Damnation Marked (The Descent Series)

by Reine, SM

  “I would lick your feet,” he informed her, which seemed like a sexy enough thing to say at the time.

  “Shut up,” she said, her breath tasting of akvavit.

  Malcolm thought he probably ripped her underwear trying to get them off. Something ripped, anyway. She was completely hairless underneath. Kinky little slut.

  She fumbled at his waist, clumsy with his belt, and shoved his pants away. He was erect—the knob was always game for sport—and he buried himself inside of her with a single, swift stroke.

  Elise made a muffled noise against his shoulder, and her fingers bit painfully into his arms. “Yeah,” he said, feeling hazy and a few minutes away from falling asleep, as well as barely aware of any sensation below his navel, “that’s right.”

  Malcolm was always down to fuck, but that didn’t mean he was at his peak performance. After a few short thrusts, tension built in his balls, and he jerked free of Elise just in time to empty himself on her leg.

  She gaped at him. “What the hell?”

  “Ah, bollocks,” he said against her neck, bracing his weight on the wall behind her. “Sorry about that. Drinking… the thing… oh, well, you know.”

  She shoved him off, dropped to her feet, and almost fell. She picked up her underwear. Swiped at her sticky leg.

  “Oh God,” she said. “That is… fuck.”

  “You are so sexy,” he slurred, trying to do his zipper again, but his hands didn’t work. His vision was fuzzy, too. Maybe it was the snow. Maybe alcohol poisoning was catching up with him. Either was fine.

  His knees gave out. Malcolm was unconscious before he hit the ground.

  James spent his evening mentally rehearsing things that he wanted to say to Elise—apologies, mostly, along with a few very carefully worded explanations.

  But when three in the morning rolled around and there was still no sign of his newly bound kopis, he had to sleep. After all the magic he had performed in the last couple of weeks, he had no choice. If he hadn’t climbed into bed, James would have passed out against the window watching the empty street for Elise’s approach.

  His dreams gave him strange, misty impressions of a towering tree, valleys of shadow, and babbling brooks. He awoke at midmorning with rain pattering against his window.

  The pipes in the wall beside him rumbled. The shower must have been running. James muttered a quiet thanks, raked a hand through his hair, and headed into the living room.

  He found Elise drinking a cup of coffee on the couch, which she had dragged out of her bedroom and left on top of the pentagram. Judging by the open bottle of vodka at her side, she must have put a shot in her morning drink. Her hair was also completely dry.

  And the shower was still running.

  James paused in the threshold. Glanced at the bathroom door. Frowned. “Elise,” he began, and everything he had prepared to say vacated his brain before finding its way to his mouth. Instead, he asked, “If you’re out here, who is in the shower?”

  Elise got to her feet and went into her room without acknowledging him. James looked between the bathroom and bedroom doors, his frown deepening.

  That was when he noticed that her shoes and sweater—which were in the middle of a muddy puddle by the door—were not alone. A pair of brown loafers and blue jeans lay beside them. The leather jacket hanging on the hook didn’t belong to him.

  The shower cut off. The door opened. A very wet, very naked Malcolm stepped out. “Hey there,” he said, waving at James as though greeting him from across a coffee shop. “You’re out of clean towels in the bath. Got any spares?”

  It took him a moment to find words. “What the hell are you doing in my condo?”

  Elise emerged with a towel and handed it to Malcolm. James gaped at her. She stared at a fixed point over his shoulder.

  “Well, I’d best put on some—you know.” Malcolm wiggled his hips. “I’ll be back to enjoy the awkward tension in a minute.” He kissed Elise on the shoulder, pinched her ass, and went into the bedroom.

  The door shut behind him.

  She did not move.

  James had practiced the things he wanted to say. Lots of things. But he didn’t want to say any of it.

  “McIntyre called Malcolm this morning,” Elise finally said. “He has a lead on Samael. We’ll be leaving in a few minutes.”

  “I think we should talk,” James said.

  She grimaced, picked up her coffee, and followed Malcolm into the bedroom. The lock gave a very loud, very clear click.

