Damnation Marked (The Descent Series)

by Reine, SM

  She stuck close to the wall as she moved around to the front doors. Her hands burned as she approached the entrance.

  On Earth, the tall doors to the cathedral were made of bronze, but they had been formed of shimmering gold in the ruins. Each panel was carved with an image of a different archangel—from Metaraon, with his unmerciful stare, to the sad eyes of the angel of death on the far left. Samael.

  Elise reached up to touch the carving of his face. His peaceful, human face.

  The door buzzed under her hand. She swallowed hard and shoved it open.

  The pews were carved of the same glossy white bone as the graceful arch of the gateway. There was no sign of Yatai. No shadow creeping over the floor, no giant serpent, and none of her legion of possessed demons.

  But they weren’t alone in the church. Through the shimmering air beneath the arch, Elise could see the altar—and the body that lay upon it.

  Nukha’il was stripped naked and stretched out on the cross, his wings pinned to the wall by spikes of obsidian. Ichor oozed from the wounds, crept over his feathers, and turned them to stone one by one. Each feather made a tiny crack as it broke off and shattered on the floor, like icicles falling off of tree branches.

  His eyes were closed. She couldn’t see him breathing.

  Her heart ached. “Nukha’il,” she said. She didn’t have to raise her voice for him to hear her. His eyelids fluttered.

  “You made it,” said a high, girlish voice.

  A child stepped out of the confessional. She wore her Sunday best—white stockings, saddle shoes, and a prim dress that covered her to the knees. Brunette hair fell around her shoulders. Wide red lips—the same crimson color as the Thom’s ruby—curved into a wicked smile.

  She didn’t have any eyes. There was nothing beyond the frame of eyelashes but the vastness of space.

  Elise recognized that face. The last time she had seen the girl, she was possessed by Death’s Hand and covered in black marks. Her name was Lucinde, and Elise had failed to save her.

  She drew the obsidian-bladed falchion. “Yatai.”

  Exorcist, the girl responded without moving her lips. She gave a tiny curtsy.

  Elise lunged, bringing the sword down on the child—

  And the blade swept through empty air.

  Yatai stood a few feet away, though she hadn’t moved an inch.

  You’re too late. The deed is done. She swept a tiny, fragile-boned hand toward the altar. I didn’t have enough marks to open the gate, but it will surely open when his brethren retrieve his body. Angels are so protective of their own. She smiled at James, baring white teeth. Aren’t they, witch?

  “If you pass through the gate to Heaven, it will violate the Treaty. It could destroy the world,” Elise said. “Everyone will die. Everyone.”

  The smile was frozen on Lucinde’s face. And may God have mercy on every soul.

  She vanished.

  “Oh, hell,” James said.

  Elise didn’t wait. She sheathed her sword and ran at the gate.

  She vaulted over the pews and jumped onto the nearest pillar, wedged tight against the wall. Grabbing the ethereal stone was like seizing an electric fence. Her bones shook and her teeth strained against the gums. Her skull ached. Her vertebrae tried to pull apart.

  Elise scrambled over the top and dropped to the other side.

  “Elise!” James’s voice was distorted as it passed through the gray veil of the gate.

  “I’m fine,” she said, scrambling to her knees, “I’m fine!” Blood seeped through the wrist of her glove. She wiped it off on her jeans before rushing to Nukha’il’s side at the altar.

  It was worse seeing the damage up close. Yatai hadn’t just driven spikes through his wings. She had pierced his ankles, his palms, and sliced open his forehead. Stigmata trickled down his cheeks.

  Her eyes narrowed as she studied the spikes driven through his flesh. They were like jagged shards of crystal, and the bite wound on her arm throbbed with sympathy. How could she remove them without getting infected?

  She struck one with the hilt of the possessed falchion, but they were too deeply embedded in the cross to budge.

  At Elise’s touch, his eyes opened. Nukha’il’s lips moved, but he spoke so softly that she had to lean close to make out the words. “I’m dying. Have mercy on me.”

