Dire Blood (The Descent Series, Book 5)

by Reine, SM

  “I’m not interested in infernal politics,” Elise said. “And I’m not the daughter of Yatam.”

  “Are you sure? Your blood smells like his.”

  She glanced down at her arm. The lacework of veins under her wrist seemed brighter than usual, and she could see a blue line running through the heel of her palm and vanishing under the sole remaining mark. Elise clenched her fist. “A man has been arrested by the Council. All I want to do is free him.”

  Hyzakis’s broad lips spread into a sly smile. “Arrested, hmm? We may be able to help each other after all.” He flapped a hand at her. “But you can’t walk into Dis like that. Human fashion on a demon? They’ll assume you’re from the Palace, and this is a terrible time to be seen as sympathizing with the administration.” His eyes skimmed Nathaniel’s body. “And we’ll need to make you look less…human. I’ll be back shortly.”

  He waddled down the stairs, leaving them alone.

  Elise went to an open window and leaned out. The wind whistled through her headscarf, warm and sulfurous, and she took a deep sniff of the air. As they drifted closer to Dis, inch by inch, she could smell more fires and grease and life. The writhing tentacles beneath the kibbeth occasionally flashed into view, then receded.

  “What’s he like?” Nathaniel asked from behind her. “My dad, I mean. James Faulkner.” It was weird the way that he said James’s name—like he was a celebrity. Someone he would never dream of actually meeting. Elise ached a little to hear it, but she wasn’t sure why.

  She turned to face him, leaning back against the railing. “Tall. Black hair. He’s going gray pretty fast now. He wears glasses, and he—”

  Nathaniel interrupted her. “Not like that. I mean…what’s he like?” There was a hint of desperation to the question the second time around.

  Although Isaac had never been the most affectionate father, she had still spent her childhood traveling with her parents most of the time. She had loved it whenever Isaac had guided her through exercises with the sword. She had longed for his attention and approval, and strived to earn his greatest compliment: “Good. Very good.”

  She didn’t remember him ever saying that he loved her, but she could almost believe that it was true when he said that.

  Nathaniel hadn’t been raised by James. Even those miserable, painful memories were out of his reach, and his only relationship with his father would have been through coven rumors.

  His expression made something inside Elise fracture a little bit.

  She leaned back against the railing, folded her arms over her chest, and frowned, trying to think of what James was “like”—and not the physical characteristics. “Sometimes, he’s condescending,” she said slowly. “Conceited. He knows that he’s the best at what he does, so he has reason to be confident.”

  “Conceited,” Nathaniel echoed softly, wrapping his mouth around the word. And there it was again—she could see him assessing, evaluating, adjusting his expectations.

  “But he’s warm and affectionate, too. When he cares about something, he’s very passionate. Music and dance and magic…it makes him radiate.” She felt a smile flit across her lips and then fade. “Most of all, James is resourceful. And smart. He won’t let anything happen to your mom.”

  The cogs in Nathaniel’s head stopped. There was nothing there but uncomplicated hope. “Do you think they might get married after all?”

  Elise frowned. “No.”

  “Oh,” he said.

  Hyzakis returned, climbing up the stairs with a bag over his shoulder. “You’re lucky,” he said. “We recently raided a colony out in the fringes, so we have more than enough clothing to choose from.”

  He opened the bag and dumped a pile of clothing onto the floor. Elise picked through it. The texture felt like leather, but the colors were strange. Some of it was tan, some of it peach, some of it dark brown. It was threaded with a cord that reminded her of a softer kind of horsehair, too.

  She lifted one of the items. It was a bustier, almost black in color, with a belt around the waist and silver buckles up the front. But that wasn’t cow leather.

  Elise traced a finger down the hem and realized what kind of animal it must have come from.

  “Cool,” Nathaniel said, reaching out to take it from her.

  She held it out of his reach. “Is all of this from the slaves?” she asked Hyzakis, keeping the revulsion out of her voice. She didn’t want Nathaniel to know what they would be wearing.

