Dire Blood (The Descent Series, Book 5)

by Reine, SM

  “I am many things, Ariane Garin. Hilarious is not one of them.”

  “What do I need to do?” she asked. “What’s the plan?”

  “You’ll do nothing. I didn’t tell you about this for a reason, so you will trust in that.”

  Ariane pressed a hand to her temple. “If you won’t tell me the truth, then why did you bring me here?”

  He faced her. His hand cupped her jaw. “You know why.”

  Ariane sighed. She did. Of course she did, and she could never deny him.

  She leaned into the darkness of the hood and pressed her lips against his. His skin was cold—he was always a little cold. He was also stiff, unrelenting, and completely unresponsive in comparison to a human man. He smelled like cut grass and dandelions.

  When Ariane stepped back, he still hadn’t responded to her kiss, nor did he attempt to touch her. But he surveyed her from the depths of his robes with a gaze that made her skin prickle with heat. When he spoke, the voice wasn’t unkind.

  “Discard your dress.”

  Ariane didn’t hesitate to remove her collar. She unhooked the buckle and peeled the straps to her hips, revealing pendulous breasts and a flat stomach marked with the spidery imprint of healed stretch marks. Ariane allowed the cloth to puddle around her feet with no shame. She wasn’t wearing underwear—she had been expecting to meet him.

  The judge gave no sign of a reaction.

  Ariane kicked aside her gown, stepped into his private bedroom, and climbed onto the bed. It required a set of wooden steps to reach the top of the mattress, which was caged inside ribs of black iron. She sprawled onto his multitudinous pillows, arms spread and ankles crossed.

  “Judge,” she said in a too-serious voice, though a smile played across her lips.

  He stepped into the bedroom and closed the door, sealing the rest of the world away.

  Done. James sagged against the corner of the cell as it spun around him. He could no longer tell the difference between the floor, the ceiling, and the walls. They flipped and whirled and fuzzed in and out of his head.

  Every side of his cell was painted. Every inch was covered in a symbol, some as large as his chest and others as small as his fingernail. The story it illustrated was immense: the collection and release of energy from his surroundings, the separation of the atoms in the stones, the dissolution of mortar. The explosion.

  All it needed was a word of power, but he could barely move his injured mouth.

  James tried not to think about what would follow once he activated the spell. It would release him from the cell, yes, but what then? He could crawl out onto the surface of Hell. A lone mortal with no strength, no clothing, no protections.

  None except the one he had drawn onto his left fist and forearm with a fingernail.

  That was the process of paper magic: the initial spell had to be designed, and then the energy could be channeled into a single icon. James had always drawn that icon on paper and saved it for later. Never before had he tried to draw it on living flesh. Especially his own.

  But he needed some defense once he escaped, and he had no paper in his cell. So he had drawn the magic on his arm. He was bleeding from the lacework of lines, but he couldn’t even tell the difference between that pain and the rest of his body. Not anymore.

  He was so tired.

  James’s eyelids dragged closed. His shallow breaths roared in his ears, like a frozen ocean rolling in and out at high tide, lapping at the beach of his skull.

  He dozed.

  Whisk, whisk, whisk…

  Dreams flitted through his mind. Distant oceans, the crack of ice, soft lips and callused hands and a sword melted in the forge.

  The sound of his door opening woke him up.

  James should have panicked. It was dark in his cell, but not so dark that an intruder wouldn’t be able to tell what he had done. All it took was smearing one symbol, or washing off a single rune, and all of his hard work would be destroyed.

  But he couldn’t panic. His heart couldn’t seem to beat fast enough.

  His eyes opened a fraction, and he saw the nightmare guard standing in the doorway. She wore her leather uniform with butcher knives sheathed at her hips and held a bottle of water in one hand.

  She gaped soundlessly at the walls, mouth hanging so low that he could see every tooth and all the way to the back of her throat. Nothing emoted quite like a nightmare.