  Her heart fragmented. Elise smoothed a hand over his brow, careful not to touch the blood. His eyelids drooped shut at her touch, as though it soothed him even as it wracked her skin with buzzing tension.

  “I’m so sorry, Nukha’il.” Her throat clenched tight. “I shouldn’t have sent you into the Warrens. I should have—”

  “Will you take care of Itra’il?”

  She swallowed hard. “She would eat me, and I don’t want to be eaten. You’re just going to have to survive. Okay?”

  The idea seemed to pain him. His face twisted. “Promise me.”

  Elise finally nodded.

  James climbed over the gate to her side of the church, dropping awkwardly to the other side. The Book of Shadows stuck out of his pocket. She jerked it free and flipped through the pages.

  “We have to heal him. Which one will do it?”

  He rested his hand on her shoulder. “We can’t heal this infection. I’m sorry.” The second part was directed at the angel, but he didn’t seem to hear.

  Nukha’il’s wing muscles spasmed. Blood slid down the feathers.

  She thought of what he had said to her a moment before she sent him into the Warrens to find Anthony—you never smile for me—and she forced her lips to spread in an expression she hoped would look happy.

  Her chin trembled and her face flushed, but she smiled.

  It was as though all the pain faded from him. His eyes unfocused, and he looked right through her without seeing. “Thank you, Elise.”

  He spoke her name with such reverence.

  The light in his eyes dimmed. The tense muscles in his wings relaxed. Slowly, his eyelids drooped closed, and the radiance seeped from his flesh until no color remained.

  The gate thrummed.

  Yatai’s shadow oozed over the walls of the church. The stones began to crack and crumble. A roof beam fell, striking a pew and cracking it in half. Inky darkness splashed where it hit.

  “We need to run,” James said, pulling her away from the puddle of shadow. She let him move her without responding.

  A wind rose around them, lashing through the cathedral. What was the point in running? She had failed. Nukha’il was dead—another name on the list of people who her choices had killed—and the gate was opening. She could already see figures glowing on the other side.

  Shadow fell over the church. The mighty serpent rose over the crumbling ceiling, more massive than ever before, like a mighty dragon grown out of night. Yatai’s empty eyes burned in its head.

  The serpent arced over the wall and slithered into the cathedral, bringing the rising wind with her. It battered Elise and made her drop the Book of Shadows.

  The notebook opened, and pages vortexed into the air. James shouted and dived, but half of the pages were already gone.

  Yatai’s darkness smashed into the gateway. The barrier snapped. Elise’s mind split open.

  It felt like a lightning bolt had struck her crown, cracking open her skull and ripping her body down the latitude. She screamed without screaming—her throat worked and her lungs emptied, but she had no air, no voice.

  Reality peeled apart. The threads that bound everything together in burning golden lines were devoured. She saw through the buildings to the gates, and beyond. She saw the planes of Heaven, pale and glowing. And eyes looked back at her.

  As quickly as everything had opened, it all slammed shut again. Elise was still standing on an island of white stone among the slithering shadows with Nukha’il’s corpse spread beside her. James’s back pressed against hers.

  Yet something had changed. Elise wasn’t sure what, at first—the consistency of the air, maybe, or
the way the all-consuming glow of the city had completely vanished.

  It wasn’t until she looked up that she realized what had shifted. The hazy line separating the angelic city from the real city on Earth was…gone.

  Wind blasted over the streets and through the front doors, whipping the obsidian dust into a thick haze. She covered her face with an arm as the debris pelted against her.

  Elise flung out a hand without seeing, and fingers found hers. James yanked her into his chest. They dropped to their knees, sheltering behind a pew.

  The walls fell down.

  But down wasn’t down anymore.

  Her braid lifted. There was no ground beneath her feet. She felt rather than heard James shout—the cry vibrated through his chest against her cheek, and she clung to him tighter, digging her fingers into the muscles of his back.

  The axis of gravity reoriented itself to the city on Earth, and suddenly, they were the inverted ones.

  Elise and James began to fall.

