Dire Blood (The Descent Series, Book 5)

by Reine, SM

  But wasn’t that wrong? Hadn’t he pushed her away every time she’d tried to kiss him? How could he want her so badly, but deny her for years?

  There was a soft clink, and the first buckle was undone.

  Something was wrong.

  Another buckle, and then another.

  The pressure of the boning against her abdomen relaxed. James’s hand slipped under the material and his fingers spanned over her ribs, stroking over her skin to the hollow of her spine.

  He brushed over the line of tattoos. Elise hissed softly.

  “Does it hurt?” he asked. She nodded wordlessly. “Is it bad?” And she shook her head.

  James responded by pressing his fingertips into them a little harder. Pleasure rippled through her, like blood dripping from fresh wounds, and she burrowed her face into his neck with a sigh. The sound dragged a groan from his chest.

  His hand slid lower and pressed harder against the base of her spine. Elise’s head smacked backward against the mirrors. She barely even felt it.

  When she looked up, he was staring hard at her, as though trying to see through her skin. “What must that feel like?” James asked in a low voice, walking his fingers down the line of tattoos to her backside. “That pain.” His hand cupped her thigh, pulled her knee under his arm, and pressed his body flush against hers.

  She thought that she should stop him, maybe, and make him see sense. But her hands had taken on minds of their own. They slid down the buttons on his shirt, opening them one by one, pulling the hem free of his slacks, and pushing the cloth off of his shoulders. It puddled on the floor. He threw her bustier on top of it.

  He drew back to take in the sight of her naked body. “My God,” James said, tracing the curves of her breasts with the backs of his knuckles.

  Maybe we should stop.

  The thought flitted across Elise’s mind, and was gone just as fast.

  She counted his scars with lips and tongue—the white starburst on the left side of his chest, the slender line of a knife wound over his heart, the elaborate sigil permanently carved into his solar plexus. And then she slid lower, dropped to her knees, and opened his belt buckle.

  James took her hand before she could proceed, tugging her to her feet.

  For an instant, she thought that he was going to stop her—that sanity had struck, and he was suddenly going to tell her they could never be like that, like he had before. But he didn’t release her hand. Instead, he rolled the warding ring between his fingers, as if contemplating it.

  Elise realized what he had decided to do too late to stop him.

  James tugged it the ring free and threw it across the room. Metal bounced against wood. It vanished into darkness, and a moment later, his ring was gone, too.

  She tried to protest. “But—”

  James kissed her again, forcing her hips on top of the piano’s lid. “I want to feel you,” he whispered against her lips. “Just this once.”

  Just this once? The words were meaningless when her sense of body had just completely unraveled.

  Elise felt duplicitous, like she stood between her own legs, and she was the one gazing down at the most perfect pair of breasts she had ever seen, with a painful erection in her slacks. Adrenaline raced through her veins and closed her throat.

  The shared desire was suffocating, but it was somewhat dampened by embarrassment when she realized that James was feeling everything she did, too. He felt her trepidation mingling with the desperate need to believe that he hadn’t really gone crazy. He felt the repressed longing warring with excitement and hunger. And when she sensed his sympathy, that just made the embarrassment worse.

  Trying to swim to the surface of their cascading minds was like fighting against the undertow. She couldn’t escape. Couldn’t do anything but feel.

  James did want her. He wanted her badly. And he felt guilty about it.

  It was almost enough to kill the mood. He drew back, bracing his hands against the edge of the piano and letting his head hang between his shoulders.

  “Are you okay?” Elise asked, and then she realized how stupidly unnecessary that question was.

  He didn’t bother trying to speak.

  The last walls between them had vanished. She picked up glimpses of his thoughts—more images than words. He was thinking about frozen beaches and helicopters. Graves and swords and cold things. Elise was in the middle of all of it, like she had taken up permanent residence in his skull long before they had ever bound to each other as kopis and aspis. It was a warm feeling, something more solid than lust, and completely foreign to her. She didn’t know how to put a label to that emotion.

  “What does it mean?” she asked, brushing the sweep of bangs off of his forehead and drawing a line down to his jaw. “That thing you feel when you look at me?”

  He turned his head and kissed the sigil on her palm. It was a strangely intimate gesture—somehow, much more intimate than kissing him or wrapping her legs around his waist. “It means that you’re oblivious,” James said.

  His mouth trailed up the scar on her arm, over her collarbone, and found her lips again.

  When he released her, Elise glimpsed their reflection in the mirror across the room. It was strange to see that they were still two distinct entities, even when she could feel the air brushing over the lean, muscular expanse of his back and the glossy piano wood braced beneath his hands.

  She looked so soft against him, so strange, so unlike herself. She should have been the one made of hard lines. But time and blood and fate had changed her—had changed both of them. Their bodies were linked in a way that was more than flesh.

