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

stared at the glistening crimson on his fingertips. His face was bleeding—why was his face bleeding?
    “Are you all right?” he asked Hannah. Her hands were welded to the steering wheel. Her hair had fallen out of its clip. Her mouth moved, but no sound came out.
    The engine ticked as it rapidly cooled.
    “Mother Goddess,” Hannah finally breathed, “I think I just killed someone.”
    James released his seat belt with a hiss of pain, rubbed his collarbone, and shoved his door open. “Stay here,” he said, stepping onto the sliver of space between the side of the car and the median.
    Traffic on the freeway was stopped in the lane behind them. People were still going around the other side, inching along and staring through rolled-down windows. Horns filled the air.
    James’s shoes crunched on broken glass as he made his way around the trunk to search for a body.
    He found a smear of blood on the top of the car and down the trunk. He found the dent where the body had bounced. He also found a red-brown puddle on the asphalt behind their rear tires and a pickup truck a few feet away. The driver looked as stunned as Hannah.
    But there was no body.
    “What the hell?” he whispered. Had the body been thrown?
    Something tickled the nape of his neck.
    James slapped at it and spun to search for what had touched him, but there was nothing there. The sensation didn’t alleviate when he turned, either.
    The creeping feeling traveled into his hairline and down his spine. It rippled over his bones. With a cold wash of fear, he realized that he wasn’t being touched—he was feeling infernal power. A lot of it.
    Red light flared under his feet. He lifted a shoe to see that he was standing on a blazing crimson sigil, which quickly spread over the asphalt and illuminated the shards of glass like fairy lights. An invisible hand drew the line in a wide, sweeping circle that encompassed James and the entirety of Hannah’s car.
    A massive demonic rune.
    He leaned into the open door of the car again.
    “We have to run!”
    Hannah hadn’t released the wheel. “Is he dead? Did I kill him?”
    He punched the button on her seat belt to release it, grabbed her arm, and dragged her across the seat. “Get out of there, it’s a trap!”
    James wrenched Hannah from the car and wrapped his arms around her, hugging her to his chest.
    The sigil exploded.
    Her car leaped into the air as though blasted by a bomb. It flipped end-over-end, and James couldn’t see where it landed.
    The red light surrounded them with leaping flames. His skin boiled.
    Beneath their feet, the road vanished, and the sky disappeared a moment later. James felt a wrenching sensation in his gut.
    They wheeled and tumbled through black void. His chest hitched with the effort it took to breathe.
    And then they hit.
    Hannah’s shrieks suddenly cut off. She lost her balance and slipped from his arms, sprawling on the ground.
    Being teleported by external forces should have been easier after all the times that James had done it in recent weeks, but it wasn’t. His body rebelled at the change, even before his senses could process what had happened. Nausea swept from his toes to the ends of his hair, rippling down his shoulders and blurring his vision.
    He doubled over, braced his hands on his knees, and vomited. James hadn’t been eating much since Elise had died—he’d just had a handful of nuts and black coffee that morning, and a salad the night before. It splattered on the ground in a half-digested mess.
    By the time he wiped his mouth clean and had recovered enough to see, Hannah was still on all fours. She flexed her fingers in fistfuls of orange-red clay.
    There was no red clay in Denver.
    James’s senses finally caught up with him. The air burned his throat with the taste of sulfur, bitterly dry and scraping his mucus membranes with every inhalation. As he bent to take Hannah’s arm, he noticed that it was harder to move, as though he were pushing through fluid.