Defying Fate (The Descent Series)

by SM Reine

  Staring out into the sea of black uniforms, indistinguishable from any other Union gathering, Zettel wondered what his funeral would be like, and how many people would be there.

  He hoped that there would be no burial. He wanted to die fighting and leave nothing behind but a legacy.

  When he was done, he gave a flag to Allyson’s partner. He told her that he was sorry for her loss, but as he stared into her tear-streaked face, he felt no grief.

  He had worked with Allyson for six years, and she had been the closest thing to a friend he had in the organization. Certainly, she was the only person he trusted.

  But her death only left him angry.

  The body was never put on display—the damage to her corpse was too severe for a mortician to conceal. The onlookers dispersed shortly after his speech. Once they were gone, Allyson was removed from the cemetery again, because she wasn’t being buried. She was being put into the Vault.

  Zettel had sent a message to his superiors asking why. She wasn’t a demon—she wasn’t going to be resurrected. She was dead. Gone forever.

  They never sent him an answer.

  Zettel pushed her drawer closed himself. The lock clicked.

  A young commander caught up with him when he tried to leave the Vault.

  “Sir,” he said.

  Zettel kept walking. “Not right now.”

  “I apologize, sir, but it’s urgent. When the staff came in to prepare the drawer for Allyson Whatley, they found one of the other refrigerators open.”

  He stopped.

  “Which one?”

  Together, they walked down the aisles until Zettel reached a row of refrigerators that he knew all too well. He had personally supervised the storage of the bodies there after the devastation in Reno.

  One of the drawers had a red light over the door, indicating that it was unlocked. Zettel pulled out the table and stared into the dead face of Elise Kavanagh.

  James Faulkner hadn’t just destroyed half of Fallon, hijacked an airplane, liberated a prisoner, and killed Allyson Whatley. He had also broken into the Vault to visit the body of his former kopis.

  Why? What was Faulkner trying to accomplish?

  Zettel had too many questions and not enough answers, but he knew one thing: he was going to make that bastard pay.

  On a hunch, he opened the adjacent refrigerators. The father of all demons hadn’t been touched, but the mother’s hand had been skinned. Her palm was nothing but raw meat.

  A seed of an idea planted in the depths of Zettel’s mind as he stared at that hand.

  “Cancel the rest of my meetings with the OPA,” he told the other kopis. “And prepare a unit for transport. No—three units. Fully armed.”

  “Yes, sir. Where will they be going?”

  Zettel grimaced.

  “We’re going to Reno.”

  James and Nathaniel found shovels in the outbuilding and dug graves in silence. The kopides went into a single trench. They made no ceremony out of pushing the bodies into it.

  Once they were covered, James began to dig another grave for Hannah under the trees. Nathaniel stopped him.

  “Not here.” He pointed at the ridge. “Up there.”

  They climbed to the hill, which was just tall enough to see over the entrance to the Haven and the forest stretching below. Nathaniel jammed the end of his shovel into the ground and began to dig. He was soon drenched in sweat and rain, pale with exhaustion, wavering on his feet.

  “I can do it,” James said.

  Nathaniel set his jaw and kept digging.

  He dug until the sun began to set.

  “Lower her down,” Nathaniel said, climbing into the grave and holding his hands up.

  James handed Hannah’s body down to him. She was so light, still every inch the ballerina.

  Nathaniel didn’t set her down immediately. He wiped his runny nose on the back of his hand and said, “Go away.”

  James sat on a rock nearby, watching the stars inching across the sky and listening to his son’s quiet sobs drift over the trees.

  The owls were hooting already. James spotted a few bats emerging for a twilight hunt.

  It was an hour before Nathaniel climbed out again. A long, miserable hour.

  “We can go now,” he said.

  The van’s engine failed on the freeway about a hundred miles north of the Haven. James hadn’t been driving with any particular destination in mind, so having their progress stopped was not much of a hindrance—it barely even registered as an annoyance at this point.

