The Descent Series Complete Collection

by S. M. Reine

  A blinking blue light caught his eye. Whoever had driven the vehicle last had removed their earpiece and forgotten it in the cup holder. That was the kind of laziness that their new commander, Malcolm, was letting the unit get away with. When Zettel had been in charge of the unit, he would have brought swift, harsh retribution upon whoever was stupid enough to lose their equipment.

  But Zettel wasn’t in charge anymore—for the time being.

  Muttering a few choice swear words, he leaned in to grab the earpiece.

  Black eyes stared at him from the backseat.

  Adrenaline rushed through him, slowing time to a crawl and making his vision sharpen. Zettel took a step back. Reached for his gun.

  He couldn’t move fast enough.

  A white flash rushed through the air and connected with his chest. They both hit the ground. His head bounced, blurring his vision and making his ears ring.

  The sensitive wiring in the ground should have registered someone sitting on top of him and made his earpiece blow up with chatter. He could see her—pale face, black eyes, black hair, lips peeled back in a grimace. He could certainly feel her, with her hands digging into his vest and knees pressing against his gut.

  But there were no alarms. His earpiece remained silent.

  She ripped the gun from his hands and flung it across the ground. And then she vanished into midair, scattering into shadow like a flock of ravens.

  A buzz. “We’re registering unusual activity in your sector. Did you fall over? ” The tiny voice had a hint of laughter to it. The dick in the control booth was laughing at him. Nobody fucking laughed at him when he had been commander. When the Union put him in charge again, Mack was going to be the first on latrine duty.

  He tried to punch the button his earpiece and missed. He hit it on the second try.

  “I just got attacked,” Zettel said, scrambling to his feet and grabbing his gun. “There is an intruder, and it’s not registering on the sensors.”

  “Negative, Gary—”

  But control was cut off by jangling alarms. They shattered the air, echoed over the plains, and made his eardrums vibrate. The spotlights on the building turned red and began to flash.

  A dozen voices began speaking in his earpiece simultaneously.

  “Something just entered the garage level—”

  “—registering a bogey, moving fast—”

  “What did you see? What is it?”

  Zettel felt a surge of satisfaction that was almost as strong as his confusion. He pressed the talk button as he ran toward the door, but he didn’t know what to tell them he had seen. The pale skin, dark hair, and how it had vanished into the shadows—those things always meant a demon of some flavor, like a nightmare or a succubus.

  But what he had seen couldn’t have been a demon. It couldn’t .

  Mason rushed to meet him at the side door, which stood ajar. The lights inside were on alarm, too, and black shapes rushed through the halls as sleeping kopides began to awake and mobilize.

  “Jesus, what was it?” Mason asked.

  I think it was a ghost.

  That would have sounded insane, so all Zettel said was, “I’m going after the bogey. Drag Malcolm’s drunken ass out of bed and have him find me.”

  And then he slammed through the door and entered total chaos.

  The screeching alarms were worse inside the warehouse. They rattled and bounced off of the walls, and the pitch made his eardrums tremble. The alarm lights were red, so it took no time for his eyes to adjust after the darkness outside.

  He was surrounded by shipping trucks and the crates they had been carrying, each turned to black cubes by the strobes.

  Nobody was working in the garage that late at night. The only active personnel should have been patrolling, just like Zettel had been outside. But as far as he could see, the room was empty.

  Footsteps banged on the metal walkway above. He whirled to follow the sound, raising his gun.

  The runner vanished before he could target.

  Swearing under his breath, he launched himself up the ladder and onto the walkway. The shadow had already reappeared on the opposite catwalk, shoved open the swinging doors into the hallway, and passed through.

  Ragged breaths tore through his throat as he chased the disappearing and reappearing shadow. The chatter on his earpiece fuzzed in and out of static.

  The shadow swept through the halls ahead of him, darkening a few feet at a time, like a black hand was moving over the lights one by one. Doors slammed around him, opening and closing of their own volition.

