Caged in Bone (The Ascension Series) (32 page)

This seemed to mean more to the angel than it did to Rylie. His eyes registered mild surprise. “And how did your…pack…end up here, mortal?” Michael’s tone made it clear he considered “mortal” to be an insult.

Abel stood. “Did you hear her? She was trying to fucking help you and just about got pulverized for it,” he said. “You want to ask her questions, you better be a hell of a lot nicer about it.”

Michael looked to be as impressed by Abel’s anger as he was by the sight of Nash’s injuries. The angel spoke even more coolly now. “I came to investigate this darkness and alert Nash to an intrusion. Something has come through the gate we recovered from Mexico. You wouldn’t know anything about that, would you, wolves?”

“All I know is that Nash needs help,” Summer said.

The angel nodded in reluctant agreement. “He’s not the only one. We’ve established an infirmary of sorts in Leliel’s home. Raqib is watching our wounded there. He will clean Nashriel’s wounds and care for him.”

Michael moved as if to touch him, but Summer wrapped her arms around Nash more tightly.

“Don’t,” she snarled.

He paused. “He may not heal at all without Shamain’s glow,” Michael said. “There is still some light in Leliel’s home. We have reserves. It could save him.”

Summer hesitated. All she had to do was say no and Rylie would happily jump in. She had taken down a hybrid before—she could probably deal with an angel, too. Anything for her daughter.

But Summer said, “Okay.”

Rylie didn’t quite relax as Michael kneeled to touch Nash’s side. “Shamain is sick tonight,” he said, pulling his brother out of Summer’s lap with slow, gentle movements, like he was taking an infant from her. “The demons are still here, and their sinful warlock magic has severed Shamain’s exits. Simultaneously, there was a disruption on Earth that ripped the tendons holding our dimension in place. Do you understand?”

“No,” Summer said.

Michael straightened with Nash in his arms. “It means everything that orients and secures Heaven is gone. The walls are torn, our foundation destroyed. Nothing, neither angels nor city, can heal in this darkness. Shamain will fall if we don’t act quickly.”

Summer pressed both of her bloodied hands to her heart. “Fall?”

“If you want to survive tonight, I suggest you find and kill the demon that has invaded us,” he said.

“Wait!” Summer leaped to her feet. “What about the other angels? Aren’t they going to help?”

“There aren’t other angels,” Michael said. “Help us, bride of Nashriel.”

His wings pumped. He lifted into the air, carrying Nash into the darkness.

Rylie stared after him without really seeing him.

There aren’t other angels?
Could the attacking demons have really wounded or killed every angel left in Shamain?

Summer wiped her fingers off on her skirt. “Well, that wasn’t much of a motivational speech,” she said with a weak laugh.

“Hunt demons,” Abel said. “Alone.” And then he punctuated it with a long stream of colorful prevarications that seemed even more vulgar than usual, considering that they were in Heaven.

“Could be worse,” Summer said. “At least I have you guys. Speaking of which, what
are
you guys doing here?”

“We were going to Eve’s temple to open another door to Eden,” Abel said. “Long story. But you can find somewhere safe. We’ll drop the bag and hunt the demon if that’s what we gotta do to keep the city from…falling.”

Summer’s eyes were bright with anger. She ripped off her shirt, kicked off her shoes, dropped the skirt. “I’m not going to hide. If you’re hunting tonight, I am too.”

She shifted into a wolf, and so did he.

Together, the pack ran through the city.

Shamain smelled like
death. It radiated from the streets and darkened buildings. The trees seemed to ooze it from their leaves. Even the texture of the air was changing rapidly. It was becoming bitter and acidic.

The last of the stars vanished from the sky, and the wolves finally reached Eve’s temple.

Rylie shifted back to her human form and pulled James’s backpack off of Abel. The grass in front of the temple prickled against her bare feet. She felt like eyes were watching her as she stepped up the path to the imprint of an archway on the tree’s trunk.

There was no door waiting for her at the top. The archway was closed.