  James opened the hood to find the problem. He knew enough about cars to fix common problems, but it all looked unfamiliar to him now. He couldn’t make any sense of the pipes, the metal, the hissing steam.

  It didn’t matter all that much anyway. He guessed that the engine block had cracked, and that wasn’t the kind of thing James could correct on the side of the road. Sixty years after Thistle bought that damn van, and it waited to die until they were hundreds of miles from any town.

  James thought about kicking the bumper, but that seemed like too much effort.

  He got back into the driver’s seat.

  Nathaniel was sleeping on the bench that hadn’t been drenched by Hannah’s blood. He had passed out from exhaustion almost the instant that James took the van onto the road, and stopping hadn’t disturbed his sleep.

  James wished he could do the same, but even though his body was willing, his mind was restless.

  His plan had been to take Hannah and Nathaniel to the Haven, then wait by Landon’s door until Elise returned from the garden. Now that neither of those things were an option, he wasn’t sure what to do. Especially not with Nathaniel his sole responsibility. Damn it all, James had never planned on fatherhood—much less when it involved a twelve-year-old that hated him.

  He sat in the driver’s door with his legs dangling over the side, watching the rain patter on the mud beneath his feet.

  James wanted to feel angry. He should have felt angry after everything Metaraon had done. But all he felt was a growing sense of helplessness.

  He covered his face with his hands, struggling to keep the despair from consuming him.

  All of his failures rolled through him like one blow after another. He had surrendered Elise to Him. Metaraon had taken Ariane—and Lord only knew where he had taken her. Hannah was gone, leaving Nathaniel motherless.

  James couldn’t have failed worse if he had been trying to do it on purpose.

  “Where are we?”

  Nathaniel had woken up. He took off his square glasses, rubbed his face, and then jammed them back onto his nose to squint out the window.

  “We’re still on the highway. The van’s not working,” James said.

  His son squeezed between the seats to join him up front. “Can we fix it?”

  “No.” James’s head fell into his hands. “I can’t fix anything.”

  Nathaniel stared at him hard. “So, what? You’re just giving up? Sitting here until the world ends?”

  “If you have better ideas, I’m willing to hear them.”

  “We find the guy who killed my mom, and we kill him,” Nathaniel said. “That’s what we need to do.”

  “Do you have any clue who Metaraon is? He’s the greatest of angels, barely a step below God Himself. Even if we could reach him—which we most likely can’t—we can’t kill him. It’s impossible.”

  “Let’s get Elise,” Nathaniel said. His voice broke, and a fresh tear slid down his cheek. “Elise can kill him.”

  The suggestion was like a punch to James’s gut. “She’s not available. She’s already on a job, and we can’t bother her.”

  “So you sent her to kill God—that’s what you’re saying, isn’t it?”

  Of all the responses he could have expected out of his son, that hadn’t been one of them. James’s jaw dropped open. “What do you know about that?”

  “Enough,” Nathaniel said. “I can read, you know. And I’ve had access to all of Pamel
a’s journals for my entire life. I know that Landon gave Ariane to Metaraon so that she could make Elise, I know that Elise was made to kill God, and I know that you’re the one who’s supposed to make sure she does it.”

  Despair bubbled up inside of James. He gave a mirthless laugh. “I did,” he said. “I gave Elise to God. Are you happy to hear me say it? It’s not as though I had a choice in the matter, Nathaniel. It’s what our coven has always done. We groom brides and send them to Him. It’s a service to the goddamn world!”

  “But Elise isn’t just some bride,” Nathaniel said.

  “No. She’s the Godslayer. She was designed to kill Him. She should have crossed over to the other side, slaughtered him, and been back by now. The fact that she hasn’t—the fact that Metaraon was here at all—means that she’s failed, and everything has gone so very, terribly wrong.” James’s voice rose in volume on every word until he was almost shouting. “And that means there is not a single thing we can do!”

  Another tear slid down Nathaniel’s cheek, and then a third. But he looked angry, not sad. “There’s one thing we can do. We can save her.”

