Dire Blood (The Descent Series, Book 5)

by Reine, SM

  Silence flooded the hall. Control was still chattering away, the useless fucks. Zettel turned the volume down on his earpiece.

  “We’ve got a problem, sir,” he said, getting to his feet.

  “We’d better have a problem, if people are waking me at midnight when I was having a good dream. What in the seven burning hells is going on, Gary?” His Irish accent was even harder to understand when he had been woken up from a drunken stupor.

  “Intruder. Thief. We’re under attack.”

  “What?” He blinked stupidly as the red spotlights cut out and turned white again. “What kind of intruder? Nightmare? Succubus?” He gave a low chuckle. “A succubus would definitely explain the dream.”

  Zettel took a deep breath. Let it out. “She was on me for a second. I only saw a glimpse, but I think I recognized her. And considering what she took…”

  “Hang on. Back up a few steps. Who is ‘she?’”

  He braced himself for the ridiculous, impossible truth.

  “It was Elise Kavanagh.”

  Malcolm only stared at him, as if waiting for the punch line to a joke. It never came. “Elise Kavanagh’s body is in cold storage,” the commander said.

  “I know.”

  “She’s been dead for weeks. You were there when we picked up her body.”

  Zettel nodded. “I know.” That day was permanently emblazoned on his memory—the first sunrise that touched Reno after days of darkness, the swirling snow and ash, the decimated buildings. Elise had gone down after killing Yatai, the mother of all demons.

  She had already been cold by the time they’d found her. And what sweet satisfaction that had been. It was Elise’s fault that Zettel had been demoted.

  He had watched the video of the autopsy with great pleasure. Had seen the mortician weighing her organs. Had read the report on her unusually low body fat and blood volume, her missing reproductive organs, her severed arm.

  Elise was definitely dead. But she was also, almost as certainly, the thing that had attacked him.

  Malcolm strode for the stairs and hit the button on his earpiece. “Control, I need you to get in touch with Union HQ and have someone check the refrigerators. See if there are any missing bodies.”

  A buzz, and the response piped over Zettel’s earpiece, as well. “Roger that.” They jogged down the stairs to the garage, and it didn’t take long for control to respond—nobody ever slept at Union HQ. “Everything is intact, sir.”

  “Shit,” Malcolm said. He jumped in the first SUV they came across and waved to Zettel. “You’re coming with me, Gary. Let’s get the bitch that stole Elise’s face.”

  Anthony Morales paced across the empty highway, hands jammed into his pockets and breath fogging around his face. He wore a path in the snow, tracing his footprints back and forth across the same ten-foot patch of ground. The snow boots were borrowed, and too big for him. They rubbed his toes raw through his woolen socks. The discomfort wasn’t enough to stop his worried fidgeting.

  “Come on,” he muttered, staring hard at I-80 heading out of town.

  The pickup that Anthony had been using was parked a good mile back—far enough that the Union monitors shouldn’t register it as someone attempting to violate the quarantine. But it made him nervous to be so far from his mode of transportation. If the Union showed up with one of those heavily loaded SUVs, they could run him down before he reached the truck. And they had made it pretty clear that they would consider anyone out after curfew to be a demon and a threat.

  He blew another breath under his scarf and checked his phone. Almost one o’clock in the morning. Elise had said she would be back by then.

  Anthony wasn’t worried about her. He didn’t think that the Union could kill Elise—hell, he was pretty sure they couldn’t even contain her anymore. There were no ropes strong enough for that. But the longer it took for her to come back, the more likely the Union monitors would be to scan his section of highway, notice the trail of footprints to his pickup, and come to investigate.

  He slapped his gloved hands together, trying to bring circulation into his fingers. “Come on, come on.”

  Something moved farther down the highway, and Anthony’s shoulders tensed.

  It was small and dark. Too distant to tell if it was Elise, or something even less friendly.

  He considered jumping the median and hiding until it got closer, but it definitely wasn’t Union—they were never that subtle on the approach. So he waited and prayed.

  As it came closer, Anthony realized that it was a boy. A human boy.

