Dark Union (The Descent Series)

by Reine, SM

  A Union witch closed the elevator’s cage and pressed a button. They descended into the mines.

  The mill looked abandoned, but the elevator was well-oiled and smooth. They dropped beyond several shafts that had been encased in solid concrete and kept dropping. Anthony lost count of how many levels they passed around eight or nine. Somewhere beyond that—where the air began to grow hot again, and they had to pump cold air in to keep it breathable—they reached a shaft like every other, and the elevator stopped.

  Another Union witch opened the door. The men piled out.

  In Reno, the demons inhabited gold mines that had been abandoned in centuries past, so they were filled with exposed wood and crumbling rock. The silver mine was much more recent. The towering machinery was plated with steel, and the offices they passed even had beige computers from the nineties.

  There was less cement so deep underground. The walls were raw stone supported with steel I-beams. The kopides were led to a dark, cavernous room with a rock tumbler, where three separate seating areas had been arranged among the machines. Their footsteps echoed off the walls as they moved to take chairs.

  Anthony hung back to let the other men select their seats. The front row was marked by “reserved” signs, but he wanted to snag a spot there. If he was going to have to speak up during the meeting—a wholly petrifying idea—then he wanted to be somewhere prominent.

  Fortunately, Ramelan saved him from having to pick a spot. “Nervous?” the kopis asked cheerfully. “You can sit with me!” And he took a seat in one of the reserved chairs. It left Anthony next to the Union’s desk, which was elevated on a platform. A huge pump whirred behind it, sending water sloshing through overhead pipes.

  He leaned around to see who was up there, and a chill rolled down his spine. Zettel and his aspis, Allyson, were already positioned above everybody else. There were a few other people there, too—the red-haired man named Boyd, a petite woman with silver rings on every finger, and a Black boy who couldn’t have been older than sixteen.

  “I’ve been excited about this summit for months,” Ramelan confessed, drawing his attention away from the Union. “I expect to meet so many interesting people. Demons, I see demons all the time—in fact, I just had lunch with Aquiel last week—but I seldom meet other kopides.”

  Anthony was too nervous to respond. His hands shook.

  After all of the kopides occupied the seats around him, the demons started to file in. They came from the opposite direction as the humans, as though they approached from deeper within the mines. A few passed for human, superficially, but Anthony would never mistake them for anything but demonic. He had run into enough nightmares and incubi to recognize that luminous skin and black hair.

  Only a half dozen of them emerged and sat in the front row of their section. Considering the most powerful demons were supposed to be invited to the summit, they looked pretty innocuous. None of them even gave Anthony a headache.

  “This is a bad sign,” Ramelan murmured.

  “Why?”

  “The infernal delegation is thirty strong. These are only the servants—not the overlords or masters. And I see no angels yet.”

  Anthony glanced around. Ramelan was right. The third section was empty.

  They weren’t the only ones who had noticed the absence. Zettel and his team on the platform were getting antsy.

  He checked the clock on the wall. The meeting was supposed to have started five minutes ago. “What’s going on?” Anthony wondered aloud. Ramelan didn’t have an answer, but he didn’t really expect him to.

  Another fifteen minutes passed quietly. And then fifteen more.

  The angels never arrived.

  Elise reached Silver Wells at the same time that the Union returned from the meeting. She lurked across the street from the school to watch as they unloaded the vans—each of which blazed with so much red magic that they were hard to look at.

  She squinted into the magical glow. Her ability to see magic was so new that she still had no idea what any of it meant, but James—who was talking to a silver-haired man over a lunch of caprese salad and doing his very best to ignore her—would have known the spells at a glance, if he hadn’t been busy. Considering that Leticia’s car had died on the approach to town again, she could only assume the magic was to counteract the interference of ethereal energy.

  Anthony was completely oblivious to anything strange about his transportation. She waved when he emerged, and he jogged over to join her. “That ended fast,” Elise said.

  “It never started. The angels didn’t show, and the demons only sent their servants.”