  Concealing two heavily armed kopides on public transportation was easy in the winter. James had watched Elise strap on her twin falchions, and he still couldn’t see any bulges underneath her long leather jacket. The yellow scarf did a good job of concealing the swords’ hilts.

  Malcolm was slightly more conspicuous. He only had two pistols, but his pockets were heavy with magazines. “If you need to shoot more than twenty-six rounds at an enemy and reload, you’re probably already dead,” he had informed James cheerfully, despite the witch’s best efforts to ignore him. “But I like to be prepared. You never know, with a fallen angel.”

  Between the three of them, they could have killed everyone on the train—probably everyone on the railroad, really, given the power in James’s Book of Shadows. But the riders were totally unaware.

  A man read the newspaper by the window. A woman whispered to a toddler chewing on the nipple of a bottle in his stroller. Two bicyclists chatted by the doors.

  And Malcolm had his arm around Elise’s shoulders.

  A pleasant noise chimed over the speakers, and a polite female voice announced that they were approaching Herlev.

  “Next stop’s ours,” Malcolm said.

  The bicyclists moved aside so that they could step onto the platform, and the trio walked through heavy snow to Herlev Hospital. It was truly a marvel of modern architecture—the tallest building in the Copenhagen region, and majestic with all of its bright glass and bronze aluminum.

  A nurse met them outside the front doors. She looked relieved to see them.

  “You’re Malcolm?” she asked in accented English. At his nod, she glanced around and pulled a silver pentacle necklace out of her shirt. “My coven put me in contact with McIntyre. My name is Karolina.”

  “What’s wrong, Karolina?” Malcolm asked. He hadn’t dropped his arm from Elise’s shoulders, but he was still leering at the young nurse. Foul excuse for a human being.

  Karolina lowered her voice. “There’s a demon hiding in the hospital. I’ve only seen it on security footage, but it’s large, and it smells like rotting eggs on the roof.”

  “Where did you last see it?”

  “Last night, in the maternity ward—” Her beeper chirped, and she checked the number. Karolina’s eyes widened. “I’m being called to an emergency. The number indicates a lockdown. Missing patient.”

  “And you work in the maternity ward?” James asked, but he and Elise were already jogging toward the doors.

  Alarms were going off inside the hospital, and it took three swipes of Karolina’s security badge to get them inside the locked down maternity ward. A security guard met them at the swinging doors.

  He shouted at them in Danish, but the sight of Karolina stopped him. James noticed a silver pentagram pinned to his lapel—another witch.

  “An infant has gone missing from the nursery,” he said, switching to English. “The demon has gone to the roof.”

  Elise didn’t need to hear anything else. She ran for the stairs.

  Malcolm drew a pistol.

  “Is there another way up?”

  Karolina twisted her hands together. “The elevators, but they’re automatically disabled when one of the infant bracelets triggers the alarm. You could take the south stairs.” He gave a sharp nod to James and left. “There will be hysteria if this gets out, and if it kills the baby—”

  “That won’t happen,” James said, hoping it was true, and then he followed Elise.

  He had to sprin
t to catch up with her. She was already four floors up, sword unsheathed and fire burning in her eyes.

  The air did smell like rotten eggs. Elise staggered when she reached the landing at the top of the building, pressing a fist against her stomach. Her cheeks were pale.

  “Samael,” she said.

  Elise moved to push through the doors to the roof, but James stopped her. “Wait. We need to… you know. Piggyback.”

  The idea didn’t seem to have occurred to her. “What do I do?”

  “Hold still,” he said.

  James wished he had more time to recall what he knew of joining in an active bond—he hated to perform his first piggyback under duress. He turned inward, as though meditating, and sought out his core of power. That part was easy. Stretching out to join with Elise, as though with a heavy chain of energy—that was more difficult. He lost his concentration twice before finally succeeding.

  She gasped.