  That didn’t ease the tension in his shoulders. Not even a little. Anthony reached back and slid his shotgun out of his spine scabbard, warming the metal in his gloved hands.

  The boy spoke. “Hello?”

  “Stay back,” Anthony responded, lifting the shotgun. “I’m armed, and I will shoot.”

  That should have been enough to make any normal child run away. This boy just stopped. Anthony wasn’t surprised—normal kids had no reason to be on an empty freeway near the edges of the Reno-Sparks quarantine in the first place.

  Anthony stepped closer.

  The kid seemed normal enough. He had shaggy black hair and square glasses. He was dwarfed inside an adult-size jacket with a furred neck that fanned out around his round face. He was probably nine or ten years old; he was pretty tall for his age, and a little bit gangly.

  “I’m not going to hurt you,” the boy said.

  Definitely not a normal kid. “What are you doing out here? You know curfew was six hours ago, right?”

  The boy blinked. “Curfew?”

  Anthony’s suspicion ratcheted up a few notches. “Let me see your hands,” he said, and the boy held up his arms. His bare fingers were turning blue with cold as he shivered. Aside from the jacket, he wasn’t dressed for the cold at all. “What are you doing on the freeway? How did you get to this side of the quarantine?”

  “I caught a ride to Fernley on a semi and walked the rest of the way. My name is Nathaniel, and I’m looking for my parents.” After a pause, he added in a bold voice, “I said I wasn’t going to hurt you, right?”

  Anthony stretched out with all his senses, including the one that told him when evil was nearby. It seemed to have gotten more sensitive ever since he had been possessed by the mother of all demons. But he got nothing off of Nathaniel. Definitely human.

  He lowered the shotgun. “You picked a really bad time for a visit, kid. It’s not just the quarantine. The Union’s got a curfew after sundown, and trust me when I say they don’t care how old you are. You could get arrested. Do you want to be locked up?”

  Nathaniel shrugged. “They wouldn’t be able to hold me.”

  “How sure are you of that?”

  “Pretty sure. I’m tougher than I look.”

  Anthony almost lifted the shotgun again. “Are you human?”

  That question seemed to surprise the boy. “What else would I be?”

  Sirens shattered the night, and distant spotlights flashed to life over the hills.

  Anthony raised the shotgun reflexively as Nathaniel pulled a notebook out of his pocket and ripped out a page. Complex black runes were drawn across it in ink.

  Paper magic.

  Anthony stared. “Where did you get that?”

  “I made it,” Nathaniel said, like it was no big deal to be in possession of obscure and powerful magic.

  Motion farther down the freeway caught his attention. The snow darkened, as though black velvet was being dragged over the surface, and Anthony’s scalp started itching. That was the feeling that he had expected from Nathaniel—the sense of something powerful and hellish.

  It was the same way that Yatai had made him feel. But Yatai was dead, and what was coming for him now was almost worse.

  The shadows resolved into a pale woman with long hair. She was wearing a t-shirt, men’s jeans, and no shoes, and she cradled a box in her arms.

  It had been two days since Anthony had found Elise�
��s body floating in the middle of Lake Tahoe. Two whole days, and he still couldn’t get used to seeing his girlfriend with snowy-pale skin and hair that bled into the night. She looked like a dead woman who had crawled out of her grave, but that was probably because she was.

  And Elise was running. That was never a good sign.

  Spotlights flared behind her—twin lights that slowly grew. Kind of like the headlights of an SUV filled with Union soldiers out to shoot them.

  A lot like the headlights of an SUV, actually.

  “Anthony! Move!” Elise shouted. Her voice carried over the night like she had used a megaphone.

  He didn’t need to be told twice. He started backpedaling in his own footprints, trying to slip the shotgun back into its scabbard to free his hands, but it took him three tries to get it under his scarf.

  Nathaniel was frozen where he stood. He clutched the paper spell in both hands.

  “You better run,” Anthony said, and then he took his own advice and broke into a flat-out sprint.

  The sound of sirens grew louder. One by one, the streetlights over the freeway slammed on, splashing yellow light over the snow. Anthony heard Nathaniel scrambling to keep up with him as the engine noises grew.