  He saw what she saw through her eyes, and there was a thrum of satisfaction between them.

  James unraveled the lacing at the hips of her leggings and then stripped them off. It was too chilly on Earth without the protection of leather, but she was only cold for an instant. He returned to occupy the space between her legs, and his hands braced her thighs. His fingertips bit into the still-fresh tattoos that he had branded on her skin.

  Elise felt it through more than just her skin—she felt it as James did, too.

  His eyes shut. His brow furrowed.

  An electric shock of thought and memory pulsed from him. The idea that he had never liked pain, not like that, even when Stephanie had asked him to try it, and the fact that it aroused him now almost bothered him. But it was gone quickly. He was having as much trouble thinking as Elise was.

  She opened the button on his slacks, slid her hand inside the waistband, and curved her hand around him.

  James sucked in a hard breath. His fingers tightened on her hips, drawing more jolts of pain through her nerves—and through him.

  “Elise,” he said, and then, “now.”

  She pushed his clothing aside. They fitted their bodies together, and everything fell into place.

  It was strange, filling and being filled; she was lost in the places they connected, hips and mouths and hands. Elise felt fingers stroking breasts, and she wasn’t sure who owned those fingers, or those breasts. Two hearts pounded. Four lungs labored to breathe. It was delirium, the haze of a dream, where she was blind and deaf and mute and nothing more than a sum of their combined parts.

  One of them was moving—maybe both. It was a new kind of dance with a silent rhythm.

  Too many hands, too much skin, too much feeling.

  She was going to break.

  “James,” she gasped, digging fingernails into her shoulders—no, those were his shoulders, even if she felt the bite of it. The sting was good. It made goosebumps ripple down to her nipples and blood swell in her vulva.

  He responded with a low groan, wordless and incoherent. Lips and tongues tangled. Saliva mingled.

  There were sparks inside his brain. James was close, and so was she.

  “Elise,” someone said, and it was pointless trying to delineate between whose vocal cords were vibrating, because everything was one. United. And the climax hit them simultaneou
sly.

  Time shattered.

  Elise didn’t sleep, but James did. They curled up in a pile of their own clothing on top of mats dragged out of the storage closet that she used to use when she was working out, practicing her flips and kicks and throws. The mats worked as a bed about as well as they worked as a landing pad for her falls.

  For hours, she watched James’s chest rise and fall with the deep, even breaths of sleep. Dreams danced through his mind, and though she couldn’t pick up any of the specifics, she knew it wasn’t pleasant. But the sleep was restful, and he desperately needed it. She didn’t want to disturb him.

  She rested her cheek on his chest, and his heart thumped underneath the bone, steady and reassuring.

  James awoke when the light outside the icy windows began to brighten. His eyelids fluttered open, and he grimaced at first. But his expression relaxed when he saw her beside him. “Good morning,” he said, voice thick and groggy.

  She rolled onto her stomach. “Good morning, James.”

  “What time is it?”

  “I have no idea.”

  “That’s fine,” he said. “I don’t really care.” James touched his lips to the curve of her shoulder. He was thinking about how beautiful she looked, and wishing that she still had freckles.

  “Sorry,” she said.

  “Sorry?”

  Elise immediately wished she hadn’t said anything aloud. It was bad enough that he was going to skim it from the surface of her brain. “For my skin. And…everything else.” Her hair, her eyes, her demon heart.

  “You’re still beautiful,” James said, and she could tell that he meant it. She could also tell that, despite the new absence of flaws, he preferred the way she used to be. He wrapped his hand around hers, toying with the bare spot on her thumb where she had worn the warding ring. “You’re also troubled. You didn’t sleep at all, did you?”

  She made herself smile. “You probably know more about it than I do.”

  The silence that followed was long and companionable. Neither of them wanted to break it.

  James couldn’t seem to stop touching her, so she rolled onto her side to give him access. He traced the places on her body that should have had lines, but didn’t. Her ribs. Her concave stomach. Her hip. The sunlight filtering through the ash-caked windows warmed the parquet and turned the room a hazy shade of gold, so different from the all-consuming shadows of Hell.

  But nothing could last forever. Not even silence. Questions hung over them, things unspoken, and Elise had to know.

  She reached up to gently rub a knuckle against his jaw. “How long?” She didn’t need to specify what she meant.

  “Always,” James said, barely above a whisper.

  “When we were living together?” she asked, and she could feel that the answer was yes. “When Death’s Hand came back? When you moved in with Stephanie?”

  “Always,” he repeated. There was nothing else to be said.

  “Then what the hell have we been doing for a decade? Why did you keep rejecting me?”

  The corners of James’s mouth drew down in a frown. “It’s complicated.”