  Her thoughts, feelings, and emotions crashed over him. For a dizzying moment, he could see himself as though looking up from Elise’s position, a good head and shoulders shorter—was he really that tall? The power of the fallen angel was overwhelming. Elise felt like she was on the verge of throwing up, or passing out, or maybe both. And her palms burned.

  The worst part was her mind—it was a pit. She was so angry. James had never experienced that emotion at such depth, and it was almost crippling.

  Yet she wasn’t thinking about Samael. She was thinking about kissing him on the beach, and how much Malcolm pissed her off, and that she blamed James for the previous night’s drunken sex. What little she remembered of it. And that only made her angrier—that she was still thinking about sex and kissing and struggling with embarrassment when Samael was on the roof with his next victim.

  It would have been so much easier if you loved me.

  He didn’t need to hear that.

  James tried to tether off the binding. He fumbled and almost lost it—then caught firm.

  Her thoughts dropped to a low murmur in the back of his mind. The seething anger faded. She didn’t show any indication that she knew that James had heard her most private thoughts.

  “Elise—” he began.

  A muffled gunshot rang out on the other side of the door.

  She slammed through the door to the rooftop. The sky seethed with heavy gray clouds. Malcolm was crumpled on the concrete with a gun six feet from his outstretched hand.

  But Samael was nowhere to be seen.

  James kneeled to check Malcolm for a pulse. Cold winter air lashed over the rooftop, making his fingers cold as soon as he extended them toward the kopis’s throat. The other man wasn’t dead. Just unconscious.

  Elise slipped on a patch of ice, caught her footing, and slid around a shed.

  “Wait!” James called, hurrying to follow her.

  He almost ran into Elise. She had stopped on the other side of the shed.

  The fallen angel was at the corner of the roof, crouched on the ledge like a massive, gothic grotesque. His back muscles twisted. The stumps of his wings twitched. A low moan rose from his throat, more like a sob than a growl. He cupped the infant between his clawed hands—a tiny bundle of striped blankets that wasn’t moving. It was too dark to tell if it was alive, but the silence made James’s heart plummet.

  “Samael!” she called. “Put the infant down!”

  He looked over his shoulder, and hope sparked in his eyes. “Elise. You’re alive.” His wing stumps twitched again. He pulled the baby closer to his chest. “I was so sure that I killed you.”

  “I’m fine. Put it down.”

  He teetered on the edge of the roof, and James stepped forward. Elise barred him with her arm.

  “I’m hungry,” the fallen angel whispered. It should have been impossible to hear him over the blasting wind, but his voice drove through James’s mind like a spike of ice. “Maybe—maybe this will be the last one. If I can’t satisfy this gnawing need…”

  “No, Samael,” she said. He lifted the baby. “Wait!”

  She stripped one of her gloves off with her teeth and held it out. The fallen angel froze, staring hungrily at her palm.

  “You couldn’t help me before,” he said.

  “But I can now. I promise.”

  He swayed. Hugged the infant tightly. Elise moved to his side, adjusted her grip on the sword, and took a deep breath. He gazed at her with wide, trusting eyes. Her attention was locked on the baby.

  She buried the blade in his back.

  Joining with him, flesh to flesh with a bridge of steel, made ethereal power explode over Elise and James. The fallen angel screamed. His mind beat uselessly against them, and James could feel Samael slip against the barrier of their fresh bond, slipping and sliding away.

  He unbalanced.

  The angel dropped from the side of the roof.

  “No!” Elise shouted, flattening her belly to the concrete barrier and flinging out a hand.

  She over-balanced. Her fingers snagged Samael’s tattered sleeve, and her hips began to slip over the side, too.

  James grabbed the back of her jacket.

  The combined weight of the kopis and the angel was almost too much, and his feet slipped on the ice. But then his knees hit the wall, his feet found traction, and he dragged her back with a groan.

  Elise’s hand remained tight on the angel. She hauled Samael back onto the roof and dropped him. He was still twitching, still shaking, still not quite dead.

  And his arms were locked around the bundle of blankets.

