Defying Fate (The Descent Series)

by SM Reine

  But once the Union was out of sight, she grinned.

  “I’ve got snacks under the driver’s seat if you guys are hungry,” she said, punching the power button for the CD player. “It’s a long drive to Reno. Help yourselves.”

  Brianna was right. It was a long drive back to Reno, and James’s reluctance to engage her in conversation only made the drive take longer. He watched the side mirror for the first three hours, expecting to see a black SUV behind them, but it never showed up. That didn’t comfort him. It only made him worry more.

  If the Union wasn’t chasing them, then what were they doing?

  The drive wore on, long and quiet.

  Nathaniel talked to Brianna sometimes. It was never anything remarkable. Observing a landmark, suggesting a different route, asking for a bathroom break. James tensed when Brianna asked after Hannah, but Nathaniel ignored the question. And he showed no sign of the grief he must have felt beyond sullen silence.

  The fact that James and Nathaniel weren’t interested in speaking to Brianna didn’t seem to dissuade her from random bursts of friendly chatting. And she never tired. A combination of caffeine pills and bottled cappuccinos kept her driving through the day and another night.

  “I’m not just a witch, you know,” Brianna said when they reached Elko, as if someone had asked her. “Did you know that there are metahumans, too?”

  James stared at the reflection of his gray stubble in the mirror.

  She went on.

  “There’s some other kind of metahumans running around, like precognitives and pyrokinetics. Not a lot—I think maybe like a dozen of us worldwide. Two dozen, max, if you count people that nobody has ever met in remote Mongolia or something. I think my rarity is why Landon elected me as the next high priestess.”

  He propped his head up on his hand. His skull felt too heavy.

  “Unfortunately, my power’s not as interesting as setting things on fire. It’s kind of a stupid pet trick, actually,” Brianna said in a low voice, as though confiding a dark secret to him. “But I can look at anyone and know what they are. Most of the time, the answer is human. Nothing remarkable about the average person. But if there’s a hint of demon blood, I can tell, and I can usually tell what flavor of demon, too.”

  That finally caught James’s attention. “You can identify species at a glance?”

  She tapped her nose. “More like at a smell. I can sniff them out.”

  “Interesting.”

  Brianna’s laugh was pleasant enough. It was just as light and fairy-like as the rest of her, almost like the jingling of sleigh bells. “Not really. I mean, how many Gray do you run into on a normal day?”

  “Too many,” James said. The desert kept rolling past them, a monotonous sheet of yellow. He thought that the horizon might have been burned into his corneas.

  “I don’t. For me, it’s like…” She jabbed her finger at the windshield, as if pointing out people in an invisible crowd. “Human. Human. Witch. Human. Witch. Witch. And then fifty more humans. You know? I did discover that one of the old biddies in my knitting circle has succubus blood, though, which was pretty funny. It definitely explains how she ended up with forty-three grandchildren.”

  James wanted to ask her what she felt from him, but he didn’t. He wasn’t sure he even wanted to know.

  Brianna prattled on, speaking to neither James nor Nathaniel. He tuned in long enough to know that she was sharing her life story. Something about gifted schools, a love of yarn, and a house filled with books. The story was as tedious as the long drive.

  They passed through the outer fringes of Dayton—a sea of desert interrupted only by twenty-year-old housing developments—and entered the Minden area. It was comparatively green in the way that embers were comparatively cooler than live flames; spring made the artificial sod as lush as it would ever be, considering that they were surrounded by yucca, sagebrush, and sand flats.

  That far south, there was no sign of the destruction that had struck Reno. Carson City, just fifty miles south of Reno, was in worse condition than Dayton. The sky was a steely gray, permanently dimmed by the fires burning underneath Reno. A haze clung to the northern hills. And all of the grass was dead.

  The freeway had been closed, so Brianna was forced to drive them through the center of town. Protesters still lined the streets near the Capitol Building. They had been camped out almost six months now to demand Reno’s liberation. They wanted their city and jobs back. They didn’t seem to realize that there was no city left to regain.

