Creature Discomforts (Descendants) (9 page)

The cave entrance was absolutely silent.

Rachel’s heart hammered so hard against her ribs she could hear her blood pulsing through her veins and pounding in her ears. Every muscle in her body tensed, every hair on the back of her neck prickled. Something was here—something deep and dark in the silent cave. Rachel raised her eyebrows at Sid in question and saw him shift his eyes down the tunnel. His chest rose and fell in short little gasps and his hands clenched the two daggers already out and held in front of his body.

Step by step, they inched farther into the cave, farther into the murky gloom. Yet the world around them kept its secrets. The tunnel curved, and muddy light bled from the cavern and fell across the toes of their boots.

Sid held an arm across Rachel’s chest and eyed the cavern just around the bend. There was something in there. A sound squirmed around them.
A wet sound, sloppy. Bile burned up Rachel’s throat. Sid leaned close, his mouth pressed to her ear.

“Ready?”

She nodded once, and they hurtled into the cavern.

Bernard was laid out flat on the cavern floor, a shape bent over him. It didn’t make sense at first, what Rachel was seeing. Bernard’s head was cocked at an unnatural angle, and his legs were splayed. Her eyes crawled up Bernard’s limp body past the thing crouched over him … over the hole ripped open in the troll’s chest. Bernard’s ribs were cracked open and splayed like the poor troll’s legs, and there was blood everywhere. Blood that had spurted from Bernard’s missing heart.

The thing squatted over Bernard’s body spun on its heels and snarled. Blood ringed Willem’s lips and dripped down his chin. Both of the vampire’s hands were covered in Bernard’s blood, and the last pulp from Bernard’s heart still clung to Willem’s fingers. Willem snarled again, his razor sharp teeth dripping, and sprang upright.

Willem was a study in whites and reds and blacks. He crouched low on the balls of his feet and circled with his jagged nails out, like an animal closing in on its prey.

Rachel matched him, her arms in front of her chest and a wooden stake in her hand. Beside her, Sid smoothly sheathed his daggers and reached for his bow. Willem charged at the same moment Sid fired. The arrow punched into Willem’s shoulder, but it barely slowed the beast down. He pummeled into Rachel and snapped at her shoulder. His teeth clamped down on the meat there and tore a gaping bite into her arm that pulled a scream from her throat.

Rachel dropped her stake and collapsed hard to her knees, Willem on top of her. He landed a punch into her ribs that cracked them apart like toothpicks and reared back for another blow. Rachel tensed, but Willem jerked suddenly, and an arrow burst through the middle of his chest. He shrieked and swatted Rachel across the temple, a jolt so hard that she slammed against the cave walls and slumped to the ground. The world blurred and swayed, either from her shoulder or ribs or the blow to her head she didn’t know.

Willem was on Sid now, circling and throwing punches. Sid grunted and ducked, playing for time and searching for an opening. But each blow from Willem came closer, each duck from Sid weakened and slowed. Rachel tried to move her arm and sobbed. It was like lightning forking through her, hot and crackling. But she couldn’t just sit there and watch Sid get slowly beaten down. It didn’t make sense. None of this made sense. Vampires weren’t supposed to have this sort of brute strength.

With a guttural groan, Rachel crawled forward and grabbed the dropped stake with her left hand. She stumbled to her feet and lurched toward Willem. He had Sid cornered now, was almost playing with him. Sid had dropped his bow and was slashing out with his dagger, opening cuts and gashes on Willem. Yet the beast pushed forward, like the wounds were nothing.

Rachel planted her feet right behind him and plunged the stake into his back. Willem twisted and bellowed, and he turned on Rachel so fast she stumbled backward across the cavern. One of Bernard’s cages scraped her torn arm, and she screamed.

Willem prowled closer and laughed. His mouth was a horror of blood and white froth, like a rabid animal. Yet still he stalked forward, his white skin gashed, a stake in his back, and two arrows studding his torso. Rachel gritted her teeth and lifted her bloody arm up to twist between the spaces in the cage’s bars. It held her steady, and the pain kept her from passing out.

The vampire was so close now she could see her face reflected in its shining black eyes. Willem cocked his head, regarded Rachel.

“You murdered my nest,” he said. His voice was sticky with blood and lather, and his breath was hot on Rachel’s cheeks.