  Save Elise? That would mean infuriating God and Metaraon, breaking James’s oaths, and undoing over a decade of work. Even if they could reach the garden, it would be suicide. But Nathaniel couldn’t possibly understand that. It didn’t matter how much he had read.

  “You have no idea what you’re suggesting,” James said dully.

  “I can open portals that go anywhere. Maybe I can even get to her in—into the garden, in Heaven. We can bring her back.”

  But even though he didn’t want to consider what Nathaniel suggested, the idea had been firmly planted in his mind.

  Go to the garden. Find Elise in the Tree. Bring her back.

  “It’s a quarantined dimension,” James said slowly. “You wouldn’t be able to jump in there.”

  Nathaniel frowned, considering. “Okay. What about a gate? There are hundreds of gateways on Earth that go to the other dimensions. There has to be one that goes to the garden. Right?”

  “There are only two doors on Earth that go there. One of them was in Landon’s basement. It’s broken.”

  “And the other?”

  James shut his eyes, imagining the mirror city that floated over downtown Reno. It had nine gateways—nine doors that led into different ethereal planes, one of which happened to be the garden.

  “It’s in Reno,” he said.

  And with those three words, he knew where they had to go next.

  XIV

  Nathaniel said that he knew someone who could pick them up, and he made a phone call. “She’ll be here in eight hours,” he said when he hung up.

  “Who?” James asked.

  “Brianna,” Nathaniel said. “We can trust her.”

  James wasn’t in any position to argue. He sank back into the driver’s seat to wait.

  He had expected Nathaniel to fall asleep again immediately, but the same insomnia that had tortured James seemed to have struck his son, too. So they sat together, awake but silent, to watch the empty night.

  James closed his eyes to mentally trace a route to the gates above downtown Reno. What would the city be like, so many months after the Union’s occupation? They would probably need to pass through Union checkpoints to get in. James’s glamor spell would protect him from prying eyes, and hopefully Nathaniel wouldn’t be recognizable.

  His mind drifted through the imagined streets of Reno—not the ruins that it would be now, but a tired city hit hard by the economy, baked by the sun, and occupied by Elise Kavanagh.

  “She’s here,” Nathaniel said.

  James’s eyes opened instantly. “Elise?”

  His son looked at him like he was crazy. “No. Brianna.”

  Had it already been eight hours? He checked Nathaniel’s phone, which sat on the dashboard. Six hours had passed. James had fallen asleep after all.

  He beat Nathaniel out of the van, prepared to confront the driver if she turned out to be unfriendly. A silver sedan sluiced into the mud and stopped a few feet away.

  Nathaniel bumped James aside.

  “Brianna!”

  He rushed down the shoulder and flung himself into the arms of the young woman that emerged from the car. She squeezed him tightly. Even though she looked to be a teenager, she was easily shorter than Nathaniel—barely over five feet.

  “Thank Hecate you’re okay,” she said, holding Nathaniel at arm’s length to look at him. “You are okay, right? We found Landon. The coven’s run for the hills.”

  “I’m fine,” he said.

  The girl named Brianna lifted her gaze to James, and he felt like a piece of meat being sized up at the market. Like she was trying to decide how valuable he could be. “Who’s this?”

  “Oh,” Nathaniel said, jamming his hands into his pockets. “That’s James.”

  “James…Faulkner?” Brianna’s jaw dropped open. She grabbed his hand and shook it. “Oh my God, it’s such an honor. I’ve heard so much about what you’ve done for the coven, for the witching community, for—”

  He jerked his hand out of her grasp and resisted the urge to rub his hand on his slacks. “You’ve clearly heard of me. Who are you?”

  “Oh. I’m Brianna Dimaria. I’m the high priestess of the coven.”

  High priestess? She couldn’t have been older than eighteen, maybe nineteen years old. It took years to reach the level of magical fluency required for priesthood, and as far as the White Ash Coven was concerned, it also took a certain amount of ruthlessness.

