Dire Blood (#5) (The Descent Series) (14 page)

Isaac’s face loomed in his vision. His mouth was tilted into a frown. “Hannah?”

“Hannah Pritchard. She was one of Ariane’s classmates in the coven. We were separated outside the Palace gates.”

“You should be much, much more worried about what’s going to happen to you,” he said, cracking his knuckles. “You killed Elise. No matter what happens at the trial—whether you burn in fire or get flayed on the rack—I am going to have my pound of flesh.”

The anger swelled inside of James, surprisingly powerful and sudden. It gave him enough strength to sit up and glare at Isaac. The man could have passed for a demon himself—he wore leather slacks and arm guards, along with a necklace of bones that hung over his black shirt. Hell had rubbed off on him.

“I didn’t kill her,” James said. “I would
never
have hurt Elise. And you would know that if you had bothered to involve yourself in her life.”

Isaac crouched in front of James and seized his jaw. “You know that you killed her as soon as you bound, you sick fuck.” His eyes were like emerald shards, dark and sharp. “I have never been so satisfied to see justice dispensed.”

He released James and strode out of the room, slamming the door behind him.

It had been years, and that man was still a goddamn bastard.

The lingering anger gave James enough strength to flex his arms, and he twisted his wrists until the leather cut into his skin like a stripe of fire against the bone.

With a roar, he ripped one arm free of the straps, and then the other. He flung the cord to the ground.

His arms had been tied behind his back for so long that moving them forward shot pain down his shoulders, his biceps, his back muscles. James sagged against the wall with a groan. His perspiration felt tackier than usual—he didn’t even have enough moisture left in his body to sweat properly.

But if Isaac wasn’t going to find Hannah, then there was no choice but for James to do it himself. Nathaniel had already spent the first ten years of his life without a father. He wasn’t going to lose his mother, too.

James dipped a finger in the blood on his wrist and hissed at the sting.

Slowly, carefully, he began painting a circle on the floor.

T
wenty years after
Elise’s first visit to Hell, she still remembered what it was like when she had first passed the portal. It had hurt, of course—it wasn’t easy for mortals to pass through the barriers between dimensions. Hot prickles had spread down her spine, like having pins driven between the vertebrae. She had felt like her skin was disconnecting from her muscles, her heart stopped for several beats, and she thought she might be suffocating. But it hadn’t lasted long—just an instant. It was still more than enough to imprint itself permanently on her memory.

That wasn’t what happened after Zettel flipped the switch and activated the Union’s portal.

The control room disappeared, and so did the basin beneath Elise’s feet.

Nathaniel cried out, and she instinctively seized his hand. He wrapped his arms around her neck and gripped her tightly. She couldn’t see his face in the darkness, but she could feel him trying to breathe, though there was no air to inhale.

And then she was home.

The black city she had seen in her vision unfolded beneath her, sprawling out in fractal lines, like it had grown as a mold on the underside of a rock rather than been planned by engineers. It was huge, climbing up the face of viciously jagged mountains and spreading out into a desert of crimson dunes. A hundred million lives sparkled amongst the shadows. Stars in a galaxy. She could smell them, even from miles overhead.

She floated above it all for an instant, peaceful and breathless, and felt totally right for being there. Nathaniel’s arms were still locked around her neck—the only sense she had that there was still a fleshy body containing her soul.

Then she felt a jerk. Her slow drift toward the glimmering spires at the center of the city halted.

Something pierced deep within her belly, like a hook driven into her intestines.

Everything blurred as she was hauled away from the city.

She was falling. She was going to crash. If she could have breathed, Elise might have screamed.

And then she stopped.

The rushing noise vanished from her ears. She was standing on a mosaic of sparkling obsidian tile, like someone had cracked lava rock with a hammer. The room wasn’t large, and there were no walls—only pillars joined by arches. And beyond them, the sky was a shade of red so dark that it was almost black.

A short altar stood in the middle of the room with the figurine of a genderless form standing in the middle. A temple?

