Damnation Marked (The Descent Series)

by Reine, SM

  She tried to take a deep breath, but it felt like her lungs wouldn’t expand. It wasn’t from the powerful heat and humidity.

  “Last night, Rick helped me track down a demon,” Elise said, keeping her tone measured. “That must have been about two in the morning. Did you see him at all after that?” Jerica shook her head, and the wooden jewelry in her ears clacked. “How long have you been down here?”

  “Since the collapse.”

  “How did you survive?” Anthony asked.

  Jerica planted her hands on her waist. “You kidding me? Do you even know what a nightmare is?”

  “So you were here when it fell,” Elise interrupted.

  “Yeah. I was worried about Rick. He had picked up a shipment of—are you sure you’re not the cops?”

  “Pretty sure.”

  “Okay. Just checking. He picked up a shipment of drugs. He was selling it to a customer we’d been dealing with for a few weeks. Rick seems like a grump, but he’s really a nice guy, so I was worried about him. Flipping drugs—that’s not the kind of shit he should be doing.”

  Elise quelled a burst of annoyance. So that was how Zohak had been getting his supply. Rick must have been good as his job; she had been following shipments for weeks trying to track the flow of lethe. “But he wasn’t at the shop.”

  “He had to be there. I didn’t see him, but Rick never leaves. Hasn’t in a hundred years. He must have been in the basement. But I didn’t get that far.” She glanced at Anthony and Elise’s ropes. “Can we finish talking on the surface?”

  “What’s down here?”

  “Nothing, aside from tunnels that go nowhere. I thought I might find a way into the Warrens if I wandered long enough. But this… this is endless.” A quaver of fear finally entered her voice. “I’d really like to finish talking on the surface.”

  Anthony was quick to reattach himself to the rope, but Elise only glared into the cavern.

  The shop had been destroyed before she could return to get answers from Rick—probably by the same thing that had killed Zohak before she could question him. Elise was sick of having her answers ripped out from under her.

  She helped Anthony double-check his rigging and waved Jerica over. “He’ll carry you up.”

  Anthony caught the suggestion in her tone. “You can’t stay down here, Elise.”

  She didn’t feel like arguing with him, so she cut him off with a hard jerk on his rope. “Nightmares weigh nothing, so all you have to do is hang on to each other. Don’t drop her.”

  Jerica obediently looped her arms around his neck. Anthony gagged at her spongy touch, but she didn’t seem to mind. Nightmares naturally repelled humans—she was probably used to having everyone give her a wide berth.

  “Shit,” Jerica said as Elise wrapped the end of the rope around her legs for extra security. “If Rick’s gone… It took months to get that job. I could lose my amnesty on Earth.”

  “You need a job?” Elise fished through her pockets and found a crumpled flier for one of Eloquent Blood’s events. “Go here. Ask for Neuma, and tell her that I sent you.”

  “And who are you?”

  “Elise,” she said simply. The demon’s skeptical expression didn’t change. Jerica would have been a lot more impressed if Elise had said “Godslayer,” but she preferred to spread it around as little as possible.

  The fact that she was ever called that title was meant to be a secret, but it had somehow been leaked to the local demons, and it spread quickly. They all whispered that the woman plaguing their nights was called Godslayer. Not kopis, not overlord—Godslayer. She couldn’t escape it.

  Anthony seemed torn between his urge to escape and his urge to keep an eye on Elise. Self-preservation won out. He caught her hand for an instant before she stepped away. “Be careful.”

  She gave him a thin smile. Anthony began scaling the wall with Jerica hanging effortlessly from his back. Elise watched until his light vanished.

  She was alone.

  At least, that was what she tried to tell herself. If Anthony and Jerica were gone, and the cavern beneath Rick’s Drugstore was empty, then she had to be alone. Really.

  Zohak’s words flitted through the back of her mind: It came from the earth… A shadow with inertia…

  Elise closed her eyes and counted to ten.