  James and Elise had wandered through the Capitol gardens in autumn many years back; she had smiled as she shuffled through the piles of leaves, quietly delighting in the colors.

  And then Brianna’s car passed the Nugget, where James and Elise had enjoyed a cheap, greasy breakfast after a performance at the Brewery Arts Center. Elise had gotten coffee and eggs. He had eaten her toast and hash browns. The food was offensively stale, slapped together with all the consideration that a minimum wage cook could muster, and they had both been too tired to hold a real conversation. But being with Elise, fresh off of a perfect performance, was far better than any gourmet experience.

  That had been during their five-year retirement—the peaceful period with no demons, no angels, and no looming threat of death. James had thought that life would never be better than that.

  He hated being right.

  When the casino strobes passed, he could no longer tolerate looking out the window. He flipped down the sunshade to shield his face and closed his eyes.

  But shutting out the world surrounding him didn’t shut out Elise. Nothing could drive her out of his mind, not when she had spent so many years burrowing deep into his psyche. Eyes open or closed, whether they were in the same room or different worlds, Elise was all that James thought about in his idle moments. Especially now.

  His mind drifted to a hike they had taken through a canyon northwest of Carson City. It was an easy trail, wide and flat, but they had gone too early in the year. The trail became muddy in the higher elevations. A few hundred feet higher, it was covered with two feet of snow.

  Elise had been wearing shorts, but she insisted on continuing through the snow anyway. She had been too fascinated by the animal prints to stop.

  “That’s a herd of deer. A stag, two does, and a couple fawns,” she had told James, nodding at a path off the main trail. “And I think a bear crossed through earlier.”

  All James saw were shallow indentations in the snow. He squinted into the trees, searching for hints of fur and legs. “How can you tell?”

  “I can’t. I’m just messing with you.”

  James laughed. She laughed. The sun caught on her curls, highlighting them a coppery shade of red that made her cheeks seem to glow.

  But then Elise cut off abruptly. She was staring at something in the trees.

  James turned. A stag watched from the ridge above them. The points of its wicked horns and what must have been extremely long legs were half-concealed by shrubbery.

  Once he made out the shape of one deer, he could pick out the others, too, though they were somewhat better concealed in the trees.

  One buck. Two does. And two fawns.

  James and Elise were only separated from the herd by fifteen feet of craggy cliff. If the buck decided that they were a threat, they would hardly have time before it charged. Yet Elise only stared at the buck, and it stared back.

  The wind through the trees sounded like the rush of tires on smooth freeway. The sun was warm, snow and all, and James thought that he had finally seen where Elise belonged: among the earth and the forest, a primal force of nature.

  James’s eyes opened, and he realized that the sound of the wind had really been Brianna’s car.

  They were approaching South Reno, but it wasn’t the South Reno that he remembered. All of the familiar landmarks he expected to see—the shopping mall, the sweeping parks, and the geothermal station—had been torn down. Guard stations and towering iron fence
s stood in their places.

  Brianna slowed to a stop behind a short line of cars waiting to enter. The Union only allowed one vehicle through at a time, after what seemed to be a lengthy inspection of the entire car.

  James twisted to look at his son in the back seat. Nathaniel was asleep again. His shirt was still covered in Hannah’s blood.

  “Get off the freeway. We need to find a way around the guard station,” James said, grabbing a blanket to toss it over Nathaniel’s sleeping form.

  “Nah, it’s fine,” Brianna said. “I’ve got this.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  She waved a hand. “I told you, it’s fine.”

  A witch was walking up the line of cars to speak to each driver. James triggered the glamor spell. Prickles washed over his skin, as if his entire body had fallen asleep at once. In the side mirror, the reflection of his gray-stubbled jaw had turned clean-shaven. He looked young, brown-haired, and Mexican—identical to Anthony, whose appearance he had “borrowed” for the spell.

