Death's Avatar (The Descent Series)

by SM Reine

  When she thought it couldn’t hurt worse, the knife dug in somewhere new, and it did.

  “Amazing how well kopes heal,” a voice said. “You may not scar.”

  The words jangled in her ears. She screamed and screamed. Blood swirled past her head, filling the cracks in the stone, and flashes of black blurred her vision.

  The tip of a stone knife scraped against her breastbone.

  You may not scar.

  Her head swam. She had no blood. No skin.

  The goddess of death held something over her, and it dripped warmth on her face, and Elise thought she recognized the strip of pink dotted by freckles and—oh God.

  The world couldn’t end soon enough.

  James ran through the jungle. He didn’t see with his eyes; he saw with Elise’s. He saw a limp hand on the floor. He saw pooling blood. He saw iron chains and bare, dirty feet.

  Pain. So much pain.

  He muttered under his breath as he ran on his repaired knee, though he wasn’t sure she could hear. “I’m coming—hold on—stay awake—”

  Bryce crashed gracelessly through the trees behind him, panting and swearing. Like many bulky, muscled men, he didn’t seem to have focused on his cardio health. He couldn’t keep up.

  The rain poured around them, salty-sweet like the ocean. Trees swayed in the wind. James’s shirt stuck to his back, and he hugged the shotgun to his chest to keep from catching on the foliage.

  Where was she?

  James tried to follow the feelings Elise radiated, but it was difficult. Her mind made no sense to him. Maybe if they had been piggybacked—maybe if she wasn’t in so much pain—

  A mark on a tree caught his eye. “Wait!” James called.

  Bryce stopped and leaned on his knees, gasping for air. “What?”

  A signpost was carved into the trunk of the tree. It was a marker from one demon to another, indicating the direction of the undercity.

  His eyes tracked the signpost to the next tree, and the next. There were small marks all around him. They led back toward town. How could he have missed them?

  “This way,” James said.

  He doubled back, climbing toward the road. Bryce followed as best he could. “Hey!” he shouted. “We got company!”

  James turned. It was hard to see through the motion of the trees in the wind, but something was moving higher on the mountain. Dark shapes.

  “Demons?” James called back.

  “A whole fucking century of ‘em!”

  He ran faster, the Book of Shadows bouncing on his back in its bag. He didn’t like his odds against a centuria of demons—over eighty of them—not even with Bryce’s help.

  As he followed the marks closer to town, he began to hear yelps and howls. They were getting closer.

  “It’s in there,” he shouted, pointing at a shop the markers indicated as the entrance. Bryce was hurrying to catch up, but he was still a hundred meters back. “I’m going down! Can you hold them off?”

  The kopis responded by drawing his gun.

  James dove into the shop and went into the basement. There was a trap door. It was open, but the stairs had collapsed.

  James!

  Elise was screaming again. She wasn’t far. He could feel her through the earth, through the collapsed paths, just a couple miles away but completely unreachable.

  Gunshots fired outside the shop. Bryce shouted.

  Fear dragged on James’s heart. What was he supposed to do? How could he get to Elise when the only entrance to the undercity was blocked?

  He shut his eyes, trying to see through their bond again. Where are you? How can I reach you?

  Through her pain, he glimpsed a bone scepter and a stone knife. James fought to push back the sounds of fighting above him and focus on her vision, trying to see beyond the bare knees of the goddess.

  A wall. Smoke. Window. And beyond that, pyramid. It was tall. The chamber, and the clock inside of it, was huge.

  James’s eyes flew open. She wasn’t at the end of a labyrinth of demonic undercity—she was just under the surface, in the jungle not far from him.

  He quickly paged through his Book of Shadows, seeing how many battle spells he had left. There weren’t many. The simple ones—casting fire, blasts of air—were almost gone. Only the powerful spells his aunt told him not to mess with remained, and they were both horrible and deadly. He’d been carrying them around for years.

  Whispering a short prayer, James ripped a handful of pages out of the Book and flew up the stairs to street level.

  Bryce blocked the doorway with his body. Another one of the leathery gray demons had its teeth clamped down on the arm of his leather jacket. Dozens more demons rushed down the street.

  James barely had time to register the sheer number of bodies before they crashed upon them. He was lost in a rush of blood and drool and growls. He dropped the shotgun. “Get down!” he shouted to Bryce.

  The kopis threw himself to the ground, and James threw a scrap of paper.

  Power ripped from him. A dozen hearts stopped beating at once.

  They fell like dominoes, but James didn’t stop to watch it. He grabbed Bryce by the arm and hauled him to his feet. “Move,” he said as the surviving demons clambered over their dead brethren. “Now. Hurry!”

