Dire Blood (The Descent Series, Book 5)

by Reine, SM

  He was holding a book under one arm and leaning on his cane with the other. “I’ve prepared the tools and space for your tattooing,” he told Elise, handing her the book. She flipped through it. Every page had a different mark on it, and there were hundreds of pages.

  “Which ones do I need?” she asked.

  “If you want to be able to get inside the most secure areas where the Council works? All of them.”

  James rose to meet them, watching over Elise’s shoulder as she went through the pages again, more slowly than before. The marks were elaborate. There was no way that she could fit all of them—even tattooed as small as they were on Abraxas’s arm—on a single limb. She was going to have to be covered in the arcane alphabet of Hell.

  “Fine,” she said, although it was about as far from “fine” as she could imagine.

  Abraxas reached for the book. “Come with me. We can get started immediately.”

  She didn’t move. “I want James to do it.”

  Her aspis reacted with shock—and he all but buzzed with reluctance. But despite the violence of his internal response, his voice was calm. “Okay. I’ll take care of the tattoos.”

  Abraxas’s forehead wrinkled. “Suit yourself. The first chapter has instructions on activating the keys once they’re marked. But get moving. The high trial is scheduled for Friday in Earth time, and today is already Tuesday.”

  He hobbled away on the cane.

  James took the book. It was impossible to read his mind the way that she had figured out how to read Nathaniel’s mind. The boy was uncomplicated, but James was in constant tumult—like his thoughts were tangled in knots.

  “I’ll get ready,” he said, and followed Abraxas down the hall.

  XIV

  It didn’t take Elise long to collect the supplies Nathaniel would need to perform his spell. She soared through Hell’s black skies, darted into the nearest market, and returned to dump a box of crystals and herbs into his lap a few minutes later. “That should be everything,” she said.

  Nathaniel was already drawing his circle of power in a private room overlooking the pit. It was sheltered by the same magic as the communal area, and supervised by a trio of nightmares at the doors. Hannah stood between the demons and her son like another guard.

  “Thanks.” Nathaniel took the box and poked through it, examining the ingredients.

  Elise scanned the circle of power. It was much more complicated than the kinds of circles James typically drew, and Nathaniel wasn’t even finished yet. “Will this take long?”

  “A couple of hours.”

  “Good. James and I have to take care of something, but I think I’ll return before you finish your spell.” She hesitated, and then reached over the line of salt to tweak Nathaniel’s chin. “Don’t leave without saying goodbye.”

  Elise was rewarded with a big smile.

  Abraxas had put his tattooing materials in his study, which was a level below Nathaniel’s temporary ritual space. James was seated at the desk to examine the needles when she entered.

  “What should I do?” Elise asked.

  “These tattoos will be permanent, so we should put them somewhere discreet. Your back, maybe. Find somewhere to stretch out in Abraxas’s bedroom. Get comfortable. I’ll be there in a moment.”

  She nodded and headed into the bedroom, shutting the door behind her.

  Abraxas’s rooms were at the bottom of the Nether Palace, and it was hotter than the levels above. Flames licked his windows. She thought that she could see shadowy figures among the fire beyond—figures with reaching hands and stricken faces. But the screams of the damned were muffled by enchantments. Elise heard nothing but her own heartbeat as she removed her bustier and the bra she wore underneath and set both on the side table.

  She had forgotten that Zettel had given Nathaniel that “note” until it fell out of her bustier. Elise scooped it off the floor, peeled it open, and considered the mark again.

  An interdimensional wedge. It couldn’t open a portal, but it could change the direction in which a preexisting one was aimed and force it to remain open. Calling it a “wedge” was a misnomer—Elise saw it for what it really was: a weapon.

  She folded the page and carefully placed it inside of her clothing so that she wouldn’t lose it.

  Something was rumbling deep in the earth below her, and Elise could feel that the demons of the Nether Palace were restless. Unhappy. It was like every fiber of Hell knew that it had been violated, invaded by angels and the Union and its Treaty violated, and it was rejecting the presence of the invaders.

