Damnation Marked (The Descent Series)

by Reine, SM

So he wasn’t surprised—not really—when he saw Elise.

  It happened late in the evening. A woman in Union gear stopped a few beds away with a gurney leaving the morgue. She spoke briefly to a doctor. She lifted the sheet to reveal the body.

  Anthony saw red-brown curls. A bloodless face with freckles across the bridge of her nose. Full lips that he had kissed more than a few times. Skin blue with cold and eyebrows frosted with ice.

  Elise seemed pretty peaceful, for a dead woman.

  The exposure lasted only an instant. Then they put the sheet over her again.

  “Do you have the autopsy results?” asked the doctor. The nurse gave him a clipboard, and he looked it over. “Hmm… this one’s getting a formal service. Guess she was a friend of the commander. Take her to be prepared.”

  Elise was wheeled on.

  He craned his neck around in his bed to watch the Union team member take her away, but there was nothing to see. Elise didn’t sit up, push the sheet away, and climb down. Given her stubbornness, he half-expected it…but only by half. He knew death when he saw it.

  Anthony stared at the ceiling.

  He tried to imagine her cremated, reduced to ashes, and spread over the lake, like Betty had been.

  A new nurse approached Anthony’s bed. She wore the Union slacks and a scrub top patterned with white flowers. “How do you feel?” she asked, unlocking the handcuffs that bound him to the bed.

  “My girlfriend is dead.” He couldn’t seem to make himself sound like he was grieving, but the nurse looked sympathetic anyway.

  “Poor dear,” she murmured. “No more symptoms of possession? Any unusual time lapses? Strange voices or urges?” He shook his head at each question. “You seem to have recovered well. You can get up and use the bathroom if you like, but stay in the ward until we can have someone discharge you.” She checked his chart. “You haven’t had a meal yet. Hmm. I’ll find you something to eat.”

  Anthony sat up, rubbing his wrists. His mouth tasted like ash. The idea of eating sounded ridiculous. “Yeah,” he said, “thanks.”

  After she left, he hobbled to the bathroom, which was a curtained room with a few basins people had been using for toilets. The nurse was right about the weakness; he could barely support his weight long enough to piss standing up. His urine was orange and filled the curtained area with the sour tang of ammonia.

  When he finished, he hung in the hallway to watch the quiet bustle. Nobody seemed to notice his absence from the ward.

  But he went back to his bed anyway, and sat down to give his legs a break.

  It wasn’t like he had anywhere to go. Anthony’s family was all in Vermont. There was nobody to talk to about what he had seen, or the things he had done. What little of it he remembered, anyway. Everything after taking the elevator into the Warrens with Elise was a blur.

  And if Reno were wasted, he wouldn’t have a job anymore. As if he hadn’t screwed up his grades enough already, there definitely wouldn’t be a college to attend for the rest of the semester.

  Without a job, family, or Elise—or hell, even James—Anthony had no idea what to do.

  A man finally approached him. He had an eye patch, hair shorn so short that his scalp glistened underneath, and knuckles that looked like they had punched a thousand faces. His bent and scarred fingers held two small bags. “Anthony Morales,” said the man with a thick Irish accent. “You’re looking healthy.”

  “Who are you?”

  The man tucked the bags under his arm and held out one twisted hand. “Malcolm. Union commander. I’m in charge of all this.” He tipped his head toward the wall, which didn’t have anything of particular interest on it, so Anthony understood it to mean the base at large.

  He gave the proffered hand a brief shake. “What did I do to rank a visit?”

  “You mean, besides killing four of my best men?”

  His stomach lurched. “You’re going to arrest me, aren’t you?”

  Malcolm laughed. “Union regulations say that victims of demonic possession can’t be held accountable for what they do under the influence, so you’re good to go once the doctors give their permission. It’s your lucky day.”

  He thought of Elise being wheeled past him on the gurney, and what Allyson had told him about Reno—buildings toppled and streets ripped from the earth.

  “Sort of,” Anthony said.

  The commander seemed to understand. His shoulders sagged. “Yeah. Sort of.” He coughed. “Here.” Malcolm gave him one of the bags. It was a plastic sack with the UKA logo on it. “You can have your belongings back. It’s just your clothes, but I’m sure it’ll feel nice to get back to normal, eh?” He hesitated, toying with the plastic edge of a second bag. “You were dating Elise, weren’t you?”