  Her eyebrow quirked. “Really.”

  “Yeah. What does it mean?”

  The Union closed the vans. Most of them headed back to their private compound, while Zettel and his team stuck around to argue in low voices. That strange boy with the dog collar was with them, although he stood a few feet away without joining their conversation. She wouldn’t have pegged him for a Union member. He didn’t look anything like a kopis.

  Zettel was obviously distressed. His face was purple, and spit flung from his mouth as he spoke. Allyson wasn’t any happier. They talked over each other like a very old—and very angry—married couple.

  A smirk played on Elise’s lips. “It means we aren’t the only ones pissed that the Union’s taken over the summit.”

  “Good,” Anthony said forcefully. He leaned against the rotten boards of the wall beside her, kicked off a shoe, and shook pebbles out. “Did you find McIntyre?” She nodded. He stuffed his foot back into the sneaker. “And?”

  “Something is going on. I still don’t know what.”

  Another black SUV approached. It didn’t come from the north, where the Union had their compound. It came from Las Vegas instead.

  The kid in the collar turned to watch the SUV pass. He looked so worried that Elise had to watch it, too. The windows were tinted black. She couldn’t see inside, but she suddenly had a bad feeling.

  Why would the Union have been in Vegas?

  “What’s wrong?” Anthony asked when he saw her expression.

  Her gaze fell on the boy across the street, and she realized with a jolt that he was already staring at her. “Hang on,” she said.

  She met him halfway across the road.

  “They have McIntyre,” the boy said without preamble. “They’ve arrested him.”

  The shock of it was so powerful that, for a moment, she stared at him with her mouth agape.

  A hundred questions cascaded through her at once—how he could know that Anthony wasn’t McIntyre, how he knew about the arrest, what he was doing with the Union—but she finally settled on, “Who are you?”

  “I’m Ben,” he said. “Um, Benjamin, actually. Flynn. That doesn’t matter right now. The team followed you to Vegas, waited until you left the hospital, and arrested McIntyre. He was in that car.”

  “What the hell?” Elise asked.

  “My thoughts exactly,” Allyson interrupted.

  Zettel and his aspis had noticed the conversation and joined them in the street. The commander snapped his fingers at Benjamin. “You. Get in the car. Now.”

  Elise instinctively stepped between them. There was no reason to feel protective of a total stranger like Benjamin—he was with the Union, after all—but she couldn’t resist the compulsion.

  Allyson reached around Elise and grabbed Benjamin’s arm. “You heard Gary. Get in the car.” She ushered him to one of the SUVs, and he gave Elise one last desperate look before the door shut on him and the witch.

  “What are you going to do with McIntyre?” Elise asked.

  “We’ll interview him,” Zettel said with an unpleasant twist to his lips, which meant that McIntyre was going to get the same strip search they had. “And as soon as we’re done with the summit, we’ll take him back to Union HQ for prosecution.”

  “Prosecution? Seriously? What is your problem?”

  Zettel gave a cold laugh. “My problem? Wha
t’s my problem? My problem is that you concealed a killer, lied to me about your identity—”

  “You can’t arrest McIntyre,” she said. “His wife is in the hospital.”

  “He killed one of my people. The only place he’s going is to a Union trial. You should just thank your lucky stars that I’m not dragging you in for interfering with our investigation—whoever the hell you even are. There’s no way you’re a witch. You’re not even married to that guy.” He jabbed his thumb at Anthony.

  Elise shoved her face into Zettel, gathering all of her five and a half feet to make herself as intimidating as possible. It worked on most people. In fact, it worked on everyone. But Zettel didn’t budge. “My name is Elise Kavanagh. I’m a kopis, and I’ve known McIntyre for years—he’s a hell of a man to have at your back. He would never kill someone who didn’t deserve it.”

  The commander stepped forward to crowd her space. His chest bumped against hers. He smelled like aftershave and gun oil. “You saying that Michele deserved to get shot and stabbed and left to bleed out in the desert? You think she deserved to suffer?”