  Occasionally, he saw a flash of a hand, a slender throat, a face glancing over a shoulder—like he was chasing a beautiful ghost through a forest of fluttering darkness.

  He was never going to catch up.

  “Issue a quarantine protocol on my level!” he shouted into the earpiece.

  Mack moved fast. The fire shields began to slide over the hallway doors.

  Zettel slid under the nearest one just in time to see the shadow pass around the next corner, near the armory. He could cut it off if he reached the next level first.

  He leaped up the stairs, taking them two at a time. His shoulder bumped into a kopis as he passed his quarters. He recognized the cry of protest, even under the blaring alarms—Malcolm.

  Then the shadow swept over them.

  For an instant, it was utterly black. Something cold washed down Zettel’s spine. The back of his neck itched and crawled.

  It was gone an instant later.

  “The hell?” Malcolm asked. He slept naked, like he was still a bachelor at university, but he had his clothes bundled under one arm and a gun in the other hand. What a goddamn pig.

  Zettel hit the button on his earpiece. “This level also needs to be closed, control. I think the bogey must be going for artifact storage.”

  The commander tried to follow him down the hall, bouncing on one leg to pull on his pants. “Oi! Gary! What bogey?”

  Between control’s shouts on the earpiece and the blasting alarms, the rest of the units in the warehouse were mobilizing, but it was too late. Men stepped into the hall seconds after Malcolm had already run past them, and the shadow was already long gone.

  That meant that the lift would be too slow, too. Zettel launched himself up the stairwell, Malcolm just a few steps behind with his trousers around his knees.

  He got out on the fourth floor. Went two halls down.

  There was nobody in sight, and the door into artifact storage was still closed. Totally silent. No shadows, no ghosts, no intruders.

  Uttering a silent thanks, Zettel punched his access code into the panel to check the logs. Text scrolled past on the screen, but he wasn’t sure what he expected to find. If the door was locked, then even a shadowy bogey wasn’t going to be able to break through three inches of heavy steel without leaving some traces.

  No attempts at opening the door showed on the log for six hours. He had beaten the bogey there.

  He squinted through the reinforced glass. There were no alarm lights inside the secure storage room, so he could barely make out the shelves of crates and containers inside as the strobes behind him flashed.

  A strobe momentarily illuminated the aisle between the shelves. A woman stood at the end, wearing the shadows like armor.

  Cold shock washed over him. For a moment, all he could do was stand with his mouth agape, face pressed to the glass. The intruder glanced up at him as she pulled a box off of the shelves. It was the size of a suitcase, and marked with the Union insignia.

  How had she gotten inside?

  Zettel inputted his access code, but it took a few seconds for the whirring locks to disengage. He slammed his fist into the door, as if that could make it go faster.

  “You bitch!” he yelled, spit flecking on the door.

  The woman saluted him with two fingers to her temple.

  Click . The locks released. Zettel flung the door open.

  Everything went black.

&
nbsp; The heavy hand of darkness pressed against his mouth and nose, squeezing into his throat, down his chest, and gripping his lungs. The rattle of alarms filled his skull. An impact rocked through his spine.

  And then the darkness was gone—and so was the bogey, the box, and any sign of her shadow.

  Zettel had somehow ended up sprawled out on his back, and he wasn’t sure how or when it had happened. Maybe that had been the pain he’d felt. The bitch must have pushed him.

  Before he could get up, Malcolm ran out of the stairwell, one hand hanging onto the pants around his thighs and the other holding a 9mm. He jerked his trousers over his hips and belted them. He was still shirtless and barefoot. He must have abandoned the rest of his clothing somewhere in the stairwell.

  “Did you see her?” Zettel asked, scrambling onto his hands and knees.

  “Her who?” Malcolm grimaced and pressed a hand to his temple. “God, that shrieking—someone turn that shit off. Hear me?” When the alarms continued, he put a hand to his earpiece. “Come on, you bastards, turn off the bells!”

  Silence flooded the hall. Control was still chattering away, the useless fucks. Zettel turned the volume down on his earpiece.

