Defying Fate (The Descent Series)

by SM Reine

  When would she wake? Would she ever? He wondered what it looked like when she smiled.

  Babushka looked up, her hands stilling in mid-brush. She said something in Russian, something that James probably should have understood, but his head was filled with the girl.

  Why couldn’t he remember Hannah?

  He backed up two steps, shut the door, and fled to the bathroom.

  It was a little easier to think with three walls and two doors between James and Elise. But making it easier to think only gave him room to hate himself.

  James gripped the sink so hard that he thought it might shatter under his fingers. He pressed his forehead to the glass and stared at the blurry shape of pale blue irises, far too bright and clear to match his dark hair and olive skin.

  Was he sick? Had he gone insane? How could he love a girl he had never even spoken to?

  Someone knocked on the bathroom door. James opened it. A woman stood on the other side, one of Babushka’s nieces—who was still twice as old as James—and she held a steaming bowl of soup cupped in her hands.

  “She’s stirring,” said the woman.

  It was a thousand-mile trudge through fear to get back to Elise’s room, and he wasn’t the first to arrive. Some of the other village women had beaten him there, and they all bore soup, blankets, utensils. It looked like offerings meant to appease Elise, as if she were some kind of angry god. If they had known how close that was to truth, they would have surely brought guns and knives instead of food.

  Babushka guarded the door. She pressed tobacco into her pipe with a gnarled thumb and bit the stem. When James attempted to enter, she caught his arm. “Wait. The girl’s still lost in the dreams, but she will be back soon.”

  He looked over the heads and backs of the women placing the food on the table beside Elise’s sleeping form. Her eyelids fluttered.

  A chill washed over him. “I don’t understand,” James said. It was easier to pretend that his Russian was too poor to discuss the subject than acknowledge that they both knew that Elise’s mind was slower to return to this world than her body.

  Excitement stirred through the women in the bedroom.

  “She’s awake,” one of them said.

  Their backs and shoulders were pressed together, obscuring James’s view of the bed. His heart thundered in his chest. He needed to see her.

  The women shifted, and he leaned on the doorframe to peer around them.

  Elise’s eyes opened.

  Good God, she’s beautiful.

  Babushka gave him a knowing look and lit her pipe. “Shame on you,” she said, blowing a cloud of smoke into his face. “Shame on all of you.”

  Elise escaped James in Yakutsk while he was reserving a hotel room. She had been awake for a week and hadn’t spoken to him once during their trip, so he didn’t realize at first that she had gone missing.

  One moment she had been standing beside him, sullen and silent, and the next she was gone, and cold air was blowing through the front door as it drifted shut again.

  James ripped his credit card out of the clerk’s hand and plunged into the street. The girl’s scarf whipped behind her as she vanished around the corner. He jerked his jacket around the bottom of his face.

  “Goddamn it all,” he muttered.

  When he made it to the other side of the building, she was gone.

  A pair of young women walked past a shop on the other side of the street, but there were no other people in sight. It was cold beyond imagining, and he could feel his fingers numbing through his gloves. Most people had the common sense to stay inside.

  A flash of motion. James looked up in time to see booted feet kicking over the ledge of the two-story building.

  She had climbed the damn hotel.

  The street-facing wall was too smooth for James’s clumsy gloves to get traction. He rushed into the nearby alley, searching for something that he could scale, and found nothing.

  Elise jumped from one building to the next, soaring over his head.

  He broke into a run, struggling to keep up with her on street level as she launched from one roof to the next. Elise seemed to soar, unaffected by petty things like gravity. But she would run out of roofs at the corner—he could catch her there.

  James reached the street before she did, and he kept his eyes to the roofs.

  No sign of her.

  A shout from behind him.

  He turned to see that the pair of girls that had been shopping had fallen to the sidewalk. Elise’s form retreated in the opposite direction, flying down the other street like a tornado. “Are you all right?” James asked the girls, who had been unlucky enough to be standing in Elise’s path.

  It sounded like they responded in the affirmative, but he didn’t wait long enough to make sure.

  He chased, but it was even harder trying to pace Elise when she was on the street. Two blocks away, she lost him completely.

  Anger surged in his chest as he stood, alone, on an empty street corner with no clue where he could go next.

  But with the anger came relief.

  Elise was gone. That was his chance. He could go back to Colorado, tell them that he had lost her, and that it wasn’t his fault. He could go back to his life and forget everything. Hug Hannah, kiss her, apologize for the fight, remind himself of what it was like to love her.

  But even if his oaths had permitted him to give up and return—and the burning of the scar on his left pectoral was a reminder that they did not—he knew that he wouldn’t have been able to let Elise go. Not anymore.

  He had been lost the first time she had laid eyes on him. He couldn’t stand the thought of never seeing those eyes again.

  James Faulkner hated Elise Kavanagh just as much as he was in love with her, and he couldn’t wait to send her back to the garden from whence she came.

