Dire Blood (#5) (The Descent Series) (6 page)

Isaac didn’t reply. He could feel it attempting to probe him with its energies, searching for weak points, the things that would make him angry. It was like being jabbed in the forehead with doughy fingers.

“Take an eyeball!” called a nightmare from the opposite walkway, skeletal fingers curved around iron columns as it watched him work.

Another passerby suggested, “Up her quim!”

Isaac was accustomed to having admirers suggest ways to coerce his subjects into talking, but he didn’t pay them any mind. They were too emotional about it. Too excited. Their aggression could feed the megaira and let it heal.

He stopped behind the demon and tipped his head to study it. As with all prisoners kept in the Palace, the demon was naked so that it couldn’t conceal any tangible weapons. The sharp lines of its hipbones jutted out under its ribs like the ears of a cat. The arms were jerked over its head by an iron chain, and blood trickled from its thumbnails to its wrists. It had started its day standing, but those two needles alone had made its knees give out.

The kneecaps. Hmm.

“I will ravage your wife and shit on her face,” said the megaira in the infernal tongue.

Isaac’s mouth twitched at its attempted threat, which was as close to laughing as he ever came.

“I think I’m going to drive a needle up your right nostril next,” he replied in the same language that the demon spoke, almost smoothly enough to pass for fluent. It wasn’t a threat. It was a statement of fact. “By law, I am required to explain—again—that you can belay this act by surrendering the information desired by the Council and naming the leader of the rebellion.”

The megaira’s skin flickered, baring the curves of its bones underneath. “My serpents will violate your wife’s every orifice and impregnate her with venom so that she dies from a rotting cunt.”

Isaac gripped the demon’s chin in one hand while onlookers cheered. His subject attempted to squirm away, but the chains had little slack. Its stubby feet slipped on the tile. One end of the needle was blunted, making it easy to thread the point into one nostril and shove with the pad of his thumb. He met resistance and pushed through.

That made the megaira stop talking and start screaming. Inky blood dribbled down Isaac’s thumb as tears squeezed from the corners of its eyes. He barely heard it wail over the delighted cries of his audience.

He shoved the needle deeper, until the end barely stuck out from its nostril, and then wiped the blood on his hand onto the demon’s shoulder.

“By law, I am required to warn you that my next action will not be to insert another needle, but to use the two in your thumbs to peel off the nails,” Isaac said. He doubted the demon heard him, since it was still screaming, but that wasn’t his concern. “You may belay this act by naming the leader of the rebellion.”

The trap door to his left groaned open. The head of security, Veronika, stuck her head through without climbing onto the platform. Her arrival was met with disappointed shouts from the walkway. They knew what her presence meant.

She had to catch her breath before speaking. “Inquisitor?” One of Veronika’s many jobs was to escort people to Earth, so she spoke smooth, perfect English.

Isaac flicked the needle in the megaira’s nose. That light touch drew a reaction down the entire body of his subject. An arched spine, gritted teeth, another wail bubbling in its throat.
Good
.

“Yes, Veronika?”

“A new prisoner is on his way. He’s a human.”

“I’m making progress here,” Isaac said. “Go ask Ariane to take care of this one. She enjoys processing the mortals.”

Veronika glanced at the people watching from the walkway. The bloody sky behind them turned the figures to indistinguishable shadows, distant enough that they would be unlikely to hear anything quieter than a yell. She lowered her voice anyway. “He’s not getting processed. He’s going to court right now. You’ll want to see this personally.”

If the head of security thought that the new prisoner needed Isaac’s personal attention, then it was likely to be the case. He examined his handiwork again. Something besides blood and ichor was dripping out of the megaira’s nose now. Brain matter, perhaps? Isaac wasn’t even sure that the demon had such a thing.

“I’m going to leave these needles in place,” he explained to the megaira, who had replaced the screaming with sweating and panting. “I don’t have any particular desire to remove your thumbnails or cause you further damage, but I will do it when I come back if I must. I hope a few hours of thinking will help you make the right decision.”

