Dire Blood (#5) (The Descent Series) Read Online Free PDF Page A

last week.”
    “I took all your magic with me when I died.” She flicked the cigarette out the window. “You didn’t need it, did you?”
    He searched within himself and found her words to be true—he was empty. He couldn’t have reached his magic with or without prefabricated spells. “How am I supposed to help you like this?”
    “You’re years too late.”
    Elise bent to kiss James. She tasted like blood.
    The first time she had kissed him, he had assumed it was on a teenage whim. Maybe a misplaced sense of obligation, like she thought that she owed him something. But there it was again, nine years later—same lips, same pained expression, same resignation when she drew back. Her hair swirled around them, gathered by the wind generated by the blade of a helicopter’s rotor.
    “Still?” he asked, unable to think of anything better to say. What an idiot. He should have said something— anything —to keep her from jumping.
    “Always,” Elise replied, looking sad. He was never going to forget how sad she looked, as if she had discovered that he had been lying to her for so many years. And then, “Bye, James.”
    He tried to grab her wrist, but she was already a ghost. Her arm slipped through his grasp.
    She jumped. Fell away from him. He leaned out the door of the helicopter to watch her disappear into the darkness and snow.
    That was the last time he would ever see her.
    Whisk, whisk, whisk…
    Elise was still sharpening her falchions. It wasn’t comforting anymore. The sound taunted him.
    It would have been so much easier if you had loved me…
    “Sir?”
    Always…
    “Excuse me, sir?”
    Pressure against his arm. The helicopter, the endless night, the sight of a distant Reno fallen under a shadow of evil—it all faded away. The sound of Elise sharpening her swords grew louder. Changed into scraping.
    People were moving. Cloth rubbing against cloth. Quiet conversations.
    James’s eyelids were so difficult to open. His head was a dead weight pressed against the plastic window of an airplane.
    He sat up, wiping drool from the corner of his mouth, and saw that the hand on his arm belonged to a flight attendant. She had brown hair. Freckles on her nose. A round face and a polite-but-concerned smile. Not Elise—a stranger. She smelled like flowery perfume, and he doubted that her soft hands had ever been curled around the hilt of a sword.
    Behind her, across the aisle, a small child was rubbing his shoes against the metal strip on the floor over and over again while his parents chatted and ignored him. That was the sound that James had heard. Not Elise sharpening her swords. Some little boy with white-yellow curls rubbing his feet on the ground. The same boy who had been playing noisy games on a smart phone for the entire three-hour trip.
    “We’ve arrived in Denver,” said the flight attendant, drawing his attention back to her again. The wings on her blouse said “Eloise.” Cruel irony. “It’s time to disembark.”
    He sat up with a groan, rubbing a hand over his eyes. The light drove spikes directly through his reading glasses into his brain.
    James thought he managed to say something like, “Thank you.”
    He knew he must have managed to remove his carry-on from the overhead storage compartment and navigate the crowded aisle to the exit, because he found himself holding his bag by Gate B14 a few minutes later, not quite sure when he had gotten off or where he was.
    Denver—the flight attendant had said Denver. Two long, pointless layovers since he’d left the Sacramento airport, and he was finally in Denver. The Union had given him a free flight to visit his old coven. Apparently “free” didn’t equate to “direct.”
    He turned on his cell phone. There was a text message from Hannah Pritchard, his former fiancée, who was picking him up in a silver Honda. They had made the arrangements before he left California.
    Her message only said, “ I’m waiting in the garage ,” and it took