“You murdered my classmates,” Rachel grunted. She flicked her gaze behind him to Sid. He leaned heavily against the cavern wall, both daggers and his bow forgotten at his feet. Rachel watched as he shook his head and struggled to stand upright. One arm inched up across his shoulder for the weapon strapped to his back, reaching for the hilt of a sword.

Claws raked across Rachel’s cheek and she cried out. Willem was right in front of her. Rachel clenched her uninjured arm, balled her fingers into a fist. She had to do something, but she could barely think past the
white hot pain shooting through her body with every breath.

“You’ll never be able to stop us,” Willem taunted. “We are a rising tide. A rushing sea.”

Rachel focused on her clenched hand, tried to direct every last bit of strength into her fist. Behind Willem, Sid swam into focus, his face determined.

“You tried to contain us, but we have awoken. Your blood will be—”

Sid roared and ran Willem through, the wickedly sharp tip of his sword slicing Willem through the back and bursting out at his stomach. The vampire dropped to his knees, his body finally going limp. The cave around them went absolutely silent. The drip of water off rock and blood from wounds echoed in the stillness.

Rachel’s legs gave out, the cage screeching against its chain as all her weight hung from her bloody shoulder. Sid pulled his sword from Willem’s chest, yet the vampire stayed kneeling, silent and slumped. Rachel’s voice was barely a whisper when she tried to speak. “Is
it …?”

At that moment, the air swelled with charge and the metallic tang of lightning sparked all around them. Rachel sucked in a breath at the same second Willem arched. The
vampire’s head was thrown back by the force and he screamed some guttural, harsh tongue. The words—if that’s what they were—were muddy and thick, like words that had been born in the muck and crawled only through darkness.

Willem burst forth with the dark language, and the words marked him, crawling black across his pale, gashed skin. They covered him in squirming inscriptions that seemed to burrow under his skin and make his entire form ripple. He coughed, then choked, then doubled over and expelled a rush of tar-black ichor that slithered away across the cavern floor, pulsating and alive. Rachel watched with horror as the creature disappeared deeper into the cavern, but a whistling breath brought her back to the crumpled figure before her.

Willem looked up at Rachel, and she gasped to see his eyes were brown, the whites around them forked with red veins.

“Wait,” the vampire whispered. “Please.”

But it was too late. Sid was swinging the sword, and Willem’s head tumbled from his shoulders and landed with a wet thud next to Bernard’s feet.

*

Rachel leaned against Sid as they trudged up the sidewalk toward Caster Hall. The sun had long ago set and the campus was dark and empty outside the halos of light shining from the lampposts. Up ahead, only a few windows still shone yellow from Rachel’s hall, the last students packing up and heading home for summer.

Sid gently helped Rachel ease up the steps—any quick movements made her right side sear with pain—and pulled the door open for her. He winced as he did, and Rachel was reminded that he was nearly as injured as she.

“At least let me hold my own gear bag,” she said.

“I’m fine,” Sid grunted.

Rachel didn’t have the strength to argue and followed him slowly into the building, every footfall echoing around them. They had won. They had defeated the vampire plaguing campus. Yet everything in Rachel told her there was something larger at play here—and somehow they were far from winning. The thought made her bone-weary.

The common room swayed around her, the shadows in the corners seeming to reach out. Was the slithering creature that had vomited from Willem waiting there, watching? Rachel wavered on her feet, tears of exhaustion pricking at her eyes.

“Rach?” Sid’s voice was frightened. He lowered her to a scratchy couch and knelt before her. “Rachel?” He said again.

Rachel blinked away the tears and dragged an approximation of a smile across her lips. “I’m just tired,” she admitted.

Sid’s shoulders slumped and he reached for Rachel’s face, pulling her close. His face was battered, and blood crusted the hairline at his temple. Yet he smiled, and it warmed something in Rachel.

“You were amazing,” he breathed. “Seriously, Rachel. Don’t listen to me when I say otherwise, when I … I try to pretend I could do something without you.”

Rachel smiled—a real one—and reached up for Sid’s hand with her uninjured arm. “Got it,” she said. “I will never let you forget how awesome I am.”

“I’m not joking,” Sid said. There was urgency in his tone, like he wanted to say something before he lost his nerve. He leaned his forehead against hers, until their faces were so close Rachel couldn’t tell where she ended and Sid began.