  But Elise wasn’t restless. She was strangely comfortable as she stretched out on his bed and rested her chin on her folded arms. The sheets were warm. Everything in Hell was so warm.

  She felt lethargic. Cozy. Like she was wrapped in a down comforter on a cold morning, with nowhere to go and a pot of coffee brewing in the kitchen. The air smelled as familiar and comforting as it did when she smelled James cooking breakfast on Sunday mornings. And when she heard the door open and shut and felt her aspis enter, her languor only grew.

  It felt right, being in Hell with him. Like they belonged among the bones and blood.

  James didn’t look at her as he sat down. The bowl of pigment went on the floor by her face, and she wondered what he had ground together to get such a fine powder, some of it black, some of it a darker red than blood. After what she had seen on sale in the markets of Dis, she imagined that it probably used to be alive. And it was going into her skin—inside her body.

  “I have no way to keep this from hurting you,” James said, sitting on the edge of the bed. She twisted around so that she could watch him prepare the needle. It was long, sharp, and polished white. Probably made from the bone of some hellborn creature.

  Elise pulled her hair over her shoulder and smoothed it down her arm. “That’s fine. I think I’ll heal it pretty fast.”

  “Not this,” he said. “I’ll have to curse the ink to imprint a permanent tattoo on the skin of a…” He didn’t finish the sentence, but Elise heard the unspoken word at the end of the sentence: demon.

  His gaze was intent upon the task at hand as he separated out a portion of the powder and mixed it with some kind of fluid in another bowl. But his heart was beating quickly.

  She frowned. Was he afraid?

  James propped Abraxas’s book open next to her, and the stirring stick clacked against the bowl as he turned the pigment into ink. “I’m going to begin,” he said. “Tell me if it gets too uncomfortable.”

  Elise sighed and shifted on the hard mattress. “Go ahead.”

  The bone needle pressed into her shoulder blade, and sharp pain flared as he used it to tap the ink into her skin.

  James moved quickly, but the distances were so minor that it felt like it took hours for him to inch down her flesh. He was silent as he worked. Occasionally, he stopped to dab at the fresh brands with a cloth and wick away blood. A line trickled down her side before he could clean it up.

  “How does it look?” she asked, resting her cheek on the backs of her folded hands.

  James sighed. “You look like you’ve been branded.”

  “Does this mean that you’re my master?”

  “I am not a demon. We are not forming a hierarchy, and you are not bound to my will.” She had been joking, but his response was sharper than the tattooing needle. “You can relax for a moment. I need to mix more ink.”

  He moved back, and Elise rolled onto her side, keeping her arms folded across her breasts. The movement pulled the skin on her back and stung, and fresh blood dribbled down to her back. It felt like being stroked with cool fingers.

  Elise got a good look at James for the first time since he’d reentered the room. He was cloaked in robes, like the kind she had glimpsed the Palace officials wearing. They hung open over his chest, revealing his black shirt and slacks. The robes suited him. They made him look like an actual sorcerer.

  “I think you could start a new fashi
on trend on Earth,” she said, reaching out to snag the hem of the robe.

  “Roll over. I’ll do a few more marks.”

  She did as he asked, relaxing into the warmth of the bed again as he worked. Elise lost herself in the repetitive sensation—the tap, the sting, the spread of heat. She sighed. He hesitated.

  “Is something wrong?” she asked.

  James continued to work without replying.

  Time passed, and the fires outside the window continued to roil. He moved down one hemisphere of her back, and then the other, until there were two broad stripes on her skin that ached pleasantly. The third went straight down her spine and hurt more than the others combined.

  She lolled in the sensations. Under normal circumstances, she might have fallen asleep.

  He finally spoke again when he reached the small of her back.

  “I need…” James coughed. “I need more room. More skin, that is.”

  “Where? My chest?” Elise pushed up on her elbows.

  “No. Your legs.”

