Dire Blood (The Descent Series, Book 5)

by Reine, SM

  Metaraon stepped around her and slammed his foot into Isaac’s face.

  There was a crack. Another splat. Ariane covered her mouth with her hands to muffle her shriek.

  Isaac’s presence vanished from her mind. Her left arm burned. The void of his absence filled her, consumed her with darkness, and she knew that he was gone.

  He was dead.

  “You didn’t have to do that for me,” she said, and she couldn’t seem to manage to raise her voice above a whisper. The dead weight of her heart was choking her.

  Metaraon wiped his hands clean on Isaac’s shirt. “I didn’t do it for you.”

  Yet he was gentle as he helped Ariane stand. She flinched at his touch, but for once, the archangel wasn’t trying to cause her pain. He cupped her face in his hands to tilt her head gently from side to side and inspect her injuries. Whatever he thought of them didn’t show on his face.

  “I’m fine,” Ariane said. Her voice broke on the second word, so she sucked in a breath and tried again. “I’m not hurt. I’m fine.”

  Oh God, Isaac was dead.

  “Your husband entered the judge’s quarters. He found my secrets. It was time for his death.” A flash of darkness crossed Metaraon’s eyes, but only a flash. “But he’s deserved death for years.” He said the last sentence with a note of finality in his voice. End of conversation.

  Ariane tried to lean into his chest, seeking comfort that she knew he had no interest in giving. She wasn’t surprised when he dropped his hands and stepped away.

  Isaac had stopped bleeding. The puddle of crimson inched across the black stone, creeping over tiles and filling the slender grout. She felt light-headed, like she was the one who had had her skull cracked open and spilled across the walkway.

  “What am I supposed to do?” Ariane asked, and even she didn’t know if she was asking about cleaning up the body or the path her life would take now that she was alone.

  Metaraon turned from her. “Clean yourself up. Leave his body. And then join me in the courtroom, because the trial is about to begin.”

  He disappeared into the tower.

  Ariane tried to follow him. She made it two steps before she hit the ground on both hands. She didn’t cry—there were no tears inside of her, not in the dry air of Dis. And not after so many years of enduring marriage to Isaac, and everything that followed that.

  But never again. Never again.

  XIII

  Whisk, whisk, whisk…

  Elise was sharpening her sword again.

  James didn’t move, didn’t open his eyes. He didn’t want to see how his dreams were going to torment him this time.

  Would she be in Saudi Arabia? On that goddamn frozen beach in Denmark? Or maybe his subconscious would be crueler than usual and place him back in Reno, the city that they had chosen as their home.

  He could already imagine that Elise would be in one of the dresses she had worn while they rehearsed at Motion and Dance, or perhaps ready to jog in her sweat pants and sneakers, or wearing her favorite Black Death concert tee. He didn’t want to see it. Any of it. Goddammit, he never wanted to see Elise again.

  Whisk, whisk, whisk…

  But there was something strange about this dream. He felt like he was prone, and covered in something scratchy—a woolen blanket, maybe. He felt heavy. His mouth was dry. The sensations were all too real for him to be sleeping.

  James peeled his eyelids open.

  There was no ocean, no beach, no sun. The roof had exposed steel beams. The walls were plain concrete. There were several oil lamps in the room, but only one was illuminated—the one in the corner where Elise was sitting.

  She was on the floor with her back against the wall. Her hair was wrapped in a scarf, which James thought might have belonged to Stephanie. He didn’t recognize the rest of her outfit—a snug leather corset, black leggings, boots with silver buckles. She had one falchion propped against her leg as she ran a stone across the sharp end of the blade, and the symbols carved into the metal glinted dully in the light.

  His eyes fell on the other falchion. James’s heart skipped a beat.

  The blade was obsidian. In his dreams, Elise never had the obsidian sword.

  Memory flitted through his mind—finding Hannah at the House of Abraxas, the invasion of the shadow, and Elise’s face bending over his as he fell into unconsciousness.

  He hadn’t imagined seeing her. Elise was alive.

