Death's Avatar (The Descent Series) (4 page)

He slid to the ground with a groan. “I think
it’s dislocated. My knee. I can’t walk—can’t feel my foot—"

Elise knelt by him. His leg looked crooked
through the slacks. She sliced open the pant leg, and her jaw
tensed when she saw the unnatural twist of his kneecap. Seeing it
made the pain worse.

“I’m going to relocate it,” she said. “Try
to relax.”

“Maybe we should wait—”

But she had already put both hands on his
leg and twisted.

There was something immensely cathartic
about cleaning blood off her falchions.

When the sun rose, Elise sat in the common
area of the village, wiping down her blades with a soft rag. It
used to be someone’s shirt, but they didn’t need it anymore.

There were more bodies this time than after
the tenth hour. Shopkeepers, farmers, laborers, friends and mothers
and brothers. All dead. Losing so many lives was hardly a victory.
It made her tense. Her neck felt like it might never unknot.

But cleaning her blades and gently oiling
the metal—it was better than a professional massage, better than
the comforting burn of whiskey, even better than her ex-boyfriend’s
ministrations. It made her feel a little less guilty to be sitting
next to a child whose face had been torn off. Just a little.

Elise walked into an abandoned house. The
doors had been left open, and rain made the carpet squish under her
feet. She used the phone to call McIntyre.

“Fly to Guatemala. I need you here,” she
said.

His responding silence was long.
“Elise…”

“Did you see what happened with the last
bell?”

“How could I miss it? It was a massacre in
the Warrens.” He paused, and Elise thought she heard his girlfriend
crying in the background. “You’d laugh if you saw how the news is
trying to explain the deaths away. They’re calling it a new
outbreak of SARS. Those mundane bastards will make anything up to
avoid seeing the truth.”

“There won’t be eyes to see if you don’t
help me,” Elise said. “My aspis is out of commission. I need
backup.”

“And my aspis is pregnant.”

Nausea flipped Elise’s stomach. She gazed at
the body on the couch. Flies were starting to cloud around it. “If
you want Leticia to live to give birth, you need to help.”

“Screw you,” he said without real ire.

“You can be down here in twelve hours. We’ll
go get this together. It’ll be the Grand Canyon all over again.
Call some of your friends—I know you have a lot of them.”

“And I’m the only one you have?”

That was probably meant to sting. “I have
better things to do than make friends. Your priorities are fucked
up.”

This was an argument they had been through a
dozen times. McIntyre switched tactics. “Would you leave James to
save the world?”

Yes. That was the plan, after all.

“Just get down here,” she said. She gave him
the coordinates of the condominium. He said he wrote them down.
They hung up.

Elise found the Book of Shadows in a puddle
of mud. Half of the pages were stuck together. She didn’t need to
be a witch to tell that they were ruined.

She stole a bottle of pills from an
unoccupied pharmacy to soften the blow. James was covered in sweat
and half-asleep when she returned to the condo on the beach.
“Here,” she said, folding two pills into his hand. “Sorry it took
so long. Have you slept?”

“Barely.”

He swallowed them while she looked at his
knee. It had swollen to twice its normal size. She suspected there
were torn ligaments and arterial damage—the kind of thing that
would require surgery if he planned on walking again. “You’ll get
over this in no time,” Elise lied.

He laughed. “Good thing I don’t dance
anymore.”

She took an avocado from her jacket, slicing
it lengthwise and prying the pit out with her knife. He took half.
“At least all the dead people mean we don’t have to pay for
food.”

He stopped laughing.

By the time he ate the avocado and some
plantains, James’s color had improved, and he didn’t look like he
was in nearly as much pain. “We can’t move you to a city for
surgery,” she said. “We don’t have time.”

“I know. But I think I can heal myself, with
your help… and the Book of Shadows.”

She handed the Book to him. His face
fell.

“Is it enough?” she asked.

He flipped through the pages and gave a hard
swallow. “It will have to be. I can do a ritual.”