  At any other time, he might have taken her shock as a compliment. But James only saw the bottle in her hands. It was a small, plastic, ordinary thing—the kind of bottle he might have paid six dollars for at a baseball game. Not something he expected to find in Dis.

  But it was water. Real water.

  “What have you done?” she asked, her hard face drawing into furious lines.

  James’s injured hand crawled up the wall.

  He touched one of the radial points and spoke a word of power.

  All of his bloody symbols caught fire instantly, illuminating with black fire that drilled into his eye sockets.

  The opposite wall vanished. He heard the explosion a second after it had actually happened, and the shock of the blast came even later. It ripped from his chest, rocked through his muscles, and tore into the stone.

  James could see everything he had written come to pass, one instruction at a time.

  The mortar melting. The atomization of rock.

  The shock traveled through the earth to tunnel a path leading to the surface. The flames raced up the rubble and disappeared, but he knew they would spread out at the top in a fireball that would melt everything within twenty feet—a preemptive strike to clear his path.

  What remained was an easily climbed tunnel to the surface, through which relatively fresh air rushed.

  Everything had happened exactly as he had planned.

  But he didn’t anticipate the way that the cell would pitch around him, making the ground rock underneath his body. He didn’t expect the nightmare guard would fall to her knees and almost slip through a crack that appeared in the floor. There had been no way for him to know that his cell was situated on top of one of those flaming pits, either, so he was surprised when fire leapt out of the gap and turned his cell into a brick oven.

  The nightmare screamed as her leg slipped through the spreading crack and fire raced up her hip. She had dropped the water bottle and it rolled across the floor.

  That got him moving.

  James grabbed for it. Almost missed. Then his fingers closed on warm plastic, and he stumbled to his feet.

  It was worse than an ordinary pit beneath his cell: they were suspended over a deep, endless chasm. Distant fires smoldered in the hazy darkness. He could hear screaming. He was fairly certain that it wasn’t his imagination.

  “No!” the nightmare shouted, trying to scrabble to her knees so that she could chase him.

  Another rumble, and the crack split further. She dug her nails into the stone to keep from falling.

  He hugged the bottle to his chest and stepped over her arms. He crossed the crumbling cell in two steps, stumbled into the tunnel, and began to climb. The earth had been melted into a hard, shiny tube by his fire, and it was already cooling—as much as anything in Hell could cool.

  But it was shaking, too. Just like the cell.

  Everything was going to fall into the pit.

  He didn’t stop to drink the water, even though every inch of his desperately parched flesh ached for it. James hauled himself up the tunnel’s slope, leaving behind the screams of souls and the nightmare that was about to join them.

  He rolled onto the cobblestone courtyard with a groan. The harsh light immediately bore down upon his ragged, exposed flesh.

  Something was shrieking on the surface, too.

  James pushed onto his hands and knees and blinked, trying to clear his hazy vision. His fireball had done more damage than he expected. A shriveled corpse lay nearby with blister-riddled flesh, and a pile of something indeterminate was still burning just beyon
d that. A demon—some kind of succubus—stood just outside the range of the damage. Her hands were plastered to her face as she shrieked.

  It was hard to focus further than that, but he saw a glistening tower over her, and a wall encompassing him and the building. He was still in the Palace. The city—and relative freedom—was just beyond.

  James got to his knees. Unscrewed the bottle. Splashed a few drops on his face.

  Relief flooded through him as he licked the moisture off of his cracked lips. It was sweeter than the best cider, more satisfying than a steak dinner, and easily as pleasurable as any of his long nights with Hannah when they were teenagers.

  He recapped it and stood.

  “Guards!” the succubus screamed. “Guards!”

  James staggered toward the outer wall, barely able to keep his footing. He focused on taking one step at a time.

  Footsteps thudded behind him. Men approaching.

  “James Faulkner!” barked a familiar voice, and he didn’t have to turn to see that it was goddamn Isaac Kavanagh.

  James slumped against the wall. Too weak to fight. Too weak to run.