  Elise drew level with Anthony. “Who’s the kid?” she asked. She wasn’t even breathing hard, and she didn’t leave any footprints in the snow.

  “You said you weren’t going to alert the Union!” Anthony yelled. His chest heaved, throat raw and breathing ragged from the cold. “You said you could get in and out without being spotted!”

  The SUV gunned it, spraying slushy snow in its wake.

  She snagged Anthony’s hand and dragged him over the median, onto the other side of the freeway, and down an off-ramp. Nathaniel followed.

  Unfortunately, so did the Union.

  The SUV smashed into the barrier. Concrete cracked.

  Anthony didn’t look back to see if they had flipped. He let his momentum carry him down the slope, shoving Nathaniel so that he was running in front.

  They jumped off of the freeway near a waterpark. The swimming pools were filled with ash and snow. “The truck is back that way!” Anthony tugged on Elise’s arm, but she ignored him.

  The Union was right behind them, just yards away. Its horn blared as it squealed down the ramp.

  “Wait,” Nathaniel said, stopping in the middle of the street.

  He flung the strip of paper into the air and spoke a word of power.

  Magic erupted through the street beneath their feet and made the air shimmer. Something huge coalesced over the SUV as it approached—a boulder the size of a car.

  The boulder dropped.

  It crashed into the hood of the SUV, and the metal crunched under it. Brakes squealed. The back tires lifted off the ground as glass exploded everywhere.

  Elise stared at him hard, as if the Union had vanished and she was seeing the child for the first time. Her eyes were endless pits, and if she had looked at Anthony like that, he probably would have shit himself. But the boy just started searching through his notebook for another page.

  Taking out one SUV wasn’t enough. Another vehicle rounded the bend to block the intersection, and Elise stopped short. Anthony ran into her back.

  A third vehicle appeared around the corner, and a fourth.

  They were trapped.

  Anthony edged backward, even though there was nowhere to go. “Elise…”

  “You’re right,” Elise said as the SUVs closed in. She shifted the box so it was under one arm and addressed Nathaniel. “Hey kid, are you scared of the dark?”

  “No. Why?”

  She lifted him under the arms, even though he was barely any shorter than she was, and threw him over her shoulder like he was a much smaller child. Then she grabbed Anthony’s wrist. The contact made his stomach cramp with nausea, and he wanted desperately to shove her away.

  Maybe the kid wasn’t scared of the dark, but Anthony was—he knew what was waiting inside.

  Elise erupted into fragments of shadow.

  Her swarming cloud of night was a few shades darker than the world surrounding them, and it consumed everything until all Anthony could see was blackness. It was as though a huge fist had clamped down on him, smothering his face and chest and jerking him off of the ground.

  He was buffeted inside a storm. Wind whipped around his ears.

  There were still sirens, and he could still hear the roaring engine of the SUV, but it quickly grew distant.

  “Hey!” someone shouted. “Stop them!”

  Popping noises. Gunfire.

  It rapidly faded, and was replaced by a roar like a tornado. Anthony couldn’t breathe, couldn’t see anything, and he felt dizzy with panic—

  But then it was over.

  Anthony fell onto the frozen, crunchy grass of a yard where the snow hadn’t stuck, and Nathaniel flopped a few feet away from him. The shadow burst with the fluttering of wings. Oxygen rushed into Anthony’s lungs.

  The boy immediately scrambled to his feet and spun, as if searching for the freeway. There was no sign of it.

  They were on a peaceful, suburban street, empty of cars or other life. The landscaping on that block was worse than on the surrounding streets—every single bush, tree, and blade of grass was shriveled and dead. They were in the outer edges of Sparks again, near Vista Boulevard, where James had a house with his girlfriend.

  Nathaniel’s jaw dropped. “Whoa.”

  Anthony flopped onto his back. It was the second time that Elise had done that to him, and it didn’t feel any better than the first. It wasn’t less frightening, either. Both times, it had felt like he was going to die.

  The shadows coalesced into Elise’s form again, and she rolled onto the pavement a few feet away.

