The Descent Series, Books 1-3: Death's Hand, The Darkest Gate, and Dark Union (The Descent Series, Volume 1) (7 page)

Once they were stacked together, James tore a page out of his Book of Shadows, flicked it at the pyre, and whispered a word of power. They ignited in an instant bonfire, flushing Elise with heat and scorching her eyebrows. The fire didn’t touch the foliage around them. The misty drizzle couldn’t slow it.

“You’ve improved.” Elise didn’t sound complimentary so much as exhausted. Her hair was stuck to the back of her neck, and she wasn’t sure if she was soaked in rain or sweat.

When the tenth hour chimed, the sky had split with fire and gateways opened, dumping demons on top of Elise and James. She killed anything that passed, but a lot of them had scattered. The villages were going to be a mess. And if the rest of the world was the same…

“Whomever is winding that clock isn’t playing games.” James took several large steps back before flicking another paper at the fire. The flames leaped fifty feet into the sky.

“At least we have this.” Elise lifted a strip of skin between two fingers. She had skinned brands off one of the demons. If she could find the symbols in Hume’s Almanac, they would be able to determine the demons’ allegiance.

But it suddenly grew hot, and the skin blackened and crumpled around the edges. She gave a shout and dropped it. It was ash before it hit the ground.

“What did you do?” she asked, spinning on James.

His eyes were wide. “Nothing. That wasn’t me.” He clapped his hands, and the flames on the bodies vanished in a flash of smoke. There were no charred bodies where the fire had been—not even bone fragments.

“Shit,” Elise said.

“Some greater demons clean up their minions to destroy evidence. This must be one of them.” He groaned and rubbed a hand through his hair, leaving a streak of white ash. “Fantastic. At least that narrows it down to…oh, a few hundred demons.”

Elise sheathed her swords, inspected herself for major injuries—nothing worse than a few bleeding claw marks—and started hiking back to the villages. James shadowed her. They had been combing the area Vustaillo noted on the map for days and hadn’t found anything but mud, ants, and several rainstorms.

The village streets were empty of life when they arrived. There hadn’t been many people in the first place, but the few who had stayed outdoors were dead now.

Elise and James turned a corner and startled a group of feasting demons. They were ugly things, like living grotesques hunched over half-eaten bodies with dirty fingernails and leathery skin. Elise had never seen the likes of them. She hoped she would never see them again.

She cut down the demons. They turned into ash a few minutes later.

“I got a couple of the symbols,” James said. He had written down as many as he could before they ignited.

“Good. I have twenty seconds.”

He looked at her. “Twenty seconds of what?”

“I timed the bells. There are twenty seconds between from the start of one to the start of the next.”

“You timed them? While fighting?”

Elise shrugged.

“So that’s four minutes,” she said. “For twelve bells. Four minutes from the first chime until…”
The end of the world
. She didn’t need to say it aloud. “I’ll be back.”

Elise headed to the post office, which was uninhabited by humans—living or dead. There was one package addressed to “Bruce Kent.” She ripped open the box, took out the copy of Hume’s Almanac sent by James’s former coven, and threw the packaging in the trash.

She met up with James again, put Hume’s Almanac in his backpack, and shouldered her own.

It was time to move on. There would be more victims, more demons, more battles to fight before they could find the clock.

“What happens with the eleventh bell?” Elise asked. “What happens with the
twelfth
?”

James shook his head.

“Let’s get to the clock before we find out.”

E
lise searched for
weeks without resting, but she couldn’t keep moving forever. When she became so exhausted that she almost failed to avoid decapitation by a stray demon, James picked an abandoned condo in a village on the ocean and insisted they stop to sleep.

At first, she refused. But fatigue won out. For a few blessed hours, she slept.

He studied as she rested, working his way through Hume’s Almanac with the drawings of the demons’ brands. There had been a letter from the high priestess tucked in the back, but no note from Hannah. She had never written to him, not in five years, and her rebuke almost didn’t sting this time.