  She sat back on her heels. Her hair swung over her chest, but it didn’t conceal anything—she was totally bare, with rivulets of blood trickling down her back to pool in the dimples at the base of her spine.

  James mashed the pestle into the mortar harder, twisting his wrist to grind what was already fine powder into dust.

  His eyes were inscrutable, but there were other ways to read what he was thinking, even without the barrier of the rings between them. The pressure of the blood in his veins was increasing, and his heart rate was elevated. It sounded like the thudding of taiko drums.

  Elise watched for a reaction as she hooked her thumbs in the waistband of her pants and slid them down over her hips.

  James’s face didn’t change, but something sparked deep in his brain.

  It had been years since she’d studied basic anatomy, and reading his signals was much more confusing than reading illustrations in a book. Yatam would have known what was happening inside James’s head, and what it meant, but Elise felt like she was listening to a conversation in a foreign language. And what was even more confusing was that she couldn’t read James’s thoughts. They didn’t skim the surface at all.

  Elise pushed down her pants. She sat back to kick them off, leaving her completely naked.

  No response. Not the slightest visual change. But the signals in his brain were going wild.

  James glanced at her, as if to make sure that she was done. His pupils were dilated, but his face was impassive. “Lie down again. I’m going to start on the back of your legs.”

  How could he speak so calmly when his skull was full of fireworks? Was she misreading him, or imagining things?

  But then she saw the flush of blood sweeping over his muscles, and heard the thrum of his growing arousal, and she realized that James was lying. He was lying with every fiber of his being. She never would have known without the powers of a demon.

  He was a good liar. A very good liar.

  Elise didn’t lie down.

  She rested her hand on his wrist, stopping him in mid-motion as he mixed a new tablespoon of ink. His heart skipped a beat, and hers skipped with it. Elise’s fingers curled around the inside of his arm, resting on top of the pulse point at the top of the scar that bound them. “Wait,” she said when he tensed.

  “We can take a break if it’s hurting you, but I still have another dozen marks to tattoo,” James said. His head was swimming. “And we don’t have much time. We should leave for the Palace as soon as we know that Hannah and Nathaniel are gone.”

  She slid her hand up his arm and onto his chest, splaying her fingers over the beat of his betraying heart. Her body mirrored his reactions. The flush of heat, the swell of blood. Elise felt like she could reach out, touch his nerves, and play his reactions like the strings of an instrument. She could suppress his arousal, or heighten it.

  Her fingers slid up to the back of his neck, and James grabbed her hand. “Stop that. What are you doing?”

  “What’s going on in there?” she asked, stroking the gray at his left temple. He pushed her arm away.

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about. Lie back, Elise. In case you’ve forgotten, you’re naked, and we have work to do.”

  “I know I’m naked, and you know it, too. I’m a demon, not a moron.”

  “Don’t say that,” James said.

  Elise let her hands fall into her lap. “What? That I’m a demon? Or that I can see that you’re thinking very hard about my body right now?”

  His Adam’s apple bobbed as he swallowed. So much blood running through his body.

  “You’re not Elise,” he said. “My kopis wouldn’t…” He trailed off. Closed his mouth. Picked up the mortar and pestle, and measured out more pigment.

  He still didn’t believe her.

  “What do I have to say to convince you?” Elise asked. “I look the same. I sound the same. I know everything that I should know—like how you found me in Russia. Near Oymyakon. We called the woman who owned the house that we stayed in Babushka, and she fed us soup for a week before I could walk. She was terrified of me.”

  James shook his head. “No.”

  “We went to the Middle East for a while, and you insisted on teaching me how to dance. I hated it. But the dancing turned into sparring, and my fighting improved for it.” Elise searched for something else, something that nobody but them could have known. “You were there when I was diagnosed with androgen insensitivity. Afterward, we burned down Mr. Black’s house together. And you were with me the first time that I broke my femur, but the second time was when I went hunting an overlord without you. I killed him with a battle axe.”

