Death's Avatar (The Descent Series) (5 page)

He blew air out of his lips. “Maybe you’ll
have a family someday. Maybe you’ll understand then.”

“Not a chance in hell,” she said.

Bryce and Diego. Elise didn’t know any kopes
named Bryce and Diego, and she didn’t
want
to know them.
Whenever she ran across other hunters, like her, they were always a
disappointment—too weak, too emotional, or too fixated on her
gender. She had never met another kopis she couldn’t hate, and that
included her ex-boyfriend. She wouldn’t go into a fight with anyone
but James or McIntyre.

So Elise armed herself and went into the
undercity.

Once, when Elise was very young, her parents
had visited the Council of Dis on the sixth level of Hell.

It was hardly a family vacation. Even though
her father tried to provide what he called “cultural context,” the
horrors were too much for her young mind. It would have been too
much for anyone.

Demons kept humans in pens as slaves.
Man-flesh was fried and sold in booths along rivers of magma.
People were strung up by their ankles and skinned while others
watched from cages. Skulls decorated doorways. Bones were worn as
jewelry, crafted into furniture, and traded as currency.

For the infernal, it was sheer bliss. For
Elise, it was a good reason for her to enjoy slaughtering every
demon whose path she crossed. In Hell or on Earth, every demon was
the same: a brutal, blood-hungry murderer.

And she was about to visit a demon city
alone.

The entrance was easy to locate. Demons left
telltale marks to help each other find their dens: a stack of
rocks, a symbol carved into a tree, a sign with demonic text
written in graffiti on the back.

She found the trap door in the basement of a
shop five miles away. It was dirty and smelled like a latrine, but
the mark on the wall was unmistakable.

Elise descended the narrow steps. The air
became still as the world above was blocked out, and soon, she only
had her flashlight as a guide. When she finally reached the bottom,
her legs were weak, her nerves were ragged, and one sword was
drawn.

She took a deep breath and pushed
through.

The undercity should have been a home away
from home for the horrors that lived on Earth. It
should
have been teeming with life.

But it was motionless. The buildings were
rotten from time and mildew, and faced the path with open doors.
Empty.

Where were the demons?

Elise took a step forward and her foot
connected with something soft. She knew without having to look that
it was a body, and once she recognized the first, she saw the
rest—lumpy shapes spread across the uneven ground of the
cavern.

She knelt to examine the body at her feet.
It had the same marks as the corpses of the humans on the surface.
Bones gnawed by dull teeth, missing flesh, shattered skull. The
tolling of the bells had struck underground, too.

Stomach acid soured the back of her mouth as
she slipped through the undercity, stepping around bodies and
avoiding sinkholes. Something smelled like brimstone.

She strode through the city, focusing on the
path. Elise didn’t want to see the racks where they hung slaves for
sale. She didn’t want to see the demons—many of which were
indistinguishable from humans—that lay in bloody piles.

It looked so similar to Dis. There were even
skulls over the doorways. They grinned at her with missing teeth
and dusty eye sockets.

Many of the homes had pens in front of them,
too. In Dis, it was where they kept their more docile slaves. In
this undercity, there were strange, grotesque skeletons
instead—unholy things that looked like a mix of pig and human.
Chills rolled down her spine. She refocused on the street.

So many dead. The air was thick with it.

Elise ducked out of one cavern into the
next, following a short tunnel that had been carved by a stream. It
let out into a murky pool.

Something scraped on the shore. She lifted
her swords, gripping the hilts so tightly that her arms
trembled.

A dark form on the ground moved, then
groaned. A survivor.

Elise made a wide circle around it,
squinting through the dim red glow. It looked like a human, but no
human had skin so papery-thin that the outlines of its bones were
visible. Its eyes twitched open. They were completely black.

“
Tikest vo
,” it whispered in a
quavering voice. That was the demon language. James spoke it, but
Elise didn’t.

“Don’t move,” she said.

It gave another groan, and spoke again, this
time in Latin. “Help me.”

Cautiously, she sheathed one of the swords
and knelt at its side. The young nightmare was dying. Its skin
faded in and out of Elise’s vision. For a few seconds it looked
like a skeleton with a tangle of innards; then it faded back.

Nightmares couldn’t be killed by physical
means—it could suffer for centuries without disappearing.

“I need to find the clock,” she said.

A pale hand reached for her. She jerked
back. “It hurts,” said the nightmare. “Help me. Please.”

Elise set her jaw. “Do you know where it
is?” After a moment, it nodded. “I need to find it.”

The skin faded. The nightmare shivered.
“This path goes down,” it said. “Down. Beyond the Temple of Yatam—a
stair. Down, down, down.”

“Is that where the chamber is?”

