The Descent Series, Books 1-3: Death's Hand, The Darkest Gate, and Dark Union (The Descent Series, Volume 1) (16 page)

“Even your living ones, apparently,” he said, taking the keys out of the ignition.

James was right: most of the apartments and houses surrounding the cemetery were dark. Even though it was almost the weekend, and there should have been parties in the college neighborhood, the blocks surrounding Our Mother of Sorrows were strangely silent.

“The dead aren’t getting any deader,” she said. “Let’s go.”

They climbed out of the car into the rainy night. She wandered toward the church, and James retrieved a flashlight from the trunk before joining her.

A small graveyard splayed in front of them. The newer headstones to the front were in neat lines, arranged in narrow rows that left no room for walking without treading upon someone’s final resting place. A single path led to a hill where the older graves stood. A lonely stone angel, illuminated by flood lights around its base, glowed like a star in the drizzly night.

James stepped on the grass. Energy swept over him, and he froze.

Elise caught his expression. “What’s wrong?”

“Someone’s been working magic here. The entire cemetery’s inside a circle of power.”

“That’s not unusual. People cast spells in graveyards all the time.” Elise kept walking. “Come on, hurry up. We don’t want to get caught trespassing. Do cemeteries have security details?”

“Considering the gaping holes in their fence, I’m going to say no.”

Elise and James moved between the graves, feet slurping in and out of the mud with each step. Grass was not native to the desert, so it didn’t take root in the hard soil properly and melted into sludge at the slightest hint of rain.

James shone his flashlight on every marker they passed. “Mario Perez,” Elise remarked. “I had that guy for class when I was a freshman.”

“I remember that,” he said, wiping rainwater off his face. “Stroke, wasn’t it?”

“Yeah.” She pulled out her cell phone, glanced at the screen, and pulled a face.

“What’s the matter?”

“Forget it,” Elise said, shoving it back in her pocket. “Let’s find this demon bastard and get the job done.”

They gave a quick search of the graves. In such a small cemetery, there wasn’t much looking to do.

“You must have misinterpreted Lucinde,” she said. “There’s nothing here. It would be pretty obvious if a major demon was around.”

He swept the flashlight side to side in fruitless searching. “It doesn’t seem—”

“Wait. Is that an open grave by the statue?”

They weaved through the tombstones to the next row. The flashlight died when they stepped up to the very edge of the plot, and James bashed the flashlight repeatedly against his thigh.

“It’s definitely open,” she said. “Too bad we can’t see it.”

“I know,” James said, looking down into the LEDs and jiggling the batteries. “From what I can tell, though, it almost looks new.” The flashlight blared on, burning his retinas for an instant, and then turned off again. “Damn!”

“How can you tell that it’s new?”

He gestured toward the sky, blinking green shapes out of his vision. “It’s been raining for quite some time. The soil erodes rapidly. This grave, although messy, hasn’t been washed out.”

“Isn’t that Amber Hackman’s grave over there?” Elise said. “I heard something about her on the news recently. Her body went missing.”

Their gazes met.

“You wouldn’t remember when Amber Hackman died, but it was quite the event for the witch community worldwide,” James said. “She’s best known for her work as ambassador for the U.N., but she also fought to obtain asylum for witches in superstitious villages. Her work saved many lives.”

“This grave is…” She squinted. “Grace Finch, beloved grandmother. I would bet anything she was a witch, too.”

“How many bodies does this demon have?”

“At least three, probably more. All witches.”

He let out a slow breath. “This isn’t good.”

“Is there something down there?”

She moved closer to the grave. The only warning James had when she fell was a surprised shriek, and suddenly, Elise wasn’t standing in front of him anymore.

“Elise!” he yelled, stepping forward.

Loose earth crumbled under his feet, and he jumped back, landing on his backside. The light flashed once, and stayed dead.

James scrambled to his knees, moving carefully to the rim of the grave. “Elise?”

He could just make out her pale skin as she tilted her face up toward him. “My fault. Erosion. At least I had a soft landing. Can I get any light?”

“The flashlight won’t work,” he said, opening it to reseat the batteries and fiddle with the connectors.

