Death's Avatar (The Descent Series) Read Online Free Page A

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.