  “Some of it. There is some from the fiends, too,” he said. “Slave leather is expensive.”

  “What’s slave leather?” Nathaniel asked.

  Elise held up the jacket. “What’s this?”

  “Slave,” Hyzakis said. He looked like he was getting impatient.

  “And these?” She lifted a smaller set of clothing that seemed like it would fit Nathaniel.

  “Fiend. The shirt is woven from harpy wool.”

  She gave them to the boy. He seemed delighted to pull on the leather pants, but he turned his back before shucking his shirt and replacing it with the harpy wool. There were also leather arm guards, like ones he might wear during archery. “This is awesome,” he said, pulling them on over his hands.

  Elise didn’t respond. She turned away from him, removed her swords and shirt, and donned the bustier. As long as Nathaniel didn’t know that she was wearing human flesh, it didn’t really matter—refusing the disguise wouldn’t save anyone’s life. She still felt a little nauseous when she began doing up the buckles.

  Between the boning and the buckles, the material held her snugly, like a fist wrapped around her ribs. It pushed her cleavage up to the window below the collar. But when she bent and twisted experimentally, she found the motion was good, and she didn’t feel suffocated—demons apparently didn’t need much room to breathe.

  The leggings were made of the same black wool as Nathaniel’s shirt. They were snug and stretchy. All that was left were the boots—only the best of infernal fashion. She stepped into them and tightened the laces. Elise didn’t check her reflection in the altar’s mirror when she was done. She already knew that she would look like one of Neuma’s coworkers.

  When she turned around, the boy was finishing dressing with his back turned, too. Hyzakis was watching her.

  “And you say you’re not Yatam’s daughter,” he said. “Your skin is silken moonlight. You have no muscle. You are more beautiful than a succubus, and more powerful than the most frightening nightmare. You fought a dozen of the rebellion’s best and didn’t sweat, so you’re certainly not human. Maybe you’re too pure to be Yatam’s daughter. Maybe you’re the fruit of Nügua’s hands.”

  “I don’t want to hear it,” Elise said.

  “You have the blood,” Hyzakis repeated. “You’ll kill the judge for us and restore the administration.”

  They were above the edges of Dis now. Slums spread beneath them, filled with ancient, leaning buildings that were little more than sticks and cloth propped against crumbling walls. Elise could see that the streets became concrete as they moved closer to the Palace, and that the buildings became more human, more modern, on the approach, as well.

  Elise pulled on her spine sheath over the bustier and buckled it. She felt better, more secure, with the falchions on her back.

  “Thanks for the ride,” she said, taking Nathaniel’s hand.

  Hyzakis hobbled toward her, leaning on a cane. “Daughter—”

  Elise focused on the shadows, the looming darkness, the acid air, and wrapped her arms around James’s son.

  She phased them off of the kibbeth, away from the rebels, and into the night.

  VIII

  The body used to belong to a touchstone, but it had become the property of the gore crows now. They perched on its face and chest, carefully balanced by their leathery wings as they dug their shining steel beaks into rubbery flesh. The only way to tell it had been a touchstone was the tattoo on the inside of its wrist, but beyond that, Veronika had no way to tel
l if it had been male, female, human, or demon. Most creatures bled in much the same way.

  “Damn birds,” Veronika muttered, flapping her hands in an attempt to drive them away. “Go, you bastards! This is a crime scene!”

  They ignored her. One of them ripped the nose off of the touchstone and swallowed it.

  “There’s not going to be any evidence by the time the birds are done,” said the coroner, stabbing at the crows with a long wooden wand. They snapped at the edge of it. A beak caught and broke the end of the wood off.

  Veronika threw her hands into the air. “Great. Just fucking great. How did these things even get into the tower? Why didn’t the wards stop them?”

  A new woman entered the cafe, clucking softly at the gore crows. A dozen exposed skulls snapped around to focus glistening black eyes on her.

