Dark Union (The Descent Series)

by Reine, SM

  Elise took one of McIntyre’s beers and cupped it between her gloved hands. “That’s a good idea.”

  “Good idea? James talked shit about kopides that tithe last time you were down,” McIntyre said, flopping into one of the kitchen chairs. “‘Unethical,’ James said. Something about organized crime, too.”

  Elise could see that James had set down his book, and was no longer pretending to ignore them. He stared at the moon through the window as he listened to their conversation.

  “James and I don’t agree on a lot of things,” she said, knowing he would hear it.

  Leticia chuckled. “Ain’t that the truth. So where is your witch? He never lets you out of his sight. I can’t believe he wouldn’t have come along.”

  “He’s alive, if that’s what you’re asking.”

  The McIntyres exchanged glances. After a moment, Leticia sniffed. “Then you tell him he’s in trouble for avoiding us.”

  “Yeah. Sure. I’ll do that.”

  In California, James picked up his book again.

  Leticia glanced at the clock and turned off the TV. It took her two tries to lower her bulk enough to set the remote on the coffee table. “I guess I better sleep if I’m having a baby today.”

  Elise helped her stand upright again and hovered as she shuffled into the bedroom. The witch’s waddling motions and giant belly were worrying.

  The blond head of a five year old girl poked out of all the sheets in the McIntyre’s bed. “Night,” Leticia whispered, careful not to make a noise when she shut the door again.

  With nobody left to entertain, Elise joined McIntyre at the table. “Aren’t you going to sleep?” he asked, and she shook her head. “Of course. I remember that.” He waved his knife at Dana’s bedroom. “What’s up with your boyfriend?”

  She ran a finger around the moisture on the rim of the bottle. “His cousin died recently.”

  “Was his cousin a friend of yours?” he asked. She nodded stiffly. “Sorry.”

  “Yeah.” She threw back a long swig of beer and banged the empty bottle on the table. “Is there more?”

  He leaned back on two chair legs, grabbed another beer out of the fridge, and opened it with his knife. McIntyre slid the bottle across to Elise. She caught it and drained the bottle in three long swallows.

  “Did the demonic overlord kill her?”

  “So you heard about that,” Elise said. Her head was getting warm.

  “Everybody heard about it.”

  She snorted out a short, mirthless laugh. “Great. No, it wasn’t the overlord who killed her.” She didn’t want to talk about Betty anymore. Preferably not ever again. She changed subjects. “What are the issues at the summit this year?”

  “There was all this stuff when they sent out the first papers—territory disputes in New Zealand, something about undercities getting eaten by sentient shadows, accusations of demons trying to break into the lowest level of Heaven. You remember how that goes. But they wiped that off the schedule a few weeks ago. There’s only one item now.”

  She arched an eyebrow. “More important than an attempted assault on Heaven?”

  “Check this out.”

  He grabbed a packet of information and pulled out the agenda, which was marked with a Union logo at the top. There were only two lines on the page.

  Priority Item: Violation of Quarantined Dimension

  Access to quarantined supra-ethereal dimension violated via gate rifts. Coordinated intervention requested. Negotiation supervised by Union kopides in all slots.

  Elise realized she was about to tear the paper in half and forced her hand to relax. “Violation? When did this happen?”

  “A few weeks ago, I guess.”

  “Which dimension?”

  “I don’t know. They’ll talk about it at the summit,” McIntyre said with a shrug. He noticed her expression and set his beer on the table. “What’s wrong?”

  She stared at the words on the page. Quarantined supra-ethereal dimension. There were a few quarantined levels of Hell—mostly because the atmosphere was deadly to non-natives—but she only knew of one quarantined level of Heaven. It was supposed to be completely blocked to all traffic.

  Elise had been there before. It was quarantined for a reason.

  Her response took too long, so McIntyre asked again, “What’s wrong, Kavanagh?”

