Dire Blood (#5) (The Descent Series) (34 page)

“We’re bringing justice to this unholy place. The Treaty’s been in danger for years now—we’ve had our ear to the ground, and what we’ve heard isn’t good. If we don’t act fast to secure the Palace, we might not have any Treaty at all.”

The Union didn’t realize what had happened yet. “Good thing you acted fast,” she said dully.

“Not fast enough. We’ve arrested some of the surviving conspirators, but we can’t get them back to HQ to answer for their crimes if we’re trapped in Hell.” Judging by his tone of voice, James was pretty sure that Zettel thought that Elise was among those who should be brought in front of Union HQ.

“Yeah,” Elise said. “Too bad.” She glanced at James, swathed in Metaraon’s discarded robes. “Look, we need clothing, and transport back to Earth.”

“You’re not in a place to make demands.” Zettel grunted. “Our supplies are still in the portal room, anyway.”

She laid her hand on the doorknob, pushed it open, and headed inside. Zettel stopped laughing.

James followed Elise.

The portal was still open, and James stood beside Elise as the Union rushed inside. James contemplated the sight of the Union’s warehouse on the other side of the dancing light. Not just the compound—Earth. The mortal planes.

Fear knotted in his stomach.

“Here,” Zettel said, crouching beside a crate that his men had dragged into the room. He opened it, removed a Union uniform, and tossed it to James. “Might be a little baggy on you.”

James quickly donned the slacks and discarded Metaraon’s robes. They stunk of angel, and he was glad to be rid of them. “You do realize what the death of all the touchstones means, Elise,” he said, pulling on the shirt and straightening it out before doing the buttons one at a time.

Elise nodded stiffly. “Yeah. I do.” It meant that Isaac, touchstone and Inquisitor, had to be dead, too. And it also meant that Elise wasn’t safe from God anymore. There was nowhere that He couldn’t reach her, once He realized all of the barriers were gone. Not on Earth, or in Hell.

She leaned her arm against his and let out a sigh. That was it. No panic, no fear. Just resignation.

“Are you going to be okay?” he asked.

Her expression made her feelings on the matter perfectly clear. “Don’t worry about it.”

James cupped Elise’s chin in one hand. “I’m sorry,” he said. “I’m sorry for everything.”

A tiny line formed between her eyebrows. Her frowns were different from when she was human, like emotion couldn’t pierce the marble perfection of her features. “I’m sorry, too. When we get back to Earth, we’re fucked. It’s going to be war.”

“That’s not what I mean.”

The corner of Elise’s mouth quirked. “You’re not worried about Heaven and Hell warring on Earth again? The kind of thing that kopides were specifically designed to stop?”

“Perhaps a little worried,” he said. “But I have bigger problems.”

“Like what?”

James bent to brush his lips over hers. Her lips were cool and moist, completely unaffected by the harsh atmosphere of Hell, and she tasted strangely like blood and leather. After a moment’s hesitation, Elise tangled her fingers with his, and she squeezed his hand tightly. The edge of her thumb ring cut into his palm.

He released her, but he kept a hand at the back of her neck, pressing their foreheads together.

Elise smiled. It was a small smile, and it didn’t touch the shadowy, endless depths of her black eyes. But it was extremely gratifying to see. A confirmation that she wasn’t angry at him—not yet.

“No,” someone said.

They broke away, and James looked up to see that Ariane had been brought into the portal room. She was handcuffed and being led by a pair of kopides at gunpoint, but she had stopped to stare at Elise and James.

Elise’s hand tensed as Ariane stepped toward them. Her bruised face seemed even worse in the lighting from the portal. James could see every wound in detail—the ring of bruises around her eye, the split on her cheekbone, the bruises peppering her jaw.

“
Fille
?” Ariane whispered. “
Ma cherie
?”

Somehow, Elise’s expression didn’t change. She was as stony and cold as Isaac had ever been. It was a terrifying expression—the kind of look she took on before killing something.

“Hello, Mother,” Elise said, voice dead.

The confirmation of her identity filled Ariane’s face with horror.

“Keep moving,” said one of the kopis guards, jamming his gun into the small of Ariane’s back.

