Caged in Bone (The Ascension Series)

by Reine, SM

  Leliel extended her wings behind her. She took care not to flare her power, only stretching the tips of her wings to either wall, leaving the feathers as unlit as those of a bird. “Did you hear me? Return to your master and remind him that we had an agreement.”

  Another twitch. Atropos flickered like aging film skipping frames.

  Such demon tricks might intimidate a mortal, but Leliel was one of Eve’s first children. She had seen those things a hundred times and was unimpressed.

  Leliel lifted her chin haughtily. “Tell me when you’re willing to cooperate, Atropos. Better yet—have Belphegor tell me when he’s ready. I’ll have nothing to do with his games.”

  The angel slipped down the stairs, one hand on the banister. The stairs twisted through the gears of the clock and carried Leliel down toward the safety of the first floor and the door beyond.

  She heard the whisper of cloth on stone.

  And then the megaira was upon Leliel.

  Cold hands clamped on to her upper arms, digging fingernails into her triceps. The hair had fallen from Atropos’s face. Her eyes were endlessly black and as empty as a corpse’s.

  With a shout, Leliel shoved her away. Atropos slipped two steps down before she caught her footing.

  “Betrayal?” Leliel hissed. “We had an agreement.”

  The megaira’s only response was to leap, hands outstretched, black hair flying behind her.

  Leliel released her power, letting the energy shine through her wings in an explosive burst of sunlight. It flooded the gears of the clock with white-gold light and chased away the shadows. She focused it all on the demon and willed her to disappear.

  Atropos should have been immediately burned away, returned to the pits of Hell. But she only staggered, flung her arms over her face, and stood her ground.

  Leliel’s hands were outstretched, straining with the effort it took to sustain that level of power. “Leave,” she urged Atropos. “Be gone, damn you!”

  The megaira’s fingernails flashed at her face, and Leliel leaped into the air, lifting herself inches off the stairs and beyond Atropos’s reach.

  The demon lunged up the stairs and grabbed for Leliel.

  It was easy to dodge her, but Atropos’s nails caught a swirl of fabric from her dress, tearing it at the hem. A long stretch of Leliel’s olive-skinned leg was bared to the cool temple air.

  Leliel hadn’t brought her sword as a show of good faith. Now she could think of nothing but the flaming blade, forming its image perfectly in her mind as though it hovered in front of her, and she prayed to it as she had once prayed to Adam.

  Nash longed to reach through the memory and slap his ex-wife.

  You fool, you damn blasted fool…

  Atropos caught Leliel by the throat and pinned her to the railing.

  “Belphegor says that the deal is off,” Atropos rasped.

  Leliel’s heart swelled with fear. She shoved at Atropos, trying to push her away, using all the power in her muscles to fight against the demon.

  It should have been an easy fight. It was Shamain, for the love of Eve—the angels’ home where no demon could survive, where the ethereal light of God’s glory and the lingering glow of the Tree stretched for centuries after its removal. Atropos shouldn’t have been able to exist there if Leliel didn’t will it, much less win a battle of muscle.

  Yet Atropos bent Leliel slowly but surely toward her, one arm locking around Leliel’s waist like a steel shackle as the other gripped the base of her right wing. Razor-sharp nails dug into her flesh.

  Even as Leliel arched her back, Atropos simply leaned forward to close the space between them. Atropos’s mouth latched on to Leliel’s throat, tongue cold and slimy against her skin, lips clammy.

  For an instant, she felt the light graze of sharp teeth against her flesh.

  And then Atropos bit.

  Pain flooded Nash as strongly as it had Leliel. He could feel the fangs scraping his veins, tearing the muscles ragged.

  They were dying.

  “We haven’t been able to find anything, sir.”

  The voice snapped Nash out of Leliel’s mind.

  His eyes opened.

  Nash was sweating and panting as if recovering from the fight against Atropos. But he hadn’t moved since shutting his eyes. His ex-wife was still unconscious in bed. There were other angels on the other side of the room, Michael among them.