  “I’m saying that if he killed her, she earned it. But if you think she didn’t earn it, then it wasn’t McIntyre. Simple as that.” He tried to argue, but she didn’t let him. “Let McIntyre go—send men to follow him, use spy drones, I don’t care, but let him get back to his family until you know more. I’ll find out who killed your recruiter.”

  “And why is that supposed to impress me?”

  “Because,” Elise said, “I used to be the greatest kopis.”

  Zettel laughed again. It was a condescending sound. “Bullshit. That’s impossible. The greatest kopis is here in Silver Wells.”

  That gave her pause. She had realized that going into hiding would mean someone else would inherit the title, but she had only considered it in the most abstract way. She hadn’t really given consideration to what it would mean to have another greatest kopis, much less being in the same place as him.

  After a beat, she said, “I was the one who came before him. I retired.”

  “Kopides don’t retire. They die.”

  She opened her mouth to argue, but didn’t get a chance. Someone shouted.

  Allyson Whatley burst out of the SUV. Elise tensed, but the witch didn’t attack. “Flynn’s having a seizure!”

  “What are the conditions?” Zettel asked.

  She shoved a printout in his face. It was gibberish to Elise, but it must have meant something to him. He scanned them, and then stepped back, shielded his eyes, and scanned the sky.

  A shadow crossed over the sun, and a lone silver feather drifted in front of Elise’s face.

  It was followed by another feather, and another. But she didn’t wait to see if there would be more. Elise shoved Anthony behind the bar, and Zettel was too busy shouting indistinct orders to his team to notice that they had disappeared.

  An angel dropped out of the sky and alighted in the center of the road. His bare feet came to rest on the searing asphalt.

  A voice echoed through the air.

  “I have come.”

  It was a powerful noise, booming and resonant, even though the voice itself was barely more than a whisper. Elise still would have heard it if she was miles away, or utterly deaf. It drove through her mind like a spike.

  She watched from around the side of the building as the angel stretched his wings to their full capacity, which forced Zettel to step back. Each wing was as long as he was tall, and he scattered downy feathers across the desert like hot snow. He blazed with inner light. She couldn’t see his face around the commander’s back.

  Elise wished that she had brought her falchions.

  “If you want to talk to me directly, you’re supposed to arrange a meeting,” said Zettel, sounding more irritated than fearful. Elise hadn’t pegged him for a complete idiot, but she was quickly changing her mind. “You can’t just wander around town like this. There are civilians, you know.”

  The quiet voice roared. “I bear a message.”

  “So bear it to the meetings. The ethereal delegation missed the first one.”

  “We will not be attending any of your meetings.”

  Zettel faltered, stunned to silence. Allyson spoke instead. “The agreement—”

  “We made no agreement.”

  She grew bolder. “So the last three thousand years of summits were… what, a whim?”

  “We’ve fulfilled our promises to the Council of Dis. But the semi-centennial summit has been taken by your human faction, and we have no agreements with you. We won’t submit to your rules.”

  Zettel found his voice again. “It’s the same damn summit it’s always been!”

  The commander’s slight movement allowed Elise to glimpse the angel’s face. He was a young man with coppery hair that brushed his shoulders, and she was stunned to realize that she recognized him. “We obey the laws of no man,” said the angel. He didn’t rise to meet Zettel’s anger, but there was a flash of annoyance in his pale eyes.

  Elise stepped out from behind the tent. “Nukha’il?”

  The angel’s spotted her over Zettel’s shoulder. “Elise?” He completely dropped the Holy Messenger act and sounded normal.

  Zettel whirled to gape at her. He composed his features quickly, but Elise ignored him as she strode forward.

  It had been weeks since she saw Nukha’il. She assumed that he had taken his friend, Itra’il—who had been enslaved and driven to madness—back to the heavenly planes to restore her sanity. Elise hadn’t expected to run into him again. Not two months later, nor twenty years later.

  “Where’s Itra’il?” Elise asked.

