Damnation Marked (The Descent Series)

by Reine, SM

  Sleeping.

  The urge to rip him out of bed was overwhelming. She tightened her hand on the molding by the door until the wood creaked.

  Part of her had thought—had hoped—that Neuma was lying. Anthony would never have gone home instead of following her into a fight. It was cowardice.

  But there he was. Sleeping.

  She left the bedroom door open and wore a path in the carpet between the kitchen and the bathroom door, arms folded tightly across her chest. The light through their window, which was barred on the outside, didn’t seem to pass through the doorway. She could barely make out Anthony’s shirtless form in bed.

  He flipped over without waking up. His hand flexed, and relaxed.

  Anthony had been having nightmares. He told Elise about them, once. He said that he was dreaming about the gateway, and the things he had seen on the other side—the things that had happened to him when Elise and James were fighting Mr. Black. She didn’t want to know about it. That conversation had a way of spiraling inevitably back to Betty.

  Elise kicked a pair of jeans out of her path and turned, walking back to the other wall again.

  Was his fear of the city really enough to make him run? After everything they had done together? Zombies, stealing a semi from a dozen guys with submachine guns, facing down the Union…

  She really wanted a smoke.

  As if her thoughts disturbed him, he rolled over again and flung an arm off the side of the bed. His chest was soaked in sweat. His hair was plastered to his forehead.

  She tore open the knife drawer. Contemplated the paring knives. Slammed it shut again.

  After weeks of exploring the higher levels of the Warrens together, there was no way he could have gotten lost. He must have been trying to run. To escape the fight.

  And while he slept, Nukha’il was at Yatai’s mercy in the ethereal city.

  The heat in her gut grew until she couldn’t contain it anymore. Elise stalked into the room and flung open the drapes. Feeble yellow sun splashed over the bed. “Get up.” Anthony mumbled and pulled the pillow over his face. She jerked the sheets off of him, and he pulled his knees to his chest reflexively. “Hey! I told you to get up!”

  Anthony peered at her from under the pillow, eyelids puffy and his eyes red. “What?”

  Elise swept his jeans and shirt off the floor and flung them at him. “Get out of bed. Get dressed. And get out of my apartment.”

  He sat up slowly. “Elise…”

  “You heard me!”

  He put one foot in his jeans, and then the other, pulling them to his knees. “Are you…kicking me out?” he asked, and his voice was suddenly very clear. Tension corded his shoulders.

  Was she kicking him out? Elise almost laughed.

  She slammed out of the bedroom to the kitchen. The apartment was too small. The walls were too close, the roof was too low—everything was too goddamn dark. Elise began stuffing things into a backpack without thinking about it—the daggers she had laid out on the kitchen table for sharpening, her charms, a couple of old photos from the walls.

  Anthony stumbled into the doorway, jeans unbelted and shirt hanging from his hands. “I think the stress is getting to you.”

  “Stress isn’t getting to me,” Elise snapped. “You’re getting to me.”

  “Excuse me?”

  “The Warrens. Last night. Why did you run away?”

  He looked puzzled. “I didn’t run. I got lost.”

  “Look, Anthony, I’ve got one job that matters in this territory—just one damn job. I have to protect the gate. I promised the ethereal and infernal delegations that I could handle it. And what happens the first time the gate is threatened? You get lost.”

  His eyes widened, and his mouth worked soundlessly. It took him a good ten seconds to find words. “It was dark.”

  Was there anything else Elise wanted out of that shithole? She couldn’t lay any claim to the furniture. Everything belonged to the landlord, from the couches to the television. The plates belonged to Anthony—he could keep them. All she had were clothes and weapons and the bicycle that was chained outside.

  That was all that remained of her life.

  “You know what? Don’t bother leaving.” She leaned into the bedroom to grab a handful of clothes out of her drawer and jam them into her backpack. She forced the zipper closed. “I’m sick of this place anyway.”

