The Descent Series, Books 1-3: Death's Hand, The Darkest Gate, and Dark Union (The Descent Series, Volume 1)

by SM Reine

  James was only just behind Marisa in running out the door, up the stairs, and into the kitchen. Augustin blinked wetly at them as they passed. “What…?”

  Marisa hit the back door without opening it, stumbling over her own feet. She sagged, favoring her bleeding arm, and the skin began to boil. James caught her, lowering her slowly to the ground. Outside, Elise struggled with the girl in the muddy back yard.

  James tried to block out the sensations Elise felt and concentrated on Marisa’s bite, pressing his hand to the wound. “Does it sting?” he asked.

  “It feels like acid!”

  He reached into his pocket and withdrew a scrap of paper. His connection to Elise made summoning his magic easy, but all too quickly it began to draw off his partner. She wavered, and Lucinde took the opportunity to squirm out from under Elise and bolt for the fence.

  James concentrated on healing Marisa’s arm, flicking the healing magic into the air around her. She whimpered. The skin twitched and writhed, but it was no longer bubbling. It settled, red and raw but clean.

  “Wait here!”

  He joined Elise in the back yard as she tackled Lucinde, smashing both of them into the fence. It shuddered with the force of the impact.

  Elise was completely covered in mud, from her knees to her gloves and jacket. Her hands slipped on Lucinde, and the girl darted for a pile of landscaping boulders at the opposite corner.

  James moved to cut her off. She froze, then tried to dart in the other direction.

  Elise was already there, uncoiling the extra rope in her fists. She was flushed, panting, and exhilarated, her excitement washing through James. Her chain of charms jingled at her belt, and the crosses seemed to glow. Lucinde glanced between Elise, and then to James again, and back. The rain struck her skin and sizzled, evaporating instantly. Her entire body steamed.

  “We should get her inside before the neighbors call the police,” he said, and Elise nodded.

  Blood-caked fingernails flashed at Elise’s face. She threw herself out of the way, grabbing the girl’s wrist. Lucinde snatched the charms at Elise’s belt. The belt loops popped, and she flung them aside. The charms sank into a puddle of mud.

  James dove for Lucinde. She darted aside, but he managed to catch her arm. Her flesh was so hot it nearly burned his hand. He jerked her around, and she kicked him—hard—in the shin.

  He growled, hefting Lucinde under his arm. She snapped at his arms with her teeth. He clamped a hand over her mouth.

  Elise kneeled in the mud, searching for her charms.

  “I can’t find them!”

  “Forget it. Door,” he grunted. Elise threw it open, and he rushed through.

  Marisa and Augustin waited on the other side. The stuffed rabbit had reappeared, and she gave a ragged sob when she saw James and Elise come back inside with her daughter in tow.

  “Out of the way!” she ordered. Lucinde kicked hard, nearly squirming out from under James’s arms.

  “Get her feet,” he said.

  Elise took her by the ankles, bracing them as James dragged her down the stairs.

  Marisa squeezed around them and shut the basement window before they dropped Lucinde again. The girl scrabbled over to the corner, curled into a tight ball, and screeched pathetically at James.

  Fumbling at the back of her neck, Elise took off her cross necklace and pressed it to Lucinde’s cheek. Her voice hardened, deepening with power as she summoned up the memory of the oft-recited rituals from ancient books to do her first exorcism in years.

  “I exorcise you, impious demon,” she recited, and James could envision the same old pages Elise was remembering with perfect clarity. Lucinde’s face screwed up with pain. “In vain do you boast of this deed. I command you to restore her as proof you no longer have any rule over her soul. I abjure—”

  Lucinde swung. “Elise!” James yelled.

  Her fist connected. Elise’s back smacked into a wall, and Lucinde lunged.

  Elise braced herself and took the impact, translating the momentum into a throw. Lucinde slid, but regained her footing immediately.

  Elise scooped her rope from the floor, holding it in the joint of her elbow to keep her hands free. She grabbed the girl by her collar and slammed her into the wall. The drywall cracked.

  “No—!” Marisa cried, throwing out a hand.