  Malcolm spoke her name like he knew her, but his face gave nothing away.

  “Yeah.”

  “I left a message for James. Asked if he wanted to claim Elise’s belongings once we had them sorted. He never returned my call, so I thought you might want them. We’ll incinerate them if nobody makes a claim.”

  “Oh,” he said. “Sure.”

  Anthony took the second bag. He peeled open the tape and peered inside.

  There wasn’t much. While the Union’s commander hung nearby, Anthony pulled out a glove—just one—and a cell phone. There was also Betty’s wedding photo.

  And that was it. Anthony’s throat closed as he looked at Betty’s smile.

  “Nothing else?” he rasped.

  Malcolm lifted his shoulders. “Two swords. Can’t have those—sorry. Our witches are studying them. There was also an enchanted ring, but the forensics department kept it. They can’t figure out what the hell it’s for. Is it yours? I can try to put in a request to get it back.”

  He pocketed the glove and Betty’s photo. “No. It wasn’t mine.” He swallowed, and Anthony closed the sack again. “Thanks.”

  Malcolm set a hand on his shoulder for a moment.

  Anthony watched his retreating back as he walked away. As soon as he was alone again, he turned the cell phone on. The battery still had half a charge.

  He tapped the photo icon and started with the old pictures. Elise had been using the same phone for a couple of years, so the first few pages mostly showed Motion and Dance—photos of recitals, some pictures of James playing the piano, a nice shot of Elise in a dress she must have worn for a performance. She also had a few snapshots of fancy dinners that Anthony couldn’t imagine her having actually eaten.

  She had taken pictures of wine glasses. Lots of wine glasses. Why? Because she liked the wine, or because she liked the glass, or because she liked the lighting? He had no guesses.

  Betty started appearing a couple pages into the shots. He went through those slowly. Beach photos, lifting weights at the gym, dancing together at a bar, a shot where they were both making that stupid duckface outside of a club.

  He had picked on Betty for making that face. A lot.

  Around the spring, Elise seemed to have stopped taking so many pictures. The wine glasses disappeared. His abs clenched as he noticed the one picture she had taken on their camping trip together—and it was of a dead spider-demon.

  The last photo was of some random rocks up at Lake Tahoe. Just a month old.

  And that was it. That was all Anthony had from Elise’s life: one glove and a cell phone with two hundred pictures.

  The phone beeped. He almost dropped it.

  When his grip was good again, he saw the “new text message” icon blinking, and he dreaded seeing what James would be trying to send her. He opened the inbox.

  The new text wasn’t from James. It was from a number she didn’t have saved to her address book.

  39.107619,-120.028424. 00:54 tomorrow. say hi for me. -Ben

  Anthony only knew of one Ben who might text Elise—Benjamin Flynn, the teenage prophet in the Union’s employ. He looked up, half-expecting to see the boy in the ward with him, but he didn’t recognize anyone strolling around the beds.
They were all doctors, nurses, and witches.

  Anthony read the message again.

  Those digits were coordinates.

  He used Elise’s map application and found them centered over Lake Tahoe.

  Say “hi” for me.

  A spark of hope bloomed within Anthony. Say “hi” to whom, exactly? Was the text meant for Elise—or did Benjamin know that Anthony would have it?

  He had to have known. That kid knew everything.

  Anthony checked the time. It was getting late. If he wanted to reach the lake by one in the morning, he would have to hurry.

  He pulled his pants on, stripped off the paper hospital gown, and headed out of the room as he pulled a Union sweater over his head. Nobody stopped him.

  It wasn’t easy to find a working car, but after an hour of searching, Anthony located a pickup with a full tank of gas and the keys abandoned on the dashboard. He only had to run into a few cars to free it from the jam on the freeway.

  Boat rentals weren’t much easier to come by in the middle of the night in December. He pounded on windows until someone woke up, and then he gave them the money that had been in his pockets when the Union had stripped him—all eight hundred dollars of his last paycheck.

  The lake was black under his boat as he steered toward the middle, not quite sure what he was searching for. Freezing water slopped over the sides.

