Caged in Bone (The Ascension Series) (11 page)

Flames consumed the kibbeth. Its belly popped from the heat. Yellow fluid gushed over the bridge and Bain Marshall, hissing where it hit the fissure.

The rest of it dissolved rapidly, breaking down into ashen fragments that smelled like rotten meat seared on a grill.

In seconds, it was gone.

The magic on Elise’s arms was gone too. She stood still for a long moment, hands outstretched, chest heaving.

Then she collapsed.

“Holy shit,” Abram said.

Rylie ran to her side, sticking her muzzle in Elise’s face. The woman was breathing. She was conscious. But she did
not
look happy.

“I’ve had better ideas than that,” she groaned, rolling onto her side. “
Fuck
, that hurt.”

“Elise!” Neuma rushed from one of the side streets, teetering on her too-tall boots.

“Don’t fucking touch me,” Elise said, standing on her own.

“You have perfect timing, doll,” Neuma said, ignoring Elise’s protests. She looped her arms around Elise’s neck and planted a sloppy kiss on her cheek, leaving a lipstick smear.

Elise grabbed Neuma by the wrist. “I need to feed.”

The half-succubus looked startled. “You just ate.”

“Palace. Now.” Elise cast a glare at Rylie. “And when I come back, you’d better have a good fucking reason for summoning me.”

Rylie could have
lived the rest of her life without returning to the Palace of Dis. She hadn’t wanted to walk down the bridge the first time, much less a second. But Elise had retreated down the fissure the instant that she returned, and Rylie didn’t know how else to get her attention.

Of course, following the demons into the Palace hadn’t worked, either. Elise and Neuma had vanished into a bedroom and Rylie still hadn’t gotten a chance to talk to them.

All she could do was wait in the antechamber and worry about Abel.

She paced in front of one of the windows, gnawing on her thumbnail as she stared at her shuffling feet. She wanted to believe that it was silly to be so worried about a six-foot-tall bodybuilder that could change into a monstrous beast at will. Very, very few people could contain an Alpha werewolf.

But “very few” didn’t mean that there was
nobody
that could contain him—or worse, kill him.

Rylie rubbed her hands over her face, trying to force away mental images of Abel dying at her feet the same way that Seth had. She glared at the door to Elise’s bedroom instead.

What in the world could she be doing in there with Neuma? It had been over an hour, and that was in Hell time. On Earth, it might have already been a full day. There was a lot of ground that could be covered in a day, even on foot.

She couldn’t wait any longer.

Rylie marched toward the door. A former slave was guarding the bedroom, and when he saw Rylie approach, he stepped in her way and lifted the Taser.

“You can’t enter,” he said.

“Try to stop me,” Rylie said, shoving him aside. She only used a fraction of her strength—probably a fraction more than she normally would have, but she was tense. It was enough to toss him into the wall.

By the time he regained his footing, she had already thrown the door open.

Rylie stopped short inside the doorway.

Elise’s bedroom in the Palace of Dis was alien and hostile and black. Obsidian floors, obsidian walls, huge windows overlooking the Palace grounds and the almost-finished tower. Her bed was bigger than any bed that Rylie had ever seen on Earth. It could have slept the entire pack. Its red silk sheets looked like sin against all of the stark, jagged lines of the bedroom’s decorations.

Neuma was lounging in the center of the bed, totally naked aside from a chunky silver ring on her forefinger. She streamed blood from several bite wounds on her breasts, her ribs, her thighs. It didn’t look like this bothered her.

Elise sat on the edge of the bed. She was still wearing her shirt, although it had been torn down the center to reveal glowing runes on her stomach, and her jeans were unbuttoned. Curlicues of smoke drifted lazily around her head. Light flared as she took a long drag of the cigarette, and her eyes met Rylie’s eyes over her cupped hands.

She offered the cigarette to Neuma without looking away from Rylie.

The air didn’t just smell like tobacco. It smelled like sweat and sex, the mingled pheromones spilled by two bodies joined in passion. It told a story that Rylie immediately regretted knowing.

“Oh my God,” Rylie whispered, hands clapped over her mouth. Her cheeks had never burned so hot before in her entire life, and she had once accidentally walked into the boys’ locker room in high school.