  The men sprinted across the road and into the jungle again. James could still hear Elise in the back of his mind, but it was faint. After another minute, he couldn’t hear her at all.

  “Why aren’t we going down?” Bryce asked.

  “We are going down,” James said. “But we’re not taking the stairs.”

  X

  After an eternity of pain, Elise awoke.

  She tried to sit up, but her hands couldn’t find traction. She slipped on something soft and slick. She looked down to see that it was a face with gaping eyes and no jaw.

  Gasping, she jerked back. Something dug into her leg—an exposed rib.

  There was nowhere safe to move. She slid to one side and rolled on top of a hairy chest with no head. When she slipped to the other side, her hand fell on a scapula.

  The realization that she was in a pit of human meat came upon her slowly, and it was followed by emotional silence—a yawning void of feeling. Elise took one shuddering breath and stopped fighting to get away.

  She settled back on the corpses and looked up at the steep walls around her. It was dark, but the occasional blast of flame revealed jagged rock. She could climb out. The clock was still rocking the earth with every beat of its human heart, and it sounded close.

  She was still in the chamber. She was not dead.

  But given all the pain she felt in her torso, she almost wished that were not true. No amount of emotional void could numb her cuts. Elise was slick with blood—both hers and that of the bodies—and she felt like she had gone through a cheese grater.

  Her shirt was nothing but scraps, her weapons were missing, and there was a stab wound on her side. She flinched when she remembered the goddess burying the knife in her body. It was the last thing she remembered before waking up.

  She must have missed all Elise’s important organs, but the goddess hadn’t known that and left her for dead. Thrown her in a pit of bodies. Forgotten her.

  Elise decided to consider herself lucky.

  She counted to ten and crawled to the wall of the pit. The clock continued to tick.

  Digging her fingernails into a jutting rock, Elise climbed to the top with her teeth grit. Stretching her arm to find another handhold hurt her stab wound. Putting her weight on one leg to push made the bites on her hip burn.

  She rolled over the edge and scrambled to the shadows on all fours, finding a dark corner to crouch before examining the situation.

  Elise could see the back of the clock. It was only a hundred feet away. Her side of the chamber was empty aside from the pit, sheltered by half-rotten columns, and the occasional blast of steam from the floor grates made enough smoke to conceal her.

  She couldn’t see
many of those ugly gray demons around the clock, but she could feel them. There were hundreds. The goddess of death was talking to them, but Elise didn’t stop to listen.

  She made her way to the other side of the chamber, sticking to the shadows, and climbed unseen onto one of the platforms with the dead cultists.

  A flash of silver caught her eye. The goddess had dropped her staff of bone and was carrying one of Elise’s falchions as she paced across the dais.

  There were four humans huddled beside her. It looked like a family. Their wrists were chained to the clock.

  So that was the sacrifice. Elise wondered what it was about those people that made them a better sacrifice than her, the greatest kopis, who barely ranked as demon food. It would have wounded her pride if she had any.

  She needed a plan, but she didn’t have any idea how to cross the room through a hundred demons, prevent the sacrifice of four humans, and stop the clock with numerous injuries and no time. She didn’t even have her weapons.

  Of course, that was fixable. If she could get one of her swords, she could bury it in the heart of the clock. It was the only thing she could imagine that might stop it.

  Her time to plan ended. The death goddess stopped speaking and whirled with the stone knife. It plunged into the neck of the man at her feet, and blood spurted from his throat.

  Elise leaped off the dais, launching herself toward the sacrifices.

  But it was too late. With a few swift strokes, all four lay dead beside the clock. The minute hand groaned into the twelve position, and the first bell chimed.

  James found a place in the jungle where the trees swayed and the ground vibrated beneath his feet. The clock was below him, and Elise with it. He was certain.

  But he also had a hundred demons following him.

  He and Bryce had evaded some of them in the jungle, but not enough. The kopis fired randomly into the horde behind him. Whether any bullets hit their targets didn’t matter—there wasn’t enough ammunition to kill them all.

  Stopping where the vibrations were strongest, he tucked the shotgun under his arm. “I need a minute!” James yelled as he scrambled up a tree. “Hold them off!”

  Bryce didn’t respond. His fighting style completely lacked Elise’s grace, but there was no denying the accuracy of his aim or the power of his swinging fists. He was a force of nature.

  “Hurry!” Byron shouted.

  James wedged himself between two high branches, selected a couple spells from his Book, and took out a pen. He muttered words of power under his breath as he drew new spells.

