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

He felt weak. Heavy.
    He looked up. They were in a forest, but it was unlike any forest he had ever seen. Iron branches reached for a red sky that roiled with smoke. There was no sun. No moon.
    A cry echoed through the air—a scream of absolute despair, like the sounds that he heard in his worst nightmares of Elise’s death. James spun to search for the source of it, but all he saw were the thick black trunks of iron trees as thick around as his body.
    Another scream followed from his other side, and then another. They echoed off of the metal trees.
    Hannah was hyperventilating. She clutched at her throat with hands that had been stained by the clay. “Where are we?” she gasped. “Who is screaming? I can’t breathe—”
    A powerful feeling of wrongness shivered in his stomach, tickled at the back of his neck, made his skin crawl like he had fallen into a pit of snakes. Demons. Infernal energy. It was everywhere—in the forest, the ground beneath his feet, the very air, woven into the fabric of existence in a way that he had never felt on Earth.
    He reached out to touch one of the trees. It was hot, as though warmed by fire deep within the earth.
    Except that they weren’t on Earth. Not anymore.
    Something huge soared overhead, blotting out the red sky. It was bulging and blimp-like, but there wasn’t enough light in the crimson twilight to make out any other detail.
    James wrenched Hannah to her feet, and the gesture made his muscles ache. “We have to move.”
    “What’s happening, James?”
    “I don’t know.” He pulled her through the trees as a chorus of screams floated over the forest. A piercing cry shattered the air beside them.
    Hannah broke free to step around a tree, and her eyes widened at what she saw on the other side. Her cry joined the others’.
    There was a body in the branches, stretched between the brittle fingers of the tree. It had two legs, two arms, a head, male genitals. But if it had once been human, there was no longer any way to tell.
    A y-incision down its torso had been peeled open and the skin had been pinned to the branches, as if the tree had cracked open the body’s abdominal cavity. A stuttering heart spit blood with every pulse. But the body was alive—dear God, it was alive —and its head was thrown back in a scream that James could see trembling in its exposed lungs.
    The swollen form floating overhead passed again, casting a shadow over Hannah and the body.
    “Don’t stop,” he said, pulling Hannah away from the corpse.
    “That body—the screaming—”
    Her panic irritated him. Elise would never have panicked.
    James shook her arm. “Focus. I think that thing is after us. We must keep moving.”
    Hannah stared around the trees, twitching and trembling. “What thing? The bodies?”
    “No. That .”
    He pointed to the sky. That shadowy blimp was still following them, drifting slowly overhead. It was lower than it had been before. Perhaps just a few dozen meters above the tops of the trees. It looked like it was at least as large as the airplane that James had taken into the Denver airport, but with legs on its underside.
    Hannah looked pale, like she might faint. But seeing the hovering creature was enough to get her to shut up and follow him.
    James focused on the soft earth beneath his feet and avoiding the tree trunks. Lifting his feet was too difficult, too slow. Running in the iron forest was like trying to jog through sand. Screams chased them.
    Hannah shrieked. Flapped an arm. Blood had dripped onto her hand.
    There were another two bodies stretched out in the branches of the trees, and they were definitely demons—most likely nightmares. Their skin was slick and transparent, and they made his senses jangle like a cracked bell.
    “Keep moving,” he said, pushing her ahead.
    The blimp descended, and James got better glimpses of it through the trees as he ran. Those were definitely legs, like those of an insect. Its body was semi-translucent and filled