Dire Blood (#5) (The Descent Series) (36 page)
Read Dire Blood (#5) (The Descent Series) Online
Authors: SM Reine
James awoke when the light outside the icy windows began to brighten. His eyelids fluttered open, and he grimaced at first. But his expression relaxed when he saw her beside him. “Good morning,” he said, voice thick and groggy.
She rolled onto her stomach. “Good morning, James.”
“What time is it?”
“I have no idea.”
“That’s fine,” he said. “I don’t really care.” James touched his lips to the curve of her shoulder. He was thinking about how beautiful she looked, and wishing that she still had freckles.
“Sorry,” she said.
“Sorry?”
Elise immediately wished she hadn’t said anything aloud. It was bad enough that he was going to skim it from the surface of her brain. “For my skin. And…everything else.” Her hair, her eyes, her demon heart.
“You’re still beautiful,” James said, and she could tell that he meant it. She could also tell that, despite the new absence of flaws, he preferred the way she used to be. He wrapped his hand around hers, toying with the bare spot on her thumb where she had worn the warding ring. “You’re also troubled. You didn’t sleep at all, did you?”
She made herself smile. “You probably know more about it than I do.”
The silence that followed was long and companionable. Neither of them wanted to break it.
James couldn’t seem to stop touching her, so she rolled onto her side to give him access. He traced the places on her body that should have had lines, but didn’t. Her ribs. Her concave stomach. Her hip. The sunlight filtering through the ash-caked windows warmed the parquet and turned the room a hazy shade of gold, so different from the all-consuming shadows of Hell.
But nothing could last forever. Not even silence. Questions hung over them, things unspoken, and Elise had to know.
She reached up to gently rub a knuckle against his jaw. “How long?” She didn’t need to specify what she meant.
“Always,” James said, barely above a whisper.
“When we were living together?” she asked, and she could feel that the answer was yes. “When Death’s Hand came back? When you moved in with Stephanie?”
“Always,” he repeated. There was nothing else to be said.
“Then what the hell have we been doing for a decade? Why did you keep rejecting me?”
The corners of James’s mouth drew down in a frown. “It’s complicated.”
Those two words were enough to make the warmth in the room fade just a few degrees.
He cupped a hand at the back of her head as he kissed her, tangling in the black hair that wasn’t hers so that she couldn’t pull away. Not that she would have wanted to anyway.
They pressed their foreheads together and didn’t move for a long time, breathing each other’s breath and feeling their hearts beat in rhythm. “We really need to go now,” Elise said, and the moment was gone. “We should have gone hours ago.”
James released her. Nodded. “You’re probably right. I’m hungry—I think I’ll see if Candace left any canned food upstairs. Do you want anything?”
She shook her head and stretched out on the mats to watch him dress. The view from the floor was pleasant. Seeing him naked was different now that she knew what it felt like to be against him, skin against skin, and remembered the salty taste of sweat on her tongue.
Even though she knew they still had to find out what had happened to Hannah and Nathaniel, it was hard to feel much urgency while watching James’s muscles flex and his body twist. He pulled his shirt on and his fingers slipped along the buttons one by one. Several of them were missing. Elise hadn’t been careful about undressing him. “Are you going to stay down there all day?”
She stretched onto her back, extending her fingers and toes to their maximum like a cat after a long nap. “It’s tempting.”
He knelt beside her with a half-smile. She knew that weird expression because she probably had the same one, herself: disbelief.
James handed her clothes to her. “I’ll see you upstairs,” he said, brushing her hair over her ear again. His fingers trailed over her temple, and a line formed between his eyebrows. His mind was a buzz of unreadable thoughts. “You should know that I love you, Elise. I’m sure you realize that now.”
Something about the way he said it didn’t come across as a romantic confession so much as an apology, so all she did was nod silently.
He lingered in the doorway for a moment, as though to give her some small amount of privacy as she dressed in the leggings and bustier. By the time she went searching for her spine sheath, he had gone upstairs and she was alone.
Elise stared at her unfamiliar reflection in the mirrors, twisting the ring on her thumb.
She didn’t look anything like she used to. She didn’t feel the same, either. It didn’t really matter if she was the daughter of Nügua, the daughter of Yatam, or the daughter of Hell—none of those names meant anything to her. What mattered was that she had changed, profoundly and irrevocably.
One other thing had changed, too. And he was upstairs making breakfast.
She found herself smiling as she laced her leggings again. It was stuck to her face, and she couldn’t have stopped if she tried.
Elise found an old jacket in the closet and tugged it over her shoulders before opening the front door. There was more snow outside than she’d expected. James’s footprints led around the side of the building to the apartment’s stairs.
But everything vanished the instant she crossed the threshold.
She was surrounded by gray void—inside and outside.
Elise couldn’t turn back to the studio. There was no studio, and she had no body to turn. She couldn’t scream without a voice.
And she wasn’t alone in the void.
He had come.
Elise
, He said in a voice as massive as His presence,
I have missed you so very much. It’s time to come home.
She wanted to cry, to flee, to scream a thousand furies at the nothingness. But it was too late. Pale hands engulfed her, cradling nonexistent flesh and enclosing her in chains. All she could see was flaming light.
James!
Elise shrieked without lungs.
And then she was gone.
T
he apartment above
the studio was just as quiet and empty as it had been downstairs. The last occupant had been one of the former instructors at Motion and Dance. Candace and all of her most important belongings were gone—photo albums, her laptop, some knick-knacks that James remembered being on the bookshelf. Candace and her husband must have evacuated.
James couldn’t hear Elise moving downstairs, but he could feel her. His last image of her was when she had twisted her arms to adjust her leggings, and he could still see the way her scapula jutted from her back, the line of her spine, the curve of her hip, and the spill of her hair like ink on snow.
That was how he wanted to think of her. Bare shoulders and a hint of a smile on her lips.
He didn’t open the pantry to search for canned food when he got upstairs. He braced his hands on the counter and stared out the dusty window. The street beyond was normal, aside from the emptiness. It was going to be a beautiful morning.
James felt Elise approach the front door. Something shifted when she crossed the warded line that separated the entryway from the lawn.
An instant later, she vanished.
Though he didn’t see it happen, he felt it as surely as he had felt her body under his hands the night before. All their years of running and hiding—and all of their struggles to keep her safe from His searching gaze—had ended in one swift moment.
God had come. He had Elise.
All the tension drained from James’s muscles. He sagged against the counter.
“Finally,” he sighed.
A
N
OTE FROM THE
A
UTHOR
Thank you all for joining me for yet another book. This was a heck of an experience to write and crazy emotional. I’m already hard at work on the next part, which is called
Paradise Damned
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