  But they didn’t attack her. She reached into the bag and extracted something red and slippery, which she flung across the room. Most of the birds descended upon it, but one crow landed on her bare shoulder, lightly digging its razor-sharp claws into her skin. She smiled as she fed it a sliver of meat out of her palm.

  “Ariane,” Veronika said, relieved. She switched from vo-ani to English. Ariane had never gotten very good at the language. “Where’s the Inquisitor?”

  Ariane Kavanagh extracted another handful of meat and let the crow nibble at it. “He’s busy. What happened?”

  “No way to tell now,” said the coroner, exasperated. He was a wan, skeletal figure that had to stoop nearly twelve feet to prod the touchstone’s body with his wand. “I thought I saw a stab wound, maybe, but after those damn birds, I can’t tell you what the depth of the injury was, or what kind of weapon inflicted it, or if it even existed in the first place!”

  The gore crow on Ariane’s shoulder snapped more meat into its beak, swallowed, and then rubbed its skull against her cheek. She lifted a finger to stroke its bony foot. “Would you hold this, please?” She handed the bag of meat to the coroner.

  She knelt beside the body and arranged her sweeping black dress around her knees so that it wouldn’t fall into the blood. The change in posture made the crow on her shoulder fly away.

  “How long will this take?” Veronika asked.

  “A few minutes. Is there espresso, by any chance?”

  “I’ll check.”

  Veronika strode across the café to the kitchen. The employees had been taken elsewhere for questioning, but the food remained, and she checked the freezer and pantry. No coffee beans. Trade had been suffering ever since the Union seized several of the normal interdimensional frequencies. All Earth commodities were growing scarce, but none so much as the delicious, bitter drink that was only becoming more fashionable as it grew more difficult to obtain.

  “Death of a touchstone, gore crows inside the wards, no coffee left in the goddamn city,” Veronika muttered, slamming the cabinets shut. It must have been a Monday on Earth. She could always fucking tell. Those hours were the worst.

  When she returned to the cafe, she found that Ariane had pushed aside several tables to make room for ritual space. She extracted glass vials from the depths of her skirt and laid them out in a row—some round, some square, but all in a dozen shades of red and orange.

  “Well?” Veronika asked, sitting on the edge of one of the tables and folding her arms across her chest.

  Ariane held up a finger, indicating that she was still working.

  Veronika peered out into the courtyard. It was just another dark day in Dis, indistinguishable from any other. The flesh orchards were stretching and flexing in the heat. Demonic nobles from the various levels of Hell strolled together, deep in conversation. Probably talking bribes, corruption, underhanded deals. Normal business for politicians, topside or below. The walkways around the torture room were empty, so whatever was keeping Isaac from attending the murder scene was not his usual business.

  Ariane began chanting and gesturing. Veronika saw nothing happening, but she imagined that the witch must have been performing something powerful and elaborate by the way she moved her hands, like she was weaving on an invisible loom.

  A fog coalesced over the body, filling in the holes that the gore crows had torn, until it appeared that it bulged with translucent fluid. And then the touchstone’s ghost sat upright.

  “There we are,” Ariane said, sitting back. She looked suddenly tired. “Jeremiah Sohigian, I believe.”

  She was right. It was hard to make out his hazy features, but Veronika had seen the itinerary of the arriving touchstones, read their files, memorized their photos. Veronika had been studying the details when she was called to the murder scene, so she had been looking at his image just a few minutes earlier. She recognized his flat nose, thin lips, and broad shoulders.

  It was one of the witches that had been meant to attend James Faulkner’s trial.

  Ariane splashed a potion on the body, and all of her magic vanished instantly. All that remained was the corpse.

  She gathered her bottles and stood, tucking them down the collared neck of her bodice. It was little more than a collection of straps that covered her breasts and navel. “There,” she said, sweeping the thick brown curls over her shoulder. A silver butterfly sparkled in her hair. “I had no clue Jeremiah was visiting. He was a beautiful man.”

  The coroner whirled a finger through the air impatiently, prompting her to go on. “And the murder weapon?”

