The Descent Series Complete Collection

by S. M. Reine

  Elise drew level with Anthony. “Who’s the kid?” she asked. She wasn’t even breathing hard, and she didn’t leave any footprints in the snow.

  “You said you weren’t going to alert the Union!” Anthony yelled. His chest heaved, throat raw and breathing ragged from the cold. “You said you could get in and out without being spotted!”

  The SUV gunned it, spraying slushy snow in its wake.

  She snagged Anthony’s hand and dragged him over the median, onto the other side of the freeway, and down an off-ramp. Nathaniel followed.

  Unfortunately, so did the Union.

  The SUV smashed into the barrier. Concrete cracked.

  Anthony didn’t look back to see if they had flipped. He let his momentum carry him down the slope, shoving Nathaniel so that he was running in front.

  They jumped off of the freeway near a waterpark. The swimming pools were filled with ash and snow. “The truck is back that way!” Anthony tugged on Elise’s arm, but she ignored him.

  The Union was right behind them, just yards away. Its horn blared as it squealed down the ramp.

  “Wait,” Nathaniel said, stopping in the middle of the street.

  He flung the strip of paper into the air and spoke a word of power.

  Magic erupted through the street beneath their feet and made the air shimmer. Something huge coalesced over the SUV as it approached—a boulder the size of a car.

  The boulder dropped.

  It crashed into the hood of the SUV, and the metal crunched under it. Brakes squealed. The back tires lifted off the ground as glass exploded everywhere.

  Elise stared at him hard, as if the Union had vanished and she was seeing the child for the first time. Her eyes were endless pits, and if she had looked at Anthony like that, he probably would have shit himself. But the boy just started searching through his notebook for another page.

  Taking out one SUV wasn’t enough. Another vehicle rounded the bend to block the intersection, and Elise stopped short. Anthony ran into her back.

  A third vehicle appeared around the corner, and a fourth.

  They were trapped.

  Anthony edged backward, even though there was nowhere to go. “Elise…”

  “You’re right,” Elise said as the SUVs closed in. She shifted the box so it was under one arm and addressed Nathaniel. “Hey kid, are you scared of the dark?”

  “No. Why?”

  She lifted him under the arms, even though he was barely any shorter than she was, and threw him over her shoulder like he was a much smaller child. Then she grabbed Anthony’s wrist. The contact made his stomach cramp with nausea, and he wanted desperately to shove her away.

  Maybe the kid wasn’t scared of the dark, but Anthony was—he knew what was waiting inside.

  Elise erupted into fragments of shadow.

  Her swarming cloud of night was a few shades darker than the world surrounding them, and it consumed everything until all Anthony could see was blackness. It was as though a huge fist had clamped down on him, smothering his face and chest and jerking him off of the ground.

  He was buffeted inside a storm. Wind whipped around his ears.

  There were still sirens, and he could still hear the roaring engine of the SUV, but it quickly grew distant.

  “Hey!” someone shouted. “Stop them!”

  Popping noises. Gunfire.

  It rapidly faded, and was replaced by a roar like a tornado. Anthony couldn’t breathe, couldn’t see anything, and he felt dizzy with panic—

  But then it was over.

  Anthony fell onto the frozen, crunchy grass of a yard where the snow hadn’t stuck, and Nathaniel flopped a few feet away from him. The shadow burst with the fluttering of wings. Oxygen rushed into Anthony’s lungs.

  The boy immediately scrambled to his feet and spun, as if searching for the freeway. There was no sign of it.

  They were on a peaceful, suburban street, empty of cars or other life. The landscaping on that block was worse than on the surrounding streets—every single bush, tree, and blade of grass was shriveled and dead. They were in the outer edges of Sparks again, near Vista Boulevard, where James had a house with his girlfriend.

  Nathaniel’s jaw dropped. “Whoa.”

  Anthony flopped onto his back. It was the second time that Elise had done that to him, and it didn’t feel any better than the first. It wasn’t less frightening, either. Both times, it had felt like he was going to die.