  Nash adjusted his suit, though there was no point in trying to compose himself when he was drenched in Leliel’s blood.

  Leliel had invited Atropos into the city. No—she had invited Belphegor, a lord of Hell. She had violated their city’s defenses and made them all vulnerable.

  Now she was paying for it.

  Michael was speaking and had been for several seconds. Nash was slow to catch up to the conversation. He lifted a hand to quiet the other angel. “Wait. What did you say? Start from the beginning.”

  “There’s no trace of Leliel’s attacker,” Michael said. “We have been unable to sense infernal forces.”

  Annoyance prickled at the back of Nash’s neck. “Did you search visually?”

  Michael looked surprised by the idea that they should actually conduct a real search. “Would you like us to?”

  “Yes,” Nash said through clenched teeth, “and be very thorough. This isn’t over.”

  The angel looked like he wanted to ask more. He must have realized that Nash had been joined with Leliel’s mind to get information. But to mention it would be extremely rude, and Nash wasn’t going to volunteer the information.

  Uriel broke away from the others and took Nash’s arm. He lowered his voice. “We have a problem.”

  Those four words were the least surprising thing that Nash could think of hearing at the moment, yet they still chilled him. Yemiel was standing on the far end of the room, absorbed in conversation with Raqib, and hadn’t heard Uriel’s report.

  To say that something was wrong seemed a gross understatement. With Leliel unconscious and drained of blood, attacked within the confines of Shamain itself, there was no way that anything could possibly be right.

  Nash stepped closer to Uriel and lowered his voice. “A problem of what nature, exactly?”

  “Unusual activity,” Uriel said. He began walking and Nash followed. The halls of Leliel’s manor were being kept brighter than usual. Every torch was lit, the stones encouraged to release their maximum glow. “Something is happening on Earth.”

  “You’ll have to get more specific than that,” Nash said.

  Uriel rubbed his thumb over the pommel of the saber strapped to his hip, like he found comfort in the gesture. It looked entirely out of place against his skinny jeans, long scarf, and thick-framed glasses. “I would be more precise if I had more information. There’s a farmhouse outside Matamoros, Mexico that’s being guarded by demons.”

  “Guarded? You’re certain?”

  “Absolutely,” Uriel said.

  If it was true, then that was more concentrated activity than they had observed for weeks. The attack patterns had become random recently, as if they were meant to wear down the human forces protecting evacuees without any interest in any particular location. Leliel believed—and Nash reluctantly agreed—that the leaders of Hell were only attempting to distract them from what was really happening, though they had no clue what that might be.

  But a farmhouse in Mexico being guarded—that could be something. Considering that Uriel had spotted it so soon after Leliel’s attack by Atropos…

  It seemed too coincidental.

  Nash glanced over his shoulder at the angels hovering around Leliel’s bedside again. They didn’t notice that he had gone yet.

  “Show me what you’ve found,” he said.

  Crossing between Heaven and Earth was more pleasant than crossing into Hell, though not much easier now that so much of Hell’s atmosphere had been pumped into Earth’s.

  Nash and Uriel flew into North America, and time distorted. The air grew dry
and harsh as the world darkened around them.

  Leaving the light of Shamain behind was excruciating, filling Nash’s heart with the immediate ache of homesickness. The fact that the city still had that effect on him so long after his banishment made his stomach twist with sick anger. Shamain had cradled him in his youth, but it had rejected him, too; it was not the home that he had chosen.

  Yet it was hard to be glad to descend from the clouds above North America, sweeping through bitterly acidic air, soaked with frigid rain that made his jacket cling to his back. Through the haze, he could see the bottom right quadrant of the glowing red X that crisscrossed the continent. Hellfire gleamed dimly in the night.

  Uriel led Nash over the fissure, darting sleek and fast through the buffeting air currents that made flight so hard above the gash leading into Hell.

  “Here,” he shouted over the wind, folding his wings back to descend toward Matamoros.