“Why? You’ve written spells more powerful
than this. You could fix yourself in a half second.” She took the
Book of Shadows, flipping through it to one of the pages in the
very back. James jerked it out of her hands.

“All my benign healing spells were
destroyed,” he said.

“So use one that isn’t benign.”

“Do you see this?” He turned it to show her
a page. It was completely obscured with ink. “This is all I have
left. It would ‘fix me,’ but requires a small sacrifice.”

“How small?”

“If I used you as the subject, it would also
render you unconscious for a week.”

She couldn’t afford to be useless anymore
than he could. She considered the page. “I could get someone else.
A survivor from a nearby village.”

“This spell might kill a normal person.”

“That’s dark magic, James. Your aunt would
be ashamed.”

He snapped the Book shut. “As I said, we’ll
use a ritual.”

James made a list of supplies, and she
collected everything from the village of the dead. The bodies were
in the same places she had left them. Nobody was coming back to dig
graves.

When she returned with the stones he
needed—pried from cheap jewelry at a tourist shop—and some herbs,
James had created a circle of power out of pillow feathers on the
bed. “What next?” she asked, eyeing his circle dubiously. He was a
powerful witch, but she wasn’t sure he was powerful enough to work
with such a weak circle.

“I’m weak. Let me piggyback for
strength.”

Elise didn’t hesitate to offer him a
hand.

He took it, and his magic washed through
her. It sent warmth cascading from the top of her skull to her
toes. Her awareness of James’s senses came to her one at a
time—first, the smell of rain grew stronger, and then she felt his
knee (which hurt as bad as she imagined), and then she glimpsed her
face as though peering through his eyes. Her cheeks and eyes were
hollow. She looked skeletal.

His emotions came upon her last. He was
tired. Worried. Relieved to have painkillers. Happy to see Elise.
Angry at all the devastation. Too much, too much. Once the power
securely fastened around them, it faded, but Elise was left
unsettled. James
felt
too much.

He leaned back against the wall with a low
chuckle. “I didn’t realize I looked that bad.” Of course, he had
seen through her eyes at the same time she saw through his.

She rubbed her own aching knee. “You’re
fine.”

Elise followed his diagrams to apply the
stones and herbs to his leg. James activated several spells from
his Book and left them on the bedside as they worked.

“Careful now,” he said when she pulled out
the bandages.

She closed her eyes to process the
information coming silently from James. He showed her the motions
to make, and she did.

When she was done, he eased back against the
wall with a groan. “How long?” she asked.

“I’ll be dancing again by tomorrow.”

Elise could tell he was lying through the
bond. It would be days before he was in service again—and with a
crippled Book of Shadows.

Her knee throbbed. James looked sympathetic.
“I can lift the bond.”

“No. You’ll heal faster while piggybacked.”
She locked what was left of the Book in its case. “I called
McIntyre again,” she said, just to change the subject.

“Is he coming?”

“Yes.”

“Good.”

There was nothing else to say, after
that.

Rain coursed down the eaves of the condo.
Ocean rushed up the beach like it was going to devour them, and
then receded after lapping at the wooden supports. It made the
condo feel just this side of dangerous, though James was safe on
the bed. He kept Elise in the corner of his eye. She stood on the
edge of the porch, and it made him nervous. He could easily imagine
an errant wave rising to slap her off the balcony.

The spray blew back her hair as another
crest swept toward their temporary condo. A thin layer of water
sloshed over her feet. She reached out a hand so the rain drummed
on her exposed fingertips, and a thrill raced through his stomach
when he saw that her glove dangled from the other hand.

“Careful,” James said.

She turned her hand over so the rain fell on
her palm instead. “Who cares?” she muttered. “He can’t get me if
the world’s going to end anyway.”

“Let’s not test the theory. Come in and
close the door. Our room is getting wet.”

She pretended not to hear him. She did that
a lot.

James traced the outline of a symbol onto
tissue paper. He could feel the power vibrating in his wrists as he
wrote it. He had filled almost the entire notebook with spells
before it was damaged, one at a time. He could do it again.

