Free The Descent Series, Books 1-3: Death's Hand, The Darkest Gate, and Dark Union (The Descent Series, Volume 1) by SM Reine

damaged, one at a time. He could do it again.
    His aunt had been the inventor of paper magic, but he was the innovator. There were things she taught him that nobody else knew—ways to store immense, unthinkable amounts of power; methods of copying spells without performing them again; how to distort a spell after binding it to the page—and the knowledge was so dangerous that he seldom used it.
    The only person he trusted to have in the room while he worked was Elise, and she wasn’t paying any attention to him. She was staring at the ocean and getting soaked.
    He wrote the final curl of the symbol. The page glowed with their shared power before fading.
    James carefully stood, using a tall stick as a crutch to stagger to the patio. The wind gusted around him. He braced himself on the railing. “Come inside,” he said.
    She trailed a finger along her palm. “Do you think He can see when one of my gloves is off?”
    He didn’t even like discussing the subject. James grabbed her arm and slid the glove back on. “You only get this contemplative when you’re exhausted. And don’t forget, I can feel what you’re thinking.” He tapped his temple.
    Elise tucked her hands against her sides. “It doesn’t matter. The twelfth hour is coming soon. I should be searching.”
    “You can’t do anything in this downpour.”
    Another wave sluiced over the patio. She finally went inside, helping James settle in bed again.
    They sat in silence with nothing to entertain them but the thrum of magic as his knee knit itself together.
    He tried to remember the last time they had sat together in comfortable silence for longer than a few minutes. James couldn’t recall having ever done it before. They were always on the run. “This is nice,” he said, surprising himself.
    He was even more surprised when a smile spread across Elise’s face. A real smile. “What if it was always like this?”
    “What, if we were in a monsoon with a dislocated knee?”
    “No,” she said, gesturing between them. “Like…this. You and me. Not fighting. Not running.”
    James studied her for a long moment—damp hair stuck to her forehead, bruises on her jaw, bandages concealing her arm. “It can’t ever be like this. We can’t stop running.”
    “I know. But…what if we could?”
    The question gave weight to the air between them. James was tired, and it wasn’t just because of the healing. He was tired of having no home. He was tired of trying to stay a step ahead of the death that pursued them. In the past, he had imagined what would happen if he could stop, and it involved reconciling with Hannah and rejoining the coven, but James hadn’t dwelled on those thoughts long. The fantasies hurt.
    He tried to imagine stopping with Elise. Living a normal life. He couldn’t fathom what that would be like.
    “It would be nice to teach again,” he said slowly. “I could start a dance company.”
    “I’ve always wanted to own a business.”
    “Really? I didn’t know that.”
    She shrugged. It wasn’t something they had ever discussed. “Maybe I could be in your company. I could be a professional with enough practice. I think it would be…fun.”
    Those were the probably most words she had ever strung together that didn’t have anything to do with dying.
    “You should sleep,” she said, tipping a couple more pills out of the bottle on the bedside. He swallowed them. “You’ll heal faster.”
    She was right. His eyes fell closed, and he let himself relax as the painkillers kicked in. His breathing grew deep and even, keeping time with the ocean, and he thought he could almost hear Elise’s heartbeat. He could certainly feel the magic knitting his knee, even as he dozed.
    The fatigue of healing and magic was powerful. It sucked him under.
    He wasn’t sure how long he floated in the gray haze before he felt lips on his forehead. “Take care of yourself,” Elise whispered. It alarmed him on some distant level, but he couldn’t rouse