When he got through the second section of the book without finding anything useful, he dropped it on the chair with a sigh, leaned back, and massaged his sore eyes. He needed reading glasses, but every time he bought a pair, they got broken in a fistfight or dropped down a canyon or eaten by monstrous demon larvae.

James went to the bedroom door. Curled up in the stolen bed, Elise looked almost childlike, if he ignored the injuries. Her face was relaxed and unguarded. She didn’t twitch when he sat on the edge of the bed. How long had it been since she slept?

His heart ached as he watched a curl in front of her nose sway with every breath. The urge to protect her was ridiculous. There was nothing he could fend off that she couldn’t. But he knew, watching her sleep, that he would do anything to defend her. Anything.

James retrieved a page from his Book of Shadows. He touched it to her skin and whispered a word of power. The cuts closed. The bruises on her face yellowed. She sighed without waking up.

He went back to reading Hume’s Almanac as darkness fell. He was beginning to doze in his chair when the sky blossomed with light and the eleventh bell chimed.

James jerked upright. Elise was already standing in the doorway, a falchion in each hand. Her hair stuck up in the back where she had been laying on it.

“Let’s go,” she said.

D
emons poured through
the streets. Pillars of flame flashed through the sky with each chime. The bells reverberated through the earth, and James clung to a tree, barely staying on his feet.

Elise slashed and stabbed, as light in her hiking boots as she could have been in toe shoes. She was locked in adagio with slavering grotesques.
Ballon, aplomb, allongé
—James’s former students would have been envious to see it, if not for the splattering blood.

People shrieked and fled. James wanted to tell them to go inside, to lock themselves where it was safe, but the sky fire and ravenous horde had driven them to mindless fear.

Children fell under the jaws of the demons. Not ten feet away, a man’s head was bashed against rocks. Elise danced to her silent andante, slicing through flesh and bone. Her swords glistened in the rain.

She climbed on top of a stall. Demons moved to follow, but James flung a page at them. Before the rain could soak it, he shouted.

A silent explosion rocked the air, knocking the demons off their feet as though the hand of God had swatted them aside. The ones still standing turned on James.

“
Ayuda
!”

An old man with his face covered in blood ran down the street. He was followed by two of the grotesques, and he reached desperately for Elise. She grabbed his forearm and hauled him onto the stall. Then she leaped down, lashing out with both feet. Skulls cracked.

Magic poured from James, swelling and crashing with the flick of paper. He was a shining light in the gloom, his Book of Shadows like a brilliant star. He set fires and brought wind upon the demons.

There were too many. Dozens. Hundreds. The jungle seethed.

He flipped through his Book of Shadows, searching for a spell that could stop everything, to save the people ripped open by blunt teeth. But then the earth rocked with the eleventh bell and he was slammed against a wall. The Book flew from his arms.

A demon crashed into him. He saw a flash of bloody tongue a heartbeat before its heavy foot mashed into the side of his knee.

James heard a wet crunch. He hit the ground. The pain struck him a few seconds later.

He roared, gripping his leg. The demon fell on him, pressing more than two hundred pounds of weight upon his chest like the crush of a boulder. Its breath stank of acid.

“James!”

Teeth ripped into his sleeve. He shoved the demon off of him, but another took its place.

And then it shrieked, blood sprayed out of its severed neck, and disappeared. Elise stood over him where its face had been. He couldn’t draw enough of a breath to thank her.

She sheathed one sword before lifting. He tried to put weight on his leg and cried out. “Lean on me,” she said, pulling his arm over her shoulder.

“We can’t go—those people—the Book—”

“I’ll come back for it. Move!”

She dragged him from the village. Slowly, so slowly, they fought their way into the jungle, where the trees grew thick and the demons could not follow.

He slid to the ground with a groan.

“I think it’s dislocated. My knee. I can’t walk—can’t feel my foot—”

Elise kneeled in front of him. His leg looked crooked through the slacks. She sliced open the pant leg, and her jaw tensed when she saw the unnatural twist of his knee cap. Seeing it made the pain worse.

“I’m going to relocate it,” she said. “Try to relax.”

“Maybe we should wait—”

But she had already put both hands on his leg and twisted.

