Dire Blood (#5) (The Descent Series) (3 page)

His sister gave him a pitying look. “Hannah’s studies are over. She won’t be back ever again.”

“What? But I see her at every esbat.”

“The coven’s being polite so that her parents don’t get mad and stop paying dues. But when she turns sixteen and applies for full membership, they’re going to refuse her. She’s not a strong enough witch.”

James felt cold all over. Hannah wasn’t joining the coven. She wasn’t strong enough. He wondered if she would be disappointed, considering what she had told him at the Christmas recital.

“But she was the only one of you three who actually studied during our year with Pamela,” he protested.

Christine’s whole face darkened. “Sometimes, studying isn’t enough.”

A
riane arrived that
weekend. James watched from his bedroom window as Landon dropped her off. There was no sign of her supposed boyfriend, that Isaac guy. She was alone. Ariane was wearing a long, loose dress with her hair gathered in glittering clips.

Pamela embraced her and led the girl inside. James ran into the living room to meet her, but by the time he got there, she had been taken into one of the bedrooms. Every door was shut.

“What’s going on?” he asked Christine, who was reading a book on the couch.

She placed a bookmark between the pages. “Nothing, as far as you’re concerned. Go outside.”

Disappointed, James did as his sister ordered. She could hardly bully him anymore; he was a very tall twelve-year-old, and she still had to catch her breath when she walked across a room. But nobody nagged like Christine. If she wanted him to go outside, she would make sure that he went outside.

He spent his afternoon wasting time in the forest, but returned a few hours later. He kicked a rock through the garden, sending it jittering and dancing over the brick path. When he passed the open window of his sister’s bedroom, he heard a strange sound: a soft, feminine noise that sounded like it was being muffled into a pillow.

James paused to peer into her room, but the curtains were drawn. He couldn’t see anything. But someone was definitely crying, and it didn’t sound like Christine.

He sneaked into the house and checked Pamela’s office. His aunt was seated in an active circle of power, and she was lost in meditation.

Slipping past her office, he eased the handle of his sister’s door down and opened it to peek through the crack. He could see Ariane sitting on the foot of the bed with her hands in her lap.

“I can’t believe it,” Christine was saying somewhere out of sight. “Why you?”

“He said my skills were most suitable, so I volunteered.”

“You
volunteered
?”

“It’s important, Christine. There’s nothing more important than this.”

Ariane ran a hand down the front of her dress, and James realized that the voluminous material concealed a strange curve to her stomach. For a moment, he had the unkind thought that she was a lot fatter than he remembered—and then he realized that it was the only place she had gained weight.

She was pregnant.

His sharp intake of breath made Christine look up. Before he could slip back into the shadows, she crossed the room, threw open the door, and grabbed his arm. “You snooping little prick!”

“Hey! Let me go!” he protested. For a weak girl, she had an awfully strong grip.

Ariane’s voice whipped through the air. “Christine! Let him in.”

James shook his sister off and stepped inside. Christine shut the door firmly behind him. “You’re pregnant,” he said, circling around Ariane. She nodded. Her rosy cheeks shone with moisture.

“Yes, I am. That’s why I’ve come here. Isaac is hunting a rogue overlord right now, and it’s too risky for me like…like this.”

“I’m so sorry.”

Her cheeks dimpled. “Don’t be sorry. I’m very happy. The problem is…” Ariane trailed off, and her gaze burrowed deep into James’s skull, as if she was seeing all kinds of things that he didn’t want anyone to see.

He shifted on his feet. “I won’t tell anyone.”

Christine gave a short laugh. “Everyone knows. Landon even congratulated her. Can you believe it?”

There was something wrong about an adult congratulating a sixteen-year-old on her pregnancy. James thought back to the tall man called Metaraon inspecting the adepts, and Ariane binding as an aspis when she couldn’t even drive yet, and the swell of her stomach under her shirt. Yeah, there was
definitely
something wrong.

James sat on the bed next to her and took her hand. “It’s okay,” he said firmly, even though it wasn’t. But he thought that it sounded reassuring. “Tell me what I can do to help you.”