Elise stood, jerking her jeans up around her hips, buttoning them under her navel. “I’m pretty sure I told Aniruddha not to let anyone in,” she said without vitriol.

Neuma was smiling around the cigarette. She blew smoke rings through puckered lips.

It took a few seconds for Rylie to think of a response. “He tried to stop me, but I pushed past him. I don’t—I’m really sorry.” She started to back away. Her every instinct wanted her to close the doors, return to the sitting room, hide her head under the couch or whatever it took to smother the horrible embarrassment she felt at interrupting Elise.

When she had said she needed to feed, Rylie had imagined something much more awful and much less private—like eating demons or something.

But she stopped herself from leaving with a hand on the door.

No
. Abel was gone. It had been over an hour.

And Elise was having sex? Seriously?

Rylie squared her shoulders and stepped forward again.

“It’s just—this is urgent,” Rylie said. “Abel is missing, his scents are gone from the sanctuary, and we found rune magic.”

Elise tossed her shredded shirt aside. Her right breast had a bite mark on it, too, encircling the nipple in a painful red wound. Magical markings slithered down her spine and over her shoulder blades. “You mean paper magic?” At Rylie’s blank look, she elaborated. “Runes written on scraps of paper. A lot of witches use them these days. Could point fingers at the Union.”

“It was in the basement of an empty house,” Rylie said. “No paper. I couldn’t see it, but I could kind of smell it. Josaiah said that it was glowing.”

Elise’s hands froze on the door of her wardrobe, all expression draining from her face.

“That’s why I summoned you,” Neuma said, sitting up with a wince. “Thought you’d want to know.”

“And you didn’t tell me?” Elise asked, dead-voiced.

Neuma gave Rylie a long-suffering look, as though to silently say,
You hear this bitch?
“You weren’t in a talkative type mood, doll. Chill out.”

Elise pulled a leather bustier out of the wardrobe and pulled it on, flipping her hair out of the way. “I would have talked about this.”

“Yeah, right,” Neuma said. “When would that have been again? When you were tongue-deep in my cunt, or when I was finger-fucking you with bloody lube?”

Elise glared at her as she buckled the bustier with jerky gestures. “Abel is missing. You found ethereal runes.” She almost sounded like she was in denial.

“Is it the Union?” Rylie asked. “Is that what you’re saying?”

Elise clenched her jaw and jerked a jacket out of the wardrobe.

It was Neuma who responded.

“Not the Union,” she said. “James fuckin’ Faulkner.”

Elise had visited
the Sistine Chapel twice before. The first time had been on a Wednesday morning during visiting hours, and her first impression of Michelangelo’s famous fresco hadn’t been positive. It was an old painting and irritatingly mortal in its sensibilities. The humans that had painted it demonstrated no understanding of God or Adam—as though they could be separate entities—and the cherubic angels had offended her so deeply that she had left within minutes. It had been crowded with tourists anyway. Too busy to be worthwhile.

Yet she kept thinking about it after she left, and she had returned for a second visit in the middle of the night. Despite James’s fervent protests, he had gone with her. Together they had broken into the Sistine Chapel, slipped past the security cameras, and taken a closer look at Michelangelo’s masterpiece.

The chapel staff had been performing maintenance on the ceiling at the time. A scaffold stood near one of the walls like a skeleton left behind by long-dead artists, and Elise and James had scaled it in utter silence, their tiniest motions echoing through the chapel.

Elise had climbed to the top and come face-to-face with Adam, the first man.

It was as inaccurate at night as it had been during daytime, but in the hushed silence she had seen beyond Adam’s fair skin to the craft of the artist. She had stared at the confident brushstrokes and aged colors for long minutes with James’s hand in hers. It was only then that she saw the mastery of it. The culmination of decades of study and practice. And she had thought that, artistic liberties aside, Michelangelo might have really once glimpsed God.

Until the police chased them out, Elise had felt deep awe mingled with fear that ached to her very core.

That was the same way she felt looking at the rune left in the basement of the house in Northgate.

Elise circled it without stepping across the lines. It vibrated with such force that it seemed to form a solid wall around its diameter—one that she could touch, but not quite see. The rune itself was a masterwork. It was six feet across and held a hundred smaller runes captive. She could identify a few of the silvery-blue marks. Others were new to her, though she thought she might be able to figure them out if she had enough time.