  James sat up, and the motion attracted her attention. A smile spread across her face—the kind of genuine smile that Elise reserved for James, and James alone, which he had thought he would never see again. “You’re awake,” she said, setting the falchion aside.

  He tried to get up. “You’re alive! The Union said—”

  “The Union was confused. Stop moving. You haven’t eaten in a while, and you’ll probably fall over.” She planted a hand in his chest, pushed him back into the bed, and sat on the corner of the mattress. “I’d hate for you to crack your skull open after Nathaniel put all of that effort into healing you.”

  His head spun. “Nathaniel?”

  “Yeah. You begat a pretty powerful kid, James,” Elise said. “It took maybe five minutes for him to fix all of your wounds. What did you do to your arm?”

  James lifted his arm, but the bandages that had been wrapped around his destroyed limb were gone, and the skin was unmarked. “I carved a spell into my skin.”

  She looked impressed. “And that worked?”

  Elise had come back from the dead, and she wanted to know how his experimental magic had performed?

  “Well enough,” he said slowly. “Where are we? Are we still in Dis?”

  “This is the Nether Palace, where the rebellion lives. It’s a stronghold out in the desert.” She glanced around the room, and her pale shoulders lifted in a shrug. “Not much to look at.”

  He barely heard her. “I didn’t think I was going to see you again,” James said. “When I heard that you had died…”

  “Don’t worry about it. I’m fine.”

  He took her hand. She was wearing the ring that he had given her, which sparked and flashed with gold magic.

  But she wasn’t wearing a glove.

  “Jesus, Elise, your hands—”

  Her smile vanished. She clenched her fist, but not before he saw that her palm was bare. No mark.

  It wasn’t Elise.

  Even though he was horizontal, he felt dizzy again, like he was going to fall. The brief, brilliant moment of hope was gone, and he felt like an idiot for having been so relieved.

  James shoved her away from him and got out of bed. His legs were unsteady beneath him, like it had been weeks since he had last attempted to walk. Someone had dressed him in a pair of loose pants while he was sleeping, but he was barefoot, and he could feel warmth radiating through the concrete floor.

  He tried to pick out the subtle errors in her face. Her nose wasn’t crooked. Her eyes were too dark—he had thought it was the dim lighting in the room, but the irises were definitely black. No freckles.

  Why hadn’t he seen it immediately?

  “James,” she said, a note of warning in her voice. “Let me explain.”

  “Who are you? Did Isaac send you to question me? Is this the Council’s idea of torture?”

  She backed away, holding her hands up in front of her. “Sit down. You’re going to hurt yourself.”

  James ripped a book off of the table beside him and hurled it at her. She didn’t dodge it—she didn’t even move. But the book hit the wall behind her and fell to the floor. Somehow, she was a good six inches to the right of where she had been standing before.

  He had only ever seen Yatam do that.

  But her shift had cleared a path to the exit. He bolted for the door.

  She was standing in front of him before he could take three steps, and he bounced off of her outstretched hands. James twisted away. He balled his hand into a fist and swung.

  The demon ducked under his arm and
stepped around him. He remembered that Elise usually won fights against bigger men with agility, and by choking them, but it was a few seconds too late—she leapt onto his back before he could react. She weighed nothing. He didn’t even stagger.

  An arm snaked around his neck and applied pressure. “Nice try, James, but dead or alive, I’ll always be able to kick your ass,” she said in his ear.

  It was Elise’s dry sense of humor, and her familiar voice. But the contact of her skin against his was nothing like when he touched his kopis. The back of his neck erupted with prickles, like when he came into contact with any other demon. His skin crawled. And he noticed, with no small amount of embarrassment, that his body reacted in other ways, too—the same way that he had been unable to resist becoming aroused around Neuma or Yatam, even when he wasn’t attracted to them.

  He pushed her arm off. She let him go without fighting, and circled around so that he could see her.