  Anthony reached the door first. He slammed his hand into it to keep her from escaping. “You can’t seriously be angry at me for what happened last night. Come on, Elise, you’re—”

  “You don’t know anything about what I feel!”

  Her own volume shocked her. The shout tore from her chest, ragged and harsh. She faltered. Almost dropped the backpack.

  So many emotions roiled inside of her. Guilt at what had happened to Nukha’il—an angel who had no choice but to obey her every word. Fear at what would happen if the darkness got inside the gateway. Longing for James’s company. Anger at Anthony for screwing up her plans. And all of it knotted into her intestines, gripping her and rocking her and making her eyes burn.

  “Wait,” Anthony said. He laughed mirthlessly. “Are you trying to break up with me?” The look on her face made his laughter abruptly cut off. “Jesus. You don’t think of it as breaking up, do you? You don’t even think of me as your fucking boyfriend. We’ve lived together for two months. We’ve been dating for half a year…”

  “You are my boyfriend, Anthony.” After a beat, she added, “You were.”

  “You know what? Good. I’m so sick of putting up with your bullshit—treating me like I’m some kind of asset, like I’m another demon at your goddamn casino. You only want me because I can fire a shotgun. I didn’t want to leave because I had nowhere to go. But now I don’t have to worry about it.”

  He sat on the couch. And then he smiled.

  The corner of a white book caught Elise’s eye, peeking out from under the couch. It was Betty’s wedding album.

  She scooped it off the floor and headed for the door.

  Anthony’s footsteps thudded behind her as he vaulted over the table to slam his hand into the door, shutting it again before she could get into the hallway.

  “The hell do you think you’re doing, Elise? That’s mine.”

  “It’s Betty’s.” He grabbed it, but she didn’t let go.

  “And I’m her cousin.”

  Bitterness spiked through her heart. “They didn’t ask you to spread her ashes, did they?”

  The hurt in his eyes was worth it. His fingers slipped. But it only made him fight harder for the album, and Elise had to drop her backpack to keep her grip.

  She won the fight, but he stepped between her and the hall.

  “Betty would have been disappointed in you,” Anthony spat. “She thought you were a hero. She thought—”

  Elise lifted the album. “Don’t you speak another word.”

  He fell silent, hand outstretched as though he expected her to throw it.

  She opened the cover and removed her favorite picture—a photo of Betty in her wedding dress with a long train and white flowers in her hair—then shoved the book into his chest.

  “Don’t come to Craven’s again,” she said, shoving the picture in her back pocket. “I’m done with you.”

  He didn’t stop her when she flung the door open again. Elise shouldered her backpack and marched to the elevator, down the stairs, and into the harsh light of early morning.

  A shadow passed over the sidewalk.

  Elise didn’t think anything of it, at first. It only temporarily dimmed the sun. The breeze that followed was chilly enough to penetrate the foulest of moods, so she hugged herself tighter and quickened her pace. She kept expecting to hear Anthony calling after her, and she wasn’t sure she could keep it together if he caught up with her—her temper was too short, exhaustion dragged too heavily on her, and she desperately wanted to crack some skulls.

  Sunlight crossed her path again, and then
faded. She punched the button for the crosswalk and squinted up at the sun.

  But there was no sun. There were no clouds, either.

  Something massive and gray filled the air, like a lens a shade darker than the sky had slid over the city. It shimmered and pulsed.

  The traffic light changed to allow her to cross the street, but Elise didn’t move.

  Whatever was in the air darkened again—just a fraction. She glimpsed a street paved with white stone. She saw what looked like the roof of her apartment building, too, as though it had been reflected on the air.

  And she thought she saw a tall white gateway.

  As soon as Elise realized what she was seeing, it was gone again.

  The sky was blue. The sun was climbing over the hills, rapidly warming the day and making the ice turn to steam as it melted.

  But there was no mistaking what she had seen: a mirror image of downtown Reno, inverted so that the tops of the buildings reached for one another.