  Isaac blurred and distorted as he ran closer, backed by a half-dozen creatures in leather armor. One was another nightmare, like the one that James had left underground. There was a brute, too, and two fiends. He couldn’t identify the others. He had never seen anything with that many teeth.

  “Fuck off,” he whispered to Isaac, unsure if anyone could hear him. The sentiment felt good.

  Isaac drew a leather cord—more bindings.

  James wasn’t going to be returned to prison. “Step back,” he warned.

  The Inquisitor’s dark, angry eyes glowed in response. God, he looked so much like Elise.

  James pressed his hand to the wall and spoke a word of power.

  Without the blood in his cell, the energy for the spell had to come from within him, and there wasn’t enough strength left for that, either. So instead, his magic sought out more powerful sources of life.

  Like the guards surrounding Isaac.

  Screams filled the air as the demons fell to their knees, flesh shriveling and eyes bulging. James’s cries joined theirs. The flesh on his arm was peeling off of the muscle.

  The shouts were soon drowned out by the resonant boom of an explosion rocking the Palace wall. There it was again—the separation of atoms and the nuclear energy of the fireball tunneling its way through the stone.

  The skin on James’s arm turned to ash.

  And the wall crumbled away to reveal the city on the other side.

  Isaac roared his fury, but James didn’t stop to confront him again. He held his destroyed, blackened arm and the water bottle to his stomach and hurried through the exit he had made for himself.

  He fell to the street on the other side and got up.

  The street was similar to the one he had seen as he had been brought into the Palace with Hannah. There were tall, mirrored buildings decorated by ancient stonework and slavering grotesques. The walls had been vandalized with phosphorescent paint—profanities and insults in the written form of vo-ani, and the occasional inverted crucifix. More of a joke than anything, really. Demons thought human theology was hilarious.

  But there were no actual demons in sight.

  James stumbled down the street without checking to see if Isaac and his guards were capable of following. He lost himself in the slap of his bare feet on concrete. Buildings blurred past him. Windows and walls and street lamps built of iron, like the trees in the forest, entered his vision and disappeared as quickly.

  He rounded a corner and stumbled into a riot.

  Demons were spread everywhere—on the street, climbing the buildings, inside the shops. They screamed as they flung rocks through the windows. He should have heard them as he approached, but his ears were still filled with the rushing of the ocean, and all he could make out was a dull buzz.

  They didn’t seem to notice him staggering into the fray. An elbow caught his side and knocked the breath out of him. A rock hurtled just past his face and shattered a window. Warped glass scattered across the sidewalk and cut into his feet.

  He kept moving. Kept running. Didn’t look at the rioters.

  A demon grabbed him by the neck. It was something with a serpentine face and long fangs. “Escaped slave?” it asked in vo-ani.

  “No—”

  The snake-demon’s head whipped around as it focused on something over the crowd.

  It swore, its thin tongue lashing against its fangs, and dropped James. He unbalanced and fell to the sidewalk.

  The tenor of the chaos changed instantly. The crowd’s focus shifted from the buildings to something that he couldn’t see at the end of the street. It must have been the Palace guards, because James heard people shouting about Council sympathizers and the Treaty.

  He didn’t wait to see if the rioters could stop Isaac.

  James stumbled down an alley, following its narrow, twisting paths until he was so thoroughly lost that he had no idea which direction he had come from. He splashed through muck and effluence. The moist splatter burned on his legs.

  The alley was much quieter than the one he had left behind. Shops had doors and signs facing into the grimy passage, and he could read some of them. One said “Books.” Another said “Curiosities.” He didn’t stop to read any others.

  There weren’t as many demons in the alley—they must have been distracted by the riot. But there were a few. They hollered obscenities at him as he shoved past.

  Can’t stop running.

  His body had better ideas. James staggered down another corner, and even though he intended to continue, his legs simply stopped working. His shoulder slammed into the wall.

  End of the line.

