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

by SM Reine

  Of course, that was fixable. If she could get one of her swords, she could bury it in the heart of the clock. It was the only thing she could imagine that might stop it.

  Her time to plan ended. The death goddess stopped speaking and whirled with the stone knife. It plunged into the neck of the man at her feet, and blood spurted from his throat.

  Elise leaped off the dais, launching herself toward the sacrifices.

  But it was too late. With a few swift strokes, all four lay dead in front of the clock. The minute hand groaned into the twelve position, and the first bell chimed.

  James found a place in the jungle where the trees swayed and the ground vibrated beneath his feet. The clock was below him, and Elise with it. He was certain.

  But he also had a hundred demons following him.

  He and Bryce had evaded some of them in the jungle, but not enough. The kopis fired randomly into the horde behind him. Whether any of the bullets hit their targets didn’t matter—there wasn’t enough ammunition to kill them all.

  Stopping where the vibrations were strongest, he tucked the shotgun under his arm. “I need a minute!” James yelled as he scrambled up a tree. “Hold them off!”

  Bryce didn’t respond. His fighting style completely lacked Elise’s grace, but there was no denying the accuracy of his aim or the power of his swinging fists. He was a force of nature.

  “Hurry up!” Bryce shouted.

  James wedged himself between two high branches, selected a couple spells from his Book, and took out a pen. He muttered words of power under his breath as he drew new spells.

  The rocking earth shifted. The tree shuddered, and the air grew thick.

  A bell chimed.

  The reverberations above the pyramid were so powerful that the entire ground tipped. Bryce lost his footing. The demons swarmed over him. He didn’t get a chance to scream.

  James tried not to watch as they overtook him. One demon leaped onto the trunk of his tree, then another, scaling it with their stubby claws.

  He carefully folded three of the spells together. A hand swiped at his foot.

  Then he threw the pages into the air.

  The earth split with a dull thud, ripping open beneath the trees while the first bell continued to toll. Hot air gusted through the hole. Demons slid into the earth.

  Holding his breath, James leaped off his branch.

  Twelve bells. Four minutes. Elise was out of time.

  One.

  A dozen demons plowed into Elise like athletes piling onto a football. The back of her head cracked against the ground.

  She jammed her elbow into a biting mouth and jabbed her fingers into an eye. The bell vibrated through the temple. It shook her blood, her bones.

  Elise lashed out with a foot and felt it connect with something. It didn’t do any good. There was no light under the pile of demons, no sense of gravity.

  That was when the roof collapsed.

  Two.

  The rubble didn’t crush Elise. But it did crush the demons on top of her.

  She shoved her way out of the pile. Dirt and rain showered through the hole in the ceiling. Beyond it, the sky changed. Gray faded to crimson as Hell and Earth began to merge.

  Elise gasped and coughed through the dust. Half of the centuria had been crushed at once. Nothing so much as touched the clock.

  A hammer swung. The bell struck again.

  Three.

  The third chime was louder than the first two. Her skull ached, and even when she jammed her hands against her ears, her brain rattled.

  Something moved on the dais. The goddess had survived.

  More demons began climbing toward Elise over the rubble. She stumbled toward the clock, slipped, and almost fell.

  Her hand caught the side of the dais. The vibrations traveled up her arm and down her spine as she dragged herself onto it.

  The goddess was laughing.

  Four.

  “It’s too late,” said the death goddess. “Hell is come upon Earth.”

  That face. That laugh. Elise’s wounds ached with the memory of the knife. “Shut up,” she growled, raising her fist for a strike.

  “Elise!”

  She looked up. James climbed down from the surface, carefully making his way along a tipped column. The first thing that occurred to her was that his leg was fixed. The second was that he had a shotgun. Where had James gotten a shotgun?

  The goddess saw him. She stopped laughing.

  “Catch!” he yelled, tossing the gun.

  Elise caught it, balancing it awkwardly between her hands. She’d only held a shotgun once before. Her father had taught her to shoot, but she hated them.

