Free Dire Blood (#5) (The Descent Series) by SM Reine Page B

feet.
    “We’d better have a problem, if people are waking me at midnight when I was having a good dream. What in the seven burning hells is going on, Gary?” His Irish accent was even harder to understand when he had been woken up from a drunken stupor.
    “Intruder. Thief. We’re under attack.”
    “What?” He blinked stupidly as the red spotlights cut out and turned white again. “What kind of intruder? Nightmare? Succubus?” He gave a low chuckle. “A succubus would definitely explain the dream.”
    Zettel took a deep breath. Let it out. “She was on me for a second. I only saw a glimpse, but I think I recognized her. And considering what she took…”
    “Hang on. Back up a few steps. Who is ‘she?’”
    He braced himself for the ridiculous, impossible truth.
    “It was Elise Kavanagh.”
    Malcolm only stared at him, as if waiting for the punch line to a joke. It never came. “Elise Kavanagh’s body is in cold storage,” the commander said.
    “I know.”
    “She’s been dead for weeks. You were there when we picked up her body.”
    Zettel nodded. “I know.” That day was permanently emblazoned on his memory—the first sunrise that touched Reno after days of darkness, the swirling snow and ash, the decimated buildings. Elise had gone down after killing Yatai, the mother of all demons.
    She had already been cold by the time they’d found her. And what sweet satisfaction that had been. It was Elise’s fault that Zettel had been demoted.
    He had watched the video of the autopsy with great pleasure. Had seen the mortician weighing her organs. Had read the report on her unusually low body fat and blood volume, her missing reproductive organs, her severed arm.
    Elise was definitely dead. But she was also, almost as certainly, the thing that had attacked him.
    Malcolm strode for the stairs and hit the button on his earpiece. “Control, I need you to get in touch with Union HQ and have someone check the refrigerators. See if there are any missing bodies.”
    A buzz, and the response piped over Zettel’s earpiece, as well. “ Roger that. ” They jogged down the stairs to the garage, and it didn’t take long for control to respond—nobody ever slept at Union HQ. “ Everything is intact, sir. ”
    “Shit,” Malcolm said. He jumped in the first SUV they came across and waved to Zettel. “You’re coming with me, Gary. Let’s get the bitch that stole Elise’s face.”
    A nthony Morales paced across the empty highway, hands jammed into his pockets and breath fogging around his face. He wore a path in the snow, tracing his footprints back and forth across the same ten-foot patch of ground. The snow boots were borrowed, and too big for him. They rubbed his toes raw through his woolen socks. The discomfort wasn’t enough to stop his worried fidgeting.
    “Come on,” he muttered, staring hard at I-80 heading out of town.
    The pickup that Anthony had been using was parked a good mile back—far enough that the Union monitors shouldn’t register it as someone attempting to violate the quarantine. But it made him nervous to be so far from his mode of transportation. If the Union showed up with one of those heavily loaded SUVs, they could run him down before he reached the truck. And they had made it pretty clear that they would consider anyone out after curfew to be a demon and a threat.
    He blew another breath under his scarf and checked his phone. Almost one o’clock in the morning. Elise had said she would be back by then.
    Anthony wasn’t worried about her. He didn’t think that the Union could kill Elise—hell, he was pretty sure they couldn’t even contain her anymore. There were no ropes strong enough for that. But the longer it took for her to come back, the more likely the Union monitors would be to scan his section of highway, notice the trail of footprints to his pickup, and come to investigate.
    He slapped his gloved hands together, trying to bring circulation into his fingers. “Come on,