Death's Avatar (The Descent Series) (7 page)

Whispering a short prayer, James ripped a
handful of pages out of the Book and flew up the stairs to street
level.

Bryce blocked the doorway with his body.
Another one of the leathery gray demons had its teeth clamped down
on the arm of his leather jacket. Dozens more demons rushed down
the street.

James barely had time to register the sheer
number of bodies before they crashed upon them. He was lost in a
rush of blood and drool and growls. He dropped the shotgun. “Get
down!” he shouted to Bryce.

The kopis threw himself to the ground, and
James threw a scrap of paper.

Power ripped from him. A dozen hearts
stopped beating at once.

They fell like dominoes, but James didn’t
stop to watch it. He grabbed Bryce by the arm and hauled him to his
feet. “Move,” he said as the surviving demons clambered over their
dead brethren. “Now. Hurry!”

The men sprinted across the road and into
the jungle again. James could still hear Elise in the back of his
mind, but it was faint. After another minute, he couldn’t hear her
at all.

“Why aren’t we going down?” Bryce asked.

“We are going down,” James said. “But we’re
not taking the stairs.”

After an eternity of pain, Elise awoke.

She tried to sit up, but her hands couldn’t
find traction. She slipped on something soft and slick. She looked
down to see that it was a face with gaping eyes and no jaw.

Gasping, she jerked back. Something dug into
her leg—an exposed rib.

There was nowhere safe to move. She slid to
one side and rolled on top of a hairy chest with no head. When she
slipped to the other side, her hand fell on a scapula.

The realization that she was in a pit of
human meat came upon her slowly, and it was followed by emotional
silence—a yawning void of feeling. Elise took one shuddering breath
and stopped fighting to get away.

She settled back on the corpses and looked
up at the steep walls around her. It was dark, but the occasional
blast of flame revealed jagged rock. She could climb out. The clock
was still rocking the earth with every beat of its human heart, and
it sounded close.

She was still in the chamber. She was not
dead.

But given all the pain she felt in her
torso, she almost wished that were not true. No amount of emotional
void could numb her cuts. Elise was slick with blood—both hers and
that of the bodies—and she felt like she had gone through a cheese
grater.

Her shirt was nothing but scraps, her
weapons were missing, and there was a stab wound on her side. She
flinched when she remembered the goddess burying the knife in her
body. It was the last thing she remembered before waking up.

She must have missed all Elise’s important
organs, but the goddess hadn’t known that and left her for dead.
Thrown her in a pit of bodies. Forgotten her.

Elise decided to consider herself lucky.

She counted to ten and crawled to the wall
of the pit. The clock continued to tick.

Digging her fingernails into a jutting rock,
Elise climbed to the top with her teeth grit. Stretching her arm to
find another handhold hurt her stab wound. Putting her weight on
one leg to push made the bites on her hip burn.

She rolled over the edge and scrambled to
the shadows on all fours, finding a dark corner to crouch before
examining the situation.

Elise could see the back of the clock. It
was only a hundred feet away. Her side of the chamber was empty
aside from the pit, sheltered by half-rotten columns, and the
occasional blast of steam from the floor grates made enough smoke
to conceal her.

She couldn’t see many of those ugly gray
demons around the clock, but she could feel them. There were
hundreds. The goddess of death was talking to them, but Elise
didn’t stop to listen.

She made her way to the other side of the
chamber, sticking to the shadows, and climbed unseen onto one of
the platforms with the dead cultists.

A flash of silver caught her eye. The
goddess had dropped her staff of bone and was carrying one of
Elise’s falchions as she paced across the dais.

There were four humans huddled beside her.
It looked like a family. Their wrists were chained to the
clock.

So that was the sacrifice. Elise wondered
what it was about those people that made them a better sacrifice
than her, the greatest kopis, who barely ranked as demon food. It
would have wounded her pride if she had any.

She needed a plan, but she didn’t have any
idea how to cross the room through a hundred demons, prevent the
sacrifice of four humans, and stop the clock with numerous injuries
and no time. She didn’t even have her weapons.

Of course, that was fixable. If she could
get one of her swords, she could bury it in the heart of the clock.
It was the only thing she could imagine that might stop it.

Her time to plan ended. The death goddess
stopped speaking and whirled with the stone knife. It plunged into
the neck of the man at her feet, and blood spurted from his
throat.

Elise leaped off the dais, launching herself
toward the sacrifices.

But it was too late. With a few swift
strokes, all four lay dead beside the clock. The minute hand
groaned into the twelve position, and the first bell chimed.

James found a place in the jungle where the
trees swayed and the ground vibrated beneath his feet. The clock
was below him, and Elise with it. He was certain.

But he also had a hundred demons following
him.

He and Bryce had evaded some of them in the
jungle, but not enough. The kopis fired randomly into the horde
behind him. Whether any bullets hit their targets didn’t
matter—there wasn’t enough ammunition to kill them all.

Stopping where the vibrations were
strongest, he tucked the shotgun under his arm. “I need a minute!”
James yelled as he scrambled up a tree. “Hold them off!”

Bryce didn’t respond. His fighting style
completely lacked Elise’s grace, but there was no denying the
accuracy of his aim or the power of his swinging fists. He was a
force of nature.

“Hurry!” Byron shouted.

James wedged himself between two high
branches, selected a couple spells from his Book, and took out a
pen. He muttered words of power under his breath as he drew new
spells.