  Her hair spilled over her shoulder as she pushed herself up onto her elbows. “Are you okay, Anthony?” she asked.

  He shook his head, but he said, “Yeah. I think we’re fine.”

  “Good.”

  She groaned and gripped her stomach. Her back arched. Her shoulders strained. With a wet heave, something heavy and black splashed out of her mouth, like a slug dragged from her stomach. Another jerk, and a second slippery organ fell from her lips.

  “What’s going on?” Anthony asked, getting onto his knees.

  “Oh God,” she moaned, sitting back on her heels. Black fluid marked her bottom lip. She wiped it off and then plucked something from one of the puddles she had vomited—a flattened bullet.

  She flung it aside, sending the bullet skittering across the icy pavement. Elise swore as she lifted her t-shirt. Her abdomen was riddled with holes that didn’t bleed, and her shirt was destroyed. “Fuck! Those assholes shot me!”

  “Yeah, and it obviously did a lot of damage,” Anthony said.

  Elise shot him an angry glare. It was a lot scarier now that it looked like her pupils had dilated to fill the entire iris. “It hurts. Okay?”

  She dug her fingers into one of the bullet wounds and pulled out another bullet.

  “Oh my God,” Nathaniel said. “What are you?”

  Elise discarded two more bullets, and the holes closed as soon as her fingers withdrew, leaving the skin underneath smooth and unmarked. “‘What am I?’” she echoed. “Isn’t that just the question of the day?” She got to her feet and scanned the street. “I guess what matters is that we just saved your life, kid. The Union’s not too careful about who they shoot after curfew.” She glanced at him for an instant. “Not that you’re helpless, apparently.”

  Her eyes fell on the box she had been carrying down the freeway. It was in a bush down the street. Anthony hung back with Nathaniel when she went to retrieve it.

  The boy’s mouth hung open. He looked pretty much exactly the same way Anthony had felt ever since he’d recovered Elise’s body only to discover that she wasn’t as dead as he’d expected. But the story behind that was way too long to tell a random person, much less one as young as Nathaniel.

  How
could he begin to understand that Elise had died and been reborn as something inhuman when nobody else seemed to understand it, either?

  So he settled for saying, “It’s okay. She’s one of the good guys.” He hoped that was still true, at least. “What did you do? That magic thing?”

  “I summoned a rock,” Nathaniel said.

  “You…summoned…a rock.”

  “Yeah. From a cave by my house. I tagged it before I left, just in case.”

  Anthony gaped.

  Elise took the box out of the bush, set it on the sidewalk, and opened the latches. She removed two swords, each as long as her forearm. Anthony couldn’t see much detail in the dark, but he knew that one was cast in steel and engraved with religious symbols. The other one used to be a perfect twin, but, just like Elise, it had been taken by something demonic. Now it was glossy and black, like obsidian.

  Nathaniel watched with his jaw dropped. “The swords. That’s Elise Kavanagh, isn’t it? But she’s nothing like the pictures.”

  “You’ve seen pictures of Elise?” Anthony asked.

  The boy looked sheepish. “When I said that I came here looking for my parents…um, I kind of meant that I was looking for someone to help me find them.”

  Anthony was about to ask him who his parents were when he noticed that the boy was still gripping his notebook in both hands. “Let me see that.”

  He jerked the paper out of the boy’s hands and ignored his protesting cry.

  Magic wasn’t Anthony’s strong suit, but he had seen his cousin, Betty, messing with paper magic often enough that he recognized some of the symbols. It looked a lot like the kind of magic James cast—the kind of magic that only James was supposed to know how to perform.

  It was powerful stuff. Too powerful for the average witch. And definitely too powerful for a ten-year-old boy.

  “Who did you steal this from?” he asked, flipping through the pages.

  Nathaniel reached for it, but Anthony held it over his head. “I didn’t steal anything. I drew those myself. Give it back!”

  “You drew these? That’s not possible. There’s no way you could know how to do paper magic.”

  The boy had written an address on the front page of the notebook in very precise cursive—a number, a street name, and a zip code.