Descent07 - Paradise Damned Read Free Page A

sedate, passive thing, best for making potions and poultices. Elise wondered if it was her mother who was strange, or the coven itself.
    That was Elise’s first real impression of witchcraft: naked bodies dancing around the fire to the beat of primal drums, with the taste of blood and magic at the back of her throat.
    But not everyone around the circle was a joyful participant in the bacchanalia. A man stood on the opposite side of the bonfire, occasionally visible through the licking flames. He wore a button-down shirt. His hair was charcoal black, like Pamela’s must have been when she was younger. And he was deep in argument with a naked old man whose skin was like leather.
    “Who’s that?” Elise asked, tugging Pamela’s sleeve.
    Pamela turned to see whom Elise was referring to. The younger man was shaking his fist in the face of the older man, silently threatening, even though Elise couldn’t hear the words over the drumming.
    “That’s my nephew, James,” Pamela said. There was a strange expression on her face. Somewhere between wistful and worried. “I think you’d like him. Would you like to be introduced?”
    How could Pamela possibly know what kind of people Elise would like? They had never even met before.
    As frightening as the coven’s weird ritual was, the contrast between their joyous shrieks and James’s anger was stark. Among all of them, this was the man with the real power—the only one of them that didn’t succumb to the crowd’s energy, and was unafraid to stand apart. Of all the witches she faced that night, he was the one she would least want to fight.
    “No,” Elise said. “I’m staying here.”
    Pamela looked relieved. “Probably best, for now. Plenty of time for that later.” She let the robe fall from her shoulders, then joined the circle again.
    Power drifted into the sky, gathered from motion, dance, and drums. Elise sat on the log and tried not to show her fear.
    The next time she looked through the flames, James was gone.
    Dad came back for Elise the next morning. The Desert Eagle was gone. The blood had been scrubbed out of the truck. And the first thing he said to Elise was, “What did you learn last night?”
    “Never underestimate,” she replied promptly.
    She didn’t just mean the werewolf that they had failed to anticipate. She couldn’t shake the image of her mother with those pagans, or her father calmly shooting Fidel in the face. She understood now that there were many things she didn’t know about her parents and the world at large—and many of those things were likely to be bad.
    “Good,” Dad said. “Very good.”

JANUARY 1995
    Pamela Faulkner was a woman of rules. Her house was full of them, and she made sure to lay them out clearly from day one. “Just so that there won’t be any confusion,” she had said, handing Elise a laminated card with bullet points printed on one side and emergency phone numbers on the other.
    No swordplay inside.
    No drills until after breakfast.
    No interfering with Pamela’s spellwork.
    No foul language.
    No staying awake past nine o’clock.
    Elise Kavanagh, daughter of a wandering demon hunter, had never had a place to call home, much less a home with rules.
    She was not a fan of it.
    Pamela called it “structure,” claiming that it was the kind of thing that a “wayward teenage girl” needed in her life, but Elise recognized it for what it was: a desperate desire to be in control. And only someone who feared the consequences of losing that control would be so obsessive about keeping it.
    Ultimately, it did not make Pamela strong to have so many rules to exert over Elise; it made her weak, brittle, breakable. And it just wasn’t fair . Elise didn’t even like eating breakfast.
    But when Mom and Dad left Elise in Pamela’s care, they told her that she was to follow the house rules, obey orders, and be polite. This was unusual advice, especially coming from Dad, for whom law breaking was an art form.
    “How