  “Nothing,” she said, trying to blank her mind before her stress drew James’s attention again. Elise also wasn’t going to discuss the quarantine with McIntyre. Not with anyone. She changed subjects. “So you still talk to half the kopides in the hemisphere, right? What does everyone know about me? Do they know I’m back?”

  “The word is that some new kopis has taken over in Reno, but nobody knows who it is. Nobody except me. So it’s not like anybody’s going to expect to see you at the summit.”

  “What if someone does recognize me?” she asked.

  “Then we’re fucked, and we deal with it.” McIntyre finished his beer and sighed. “I should curl up with the wife for a couple hours. She gets pissy if I stay up long. I’ve got all the stuff I emailed stuck in this binder, if you want to catch up.”

  “I’ll read it.”

  “Summit check-in starts at eight, and it’s three hours out of here, so you guys should probably be out of here by five. You can take Tish’s car. Keys are on the hook.” He stood and stretched. “Good to have you back, Kavanagh.”

  McIntyre disappeared into the bedroom.

  Instead of reading the binder, she checked his refrigerator. They were short on food, but there was another six pack of beer on the shelf. She grabbed a bottle and sat on the front step with the agenda clutched in one hand.

  She kept reading the first line over and over. Each time she did, she felt queasier.

  But she wasn’t sure if it was nerves, or something else. The mobile home buzzed around her with the residue of powerful magic. That was no surprise—Leticia was a witch, after all, and her pregnancy had probably limited her to casting all her spells at home. Elise wasn’t used to being able to feel that much magic.

  In the silent darkness, Elise had nothing to distract her from James’s thoughts, so she tentatively prodded him. He would have been able to interpret the magic she was feeling. But he had somehow managed to fall asleep, and was dreaming of cabins in Colorado. She was alone.

  She got through the entire six pack before sunrise.

  IV

  Morning came too soon. Elise loaded Leticia’s car before Anthony woke up, and they left with the sunrise. He read the notes on the summit as they headed north toward Silver Wells. They couldn’t pick up any radio stations in the middle of the state, and the tape deck didn’t work, so there was nothing else to do on the long drive.

  After a couple hours of driving, the sun rose, the inside of the car grew hot, and the air conditioner started to give up. Anthony’s forehead shone with sweat when he finally set down the binder. “This isn’t going to work. I’m not a kopis. You’re not a witch.”

  “Nobody needs to know that,” Elise said. Her head ached from too much beer and not enough breakfast.

  “What if they want you to cast a spell?”

  “Most witches don’t have James’s ability to do magic in a heartbeat—Leticia can’t cast spells without crystals and chanting and hours of preparation. If I need to do a spell, I’ll wave my hands and speak Latin. It’ll be fine.”

  Anthony shook the page with the schedule on it. “I have to go to meetings. I have to mediate.”

  “It’s easy,” Elise said. “You’re just there to break up fights.”

  “Fights between the most powerful angels and demons on Earth? Yeah, no way that’s going to go wrong.”

  Her response was interrupted by the car’s sputtering as they mounted a hill.

  The dashboard lights turned off. The engine died.

  Elise swore as she steered the gliding car onto the side of the road. Gravel pinged off the windshield.

  Once they stoppe
d, she popped the hood, and Anthony got out to check the engine.

  “Nice of the McIntyre’s to send us with a lemon,” she said, leaning against the bumper beside him. The heat radiated through her jeans.

  After a moment, Anthony straightened, wiping oil onto his jeans. “I don’t know what’s wrong with it.”

  “Is it the heat?”

  “No. I mean, I don’t know. Maybe. But they take care of their car; everything is in good condition. I don’t see any problems.”

  Elise tried to turn on her cell phone, but the screen stayed black. The battery was dead.

  “Your phone working?” she asked. He checked and shook his head. “Then it’s not a car problem.” She opened the trunk and put on her backpack.

  “What is it?”

  “Angels,” Elise said. Electronics didn’t work right around strong ethereal presences.

  “What are we going to do?” he asked.

  “We’re walking.”

  “In this heat? Are you serious?”

  “What else would we do? Do you have a horse in your suitcase?”