“You are very sweet,” Ariane said, patting his cheek. “Do you know what you can do to help?”

“What?”

“Never, ever go anywhere near my daughter.”

J
ames spent a
lot of time thinking about that short conversation with Ariane.
Never, ever go anywhere near my daughter.
Was that meant to be for his safety or the baby’s? The latter didn’t make any sense. James was hardly a threat.

One thing he did understand, with sudden clarity, was that there were secrets in his coven. Secrets that even he, the nephew of the high priestess, couldn’t begin to fathom.

Secrets that he could only learn by immersing himself in them.

He went to Pamela that weekend. She was writing another paper spell at her desk, and she looked strangely old and shrunken in her high-backed chair. Her black hair was streaked with white. Her skin was the consistency of the paper she wrote upon. “What do you need, sweetheart?”

“Can you tell Landon that I’m ready to initiate?”

Pamela set down her pen, gave him a sad smile, and nodded.

J
ames was initiated
that week. Isaac killed his demon a few days later, and Ariane left to be reunited with her kopis.

Christine died two weeks after that.

Her funeral was held in the woods outside of Pamela’s house. James followed the pallbearers from a distance, watching his father shudder as he carried her casket to a grave that had already been prepared. He could hear his mother sobbing behind him, and it sounded so distant, like James was a million miles away from his family.

Rain sprinkled on the clearing. The entire coven had gathered to honor Christine, and they milled around the disturbed earth of her grave wearing black robes. Ariane and Isaac stood shoulder-to-shoulder on the opposite side of the grave. Even underneath a loose sweater, James could see that she was growing quickly. Isaac looked skinny next to her.

The ceremony was short. Landon said some words about eternity, and cycles, and the everlasting nature of souls.

And then it was over. The crowd broke apart.

James pushed through the coven to reach Ariane’s side.

“Hi,” he said.

She clutched the cross necklace over her heart, as if in prayer. “Do you…do you know what killed her?”

He did. In fact, Pamela had given James two explanations for his sister’s passing: first, the publicly known cause of death that had been allegedly diagnosed by doctors; and second, the actual cause of death that had been diagnosed by the coven.

The first reason was heart failure. An unknown defect.

The second reason was accidental suicide via magic.

Pamela had explained that, apparently, Christine had been struggling to catch up with James so that she could impress their family. She enchanted objects with greater and greater spells, none of which she was capable of handling. When she ran out of animals to sacrifice, she began drawing off of her own life force.

After months of abuse, all it had taken was a single candlelight spell to do her in.

Saying that out loud would have felt like admitting that James had killed his sister, and Ariane was already crying. So what he told her was, “It was an accident. An awful accident.”

She nodded and sobbed even harder.

He didn’t know what to say after that. Ariane and Christine had been close friends—much closer than James and Christine had ever been. He wanted to apologize for telling Christine that he was better than her, and that he was sorry for making her cry, and sorriest of all that he hadn’t trusted her enough to be more involved in her studies. But telling Ariane that wouldn’t fix anything. She had much bigger worries anyway.

Ariane saved him from having to think of consoling words by reaching out to take his hand. “I’m going to name my baby after her. I would like to give her ‘Christine’ as a middle name.”

“She would have liked that,” James said.

“Yes. I think so.”

Isaac finally spoke up. “Sorry for your loss, Faulkner.”

It was the first time that James had ever heard Isaac speak, and it rang out as unemotional and inauthentic. His voice was deep and dead. He didn’t even change expression when he said it.

James studied the kopis in the gray light of the storm. He had a hawk-like nose, eyes slanted in such a way that he would always look angry, even if he smiled, and a long scar running from one temple to the corner of his mouth. Now that he was standing right in front of him, James realized that his original estimation of Isaac’s stature had been wrong. The man wasn’t skinny; he was lean, but densely packed with muscle. He vibrated with tension, as if he might snap at any moment.

Isaac was, in short, absolutely terrifying.

