Death's Avatar (The Descent Series) Read online

  And before he realized anything might have changed between them, they were bound as kopis and aspis. More permanent than marriage, more fatal than family, closer than the oldest friends. James was sworn in Elise's service as her protector—the shield to her sword. Forever. Whether he liked it or not.

  He wasn't going to spend the rest of his life passionately in love with his frigid, beautiful, brilliant fiancée. He was going to spend the rest of his life following around a woman whose idea of friendship was choosing not to stab him. Sometimes, she even smiled at him.

  James suspected it might be something like Stockholm Syndrome, but he started looking forward to falling asleep to the sound of Elise sharpening her swords. He liked sparring with her. He felt pride when she killed something new and horrible. And when she started holding actual conversations with him, he was thrilled to discover a compassionate, loyal, and clever woman hidden beneath her silence and steel.

  He wasn't sure when it happened, but by the time they had been traveling together for five years, James could no longer think of a place he would rather be.

  Naturally, that was when the world ended.

  Part Three: Pillars of Flame

  III

  June 2004

  There are over a thousand kopes spread across the world. They can be found in rural America, metropolitan Asia, and the empty plains of Africa. Of these thousand, eight hundred are in active service; four hundred or so have taken witches as their aspes.

  Of those four hundred, only one has the number for Elise Kavanagh’s answering machine.

  Lucas McIntyre sat on the steps outside his trailer and watched the sky burn. He held his cell phone in one hand and an 8mm pistol in the other, debating which one would be a better response to the hell that had been unleashed on the desert.

  Ten chimes. Ten pillars of flame lancing through a red sky. There was no way anybody could miss that message.

  Unlike most kopes, McIntyre kept touch with his demon-hunting brethren around the world. Tristan in Vancouver reported seeing it, too. So did Maasilan and Wendall. He was sure the flames spanned the entire world.

  Of all the kopes he could call, he dialed for Elise.

  “Leave a message after the tone,” said a mechanical voice.

  “It’s McIntyre. Call me.”

  That was all he said. There was no point in describing what he was calling about—she would know. She always knew.

  “Lucas!” called his girlfriend from inside the trailer. He pretended not to hear her.

  The last time the bells had chimed, it had been nine times. McIntyre wasn’t a man of education, but he could sense a developing pattern. He wondered what would happen when the clock—whatever and wherever it was—struck twelve.

  He shared a trailer with his girlfriend well outside of Las Vegas. They partly selected it because it was all they could afford, and partly because they were above the edge of the demonic Warrens, where everything interesting happened. He had become used to feeling the presence of demons itching at the back of his skull.

  And he could feel demons nearby now. A lot of them. They started appearing with the first chime, and now that the tenth had died off, it felt like there were thousands just beyond his line of sight. They hadn’t come from the Warrens.

  “Lucas!”

  McIntyre kicked the dust off his boots before going inside. He set the gun and phone on the side table. Tish hated it when he was armed in the house. “What?” he snapped.

  Tish stood by the kitchen counter, resting her pregnant belly against its side. Her face was ashen. “Look.”

  His gaze followed her pointed finger out to the horizon. Dark shapes milled against the hills. Those were the demons he had felt emerging—and they were moving toward the trailer.

  He kissed Tish’s forehead. “Get in the bathroom. Shove something against the door. Don’t leave until I tell you.”

  She nodded, lips white around the edges.

  While she barricaded herself, he took care of the rest of the house, leaving one window through which he could aim a gun. McIntyre wasn’t usually the defensive type. He liked to meet fights head on. But he also wasn’t suicidal.

  A minute after boarding the front door, the demons hit his trailer in a wave, cresting and crashing against the walls. The sky fire had faded. It was too dark to see anything through the window except yellow teeth and glistening eyes.

  His heart drummed inside his ribcage. He pulled on protective earmuffs, shouldered a rifle, and aimed.

  He blasted the demons out of the window, one at a time. They burst into ash on his sink.

  The house rattled and trembled. His girlfriend was screaming. Aim and fire, one after another. Dead demons everywhere.

  His rifle clicked—empty. McIntyre slammed his shoulder into a bookcase to block the window. It jittered and jumped as fists smashed into the back.

  A light on the cell phone caught his eye. He had missed three calls. McIntyre dialed the voicemail password and held it between his ear and shoulder as he reloaded the rifle.

  There were two messages. The first was from his friend Peter in Bulgaria—he was under attack, too. The second was left by an anonymous phone number. He could barely hear it over the slamming on the walls.

  “I’m taking care of it.”

  Five words. No greeting, no goodbye. But McIntyre recognized Elise’s voice, and he suddenly felt much better.

  He threw the phone on the couch, shoved the bookshelf aside, and fired into the mass of demons. His girlfriend kept screaming as brain splattered in the dirt.

  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 feasti
ng 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.

  IV

  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 fro
m 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!”