The woman turned on James, cheeks pinkening with rage. It might not have been as chilling as Elise’s expression, but she had a temper of her own, and he had apparently managed to inspire the worst of it. “You’ve betrayed us all,” she told James. Then she reached into the neck of her dress and pulled out a vial. “
Je suis désolé
, Elise.”

One of the kopides shouted, and the other reached for her—too late.

Ariane flung the glass bottle at the portal. It exploded, and silvery fluid gushed over the stones, splattering on the floor.

James felt all the magic in the portal’s basin instantly vanish, as if it had never existed at all. Ariane had just canceled out the magic in the portal—the magic that bound together everything in the Palace.

The light of the portal blinked out in an instant. The Union warehouse on the other side vanished.

And so did Elise and James’s route home.

The guard smashed the butt of his gun into the back of Ariane’s skull, and she fell just as she attempted to extract another potion from the bodice of her dress. It was flung from her hand and shattered on the stone. It was the same color as the last potion, and James felt more magic leech out of the tower.

“Shit,” Gary Zettel said, “
shit
! Allyson—”

His aspis ran across the room to lay her hands on the symbols ringing the basin, but there was no reaction.

The room began to tremble.

Ariane tipped her face up toward Elise. “I love you,” she whispered, reaching her fingers toward her daughter’s booted foot.

Elise stepped back before they could touch.

“We have a problem,” James said as a rumbling rose throughout the room, making the floor shake beneath their feet.

Something cracked. A brick tumbled out of the ceiling, crashed to the floor, and shattered.

James dragged Elise toward the door. The Union didn’t try to stop them—they were yelling, panicking, focusing on the basin of the portal as it began falling apart. “What just happened?” she asked.

“Your mother—she closed the portal and destroyed the magic holding the room together. The tower is falling.”

They were about to cross into the foyer when the wall over the doorway split. Bricks crashed to the ground in front of them, and Elise pulled James back at the last moment, shielding him from the debris. Broken stone pelted his skin.

Elise swore loudly, but he could barely hear her under the shouts of the rest of the Union.

The floor tipped beneath them. Deep, thudding explosions of collapsing stone rocked the tower. James could feel the magic dissolving around him, loosening the mortar and making the walls lose their structure.

There were no windows in the room, no other doors, and no portal—no escape.

“Hold on!” Elise yelled, wrapping her arms around James.

And then the tower vanished.

T
here was peace
in the darkness. No noise, no light, no Union or cherubim or witches with potions that destroyed magic at a touch. Just Elise and James, a gentle buffeting, a drifting.

She hadn’t had a plan for escaping the Palace—all she knew was that they needed to be somewhere else, and suddenly, they were. Elise and James appeared in the desert fringes of Dis.

The nearby cliffs were carpeted in iron trees. A fiery gash in the earth separated them from the city. A wild kibbeth floated not too far away, legs twisting and tangling as it traveled on a cushion of air. The desert was quiet except for a hot breeze, which showered sand against her legs. Distant echoes that could have been the wind through the chasms or the screaming of lost souls whispered over the desolation.

With sensation and clarity of sight came emotion, and all Elise could feel was dread.

A few miles away—so close, but so impossibly useless—stood the Palace and the destroyed portal room. “No,” Elise whispered, staring at the black city. A new plume of smoke rose from one of the towers and spiraled into the sky.

It looked peaceful.

“We’re trapped.” James sounded empty, numb. His voice was rough. “We’re trapped in Hell.”

And it was Ariane’s fault.

“So that’s it,
mère
,” she said into the wind.

Anger vibrated through her, radiating from her crown over her skin to her fingertips and toes, until the fury suffused her every fiber.

She seized a rock the size of a softball that had been warmed by the fires deep below them and hurled it at Dis’s distant skyline as she screamed wordlessly into the endless night.

Someone spoke behind Elise in a silky-smooth voice that dripped with careful control. “I would be angry, too, if I had just surrendered the most ancient and powerful bastion of justice in our universe to a hive of bumbling mortal idiots.”

Abraxas—the real Abraxas—stood behind them, and his squashed face was twisted into a fury that rivaled Elise’s. “Are you only here to taunt us, or do you have something helpful to offer?” James asked.