  A rushing sensation filled her stomach as they slipped into the air. James swiped a hand at the nearest pew, and even though his hand brushed the top of it, there was nothing to grasp. They slipped.

  The church dropped away from them, and Elise managed to grab a fragment of wall, stopping their descent with a hard jerk that nearly ripped her arm from its socket.

  James’s grip around her slipped. She held on to him tighter with her other arm.

  “Don’t let go!” she tried to yell, but even though her throat burned with the volume, all she could hear was the wind and her pounding heart.

  Elise’s feet dangled over the patchwork of buildings in Reno, which was shadowed from the sun by having the ethereal city appear above. The wall of the cathedral dissolved in her fingers.

  It slipped.

  They fell.

  Together, they plummeted through the air. The moist air froze the tip of her nose and her ears. She couldn’t draw in a breath, couldn’t see where they were going, could only feel the rushing air and James wrapped around her and the swords on her back.

  The city grew quickly.

  Red flashed past her eyes—the ruby Thom gave her drifted out of her pocket and tumbled through space.

  Elise swiped at it. Missed. Grabbed again.

  Her fingers closed on the choker, and she managed to squeeze out his name: “Yatam!”

  They slammed into the pavement.

  X

  The impact shocked through Elise’s entire body, like a steamroller blowing over her shoulder, her chest, and down her legs.

  James landed on top of her, and there was a crack that might have been his elbow, or her skull, rupturing. She thought his knee drove into her gut, but with her every nerve exploding, she could barely tell.

  He shouted. She couldn’t do the same. All of the breath had rushed from Elise’s chest.

  She tried to breathe in again, but her lungs wouldn’t obey. They jerked and collapsed. She wheezed. Squeezed her eyes shut. Tried not to panic.

  Was she bleeding? Was she about to die?

  She tried to breathe in through her nose but only gasped for breath like a fish flopping on the deck of a boat. Her hands clawed at her chest.

  Her lungs drew a staccato breath before emptying again, and the second time she breathed, she almost filled them. The influx of oxygen made her head swim and the stars disperse from her vision. It hurt—oh God it hurt.

  Yet they were, impossibly, alive.

  James held himself over her on both of his arms, blood cascading down the side of his face. One of his eyes was swollen shut. She thought she heard him utter a few colorful swear words, but it was impossible to hear over the whine of her throbbing eardrums.

  He flopped onto his back beside her.

  There was air above. Empty air. Clouds of ash plumed overhead, as though a volcano had erupted in the nearby mountains. She couldn’t see the ethereal city.

  Elise finally expanded her chest fully. A spike of pain drove through her side.

  Skin brushed against hers—James’s hand. She clenched it tightly. He spoke, but she was slow to understand the words. “Pocket. Right side. Get the Book.”

  She braced herself before getting onto all fours. It felt like gravity had tripled, and Elise’s muscles shook with the effort. Her wrists wouldn’t support her. She rocked back on her heels and nearly fell over.

  James’s arm was curled against him, the hand crumpled and useless. The Book of Shadows protruded from his right pocket. It almost had fallen out.

  “Last page,” he gasped. “Put it in my hand.” Elise did as he asked, and James squeezed his eyes closed, took a deep breath. “Take off our rings.”

  She pulled hers off, and then his. Dropped them on the asphalt.

  James spoke a word of power. It didn’t boom through them so much as whimper—more like the pop of a cap than the usual atom bomb of his most powerful magic. But it was enough.

  Magic showered over her. The pain in her side eased. The cut on James’s forehead stopped bleeding as she watched. Her muscles strengthened and the ringing in her ears subsided. When the magic faded, she wasn’t healed—not completely. She was still bruised and battered.

  But nothing hurt, nothing bled, and she had the strength to get onto her knees.

  They hadn’t fallen onto the street of downtown Reno. Instead, they had somehow reappeared in James’s suburb, north of the city. His house was twenty feet away.

  As far as Elise could see, all of the grass, bushes, and trees on the street had died. Tens of thousands of dollars of landscaping pulverized in an instant.

