Death's Avatar (The Descent Series) (3 page)

Elise killed fourteen demons that day. She
knew this for a fact because she counted the skulls while piling
the bodies.

Once they were stacked, James tore a page
out of his Book of Shadows, flicked it at the pyre, and whispered a
word of power. They ignited in an instant bonfire, flushing Elise
with heat and scorching her eyebrows. The fire didn’t touch the
foliage around them. The misty drizzle couldn’t slow it.

“You’ve improved.” Elise didn’t sound
complimentary as much as exhausted. Her hair was stuck to the back
of her neck, and she wasn’t sure if she was soaked in rain or
sweat.

When the tenth hour chimed, the sky had
split with fire and gateways opened, dumping demons on top of Elise
and James. She killed anything that passed, but a lot of them had
scattered. The villages were going to be a mess. And if the rest of
the world was the same…

“Whoever is winding that clock isn’t playing
games.” James took several large steps back before flicking another
paper at the fire. The flames leaped fifty feet into the sky.

“At least we have this.” Elise lifted a
strip of skin between two fingers. She had skinned brands off one
of the demons. If she could find the symbols in Hume’s Almanac,
they would be able to determine the demons’ allegiance.

But it suddenly grew hot, and the skin
blackened and crumpled around the edges. She gave a shout and
dropped it. It was ash before it hit the ground. “What did you do?”
she asked, spinning on James.

His eyes were wide. “Nothing. That wasn’t
me.” He clapped his hands, and the flames on the bodies vanished in
a flash of smoke. There were no charred bodies where the fire had
been—not even bone fragments.

“Shit,” Elise said.

“Some greater demons clean up their minions
to destroy evidence. This must be one.” He groaned and rubbed a
hand through his hair, leaving a streak of white ash. “Fantastic.
At least that narrows it down to… oh, a few hundred demons.”

Elise sheathed her swords, inspected herself
for serious injuries—nothing worse than a few bleeding claw
marks—and started hiking back to the villages. James shadowed her.
They had been combing the area Vustaillo noted on the map for days
and hadn’t found anything but mud, ants, and several
rainstorms.

The village streets were empty of life when
they arrived. There hadn’t been many people before, but the few who
had stayed outdoors were dead now.

Elise and James turned a corner and startled
a group of feasting demons. They were ugly things, like living
grotesques hunched over half-eaten bodies with dirty fingernails
and leathery skin. Elise had never seen the likes of them. She
hoped she would never see them again.

She cut down the demons. They became ash a
few minutes later.

“I got a couple of the symbols,” James said.
He had written as many as he could before they ignited.

“Good. I have twenty seconds.”

He looked at her. “Twenty seconds of
what?”

“I timed the bells. There are twenty seconds
between from the start of one to the start of the next.”

“You timed them? While fighting?”

Elise shrugged.

“So that’s four minutes,”
she said. “For twelve bells. Four minutes from the first chime
until…”
The end of the
world
. She didn’t need to say it aloud.
“I’ll be back.”

Elise went into the corner shop. The owner
was dead behind the counter. She paused to close his eyes and pull
his shirt over his gutted belly before stealing change from the
drawer.

She called her answering
machine on the payphone. There was a message waiting for her, as
she knew there would be: “
It’s McIntyre. Call me.
”

He didn’t answer when she called him back.
She hoped he wasn’t dead. The Las Vegas territory was too big to
leave unprotected.

“I’m taking care of it,” she said, and then
she hung up.

Before returning to James, she detoured at
the post office, which was uninhabited by humans—living or dead.
There was one package addressed to “Bruce Kent.” She ripped open
the box, took out the copy of Hume’s Almanac sent by James’s former
coven, and threw the packaging in the trash.

She found James in the hostel two blocks
away.

“McIntyre called,” she said. James gave a
hum of interest without looking up from his Book of Shadows, where
he was copying another spell. “I think he heard the bells, too.
This is a global problem.”

“I agree.”

She put Hume’s Almanac in James’s backpack
and shouldered her own. He followed suit. It was time to move on.
There would be more victims, more demons, more battles to fight
before they could find the clock.

“What happens with the
eleventh bell?” Elise asked. “What happens with the
twelfth
?”

James shook his head. “Let’s get to the
clock before we find out.”

They spent the next month absorbed in the
frustrating task of cleaning up after the tenth bell. Searching for
the entrance to the temple became secondary to flushing out demon
nests and dragging half-dead humans to safety.

“Let’s give it up,” Elise told him one
morning. “There are dozens more of those things hiding in the
jungle. It could take months to find them all. We don’t have
time.”

“They’re still killing. They’re too
dangerous.”

She didn’t like it, but she didn’t argue.
They continued picking off demons one by one during the evening and
searching for the clock during the day.

Time passed. They didn’t find any temples,
underground or otherwise. And an ugly thought crept up on James as
their futile search continued.

There was one obvious place they hadn’t
searched yet: the undercities themselves. The shadowy places that
demons lurked, out of humanity’s sight. Elise must have realized it
was the last place they hadn’t looked within a fifty mile radius,
just as he did. But neither of them spoke of it aloud. Going to the
undercities was suicide.