“Why should I offer anything at all? I didn’t let you into the House of Abraxas for fun. I didn’t heal you, shelter you, guide you to victory in the Palace of Dis so that you could surrender it to humans. The Union!” He spat onto the red dirt. “I don’t owe you anything.”

“You think that being trapped in Dis is some kind of
victory
?”

Abraxas sneered. “You’re alive. Your son is safely on Earth. You’re not tormented in a pit of eternal Hellfire.” He leaned hard on his cane so that he could gesture at them with his other hand. “You’re together, and please, have my blessings on that. You’re welcome, you ungrateful maggots.”

“You let Metaraon take Hell,” James said.

“Oh, and the Union is a vast improvement in leadership.”

Elise advanced on him. “You’ve got a way to cross dimensions—don’t you?”

Abraxas didn’t step back. He worked his mouth around like he was chewing his own teeth. “There’s no other portal. We shut all of them down centuries ago. It’ll be years before they can craft a new portal—and that’s years in Hell, in case you were wondering. Not years on Earth. So multiply that by seven if you want to imagine how much you’ll be missing out on while you twiddle your thumbs and try to live off the fruit of the iron forest.”

“Fuck,” Elise said.

“But there’s another way back.”

James spread his arms wide. “Well? We’re all ears.”

“There’s a price for that information,” Abraxas said. “The price is higher now that you’ve fucked up my life.” He extracted a knife from within his robes. It had a long, triangular blade—almost more of a sword. “I want your blood, daughter of Nügua.”

“No,” James said immediately.

Elise considered the blade, and Abraxas, and her throbbing heart. Her blood was power—what kind of power, she didn’t know. Bleeding herself into Yatam had rendered him mortal, but that was when she had been mortal, too. Who knew what it would do now that she had changed?

“How much would you need?” she asked.

Abraxas produced a second object: a teardrop vial with a stopper. It was smaller than his thumb. “Enough.”

James hovered in the corner of her vision, rubbing a hand over his gray stubble. “Elise…” Her name was laced with warning.

She ignored him to address Abraxas. “Why?”

“I’ll need to get my Palace back somehow.”

It was ominously vague, but there was no way that Abraxas could know what her blood would or would not do—not when she didn’t even know herself. Maybe it would do nothing at all. What price was she willing to pay to get James home?

Elise extended her hand. The palm was bare.

“The other one,” Abraxas said.

James caught her wrist when she began to reach out. “Think about this, Elise.” His eyes were very blue. “If there is another way out of here, we can find it without him.”

The judge’s lips split to bare his twisted black tongue behind the cage of his teeth. “And how old will your son be by the time you reach him again?”

James’s hand tensed, but he didn’t fight back when Elise pulled away from him.

Abraxas struck swiftly, burying the point of the dagger in the center of the mark on her palm. Blood, thick and dark, welled forth from the wound, and she closed her fist. He moved the vial underneath as she squeezed her hand.

Three drops fell into the vial, one at a time.

He corked it, and the blood stuck to the sides of the vial like a rich red wine.

Elise sucked the rest of the fluid into her mouth. Any blood worth bartering for was too dangerous to spill on Hell’s soil. It tasted sweet, a little more metallic than she’d expected, almost peppery.

Abraxas kissed the glass with his wrinkled lips. “Perfect.”

Then he turned and began to walk away.

“Hey!” Elise said sharply, phasing across the stretch of land between them to block his path. “What about getting us back?”

Abraxas tweaked the hollow of Elise’s throat with a knobbly finger. His touch made her stomach cramp. “You bear the most dire blood, with the powers of Hell’s father and his mother before him. You’ve been able to jump between dimensions as long as your veins have run thick with it. You’ve just got to want it badly enough.”

He thumbed his nose, winked, and disappeared. Elise grabbed at the place he had been standing, much too late.

“Motherfucker,” Elise said without any real ire. She was too exhausted for that.

A long silence followed, filled only with the wind, and the occasional punctuation of a voice crying out from a pit deeper in the desert.

Then, an echoing
crack
.

Elise turned to face Dis as the Palace’s grand tower fell, collapsing in the center of its brethren. At that distance, it was as quiet and peaceful as everything else. Almost graceful. Light rippled over its windows as the glass shattered. Its glimmering spire arced through the air, slow and soft, as though pillowed on air, and vanished behind the walls of the city.