  James caught her arm. “Stay out of it. Trust me. She isn’t feeling any of this.”

  “I abjure you,” Elise went on, voice rising as she shoved the cross into Lucinde’s face again, “stripping you of the arms with which you fight. I revoke the powers by which—” the girl clawed at Elise’s wrist, trying to pry her off, “—this creature became bound to your service.”

  Her back arched, even with Elise’s hands holding her flat to the wall. Lucinde’s nails dug into her sleeve.

  Elise pushed the girl to the floor, pinning her arms to the dirty linoleum with her knees. She flung her head from side to side, but even with all the strength the demon provided, Elise had size on her side.

  “This creature is restored, rejecting your influence, granted divine mercy for defense against your assaults!”

  Lucinde began to scream, high and loud. Something pulsed underneath the surface of her skin where Elise held the cross.

  She focused all the energy she possessed on that point, building it up between them. Heat rippled across James’s skin. Elise seized upon the darkness within Lucinde.

  “Crux sacra sit mihi lux,” Elise said, and the power poured out through her words. “Non draco sit mihi dux. Vade retro, Satana—”

  The power of the demon boiled through the air like hot oil, simultaneously slimy and as dry as a desert wind. Her screaming reached a pitch, and Elise released the cross so she could cover her mouth with her gloved hand.

  The girl bit down, but her teeth got nothing but glove. Even muffled against her hand, James could hear screaming. It didn’t come from her throat.

  “Nunquam suade mihi vana,” Elise continued. The stench of sulfur was almost choking. “Sunt mala quae libas. Ipse venena bibas!”

  A silent clap of thunder roared inside Elise and James. Lucinde wrenched her head to the side, out from underneath Elise’s hand. “Mother!” she shrieked in a hundred voices. “Sorrow!”

  She roared once more, wordless and agonized, thrashing beneath Elise.

  Lucinde gasped, and then slumped. Her eyes closed, her mouth hung open, and she stopped moving.

  Elise released the child, and Lucinde didn’t move. She lay limply between Elise’s legs, unconscious but breathing. The black symbol rapidly faded. Her veins sank into her skin once more.

  “Madre de dios,” Marisa whispered.

  James followed her gaze. She was watching the same place as Elise—not at the girl, but at the ceiling. A dark shadow manifested above the room. A smell like burnt ozone and charred hair, traced faintly with the iron tang of blood, permeated the entire basement.

  Elise dropped her necklace into the pocket of her jacket, staring into the depths of the demon’s form.

  “Servant,” she said in a low, strong voice. “Return to the Hell in which you belong and never return. Be gone.”

  The demon dissolved. The pressure eased.

  Elise pressed her fingers to Lucinde’s throat. James could feel the pulsing of her heartbeat in his own fingertips, steady and strong.

  She was alive.

  “Lucinde,” Marisa cried, pulling her arm free from James and scrambling over to her daughter. “Is she okay? What did you do to her?”

  “She’s fine, Marisa,” Elise said. “You might both want to get checked out by a doctor, though. I’m sure Stephanie would be happy to pay a visit once she gets off her shift.”

  Marisa smoothed her hand over Lucinde’s cheek. “Baby…baby, please wake up…”

  The girl’s eyes opened. The whites were no longer yellow and veined. Lucinde had to swallow twice before she could speak. “Mama?”

  “Oh, bambina.” Marisa choked
on a sob and collapsed over her daughter, raining kisses all over her face and arms and tummy. She spoke rapidly in Spanish, too quickly for James to understand, but he got the gist of it. “My baby, querida, mi corazon…”

  James rested his hand on Elise’s shoulder and lifted the magical binding between them. Her feelings disappeared from him in a rush. More than the physical sense of being tired, though, he felt drained spiritually—he couldn’t have lit a candle if he wanted to, with or without paper magic.

  He didn’t need to read Elise’s mind to see she felt the same. “I almost forgot what that was like,” she said.

  “Yes, but perhaps now we should…” he said, gesturing toward the door.