  Elise threw the backpack over her shoulder and got moving. Anthony kicked the bumper of the car before following.

  Silver Wells was just over the hill—which, as far as the desert was concerned, was impossibly distant. It was just like every other ghost town they had blown through at forty-five miles per hour. There was no indication of what was going to happen there aside from a collection of RVs and modular buildings to the north, which resembled a small military installation.

  There was no heat like Nevada heat. Standing on the pavement felt like being in a broiler. The world was made of rippling lines and silver mirages, and Elise could feel her neck and nose burning.

  Two miles was a long walk in that heat.

  The first buildings they came across were empty tin shacks, which were worn by wind and pocked by rust. An ugly, abandoned bar with peeling yellow paint came next, and then a trailer park without any trees or grass. A dog tethered to a fence post growled at them.

  There was no other sign of life in Silver Wells, but McIntyre’s report said the town had a population of two hundred. All of them seemed to have gone into hiding at the sight of visitors. Given the quality of the visitors incoming, it was probably a smart move.

  A convoy of black SUVs passed them. Elise and Anthony had to get off the road to keep from getting hit.

  “The Union?” he asked the bumpers receded into the distance.

  “Probably.”

  He glared. “Good drivers.”

  The SUVs stopped outside a small elementary school. Someone had mounted a sign that said REGISTRATION in the dirt pit that was supposed to be a parking lot, and the doors to the gymnasium were propped open by a sputtering box fan caked in gray dust.

  Elise and Anthony went inside. It was no cooler than outside, but a break from the sun was a relief. The faint breeze from the fan was almost chilly on her sweaty back.

  Warped boards formed the floor of the basketball court, bordered on one side by metal stands. A pair of folding tables had been set up at the end of the room, and a handful of men, none older than thirty, were lined up in front of them. They were unmistakably kopides: they refused to stand with anybody at their backs. A few women sat on the benches—probably aspides. Magic glimmered on their necklaces and hair clips.

  The line in front of the table dissipated shortly. The men peeled off one by one, taking their witches with them.

  “Go sign in, McIntyre,” Elise said.

  Anthony approached the table.

  “Name?” asked a cocoa-skinned woman with hair cropped short to her scalp. Her shirt was stamped with “Unit B26” over the breast.

  “McIntyre,” Elise said from behind Anthony’s shoulder. “Lucas and Leticia.”

  The woman looked up at them. She had a hard face, like she was constantly seconds away from a stern reproach. “McIntyre?”

  “Yeah,” Anthony said. He had grown still with tension.

  “We’ve been waiting for you.” She shuffled through folders in a plastic bin and came up with one tagged by a red sticker. She handed it to them. “Keep your ID on you all weekend. Checking in at the motel is your responsibility.”

  He stepped back. “Thanks.”

  Everyone in a black Union polo watched as they headed back out into the summer heat. A sense of unease crept over her.

  “Let’s get out of here,” she said.

  Inside a motel room labeled by a tin zero hanging from one nail, the Union of Kopides and Aspides was preparing to move.

  The motel was enduring renovations, and the wall between rooms zero and eleven had been knocked down to make it one large chamber. Unit B13 used the four beds to house their computers, guns, and other equipment; the actual team members slept on the softest spot on the floor they could find. Nobody complained about it. The other two units on-site had to endure the heat in the camp outside town.

  But Unit B13 hadn’t been given the best lodgings because they were unusually skilled, or because they were special. It was because they had Benjamin Flynn, and he was the most powerful precognitive alive.

  Benjamin stared at himself in the mirror of the shared bathroom. He had been in there for over an hour, but nobody dared to interrupt. They were all afraid of him.

  He couldn’t blame them. He didn’t like himself, either.

  He touched the collar on his neck. To anyone outside his unit, it probably looked like he was just some punk kid with an edgy style, but it was connected to Boyd’s computers, and it somehow recorded his visions. The quartz on the left side was Allyson’s work, and meant to suppress the small premonitions that peppered his day; the uncut, pebble-sized diamond on the other side was supposed to dampen the big hits. Both of them worked… more or less. He hadn’t gone comatose from a big vision in a few months, anyway.

