Caged in Bone (The Ascension Series) (28 page)

He wasn’t a witch. He didn’t know what he was looking at or what to do.

Levi struck him an instant later.

They fell to the ground, kicking and punching. Levi’s fists were sledgehammers. Abram’s skull rang. All he could do was try to defend, cover the sensitive parts, take the damage and wait for a chance to strike back. They rolled and smashed into the altar—didn’t change a thing about the sky, no matter how satisfying it was.

And Levi was holding back. He could have flattened Abram if he wanted to, and he didn’t.

Abram somehow ended up on top of Levi, the werewolf facedown on the ground. His eyes raked down the sculpted lines of his back and landed on a tattoo imprinted on Levi’s lower hip.

It was a bleeding apple.

Hard metal pressed against the base of Abram’s skull. “Let him go,” Yasir said.

Later, when Abram didn’t have a gun aimed at his brain, he was going to seriously reconsider his trust in Seth’s judgment.

For now, he lifted his hands from Levi’s throat, holding them at shoulder-level with the fingers spread.

“You’re not with the Union,” Abram said, barely moving his lips.

“You’re right,” Yasir said. “Stand up.”

Abram did as he was told. The commander—or whatever the fuck he really was—didn’t move the gun from the back of Abram’s head. Levi got up, inspected the pieces of his shirt, and shot Abram a dirty look as he stripped it off. “Some thanks for saving your ass twice.”

The sky was growing paler by the moment. Jagged gray slices cut through the clouds, flat and lifeless, almost like they were on a canvas and someone had accidentally painted a line overhead.

“Why?” Abram asked. He didn’t need to get any more specific than that.

“Because in order for the Tree of Life to survive on Earth, we’re going to have to make it a little more Heavenly here and a little less Hellish,” Levi said matter-of-factly, like he was stating some painfully obvious truth that Abram should have seen. He pulled his jacket on over his bare torso but left it unzipped. “That means we need some of Heaven’s atmosphere. It isn’t going to hurt anyone. It’s a much more minor tear than that one.” He pointed at the smoldering bridge behind them.

“I wasn’t lying when I said that my team and I are your allies, Abram,” Yasir said. It was a ridiculous statement coming from the man a finger squeeze away from blowing Abram’s brains all over Bain Marshall. “But we had to move fast on this. You never would have let us in if I’d been forced to explain what was really happening, especially considering what your family thinks about the Apple.”

Abram turned to face Yasir. The gun remained aimed steadily at his chest.

“I’ll give you thirty seconds to explain,” Abram said. “If I’m not happy thirty seconds from now, I’m going to take that gun and shoot you.” He was fairly confident he could do it. He’d held his own against much stronger and faster enemies than Yasir.

The commander lifted an eyebrow. “All right. The Apple’s trying to fix Earth. Transplanting the Tree of Life here will heal the Earth and correctly segregate Hell and Heaven. The Tree, as far as we know, is in Eden. We’ll have to get into Shamain to reach Eden.” He pointed at the sky. “That leads straight into Shamain. It means our team has linked enough gates in North America to tear open the sky. Now Stephanie’s going up to Heaven, and we just have to hold the fort until she returns.”

Stephanie’s involved too?
Wasn’t there
anyone
he could trust? “And the Union?”

“They kicked out all members affiliated with the Apple years ago, at about the same time that I switched alliances,” Yasir said. “We stole some equipment on our way out. Good thing we’re not really Union, because the OPA does want to kill you guys. But we
are
on your side, if you’ll let us be, and we
will
protect you when the OPA comes to exterminate the werewolves.”

When
they come, not
if
.

This was Abel’s fault for going and getting himself abducted at the worst possible time. And probably Rylie’s fault, too.

At least, that was what Abram would have preferred to think—when really, it was his fault for being a dumb, trusting fuck.

He was not cut out for this leadership shit.

“Make sense?” Yasir asked when Abram didn’t respond.

“Yeah. Makes sense.” Abram cracked his knuckles and eyed the gun. “But now it’s been thirty seconds, and I’m still not happy.”

“Uh, is this supposed to be happening?” Levi asked, interrupting their conversation.