  She sheathed her sword and pulled the baby free. She lifted it awkwardly—mostly because it was squirming, crying, and alive. Its face was purple. Its chin trembled with the strength of its screams.

  “Shh.” She bounced it gently with one hand under its neck and the other under its legs as though it were a football. “You’re okay. Stop crying.” She turned panicked eyes on James. “Is it okay? Is it hurt? What’s wrong?”

  He took the baby and held it against his chest. A tiny pink cap had fallen to the roof. A girl, then—not an “it.”

  “I think she’s just startled.” He offered his pinky to the infant, and she closed her toothless mouth around it. She fell silent and began to suck. He couldn’t help but smile. “There we go.”

  Elise climbed to her feet, legs shaking. “What did you do to it? Is it dead?”

  Her gums pressed into his knuckle. Her face scrunched. Fairly typical baby business. “She’s just fine.”

  Satisfied, Elise turned to study Samael. He twitched on the ice. Blood bubbled over his lips. “Mercy,” he whispered.

  “Mercy,” Elise agreed.

  She stabbed him again—through the eye, this time.

  He stopped twitching.

  James felt a surge of vindication as he bounced and swayed over the body of the fallen angel, cradling the last baby Samael would ever try to kill. It didn’t bring back all the children who had died in Africa, Egypt, or France. But for the parents who would get to take their child home that day, everything was going to be just fine.

  “We need to get rid of him,” Elise said.

  He had a spell for that, but James’s hands were still occupied, and the little girl didn’t seem to show any inclination to release his finger. “Book of Shadows. Front jacket pocket.”

  Elise tugged it out. He directed her to remove a page about halfway through and hand it to him. The infant didn’t stir when he whispered a word of power and carefully flicked the spell at Samael.

  His feathers caught fire, and the flames crept over his flesh, which dried and curled like flakes of paper.

  “Close the piggyback,” Elise said.

  He silently terminated the bond, severing his thoughts and emotions from hers.

  It was a relief—the burning of her palms immediately vanished, and so did her rage. He felt empty, and was glad for it.

  She bowed her head over the smoldering remains of the fallen angel. Her expression didn’t change, but she clos
ed her eyes and rested her chin on her hands as though in prayer.

  He waited until the baby began to fuss, grunting and kicking her legs, and then he said, “We should go.”

  Elise straightened. Her cheeks were dry, and Samael was nothing but cinders.

  She went to Malcolm and slapped his cheeks a few times. It didn’t wake him up, but he was breathing. She pulled him over her shoulders in a fireman’s carry. “What’s the baby doing?” she asked, hefting Malcolm’s limp body.

  “Judging by those noises? Probably trying to fill her diaper.”

  Elise gave him a very, very wide berth as they headed downstairs.

  They turned the infant over to the nurse. Karolina wept to see her unharmed, and then gave them a private room for Malcolm to recover in. He snored softly as Elise dropped him on the hospital bed.

  “I don’t think he’s even unconscious,” James said, exasperated. He shoved the kopis’s legs onto the bed. “I think he saw Samael and fell asleep.” Elise flopped into the chair by the door and covered her face with her hands. He hesitated, wondering if he should try to comfort her, or apologize, or say anything at all. “Samael…”

  “I don’t want to talk about him.”

  “Are you all right?”

  “Fine.” She rubbed a hand over her bandaged forearm. Seeing her scratch at the new scar made James’s itch, too. “It’s too late to change your mind now, you know.”

  “I wouldn’t, even if I could.” He sighed. “I’m sorry, Elise. About the beach. I hope you don’t… well. You know. It’s not you.” She didn’t say anything. After an awkward moment, he repeated, “Sorry.”

  She gave him a steady stare that told him nothing about what she was thinking.

  That was the closest thing they would have to a discussion on the subject for quite a few years.

  PART SIX

  Godslayer

  XI

  NOVEMBER 2009

  The ethereal city hung suspended over Reno, defying gravity and common sense. James could see it from the hill behind his house. A helicopter buzzed through the ash-fogged sky, and he shielded his eyes against the sting of dust to watch it approach the city.