Rachel tugged her fingers from Sid’s hand and sat back. Something was changing between them, something Rachel hadn’t wanted to admit she desired. But she knew one thing: She didn’t want it to happen like this, born of fear and adrenaline. If she and Sid were going to take the first tentative steps to become more than friends, she wanted it to happen in the light of day, under the sun, where the most pressing matter was where to eat for lunch. Not like this.

“I’m exhausted, and I’ve lost more blood than I’d like to think about. Can we … can we talk about this in the morning?”

Sid deflated just the tiniest bit, but he covered it with a smile and helped Rachel to her feet like the last few minutes had never happened. They hobbled together down the hall and nudged open Rachel’s dorm room door. She had to blink against the sudden brightness.

Three figures stood close by Kendra’s desk examining an object held between them. Kendra and Daphne looked up when they entered and rushed to help, Kendra taking Sid’s weight and Daphne Rachel’s. The third person stood stock still, his eyes on Sid.

Sid lowered himself next to Rachel on her bed and closed his eyes for a long moment. “Hello, Bruno,” he finally said.

The older man, Bruno, nodded in hello to Sid.
The overhead light caught at a long-healed scar slashed down his face from eyebrow to jaw. “The vampire is dead?” He spoke with a heavy French accent and carried himself like a warrior.

Rachel felt Daphne and Kendra stare at them, waiting for an answer. Yet she wasn’t sure how to answer when she felt anything she said would be wrong. Sid reached for her hand and squeezed it then nodded at Bruno.

Bruno’s broad shoulders slumped just the slightest at that, but he recovered quickly and held a golden urn up to the light. It was etched in an ancient script, every inch of the metal marked with words. Bruno turned the urn in his hands to expose the back of it, where a jagged scar rent the vessel nearly in half. He set the urn carefully on Rachel’s desk and turned back to the group.

“The beast of old has returned.
Abbadon is awoken.”

DESCENDANTS 2

EAT YOUR HEART OUT

The beast descended in a storm of locusts. Worms crawled from the earth, and swarms of moths doused the village fires.

The village was beset, cutoff, without hope.
Abbadon, the great beast, preyed on the villagers by day and night and snared them in his spiders’ webs. The valiant men fought, armed with scythes and axes. But what were the weapons of farmers and woodsmen against a greater evil? The villagers gathered, ready to face their end. But help came from the unlikeliest of sources—witches.

The bravest of the village yet living followed the witch
deep into her coven’s Vale, a place no man had entered and returned alive. There they struck a bargain: Their help for their blood. It was a steep price, steeper than they knew.

Those original thirty
returned to the village changed, something unheard of in the history of man. A hunter. A warrior. Born of women but with the blood of demons. They became the Descendants.

They were the first of their kind, but not the last. These volunteers pass
ed on their gift to a single member of the new generation, each inheriting at the precise age his or her forebear did. And for more than a thousand years, the progeny of those first, frightened villagers have had the sight of witches, the healing power of vampires, the strength of giants, the blood of demons.

Yet the
coven demanded payment. The witches gave of themselves and expected something in return. Though the thirty new Descendants—powerful in their infected blood—were safe, every other child of their generation became sacrifice.

It was a
sacrifice the village still remembers in its roots and bones and ancient walls. But it was a worthy sacrifice. Using a spelled urn, the Descendants tied the beast Abbadon to the metal and trapped its spirit for the rest of eternity …

“Wait,” Kendra cut through Bruno’s tale.

Rachel blinked into the dorm room’s dim light. She stifled a yawn with her left hand—careful to keep her right arm immobile in its wrapping—but the movement still made her ribs pulse with a dull ache.
Everything
ached. Her right shoulder where the vampire Willem had bit out a chunk seared with heat; her cheek where he had raked his fingernails stung when she opened her mouth. Even her eyelids felt raw and scratchy against her eyes. And heavy, like they were possibly made of the same material as Bruno Guillory’s all-important urn. The large Frenchman was even holding it up as a prop as he paced the room and told his tale to Rachel, Kendra, fellow demon hunter Sid, and her mom, Daphne. The peculiar symbols and letters etched along the golden urn’s surface caught the light, seemed to shimmer as if alive.