  “Wait,” Marisa interrupted, scooping Lucinde into her arms. Blood seeped through the makeshift bandage on her arm. “Gracias, thank you so much. She’s okay again. You really did it. It wasn’t…” Lucinde looked dazed, as though she wasn’t quite sure what was going on. It was a pleasant departure from the screaming. “That was nothing like the movies.”

  “Life usually isn’t,” Elise said.

  “How can we ever repay you?”

  “Don’t worry about it.”

  The temperature in the kitchen was much warmer than the basement. Augustin stood when they entered.

  “Is she…?”

  James pulled Elise aside from the doorway, letting Marisa enter the kitchen. He froze, going completely expressionless.

  She blinked several times, squinting against the fluorescent lamps, and buried her face in her mother’s shoulder. Marisa stroked Lucinde’s hair, murmuring to her softly, but her eyes were all for Augustin. For the first time, James glimpsed real love between them.

  And Augustin crumbled. He collapsed against the table as though he could no longer stand.

  “Thank God.”

  Marisa brought Lucinde to him, and they cried, relieved and happy and still sort of drunk off the whiskey. The kitchen felt so much brighter without the weight of the possession heavy over the entire house.

  “Call us if you need anything else,” Elise said, but the Ramirezes weren’t listening.

  “Let’s go,” James said.

  They left the kitchen, and even though all the lights inside were off and the curtains drawn, it felt nowhere near as dark as it had been when they had first arrived. James found his jacket, and Elise took a moment to go to the thermostat, flicking off the air conditioner before cutting around the side of the house to find her charms in the back yard. They met again in the front.

  The rain hadn’t let up. They got in the car, and James fished an old towel out of the backseat, drying off his hair. He offered it to her when he was done, but she gazed thoughtfully out the window and didn’t see.

  “How do you feel?” he asked.

  “Good,” Elise said. “I feel…good. Are you okay? I saw you healing Marisa, but you didn’t take it from me.”

  “I’m fine, but I certainly won’t be doing any more magic for a few days.”

  “What do you think about what Lucinde said?”

  “‘Sorrows,’” James repeated, and she nodded.

  “What did it mean?”

  “She said ‘mother’ as well, and I don’t think she was calling Marisa. I believe it’s a name.” He removed a city map from the glove compartment and scanned it briefly. He pointed at a green oval on the north end of the paper. “See here—Our Mother of Sorrows, right by the university.”

  “Why would a demon yell the name of a cemetery?”

  “A lesser demon, such as the one that possessed Lucinde, is merely an appendage of its master rather than an individual entity,” he said. He started the car. “So as it is exorcised…”

  “It goes back to its master and sees or thinks exactly what its master sees or thinks,” Elise said. “I’m going to the cemetery.”

  He stopped at the red light. “You’re going?”

  “Listen, James…” She paused to collect her thoughts. When she spoke, her voice was soft. “You’re right. I have to take care of this. This bitch—the death goddess—almost skinned me, and she owes me her blood. But I’d feel a lot better if you weren’t around for it.”

  “You’re completely unprepared.”

  “I don’t have time for preparation. I have to get her now. Who knows where she’ll be tomorrow?”

  “You realize this is likely to be a trap,” he said.

  She nodded.

  He gave a low, thoughtful hum, drumming his fingers on the steering wheel. The light turned green and James lurched into the intersection, making a fast illegal left turn. Elise gripped the side of the door, staring at him. “James, Motion and Dance is the other way,” she said.

  “We’re not going to the studio,” he said. “We’re going to Our Mother of Sorrows.”

  X

  Elise and James sped toward the cemetery in silence. The windshield wipers whisked a quick rhythm back and forth, clearing sheets of water off the glass with every swipe. The air blowing through the vents was cool, like the air outside, smelling sweetly of petrichor and sage.

  The white monolith of the cemetery’s church rose out of the darkness. He parked in the circular driveway before the building, and Elise hit the radio button, silencing the oldies station in the middle of a Led Zeppelin song.

  “It’s really close to UNR,” she remarked. A stone angel loomed in the dark distance.