  The city was situated on the east side of the country, just south of Texas’s border. The air was cleaner than it was near the fissure to the northeast, purified by storms that bent the trees and slicked the streets. Most of the city seemed to have escaped siege from demonic attack, but there had been no electricity for weeks. The residents dwelled in darkness.

  The angels shot beyond the limits of the town to farmland. Uriel stopped above one particular farm and pointed at the fields.

  Nash snapped his wings out to hold himself suspended a few hundred feet above the ground as he tracked the silhouetted demons moving through the maíz. They weren’t moving toward any particular farmhouse, nor were they moving away from them. The motion was lateral, like a wide orbit with one tin-roofed house as its pivot point.

  Patrolling.

  Nash and Uriel dropped into the trees beyond the edge of the property and folded their wings back. The branches sheltered them from the worst of the wind, but Nash was already drenched; he felt soggy into his marrow. He never had to put up with this kind of weather in the Haven.

  “This is nowhere near the fissure,” Nash said, pushing his hair back off of his forehead. “Why would they be here, of all places?”

  “My guess? It’s nearly equidistant from the two southern legs of the fissure—far enough that our normal searches wouldn’t find them.”

  Nash gave Uriel a sideways look. The other angel was sodden, too. “Why were you here?”

  “I’ve been tracking the movements of mortal military forces,” Uriel said, looking embarrassed. “They’re nearer to the fight than we are, and far more numerous. They have electronic surveillance. Their eyes are everywhere. I thought I might find something interesting by looking where their eyes do.”

  No wonder he had been so discreet about his discovery. It was shameful to suggest that the mortals might have a better idea of what was happening in the war than the angels did. Everything that angels did was superior to humans—everything. They needed nothing and no one. Certainly not military surveillance.

  The corner of Nash’s mouth twitched into a smile. He clapped a hand on Uriel’s shoulder. No words of comfort here—Uriel’s biases were his problem, not Nash’s. “We shouldn’t enter alone. Return to Shamain and alert Azrael; he’ll be able to assemble backup.”

  “But there are two of us,” Uriel said. “They’re only demons.”

  Until Nash had seen what wounded Leliel, he would have agreed. A single angel was enough to kill hundreds of demons under the right conditions. But Leliel had fought one-on-one against Atropos and lost, with nearly fatal results.

  Nash wouldn’t be so arrogant. He would go home to Summer.

  “Collect at least another three,” he said. “Five total, including us.”

  Uriel didn’t seem to like those instructions, but he nodded. “Very well.” He took flight again.

  Alone in the storm, Nash climbed atop a cluster of rocks and shielded himself from the wind and rain with his wings. It was hard to make out much detail in the night. He could still see the human-like figures circling the house—possibly nightmares. But the dark shapes in the fields were far more indistinct. They could have been fiends or naga and he never would have known.

  Twin lights appeared on the horizon and grew. Nash’s wings went tense.

  Headlights.

  Not just a single pair of headlights, either—they were soon followed by another pair, and another. The headlights turned off as they crested the hill, but Nash could still feel the humans within the vehicles. They were approaching the farmhouse as quietly as possible.

  Had the demons taken human allies?

  Nash lifted into the wind, swooping over the fields to land on a tree near the house’s driveway. He sank down into the branches and allowed the leaves to conceal his position.

  Nearer the house, he could tell that there were no nightmares patrolling the house. Rather, they were megaira: skeletal creatures with mostly human forms and slender serpents where hair should have been. Megaira feasted on anger and aggression. Interesting choice of guard for a demon outpost on Earth.

  They would be extremely effective against humans, emotional beasts that they were. But megaira would be helpless against angels. Angels didn’t get angry.

  Nash heard the first pops of gunfire echo over the fields. It sounded like firecrackers.

  The humans were definitely not allies.

  He closed his eyes and opened his other senses to the nearby mortals. There were fifty of them. No, forty-eight. Two had already fallen. Their minds vanished from his view at the same time.