  The shadows coalesced into Elise’s form again, and she rolled onto the pavement a few feet away.

  Her hair spilled over her shoulder as she pushed herself up onto her elbows. “Are you okay, Anthony?” she asked.

  He shook his head, but he said, “Yeah. I think we’re fine.”

  “Good.”

  She groaned and gripped her stomach. Her back arched. Her shoulders strained. With a wet heave, something heavy and black splashed out of her mouth, like a slug dragged from her stomach. Another jerk, and a second slippery organ fell from her lips.

  “What’s going on?” Anthony asked, getting onto his knees.

  “Oh God,” she moaned, sitting back on her heels. Black fluid marked her bottom lip. She wiped it off and then plucked something from one of the puddles she had vomited—a flattened bullet.

  She flung it aside, sending the bullet skittering across the icy pavement. Elise swore as she lifted her t-shirt. Her abdomen was riddled with holes that didn’t bleed, and her shirt was destroyed. “Fuck! Those assholes shot me!”

  “Yeah, and it obviously did a lot of damage,” Anthony said.

  Elise shot him an angry glare. It was a lot scarier now that it looked like her pupils had dilated to fill the entire iris. “It hurts. Okay?”

  She dug her fingers into one of the bullet wounds and pulled out another bullet.

  “Oh my God,” Nathaniel said. “What are you?”

  Elise discarded two more bullets, and the holes closed as soon as her fingers withdrew, leaving the skin underneath smooth and unmarked. “‘What am I?’” she echoed. “Isn’t that just the question of the day?” She got to her feet and scanned the street. “I guess what matters is that we just saved your life, kid. The Union’s not too careful about who they shoot after curfew.” She glanced at him for an instant. “Not that you’re helpless, apparently.”

  Her eyes fell on the box she had been carrying down the freeway. It was in a bush down the street. Anthony hung back with Nathaniel when she went to retrieve it.

  The boy’s mouth hung open. He looked pretty much exactly the same way Anthony had felt ever since he’d recovered Elise’s body only to discover that she wasn’t as dead as he’d expected. But the story behind that was way too long to tell a random person, much less one as young as Nathaniel.

  How could he begin to understand that Elise had died and been reborn as something inhuman when nobody else seemed to understand it, either?

  So he settled for saying, “It’s okay. She’s one of the good guys.” He hoped that was still true, at least. “What did you do? That magic thing?”

  “I summoned a rock,” Nathaniel said.

  “You…summoned…a rock.”

  “Yeah. From a cave by my house. I tagged it before I left, just in case.”

  Anthony gaped.

  Elise took the box out of the bush, set it on the sidewalk, and opened the latches. She removed two swords, each as long as her forearm. Anthony couldn’t see much detail in the dark, but he knew that one was cast in steel and engraved with religious symbols. The other one used to be a perfect twin, but, just like Elise, it had been taken by something demonic. Now it was glossy and black, like obsidian.

  Nathaniel watched with his jaw dropped. “The swords. That’s Elise Kavanagh, isn’t it? But she’s nothing like the pictures.”

  “You’ve seen pictures of Elise?” Anthony asked.

  The boy looked sheepish. “When I said that I came here looking for my parents…um, I kind of meant that I was looking for someone to help me find
them.”

  Anthony was about to ask him who his parents were when he noticed that the boy was still gripping his notebook in both hands. “Let me see that.”

  He jerked the paper out of the boy’s hands and ignored his protesting cry.

  Magic wasn’t Anthony’s strong suit, but he had seen his cousin, Betty, messing with paper magic often enough that he recognized some of the symbols. It looked a lot like the kind of magic James cast—the kind of magic that only James was supposed to know how to perform.

  It was powerful stuff. Too powerful for the average witch. And definitely too powerful for a ten-year-old boy.

  “Who did you steal this from?” he asked, flipping through the pages.

  Nathaniel reached for it, but Anthony held it over his head. “I didn’t steal anything. I drew those myself. Give it back!”

  “You drew these? That’s not possible. There’s no way you could know how to do paper magic.”