  “Look,” she said, flashing her left arm at him. The skin between the inside joint of her elbow and wrist was marked with a white line. “And look!” She flashed her opposite palm, which had the mark he had feared for years. It was the same hand that had the ring he had given her. There was no mistaking the rings for any other—the enchantments on the band were powerful and impossible to mimic.

  His fists dropped, but the tension didn’t leave his shoulders.

  When a long moment passed in silence, she closed her fist on the symbol again.

  “It’s me,” she said. “I am Elise, and I did die. But I came back. I’m just…different.”

  “You’re a demon,” James said.

  Hurt flashed across her face. “Yeah. I’m a demon.”

  The door opened, and a new creature entered. The top of his head barely reached James’s chest. His head was oblong, and he leaned on a cane with every step.

  “Hyzakis,” Elise said, turning from James. Their struggle had loosened her headscarf, and a few locks of black hair dangled on the back of her neck. The texture looked soft, but not glossy. Demon hair.

  “You’re up and about,” Hyzakis said to James, but not like he cared all that much. “Fine. You can help us plan our next move.”

  “Our next move?” Elise echoed.

  Hyzakis hobbled up to her and jabbed her in the chest with a knuckle. “I take you from the desert. I clothe you. I transport you to the city, and let you into my home when you find the kind of trouble that would kill anyone else. I didn’t do any of that from the kindness of my heart.”

  She pushed his hand away. “I didn’t ask you to do any of that. You volunteered. I don’t owe you shit.”

  James forced himself to focus on Hyzakis. “What do you want?” he asked, backing into the corner by the bed. “Who are you?”

  The demon grinned. “I’m known here as Hyzakis, the leader of the loyalists. And that’s all the information the rebels need. But…” He pushed up his sleeve to bare his arm to the elbow. His skin was marked with a dozen tattoos. James had seen them before—it was what the Palace of Dis used instead of keys. That many marks meant that he must have once had a lot of access to the Palace.

  “My mother has two of those.” Elise pointed near his elbow. “Those two.”

  “Your mother is only the Inquisitor’s wife, so she doesn’t need access to many areas. She should only have one tattoo, where Isaac has three. I know, because I supervised the day they arrived and were tattooed.” Hyzakis dropped his sleeve. “It’s the pleasure of the presiding judge to issue access to new employees.”

  “The presiding judge is Abraxas,” James said.

  Hyzakis scowled. “The man you know as the ‘presiding judge’ is a fraud. He’s taken my job. My quarters. My house.” He saw Elise’s hard glare and lifted his chin. “That’s right. I’m Abraxas.”

  It was too hard to keep standing. As much as James didn’t want to let down his guard, he had to sit on the bed again. “Impossible. Abraxas was at my trial. He’s a tall man with a deep voice.”

  “Metaraon is a tall man with a deep voice,” Hyzakis said. “And he’s taken my life so that he can dismantle every single safeguard that protects the souls on Heaven, Hell, and Earth from interdimensional war.”

  He curled his hands over the top of his cane, and seemed to relish the responding shock and silence.

  James rubbed a hand over his jaw, staring at Elise without seeing her. The light from the oil lamp cast shifting yellow shadows on her clothes, but not her skin. That remained a pale, translucent shade of white, a few shades lighter than the tan she should have had.

  If Metaraon was in Hell, that violated laws that had been in place for centuries. But why would Metaraon have arrested James?

  “You see why you need to help me.” Hyzakis—Abraxas—lifted his cane and nudged Elise’s shoulder with the end. “You have the blood, and Hell will recognize you as one of its own. You are the only one capable of getting full access to the Palace of Dis. With the right preparation, no ward will be able to block you. No door can stop you. No prison can hold you. You can get in to kill Metaraon, and I can do everything in my power to restore the Treaty of Dis before the world as we know it is destroyed.”

  The rebels’ communal area in the Nether Palace was on a ledge overlooking the depths of a fiery pit in the desert. Some kind of magic protected it from the billowing smoke, which left the air hot, dry, and clear, so that it was safe for every member of the rebellion to pass through.