  The air was hot, but she could breathe. The shadows were not living. And she was definitely alone.

  She picked a direction and started walking.

  The sound of her footsteps was strangely flat as she picked her way over the rubble, pausing occasionally to stack one rock atop another to guide her back to the place where her rope dangled. After a few minutes, the cavern wall curved, and she walked along it until she came upon a tunnel. It sloped deeper into the earth.

  Elise began to descend.

  Breathing became a challenge. Water puddled in several places in the tunnel, and it was hot enough that it scalded her legs when it splashed onto her jeans.

  The tunnel was narrow enough that she could reach out and touch both sides, but she couldn’t see both rock walls at the same time. Either her light was fading, or the shadows were deepening.

  The path twisted, turned, and split. Elise followed the right wall, trailing her fingers along the dry stone.

  And then the wall disappeared. Her hand fell into empty air.

  A whisper rose behind her.

  Exorcist…

  She spun, raising her light.

  There was nothing to see beyond falling dust.

  The hair on the back of her neck stood on end. Elise drew her sword again and flexed her fingers on the leather-wrapped hilt.

  “Show yourself,” she said.

  Every other sound fell flat, but her words were carried into the gloom, echoing a dozen times over.

  Show yourself. Show yourself…

  For a moment, only her own voice filled the tunnel. And again, she heard that velvety, feminine voice call to her.

  Exorcist…

  Elise clamped her mouth shut.

  She stepped back until she found the wall, and gripped a jutting stone. Her racing heart gradually slowed.

  There had to be an end to the tunnels. There had to be.

  She followed the wall back the way she had come, but it took her to an unfamiliar place in the tunnels. Elise didn’t see any of her signposts at the junction.

  No way back.

  She hung to the left and kept going. Elise didn’t locate her starting cavern, but she finally found the end of the tunnel, more by mistake than by design.

  Her toe caught on a rock, she stumbled, and her hands met a wall of fallen rock.

  The tunnel roof had collapsed. The debris sparkled with some kind of mineral in the faint light—probably pyrite, which miners used to call “fool’s gold.”

  Water trickled out of the ceiling, making a steaming waterfall down the collapsed rocks that puddled at her feet. She traced her gloves over the dry rocks, feeling for gaps, and found nothing.

  Was that wall the place that the shadows were moving toward? Had they caused it to fall?

  Her flashlight flickered.

  “No…” She banged it against her knee. It flickered again. “No, no, no…”

  The bulb went out.

  Everything disappeared—the tiny waterfall, the sparkling rocks, her hands in front of her eyes.

  She stopped breathing.

  A slithering noise echoed from the deep.

  It sounded like… dragging.

  The weight built in her chest, crushing her like a giant fist. Elise gasped in the heat.

  You are a lovely thing, exorcist, murmured the voice.

  It was right behind her.

  She whirled—or at least, she thought she whirled. But she no longer had any sense of direction. One hand clutched the dead flashlight, the other clutched the sword, and both were equally useless.

  Lovely, yes… but not so terribly lovely. I can’t see why he’s so enamored with you.

&nbs
p; From her right side.

  Elise swung, and her sword met with nothing. The velvety voice gave a throaty chuckle.

  “Lovely?” she hissed between her teeth. The taste of ash crept over her tongue, thick and cloying, and began to slide down her throat.

  She coughed. Gasped. Fell to her knees.

  I wonder if he would be so enamored with a corpse.

  “Elise?”

  Someone else had spoken.

  A dim glow reached her eyes, and after so long in darkness, it felt like burning arrows piercing straight into her brain.

  The pressure in her throat vanished. She sucked in a hard breath.

  “Over here,” Elise choked out, and the glow moved closer. It resolved into a figure, willowy and tall.

  Nukha’il strode to her side, and with him came pale moonlight. It emanated from the wings folded neatly along his spine and flooded the tunnel.

  She never thought she would be so glad to see an angel.

