Death's Hand, A Dark Urban Fantasy (The Descent Series)

by SM Reine

  One by one, each body decayed and blew away, leaving the street empty.

  Except for one body, laying in the middle of the sidewalk and surrounded by cratered concrete.

  James.

  She climbed over the rubble, almost slipping on a rebar as she made her way to his side. He looked like he had been thrown, too, but he had gone through a window. Her sword was still in his chest. She wrenched it free with a sick slurping sound.

  Pressing her fingers into his throat, she held her breath. It was stupid, it was useless to hope, but she had to be sure.

  There was no pulse, of course. Nobody could survive getting stabbed in the heart—not even the vessel of Death’s Hand.

  Elise bowed her head over his, pressing her mouth to the top of his head. His hair smelled like brimstone, plaster, and his shampoo. “I’m sorry,” she murmured, eyes burning. “I’m so sorry.”

  Now she knew why she felt so hollow inside.

  Was it supposed to hurt this bad? Was she supposed to feel like a fist had wrenched her heart from its chest, leaving a gaping void under her ribs? She had never felt such a thing. Not when her dog died as a child, nor when her parents left her with James’s aunt because they moved faster without her. Not even when Pamela Faulkner died.

  Her shoulders shook. She couldn’t breathe. Elise tilted her head back, squeezing her eyes shut and gritting her teeth against the ache swelling inside of her gut.

  A ragged wail tore from her, shattering the silence of the night.

  Her fingers dug into James’s chest, slippery with his blood. Becoming bound as kopis and aspis was an oath: to stand shoulder-to-shoulder in their battles, to protect one another, and when the time came—die together. She was supposed to guard him. She wasn’t meant to kill him.

  He gave up everything for her. Everything.

  His skin cooled to the temperature of the air. Elise wanted to cover him in a blanket to give him the modesty in death Ann hadn’t given him for the last few hours of his life. He shouldn’t have to be naked and vulnerable when everything else had been stripped from them.

  Elise’s chest hitched. “James,” she whispered.

  And a voice whispered back.

  Elise…

  Her eyes fell on the stone staff. It was a few feet away in the crater, no longer alive even though it steamed slightly in the damp air.

  All the mighty power of Death’s Hand was gone, boiled down to a tiny flicker of demonic energy inside the cylinder. It gave a fraction of a roll onto its side, barely more than an inch.

  Elise…

  It was what was left of vedae som matis, but it sounded very much like James.

  That tiny flicker of energy tugged at her.

  Elise stepped away from James without thinking about it, sliding down one of the craters to reach for the stone cylinder. Her fingers hesitated just over its surface. She could feel the heat radiating from it.

  It wasn’t just demonic power. It was necromantic power, too—a little bit of the demon, a little bit of Ann, a little bit of James.

  She glanced up at his body again, and the grief sliced through her anew.

  He would never cast another spell. They would never have Sunday breakfast together again. She would never see him smile again, that special soft smile that she never saw him aim at Stephanie.

  Unless…

  She closed her hand on the stone cylinder even as every bit of her common sense screamed no! Elise had been tortured by the death goddess using the stone as a knife. She had felt it wrapping around her flesh as Death’s Hand tried to possess her. It was the reason James was dead in the first place.

  The flicker of light was fading fast.

  She knelt over James, gripping the stone in both hands as she studied him. His skin was gray. There had to be some way to use what was left of its power, but she didn’t know what to do with it.

  How did James do magic? A circle of power. Incantations. Elise wasn’t a witch. She couldn’t do any of that.

  She leaned over him. The stone vibrated, and she touched it very gently to the wound on his chest.

  Light erupted from the stone.

  Shocked, Elise tried to let go, but her fingers stayed welded to its surface. Heat rushed through her fingers, up her arms, and into her body.

  The symbols tracing the stone doubled and split from its surface, one set rising from the vessel in burning white lines. They swirled over her body and ruffling the little hairs at the back of her neck. The golden light filled her vision until she couldn’t see anything around herself.

  It wasn’t vedae som matis she felt in that moment. It was something more, so much more, like staring into eternity, and the only anchor keeping her from spilling out into nothingness was her grip on the vessel. Some great beast pulsed in the beyond, rubbing past Elise through the marks. It wasn’t demonic, or even angelic. It was something greater still.

  The golden fire shifted from Elise’s arms to her palms, glowing through her gloves. The power beat in time with her heart.

  God, the power.

  She felt as though she had never lived before. Wouldn’t anyone kill to feel this energy for any length of time—to gaze into forever and clutch it in her grasp?

  Through the light, she could see James sprawled on the ground, but she could see the dead for miles and beyond. It wasn’t the corpses themselves—those had all dissolved with the exorcism—but a vast, endless ocean of souls, animal and demon and otherwise. They formed the Earth beneath her, and Life roared above her as the sky.

  She could resurrect anybody. Elise could put her hands upon someone laid to rest a millennia ago and bring them back at a whim. She could touch any number demons she had sent to Hell and reanimate them as her own. She might even be able to improve upon what Ann had done—she could make them as alive as she was. Their hearts would beat for Elise.