His aunt had been the inventor of paper
magic, but he was the innovator. There were things she taught him
that nobody else knew—ways to store immense, unthinkable amounts of
power; methods of copying spells without performing them again; how
to distort a spell after binding it to the page—and the knowledge
was so dangerous that he seldom used it.

The only person he trusted to have in the
room while he worked was Elise, and she wasn’t paying any attention
to him. She was staring at the ocean and getting soaked.

He wrote the final curl of the symbol. The
page glowed with their shared power before fading.

James carefully stood, using a tall stick as
a crutch to stagger to the patio. The wind gusted around him. He
braced himself on the railing. “Come inside,” he said.

She trailed a finger along her palm. “Do you
think He can see when one of my gloves is off?”

He didn’t like discussing the subject. James
grabbed her arm and slid the glove back on. “You only get this
contemplative when you’re exhausted. And don’t forget, I can feel
what you’re thinking.” He tapped his temple.

Elise tucked her hands against her sides.
“It doesn’t matter. The twelfth hour is coming soon. I should be
searching.”

“You can’t do anything in this
downpour.”

Another wave sluiced over the patio. She
finally went inside, helping James settle in bed again.

They sat in silence with nothing to
entertain them but the thrum of magic as his knee knit itself
together.

He tried to remember the last time they had
sat together in comfortable silence for longer than a few minutes.
James couldn’t recall having ever done it before. They were always
on the run. “This is nice,” he said, surprising himself.

He was even more surprised when a smile
spread across Elise’s face. A real smile. “What if it was always
like this?”

“What, if we were in a monsoon with a
dislocated knee?”

“No,” she said, gesturing between them.
“Like… this. You and me. Not fighting. Not running.”

James studied her for a long moment—damp
hair stuck to her forehead, bruises on her jaw, bandages concealing
her arm. “It can’t ever be like this. We can’t stop running.”

“I know. But… what if we could?”

The question gave weight to the air between
them. James was tired, and it wasn’t just because of the healing.
He was tired of having no home. He was tired of trying to stay a
step ahead of the death that pursued them. In the past, he had
imagined what would happen if he could stop, and it involved
reconciling with Hannah and rejoining the coven, but James hadn’t
dwelled on those thoughts long. The fantasies hurt.

He tried to imagine stopping with Elise.
Living a normal life. He couldn’t fathom what that would be
like.

“It would be nice to teach again,” he said
slowly. “I could start a dance troupe.”

“I’ve always wanted to own a business.”

“Really? I didn’t know that.”

She shrugged. It wasn’t something they had
ever discussed. “Maybe I could be in your troupe. I could be a
professional with enough practice. I think it would be… fun.”

Those were the most words she had ever
strung together that didn’t have anything to do with dying.

She wrapped her fingers around his. Her
gloves were damp from rain, but her skin was warm. He pulled
back.

Elise wasn’t smiling anymore.

“It can’t ever happen,” he said.

“You should sleep,” she said, tipping a
couple more pills out of the bottle on the bedside. He swallowed
them. “You’ll heal faster.”

She was right. His eyes fell closed, and he
let himself relax as the painkillers kicked in. His breathing grew
deep and even, keeping time with the ocean, and he thought he could
almost hear Elise’s heartbeat. He could certainly feel the magic
knitting his knee as he dozed.

The fatigue of healing and magic was
powerful. It sucked him under.

He wasn’t sure how long he floated in the
gray haze before he felt lips on his forehead. “Take care of
yourself,” Elise whispered. It alarmed him on some distant level,
but he couldn’t rouse himself enough to figure out why.

When James woke up, the active bond had been
closed, and Elise was gone.

Elise gave McIntyre sixteen hours before
calling him back. He was still in Las Vegas when he answered.

“I’ve sent two of my friends down to help
you,” he said. “This guy, Bryce, and a kid called Diego—he’s
already close. They’re going to meet you at the condo. They should
only be four hours away, max.”

“You’re a goddamn bastard, Lucas
McIntyre.”