  “We’ve got a problem, sir,” he said, getting to his feet.

  “We’d better have a problem, if people are waking me at midnight when I was having a good dream. What in the seven burning hells is going on, Gary?” His Irish accent was even harder to understand when he had been woken up from a drunken stupor.

  “Intruder. Thief. We’re under attack.”

  “What?” He blinked stupidly as the red spotlights cut out and turned white again. “What kind of intruder? Nightmare? Succubus?” He gave a low chuckle. “A succubus would definitely explain the dream.”

  Zettel took a deep breath. Let it out. “She was on me for a second. I only saw a glimpse, but I think I recognized her. And considering what she took…”

  “Hang on. Back up a few steps. Who is ‘she?’”

  He braced himself for the ridiculous, impossible truth.

  “It was Elise Kavanagh.”

  Malcolm only stared at him, as if waiting for the punch line to a joke. It never came. “Elise Kavanagh’s body is in cold storage,” the commander said.

  “I know.”

  “She’s been dead for weeks. You were there when we picked up her body.”

  Zettel nodded. “I know.” That day was permanently emblazoned on his memory—the first sunrise that touched Reno after days of darkness, the swirling snow and ash, the decimated buildings. Elise had gone down after killing Yatai, the mother of all demons.

  She had already been cold by the time they’d found her. And what sweet satisfaction that had been. It was Elise’s fault that Zettel had been demoted.

  He had watched the video of the autopsy with great pleasure. Had seen the mortician weighing her organs. Had read the report on her unusually low body fat and blood volume, her missing reproductive organs, her severed arm.

  Elise was definitely dead. But she was also, almost as certainly, the thing that had attacked him.

  Malcolm strode for the stairs and hit the button on his earpiece. “Control, I need you to get in touch with Union HQ and have someone check the refrigerators. See if there are any missing bodies.”

  A buzz, and the response piped over Zettel’s earpiece, as well. “Roger that. ” They jogged down the stairs to the garage, and it didn’t take long for control to respond—nobody ever slept at Union HQ. “Everything is intact, sir. ”

  “Shit,” Malcolm said. He jumped in the first SUV they came across and waved to Zettel. “You’re coming with me, Gary. Let’s get the bitch that stole Elise’s face.”

  Anthony Morales paced across the empty highway, hands jammed into his pockets and breath fogging around his face. He wore a path in the snow, tracing his footprints back and forth across the same ten-foot patch of ground. The snow boots were borrowed, and too big for him. They rubbed his toes raw through his woolen socks. The discomfort wasn’t enough to stop his worried fidgeting.

  “Come on,” he muttered, staring hard at I-80 heading out of town.

  The pickup that Anthony had been using was parked a good mile back—far enough that the Union monitors shouldn’t register it as someone attempting to violate the quarantine. But it made him nervous to be so far from his mode of transportation. If the Union showed up with one of those heavily loaded SUVs, they could run him down before he reached the truck. And they had made it pretty clear that they would consider anyone out after curfew to be a demon and a threat.

  He blew another breath under his scarf and checked his phone. Almost one o’clock in the morning. Elise had said she would be back by then.

  Anthony wasn’t worried about her. He didn’t think that the Union could kill Elise—hell, he was pretty sure they couldn’t even contain her anymore. There were no ropes strong enough for that. But the longer it took for her to come back, the more likely the Union monitors would be to scan his section of highway, notice the trail of footprints to his pickup, and come to investigate.

  He slapped his gloved hands together, trying to bring circulation into his fingers. “Come on, come on .”

  Something moved farther down the highway, and Anthony’s shoulders tensed.

  It was small and dark. Too distant to tell if it was Elise, or something even less friendly.

  He considered jumping the median and hiding until it got closer, but it definitely wasn’t Union—they were never that subtle on the approach. So he waited and prayed.

  As it came closer, Anthony realized that it was a boy. A human boy.

  That didn’t ease the tension in his shoulders. Not even a little. Anthony reached back and slid his shotgun out of his spine scabbard, warming the metal in his gloved hands.