  James brought Elise down from her high. The instant she thought of him, the souls around her came into focus, and she could feel him clearly. His soul glowed brighter than any other in the vast ocean.

  The power began to slip from her grasp.

  She gazed down at his face, and even through the light, she could see the triangle of his jaw, the day-old stubble, the well-defined cheekbones.

  Elise didn’t really want power. She just wanted James.

  Her hands overflowed with the symbols needed to call a soul into a body, to make the heart beat and the brain function. The magic wanted to be used, so Elise didn’t try to resist. She laid her hands upon James’s temples. She opened to him like a flower’s petals parting to the sun, and the symbols from the cylinder flowed from the sword into her shield.

  James’s soul, torn apart so violently by vedae som matis, began to mend as Elise watched.

  His heart beat once. Twice.

  The rhythm sped until its steady beat matched her own. Elise’s lungs expanded, and his inflated as well, drawing air through his lips and into his chest. It was strained, difficult at first, and she labored to breathe for them both, but it became easier with every breath.

  The blood began flowing. Color faded into his skin, and warmth spread into his muscles and tendons. Electrical impulses sparked in the air between them, and something seemed to click on in his brain.

  Her heart beat with his, one muscle in two chests. Slowly, so slowly, Elise’s heart became her own again, but even as she left, his continued to beat. It wasn’t as clean a cut as she would have expected. Some of Elise remained in James, and some of him remained in her, but when he kept breathing it wasn’t her life that made his lungs work.

  Only when his body functioned did his soul return. It drifted into him, as softly as a feather fluttering into the ground. It settled into his body with a soft sigh that curled through the room, and she suddenly felt as though a hole inside of her had filled. She was complete again.

  James…

  Eternity shut down, withdrawing from Elise. The burning glow of her hands flickered, then disappeared. The power blew out of her ag
ain. The gold light emanating from the stone died, leaving nothing but rock in its place.

  The world went dark.

  Elise sagged, suddenly weak. Her eyes cleared and she could see the casino once more. Everything was still.

  And James coughed.

  He rolled onto his side. His legs drew up into his chest, curling around the sword wound. Every cough brought a fresh groan of pain, punctuated with another cough when he sucked in the dusty air. “James,” Elise said, reaching out to roll him onto his back again. Her hands were shaking.

  He frowned up at her, brow furrowed with pain, confusion. His eyes were clear now the poison was flushed out of his system, but the stab wound in his chest trickled blood. “Elise?” James’s jaw chattered as he spoke, his skin clammy underneath her bare fingertips. “What happened? What’s going on?”

  “Oh, James,” Elise said, her voice cracking. She rubbed at the blood on his cheeks, wiping it away with her gloves, and then gave up, throwing her arms around his neck.

  Her relief was so strong that she couldn’t hold it inside. A laugh bubbled from her throat. James stared at her as though she had gone crazy, his hands clenched over his wound.

  He would have questions later, and so would others. His resurrection would be a beacon that called to demons and angels for thousands of miles around them through a thousand dimensions. There would be repercussions.

  But for the moment, Elise didn’t care—not one bit.

  He was alive, and nothing else mattered.

  XXII

  The hospital released James the next morning. They were too busy to keep anyone longer than a couple of hours—the citywide coma had inflected tens of thousands of injuries, from car accidents to cigarette fires and people falling down stairs, and the hospital was swamped.

  There was no accounting for the missing hours, but the news claimed that all the damage and dead were caused by an earthquake. It was a stupid excuse. Elise couldn’t imagine anyone falling for it, even though the story was discussed worldwide as fact. She flicked through the channels on the hospital TV and saw it on every major news network.

  “Can you believe this?” Elise asked, shutting off the television and dropping the remote onto James’s bed. He was dressing behind a curtain while the nurses prepared his bed for the next patient. “Who comes up with this stuff?”

  “Lord only knows,” he muttered.

  Stephanie stopped by to drop off a few forms and brush a kiss over his lips. “I’ll visit you as soon as I can,” she whispered, lingering in the door. “Maybe I should take you home.”

  “He already has a ride,” Elise said.

  “You’re both on enough hydrocodone that I think—”

  “It’s fine, Stephanie,” he said. “Thank you.”

  But it was true that Elise and James were both unsteady on their feet as they carefully made their way to the parking garage. Normally, Elise wouldn’t have taken any of the painkillers they prescribed to her, but the injury on her shoulder was bad enough that she caved in. She was still better than James. He could barely walk.

  He sighed as she settled him into the front seat of the car, shutting his eyes.

  “Do you need help with the seat belt?”

  “I was stabbed, not paralyzed,” he said, but he couldn’t work up the energy to sound annoyed.

  He fell asleep again before Elise reached the street. Being possessed by a major demon, exorcised, killed, and brought back to life seemed to be pretty exhausting. James hadn’t been awake longer than fifteen minutes since his resurrection.

  Elise was hardly any better. She situated James in bed and passed out on his couch, waking up ten hours later to find he was still asleep, too. She staggered back to her car and slipped into the duplex without waking Betty.

  Before the sun rose, she was awake and gone.