  Still, she was armed. It was better than the alternative.

  She whipped the butt of the shotgun across the goddess’s face. Her head snapped back.

  Five.

  The sky turned virulent red, and the world was falling. Elise’s senses screamed—demons everywhere, all around her, like she had felt in Dis so long ago—and the air tensed like something was about to snap.

  Demons were climbing toward James. She was helpless to join him.

  The goddess regained her footing and came at Elise, falchion raised. She braced the shotgun against her shoulder, took aim, and fired.

  The goddess’s leg became a mess of red below the knee. She screamed in Latin. Elise smiled.

  Six.

  Elise tried to pump the shotgun so she could fire again, but the mechanism was stuck. Didn’t matter. She preferred the personal touch anyway.

  She tossed the gun aside and ripped her falchion out of the goddess’s hand. The twin was next to the sacrifices. Elise grabbed it, too.

  Holding both of her swords was like having her arms reattached. She was complete.

  Seven.

  Elise thought her skull might split in two.

  The chime shook James off the pillar, dropping him in the crowd of waiting demons.

  “James!” she shouted.

  No response.

  The dais rocked with the pendulum. She scrambled to keep her footing as the goddess lunged. Her stone knife slashed through the air and sliced into Elise’s arm, deeper than before. She cut into muscle.

  The air thickened, darkened, grew sour. Air gusted from the grates. It stunk of sulfur, like the planes of Hell.

  A man screamed.

  Eight.

  The goddess was fast. Too fast for a woman with a ruined leg. She twisted and spun, meeting the blades of Elise’s swords with her stone knife, swift and agile and skilled beyond imagining.

  She deflected every swing, every strike. The ritual knife was a blur. Blades met, and Elise shoved her away. She couldn’t take down a goddess.

  The clock was her last chance—the only way she could stop the collapse of the wall between Heaven and Earth.

  Nine.

  The goddess flashed in front of her. The knife bit into Elise’s injured side. She cried out, and her voice was silent under the bell’s roar.

  Pain seared through her body when the goddess shoved her against the clock. Elise’s ears rang. Her vertebrae shook and scraped against each other.

  The stone knife slashed open her brow. Blood cascaded down the side of her face.

  Rain showered upon them. It tasted like acid.

  Ten.

  Her back was against the clock. She was right there, and she couldn’t do anything to stop it. The goddess’s stinking breath heated Elise’s face as she smiled, baring bloody teeth.

  If she couldn’t reach the heart of the clock, there was another heart she could reach.

  She kicked the goddess away. Just enough to have room to move.

  A wave of demons crashed against the dais, clambering over the edge. Their mouths were bloody. Elise wondered if any of that belonged to James.

  Eleven.

  She plunged her sword into the goddess’s chest.

  The heart in the clock exploded blood, splattering against the inner workings. The hammer shattered
.

  The dais pitched and everyone fell.

  The twelfth bell never rang.

  When the eleventh bell died off, Elise was the only one left standing.

  She clutched her sword in both hands as though it was her last line to life. Its blade dripped, her knuckles were white, and her gaze was empty. Her mind was a thousand miles away.

  The pendulum no longer kept in time with the seconds. Its hand slowed with every swing.

  Nearby, gray matter slipped out of a crack in a demon’s skull, oozing across the tile. It trickled into one of the iron grates and dripped onto underground fires a hundred feet below. Brain hit flame. It gave a hiss and smelled like barbecue.

  Barbecue. Her stomach lurched.

  The sword slipped from Elise’s fingers. Metal clattered against stone. The death goddess was sprawled at her feet, her necklace of skulls shattered, and her face had lost all its malice in death. She almost looked human.

  The fires darkened and the heat faded.

  Elise’s eyes rolled up to the ceiling. Her fingers twined through the curls at her scalp as her mouth opened in a silent cry. She had screamed too much earlier in the night and no longer had a voice.

  Her knees weakened. She collapsed.

  The clock’s pendulum continued to slow.