She turned to look at the wolves. They weren’t watching her; they were alert, eyes on the bottom of the hill, as if expecting attack. She wasn’t the only one who didn’t feel alone. “How do we get in?” Rylie asked, knowing that Summer and Abel wouldn’t be able to respond, and that it wouldn’t have mattered if they could.

Rylie walked around the trunk to search for a door, but the archway was the only sign of an entrance. And James Faulkner definitely still wasn’t there to let them in.

She circled back. Abel and Summer were waiting for her, and Rylie couldn’t see anything beyond them. The rest of the city was too dark.

“Let’s just leave the bag here,” Rylie said, trying to rub the sudden chill off of her arms. “We can come back after we’ve hunted.”

Abel’s gaze focused beyond her. His eyes sharpened and a growl rippled from his throat.

She turned to see that a burning point of light had appeared in the trunk of the tree.

Rylie’s heart skipped a beat. Was Shamain’s glow being restored?

No—this light was red, not the pale blue-gray that she had seen when she first set foot through the gate. And it was growing rapidly, spreading over the trunk of the tree until it looked like a fist-sized ember. It swelled like a tumor.

She backed up until her back hit something furry. She didn’t look behind her to see if it was Abel or Summer.

The center of the burned point brightened to white-hot, then melted into an opening.

Something moved beyond that hole.

Abel stood in front of her, furred body pressed against her legs, as Summer came up from behind. Their growling sounded like the idling of a semi truck.

The trunk crumbled and flaked away into the shape of the arch.

The man who stepped through was taller than Rylie, his form slender and skin pallid. He wore a slim-fitting jacket that buttoned at the throat. His hair was slicked back. At a glance, Rylie would have said that he was a normal man—all the parts were in the right places, with two arms, two legs, a nose and mouth.

Except that Rylie recognized him. She had seen etchings of this guy passed around so that anyone who spotted him would know that the infernal army wouldn’t be far behind. The artist’s rendering of his features had been perfect, from the hollow cheeks to the shadowed eyes, his unsettling stare.

It was Belphegor, and he was in Shamain.

The clearing in
Colorado was empty when James returned to it, although there were obvious signs that Stephanie—and the Apple—had tried to brute force the gate open. The snow had been trodden to a muddy mush. There were scorch marks on the pillars.

Just because they had given up on it for now didn’t mean that they had gone far. James didn’t have much time.

He needed a new plan.

The gate itself still wasn’t working, but the sky had torn open and created a direct route to Heaven. He didn’t need ethereal artifacts now; he only needed to calculate the physical location of Shamain relative to his position and make a portal that would lead there. And he needed to do it before Stephanie came back.

He scuffed the snow away from the base of the gate, baring the ground underneath. He had spray-painted a circle of power on the hard-packed dirt. It was one of the most elaborate runes that he had ever created—more elaborate than the one that had been required to erase Abel’s scent from the sanctuary, but less elaborate than the time he had broken out of a prison in Dis with nothing but his blood.

The magic was complicated enough that James struggled to understand what he had done, even now. He had painted it over the course of weeks, trapped in a haze, almost like he was drawing it from pictures in his dreams. He’d been forced to restart twice. He barely recognized the rune that remained.

And that had been when he could focus. Now he couldn’t stop thinking of Elise’s body against his, her lips attached to his wrist, how close he had come to death.

There had been a moment after orgasm where she had gone completely limp and James’s heart had refused to beat. He wasn’t sure what had been more frightening: watching her collapse in front of him, or feeling like every one of his body’s organs was shutting down. He’d been momentarily convinced that they’d managed to kill themselves.

Who knew what would happen when mage blood mingled with that of a god-demon?

Scariest of all, in retrospect, was how readily he would have done it again—opened a vein and risked death just for a few minutes of feeling, for the first time in years, that he wasn’t missing half of his soul.

He had been staring at the rune underneath the snow without moving for too long and lost track of his mental math. James refocused, attempting to rearrange and assemble every symbol he needed in the correct order.
The illustration of the sphere goes near the northernmost triangle; those lines to the east need to crisscross…

James scuffed out the incorrect lines. He grabbed the spray paint from the stack of scrap wood and began adding new lines where the old ones had been erased.