  Growls and snarls built within the long grass. It stirred the megaira to life. They loped toward the sounds of gunfire and left the front door of the farmhouse unguarded.

  Nash didn’t hesitate. He dropped to the ground behind them once they had passed, folding his wings tight to his back so that he wouldn’t be visible, and peered through the window. It looked like an ordinary farmhouse. There was a living room decorated with rugs and family photos, though there was no family in sight. It seemed to have been undisturbed by the demons.

  Perhaps it wasn’t the house they were guarding.

  He heard rustling behind him.

  Nash leaped easily onto the roof.

  It wasn’t a demon that approached the house—it was a human, wearing black cargo pants and a flak jacket. His hair was mussed as though he had been wearing a helmet but had lost it. His eyes were wild. He bled from the scalp.

  All that black gear and the assault rifle he hugged to his chest looked militaristic, but the man didn’t look Mexican. His features were strongly Middle Eastern.

  When he turned, sweeping the muzzle of the rifle toward the seemingly empty night, Nash glimpsed bold white letters on the back of his jacket: UKA. Union of Kopides and Aspides. The military wing of the Office of Preternatural Affairs, an American institution that had bases in Los Angeles and Maryland.

  He was a long way from home.

  Movement caught Nash’s attention. The fight had moved past the farmhouse without ever reaching it, and now he saw faint muzzle flashes toward the barn. A single spotlight lit the structure’s interior, powered by a humming generator.

  So that was what the demons had been guarding.

  The Union man sprinted toward the fight.

  “Excellent choice,” Nash muttered, taking off once more.

  There were forty surviving men now. They had taken defensive positions behind rows of grapevines and a pair of trees, firing into the demons that stood between them and the barn. There were a half-dozen megaira, a few handfuls of fiends.

  The Union didn’t see the megaira approaching them from behind.

  A megaira seized a woman by the helmet and pulled hard. With a sickening pop, the helmet detached—and took the head with it. The blood sprayed directly in the line of light that spilled from the open barn door.

  Nash soared overhead unseen as the Union whirled to fire on the demons. The mortals were penned in. No escape.

  He landed on the roof. Nash couldn’t see what was within the
barn, but the instant that he touched down, he knew.

  There was an ethereal artifact inside.

  He pressed both hands to the metal and shut his eyes. He could feel the energy of an ethereal gateway vibrating deep in his bones. He could almost see it, the radiance was so strong. It would be tall and arched. White stone with black veins. There would be marks rimming the bases of the parallel pillars, and it was those marks that called to him, asking him to open it wide.

  Nash had no way to tell where that door would lead—not without opening it, which would require the help of a second angel. There were several gateways hidden on Earth still. It could have been any of them.

  But this one was in the custody of demons. He was certain that meant that it would lead to Shamain.

  More screams from below. He opened his eyes to see that the Union was losing their fight, numbers rapidly dwindling. Thirty left alive, now twenty-seven.

  He hesitated.

  The Union had thinned the numbers of the demons, but there were still too many for the mortals to handle. He had meant to wait for Uriel to return with backup. If Nash waited a few seconds longer, it would be too late for the humans.

  He was momentarily tempted to stand aside and wait—to do the safe thing. But Summer’s face floated to the front of his mind. Her smile, her warmth.

  She would want these humans saved.

  Nash extended his wings and let his power flare.

  The light inside the barn flickered then turned off. Shouts rose from the fight underneath him. Everyone was disoriented by the sudden darkness. The demons would adjust faster than the humans—Nash needed to move quickly.

  He jerked the saber from its sheath and stepped over the side of the roof.

  Nash flooded the blade with his energy. Flames leaped from the pommel, licking all the way up the cutting edge.

  In the light of the fire he saw the megaira turn to him, looking stunned.

  He plunged his blade into the belly of the nearest one.

  The smell of cooked meat filled the air as he jerked it to the right, tearing the megaira open. He let his momentum carry him toward the next of them. The blade bit into her neck easily.