The rocking earth shifted. The tree
shuddered, and the air grew thick.

A bell chimed.

The reverberations above the pyramid were so
powerful that the entire ground tipped. Byron lost his footing. The
demons swarmed over him. He didn’t get a chance to scream.

James tried not to watch as they overtook
him. One demon leaped onto the trunk of his tree, then another,
scaling it with their stubby claws.

He carefully folded three of the spells
together. A hand swiped at his foot.

Then he threw the pages into the air.

The earth split with a dull thud, ripping
open beneath the trees while the first bell continued to toll. Hot
air gusted through the hole. Demons slid into the earth.

Holding his breath, James leaped off his
branch.

Twelve bells. Four minutes.

Elise was out of time.

One
.

A dozen demons plowed into Elise like
athletes piling onto a football. The back of her head cracked
against the ground.

She jammed her elbow into a biting mouth and
jabbed her fingers into an eye. The bell vibrated through the
temple. It shook her blood, her bones.

Elise lashed out with a foot and felt it
connect with something. It didn’t do any good. There was no light
under the pile of demons, no sense of gravity.

That was when the roof collapsed.

Two.

The rubble didn’t crush Elise. But it did
crush the demons on top of her.

She shoved her way out of the pile. Dirt and
rain showered through the hole in the ceiling. Beyond it, the sky
changed. Gray faded to crimson as Hell and Earth began to
merge.

Elise gasped and coughed through the dust.
Half the centuria had been crushed at once. Nothing so much as
touched the clock.

A hammer swung. The bell struck again.

Three
.

The third chime was louder than the first
two. Her skull ached, and even when she jammed her hands against
her ears, her brain rattled.

Something moved on the dais. The goddess had
survived.

More demons began climbing toward Elise over
the rubble. She stumbled toward the clock, slipped, and almost
fell.

Her hand caught the side of the dais. The
vibrations traveled up her arm and down her spine as she dragged
herself onto it.

The goddess was laughing.

Four
.

“It’s too late,” said the death goddess.
“Hell is come upon Earth.”

That face. That laugh. Elise’s wounds ached
with the memory of the knife. “Shut up,” she growled, raising her
fist for a strike.

“Elise!”

She looked up. James climbed down from the
surface, carefully making his way along a tipped column. The first
thing that occurred to her was that his leg was fixed. The second
was that he had a shotgun. Where had James gotten a shotgun?

The goddess saw him. She stopped
laughing.

“Catch!” he yelled, tossing the gun.

Elise caught it, balancing it awkwardly
between her hands. She’d only held a shotgun once before. Her
father had taught her to shoot, but she hated them.

Still, she was armed. It was better than the
alternative.

She whipped the butt of the shotgun across
the goddess’s face. Her head snapped back.

Five
.

The sky turned virulent red, and the world
was falling. Elise’s senses screamed—demons everywhere, all around
her, like she had felt in Dis so long ago—and the air tensed like
something was about to snap.

Demons were climbing toward James. She was
helpless to join him.

The goddess regained her footing and came at
Elise, falchion raised. She braced the shotgun against her
shoulder, aimed, and fired.

The goddess’s leg became a mess of red below
the knee. She screamed in Latin. Elise smiled.

Six
.

Elise tried to pump the shotgun so she could
fire again, but the mechanism was stuck. Didn’t matter. She
preferred the personal touch anyway.

She tossed the gun aside and ripped her
falchion from the goddess’s hand. The twin was next to the
sacrifices. Elise grabbed it, too.

Holding both of her swords was like having
her arms reattached. She was complete.

Seven
.

Elise thought her skull might split in
two.

The chime shook James off the pillar,
dropping him in the crowd of waiting demons.

“James!” she shouted.

No response.

The dais rocked with the pendulum. She
scrambled to keep her footing as the goddess lunged. Her stone
knife slashed through the air and sliced into Elise’s arm, deeper
than before. She cut into muscle.

The air thickened, darkened, grew sour. Air
gusted from the grates. It stunk of sulfur, like the planes of
Hell.

A man screamed.

Eight
.

The goddess was fast. Too fast for a woman
with a ruined leg. She twisted and spun, meeting the blades of
Elise’s swords with her stone knife, swift and agile and skilled
beyond imagining.

She deflected every swing, every strike. The
ritual knife was a blur. Blades met, and Elise shoved her away. She
couldn’t take down a goddess.

The clock was her last chance—the only way
she could stop the collapse of the wall between Heaven and
Earth.

Nine
.

The goddess leaped forward. The knife bit
into Elise’s injured side. She cried out, and her voice was silent
under the bell’s roar.

Pain seared through her body when the
goddess shoved her against the clock. Elise’s ears rang. Her
vertebrae shook and scraped against each other.

The stone knife slashed open her brow. Blood
cascaded down the side of her face.

Rain showered upon them. It tasted like
acid.

Ten
.

Her back was against the clock. She was
right there
, and she couldn’t do anything to stop it. The
goddess’s stinking breath heated Elise’s face as she smiled, baring
bloody teeth.

If she couldn’t reach the heart of the
clock, there was another heart she could reach.

She kicked the goddess away. Just enough to
have room to move.

A wave of demons crashed against the dais,
clambering over the edge. Their mouths were bloody. Elise wondered
if any of that belonged to James.

Eleven
.

She plunged her sword into the goddess’s
chest.

The heart in the clock exploded blood,
splattering against the inner workings. The hammer shattered.

The dais pitched and everyone fell.