  “There are several graveyards around here,” he said. “When old west towns such as this were founded, they always put the cemeteries at the tops of hills to keep the bodies—and their smell—out of the way.”

  She studied the faces of the apartment buildings on the ridge overlooking Our Mother of Sorrows. “Guess they didn’t plan on people building homes out here. At least your neighbors would be quiet.”

  “Even your living ones, apparently,” he said, taking the keys out of the ignition.

  James was right: most of the apartments and houses surrounding the cemetery were dark. Even though it was almost the weekend, and there should have been parties in the college neighborhood, the blocks surrounding Our Mother of Sorrows were strangely silent.

  “The dead aren’t getting any deader,” she said. “Let’s go.”

  They climbed out of the car into the rainy night. She wandered toward the church, and James retrieved a flashlight from the trunk before joining her.

  A small graveyard splayed in front of them. The newer headstones to the front were in neat lines, arranged in narrow rows that left no room for walking without treading upon someone’s final resting place. A single path led to a hill where the older graves stood. A lonely stone angel, illuminated by flood lights around its base, glowed like a star in the drizzly night.

  James stepped on the grass. Energy swept over him, and he froze.

  Elise caught his expression. “What’s wrong?”

  “Someone’s been working magic here. The entire cemetery’s inside a circle of power.”

  “That’s not unusual. People cast spells in graveyards all the time.” Elise kept walking. “Come on, hurry up. We don’t want to get caught trespassing. Do cemeteries have security details?”

  “Considering the gaping holes in their fence, I’m going to say no.”

  Elise and James moved between the graves, feet slurping in and out of the mud with each step. Grass was not native to the desert, so it didn’t take root in the hard soil properly and melted into sludge at the slightest hint of rain.

  James shone his flashlight on every marker they passed. “Mario Perez,” Elise remarked. “I had that guy for class when I was a freshman.”

  “I remember that,” he said, wiping rainwater off his face. “Stroke, wasn’t it?”

  “Yeah.” She pulled out her cell phone, glanced at the screen, and pulled a face.

  “What’s the matter?”

  “Forget it,” Elise said, shoving it back in her pocket. “Let’s find this demon bastard and get the job done.”

  They gave a quick search of the gra
ves. In such a small cemetery, there wasn’t much looking to do.

  “You must have misinterpreted Lucinde,” she said. “There’s nothing here. It would be pretty obvious if a major demon was around.”

  He swept the flashlight side to side in fruitless searching. “It doesn’t seem—”

  “Wait. Is that an open grave by the statue?”

  They weaved through the tombstones to the next row. The flashlight died when they stepped up to the very edge of the plot, and James bashed the flashlight repeatedly against his thigh.

  “It’s definitely open,” she said. “Too bad we can’t see it.”

  “I know,” James said, looking down into the LEDs and jiggling the batteries. “From what I can tell, though, it almost looks new.” The flashlight blared on, burning his retinas for an instant, and then turned off again. “Damn!”

  “How can you tell that it’s new?”

  He gestured toward the sky, blinking green shapes out of his vision. “It’s been raining for quite some time. The soil erodes rapidly. This grave, although messy, hasn’t been washed out.”

  “Isn’t that Amber Hackman’s grave over there?” Elise said. “I heard something about her on the news recently. Her body went missing.”

  Their gazes met.

  “You wouldn’t remember when Amber Hackman died, but it was quite the event for the witch community worldwide,” James said. “She’s best known for her work as ambassador for the U.N., but she also fought to obtain asylum for witches in superstitious villages. Her work saved many lives.”

  “This grave is…” She squinted. “Grace Finch, beloved grandmother. I would bet anything she was a witch, too.”

  “How many bodies does this demon have?”

  “At least three, probably more. All witches.”

  He let out a slow breath. “This isn’t good.”

  “Is there something down there?”

  She moved closer to the grave. The only warning James had when she fell was a surprised shriek, and suddenly, Elise wasn’t standing in front of him anymore.

  “Elise!” he yelled, stepping forward.

  Loose earth crumbled under his feet, and he jumped back, landing on his backside. The light flashed once, and stayed dead.