  James located Elise again three days later in Harbin, south of the border. The city looked like the bastard child of Paris and Moscow, though China had long since claimed it from Russia.

  It was hard to find someone who spoke a language James understood who would also admit to having encountered Elise. He thought that the bakery owner must have run into her, judging by the suspicion in his eyes when James showed her photo to him, but he only spoke Mandarin. He shoved James out of his shop, yelling incoherently and waving his hands.

  Tracking spells eventually led him to a hostel, and one of the staff onsite spoke Russian—wonder of wonders. They had caught her in the closet. She had probably sneaked in before the door was locked the night before , but she had been cooperative about leaving once caught. It was only in the morning that they had realized that she’d had stolen a lot of yuan.

  They wouldn’t let James leave without paying for what Elise had taken. He stuffed a fistful of rubles into the hands of his informant and left before they could ask for more.

  James didn’t need another tracking spell to tell him that she was doing her best to escape as quickly as possible. Her persistent southward journey on the M56 Kolyma highway had made her intentions clear enough, and the hostel wasn’t far from the Jingha railway station.

  It was easy to find her among the crowd milling on the train platform. Her paranoia gave her away. She refused to stand with anyone at her back, so all James had to do was watch for the girl who had backed herself into the most hidden corner possible.

  Elise was a bundle of jackets and scarf wedged between two benches. Her gloved hands were buried under her arms, and he suspected that she had armed herself again.

  Her eyes darted over the crowd. Was she watching for James or some other enemy?

  There were too many possible escape routes from the Jingha station, which was outdoors. James didn’t dare approach her yet.

  He grabbed a newspaper, melted into the crowd, and pretended to read. The hànzì was illegible to him. He could pick up a relevant word here and there, the kinds of things he needed to get around—references to food, for instance, and transportation. He might have been
able to pick up more if he hadn’t been watching Elise out of the corner of his eye, too.

  A train pulled into the station. The crowd shifted as the car emptied and others took the passengers’ place.

  Elise didn’t move from between the counters. James sat on a bench, ducked his head, and continued pretending to read.

  The next few trains didn’t make her move, either. His legs and back grew stiff from sitting too long, but he didn’t dare try to walk to loosen his muscles. He wasn’t going to let her out of his sight.

  His eyelids grew heavy. His head drooped.

  When was the last time that he had slept? He had been trying to stay awake since Elise escaped, and chasing her across what felt like half of Russia had stolen what little energy he had left.

  His brain filled with the warm, buzzing fog of voices among the crowd, the announcer on the stereo, and the hiss of train wheels on rails.

  James jolted awake when the back of his head bumped against the bench. His eyes shot open.

  Elise was no longer between the booths.

  He bolted upright, heart pounding, blood roaring through his skull like the wind blowing over empty tundra.

  There was a train in the station, and the doors were sliding closed.

  James flung the newspaper aside and launched himself toward the train, but stumbled over his feet. He crossed the yellow line in time to bang his fists on the closed doors.

  He swore in every language he knew as the train pulled away.

  On the other side of the platform, where another train was just pulling into the station, stood a slender young woman in a white shirt, jeans, and a yellow scarf covering her hair. She wasn’t wearing a jacket. Probably an attempt to disguise herself. James wouldn’t have even recognized Elise if not for her bony figure, the way she jerked at every odd sound, the warm feeling that built in his chest the instant he saw her.

  He hadn’t missed Elise after all—but he was only moments away from losing her.

  James jumped into the train trench and scrambled onto the other side. Guards shouted at him. Someone in a uniform was striding toward him. He ignored them.

  Elise slipped through the doors, and James was just moments behind her.

  He leaped onto the car as it closed.

  James scanned the seats, but there was no sign of Elise now.

  The floor lurched under his feet, and he had to grab onto the wall to keep from falling over.

  He pushed through the people standing near the windows, making his way toward the back of train. He walked from car to car, watching for Elise as the train built momentum and the station disappeared from view. They chugged through town, steady and sure, and James made his way all the way to the back of the locomotive.

  He peered through the window before entering. The last car was almost empty aside from a Chinese couple sitting at the back door and one girl across from them.

  Elise had lost the yellow scarf. She must have been freezing in nothing but a t-shirt, but she showed no sign of discomfort. She was slumped in her seat, legs extended in front of her, almost lazy-looking. But James recognized the position for what it meant: she was ready to leap. To attack. And the young couple across from her had no idea.

  There was nowhere left for Elise to go. James straightened his jacket. Pushed the door open.

  Her eyes lifted to his.

  He had an instant to register the knife in Elise’s hand before she lunged.

  James threw himself backward. The knife swished millimeters from his shirt.

  Elise slashed again and again as the Chinese girl shrieked. The man wrapped his arms around his girlfriend and steered her out of the car. James barely noticed. He was too busy ducking, jumping, knocking Elise’s arms aside with his own.

  It was luck that disarmed her, rather than James’s efforts. The train turned a corner. The car jittered and bumped. She lost her footing, fell into a seat, and dropped the dagger.