  Benjamin thought a bunch of white guys sticking the Black kid in a collar was fucked up, and he told them that. They asked if he would prefer a straitjacket. He said he would rather be treated like a human, and they laughed like he was joking.

  Carefully, he wiggled a shard of glass from the broken mirror into the lock. He wanted to fry the Union’s electronics. They had built up an archive with thousands of hours of murky video of his prophecies, and written a ton of volumes interpreting them, and he was sick of it. He deserved privacy. The people he saw in his visions deserved privacy. And the collar was stupid.

  A spark of electricity flared on the wiring. It leaped to his hand and zapped him.

  “Ouch!”

  He dropped the glass into the sink.

  A fist pounded on the door. When Allyson spoke, it sounded like she had her face pressed against the other side. “What are you doing in there? Did you have a vision? I’m coming in.”

  “I’m taking a dump,” Benjamin replied. “Bad burrito.”

  “Unlock the door, Flynn.”

  “Five more minutes.”

  “You have ten seconds, and then I break the bathroom lock.”

  She meant it. The Union had done it before. He wasn’t really a team member—he was like their pet or something. The dog everyone liked to kick.

  Benjamin groaned and swept the shard of glass into the drain of the sink. He flushed the toilet with his foot, ran the faucet for a couple of seconds, and unlocked the door just as Allyson was preparing to shoot it open with her handgun.

  She glanced around the bathroom like she expected to find someone inside with him.

  “Are you okay?” Her hair was red and shoulder-length, which offset a round face that seemed pudgy even though her body fat was close to zero. She ate and trained with the Union hunters, despite being a witch; she was bulky with muscle and twice as thick as he was.

  “My rectum’s not okay,” Benjamin said.

  He was rewarded with a sound of disgust. “Get out of there.”

  The unit bustled around rooms zero and eleven, discussing summit guests as they registered in the high school gymn
asium. The thirty kopides that the Union invited had been trickling in all day. They watched on wireless security cameras that they had set up around town.

  “The demons are getting almost as bad as the angels,” Boyd said, pointing to one of the monitors. “You see that? Almost all of them are staying in the Warrens. Jesus Christ, the paranoia is contagious.”

  “Angels,” Allyson scoffed as she took position by the surveillance station again. “Rigid bastards with sticks up their asses. We haven’t had a single angel check in yet. Probably don’t want to lower themselves to talking with mere mortals.”

  Zettel noticed Benjamin, and stopped filling a magazine with bullets. “What are you doing?” Whenever they spoke, the commander made it pretty clear that he thought Benjamin was a waste of Union resources, not to mention oxygen. And it only got worse since Michele died.

  “Nothing.”

  “Then find something to do,” Zettel said.

  “Like what?”

  “I don’t care.” He returned his attention to the ammunition. “Make it happen somewhere other than here. You’re getting in the way.”

  Benjamin hadn’t been allowed outside on his own in weeks, but he still hesitated by the door. It was dangerous going out. If he had any visions, he could be flattened in public.

  But the outcome of that scenario would probably be better than what Zettel did to him if he stuck around.

  He put on dark sunglasses and left the room.

  Moving through Silver Wells with the glasses on gave everything a dull, gray-brown cast. It only served to make the surrounding buildings look more desolate, as if the desert had sucked the color and life from everything.

  The streets were empty. Benjamin was alone as he walked to the convenience store.

  Standing on the street corner, by a station with peeling paint and ancient gas pumps, Benjamin contemplated trying to run away again. A year with the Union was a year too long. They had promised to help him; instead, they dragged him around with a bejeweled collar and forced him to rehash his visions in exhausting detail.

  But where would he have gone? The Union paid his parents a lot of money to keep him. They would never take him back. And Zettel threatened to break his legs if he tried to leave again. He didn’t need his legs to act as a precog. He could have been a floating brain for all the Union cared.