Nathaniel still had his arms locked around Elise. She grabbed his wrists and disengaged him. The boy stepped back, looking embarrassed at the way that he had grabbed her. “Sorry,” he said.

Elise frowned. “You’re not vomiting.”

“Uh…no. I’m not.”

“And neither am I,” she said, running her hands over her stomach. She was still wearing James’s shirt and jeans, with the hems tied so that everything fit around her curvy form, and her swords were still on her back.

Nathaniel’s eyebrows knitted. “Is that…bad?” His voice was raspy. He coughed.

No, the lack of vomiting wasn’t bad—it was kind of refreshing, actually. Elise had been teleported between dimensions by Yatam, and had reacted badly every time. But it wasn’t just that she didn’t feel sick; she actually felt…good.

Elise took a deep smell of the air. Sulfur, ash, sage, cooking meat—it was simultaneously the strangest and best thing she had ever smelled, and she let the flavors roll over her tongue as she savored them.

Nathaniel didn’t look like he was doing as well. He gagged on the heat and pulled at the neck of his sweater. “Oh man, this is gross.”

“This isn’t the Palace of Dis,” she said, stepping up to the archway. “It’s too quiet. We should have been attacked by now.”

The quiet made sense as soon as she leaned out the arches and looked into endless desert. The mountains that she had glimpsed were so far in the distance that they made barely any impression on the horizon. There was no sign of the city, either.

Instead, they were near one of the flaming pits—a canyon that dropped off just a few feet away from the archway in which Elise stood. Smoke guttered out of its depths. She couldn’t see any leaping flames, but she knew they had to be there; she could feel the patterns of their heat dancing over her bare arms.

A hot wind whistled between the arches and carried noise out of the canyon. At first, Elise thought it was just the air whipping over the rock and making a piercing noise like a whistle, but then she realized that there were voices. Shouts. Sobbing.

There were people inside the chasm.

Nathaniel must have heard it, too. He moved to step out of the temple, but Elise stopped him with a hand on his shoulder. “Get rid of the jacket,” she said. “And the jumper. We need to find a way across the desert, and you’ll want to be comfortable.”

He pulled off his jacket as Elise attempted to mentally calculate the distance. Anthony had complained that he couldn’t breathe when she carried him through shadow. If Elise tried to jump Nathaniel all the way across the desert, she might suffocate him.

“How are we going to do it?” he asked, folding his jacket neatly over one of the railings. He definitely shared James’s tidy genes. “Are we going to walk?”

Elise opened her mouth to respond.

Something whistled through the air and struck her in the shoulder.

The force of the impact made her stagger. She craned her neck around to see her back. A long, slender bone jutted out of her shirt, and she reached around to wrench it free. The tip was sharpened to a point—an arrow.

Dark shapes were advancing on the temple on the opposite side of the desert at a flat-out run. They were fast. Much faster than any human would have been able to move in the heavy air.

And they were all armed.

“Get down!” she shouted, shoving Nathaniel behind the altar.

He dropped to the floor just in time for another two arrows to whizz through the temple. The first one missed her. The second glanced off of her bicep, leaving a burning stripe that faded instantly.

Elise drew her swords and leaped out of the temple.

The wave of demons crashed into her. They were as varied as all the stones in the earth—some short, some tall, some humanoid, some four-legged and furred. Elise didn’t waste any time identifying them.

She whirled and sliced with her falchions, moving entirely on instinct.

They had seemed to be approaching quickly, but now everything was slow—she could see the hand reaching for her face extend as if it floated through sludge. It was easy to knock the clawed arm aside and drive her blade into the attacker’s gut. Its twisted, ugly face went slack. She kicked it and sent it to the dirt.

Another arrow. Elise flashed out of its path with a thought, and it buried in the throat of the nightmare behind her instead.

The archer was an incubus, and he was carrying a crossbow with mechanisms of brass. He didn’t have to manually reload. Another bone whirred into place, and he lifted it to fire again.

With another thought, Elise appeared behind the incubus, wrenched the automatic crossbow out of his hands, and kicked him in the back.

They were all too slow. It was much too easy.