  “My ability to reconstruct is limited. You’ll have to resort to traditional methods of investigation.” Ariane held out a delicate hand. “I want the files for the touchstones. I know you must have them. You’re not surprised to see him here.”

  Damn perceptive mortals.

  “You don’t have the clearance,” Veronika said.

  “My husband does.”

  “And you’re not your husband.”

  The door to the café opened again. Grateful for the distraction, Veronika turned to face the incoming figure, hoping that it would be the cleanup crew. But then she saw the red robes, the shadowed hood, the aura of darkness.

  The entire flock of gore crows took to the air, screeching and cawing. They swept out the door before it could swing closed again.

  Veronika dropped to one knee, and the coroner followed suit. It took a moment for Ariane to do the same.

  “Judge Abraxas,” Ariane murmured, head bowed.

  “What have you determined?” Abraxas asked, voice echoing from the depths of his robes. It was resonant and chilling, even to Veronika, and it made her briefly contemplate phasing away into shadow. Just having him nearby made her feel as though she were guilty and on the brink of execution.

  “Jeremiah Sohigian,” Ariane said. “Why would Jeremiah Sohigian be in Dis without my knowledge? I attend to the matters of all human guests.”

  Veronika got to her feet, certain that she was about to watch the Inquisitor’s wife get thrown across the room, or disemboweled, or something else equally unpleasant. The apology formed on her lips immediately. “Judge Abraxas—”

  She fell silent when the darkness in his hood angled to face her.

  Veronika wondered, not for the first time, what was waiting inside those robes. Abraxas was older than she was by at least a thousand years, and she had only been the head of security in Dis for a mortal century. She hadn’t glimpsed the judge even once. Not since he took on the role.

  “Veronika—notify the alternate touchstone, incinerate the body, and check on our newest prisoner,” Abraxas said. “Ariane, follow me.”

  The coroner gaped. “Incinerate? But—”

  All it took was one look from the hood to shut him up.

  The judge turned. Ariane got to her feet and followed him, gown trailing behind her. Its tail dipped in the puddle of blood.

  Veronika glimpsed a gore crow landing on Ariane’s shoulder before the door shut.

  Ariane Kavanagh followed the specter of red robes through the halls until they reached Judge Abraxas’s rooms in the west tower. That floor ha
d been occupied by many judges over the years, and each of them applied a personal touch; Abraxas’s customizations were massive murals on every wall of the hallway depicting bloody wars between towering beasts. The paintings were no less ugly than the last hundred times Ariane had seen them.

  She waited to speak until they were in front of his door. “Do you want to tell me what is going on here?”

  “It’s not your concern.”

  “Jeremiah Sohigian was a human touchstone. That’s my only concern.”

  He opened the door to his quarters. The foyer served as a receiving room and office, and only Belphegor was in attendance at the moment.

  “Sir,” Belphegor said, standing from his desk in the corner.

  A single word emanated from beneath the hood: “Leave.”

  The attendant ducked his head, pressed his fist to his chest, and left.

  “You told me that you would keep no more secrets from me,” Ariane said.

  “I told you what you wanted to hear.”

  She threw her hands into the air. “Of course I know that, but I had hoped…”

  “It’s for your protection.” It almost sounded gentle. He stepped across the room to the window and folded his hands behind his back as he surveyed the city below.

  “Isn’t it always ‘for my protection?’ Everything has supposedly been for my protection, and yet nothing has changed.”

  “James Faulkner has been brought to Dis for high trial.”

  Ariane felt as though she had walked face-first into a wall. “James?”

  “I’m surprised Isaac didn’t tell you,” he said, although he didn’t sound surprised at all. “All touchstones and Council members have been summoned. We’ll have a full Palace soon. Very soon.”

  “My God,” she said. “You’re doing it. You’re finally doing it, aren’t you? But…how? Now that Elise is—”

  “We work in mysterious ways.”

  She planted her hands on her hips. “You think you’re hilarious.”