  The boy had written an address on the front page of the notebook in very precise cursive—a number, a street name, and a zip code.

  It was the name of the street they were standing on.

  Elise joined them, carrying both of her swords and her spine sheath under her arm. A ring glimmered on her right hand.

  “Check this out,” Anthony said, holding up the page so that she could see it.

  She glanced at the spell drawn on the page and the address written at the top, and her face darkened. She rounded on Nathaniel. “You have about five seconds to explain this,” Elise said, jabbing her finger at the page. “Or else I’m going to have to assume you’re evil.”

  He took a step back. “Okay. Um. My name is Nathaniel Pritchard. I came here because my mom went missing—and my dad. I know where they are, but I need help getting them back, so I came looking for Elise Kavanagh. I mean, I came looking for you.”

  “You’re looking for me? Why?”

  “Because my dad’s your aspis. And two weeks ago, James Faulkner—and my mother—were both taken to Hell.”

  4

  Elise Kavanagh stared in the mirror and didn’t recognize the face staring back. She had spent her entire life looking at the same woman in her reflection. Freckles had marked the tops of her cheekbones. She had thick eyebrows, wide lips, and a bend in the bridge of her aquiline nose that was the result of a poorly healed break. Her hair should have been soft and red-brown and curly.

  That was the woman she knew. This…this was a stranger.

  Now when she looked in the mirror, Elise saw a woman with flawless, porcelain skin. That familiar bend in her nose was gone. Her lips were just as wide, but they were fuller and redder, like they became after kissing her boyfriend and flushing with blood. Her hair was sleek and straight and well past her elbows—several inches longer than the last time she had seen herself.

  And she had black irises, as deep as pools of ink splashed across the darkness of space.

  It was though an artist had picked out her flaws and smoothed them down. Sculpted her from ivory, moonlight, and marble.

  She looked like a demon.

  Elise sat on the lid of the closed toilet and covered her face with her hands so she wouldn’t have to see it anymore. That didn’t help, either. Her hands had changed, too—or, at least, one of them had. Both of her palms had borne ethereal marks before she died, but Yatai had taken one of them, along with her entire right arm. Elise had been reborn with only one of the marks intact.

  Her shoulders began to tremble. Once she started shaking, it was hard to stop.

  Elise shuddered and clenched her hand into a fist.

  “Are you okay?” Anthony asked outside the bathroom door. “You’ve been in there for almost an hour.”

  Had it really been so long? She had become lost while staring into the pit of her own eyes, trying to find some familiar feature and failing.

  She fought against the surge of panic that rose inside of her. Elise twisted the thumb ring that James had given her as she struggled to find the usual emotional silence that she found so comforting. But reminding herself of James didn’t help at all. Not when a boy that claimed to be his son was sitting in the kitchen, just a few feet away, with the worst news that Elise could imagine receiving.

  “I’ll be out soon,” she whispered, unsure if Anthony would be able to hear her.

  Her hand found the faucet. She could feel the pores of metal under her fingers as she twisted it. The water that came out was brown. A pipe must have broken somewhere.

  Flipping her hand over, she looked at her bare palm, where there should have been a mark.

  Nothing was right. The water, the city, her body, her emotions—wrong, it was all wrong.

  Elise turned off the faucet, pulled her hair back into a messy knot, and pulled a scarf over it. She stepped out of the bathroom just as Anthony was about to knock again.

  “Hey,” he said. “Are you okay?”

  A pulse thudded in Anthony’s throat. She could watch the blood flowing beneath his skin, and the subtle shift of shades as his heartbeat sent fresh fluids pulsing over his face, down his shoulders, and to his hands. The blood fed into his brain, where neurons sparked and flashed. She couldn’t quite see them through his skull, but she was aware of them. It was like closing her eyes, putting her fingers into a dark box, and stroking whatever was inside.

  Elise thought that maybe—just maybe—if she could figure out the patterns in the dancing electricity, in the waves of blood and the way his muscles sang as they tensed and released, she would be able to read Anthony’s mind like reading musical notes stamped onto a page. Yatam had been able to do it. Surely she could, too.