He felt another jab of its mind against his. A sharp pinch in his temple said that it had plucked a thought from the undercurrent trickling through his brain.

The megaira labored to speak. Its voice whined around the needle in its nasal cavity. “If you’re not so concerned about your wife…” A cough. A gurgle. “Perhaps I could become carnally acquainted with your daughter’s corpse.”

Isaac sucked a hard breath through his nose.

“I don’t think I want you to talk until I come back,” he said, his voice cracking on the last word.

He selected one more needle and slammed it into the underside of the megaira’s jaw.

Its muffled squeals followed him down the ladder.

The courtyard was quiet at that time of morning; most demons were already at work, so only gardeners wandered through the flesh orchards. They gave the limbs protruding from the earth the occasional jab with a stick to make sure they were still fresh enough to twitch. As Isaac passed, one of the hands failed to react. The gardener jerked it from the soil, roots and all.

Veronika was waiting for him nearby, beside the sculpture of Lucifer. She wore the leathers of Palace security—it was almost like the biker gear that humans wore on Earth. It was a recent change to the livery of Palace employees. The citizens of Dis liked to be trendy and emulate whatever was happening topside, but official garb was slower to update, so the security team had only recently stopped wearing scale armor.

She had her daggers—which were more like butcher knives—sheathed at her thighs, but every line of her body said that she was on edge, as though waiting for an attack. The nightmare’s mouth was in such a severe frown that it nearly bisected her jaw from her face.

“What is it?” Isaac asked, wiping his hands clean on the towel she handed him. The open air of Dis scratched at his raw throat and burned his skin. He failed to suppress a cough.

Veronika headed for the door to the south wing, and he matched her stride. “Bounty hunters, sir. They’re bringing a man down from Earth. He’s scheduled to arrive this morning and will be immediately put in front of the Council.”

“But there were no bounties on any topside humans. I would have seen it.”

Veronika waved her wrist in front of the door, and it unlocked. “The Council already paid a fee to the ones bringing this man in, so they must have put out the call.” She rested her hand on the handle without opening it, as if waiting to see Isaac’s reaction. He gave none. A secret bounty from the Council was interesting, but not unusual. “Abraxas paid in cash. Earth money.”

“How much?”

“Half a million American dollars,” she said. “Taken straight out of our security budget, according to the treasurer—and please keep that to yourself, because I’m not supposed to know.”

Now that was interesting. Isaac struggled to keep his face blank. “What’s his crime?”

“Transubstantiation and violation of The second law. He’s accused of turning from a human into a demon.” Veronika opened the door and he went inside.

“That’s not possible,” Isaac said.

“Yeah, I thought so, too. But James Faulkner is apparently the most powerful witch on Earth, so he must have found a way.”

Isaac stopped halfway into the hall.

“What did you say his name was?”

T
he ground shifted
and swayed underneath James. He could hear the fluid in his skull swooshing from side to side with every motion.

For a moment, he was so grateful to have slept without dreaming that he neither remembered nor cared what had happened to him. It had been days since he’d been able to close his eyes without seeing Elise’s cold, bloodless face on the other side. But the smell of sulfur crept over him, and it was followed by an awareness of his raw nasal passage and his throbbing skull.

Memory returned all at once.

James was in Hell.

He tongued the wound on the side of his mouth. The skin was sticky—he had been bleeding profusely—but it had already clotted and dried into a caked mass on his cheek. The injury must have been hours old.

Forcing his eyes open, he saw a pair of feet. Dainty black loafers. Ankles bound with leather cord.

Hannah.

His blurry gaze traveled up her feet to her knees, and then her face. Hannah was unconscious. Her wrists were tied in front of her, and her skin and clothing were covered in a layer of red dust.

He tried to say her name, but his tongue wouldn’t articulate words. It stuck to his dry lips.

James swallowed, coughed, and cleared his throat. “Hannah?” His voice came out as a croak. The air tasted sulfuric and bitter.

She didn’t respond.

