Alma Katsu - The Descent

“It’s hardly your fault. How were you to know?” He hugged me tighter against him, wrapping both arms around me. I continued, “What I don’t understand is why trick me into coming to the underworld? Why not go after Adair, if he’s the one she wants?”

“Because he would never come without a reason. He needed an incentive—and that’s you,” Jonathan pointed out.

“He’d come after me, you mean?” I started upright. “I hadn’t thought of that—do you think he would do that?”

“Silly girl—what do you think?” he chided gently.

I was swamped by a wave of guilt. I hadn’t thought he would be in danger, never. He hadn’t offered to come with me to the underworld after Jonathan and it was plain that he feared the underworld more than anything he’d feared on earth. For that reason alone, I never considered that he might come after me. I thought I would be sick. “But why—why is she interested in Adair? What could he have possibly done?”

Jonathan shook his head. “I can’t tell you that. I don’t know. The queen has been careful not to say anything about Adair in my presence. I doubt her guards know, either. I get the sense that she plays her cards close to her vest. She’s a lonely woman. Something has made her very unhappy, but she never talks about it.”

Our foreheads bowed together, we contemplated this troubling mystery: the queen was unhappy and Adair had something to do with it . . . but I couldn’t begin to imagine what that might be. Perhaps he’d stolen the wrong soul, the soul of someone important to her. Or perhaps it had to do with one of his companions, someone he’d wronged horribly. Then I thought of what she had done to Dona, how she didn’t seem to feel compunction or sympathy for anyone. Whatever was between her and Adair, it was most likely personal.

I thought again of the vial. I could still feel its shape in my palm, a phantom, and wondered if our little trick had worked, if Adair had tried to bring me back and failed. I wished there was a way to send a message to him now—don’t come after me, don’t—but I supposed that power resided with the queen alone.

“What comes next, do you think?” I asked.

He ran a finger over my brow, brushing hair out of my eyes. “We wait for Adair to show up. I think you’re safe, for now. The queen has no reason to hurt you—as far as she’s concerned, you’re bait and nothing else,” he said, and I was just about to say that I’d never been so happy to be overlooked in my life when the door flew back, and a pair of demon guards rushed into the room—followed by the queen.

I almost felt sorry for her, to see the look on her face. She was jealous, it was plain—jealous and frustrated. I sensed no love between her and Jonathan, but the look on her face was frozen, hard, murderous—as though she could have obliterated me at that moment with a look, and yet she was holding back . . . with great effort.

She raised a hand and pointed at me, and I flinched. Then her finger started to tremble and she croaked over her shoulder at the demons: “Apparently this slattern cannot be trusted, not with any man. Take her from my sight! Take her away—and throw her in the pit.”

The island did not suffer the ill effects of the deluge for long. Adair quickly surveyed the grounds and found that the sun and brisk sea winds had gone a long way toward stripping away the excess moisture and drying things out. The floating dock had been lost and would have to be replaced. Only time would tell if the trees would grow back. The goats were gone, of course, and Adair decided he would not replace them.

Terry and Robin, too, appeared to have been swept out to sea—there was not a trace of them on the island. He was certain that those vindictive witch sisters had possessed them, and although he wished things had turned out differently, he would not beat himself up over it. What was done was done. Whether the powerful witch sisters, Penthy and Bronwyn, had been taken care of, he wasn’t sure. They could be looking for another pair of vessels to take over. The whole incident made him uneasy, so Adair resolved not to think about it, not for now.

He decamped to the study, where he felt most comfortable and at his strongest. He built up a luxurious bed for Lanore directly on the floor, a feather mattress bolstered by a wall of pillows, and laid her out there, covering her in a blanket of fine cashmere, the color of moonbeams. He’d checked her hand earlier, hoping against hope that she’d managed somehow to hold on to the vial, but it was gone, undoubtedly lost to the sea.

A strange occurrence happened to him that night: he had a dream. Adair rarely dreamed. He didn’t really need to sleep, and did only because it was a bodily pleasure, as enjoyable as smoking or eating. There were times, when he was upset or depressed, when he would seek the sweetness of oblivion, too, and this was why he slept now. Since sending Lanore to the underworld, Adair would hibernate around the clock if it meant time would pass more quickly and would hasten the day when she would return to him.