Its skeletal hand touched her arm. Elise’s
skin crawled. “The door is behind the statue.” Its black eyes
begged. “Please.”

She didn’t have her exorcism charms, but the
blade of her sword was carved with some of the same symbols. She
slid the falchion between two of its ribs. “
Crux sacra sit mihi
lux. Non draco sit mihi dux. Vade retro, Satana, nunquam suade mihi
vana. Sunt mala quae libas. Ispe venena bibas.
” The sword
glowed briefly. The demon’s eyes fell closed. “Return to the Hell
in which you belong. Begone.”

Its hand slipped off her arm, and a moment
later, the body was gone. She stood over the place it had laid,
staring at the empty ground. Killing demons was usually satisfying,
but this time, she felt nothing.

“Be at peace,” Elise said to the empty
chamber, sheathing her sword. She was surprised to mean it.

There was only one other path leading down
from the cavern. Elise took it. It sloped into darkness, away from
the red glow of the undercity, and she followed it down, down,
down.

It took her an hour to reach the Temple of
Yatam. The path opened into a quiet chamber with smooth walls. A
stream spilled down the rocks to her right in a frothy mist,
illuminated by the flickering glow of blue flame.

The only thing that made the room look like
a temple were nine columns surrounding a faceless statue. It stared
at her without eyes. Elise edged around it. As the nightmare said,
there was a stair behind the statue, spiraling deeper into the
ground. The air grew warmer and warmer as she descended.

Distantly, through the earth, Elise could
hear the clock. Every swing of its pendulum gently rocked
everything around her. Rock groaned. Dust showered from the roof of
the stairwell. The stairs felt like they swayed from side to
side—the slightest motion that made the entire world vibrate.

Tick… tock…
The clock echoed through
the air.

At first, she didn’t realize she heard it
with her ears. But then she came upon a doorway and stumbled
through… and she saw it.

The clock stood at the end of a very long
chamber with sloping walls. Elise wouldn’t have been able to reach
its face if she stood on James’s shoulders.

The dagger-shaped pendulum rocked in time
with every beat. It pulsed through her and made it hard to breathe.
The hands on the face crept toward the place the twelve should have
been—and all six were going to align simultaneously.

Dusty skeletons lay on platforms around the
edges of the room. Scraps of red cloth hung from the bones,
although time had eaten most of the robes away. They trembled with
every
tick
and
tock
of the swinging pendulum.

Elise made her way through the room,
stepping around metal grates that blasted hot air. She peered into
one as she passed. It glowed red faintly, as though there were
fires miles below.

She had to climb onto another platform to
reach the body of the clock. It was almost too loud to approach.
Elise drew her left-hand sword as she peered into the workings of
the clock. Something throbbed in the depths of its cogs—a
heart.

Why hadn’t the hour struck yet?

She didn’t wait to find out. There had to be
attendants somewhere close.

Make it fast
.

Bracing herself, Elise seized the handle on
the cage of its body and swung it open.

A distant
thud
rocked the pyramid.
The platform pitched beneath her feet. An invisible hand smashed
into her chest, shoving her away from the clock.

She soared through the air and struck the
opposite wall. The sword clattered out of her hand. Elise collapsed
onto a grate and the metal seared her skin.

The
tick tock
was louder than before.
The beating heart thrummed. And when she rolled over, her face came
up against a pair of bare feet. Her gaze traveled up bare legs.

The woman wore a necklace of skulls. Her
dark hair was tangled with teeth, her dagger was carved of stone,
and her hips were draped in folds of leather. The silhouettes of
demons framed her—dozens of them. The stink of brimstone was
strong.

“What a surprise,” said the goddess in
perfect Latin.

Elise leaped for her sword.

Something connected with her head from
behind. It cracked her skull and rattled her brain.

A flash of white light—and then
darkness.

Elise could see the sky.

Her eyes opened to slivers. There was a
window above her—an open square too small for a human to slip
through. The sky was a churning mass of violet and crimson.

No, wait. That wasn’t a sky at all. It was
smoke from the fires beneath the clock.

Elise was still inside the pyramid. But she
was in a separate room, with the same jagged gray stone and hazy
air. Her eyes and throat burned with it.

She had been chained to the wall. Her hip
burned, and she shifted her legs out from under her, stretching out
to see a mess of blood smearing her shirt. When had she been
injured?

“That came from my children. They wanted a
taste.”

Elise twisted around, trying to see the
speaker, but the goddess stood beyond her field of vision. Her
motion was limited by the shackles. “Who are you?”

The response came right behind her ear. “I
am the cold kiss of death,” she whispered, “and you can never
defeat me.”

Elise’s stomach churned. “Let me go.”

“No. You chose to come. Now you must live
with that choice—and die for it.”