Both Abram and Yasir looked up.

The crack in the sky had spread wide, so wide that Abram momentarily thought that the clouds had disappeared and left nothing but gray sky behind it.

There was something dark on the other side of the fissure. A hint of trees and the faint silhouette of a dark city skyline faded into view.

Abram assumed it was Shamain.

The ground was shaking beneath Abram’s feet. The barricades rattled, and it wasn’t just from the wind. Smoke guttered from Dis like a flame about to go out.

“I don’t think that’s supposed to happen,” Levi said.

Yasir holstered his gun. Turned to the waiting witches, his face pale.

“Get to the SUVs,” he said.

James had spent
months constructing a home for Elise. “Home,” of course, being a very nice name for a very terrible thing—a cage specially designed to contain his kopis now that she’d been turned into a demon. He had selected a small, abandoned resort in the Himalayas to ensure that she wouldn’t be disturbed, yet would still have ample room to roam.

He had been planning what she would need, and how he might contain her there, even before they reunited in Northgate. He had seen what kinds of terrible things Elise could do. Slipping between shadows like a nightmare, fighting like the oldest of master demons.

He hadn’t planned on having to put Elise in the cage so soon after finishing its construction. And he
definitely
hadn’t planned on being forced to follow her inside.

Stephanie’s betrayal and the broken gate had left him with little other choice.

A lot of things suddenly weren’t going to plan.

James felt the momentary disorientation of slipping across the dimension, space stretching and bending to his will. His vision faded to black and returned a few seconds later, only to find that he was standing in the bedroom where he had left Elise.

The furniture was shattered. He stepped off of the broken wardrobe, slipping on a board.

“What in the name of…?”

He had just carried Elise’s unconscious body to bed hours earlier. Everything had been in order at that time. But now her mirror was cracked as though she had punched it, there were clothes strewn all over the floor, and worst of all—to his horror—the curtains had been ripped down.

It was night on the other side, but not for much longer. The sky was tinged orange.

All thoughts of Stephanie fled from his mind. James snatched the curtains from the corner and put them back up.

He slammed through the bedroom door.

Elise had ripped down one of the pillars outside—thankfully not one that was load-bearing. The contents of half of the kitchen cabinets were scattered across the courtyard. Cracked eggs floated in the stream that ran underneath the exercise room.

“Elise?” he called. She didn’t reply.

He flung open the door to the kitchen—empty and destroyed—and the library—also empty, with its curtains ripped down. James shut that door and locked it. He would have to fix that later.

Touching the walls as he moved to the next door, he felt the ache of the runes that he had built into the walls. They were intact, but strained. As if a burst of magic had forced them to stretch to their very limits. He had constructed the temple to be able to withstand any amount of magical onslaught, so the fact that they had been damaged at all was incredible.

James pushed the bathroom door open.

The curtains were down here, too. One entire wall of the bathroom was made of glass and now it was exposed, giving James a perfect view of the rising sun. Its yellow light was creeping toward the massive tub.

And next to the tub was Elise.

She was curled into a tight ball, hands fisted in her hair even in sleep. It looked like she had stripped off most of her clothes in the midst of the same destructive fury that had torn apart the temple. Now the sun was only a few feet from her naked toes. He could see her skeleton through her feet as her hair faded into a mist that dribbled across the floor.

It should have hurt enough to rouse her—but she was unconscious.

James swept through the bathroom, gathering the curtains, quickly hanging them on the hooks in front of the glass wall. He started with the center panel to stop the creep of sunlight toward Elise and moved out from there.

Then he dropped by her side, gently moving her hands from her face.

He could almost see the outline of her teeth through her skin. Her skin was tissue-thin and as colorless as the void in Heaven. She looked like the survivor of a plague…or someone who was on the brink of starving to death.

She hadn’t looked like this when she was trying to kill Leander. Skinny and pale, but not deathly.

It had only been hours.

James touched her forehead carefully, worried that pressing too hard might bruise. Her temperature was a few degrees cooler than the room. “Elise,” he said, “can you hear me?”

She didn’t respond to his voice, nor did she respond to a gentle shake.