He hadn’t dreamed any of the other nights since sending her to the underworld, but that night, he dreamed. It was one of those odd dreams, the kind that made him conspicuously aware that he was dreaming, and he had been so distracted by this very conspicuousness that he now could remember very little of it. As a matter of fact, he remembered only one crucial moment, and the vision had been so horrible that he had been thrown out of sleep and awoke sweating; he had to touch Lanore’s hand to reassure himself that she was still with him, that no one had snatched her away while he was asleep.

In this dream, he’d been brought to a chamber, a squalid stone room with a dirt floor, a dank prison cell not unlike many he’d seen with his own eyes. In an odd twist for a prison cell, instead of a cot or pallet, there was a fully dressed bed in the center of the room, taking up nearly all the space. Lanore was on the bed, her hands bound, her eyes blindfolded. She struggled against her restraints. Naturally, he tried to rush to her side but was prevented by an invisible wall. He was helpless, being forced into the role of an observer. He knew, by the twisting of his gut and the terror expanding in his chest, what would happen next.

Within a minute, the door opened and a dark figure, huge and hulking, slipped into the room. Adair couldn’t make out what this figure looked like until it came closer to the bed, and then he saw that it was a demon of some kind, a horrible monster worse than anything he recalled being described in mere stories. This creature was bestial, an animal with only vestigial traces of man. It was as large as an ox, with a broad, strapping back. Its muscle-bound haunches were as massive as boulders; its hocks were like pistons. Long threads of saliva dripped from its maw. It hovered over Lanore, its shadow eclipsing her, swallowing her up so that Adair could no longer see her, he could only hear her whimper in distress.

In a panic, Adair threw himself at the unseen barrier again and again, but whatever it was held as firmly as the accursed wall in the basement of the Boston mansion, the one that had held him for two hundred years. The beast put its hands on Lanore’s shoulders, pinning her to the bed. He began to shift his weight over her, to climb her in preparation for mounting her, and Adair thought he would lose his mind. He tried to force himself to wake up. He couldn’t watch what was about to happen.

He snapped awake on the floor next to Lanore, drenched in sweat, feeling as though his stomach had been ripped out. Now he understood why Lanore had been so desperate to go after Jonathan. No one would be able to endure such scenes, not about someone you loved. Even being fully aware that it was only a dream hadn’t kept him from being completely consumed with horror. The dreams were exercises in torture, and he couldn’t believe that a dream like that had come from his subconscious. He fully believed that the dream was a message.

He rose from the floor and paced around the room, trying to work out this wild, unsettled feeling inside him. He expected this feeling to dissipate like morning fog once he was fully awake, but it didn’t. He thrummed with apprehension: Do something to help Lanore, and do it now.

It was plain what he must do: he must call her back to the land of the living. Now that she’d been stripped of the vial, she had no way of contacting him from the underworld, and her safety was obviously more important than any mission to save Jonathan. Let her be mad at him for bringing her back too soon, he decided; he didn’t care. He would be doing it for her safety. Once he’d decided, he was rewarded with a huge sense of relief, like a weight lifted from his chest.

His decision made, Adair sprang into action. He knew which spell he’d use to bring her back; he’d selected it in advance and had put it aside in a special place so it would be at hand when the time came. He spent the predawn hours preparing the room: surrounding her with candles; drawing the proper magic circle on the floor, making it large enough to protect them both; anointing her with purified water and oils.

He wondered, fleetingly, as he toasted certain buds and leaves and ground them into a fine powder, if such steps were still necessary. After all, he’d been able to summon the sea to return Lanore to him with no ceremony, no trappings or incantations, nothing more than desire, and that success seemed proof enough of the power he had at his command.

Adair waited until midnight, the time when the two worlds were closest. He went through with the old steps—he lit the candles, smudged Lanore with ashes, splashed her with the potion he’d prepared. If nothing else, all that was ceremony, a way to still his mind and help him focus, not unlike any religious service. He likened it to going into an oracular trance, losing himself in the deep concentration required for the task that lay ahead. Unlike an oracle, however, he was not making himself a channel through which the gods might speak, but preparing a channel through which he could access a power on the other side. He was readying himself to wield—dare he say it?—a godlike power. But that was the feeling exactly: when he tapped into the hidden realm, he felt he was a god among men.