seem to want to leave the dance hall, and James was all too happy to oblige her whims—anything to keep her from setting foot outside the warded line of the front door.

  He opened the storage closet, coughing on the dust that spilled out, and moved the punching bag and cleaning equipment out of the way. Elise helped him spread the mats over the parquet flooring. Either one of them would have been strong enough to move the equipment on their own, but it was the cooperation that was the fun part.

  James kicked aside the pile of their clothing by the piano so that they could set up in a bright patch of moonlight. Once they had converted the floor of the dance hall into a very large, very firm bed, he sat down on the mats. He was surprised when Elise climbed into his lap as easily as though it was something they had done a thousand times before.

  James opened himself to her thoughts, but for once, her mind was an uncomplicated haze. It was as if the afterglow had wiped away everything except a pleasant buzz.

  He was envious of the simplicity. James couldn’t seem to stop thinking about how much he hated himself.

  She didn’t notice that, either. His thoughts were locked down tight, stuck in the darkest corner of his mind, sheltered from scrutiny.

  “Should we talk about this?” Elise asked as she settled her thighs on either side of his, running her fingers through James’s hair with a half-smile playing on her lips. She weighed nothing in his lap. She stroked the streaks of gray at his temple, tucked hairs behind his ear, stroked the fuzz on the back of his neck. The casual contact sent ripples of warmth through his body. It wasn’t even a sexual thing.

  Smiles aside, she had posed a sobering question.

  Elise wasn’t asking to talk about the sex that they had just enjoyed—which James definitely had, in the sort of mind-melting way that made him doubt that he could ever enjoy sex with another human being ever again—she was asking the why of it all. What had changed. Why he had stopped denying her. What everything meant.

  He knew that he should tell her the truth. She deserved to know about the oaths that he had made. She had deserved to know the truth for years.