He relaxed into the swaying motion of the floor. It was grainy—some kind of rough reddish wood, although not a wood that he was familiar with. The floor was throbbing. It sounded like wind was rushing outside. Hard orange light shot through the gaps between boards so brightly that it made his eyeballs ache. James’s shirt and slacks were as dusty as Hannah’s, as if he had been rolling around on the surface of Mars.

He assumed that his stiff, unmoving arms meant that he was tied, too, but he felt so strange and disconnected from his own flesh that he couldn’t tell.

James rolled onto his stomach with a groan. Wriggling closer to the wall, he pressed one eye to a slit between two boards.

Whatever he was in, it wasn’t a ship. There were buildings passing by, and the doors and shop fronts resembled the slums of Dubai. A strange language was scrawled across the walls in red-brown paint, but it was gone before he could try to decipher the language.

Dark forms slipped into view and out again. People walking past his transport.

But not humans.

James’s scalp itched and crawled as his stomach knotted. The feelings swelled and then subsided every time he passed another pedestrian. It wasn’t nausea from his head injury—it was the feeling that he got from demons.

He was still in Hell. And judging by the fences, the cement paths, and the iron trees that he glimpsed, he had been taken into the City of Dis.

There were shouts in a foreign tongue, and an explosion thudded in the distance. He squinted through the sliver in time to see a squat creature with a smashed face throw something at his transport.

Something thudded against the other side of the wood, making the entire vehicle shake. James jerked away.

Hannah sat up and pushed her hair out of her face with both hands. The right side of her face was swelling. “Where are we?” She sounded as raw as he felt.

“We’re in Dis.”

“We can’t be in Dis. I have to get home. Nathaniel—”

“It’s better for him to be there than here.” James started wriggling, trying to free his wrists from their bindings behind his back. Every little motion hurt. “But trust me when I say this isn’t my first choice of vacation spot, either.”

“How can you be joking at a time like this?”

He didn’t respond. Of all the things that he had been through with Elise—being sacrificed and possessed by a powerful demon, the threat of apocalypse, and delving deep into infernal undercities—falling into Hell was just one more episode in his miserable life.

But Hannah had barely been outside Colorado, much less to another dimension. She had certainly never been held captive. And she looked like she was about to hyperventilate from the sulfuric air.

“I’m going to protect you, Hannah. You will get home to Nathaniel, and I will take both of you to safety.”

“Those are some bold goddamn words from the man who just got the two of us dragged into Hell!”

“Relax,” he said. Their vehicle bounced over something, bumping the back of James’s sore head against the wall.

Hannah glared. “Relax?
Relax
?”

She had found the end of his patience.

“Yes. Relax. Now shut your damn mouth and stop distracting me, woman.”

Fury flashed across Hannah’s face, but she didn’t try speaking again. She lifted her wrists to her mouth and bit at the leather strap.

James concentrated on his own bindings. If only they had tied him in front…but he was confident he could loosen them, if only he could reach the knot with his fingers…

The vehicle jerked to a halt. There was commotion outside. More shouts, more quiet explosions. They were growing closer, like a riot was moving up the street. The next explosion was loud enough to make James’s ears ring and the vehicle shake.

Every hint of anger had vanished from Hannah’s face and had been replaced by fear. A tiny whimper rose from her throat.

James turned his head to peer out of a slit again. There were no shop windows visible now—just a blank wall reflecting the harsh orange-red light.

Nearby voices spoke outside of the cart, jabbering in a rough, guttural language. It was
vo-ani
, the infernal tongue. He had studied the demonic language for years so that he could study ancient infernal spells, and James considered himself fluent in it. He practiced using it on Earth with demons whenever he had the chance—which was not often, considering that most of his interactions with demons ended in their abrupt death.

But there was a difference between speaking with Earth-bound creatures that had human mouthparts and trying to understand a regional accent in Hell. He only picked up a word here and there: things like “Palace,” “market,” and “bounty.”

Hannah was still whimpering.

He started twisting his wrists harder, flexing his muscles to strain against the leather.

A click, a clatter. The back wall of their enclosure dropped open.