He tried not to think of the smell of Elise’s sweat or the fact that she had called him Adam.

Fourth quadrant octagon needs to be shifted three degrees to the left.

He wasn’t Adam. His dreams meant nothing.

Two parallel lines connecting with the circle…

James kept spraying until the circle was complete.

A loud
crack
drew his attention to the sky. It had been brightening as he worked, but he had ignored it, assuming that the light was only from approaching dawn. Now he stepped back and shielded his eyes from the gray glow.

It wasn’t sunlight, but gray Heavenly light thrusting into Earth’s atmosphere.

And there was something coming through that fissure.

It was impossibly huge, much larger than anything that was meant to be suspended in the sky. It looked like the underside of an earthen sphere.

He had survived the demon apocalypse of 2009 in Reno. He had seen what happened when ethereal ruins had been pulled from a Heavenly dimension onto Earth. This looked similar—but on a much, much larger scale. Frighteningly so.

Shamain was tumbling.

The city shifting changed everything, and the teleportation spell was so specific. He was making estimates based on Shamain being where it had stood for millennia. He could change the symbols, do a new estimate that involved catching the city as it slipped between dimensions. But that would take time.

If he didn’t go now, he would never get into the city. Lord only knew where the Eden gate would be after that.

He had no choice. He had to go through
now
.

James activated the rune on his body that he had linked to the larger teleportation rune. Light flared between the pillars of the gate.

It wasn’t like an ethereal door—he couldn’t see what was on the other side and make sure that it was aimed at the right position. He could have misestimated his target. His hurried, sloppy calculations could be wrong. Or the city could have already moved too far for him to reach it.

But Eden was waiting.

James covered his head with his arms and leaped through.

James didn’t land
on the roof of the building that he had been aiming for. He appeared in the air six feet to the right and about twenty feet lower than intended.

On the bright side, he didn’t have much time to build momentum before crashing into the canal below.

He hit the wall of water with less than a lungful of air.

The water was as warm as tears, sweet but salty. It pulled him under with gentle hands and sucked him deep into its belly, swirling and rushing and shoving against his limbs, catching on his clothes, soaking his loafers so that they instantly doubled in weight.

It was comfortable to be submerged in Shamain’s canals. They welcomed James so readily that, for a moment, he forgot that he couldn’t breathe.

James reached out for the canal’s wall. His fingertips grazed stone worn smooth by millennia of flowing water then slipped away. The water was moving too fast.

His lungs hitched, desperate for oxygen.

James’s knee banged into the bottom of the canal. He kicked out with flat feet, connected with the bottom, pushed off. His head broke the surface. Air rolled down his throat with the taste of cinnamon and apples, and then the canal pulled him under again.

It shoved him onward as he struggled against the weight of his clothes. James kicked off his shoes. His socks were whipped away into the current.

The falchion on his back felt like an anvil pressed against his spine, dragging him to the bottom.

He wouldn’t let go of it. That, of all things, needed to stay.

In bare feet, James kicked against the bottom of the canal again, lurching toward the surface.

But suddenly, there was no water and no canal.

James was launched into open air.

He was falling.

He sucked in a dizzying rush of oxygen as he reached blindly for something to catch himself. Fingers brushed wet stone. He seized upon it and gripped it so tightly that his knuckles ached. His weight stretched his arm to its full extension, shoulder aching, and water sluiced past him in a frothy white roar to disappear into a black pit underneath him.

James had caught the edge of a shattered canal where it drained into a sinkhole. That much he could tell. Why the canal would have broken—why there was a sinkhole at all—made no sense.

His grip slipped, and he grabbed the rim of the canal with the other hand. Grunting, teeth gritted, he hauled himself over the edge of the chasm.

He rolled onto cracked white cobblestone, dripping water from his hair and clothes.

It took him a moment to realize that he couldn’t see anything, and it wasn’t because he had knocked his head against something in the canal. Heaven was dark. He had been in ethereal ruins that were thousands of years old and they had still seemed to sparkle with an internal light. This darkness was…impossible.