  James pushed the bodies of demons off of him. Emptying every page of the Book—even the terrible ones he had sworn never to use—meant they had died in a thousand ugly ways. Ruptured organs. Suffocation. Burning from the inside.

  His foot caught the pentagram-marked binder as he climbed free, but he didn’t pick it up. He didn’t want to look at it. He never wanted to cast a spell again.

  The clock wasn’t ticking with that terrible pulse anymore, and the sudden silence made his ears ring. Coughing, he slipped to the bottom of the pillar. “Elise?” he called, voice muffled in his ears.

  He nudged a demon’s body onto its back. The slash of its mouth gaped open, and the remaining air in its lungs sighed out with a whiff of sulfur. Covering his nose and mouth with his arm, he moved forward. James scrutinized each body he passed, half expecting to see Elise beneath them.

  The room depressurized, and the demons began to rot.

  Their skin dissolved to reveal bone. Their chests spread and tore. Organs twisted like worms within their guts as they vanished. One by one, they rotted away until the only body left was that of the goddess in the front of the room.

  A glint of steel caught his eye. His gaze moved from the sword to the legs beside it, and he realized the goddess wasn’t alone.

  “Jesus Christ…” He scrambled onto the dais. Elise’s skin was shredded and her chest was blackened with blood, and his stomach flipped when he realized it was all hers. “Elise—oh, Lord, Elise…”

  Her eyes fluttered open. “James?”

  “Are you all right?”

  She sat up carefully, wincing. “I’m not the one with a sword through my chest.” It wasn’t funny, but he laughed. Even a hint of humor after that fight was enough to drive him toward hysteria. “Let’s not do this again.”

  “I couldn’t agree more.” He helped her stand, and then picked up the sword she dropped. Elise turned to leave. “Don’t you want the other one?”

  She glanced at the falchion buried deep in the goddess’s chest. Her lip curled. “No. Hell can keep it.”

  The bladed clock swung once more, and it stopped midway on the down stroke, forever frozen between tick and tock. The earth shook.

  “We need to get out of here,” James said.

  Slowly, painfully, they climbed to the surface. Night had fallen, and the rain had stopped, leaving the air sticky and hot. They staggered almost a quarter mile before collapsing.

  Elise shuddered like a tree in a hurricane. Her wounds looked agonizing.

  “Can you heal me?” she asked. Her voice came out in a raw whisper.

  “I’m sorry. I have nothing left.”

  She nodded without speaking. Her face was very pale.

  They stared up at the vast black sky together. The clouds thinned, revealing stars and endless black sky. They waited until the sky faded to the deep navy of false dawn, and the sounds of night were replaced by birdsong.

  When the sun broke the horizon, the light shone in Elise’s hollow gaze.

  They had won, but James couldn’t help but feel they had lost something much worse than their lives. She sagged against his side. “Never again,” he murmured into her hair. “Never again.”

  PART SIX

  Sacrifice

  XIV

  MAY 2009

  “James!” Elise burst through the apartment door. The air inside was stale having the windows and doors closed all day. Nothing had changed since she left—paper spells were strewn across the kitchen table, and a rug was rolled neatly against the wall. There were even vacuum lines on the carpet from the last time James cleaned.

  “I could use you at Motion and Dance, Betty,” Anthony was saying into his cell phone, trailing behind Elise. “There’s something going down. Elise is messed up and I’m confused and I need someone sane. Yes, you’re sane. What? God, shut up. Just get over here, okay?”

  Elise jiggled the handle on James’s door, and it didn’t open. She found the key on top of the molding for the bathroom door. The tumblers fell into place with an audible click.

  James’s bed was empty. She cut her gaze to the window—open—to the mess of papers and books on the floor. The sheets on his bed were a mess. Stephanie sat at his desk. She gazed blankly at the window.

  Anthony came up beside Elise and peered over her shoulder. “Was there a fight?” he asked.