  He was still shaking his head.

  “When I got a parasite from a tepid lake in Bolivia, it took you three days to write a spell that could heal me. I spent the whole time throwing up. Afterward, I laughed at the idea of getting killed by a bug instead of a demon, and you got mad at me for thinking that it was funny.”

  “Any nightmare could learn that by stalking me,” James said.

  Elise’s eyebrows lifted. “You have nightmares about that?”

  “Not lately, but…” He seemed to realize that he had responded to her, and her mouth shut.

  She threw her hands into the air. “We’ve been everywhere together, James. What do I have to say to convince you? Do I have to talk about the first time we piggybacked at the hospital in Denmark? Or talk about the details of the first offer we made on Motion and Dance, and how the owners were so insulted that they countered by raising their price? Do you think a nightmare could learn that by stalking you?”

  “Elise,” he began, but she wasn’t done.

  Now that the frustration had risen with her, it triggered a torrent of other emotions—and it was feeding off of James’s stress, his anxiety.

  “Do I have to tell you about how much I hated Stephanie, and how angry I was that you two bought a house together without telling me?” She grabbed a fistful of his shirt—not to pull herself against him this time, but to force him to look at her. “And right before I left you to defeat Yatai…”

  She stared at his mouth and at the magic lingering at the corner of his lips. Speaking so many words of power had permanently etched the spells onto his skin.

  I kissed you.

  James’s eyes roved over her face, like he was trying to memorize every changed line. The silence between them was powerful and weighty.

  “I wouldn’t have done it if I knew I wasn’t going to stay dead,” Elise said.

  Something about that worked where nothing else had. A line appeared between his eyebrows, and he reached up to pull a lock of silky black hair between his fingers. “Don’t apologize.”

  Elise put her fingers over his, stopping his hand. “I wasn’t planning on it.” His gaze dropped to the place they touched, and she realized that the glimmer of the ring had caught his eye.

  “How?” he asked.

  “I’m not sure. I think
Yatam must have done this to me. He had a statue—a sculpture of the goddess that turned him from a man into a demon. I died at her feet. I think that’s what brought me back.”

  “So maybe there’s a cure.”

  Her heart felt heavy. “I don’t think there is.”

  “God, Elise,” James murmured, sadness etching the lines of his face. “I missed you. I missed you so damn much. When I thought you were gone…” He closed his eyes. When he looked at her again, the sadness was gone. “And then you came back, and for about a half a minute, I was relieved.” He picked up the bowl of pigment again. “Lie down on your side, and for God’s sake, cover yourself.”

  Stung, she grabbed another robe off of Abraxas’s chair and then returned to bed.

  James continued to tattoo lines of ink down her hip.

  She watched the fiery pit behind his back for a long time, struggling not to let annoyance overtake her. But it wouldn’t be ignored. Tension clenched in her gut, and after several minutes, she knew that she had to say something. “I came to Hell for you,” Elise said. “I saved you and Hannah.”

  He finished etching a symbol onto the flesh of her thigh. “And I’m grateful.”

  “You have a funny way of showing it.”

  “How do you expect me to react? I warned you that your collusion with demons wouldn’t end well. Give me your other leg. Just a few more marks left.”

  She rolled onto the opposite side so that her back faced him and adjusted the robe to protect his delicate sensibilities. “If I hadn’t been colluding with demons, I really would be dead right now. Would that be better? If I was a dead human instead of a living…whatever the fuck I am?”

  James’s hand moved down her leg slowly, tracing a line of fire parallel to her femur. “If you hadn’t jumped out of that helicopter in the first place, you could have evacuated with me.”

  “I didn’t have a choice,” Elise said. It was easier to argue when she didn’t actually have to see him. She wouldn’t have to feel guilty for digging in deep. “And it’s not like there was anything waiting for me if I did evacuate. Maybe I wouldn’t have died in the first place if you had supported me instead of being a condescending asshole that rejected my lifestyle choices. Did you think about that?”