  But the enchantments didn’t block the screaming. The cries of damned souls drifted through the air, like a song that resonated deep inside of Elise’s body. It was almost pleasant.

  None of her human companions seemed to agree.

  “This is creepy,” Nathaniel said, hands pressed over his ears as he sat on a stone bench near the ledge. He didn’t like the Nether Palace. Of course he didn’t like it. He hadn’t liked a single thing since they’d left Earth.

  But Elise smoothed a hand over his hair. She couldn’t resist the urge. “We won’t be here much longer.”

  She realized that Hannah was watching her with the same calculating stare that her son got when he was evaluating something, and Elise dropped her hand.

  James joined them. It had taken Abraxas a while to find clothing that fit him among the fruits of their last raid, but they had done a good job dressing him—he wore a long-sleeved shirt of harpy wool that would protect his arms from Dis’s dry air, and black leather slacks that looked much more likely to have come from some flavor of demon than a human slave. He had also found a razor and shaved his face.

  He almost looked normal, except for the fact that he was avoiding Elise’s eyes.

  “Dinner,” he said, setting the tray he carried on another bench. “I made sure that all of it is safe for us to eat. This was taken from a Palace transport—all imports from Earth.”

  James removed bottles of water, bags of chips, wrapped sandwiches. Nathaniel guzzled an entire bottle of water before falling on the chips like a beast. Hannah acted only slightly less ravenous. She actually took a sandwich to another bench before taking huge bites of it.

  A hand appeared in Elise’s vision holding one of the sandwiches. She followed the arm up to James’s shoulder, and then his shaved throat, where his pulse was beating

  Okay, so maybe she did have a little bit of an appetite.

  When she didn’t reach for the sandwich, he moved away without speaking to her. She paced across the ledge, trying to distance herself from the sound of James’s blood rushing through his veins, and the almost irresistible beat of his heart.

  He hadn’t spoken to her since Abraxas had told them what they needed to do. Not once. It wasn’t exactly the reunion Elise had been planning on having.

  She watched the three of them eat from a safe position against the back wall. Hannah and Nathaniel were side by side, and James took the bench opposite them. The boy kept gazing between his parents, and even at that distance, his thoughts were loud and clear: he was very happy. And hopeful. And thi
nking of weddings, younger siblings, and holidays with two parents.

  Elise felt something fracture inside of her.

  “So how are we getting back?” Hannah asked. Her voice was soft, but it still carried over the screaming from within the chasm.

  “I can jump us between dimensions,” Nathaniel said. “I just need some supplies and a few hours to cast the spell.” He sounded so restrained, like he was struggling not to show off in front of James.

  “You can cross dimensions?” James asked.

  Nathaniel radiated pride. “I’ve been doing it since I was seven.”

  “Not intentionally,” Hannah said sharply.

  “But I can do it on purpose.” He shoved another fistful of chips into his mouth and swallowed before continuing. “Elise can help me get what I need. She’s fast.”

  Hannah glanced over her shoulder, and Elise pretended she wasn’t listening. “You’ve never carried four people before,” Hannah said doubtfully. “You’re strong, Nate, but you’re still learning. I just don’t know if—”

  “It won’t be four people,” James said softly.

  His words were quiet, but it killed the conversation instantly. Screaming, soft and melodic, drifted on a breeze.

  Hannah was the first to speak again. “You’re not coming.”

  “There’s a problem at the Palace. It’s desperate. Elise and I…” James hesitated. Sighed. “Someone has to get control of the Council. I’ll follow you two as soon as I can.”

  “But how will you get back without me?” Nathaniel asked. All of the hope and pride had vanished from his voice.

  “There’s a portal inside the Palace. As soon as we’ve gotten control again, we can pass through.”

  Nathaniel sat up straighter. “I can help.”

  “You can help,” James said. “You can get your mother to safety.”

  The conversation may have continued, but Elise didn’t hear it. Abraxas appeared in the archway and crooked a finger at her. “Daughter,” he called.

  She bit back an angry response and appeared in front of him. “What?”