  Elise gazed at the exposed mattress. Red drops blotted its surface. She ran her fingertips along one of the spots, and rubbed it between her finger and thumb. She didn’t need a forensic expert to know whose blood it was.

  “Stephanie,” she said. The doctor didn’t look at her. “Stephanie. Dr. Whyte.”

  Slowly, so slowly, she looked over to Elise. “They took him,” she said. Her voice was the kind of calm that came from having reached a point of such hysteria that she didn’t have any emotion left. “Those…things. They came through the window. I cracked it to get some air.”

  Elise hauled Stephanie out of the chair and slammed her into the wall by the door. Anthony gave a startled cry and stepped forward, but she shot him a look that froze him mid-step.

  “Are you working with her? Did you let Ann in? What the fuck did you do to him?”

  Stephanie’s face crumbled. “I didn’t do anything. James was resting peacefully. I got a phone call and after I hung up, they came in. They knocked me out. I woke up and…” She wouldn’t look at the bed.

  “Who called you?” Elise demanded.

  “Ann. She said she had a question for James.”

  “Did you tell her to come in? Did you tell her to take him?” She pulled back a fist, but Anthony caught it.

  “Elise!”

  He peeled her off Stephanie. Elise jerked her arm out of his grasp, but she didn’t move to attack again.

  The doctor adjusted her shirt, neatened her hair, and broke down into tears.

  “I don’t understand,” she cried. “What was that?”

  Stephanie sobbed for a good long minute, and Elise waited, drumming her fingers against her thigh. When the doctor showed no sign of letting up, she made a disgusted noise.

  “This isn’t helpful. Where did they take James?”

  Stephanie sucked in a hard breath, straightening and grabbing a tissue to blow her nose. The tears stopped as suddenly as they began. Long breath in, long breath out. When she spoke, her tone was measured and even. She enunciated each word with great care. “I have no clue. I was unconscious.”

  “What were you doing all day?”

  “I woke up a few hours ago and waited for you. I didn’t know what to do,” she said. “I think—I might go home.”

  “She’s in shock,” Anthony whispered.

  “Fine. Get out
of here. Have a drink and lay down or something. You’re not doing any good,” Elise said. Stephanie left without saying another word.

  Elise stared at the spot of blood on the bed, her gaze narrowing until she saw nothing else.

  James was gone. Ann had him, and Elise had been right there the whole time.

  “I’m going to fucking kill her,” she said.

  Daylight waned. Clouds darkened what little sun remained. One moment, the air had grown still, and the next, rain poured out of the thunderheads. Lighting sparked over the mountains in the distance. Rain filled the streets and the people of the city took shelter inside.

  Inside Motion and Dance, a storm also began to break within Elise.

  “He’s not here,” she said.

  “Who?” Betty asked. Her friend Cassandra had given her a ride as soon as Anthony called, but Elise’s attitude made her wish she had taken a minute to put on full body armor first.

  Her roommate paced the dance hall like a caged animal, limping on every other step. Her eyes were darkened pits of fury. She had become the spirit of vengeance itself, barely contained by human flesh.

  Anthony cradled his forehead in his hands as he leaned against one of the mirrors in the main dance hall. He had stopped trying to talk when Elise almost punched him for it.

  “Who’s not here?” Betty repeated.

  “James. She took him.” She struck the palm of her hand with a fist. “I shouldn’t have left so fast. I should have searched the house. I should have…”

  “Hey, calm down,” Betty said, touching Elise’s shoulder. Her skin was hot. “Talk to me, girl. What’s happened?”

  “Ann has kidnapped my aspis for ritual sacrifice to a demon goddess of death.”

  Betty shook her head. “Yesterday, I would have said you were crazy. Today—well, you’re still crazy, but it’s contagious. What’s an aspis? Demons? Is that what that gargoyle thing was?”

  “That was a fiend.” She flung herself into the chair, shredding her jeans along the hole to turn them into half-shorts. Betty leaned in to examine the gashes on Elise’s legs. The blood had smeared, and the wounds were raw.