  The boy spoke. “Hello?”

  “Stay back,” Anthony responded, lifting the shotgun. “I’m armed, and I will shoot.”

  That should have been enough to make any normal child run away. This boy just stopped. Anthony wasn’t surprised—normal kids had no reason to be on an empty freeway near the edges of the Reno-Sparks quarantine in the first place.

  Anthony stepped closer.

  The kid seemed normal enough. He had shaggy black hair and square glasses. He was dwarfed inside an adult-size jacket with a furred neck that fanned out around his round face. He was probably nine or ten years old; he was pretty tall for his age, and a little bit gangly.

  “I’m not going to hurt you,” the boy said.

  Definitely not a normal kid. “What are you doing out here? You know curfew was six hours ago, right?”

  The boy blinked. “Curfew?”

  Anthony’s suspicion ratcheted up a few notches. “Let me see your hands,” he said, and the boy held up his arms. His bare fingers were turning blue with cold as he shivered. Aside from the jacket, he wasn’t dressed for the cold at all. “What are you doing on the freeway? How did you get to this side of the quarantine?”

  “I caught a ride to Fernley on a semi and walked the rest of the way. My name is Nathaniel, and I’m looking for my parents.” After a pause, he added in a bold voice, “I said I wasn’t going to hurt you, right?”

  Anthony stretched out with all his senses, including the one that told him when evil was nearby. It seemed to have gotten more sensitive ever since he had been possessed by the mother of all demons. But he got nothing off of Nathaniel. Definitely human.

  He lowered the shotgun. “You picked a really bad time for a visit, kid. It’s not just the quarantine. The Union’s got a curfew after sundown, and trust me when I say they don’t care how old you are. You could get arrested. Do you want to be locked up?”

  Nathaniel shrugged. “They wouldn’t be able to hold me.”

  “How sure are you of that?”

  “Pretty sure. I’m tougher than I look.”

  Anthony almost lifted the shotgun again. “Are you human?”

  That question seemed to surprise the boy. “What
else would I be?”

  Sirens shattered the night, and distant spotlights flashed to life over the hills.

  Anthony raised the shotgun reflexively as Nathaniel pulled a notebook out of his pocket and ripped out a page. Complex black runes were drawn across it in ink.

  Paper magic.

  Anthony stared. “Where did you get that?”

  “I made it,” Nathaniel said, like it was no big deal to be in possession of obscure and powerful magic.

  Motion farther down the freeway caught his attention. The snow darkened, as though black velvet was being dragged over the surface, and Anthony’s scalp started itching. That was the feeling that he had expected from Nathaniel—the sense of something powerful and hellish.

  It was the same way that Yatai had made him feel. But Yatai was dead, and what was coming for him now was almost worse.

  The shadows resolved into a pale woman with long hair. She was wearing a t-shirt, men’s jeans, and no shoes, and she cradled a box in her arms.

  It had been two days since Anthony had found Elise’s body floating in the middle of Lake Tahoe. Two whole days, and he still couldn’t get used to seeing his girlfriend with snowy-pale skin and hair that bled into the night. She looked like a dead woman who had crawled out of her grave, but that was probably because she was.

  And Elise was running. That was never a good sign.

  Spotlights flared behind her—twin lights that slowly grew. Kind of like the headlights of an SUV filled with Union soldiers out to shoot them.

  A lot like the headlights of an SUV, actually.

  “Anthony! Move!” Elise shouted. Her voice carried over the night like she had used a megaphone.

  He didn’t need to be told twice. He started backpedaling in his own footprints, trying to slip the shotgun back into its scabbard to free his hands, but it took him three tries to get it under his scarf.

  Nathaniel was frozen where he stood. He clutched the paper spell in both hands.

  “You better run,” Anthony said, and then he took his own advice and broke into a flat-out sprint.

  The sound of sirens grew louder. One by one, the streetlights over the freeway slammed on, splashing yellow light over the snow. Anthony heard Nathaniel scrambling to keep up with him as the engine noises grew.