  “There you are,” he said, his features sagging with relief. “When I found that boyfriend of yours alone on the rooftop…” Nukha’il shook his head, as if his fears were too great to utter aloud. “You look like you’ve survived.”

  “Somehow.” She wiped her tongue with the back of her hand, but she couldn’t get rid of that ashy taste. “Remind me not to go spelunking alone again.”

  “I would be happy to remind you if you give me warning beforehand.” Even though he continued to speak calmly, he managed to make it sound like an admonition.

  Elise got to her feet, squinting around for a sign of what might have spoken to her before Nukha’il arrived. She wasn’t surprised to find them alone. “What’s on the other side of this collapse?” she asked, nudging one of the rocks with her feet. “Does this go into the Warrens?”

  “I don’t know. I’m not familiar enough with the layout of the undercity.”

  “Can you open it?”

  The corner of his mouth lifted. “With a jackhammer.”

  A knot of tension in Elise’s spine eased—just a fraction. She almost found the strength to laugh. But it quickly died in her chest.

  “I’m lost.”

  “Then it’s a lucky thing that I found you.” He held out a hand. She shook her head. “Still no? After all this time? I’ve flown with you before.”

  “We can walk.”

  “Suit yourself.”

  He guided her back to the main cavern in silence. Eventually, she began recognizing her signposts, and she led the way to her ropes. Gripping the fiber was enough to calm her again, as if it were a lifeline.

  Nukha’il watched as she harnessed herself again. “My wings would be faster.”

  She bit back an angry response.

  “Did you kill my flashlight?”

  His wings drooped with embarrassment. “Sorry. I forget sometimes.” Her light flickered to life again. It was ugly and harsh after the gentle glow of his wings.

  “Why did you come down here, anyway?”

  “You asked me to check into the security of the gate. I thought you’d like to know what I found.”

  Her hands stilled on the rope. “Has it been invaded by the darkness?”

  “Not at all,” Nukha’il said, though he didn’t sound happy about it. “But I did find something interesting.” He hesitated, as though trying to choose his words. “It was a man. He was sitting on the gate’s dais when I arrived.”

  Fear shocked through her. “A man? What was he doing there?”

  “I don’t know. But he wants to speak with you.”

  PART THREE

  Fallen

  JANUARY 2000

  Something was killing babies. The disappearances could have passed for coincidence at first, but a pattern quickly became too distinct to deny: infants and small toddlers would vanish from their mothers’ beds at night, only to reappear weeks later, bloated and lifeless and miles from the places from which they had been taken.

  The killer began in African villages and moved quickly. By the time the children’s bodies were discovered, the killer was already gone, leaving screams in its wake.

  The kopis in Lesotho thought to cut open one of the bodies and was shocked to find it bloated by gas, without a single organ intact. Even the eyelids, when cut open, revealed empty pockets of air that reeked of brimstone.

  Elise was passing through and heard about what was happening. It would have been hard not to—the entire countryside was in mourning. The cries could be heard for miles.

  After questioning the local kopis—with the help of a friend who spoke a handful of English words—James extrapolated the pattern.

  “The livestock dies first,” he explained as they walked the dusty road between villages. He had tied a cloth around his head to protect himself from the merciless sun, but his nose was peeling and crispy. “When there are no more pigs, one child disappears, and then a few more over the week. There is a lull for a couple of days. The locals find the bodies after that. It’s too late by then, of course, because the killer has moved on.”

  Elise pondered this information. “Why pigs?”

  “Don’t you think the question should be: why babies?”

  “Everything eats babies.” She kicked a rock along the road with her boot. It skittered and danced over the dirt. “Maras. Ghouls. Lamias. Waiting to do it until there are no more pigs in town is the weird part.”

  “We’ll have to agree to disagree on which part is weird, I think.”

  “Fine, Mr. Doesn’t-Think-Babies-are-Dinner.”

  He laughed. “I’ll stick to James. Thank you.”