James had given her an entire Book of Shadows to further her studies. She was now reliably replicating many of his spells and putting them to practical use—mostly against enemies she couldn’t swallow, like the kibbeth.

Studying his magic had given her a new, grudging respect for his abilities. He really was an artist. A genius.

“Is it him?” Rylie asked, breaking the silence of the basement. The glow of the rune that was so obvious to Elise didn’t touch Rylie’s skin. It was invisible, unlike the spells Elise carried under her sleeves and gloves.

Elise’s eyes swept over the tiny marks. She tried to imagine someone else having cast this spell—an angel from Shamain, or an ambitious Union witch. It was impossible. This was James’s handiwork.

“I’m going to dismantle it,” Elise said. “Maybe it’ll bring the scent trail back. Tell me if anything changes.”

She tried to scuff the edge of the circle, but the toe of her boot connected with the rune like a wall of electricity. It tingled all the way up to her knee.

Elise crouched and held her hand out, careful not to touch the edge. The glow made her fingers ache. “Come here, you little fucker,” she muttered, trying to urge it onto her fingers like all of the other runes that she had taken from James.

The instant she stretched tendrils of magic toward the rune, it vanished.

Elise blinked into the darkness. Without the hum of magic, everything was so much quieter. The pressure in her chest eased.

“What’s wrong?” Rylie asked. “Did you remove it?”

Elise rubbed her hand on the ground. It wasn’t even warm. Hard to believe that something so brilliant should be able to vanish without leaving a trace. James must have booby-trapped it to prevent another witch from dissecting his magic, always paranoid about having his techniques stolen.

“It’s gone,” Elise said. “Can you smell anything?”

Rylie sniffed audibly. “Nothing new.”

Damn it all
. “That’s fine,” Elise said. “I don’t need smells to find James.” She smoothed her hands over her hair as she stood. It was sticking up as though she had rubbed a balloon over her head.

“What’s the game plan?” Rylie asked.

Find James. Save Abel.
And then Elise would do
something
about James—something permanent. She hadn’t decided what yet.

“I’ll leave tonight,” Elise said. When she stepped closer to Rylie to approach the trap door, the Alpha stepped back, like she was trying to stay out of Elise’s reach.

“I’m coming,” Rylie said.

Elise’s eyes narrowed. “The pack needs one Alpha.”

“On the moons, yeah, but we just had a moon three days ago. We’ve got ten days to find Abel and get back. Summer and Abram will take care of everything until then.” She waited until Elise had phased back onto the first floor then climbed after her, emerging from the closet looking dusty but determined. “You’re not the only one that’s angry, Elise. I’ve got a lot of good reasons to want to find James Faulkner.”

The statement was so strange coming from Rylie. The slender blond girl looked so passionately angry now when she was usually shrinking and demure. Her gold eyes flashed with wolfish fierceness.

It was that hidden fury that made Rylie such a powerful ally. A werewolf in control of shifting shapes was one of the deadliest monsters on Earth. Maybe
the
deadliest, after Elise.

And that was exactly why Elise hesitated to agree.

Something needed to be done about James. He had crossed too many lines, pushed all the wrong buttons. Too many people had died because of him—including one that Rylie loved. He was an atom bomb on two legs. The problem was that Elise couldn’t think of a resolution between James and a werewolf that didn’t involve one of them dying.

But Rylie was right. She deserved this revenge.

“Fine,” Elise said, feeling heavy, exhausted, angry. “We’ll take care of James together.”

“Promise?” Rylie asked.

After a moment, she said, “Yes.”

“You can’t just
leave.”

“I can, and I will,” Rylie said.

That obviously wasn’t the answer that Abram wanted to hear. He raked his hand through the short curls at his scalp, jaw clenched, tendons flexing in his neck.

They were in Rylie and Abel’s cottage, preparing supplies for Rylie to leave. She didn’t plan to take much. Abel had taught her how to pack light for travel—dress heavy, don’t take duplicates of anything except socks and underwear, bring calorie-dense snacks. Without his guns in her backpack, there was room for her to pack more than usual, but she didn’t know what else she could possibly need. The world beyond Northgate was a giant question mark.