  “So you’ve been initiated,” he said skeptically. “And you’ve drawn down the moon.”

  “Not yet, but it’s on the to-do list,” Brianna said. He realized that she was wearing a dozen different crystals on a woven necklace and a yellow shirt with uneven stitching, like she had sewn it by hand. The lack of concern for her appearance made him mentally bump her age into her twenties.

  James tried not to let his skepticism show. “And how much did Landon tell you about the coven, exactly?”

  “Not much,” she admitted. “But he was supposed to brief me on it soon. I guess that won’t be happening now.”

  “Which family are you from?”

  “No relation to any of you,” Brianna said.

  Nathaniel was already throwing his backpack into her trunk. He spoke up from the back of the car. “Landon brought her in from outside. He said it was time for fresh blood.”

  What in the seven hells had Landon been getting at? Putting his house on sale, bringing in a new person to run the coven…

  Brianna’s presence was a puzzle that James wasn’t prepared to solve. Not that day, probably not that month, and maybe not for the rest of the year. Getting past the Union to reach the darkest gate was much more pressing than the successor to a senile high priest.

  And Brianna, whether James liked it or not, could be useful. While the Union was going to be on the lookout for him, it seemed unlikely that they would know anything about a girl who thought it was fine to wear open-toed sandals in rainy weather.

  “We need someone to take us into Reno, Nevada. It’s a city occupied by the Union. It will be dangerous,” James said. There was no reason to beat around the subject.

  Fortunately, Brianna didn’t look like she cared all that much. “I’m scrappier than I look.” She gave him a small smile. “And I know things. I’m useful.”

  He highly doubted that.

  “Fine,” James said.

  Brianna held the passenger door open for him. “I just have to say, I am so honored to meet you. I’ve heard a lot about you.”

  James grabbed the door. “Get in the damn car and drive.”

  Another pair of headlights approached in the distance. It was too dark to make out the shape of the vehicle, but judging by the height of the headlights, it was probably an SUV.

  It wouldn’t have seemed strange if there was more traffic on the road.

  “Pull into the trees,” he said, sl
ipping into the passenger’s seat and slamming the door.

  “I don’t think my Honda can do that,” Brianna said. “I don’t exactly have an ATV.”

  “Just kill the lights and get us off the road.”

  She shrugged and did as he asked. The rocks made dangerous banging noises on the undercarriage of her Accord, and Brianna flinched at every one.

  By the time the approaching headlights slowed, she had pulled them behind a row of trees.

  Through the bushes, James watched as a black SUV pulled alongside the van and stopped. This vehicle had no cowcatcher or hood-mounted machine guns. But it had long antennas, like a new van, and a man wearing all black sliding off of the front seat.

  James recognized Yasir ibn Omari—the young commander whose uniform he had stolen back at HQ. Yasir paced around the abandoned van, opened the doors, and climbed inside.

  “The blood,” Nathaniel whispered, as if they were at risk of being heard.

  Another Union member stepped out of the van to join Yasir. She was dark-skinned, dark-haired, and not wearing a jacket, so James could see that she wore a shoulder rig with a handgun under each arm. She also held a large DSLR camera with the strap around her neck. She climbed into the back of the van with Yasir.

  “Get us out of here,” James said. “Now.”

  “But they’ll see us,” Brianna said.

  “So drive quickly.”

  She shrugged again. “Whatever you say, boss. Hang tight.”

  Brianna floored it. James was thrown hard into the back of his seat as they bounced over the rough terrain and onto the shoulder. The tires squealed on pavement, seeking traction.

  James craned around to watch the SUV as they peeled away. Yasir had jumped out of the van, and his mouth opened in a shout that James couldn’t hear.

  “Faster,” he said.

  The groan of the Honda’s struggling engine muffled Brianna’s heavy breathing. She watched the Union members in the rearview mirror until they disappeared into the night. Her cheeks were pale, and James half-expected her to throw them out of the car right at that moment.