  Elise didn’t smile back. Her brow furrowed with thought as she gazed at distant Masai trees and the huge, leathery forms of the elephants milling beneath them. “Why pigs?”

  “I have no clue, but given the pattern’s ongoing northward route, we’ll likely have a chance to see soon enough.”

  He was right about one thing: the murders continued north very quickly. But they couldn’t seem to catch up. Every time they arrived in a new village, the residents were just finding the dead.

  Suspicious eyes followed them as they hurried past farms empty of livestock. They didn’t need to understand the whispers to know that rumors of white demons were spreading in their wake. To the locals, their appearance after the deaths seemed too soon to be accident. To Elise, they were frustratingly late.

  They were sleeping in a hostel a few weeks later when villagers arrived with guns.

  That was when they decided that they were done with Africa.

  Elise and James moved to France, which had been picked with the rigorous selection criteria of “soonest flight that doesn’t land in Africa.” She stayed in touch with the kopis in Lesotho with the help of her friend Lucas McIntyre, who had contact information for most kopides and had better luck finding a Bantu translator.

  But the Sotho kopis had no more useful information. Pig farms were recovering, no more children were found as husks, and the killer’s trail had gone cold.

  Despite renting a lovely apartment on the ocean, Elise soon began spending a lot of time in internet cafes.

  “What do you hope to find?” James asked when she returned to their room one night. He was casting fresh wards on their balcony, which would render anything that approached their railing unconscious. There was already a seagull sleeping on the planter.

  She kicked off her boots and stretched out on the couch with a stack of printed news articles. “Did you know that China has the highest population of pigs in the world?”

  “Does this mean we’re making another trip to China?” He drew a chalk line over the doorway. “You know I’m not a fan of China—or that entire side of the continent.”

  Neither of them were. They had mostly avoided East Asia since James had found her in Russia, just to be careful.

  “Not Asia this time. Cairo recently had a big outbreak of disease on their pig farms. They lost thousands of heads.” Elise dropped a stack of pages on the side table. “Guess what
infant mortality rates in Egypt are like this month?”

  “If you know where the killer is right now, then why are we reading news articles?”

  “Because it will already be gone by the time we get there. We have to know where it will be next. Before it arrives.”

  James dropped his chalk and sat beside Elise. He flipped through the articles she had dropped. “You’re dedicating a lot of time to this.”

  “Yeah. So?”

  “So I don’t think I’ve seen you this interested in anything before. Does this killer sound familiar to you? Is this personal?”

  Elise’s lips pinched together. “Look at this.” She showed him printouts from the bottom of her stack. The infants all had skin in mottled shades of brown and black. The bodies were tiny.

  He studied the young kopis while she was distracted. It was easier than looking at the pictures.

  Elise wasn’t sentimental; they had seen dead children in one of their very first investigations together, and she had been as bothered by it as she was by any other dead human—which was to say, not at all. Her face didn’t show any hint as to why these deaths were different.

  Not for the first time, he wished he could pry open her skull and read her thoughts.

  The seagull on their balcony woke up, took three dazed steps, and flew away.

  “What will our next destination be?” James asked

  She resumed reading. “I’m not sure yet. I’ll let you know in a couple of days.”

  It turned out they didn’t have a couple of days. Pigs began dying in France that very night.

  They took the train to a village in Brittany, where a farm’s entire stock had gone missing. The day was wet, gray, and miserable. James wandered the fields searching for footprints in the mud, while Elise tried to understand the farmer’s complaints through his thick regional accent.

  It took an hour for her to rejoin James. Her face was pinched. “He didn’t hear anything. He didn’t see anything, he doesn’t fucking know anything. God, what an idiot.”

  James gave her arm a brief, sympathetic squeeze before crouching by the fence again. He hiked up his pea coat so it wouldn’t drag in the mud. “See this?” Elise dropped beside him, leaning her shoulder into his. The wood had been burned. Yellow residue was left behind in a shape like two crescents. “Does that look like a cloven hoof to you?”