  Elise glanced around, but nobody else seemed to have noticed. A man in a white tank top, oblivious to the cold, jogged past with his pit bull trailing behind him. A car cut a turn too close and bumped over the opposite sidewalk, making a woman shout and wave her fist. The other cars moved along totally undisturbed. People were too absorbed in their lives to notice that anything had gone awry.

  Maybe she had imagined it. Maybe it was the stress.

  Then her gaze met with that of a man sitting in a parking lot on the other side of the fence. He had a sign that said “lost my job, please help,” a shopping cart piled with trash bags, and wide eyes filled with fright.

  “Jesus Christ,” he said. “Did you see that?”

  The glorious moment where Elise hoped that she was going crazy was instantly shattered.

  For a few seconds—a few utterly impossible, mind-breaking seconds—the ethereal city, and its entire parallel dimension, had faded into view above Reno.

  The manager’s office was empty when Elise arrived.

  She kicked the enchanted closet door. “Let me in!”

  The hinges whined with annoyance as it opened. Elise ducked in, removed the trash bag that encased her falchion’s twin, and shut the door again. She ripped open the garbage bag before she could think too much about what she was doing.

  What lay inside was not the falchion that Elise had tenderly cared for all those years. The ichor had eaten into the metal, coalesced, and hardened; the blade had become the same material as Zohak’s skin, like shining obsidian. The symbols she had carved into it as a teenager were distorted.

  Elise swallowed hard before removing it from the bag.

  What used to be leather wrappings around the hilt had crumbled into dust. It felt strange in her hand, but it had a good heft to it, and the edge looked sharp enough. She didn’t dare test it.

  The falchion felt wrong to her demonic sense, like the chime of a cracked bell, but it was exactly what Elise wanted. She couldn’t use her other sword, or any other weapon, against Yatai’s legions—not unless she wanted them to turn into obsidian, too. But she could use her possessed sword against them.

  Carefully—very carefully—she sheathed the obsidian blade in her spine scabbard beside its twin. It was thicker than it used to be, and it took some wiggling to fit it in properly. Then she pulled the jacket over her shoulders and flipped her hair out of the collar to cover the hilts.

  Elise bumped into a girl on her way down the stairs.

  “Hey!” The girl looked familiar, but she wasn’t wearing a Craven’s uniform—not the tie and vest of a dealer, nor the ridiculously short skirt of a cocktail waitress. She also obviously wasn’t a stripper. She was much too ugly.

  Elise slowed on the stairs. “What are you doing back here?”

  “I’m looking for where you guys store the uniforms. Neuma said she’d give me a job.”

  She blinked, trying to put a name to the face. She finally recalled the tunnels beneath Rick’s Drugstore. “Jerica. Right?”

  The nightmare rolled her eyes. “How nice to see that I made an impression.”

  “Uniforms are in the break room,” Elise said. “Stay out of my office.”

  She hurried down the stairs, and Jerica remained at the top.

  “I wanted to say thanks!” she yelled, but Elise had already sprinted across the casino floor and into the daylight.

  A few blocks away at St. Mary’s Hospital, James’s phone chimed.

  He sat up from the couch in Stephanie’s office. His Blackberry was on her windowsill all the way across the room. The screen illuminated, and then dimmed.

  That sound meant he had an email.

  James had been resting ever since Stephanie had found him pacing the halls in the emergency room and shuttled him into her office, but his mind was moving too fast for him to truly relax. The sugar-free gelatin he had bought at the hospital cafeteria wasn’t sitting well, and that beep from his Blackberry made his stomach pitch. He thought he might throw up.

  He stood, adjusted his clothes, checked the buttons on his shirt, and smoothed down his hair. He double-checked to make sure everything was in his pockets—the Book of Shadows he had been carrying for weeks, the keys to Motion and Dance, and a pack of cinnamon-flavored gum. Then he adjusted his buttons again.

  The phone chimed helpfully to remind him that he still had a new email.