  She stayed at the office over the next week while her injuries quickly knit themselves, avoiding Betty and Anthony and the long conversations they would need to have. Brushing her teeth in the sink and sleeping stretched out on her floor, Elise took her solitary time to mend—and seek out new clients online to replace David Nicholas and Craven’s.

  But Elise couldn’t stay in her office forever. James called her phone at least three times a day, and although he never left a message, she was sure he must have been getting irate. Betty was—and she texted about a hundred times to make sure Elise knew it.

  By the time the next weekend rolled around, her face and body completely healed other than her shoulder, and she finally gave in to the calls.

  Elise found the Motion and Dance parking lot full. The main dance hall was occupied by a dance fitness class, so she found James in the back room supervising a “creative ballet” class for preschoolers, which wasn’t a dance class as much as a play group filled with girls in tutus. He looked healthy but pale, slumped in a chair in the corner to watch the kids bounce around in pink leotards with a long-suffering expression.

  She took a few minutes to observe him silently. She had missed him over the week, even as she hid out in solitude. There was a little color in his cheeks and a hint of beard growth at his jaw. He looked like he had on any other day. Normal.

  Something tense inside of her eased. She hadn’t really thought she would come to find him a revenant—or something worse—but he didn’t look like he had been hurt by her little act of necromancy at all. Elise stood behind his chair and cleared her throat.

  “Isn’t this Candace’s class?” Elise asked, standing over his shoulder.

  James looked up, and his eyes widened. “Elise!” He tried to stand too quickly and winced, gripping his chest. She grabbed his arm.

  “Hey,” she said. “Relax. Sit down.”

  “Where have you been? I haven’t seen you all week.”

  “I’ve been healing.” She pointed at the last of the yellow bruises around her eye. Showing him her shoulder would have been a lot more impressive, but he didn’t need to know he had eaten her flesh.

  James eased back into the chair, studying her face. “It must have been terrible if you’re not healed yet.”

  She ignored the implied question. “Where’s Candace?”

  “Her husband dropped a pot of boiling water on himself during the, uh, earthquake,” he said. “First degree burns. She’s taking care of him. Excuse me, just a moment.” James clapped his hands and raised his voice. “You! Penny! I told you no running!”

  Elise had to hide a smile behind her hand. James liked children about as much as he liked food poisoning.

  “I can finish out the class,” she suggested.

  He sagged with relief. “Thank God. I’ll be in the lobby.”

  Elise supervised the last twenty minutes of creative ballet. She didn’t like kids any more than James did, but she had “taught” the class herself while she was still in college, so she didn’t mind doing it one more time. Trying to convince a dozen four year olds to plié was a great exercise in patience.

  When the class ended, James and Elise sat together in the lobby as the parents took their kids away. His friendly smile looked authentic until the door swung shut, and then he grimaced.

  “Those people would do better with a daycare than a dance class,” he muttered.

  “They pay the bills. Your children’s ballet classes are about half your income.”

  “I suppose. Would you like to explain why I’ve seen Betty more this last week than I’ve seen you? As you can tell, I really could have used your help around the studio. And not just with classes.”

  “I thought you would have Stephanie nursing you back to health.”

  “She’s visited when she has time,” he admitted, “but there’s very little of that. Betty said you haven’t been coming home while she’s awake.”

  Elise shrugged, and then winced. Her bra strap rubbed against the bandages on her shoulder. “I have a lot of work to catch up on. I’m busy.”

  “Your work ethic couldn’t have anything to do you’re your roommate’s ince
ssant questions, could it?”

  “That might have been a factor.”

  “She’s been here every day. In fact, you missed her by a half hour,” James said. “I’ve never realized anyone could be so damn inquisitive about demons. If you wanted to tell her the truth, you could have also had the decency to make yourself available for questioning.”

  “I’ll keep that in mind for my next earth-shattering revelation,” she said.

  Something in her voice made him give her a sad smile. “What happened that night?”

  “Didn’t Betty tell you?”

  “She didn’t have all the details. I don’t remember anything after our investigation at the cemetery myself, except bits and pieces of trying to sleep that evening.”

  That was a lot of empty ground to cover. Elise sighed and leaned her head on his shoulder. “It was Ann. She was working for Death’s Hand. She tried to fight me, and they both lost. I don’t want to talk about it.”

  “Betty told me as much, but that doesn’t explain why I’m healing from several major injuries. Or what happened to almost two hours of everybody’s life.”

  “Your wounds aren’t that major. The doctors said they missed your major organs.” Of course, Elise was confident that she had actually punctured one very significant organ, but resurrecting him had healed almost everything. “I have a question.”

  “Yes?”

  “Ann said that you hadn’t told me the truth yet. That there was something about you that would…” She trailed off, gazing at the smooth line of his nose and the curve of his chin. Ann said I would want you to die. “She said you hadn’t told me something.”

  “Demons are liars,” James said.

  “She wasn’t a demon. I’m not sure she was evil at all. I think she was… confused.”

  “Then she must have been confused on this point as well. I have no idea what she’s talking about.” He spoke forcefully, and his hand tightened on hers. “You know you can trust me, Elise. I would never lie to you.”