Ariane embraced James. Her belly was a hard lump between them. “You will make the right choices and do good things,” she whispered into his ear. “You won’t let your thirst for knowledge destroy you. Promise me that.”

It seemed like such a weird thing to request, but James would have told her anything to make the crying stop. “I promise.”

DECEMBER 1982

T
he first Christmas
after James’s sister died was somber. The Faulkners didn’t decorate a tree, bake cookies, or sing carols, as they had every year prior to that. Instead, they ate a quiet dinner of ham and sweet potatoes on Christmas Eve, and went to bed early.

James awoke to find snow outside and Pamela talking on the phone in the kitchen. She hung up when he stepped out.

“Merry Christmas, Auntie,” James said, kissing her on the cheek. He hadn’t called her that since he was much younger than his very noble age of twelve, but the name always made her smile, and there were far too few smiles in the house.

She didn’t smile. “And to you, James.”

“Who was that on the phone?”

“That was Landon,” Pamela said, opening the refrigerator to remove a carton of eggs. “Find a whisk. I’m cooking scrambled eggs, and you can make yourself useful by starting on the pancakes.”

He did as instructed. “What did Landon want?”

“Ariane gave birth this morning, just two hours ago. She and the baby are perfectly healthy. Six pounds, fourteen ounces. Nursing well.”

“That’s nice,” he said. His aunt frowned. “That’s…not nice?”

She huffed. “Of course all of that is
nice
, but the baby has tested positive as a kopis.”

Surprise washed over James. Ariane had seemed so certain that she was pregnant with a girl, but all kopides were men. He supposed that meant that the baby wouldn’t be named after Christine, after all.

“Excellent,” James said. “So what’s his name?”

Pamela cracked an egg. The yolk hit the skillet and sizzled.

“Her name is Elise.”

P
ART
T
WO

High Trial

I

NOVEMBER 2009

E
lise was sharpening
one of her falchions. The steady
whisk-whisk
of the file scraping along the edge of the blade was as comforting and repetitive as a heartbeat. James had fallen asleep to that sound on so many countless nights that he struggled to sleep without it sometimes.

They were in Saudi Arabia. The room they rented was small, and the window had no glass to keep out the unrelenting heat. Elise had removed her headscarf in the privacy of their room, and her auburn curls stuck out in every direction like she had been electrocuted. Her hair fell all the way down her back and veiled her freckled shoulders, but that wasn’t right. She hadn’t grown her hair that long until after retirement, and James and Elise hadn’t been in the Middle East since she was a teenager.

He watched her work from his bed without sitting up, head propped on his arms. The woman sitting by the window wasn’t a teenager. She was beautiful, mature, battle-worn, scarred. Her hair clung to the hard lines of her cheekbones and jaw.

Elise lifted the blade into the sunlight and blew metal fragments off the edge, but the file continued making a soft
whisk-whisk
even after she set it aside.

“You could ruin the geometry if you file that much more,” James said. That was what he had told her at the time, when she was sixteen.

In reality, when they had really been visiting Saudi Arabia, she had ignored his words of caution. Now she set her sword beside the whetstone and pulled out a pack of cigarettes. “Do you have a lighter?”

“You don’t smoke,” James said.

The cigarette was already lit. She put it to her lips, sucked in a breath, blew out smoke. “You don’t know anything about me.”

He was kneeling in front of her, watching her profile silhouetted against the harsh daylight. Light blazed behind her, but he didn’t know if it was the sun or the glow of a distant garden lit with angelfire.

Elise returned the cigarette to her lips. A line of blood trickled from her nose and detoured around the curve of her lip.

James swallowed against the lump in his throat. “I’m so sorry.” He reached up to brush the blood away with his thumb. It smeared on her cheek.

She didn’t react to his touch. Her skin was so cold that her freckles were turning blue.

Elise’s brow knitted, and she coughed. “Hell,” she muttered in the same tone of voice she used whenever she realized that she had made a mistake in the accounting for Motion and Dance. Annoyed, but casual. Black blood trickled from her hairline down her neck to pool around her collarbone.