“I think there’s a pair of security guards down here,” Elise said. A beat, and she added, “They’re dead.”

James closed the battery door and the bulb came back on. He beamed it down into the grave. Elise shielded her eyes, back pressed into the muddy wall.

The bodies looked like mud-covered sacks, half-concealed by a sheet flung over their legs. He could make out the
Securitas
logo on the breast pocket of the man on the right. His stomach pitched.

“Shine the light over that way,” she said.

James obeyed, watching as Elise kneeled in the space beside the bodies. She felt the throat of the closest guard and hovered her hand over his mouth. When she began wiping mud away from their throats to bare bloody gashes, James looked up at the sky.

Gray clouds, highlighted with shades of blue and purple, shifted slowly across the heavens. The moon wasn’t even visible through the cover. Casino lights to the south turned the clouds green and orange and a dozen other unnatural shades of the rainbow.

“Someone slit their throats with a sharp knife. The wounds are pretty clean,” she said from below. James took deep, shallow breaths, grateful that the rain kept the smell of death from reaching him.

“We should get you out of there. We need to…I don’t know, report this or something.”

“Report it? Are you crazy?” She dug her hands into the wall of mud, trying to haul herself up with the side of the grave. The soil slipped under her fingers. She lost her footing, stumbled back on the bodies, and one of the guards squelched deeper into the mud. “Uh, help?”

James offered a hand to her. She took his wrist, and he hauled her out of the hole. Elise crawled a few feet away from the grave before trying to wipe mud off her arms. “Are you all right?”

Elise cast a grimace at the grave. “Better than some people. We can’t report this. Once the police are here, we’ll never get the opportunity to find out what happened.”

“But…”

“Business first. Then we tip off the law.” She scooped the flashlight off the ground. “You never would have had a problem with this five years ago.”

He glanced down into the shadowy depths of the grave and quickly averted his gaze once more. “You said it yourself. Five years is a long time.”

Her head snapped up. “What was that?”

James scanned the cemetery with his eyes as Elise did the same at his back, but he heard it before he saw it—slow, shuffling, squelching. Footsteps.

“Perhaps it’s the next shift,” he muttered.

“Or maybe it’s a zombie,” Elise said.

She pointed, and James followed her finger to the street beyond the fence.

A figure slid into the light. His shoes were visible first, and then his shoulders illuminated. His hanging head shadowed his face and chest. The man was clad in a poorly-fitting gray suit, torn and splattered with mud. There was no shirt under the jacket, baring a sunken chest covered in raised veins and swimming black marks that were darker than shadow.

His head lifted. Light spilled onto his nose and angular jaw, which were gripped with veins. A single sigil was emblazoned between his eyebrows. James didn’t need to look closely to know it was the same mark Lucinde had borne not too long before.

“You again,” Elise murmured.

The possessed corpse shambled forward. His eyes didn’t quite focus on either of them.

Elise and James backed toward the gate.

A twig snapped.

James spun. A woman lurched toward them from the darkness at the other end of the cemetery, her straggly hair caked in dirt. She, too, was clad in clothes that didn’t suit her—a plain frock and a pair of cheap sandals. The dress was several sizes too big, and it hung off her shoulder, exposing a sagging breast.

Black tears streaked her cheeks. The other possessed one was close enough for James to see the swollen blood vessels in his eyes as well, and he realized that the woman’s eyes had burst.

James edged over until he was shoulder to shoulder with his kopis. “This is your area of expertise. What do we do?”

“Kill them.” She held a long, curved knife in one hand. James hadn’t seen her draw it.

The woman sped up, and the man angled to cut off their exit. It took him a moment to realize Elise wasn’t following him toward the fence.

“If they’re here, their master won’t be far,” she said.

“You’re suggesting we fight.”

Elise was never given a chance to respond.

The man pitched toward her. She ducked away from his clumsy hands, delivering a kick squarely in the middle of the back. He tumbled into the mud.

“James—look out!”

He spun, but it was too late. A pair of hands dug into his shoulders, and the earth rushed to meet his face.