W
hen the sun
rose, Elise sat in the common area of the village, wiping down her blades with a soft rag. It used to be someone’s shirt, but they didn’t need it anymore, and there was something immensely cathartic about cleaning blood off her falchions.

There were more bodies this time than after the tenth hour. Shopkeepers, farmers, laborers, friends and mothers and brothers. All dead. Losing so many lives was hardly a victory. It made her tense. Her neck felt like it might never unknot.

But cleaning her blades and gently oiling the metal—it was better than a professional massage, better than the comforting burn of whiskey, even better than her ex-boyfriend’s ministrations. It made her feel a little less guilty to be sitting next to a child whose face had been torn off. Just a little.

Elise walked into an abandoned house. The doors had been left open, and rain made the carpet squish under her feet. She used the phone to call McIntyre.

“Fly to Guatemala. I need you here,” she said.

His responding silence was long. “Elise…”

“Did you see what happened with the last bell?”

“How could I miss it? It was a massacre in the Warrens.” He paused, and Elise thought she heard his girlfriend crying in the background. “You’d laugh if you saw how the news is trying to explain the deaths away. They’re calling it a new outbreak of SARS. Those mundane bastards will make anything up to avoid seeing the truth.”

“There won’t be eyes to see if you don’t help me,” Elise said. “My aspis is out of commission. I need backup.”

“And my aspis is pregnant.”

Nausea flipped Elise’s stomach. She gazed at the body on the couch. Flies were starting to cloud around it. “If you want Leticia to live to give birth, you need to help.”

“Screw you,” he said without real ire.

“You can be down here in twelve hours. We’ll go get this together. It’ll be the Grand Canyon all over again. Call some of your friends—I know you have a lot of them.”

“And I’m the only one you have?”

That was probably meant to sting. “I have better things to do than make friends. Your priorities are fucked up.”

This was an argument they had been through a dozen times. McIntyre switched tactics. “Would you leave James to save the world?”

Yes. That was the plan, after all.

“Just get down here,” she said. She gave him the coordinates of the condominium. He said that he wrote them down. They hung up.

Elise found the Book of Shadows in a puddle of mud. Half of the pages were stuck together. She didn’t need to be a witch to tell that they were ruined.

She stole a bottle of pills from an unoccupied pharmacy to soften the blow. James was covered in sweat and half-asleep when she returned to the condo on the beach. “Here,” she said, folding two pills into his hand. “Sorry it took so long. Have you slept?”

“Barely.”

He swallowed them while she looked at his knee. It had swollen to twice its normal size. She suspected there were torn ligaments and arterial damage—the kind of thing that would require surgery if he planned on walking again. “You’ll get over this in no time,” Elise lied.

He laughed. “Good thing I don’t dance anymore.”

She took an avocado from her jacket, sliced it lengthwise, and pried the pit out with her knife. He took half. “At least all the dead people mean we don’t have to pay for food.”

He stopped laughing.

By the time he ate the avocado and some plantains, James’s color had improved, and he didn’t look like he was in nearly as much pain. “We can’t move you to a city for surgery,” she said. “We don’t have time.”

“I know. But I think I can heal myself, with your help…and the Book of Shadows.”

She handed the Book to him. His face fell.

“Is it enough?” she asked.

He flipped through the pages and gave a hard swallow. “It will have to be. I can do a ritual.”

“Why? You’ve written spells more powerful than this. You could fix yourself in a half second.” She took the Book of Shadows, flipping through it to one of the pages in the very back. James jerked it out of her hands.

“All my benign healing spells were destroyed.”

“So use one that isn’t benign.”

“Do you see this?” He turned it to show her a page. It was completely obscured with ink. “This is all I have left. It would ‘fix me,’ but requires a small sacrifice.”

“How small?”

“If I used you as the subject, it would also render you unconscious for a week.”

She couldn’t afford to be useless any more than he could. She considered the page. “I could get someone else. A survivor from a nearby village.”

“This spell might kill a normal person.”

“That’s dark magic, James. Your aunt would be ashamed.”

He snapped the Book shut. “As I said, we’ll use a ritual.”