So they kept hunting, and the clock kept
ticking.

Elise went weeks without resting, but she
couldn’t keep moving forever. When she became so exhausted that she
almost failed to avoid decapitation by a stray demon, James picked
an abandoned condo in a village on the ocean and insisted they take
a day to sleep.

At first, she refused, but fatigue won. For
a few blessed hours, she slept.

He studied as she rested, working his way
through Hume’s Almanac with the drawings of the demons’ brands.
There had been a letter from the high priestess tucked in the back,
but no note from Hannah. She had never written to him, not in five
years, and her rebuke almost didn’t sting this time.

When he got through the second section of
the book without finding anything useful, he dropped it on the
chair with a sigh, leaned back, and massaged his sore eyes. He
needed reading glasses, but every time he bought a pair, they got
broken in a fistfight or dropped down a canyon or eaten by
monstrous demon larvae.

James went to the bedroom door. Curled up in
the stolen bed, Elise looked almost childlike, if he ignored the
injuries. Her face was relaxed and unguarded. She didn’t twitch
when he sat on the edge of the bed. How long had it been since she
slept?

His heart ached as he watched a curl in
front of her nose sway with every breath. The urge to protect her
was ridiculous. There was nothing he could fend off that she
couldn’t. But he knew, watching her sleep, that he would do
anything to defend her. Anything.

James retrieved a page from his Book of
Shadows. He touched it to her skin. The cuts closed. The bruises on
her face yellowed. She sighed without awakening.

He went back to reading Hume’s Almanac as
darkness fell. He was beginning to doze in his chair when the sky
blossomed with light and the eleventh bell chimed.

James jerked upright. Elise was already
standing in the doorway, a falchion in each hand. Her hair stuck up
in the back where she had been laying on it.

“Let’s go,” she said.

Elise’s style of fighting was poetry in
motion.

In his other life, before becoming an aspis,
James was a dancer. It was a family thing—his parents did it, his
sister did it, and he did it, too. Theoretical witchcraft was his
passion, but choreography and teaching paid the bills. It never
occurred to him to do anything else with his life until he was
called upon to find Elise.

He had been in ballet productions and won
ballroom competitions with Hannah in his arms. The Argentine tango
was his favorite. Grace and beauty in the lines of the body, the
arch of the arm, the curve of the leg—these were his expertise.

But never had he seen a dancer more
beautiful than Elise wielding her twin falchions.

Demons poured through the streets. Pillars
of flame flashed through the sky with each chime. The bells
reverberated through the earth, and James clung to a tree, barely
staying on his feet.

Elise slashed and stabbed, as light in her
hiking boots as she could have been in toe shoes. She was locked in
adagio with slavering grotesques. Ballon, aplomb, allongé—James’s
former students would have been envious to see it, if not for the
splattering blood.

People shrieked and fled. James wanted to
tell them to go inside, to lock themselves where it was safe, but
the sky fire and ravenous horde had driven them to mindless
fear.

Children fell under the jaws of the demons.
Not ten feet away, a man’s head was bashed against rocks. Elise
danced to her silent andante, slicing through flesh and bone. Her
swords glistened in the rain.

She climbed on top of a stall. Demons moved
to climb after her, but James flung a page at them. Before the rain
could soak it, he shouted.

A silent explosion rocked the air, knocking
the demons off their feet as though the hand of God had swatted
them aside. The ones still standing turned on James.

“
Ayuda
!”

An old man with his face covered in blood
ran down the street. He was followed by two of the grotesques, and
he reached desperately for Elise. She grabbed his forearm and
hauled him onto the stall. Then she leaped down, lashing out with
both feet. Skulls cracked.

Magic poured from James, swelling and
crashing with the flick of paper. He was a shining light in the
gloom, his Book of Shadows like a brilliant star. He set fires and
brought wind upon the demons.

There were too many. Dozens. Hundreds. The
jungle seethed.

He flipped through his Book of Shadows,
searching for a spell that could stop everything, to save the
people ripped open by blunt teeth. But then the earth rocked with
the eleventh bell and he was slammed against a wall. The Book flew
from his arms.

A demon crashed into him. He saw a flash of
bloody tongue a heartbeat before its heavy foot mashed into the
side of his knee.

James heard a wet crunch. He hit the ground.
The pain struck him a few seconds later.

He roared, gripping his leg. The demon fell
on him, pressing more than two hundred pounds of weight upon his
chest like the crush of a boulder. Its breath stank of acid.

“James!”

Teeth ripped into his sleeve. He shoved the
demon off of him, but another took its place.

And then it shrieked, blood sprayed out of
its severed neck, and disappeared. Elise stood over him where its
face had been. He couldn’t draw enough of a breath to thank
her.

She sheathed one sword before lifting. He
tried to put weight on his leg and cried out. “Lean on me,” she
said, pulling his arm over her shoulder.

“We can’t go—those people—the Book—”

“I’ll come back for it. Move!”

She dragged him from the village. Slowly, so
slowly, they fought their way into the jungle, where the trees grew
thick and the demons could not follow.