  Brianna stared at him. “Holy crap, that’s…”

  “Not right now,” he said in his own voice.

  Activating his magic immediately killed all of the electricity in the checkpoint. The red signal dimmed, darkened. James watched the guards inside the booths take out their earpieces and look at them in confusion.

  The guard rapped on their window with her gun. Brianna rolled it down. “Hi,” she said. “We’re on our way to UNR for the study.”

  What study? James tried not to stare at Brianna.

  The guard bent over to look in the car. “He’s not old enough,” she said, jerking her chin at Nathaniel.

  Brianna put her hand on James’s knee. His skin crawled. “We couldn’t leave our little guy behind.”

  James glanced back at Nathaniel. His glasses had fallen off. With the blanket to his chin and uneven bangs, he did look like a little boy—though probably not little enough for Brianna and Anthony to have produced him.

  “Get out,” the witch said. “I’m going to search your car.”

  “I don’t want to disturb him,” Brianna said.

  Her lie was already falling apart—the guard didn’t look remotely convinced. But when James reached for a spell to attack, Brianna’s hand tightened on his leg, digging her fingernails into his thigh.

  Brianna held up her wallet. It bulged with money. “Can you just inspect this?”

  After a beat, the witch took it from her. When Brianna took it back a moment later, the wallet looked much thinner.

  The guard stepped back and waved them through.

  “See?” Brianna said when they had cleared the checkpoint. “I told you that it was fine.”

  XV

  James didn’t allow his glamor to dissolve after they passed the checkpoint. He clutched it to his skin like armor.

  “A study at UNR?” he asked Brianna, glancing over his shoulder at the retreating guard post.

  “It’s been all over the blogosphere,” she said. “The Union’s experimenting on people in Reno now.”

  “What kind of experiments?”

  Brianna shrugged. “Who cares? It saved us.” She picked up speed as they hurtled down the highway, weaving between the empty lanes. “Where to now?”

  James wasn’t sure what to tell her. Should he have her take them downtown, straight to the mirror city? Was he ready to pass through the gates? “Cross over to I-80 and get off on Keystone,” he decided after a moment.

  Brianna did as he ordered, shooting him looks out of the corner of her eye, as if she couldn’t quite believe what her eyes were telling her. “You’re kind of sexy like that.”

  Elise certainly seemed to think so. “I’ll choose to take that as a compliment.”

  On the west end of Reno, the devastation wasn’t too bad. There were a lot of abandoned, ash-covered cars parked on the sides of the road, and a few blocks were cordoned off to block sinkholes that Yatai had created, but everything was otherwise normal. With the sun shining, it was hard to believe how much of a disaster had befallen Reno.

  Despite the beautiful day and the wind smelling of blooming sage and sun-warmed earth, the streets were empty. Boarded-up windows concealed empty houses. Any cars that hadn’t been destroyed were missing, and the sidewalks were empty.

  It was a dead city—as much a ghost town as any James might pass on the drive to southern Nevada.

  Motion and Dance was just as dusty as the other buildings on the street, but everything else looked normal. The grass was even green—a condition that would end within the next two or three weeks, as soon as summer’s blistering heat struck.

  Brianna pulled into the parking lot. She turned in her seat to face him.

  “I want to know how to do…that,” Brianna said, waving at James’s face. “I want to know everything you know. Landon might be dead, but I can still lead the coven if you teach me. Let me be your apprentice.”

  James massaged his fingers over his temple. He could feel a headache forming. “You will not be my apprentice. I don’t have apprentices.”

  “Pamela had apprentices.”

  “Thanks for the ride,” he said, getting out of the car. “I hope your trip back is safe.”

  “Trip back? But I’ve driven hundreds of miles to help you!” Brianna said.

  “And I’m grateful,” he said. “But this is where we separate.”

  He opened the back door and gently shook Nathaniel’s knee. He jolted awake, staring wildly around the car as if they were under attack. James could see the instant that he remembered what had happened over the last few days—his face hardened into a mask, and he shoved his glasses onto his nose.