Slow as the attackers were, they were also numerous. A few of them slipped around her and fell upon the temple.

Nathaniel’s cry broke over the desert.

She whipped through the air to the temple. A brute had Nathaniel by the arms and was lifting his slender body into the air as he kicked and hollered.

Elise plowed into the brute’s gut. All three of them fell.

The brute’s fist connected with her face. Even though it didn’t hurt, his weight was still enough to pin her, and she couldn’t melt away from the knee in her gut when he flashed a brilliant light in her face. It flared for only a dizzying instant, but it left green shapes floating in her vision.

When she could see again, the incubus archer was reaching for Nathaniel.

She shoved the brute away.

“Don’t you fucking touch him!” Her voice hit a screaming pitch on the last word, and she came completely undone.

Elise’s skin, her hair, her bones—it all whipped away from her. She was a million shards of glass shattering in the void. She was the darkness between the stars. She was the heat of the fire, and the shadow in the pit.

She felt infinite.

The incubus dropped Nathaniel, and he spilled to the floor.

“Get behind me, kid,” she said, though she wasn’t sure how she had spoken words with no mouth, no teeth, and no tongue.

After a heartbeat’s hesitation, he scrambled towards her as Elise drew back into herself. Collapsing was so much harder than exploding—it took all of her concentration to reform her bones, her organs, her muscles, and contain it within her skin.

For a moment, she thought that it wasn’t going to hold. That she was going to fly away into the eternity of the moonless night.

But her skin did solidify. Nathaniel was touching her elbow.

She was whole again.

Their attackers hadn’t moved since dropping Nathaniel. But once she stood in front of them, wearing James’s jeans and with the falchions on her back, they began to stir.

“Father,” said the nearest creature. He dropped to his knees and lowered his forehead to touch the ground.

The entire mob fell one by one, murmuring the same thing:
Father. Father. Father…

Elise ran her hands over her own face. It felt the same as it had since she had been reborn, and she was fairly certain that she didn’t look like a man.

“What’s going on?” Nathaniel asked, hugging close to her back.

Realization dawned on her, as bright as the fire in the pits. Her black hair and eyes, her white skin, the bleed of her energy.

They thought that she was Yatam, the father of all demons.

“It’s okay,” Elise said. “They’re not going to hurt us.” She addressed them. “Are you?”

No response. It sounded like they were muttering prayers.

Elise stepped toward the nearest demon. He drew a knife and she froze—but he didn’t move to attack. He held it out to her in both of his clawed hands like an offering.

After a moment’s hesitation, she took it. The demon lifted his chin to expose his throat. “It would bring me such pleasure to bleed for you,” it said. It was speaking the infernal tongue. There was no way she should have understood it so easily.

“Why do you think I’m Yatam?” she asked, fingers clenched around the dagger.

“You appeared in your temple. It’s been centuries since you visited us. We thought that no love remained for your children.” She could see the pulse throbbing in his neck and tried not to stare.

“But how did you identify me? I don’t look like Yatam.”

“We know the smell of your blood, Father. It runs through all of us.”

Elise stepped back without cutting.

Was that what had happened to her? She had exchanged blood with Yatam once. He had drunk deep from her femoral artery and consummated the exchange before the goddess who birthed him. Elise had stabbed him during the act, and their blood had mingled on their flesh. It had been intended to make Yatam mortal, and it had succeeded. It shouldn’t have done anything to her at all.

But now she had his powers. More than that: she seemed to have his blood.

“Stand up,” Elise said, and the demon obeyed her instantly. She gave the knife back to him. “I’m not going to kill you. But I need your help. I need to get into the Palace of Dis.”

“You can walk upon the city and flatten it beneath your feet. Why do you need us?”

She frowned. “Because I’m only going in to bring two people out, and I don’t need to kill everyone in the process.”

“But—”

“Don’t question me,” Elise snapped. “What are all of you doing in the desert, anyway? Why did you attack us?”

“We thought that you were touchstones arriving for the trial. We pulled you out of the portal so that we could seize you.” After a nervous pause, the demon added, “We didn’t intend to kill you. Only capture.”