He brushed his fingers through her hair and contacted something wet and sticky on the back of her skull. James rolled her toward him. There was a seeping wound near the base of her neck that looked like it must have been inflicted by someone else.

James dampened a towel in the tub and cleaned the wound. It must have stung, but that didn’t disturb her either.

Muttering curses under his breath, he stripped off his glove and warding ring.

Elise’s mind was weak and fading. She was just as damaged internally as she was externally.

He focused his thoughts toward her.
Elise
?

She was dreaming. That was a good sign, if only because it meant she wasn’t dead. The fact that she was dreaming of a distant garden and a towering Tree was less of a good sign.

Elise, wake up.

Her eyelids flickered. Her shoulders tensed.

She had heard him.

And then she began to awake.

It had been
years since Elise had slept and dreamt as she rested.

She hadn’t missed the experience.

Elise stood between the tangled roots of a towering tree, taller than the sky and broader than any city she had ever seen. She was tiny on the grass in front of it, dwarfed by a trunk that she couldn’t have wrapped her arms around with the help of a thousand other people. Its bark was as pale as her skin. It smelled like cinnamon and apples.

There was a voice in the garden.

Elise
…

She turned to see who was speaking to her, afraid of seeing a familiar face glowing with godhood, momentarily convinced that He could have returned from the depths of death to torment her again.

Yet Adam was nowhere in sight, and she wasn’t even in the garden, as she had initially believed. She was in a forest. Every tree was as large as the first she had seen, forming a massive forest of skyscrapers. Their branches tangled to form a lightless canopy. Pale blue lightning bugs drifted among the draped ivy, dancing on blossoming roses the size of Elise’s fist.

This wasn’t one of Eve’s memories. There had never been a garden that looked like this. The angels had been careful to prevent the wilderness from dominating their civilization.

It was wild and free here, filled with life waiting to spill from the branches.

“Elise.”

She looked down. There was a boy—a young man—sitting on the ground with a sapling in his hands, the bulb of its roots dirtying his fingers. He had scruffy brown hair and pale blue eyes. There was still a little bit of that childhood softness to his cheeks, but it was fading rapidly; this was a teenager growing as rapidly as the tree he sheltered, and soon he would be a man.

“Nathaniel?” Elise whispered.

He lifted the sapling toward her. “I’ve taken good care of it. You don’t need to worry.”

Why would she care about some sapling? This was
Nathaniel
, the boy that had helped liberate her from Adam’s captivity, the one who had died and been reborn into her arms as an angel. The first angel to have been hatched from Eve’s nursery in years—other than his father, James.

She slid off of the root, crossing the grass to kneel in front of him. The soil was moist and warm under her knees.

“Forget the plant. What about you?” Elise asked, cupping her hands around his. He felt real. He wasn’t a ghost. She wasn’t even all that certain he was a dream.

“I don’t matter anymore,” Nathaniel said. “I’m everything.”

Her fingers brushed a root, and warm recognition flowed up her arms. This wasn’t just a sapling. It was a cutting of the Tree that had been destroyed in the final battle. The Tree whose sap still ran through Elise’s veins.

There was a strange light in Nathaniel’s eyes. That wasn’t a normal ethereal glow. It was something greater and far more terrifying—something that he never should have touched.

“My God,” Elise said.

And he whispered, “Yes.”

Elise, wake up
.

He began to fade from her, holding the sapling to his chest as the earth vanished underneath her and the trees bent away.

Consciousness struck.

The pain flooded back all at once—the cramping hunger, the crack in her skull, the heaviness of her muscles. There was sunlight outside. It was daytime. Her skin crawled with electricity as if it were trying to fragment into a million pieces and peel off of the bone.

Elise groaned through gritted teeth, back arching, heels digging into the floor under her.

But there was food nearby. She could hear it the rush of healthy blood through healthy veins.

She just needed to find it.

Shoving herself onto all fours, Elise pressed her forehead against the tile, trembling at the force of daylight outside the walls. It had been so painless in the forest of her dreams, effortless and safe. She wanted to go back. She wanted out of his hellhole.