There was a smack, a crack, and the female was suddenly on the ground with him. A small sound came from her throat, more instinctive than a protest of pain.

James gasped and tried to squirm away, but the mud sucked him down, making it hard to move. Elise’s foot came down on the woman’s face once. The possessed one caught her ankle. She stumbled out of the grip.

The possessed woman clawed at his ankles when James scrambled to his feet. Elise kicked her in the side of the head, even harder this time. It was accompanied by an even louder
crack
, and her skull caved in like a rotten egg that had been smashed against the asphalt.

The older man lurched forward, grabbing James’s neck in both hands. He was slow, but too strong to stop.

James struggled to pry the hands away. “Elise,” he groaned. “Help—please—”

The female grabbed Elise, dragging her to the ground. “I’m a little busy right now,” she said.

He heaved with all his strength, peeling the arms away inch by inch. He could feel his pulse throbbing in his temple. The man, however, showed no signs of exertion. The possessed one pushed steadily on, its half-focused eyes fixed squarely on James’s throat.

Out of the corner of his eye, he saw Elise grab a felled branch the size of his arm. She swung her makeshift club like a bat, and it hissed through the air, smashing into the woman’s face.

James leaned back and pushed his knee between himself and the zombie, trying to kick him off.

The cold fingers tightened around his neck, the heels of his palms pressed into his esophagus, and the world grew darker—

Then a familiar blade came down on the servant’s elbow, slicing across the inner joint. Blood gurgled sluggishly from the cut.

Elise cut again, and suddenly, all the pressure was gone from the right side of James’s throat. The servant’s hand fell limply to his side, and James wrenched away from him with a gasp. Fresh oxygen rushed into his lungs, and he coughed as the graveyard swam around him.

The man turned on Elise, groping for her with the arm that still worked. She flung him to the ground. “Hold him,” she ordered, and James approached cautiously.

“Is he…?”

“I slapped him with the pendant of St. Benedict,” Elise said, taking the necklace of charms from her pocket. It jingled in the night. “I stuffed it in his mouth. He won’t be able to get orders from his master until he manages to spit it out.”

James put his foot on the servant’s chest just in case. “You still carry extra medallions?” he asked.

“I just started again. It seemed like a good idea.”

“A very good idea,” he agreed, watching as Elise hauled the dead woman to her feet. The rain made her bloody face run with red tears.

“Where is your master?” she demanded. The body twisted and writhed, fighting to break free with a whining shriek. “I know you can speak. One of your demonic friends spoke through a girl tonight, so talk!”

Motion caught James’s eye. A small, leathery body emerged from behind a tombstone, perching on the top. Its bulbous eyeballs shone dimly in the light, yellow and bulging and focusing directly on him.

Another scaled the fence. He turned, and his gaze fell on another as it crept out from the shadows of the building adjacent to the cemetery.

“I told you to talk!” Elise said. She slapped the corpse across the face as James edged closer. Decomposing brain, like cottage cheese, crumbled out of the crack in her skull.

“Elise…”

Yet another gray demon crept out from behind the tree. This close, he could see the blood encrusting its nails and the droop of its lower lip as it salivated with hunger.

“What, James?” she asked without taking her focus off the struggling woman.

“I think we’re about to have bigger problems.”

Her face darkened in increments as she counted each demon. “Fiends. I
hate
those guys.”

James swallowed. “We fight?”

“No. We don’t stand a chance against three.” The possessed woman suddenly stopped fighting and went limp in Elise’s arms as though all her strings had been cut.

“What the hell…?” James wondered.

“The master must have realized the servants weren’t doing anything,” she said, dropping the body. “Run!”

She didn’t need to tell him twice.

Elise leapt over the fallen body of the possessed woman, snatching at James’s hand and dragging him along with her.

Their feet made sucking noises with every step, but James could hardly hear it over the pounding of his heart. He felt cold, awash with adrenaline. His gaze narrowed, focusing on the door to the cemetery’s attached office, until all he could see was the door half-lit in the darkness of stormy night.

He hit the doors before Elise did, throwing them open. The lock was punched out—someone else had been there first.

“Get inside!” he bellowed.