Read Dire Blood (#5) (The Descent Series) for Free Online

died. Malcolm, the Union commander who had recovered her body, had left a few messages for him. Maybe there were some details in his voicemails. James couldn’t bring himself to listen to them.
    Had her neck been snapped, like the greatest kopis that preceded her?
    Was it a stray gunshot? Demonic possession?
    Had she been alone?
    He tipped his head back against the chair and rubbed a hand down his face. Those thoughts had been torturing him for days. He couldn’t escape—not when he was awake, not when he was unconscious, not when he had taken a handful of sleeping pills and passed out for twelve hours the night before traveling to Colorado.
    Hannah tipped her chin down and arched an eyebrow. “You’re killing yourself over this, aren’t you?”
    James was angry with her for saying it, but he wasn’t sure why.
    “Let’s just go,” he said, too exhausted to yell and shout and rail against fate in the way he wanted to.
    She pulled out of the parking garage.
    James glanced into the back seat of the car as they emerged into the sunlight. There was a pair of shoes with cleats behind Hannah’s chair, and a miniature DVD player hanging on the back of her headrest. They were the kind of accoutrements that he would expect to see in the car of a mother.
    It felt so very, very strange to see them in Hannah’s car.
    “We’ll have to tell the coven what happened as soon as possible,” she said. “Landon will need to take action.”
    “No, I’m not ready to discuss it. Especially with Landon.”
    “Unfortunately, James, this isn’t just about you.”
    The city that he had left behind so many years before blurred past him. James hadn’t given any consideration to how it might feel to return, but he probably would have guessed that he would be sad. There were a lot of sad memories in Colorado.
    But he wasn’t sad. Not about the town, not about his dead sister and aunt, and certainly not about what he had left behind with Hannah. There was no room for any more sadness inside of him.
    “What’s the coven been doing lately?” he asked.
    She turned the wheel to the left. The car banked around a curve. “How much do you really care?”
    James clenched his hands in his lap. “Is every conversation between us going to be an argument for the next few days?”
    “If it has to be,” she said. “Don’t forget, I can still smell your bullshit. You’re not saying what’s on your mind. You don’t care about the coven, or Landon, or anything else around here.”
    “That’s not true. I care about you—and Nathaniel.”
    She gave him that look again. The Hannah look. Her eyes were off the road for only a moment.
    James glanced back at the freeway before she did, so he saw the person standing in the left lane a half second before they hit him.
    “Watch out!”
    Everything moved in slow motion.
    She slammed on the brakes and tried to swerve.
    The body connected with their bumper. The impact made the entire car shudder, and rubber squealed.
    The windshield spider-webbed with cracks and bowed into the passenger compartment as the person they hit bounced over it. Hannah screamed as the thudding traveled over the roof of her car, struck the trunk, and slid off of the back.
    Another crunch , another shock. The seatbelt snapped tight over James’s chest. His head whipped forward.
    The car skidded across the lane as the truck that had bounced off of their bumper squealed to a halt. Vehicles blew around them, blasting their horns and skidding on asphalt.
    They finally stopped moving.
    James’s head was spinning, but it was no longer from grief. He couldn’t focus on the dashboard in front of him, and he could barely make out the median on the other side of the shattered windshield; they had been spun forty-five degrees and hit concrete.
    He took a short inventory of his injuries. The seatbelt had cut into his neck, but it had saved him from being launched out of his seat. His upper lip was damp. He wiped blood off of it and