  He shivered in his jeans and jacket, trying to keep his feet out of the puddle at the bottom of the boat. Anthony kept one hand on the rudder and the other on Elise’s cell phone, closing the distance between the dot that indicated his location and the coordinates sent by Benjamin. There was a spotlight mounted on the front of his boat, but he didn’t need it to see. The sky was filled with lush purple snow clouds. The mountain’s icy peaks were a darker shade of gray against the steely clouds.

  A freezing wind blasted his hair around his forehead. He crested an arcing wave, and his stomach lurched.

  He checked the phone again. It was confused by his position in the middle of the lake, but it looked like he was getting close.

  Anthony traveled a few more yards and cut off the motor.

  Almost one o’clock.

  He was in the right place. It was the right time.

  More water slopped over him, splashing his jeans and chilling him to his core. “This is crazy,” he said aloud, jaw chattering. “What was I thinking?”

  As if in response, the wind blew harder. He seized the sides of the boat as snow whirled over the water.

  Damn it, he hadn’t brought gloves. His fingers were stiff and useless.

  Another wave swelled under his boat, and for a moment, all he could see was the gray-purple depths of the water.

  When the boat righted itself again, he saw something pale bob to the surface of the water.

  His hands weren’t working well enough to get the motor running again—he had to stick his fingers in his mouth for a few seconds to limber them first.

  Anthony steered the boat closer. Turned on the floodlight.

  It was a body, facedown in the lake, with masses of inky black hair spread around its head. Judging by the shape of the waist and legs, it was a woman.

  A naked woman.

  Probably a dead woman.

  “Oh, Jesus fucking Christ.” He rubbed his hands on his frozen jeans. “What the hell, Benjamin?”

  Snow swirled harder around him as he struggled to bring his boat alongside the body. There was a pole and net underneath the seats. He used it to drag her closer. Careful not to capsize, he snagged a limp arm and dragged it over the side.

  The skin was shockingly warm on his cold fingers. It felt more like he had pulled her out of a bath than Lake Tahoe in December. And she weighed nothing—it was easy to drag her legs into the boat. Masses of wet hair stuck to her face and chest.

  Something dark marred one of her palms. Anthony grabbed her hand and uncurled the fingers.

  There was a mark on her skin—an intricate design imprinted on the palm, more like a brand than a tattoo. A few centimeters below the base of the mark, a long red scar stretched all the way into the corner of her elbow.

  It wasn’t the first time he had seen that mark, or that scar.

  Anthony’s heart pounded as he drew her shoulders into his lap and shoved the hair out of her face.

  She looked like Elise.

  Rubbing his eyes and shaking his head didn’t change anything. He wasn’t imagining the resemblance. He wasn’t going crazy. Those were the same lips, cheekbones, and arched nose—except this woman didn’t have the twisted bridge from having her nose broken in a dozen fights. She also had black hair. Black eyebrows. White skin, no freckles.

  She coughed. Her chest jerked. Anthony almost dropped her.

  Water spilled over her lip, cascading down her chest in waves, too much to have been in her lungs and stomach. Buckets of water.

  She gurgled and choked on it, and it was more instinct than rational thought that made Anthony prop her up against his shoulder so that she could vomit into the bottom of the boat.

  Her hands bit into his biceps. It hurt. She was too strong. He tried to push her off, and her eyes flew open with a gasp.

  They were black. So very, very black.

  “Elise?” he asked tentatively, pushing more hair off her forehead.

  She screamed. It was a shrill, piercing sound. She threw herself away from him, slipping and falling over the bench. She bumped into the spotlight. It spun on its base.

  “Whoa! Wait, be careful—”

  She jerked, staring out at the water as if she couldn’t believe the sight of it. Pulled her knees into her chest. Covered her face with her hands, and kept screaming.

  Then she held her hands away from her, as though she was frightened of them, and the shrieks cut off.

  She lifted her right arm. Stared at the empty palm in the reflection of the spotlight off the water. Ran her fingers down to her elbow, as if she couldn’t believe it was there.

  And then she looked past her hand to him.

  Recognition sparked in her black eyes.

  “Anthony?”

  A NOTE FROM THE AUTHOR

  Okay, I know what you're thinking—is that it? No! This is not the end of the series. :) The next book is called Dire Blood, and I'm shooting for a January 2013 release. So you can relax knowing that more is coming for Elise and James!

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  Sara (SM Reine)

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