  The rocking earth shifted. The tree shuddered, and the air grew thick.

  A bell chimed.

  The reverberations above the pyramid were so powerful that the entire ground tipped. Byron lost his footing. The demons swarmed over him. He didn’t get a chance to scream.

  James tried not to watch as they overtook him. One demon leaped onto the trunk of his tree, then another, scaling it with their stubby claws.

  He carefully folded three of the spells together. A hand swiped at his foot.

  Then he threw the pages into the air.

  The earth split with a dull thud, ripping open beneath the trees while the first bell continued to toll. Hot air gusted through the hole. Demons slid into the earth.

  Holding his breath, James leaped off his branch.

  XI

  Twelve bells. Four minutes.

  Elise was out of time.

  One.

  A dozen demons plowed into Elise like athletes piling onto a football. The back of her head cracked against the ground.

  She jammed her elbow into a biting mouth and jabbed her fingers into an eye. The bell vibrated through the temple. It shook her blood, her bones.

  Elise lashed out with a foot and felt it connect with something. It didn’t do any good. There was no light under the pile of demons, no sense of gravity.

  That was when the roof collapsed.

  Two.

  The rubble didn’t crush Elise. But it did crush the demons on top of her.

  She shoved her way out of the pile. Dirt and rain showered through the hole in the ceiling. Beyond it, the sky changed. Gray faded to crimson as Hell and Earth began to merge.

  Elise gasped and coughed through the dust. Half the centuria had been crushed at once. Nothing so much as touched the clock.

  A hammer swung. The bell struck again.

  Three.

  The third chime was louder than the first two. Her skull ached, and even when she jammed her hands against her ears, her brain rattled.

  Something moved on the dais. The goddess had survived.

  More demons began climbing toward Elise over the rubble. She stumbled toward the clock, slipped, and almost fell.

  Her hand caught the side of the dais. The vibrations traveled up her arm and down her spine as she dragged herself onto it.

  The goddess was laughing.

  Four.

  “It’s too late,” said the death goddess. “Hell is come upon Earth.”

  That face. That laugh. Elise’s wounds ached with the memory of the knife. “Shut up,” she growled, raising her fist for a strike.

  “Elise!”

  She looked up. James climbed down from the surface, carefully making his way along a tipped column. The first thing that occurred to her was that his leg was fixed. The second was that he had a shotgun. Where had James gotten a shotgun?

  The goddess saw him. She stopped laughing.

  “Catch!” he yelled, tossing the gun.

  Elise caught it, balancing it awkwardly between her hands. She’d only held a shotgun once before. Her father had taught her to shoot, but she hated them.

  Still, she was armed. It was better than the alternative.

  She whipped the butt of the shotgun across the goddess’s face. Her head snapped back.

  Five.

  The sky turned virulent red, and the world was falling. Elise’s senses screamed—demons everywhere, all around her, like she had felt in Dis so long ago—and the air tensed like something was about to snap.

  Demons were climbing toward James. She was helpless to join him.

  The goddess regained her footing and came at Elise, falchion raised. She braced the shotgun against her shoulder, aimed, and fired.

  The goddess’s leg became a mess of red below the knee. She screamed in Latin. Elise smiled.

  Six.

  Elise tried to pump the shotgun so she could fire again, but the mechanism was stuck. Didn’t matter. She preferred the personal touch anyway.

  She tossed the gun aside and ripped her falchion from the goddess’s hand. The twin was next to the sacrifices. Elise grabbed it, too.

  Holding both of her swords was like having her arms reattached. She was complete.

  Seven.

  Elise thought her skull might split in two.

  The chime shook James off the pillar, dropping him in the crowd of waiting demons.

  “James!” she shouted.

  No response.

  The dais rocked with the pendulum. She scrambled to keep her footing as the goddess lunged. Her stone knife slashed through the air and sliced into Elise’s arm, deeper than before. She cut into muscle.

  The air thickened, darkened, grew sour. Air gusted from the grates. It stunk of sulfur, like the planes of Hell.

  A man screamed.

  Eight.

  The goddess was fast. Too fast for a woman with a ruined leg. She twisted and spun, meeting the blades of Elise’s swords with her stone knife, swift and agile and skilled beyond imagining.

  She deflected every swing, every strike. The ritual knife was a blur. Blades met, and Elise shoved her away. She couldn’t take down a goddess.

  The clock was her last chance—the only way she could stop the collapse of the wall between Heaven and Earth.

  Nine.

  The goddess leaped forward. The knife bit into Elise’s injured side. She cried out, and her voice was silent under the bell’s roar.
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