  “I’m fine,” she said, even though it had been too long since he’d asked her the question, and it was a complete and utter lie.

  Elise wasn’t fine. Nothing was fine.

  She should have been dead.

  Anthony followed her into the living room. “What happened at the warehouse?”

  Elise paced across the carpet. It felt strange under her bare toes. Synthetic grass. A million tiny fibers. Sensory overload.

  She stepped back onto the tile.

  “I broke in. I found where they keep the things they consider to be dangerous. I took the box with my stuff.” Elise lifted the hand with the ring to show him. “It set off alarms.”

  “Oh,” he said, and that was all.

  Flashing neurons, the shift in his brow. He still thought that there was a good chance that she wasn’t who she claimed to be. That maybe she was a ghost, or a demon pretending to be Elise. He didn’t feel safe around her. She plucked the thought out of the air, but it was gone as soon as she sensed it.

  So many emotions coming from him, so many hormones.

  “Stop it,” Elise said. “Stop thinking. Stop…feeling.”

  Anthony held out his hands, like he was trying to soothe a spooked horse. “Just take a deep breath.”

  Anger surged in her, a black fist between her ribs. “Breathe? That’s your answer? That’s fucking stupid.”

  Anthony gave a shaking laugh. “Okay, I guess you haven’t changed all that much.” His eyes flicked down to her chest. Flicked back up. She had replaced her bullet-riddled shirt with a button-down taken from James’s hamper. It was much too loose on her, and the collar gapped to bare the curve of one pale breast.

  His blood pressure increased as the flow of blood redirected toward his pelvis. Arousal.

  Elise’s physical reaction to it was more powerful than she expected. She responded in kind: heat gathered between her legs, her heart sped up, and her mouth went dry.

  Hungry.

  Blinking rapidly, she tried to clear her head of the thought.

  “I don’t know what’s happened, but I’m still Elise,” she said in a voice that was as level as she could make it. It was hard not to scream. “I’m not going to hurt you, so you can stop thinking about that.”

  Saying that she knew what he was thinking only made the fireworks in his brain double. “Nathani
el’s still waiting in the kitchen,” Anthony said, voice shaking. “We should do something about him.”

  She nodded. If there was a problem with James, then that was something she could handle. There would be enemies to fight and kill. Facing the tangible issues was a hell of a lot easier than dealing with the intangible ones.

  “Let’s see what he has to say.”

  Elise let Anthony take point down the hallway.

  Anthony went in and sat down on the stool across from Nathaniel while she hung back in the hallway to study their visitor. He was seated at the kitchen island eating granola bars.

  Nathaniel Pritchard was ten years old, almost eleven. Not yet in puberty. Still very childlike—soft skin, soft hair, that childish musk of sweaty feet and hair. But growing quickly. She could feel the stretch of his bones and muscles. She could hear the blood rush as it flooded to his cheeks. She could smell the rush of hormones.

  He may have been a child at the moment, but his body was a time bomb; it would be about twelve months, perhaps eighteen, before his growth exploded and he would begin sweating like an adult and growing all of that ancillary hair.

  “So you said that you’re James’s son,” Anthony said, and Elise picked up a hint of suspicion. Worry. He was mistrustful of children now, since he had been possessed by a demon that wore a mask of innocence.

  Elise inched around the corner, peering at the boy without leaving the shelter of the shadows. His hair was dark brown and tousled. He wore thick-framed glasses over puppy-brown eyes, and a blue cardigan with jeans. The notebook stuck out of his pocket. A silver pentacle protruded from the neck of his shirt.

  Every inch of him said “witch.” A child witch.

  Now that she was away from the Union and had had a few minutes to settle down, she realized that she had seen him before. James had a photo of Nathaniel on his cell phone. Elise had been too distracted when she had first seen it to consider the shape of his mouth and nose, and what those features meant.

  Plastic crinkled. Teeth sank into granola. Saliva slopped over a tongue as he chewed. The boy swallowed before speaking.