  When she reached for it, James kicked it to the end of the car. Elise leaped for it. He grabbed the back of her shirt.

  Big mistake.

  She whirled, and a fist connected with his jaw. The car exploded with lights.

  They exchanged blows. James should have had the advantage—he was a full head and shoulders taller than her, easily fifty pounds heavier, and much older. Yet he couldn’t even begin to keep up with her speed mentally, much less physically. Whenever he swung, she had a way of vanishing and reappearing behind him again.

  He didn’t know what was hitting him. Elbows, fists, feet. It was all punishingly painful. The fact that it was a sixteen-year-old girl that he was losing to—well, that definitely didn’t make him feel any better.

  But her fighting style was inelegant, and James realized that she telegraphed her moves with her eyes. She always looked where she was attacking.

  When she looked to the knife, he knew his moment had come.

  She dropped beneath the swing of his fist and rolled to the back of the car. He could tell in advance that when she swung again, it would be aimed at his neck.

  James caught her arm in his fist.

  She twisted free. The knife flashed toward James’s chest. He barely seized her wrist in time. Her other fist swung at him, and it was all he could do to catch that one, too. Both of her arms were trapped. Unfortunately, so were his.

  This time, he didn’t let her escape. They were braced between the seats of the swaying car, locked in each other’s grip, and James’s teeth ground together with the effort it took to hold her.

  “I’m not trying to hurt you,” James said.

  “I won’t go back,” Elise said, her voice still raw, as though she had been screaming. Though her eyes were fierce and the point of her dagger was only an inch from his heart, there was something vulnerable in those words. Genuine fear.

  James’s arm muscles trembled with the exertion of having to hold her back. He wasn’t going to be able to hold her off much longer. “I came to help you.”

  The pressure against his arms lightened. Just a little. Elise had eased up—barely.

  But even though the shift in her posture was slight, the change in her expression was far more drastic. She had dropped her guard, and it was the first time that he felt like he could see her—really see her. There was raw fear on her face. Wide eyes, pale cheeks, a tremble in her jaw. She wasn’t a weapon that Metaraon had developed to kill God.

  She was a girl—just a teenage girl, barely older than a child, so fragile and small and filled with terror.

  “I can’t go back,” Elise said. “I would rather die.”

  The lie slipped out of him before he could stop himself.

  “I’ll protect you. Nobody can make you go back,” he said.

  She didn’t move, but there was a tremble in her arms, and her chin gave the faintest of quivers.

  He wanted the lies to be true—that she really could be safe with him. And when he spoke again, it was with total sincerity. “I swear I will protect you,” James said softly.

  She relaxed, just a fraction more.

  There was still mistrust in her eyes when she stepped back, but she didn’t try to attack him again. His biceps trembled from the effort it had taken to hold her off. The weight advantage didn’t seem to matter when he was battling a girl with a temperament like a wild animal.

  The door slid open behind him, and a conductor stormed into the car.

  James understood just enough Mandarin to realize that the conductor was asking if they had a problem. There would be railway police not far behind, and James weighed his chances—if Elise protested, would the police believe James, the adult man, or the teenage girl? With neither of them fluent in the local language, they would both probably be in trouble.

  Elise responded to the conductor. James was stunned to hear her speaking Mandarin. In their week together, he hadn’t even heard her speak that much English.

  They exchanged a few words. The conductor looked offended, rounding on James, and he braced himself to
be ejected from the train—or worse.

  “Ticket,” the conductor said in Russian.

  James gaped for a minute before his brain managed to translate the request. He patted down his jacket, trying to remember if he had thought to buy a ticket at the platform. He had. It was tucked in his breast pocket.

  He held the ticket out, the conductor punched it, and then Elise and James were alone in the car again.

  They stared each other down, several feet apart.

  He wasn’t sure if he should relax or worry even more now that Elise had somehow talked them out of trouble. Maybe she just wanted to kill him in private.

  “Does this mean that you’re coming with me?” James asked.

  Elise responded by sitting down exactly where she had been before. She propped her arm against the window and stared out at the tundra.

  She didn’t react when James sat down across from her, so that had to be as good as a yes.

  They rode the train for some time. When James got off at the first airport, Elise got off with him, and she didn’t try to escape again.

  James stretched out as much as he could in his airplane seat with a flimsy blanket covering his lap and Elise stiff in the chair beside him.

  Their flight had two layovers between Changchun Longjia International Airport and Denver. In eighteen hours, they would arrive in Colorado. James would surrender her to Landon. And he would never think about Elise Kavanagh again.

  Colorado – March 1998

  After two uneventful layovers and one long drive, James and Elise arrived at Pamela’s house.

  He was home. It was over. It was all over.

  He climbed onto Pamela’s porch the same way that he had a thousand times before. The key to her door felt heavier than usual now that the house belonged to him. But even though James held the key in his hand—the key to the end of his journey—he didn’t insert it into the lock.

  All he needed to do was walk inside, and all of his problems would be solved.