  The distance between the couch and window couldn’t have been more than ten feet, but it felt like it took ten minutes for him to get there. James hesitated with his hand over the cell phone. There was a strange rushing sound in his ears. His head felt light.

  The mail icon was blinking.

  He swallowed hard and picked up the phone.

  Before he could unlock it, the Blackberry vibrated in his hand, and Elise’s name lit up on the screen. The first bar of “Für Elise” tinkled over the speaker.

  He deflated, sagging against the windowsill and bumping his forehead against the glass. James gave his heart a few seconds to slow before lifting the phone to his ear. “Hello?”

  “Where are you?” Elise sounded out of breath.

  “St. Mary’s. What…?”

  “Good. I need you to meet me at the Shell station, the one on Sierra. I think we’ve—”

  The line went silent.

  “Elise?” he asked.

  James checked the screen. She hadn’t hung up on him; there was an “x” where the bars indicating his signal strength should have been.

  He swore under his breath and moved into the hallway, lifting his phone to search for the network.

  He bumped into Stephanie when he passed through the door. Her strawberry-blond hair was loose around her shoulders, and she chewed on her ponytail holder in the corner of her mouth. She only did that when she was really absorbed—like when she was losing to James at a game of Scrabble, or when she was worrying about one of her patients.

  She waved the lab sheet. “You’re still here! Good. I have your results.”

  It took him a moment to remember what results, exactly, she could be talking about. “Oh. Excellent. Could I borrow your cell phone?”

  “Don’t you want to know what I found?” she asked, handing her smart phone to him.

  “Of course. In a minute. My phone died in the middle of a call, and I think it was important.” James dialed Elise’s phone number from memory and pressed the button, but the call didn’t connect. Stephanie didn’t have any reception, either.

  “Your results are a lot more interesting than I expected,” she said, resuming her chewing. “Did you know—?”

  “Myostatin deficiency?” he asked, tucking her phone in the pocket of her lab coat again.

  The hair tie fell out of her mouth. “Yes. Exactly. How long have you known about that?”

  “Roughly three seconds,” James said. He held his cell phone over his head and paced to the end of the hall. Still no reception, although his email had already been downloaded, and the icon was blinking persistently. “I need to step outside
.”

  Stephanie followed. “What’s going on? Is there something you’re not telling me?”

  “Yes. A great many things, as a matter of fact. I’ll see you at home.”

  He dropped a kiss on her protesting lips, took the stairs to street level, and jogged across the parking lot.

  Elise was waiting at the gas station, holding her cell phone over head the same way that James had a few minutes before. As he grew closer, he began hearing her thoughts as a rapid-fire undertone. Her brain was filled with a hum of distress.

  City’s here…Anthony…Goddamn it, Yatai…

  She spoke aloud. “Do you have any reception?”

  “No. I think the network must be down.”

  “I think I know why that is.” Elise pointed at the roof of a casino.

  “Because of the Eldorado?”

  She made an irritated noise. “No. Look.”

  He scanned the sky. He still didn’t see anything. But then he thought of the myostatin deficiency, and the way Elise had begun to see magic in the same way that he did, and he stopped trying to see with his eyes.

  James relaxed and stretched out his senses.

  Opening himself made it impossible to tune out Elise, but she was focusing on the same thing he was, so it only amplified the new sense he had recently acquired—the one that could feel the proximity of infernal and ethereal powers. And there was something in the sky over the casino. It made his palms itch.

  “What is that?” he asked.

  Her mouth was drawn into a grim line. “It’s something bad. Really bad.”

  As if on cue, the sign for the Shell station buzzed and went out.

  James jumped, despite himself. The lights inside the station had turned off, as well, and a trucker who had been trying to fill his semi shouted as the pump failed.

  Brakes squealed behind them, and there was a loud crunch as two cars at the intersection connected. One of them had been making a left turn onto the street. The other had tried to progress through the light at the same time, and they had collided.