  All magic had a cost. Especially the kind that saved lives.

  James sat up. “Are you okay? I landed on you.”

  She scanned the street, using his shoulder to get to her feet. “I’m fine. I think our fall must have been broken by…”

  Yatam.

  A body lay a few feet away, folded into the fetal position. The ruby stone she had used to summon him was on the street between them.

  She scooped the choker off the ground as she ran to him.

  The entity called Yatam may have been one of the oldest surviving demons, but he wasn’t impervious to damage. He had been pale the last time she saw him; now he was purpled and swollen with ruptured blood vessels, his gray suit was dirty and torn, and his hair was spread around him like a cloak.

  Elise had been wrong—she hadn’t taken most of the impact. Yatam had. There was a crack in his skull, and what oozed out was black.

  Against her better instinct—and everything she knew from first aid training—she put an arm under his shoulders and lifted. He didn’t react.

  “What are you doing?” James asked, hovering nearby. She could feel him holding the golden rings in one hand. After being isolated by the magic of the bands for an hour, it was a relief to be able to hear him again within her skull.

  “Getting him inside your house. We have to do something—we need to heal him.”

  “Him?”

  “He’s the only reason we survived.”

  “My spell—”

  “Your magic would have done nothing if we had pancaked,” Elise snapped. “You can agree or disagree—that’s up to you—but you’d better get out of my way.”

  James pocketed the rings, took Yatam’s legs, and helped her lift him. The demon sagged between them, limp and useless. Elise almost missed the step onto the curb. They took quick, shuffling steps past James’s white picket fence, his dead lawn, and onto his door. The potted flowers on the patio were wilted.

  She staggered inside and set him on the floor harder than she intended. His eyes remained closed. Even with half of the skin on his face stripped off, he was beautiful.

  James flicked a light switch. Nothing happened. The power was out there, too.

  “Damn. I’ll have to find candles.”

  She stepped in his path before he could leave the room. “Heal him.”

  “I don’t have it in me to perform magic of that magnitude ag
ain today. I could kill myself.”

  Yatam groaned. His skin shimmered, and Elise glimpsed the lacework of veins in his arm and chest, as though his flesh had turned to a transparent jelly. He was going incorporeal, like so many demons did when catastrophically weakened.

  “Then give me your Book of Shadows. I’ll try to heal him.” At his stare, she went on. “You’re sensing demons and growing the muscles of a kopis. I sense magic—who says I’m not getting witch muscles, too?”

  He raked a hand through his hair. “Elise…” She held out a hand. He removed the notebook from his pocket and placed it in her hand, but didn’t immediately let go. “I’m going to walk you through it.”

  She nodded and took the Book. “Which page?”

  “Find it yourself. If you can do the magic, you should be able to see it. Hang on—we’ll need a sacrifice.”

  James hurried out of the room and disappeared down the hall. “We don’t have time for you to test me,” Elise called after him.

  “Just do as I say!”

  She thumbed through the pages, starting in the back where the other healing spell had been located. She found one that glowed with a similar red light, like blood and roses, and removed it.

  Yatam’s skin flickered again. She could see his teeth through his cheeks.

  James returned with a cage of mice. Living energy was the fastest way to gather strength for a spell, and they had already killed all of the flora on the street. Elise held up the page she had picked out. “This one?”

  He nodded and set the cage on the floor by Yatam. “That spell is dangerously powerful if wielded improperly. It requires immense focus.” James cupped his fingers around hers. His skin was warm and rough. “Words of power are not spoken, strictly speaking. It comes from the mind, the chest, your core—you only open your lips as a focus to direct it.”

  When Yatam’s skin faded a third time, it didn’t come back. He was a mess of twisted muscle with slivers of bone peeking through.

  James folded his arm around her and pressed a fist into her solar plexus. It still hurt after their fall. “Bring it from here. Gather the power. See the magic on the paper. Speak the word.”

  “What word?”

  “The word on the paper.”