  “She rests,” Nukha’il said, folding his massive wings behind him. He was no longer gaunt from being fed a constant stream of drugs, and his skin shimmered with a milky white glow. “That is all she does now. I have forced her into hibernation, because when she wakes… Well. It’s better if she doesn’t wake.” He appraised her. “You shouldn’t be here.”

  “You’re telling me.”

  “No. You shouldn’t be here.” His pale hands swept toward the expanse of desert. Elise wasn’t sure if he meant that she shouldn’t still be in Nevada, where the ethereal city and its dark gates were hidden, or if she shouldn’t be on Earth. She never knew, where angels were concerned.

  “We have to resolve the issue of the quarantine,” Elise said.

  Nukha’il’s face registered surprise. “There is no issue. They’re ethereal, and in our jurisdiction.”

  “I’m not letting anyone else approach those gates.”

  “This is why we’re having meetings,” Zettel interrupted. “It’s not an issue for anyone here to decide alone. The Union—”

  She rounded on him. “The Union has nothing to do with my territory.”

  “Your territory? Northern Nevada is owned by demons.”

  Nukha’il inclined his head. “Her territory. Even so—no mortal is capable of maintaining quarantine.”

  Elise held up the hand that wasn’t broken. She didn’t have to bare her palm to make the message clear. “I’m not just any mortal.”

  They shared a long, understanding silence. He knew, as all angels knew, that Elise was different. He had seen it firsthand in the angelic city.

  He was the first to speak.

  “Very well,” Nukha’il said. “The ethereal party will send a representative to negotiate after all. But only if Elise Kavanagh mediates.” Zettel opened his mouth, but the angel’s glare silenced him. “Those are my terms.”

  She didn’t want to negotiate. She just wanted everyone to leave her, and her city, completely alone. But it was better than nothing. Elise nodded. “Then I’ll see you tomorrow.”

  The angel kneeled and reached his hands toward her.

  She hesitated. Elise knew what he wanted, but her palms burned being so close to him. It was a gesture of supplication. He wanted to signify his obedience to her.

  A dangerous gesture. She didn’t want
to have anything to do with it.

  But the Union was watching.

  After a moment, she rested her good hand in both of his, and he bowed his head to her knuckles. Pain scythed from her palm to her elbow. “She who is above us all,” he murmured in that resonant voice, and her skin crawled.

  He unfurled his wings and leaped into the air. There was no breeze, but they snapped wide and lifted him as though blown away on a hurricane. For an instant, his body was silhouetted against the sun.

  Elise shielded her eyes to search for him, but he was already gone.

  Something trickled down her wrist, and her hand suddenly felt like it was being sliced open. With a ragged shout, she ripped a glove off with her teeth and flung it to the dirt.

  A gash had opened over her sigil. Her fingers spasmed.

  Allyson stared at her as though she had grown horns, and so did Anthony. It was the reaction she had hoped for. But Zettel was no more impressed by the angel’s supplication than he was by anything else, and he strode over to shake a fist at her.

  “This is our operation! We have control!”

  “You have nothing,” she spat. “Nothing except my friend.”

  “A murderer.”

  “It’s a mistake. Take me to the Union compound—I’ll talk to him.”

  Zettel’s jaw clenched. A vein bulged on his forehead. “Fine. Get in the SUV.”

  IX

  Riding out to the Union compound was a different experience without a black bag over Elise’s head, but they were still escorted by men with guns. Zettel took them directly to the trailer they had been confined in before, giving them no opportunity to explore their surroundings. “Five minutes,” he said. “Boyd, stay at the door.”

  The Union locked them inside.

  McIntyre was in his underwear—which were boxers covered in the Bat Signal—with his wrists zip-tied and a black bag over his head. Sweat covered his chest. “Let me go,” he said when they came in.

  “I’m working on it,” Elise said.

  Surprise registered in his muffled voice. “Kavanagh?” She cut him free and removed the hood. McIntyre had a hell of a shiner and a fat lip, but he looked otherwise unharmed. He must not have fought as hard as Elise had. “What the hell is going on?”