  Those two words were enough to make the warmth in the room fade just a few degrees.

  He cupped a hand at the back of her head as he kissed her, tangling in the black hair that wasn’t hers so that she couldn’t pull away. Not that she would have wanted to anyway.

  They pressed their foreheads together and didn’t move for a long time, breathing each other’s breath and feeling their hearts beat in rhythm. “We really need to go now,” Elise said, and the moment was gone. “We should have gone hours ago.”

  James released her. Nodded. “You’re probably right. I’m hungry—I think I’ll see if Candace left any canned food upstairs. Do you want anything?”

  She shook her head and stretched out on the mats to watch him dress. The view from the floor was pleasant. Seeing him naked was different now that she knew what it felt like to be against him, skin against skin, and remembered the salty taste of sweat on her tongue.

  Even though she knew they still had to find out what had happened to Hannah and Nathaniel, it was hard to feel much urgency while watching James’s muscles flex and his body twist. He pulled his shirt on and his fingers slipped along the buttons one by one. Several of them were missing. Elise hadn’t been careful about undressing him. “Are you going to stay down there all day?”

  She stretched onto her back, extending her fingers and toes to their maximum like a cat after a long nap. “It’s tempting.”

  He knelt beside her with a half-smile. She knew that weird expression because she probably had the same one, herself: disbelief.

  James handed her clothes to her. “I’ll see you upstairs,” he said, brushing her hair over her ear again. His fingers trailed over her temple, and a line formed between his eyebrows. His mind was a buzz of unreadable thoughts. “You should know that I love you, Elise. I’m sure you realize that now.”

  Something about the way he said it didn’t come across as a romantic confession so much as an apology, so all she did was nod silently.

  He lingered in the doorway for a moment, as though to give her some small amount of privacy as she dressed in the leggings and bustier. By the time she went searching for her spine sheath, he had gone upstairs and she was alone.

  Elise stared at her unfamiliar reflection in the mirrors, twisting the ring on her thumb.

  She didn’t look anything like she used to. She didn’t feel the same, either. It didn’t really matter if she was the daughter of Nügua, the daughter of Yatam, or the daughter of Hell—none of those names meant anything to her. What mattered was that she had changed, profoundly and irrevocably.

  One other thing had changed, too. And he was upstairs making breakfast.

  She found herself smiling as she laced her leggings again. It was stuck to her face, and she couldn’t have stopped if she tried.

  Elise found an old jacket in the closet and tugged it over her shoulders before opening the front door. There was more snow outside than she’d expected. James’s footprints led around the side of the building to the apartment’s stairs.

  But everything vanished the instant she crossed the threshold.

  She was surrounded by gray void—inside and outside.

  Elise couldn’t turn back to the studio. There was no studio, and she had no body to turn. She couldn’t scream without a voice.

  And she wasn’t alone in the void.

  He had come.

  Elise, He said in a voice as massive as His presence, I have missed you so very much. It’s time to come home.

  She wanted to cry, to flee, to scream a thousand furies at the nothingness. But it was too late. Pale hands engulfed her, cradling nonexistent flesh and enclosing her in chains. All she could see was flaming light.

  James! Elise shrieked without lungs.

  And then she was gone.

  The apartment above the studio was just as quiet and empty as it had been downstairs. The last occupant had been one of the former instructors at Motion and Dance. Candace and all of her most important belongings were gone—photo albums, her laptop, some knick-knacks that James remembered being on the bookshelf. Candace and her husband must have evacuated.

  James couldn’t hear Elise moving downstairs, but he could feel her. His last image of her was when she had twisted her arms to adjust her leggings, and he could still see the way her scapula jutted from her back, the line of her spine, the curve of her hip, and the spill of her hair like ink on snow.

  That was how he wanted to think of her. Bare shoulders and a hint of a smile on her lips.

  He didn’t open the pantry to search for canned food when he got upstairs. He braced his hands on the counter and stared out the dusty window. The street beyond was normal, aside from the emptiness. It was going to be a beautiful morning.

  James felt Elise approach the front door. Something shifted when she crossed the warded line that separated the entryway from the law
n.

  An instant later, she vanished.

  Though he didn’t see it happen, he felt it as surely as he had felt her body under his hands the night before. All their years of running and hiding—and all of their struggles to keep her safe from His searching gaze—had ended in one swift moment.

  God had come. He had Elise.

  All the tension drained from James’s muscles. He sagged against the counter.

  “Finally,” he sighed.

  A NOTE FROM THE AUTHOR

  Thank you all for joining me for yet another book. This was a heck of an experience to write and crazy emotional. I’m already hard at work on the next part, which is called Paradise Damned. If you would like to know when it's available, make sure to sign up for my mailing list: smarturl.it/armyofevil.

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