  There was an apothecary shop jutting into the dark alley. Its red brick face had a lacework of cracks through it. It looked ancient, medieval, and abandoned. Safe.

  He dragged himself into the sliver of space between the apothecary shop and the building next door. The street end was blocked by a tall iron fence, and there were no lights in his hole, so nothing would be able to see him from the alley.

  It was only then that James allowed himself to collapse.

  He let his head fall back against the wall, and he waited until his heart slowed before he opened the water bottle and sipped at its contents. He wanted to guzzle it—it was still delicious, like honey and sex and hot showers—but he didn’t know when he would encounter water again. So he wet his lips. Let it trickle down his throat. Splashed a little on his face.

  Then he capped the bottle and examined the damage on his arm.

  Every inch of his left arm was a black, flaking mess, as though he had shoved it into a furnace. The only thing that remained untouched was the scar on his underarm, running from his wrist to the inside of his elbow. The white line stuck out among the black like a ghostly signature.

  The burns didn’t even hurt. They felt kind of cold.

  His eyes fell shut. He slid to the side, leaning against some kind of wooden bin that smelled like rotting animals, and let out a sigh.

  The pain, the exhaustion, the dehydration—it finally won.

  James passed out, and sweet oblivion sucked him under.

  IX

  Ariane slept, and when she woke up, she was alone in Abraxas’s vast bed. She stretched, languorous in all of her wounds and sore muscles— the blossoming bruises on her thighs, and the rips in her skin, which had been limited to the areas that her clothing would hide. Her nipples were still marked with the imprints of her lover’s teeth.

  He only knew how to love with pain, inflicted casually and with a severity that never failed to stun her. But at least he did love. Some men didn’t manage that at all.

  He stood by the window, robed and hooded once more.

  “Come back,” she said, rolling onto her belly and burying her face in a pillow. It smelled like garden soil, sweat, and the musk of blossoms on a hot day. Her blood left a moist imprin
t of her body on the sheets, though the cloth was so dark that she couldn’t see it. “And take off that damn robe.”

  “I have work to do.” He nodded toward the city below. “Do you see?”

  Ariane sighed and slipped from underneath the sheets. She limped as she crossed the room and leaned on his side. The rough red fabric stung her wounded flesh.

  There was a hole in the very back wall of the Palace—a gaping maw that led straight into the city. The rioters were trying to enter through it, although security held them at bay for the moment. The rebellion had been beating at their walls for months, and now someone had opened a door for them.

  It wasn’t the only damage to the courtyard. There was also a roped-off hole behind the flesh orchards from which smoke plumed.

  “What happened?” she asked.

  “James Faulkner.” The name dripped from his lips like venom.

  Ariane’s eyes traveled from the chasm in the ground to the hole in the outer walls. James must have been imprisoned in the isolation ward above the pits. Escaping into the city might be an improvement over Hellfire—but not by much. “Where does he think he’s going? The only way back to Earth is contained within our towers. He won’t be able to get back like that.”

  “He wasn’t brought into the city alone.”

  Ariane gasped. “Elise?”

  The hood shook slowly from side to side. “Hannah Pritchard.”

  Though it had been years, Ariane still felt a pinch of annoyance at the name of the other witch. Hannah was a cold, unfriendly woman. Even eternal flames wouldn’t have been able to melt the ice packed around her heart. But if she was in Hell, and not in the Palace…

  “He’s trying to save her,” Ariane said. James had always been a determined young man. He wouldn’t care that Hannah was already, more than likely, on the butcher’s block. “That means we can intercept him. I’ll contact the markets to see if she’s passed through.”

  “That won’t be necessary. I already know where she is.” He turned and moved toward the doors of his quarters. “I purchased her at auction.”

  She followed him into the foyer, scooping her dress off of the ground. “You purchased…?” She clipped the collar at her throat as she struggled to find a way to express her anger. “First, you didn’t tell me that James was on trial. Then you didn’t tell me that—”