  “We’re here?” Nathaniel asked, squinting at James’s magicked features. It wasn’t a look of confusion; he looked to be analyzing the magic, trying to understand the spell that had changed his father’s face.

  “We’re here,” James confirmed.

  Nathaniel pushed the blanket off and got out. Brianna rolled down the window and hung her arm over the side.

  “I’m going back to Colorado to see what I can figure out,” she said. “Give me a call when you’re done with…whatever you’re doing. I could use your help salvaging the coven now that Landon’s gone.”

  “I’ll consider it,” James said, which was his way of saying, “Not a chance in Hell.”

  “You’ll want to be somewhere safe before it gets dark,” Brianna said. “There are demons underground. A lot of demons. I can feel them. And as soon as the sun goes down, I bet they’re all going to come crawling out looking for something to eat. You know?”

  “Yes. Right. Thanks for the warning.”

  Nathaniel stood on the sidewalk until Brianna’s car disappeared down the street. It looked like he wished he could go with her—maybe he was having second thoughts about their ridiculous rescue mission.

  James had bigger things to worry about than second thoughts. He drank in the sight of the studio, his heart aching.

  One of the front windows had been broken. The carpet in front of the reception desk was sprinkled with glass. He reached through the broken window to unlock the door, then stepped inside.

  The memories that Metaraon had dragged to the surface seemed so recent, rather than years old. It was like prodding a fresh wound.

  James could almost hear Betty laughing in the dance hall.

  Nathaniel followed him through the dance hall, where the blue exercise mats still covered the floor. The boy tapped a key on the piano. It was desperately out of tune, and the note rang sour.

  A glimmer of metal under the piano caught James’s eye—a pair of rings that had been tossed aside in a moment of passion.

  James fished the rings out from under the piano and pocketed them.

  “Who’s that?” Nathaniel asked, staring hard at James.

  He touched his face. He could still feel his own nose and chin, but it was Anthony’s face in the mirrored walls.

  “This is a man named Anthony Mo
rales,” James said. “He’s a…friend.” He let the glamor fall away. His skin turned white again, gray stubble reappeared on his cheeks, and exhausted blue eyes stared back at him from the mirror.

  “How did you do it? Not just that one. All of them.” Nathaniel waved at James’s body to indicate the marks. Even with the glamor concealing his skin, the magic contained within the spelled tattoos glimmered faintly.

  “Like I told Brianna—”

  “No crap. Just tell me,” Nathaniel insisted. He sounded exactly like Hannah when he talked like that.

  James sighed, running a hand over the stinging welts on his arm. “It’s hard to explain. Human magic requires a source of power, preferably one that originates from plants. The strength of the spell correlates to the energy source, which is why sacrifices are sometimes—”

  “I know,” Nathaniel interrupted.

  Of course he did.

  James stared helplessly at his son, wondering how the hell he was meant to bridge this gap between them. Nathaniel was already educated well beyond the point that any boy his age should have been. James couldn’t speak to him like Pamela spoke to her initiates.

  He would have to approach it from a different angle.

  “Arcane ethereal magic is self-powering,” James said. “The words themselves are the magic, augmentable with herbs and crystals, rather than using them as a source of power.”

  He extended his arm toward Nathaniel. James had used all of the spells on that forearm, but the imprint of welts remained. Even with increasingly kopis-like attributes, he couldn’t heal the burn of magic quite so quickly. The red marks stung when he looked at them, as if they burned anew.

  “See these marks? It’s a bastardization of written magic and arcane ethereal magic—what they used to call magecraft.”

  Nathaniel rolled his eyes. “Magecraft hasn’t worked for hundreds of years.”

  “Thousands,” James said.

  “And only angels can perform it.”

  He coughed into his fist. “That’s true. Mostly. It’s been strictly regulated by the Council of Dis, but the touchstones of the Treaty have all been killed.”

  Nathaniel’s eyes widened. He sat on the piano bench.