“Wait,” Kendra said again. She unhooked her arms from around her knees and let her legs flop over the edge of her bed with a heavy thump. “So, like
Aladdin
?”

From her position leaning against the sink, Daphne Chase choked out a laugh, but covered it with a cough. Bruno frowned and ran a massive hand down the side of his face, one finger tracing the length of a scar slashed from cheek to jaw. “No, I said
Abbadon.”

Kendra waved a hand through the air. “But he’s in an urn? Like, a genie in a bottle? I mean, that’s kind of nuts. A whole new world and shit.”

Bruno stared at Rachel’s best friend for a moment, his mouth opening and closing. Above, the ceiling fan made a whoosh and a rattle with every rotation, throwing spinning shadows across the walls. Bruno palmed the broken urn back and forth, a crease working between his thick eyebrows.

“I have demon blood in me?” Rachel said it out loud without even realizing. Kendra’s head shot up, and the girl poked at the gills slashed along her neck—evidence of her own half-demon lineage. “I mean,” Rachel said. She shook her head, but it only made her temples throb and the stitches along her hairline pull taut. She tried for a smile instead. “I mean
, that’s totally fine. I just … didn’t know.”

Bruno sighed deeply. “Am I able to continue?”

Rachel slumped against her headboard in answer. The middle-aged Descendant had arrived in Georgia, what, a day ago? And already he was taking over. Rachel
knew
the Descendants still living in France were the leaders of their little band of demon hunters, but she knew it kind of like she knew statistics. It wasn’t concrete. Tenuous at best.

Statistics
. Rachel wondered idly when her final grades would be in. Though, maybe she didn’t want to find out. She clenched her left hand into a fist.

Sid’s fingers inched across the space between them and squeezed Rachel’s fist. “I know,” he whispered out the side of his mouth, throwing an eye roll toward Bruno.

That pulled a small smile from Rachel, and she nearly didn’t feel the sting in her cheek. She eyed Sid. He appeared nearly as bone-tired as she felt. His normally straight back was curved with exhaustion, and the fight with Willem had left his face a mottled purple and green. And those were just the injuries she could see. She hadn’t missed the way Sid winced with every movement. Sid shifted so their knees touched, so she could feel the heat from him. A flush crawled up Rachel’s neck, and she edged away.

It was hard to believe that a little more than twenty-four hours ago, she and Sid had been fighting the very creature of which Bruno now spoke. Rachel had known something was wrong with the vampire, felt it all the way to the pit of her stomach. But that Willem had been taken over by some greater demon?

Bruno had jumped back into his story, and as much as she wanted to collapse against her pillows and forget everything that’d happened in the past day, she needed to pay attention. Or at least
try
to pay attention.

“
Abbadon’s trapped spirit was buried in a lead coffer in consecrated ground,” Bruno said. “It was buried beneath the crypt of a church. But the church was deconsecrated and turned into a family home, and the family’s son unearthed Abbadon’s prison.” He held the urn up to the light and shook it a little, like they may have forgotten it.

“And the boy was turned into a puppy, and he made the family very happy. The end.” Sid stood with a wince he failed to hide.

Bruno frowned again. In fact, he looked like frowning was perhaps his natural state of being. “Why would Abbadon turn someone into a dog? No. He warped the child, who then killed his entire family.”

Rachel groaned. “Of course he did.”

The Frenchman opened his mouth to continue, but Daphne pushed herself away from the sink and set her face in a placid smile. “Monsieur Guillory, I know we have much to discuss. But these two have been through a lot in the last day. They heal faster than most, but they still need to sleep.”

Bruno started pacing, flipping the urn between his giant palms with increasing speed. He used words like “urgent” and “ultimate evil,” but Daphne stood her ground.

Their voices receded to a dull whine that poked at Rachel’s ears. Her eyes wandered around her dorm room, from Kendra watching her closely to the last of her things to be packed. Her duffle leaned against her closet door and bulged with a jumble of clothes and toiletries, but mostly with weapons. Her mom had refused to pack those up until they were actually leaving Saint Etienne University in the morning to head back to Shipley on the Georgia coast.

Her gaze wandered from Sid’s back where he leaned heavily against her bedframe to the alarm clock on her nightstand. The time blinked green at her: 11:59. She kept staring until the numbers blinked anew: 12:00.

Happy birthday to me.

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