Caged in Bone (The Ascension Series)

by Reine, SM

  “We’ll see what we can do,” Abram said, swallowing down pangs of grief. Time moved much more slowly in Hell than on Earth. If this woman had children when she went to Hell, chances were good that they weren’t children anymore—or alive at all.

  She smiled blankly at him. “Thank you.”

  He returned to the Scions and took count of the slaves that had been brought back. Fifteen this time. The biggest homecoming day they’d had was thirty; often, it was no more than three or four people. Fifteen was good. That meant Elise must have gotten compliance from a small House.

  A woman wearing six-inch heels strolled from the bridge, unperturbed by the shift in dimension. She had sleek black hair down to her elbows and small breasts that were held in place by a leather strap. When she spotted Abram, she smirked and strolled toward him.

  Neuma.

  The back of Abram’s neck prickled. Elise usually escorted the slaves to Earth, not Neuma. The succubus did PR. Elise did the actual dirty work. “Where is she?” Abram asked out the corner of his mouth as he opened a new box of blankets and handed one to a Scion.

  “Personal business,” Neuma said airily.

  “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  She peeked into another box to check its contents. It was a delivery of clothes salvaged from the homes in Northgate, intended to be taken to Hell to clothe newly freed slaves. She lifted the box to her shoulder and threw him a glance as she walked back toward the bridge. “Don’t ask questions.”

  Abram watched her until she vanished through the fissure again, crawling back to the dark pit from whence she came.

  At least she hadn’t hit on him this time. Christmas miracle.

  As he helped Summer carry a man to the tractor, he kept his eyes on the surrounding crowd, watchful for any incidents. If there was going to be a breakdown, it was often here and now. Right when the emotions were surging high.

  He wasn’t surprised when he heard gasps. It filled him with a sense of dread and inevitability.

  Abram waded into the crowd to find out what had gone wrong this time—another suicide jumping off the bridge halfway up, maybe.

  But the source of the disturbance wasn’t the fissure. It was coming from the opposite direction.

  He was stunned to see Rylie, white-blond hair a tangled mess about her face, panic in her eyes. She ran through the crowd to his side.

  There hadn’t been a lot of time to get to know his mother since returning from the Haven, but they’d already been through a lot of pain as a family. He knew what she looked like when she was grieving. But this fear, this abject terror—this was something that he had never seen before.

  “Is he with you? Where is he?” she asked.

  “Whoa,” Abram said as she grabbed him. “Who are you looking for? What’s wrong?”

  Her fingers dug into his biceps. “It’s Abel. He’s—he’s gone.”

  Abram had seen a lot of disturbing things in the last few weeks, but nothing disturbed him more than watching an entire pack of werewolves sweep Northgate and find no hint of Abel’s scent.

  “It’s like he was never here at all,” Rylie said, wringing a sweater in her hands. It was one of Abel’s, and it was covered in his fur. He had worn it every full and new moon since the autumn nights had started to get too cold for nudity. It should have smelled of Abel’s skin and sweat and the oils in his hair.

  But Rylie said it didn’t.

  They were standing on the steps of St. Philomene’s Cathedral in the crisp morning air. The eaves hung heavy with icicles that caught the sun, diffusing the light into gold sparkles on the church’s siding. But the snow surrounding them had been trampled into a brown, slushy mess by the boots of the pack and Scions as they swept the town.

  Summer took it out of Rylie’s hands as gently as possible, then lifted the hood to her nose and sniffed. Her eyes widened. “I smell you, Rylie, but not him.”

  “Nothing at the sanctuary smells like him.” Rylie snagged the sweater out of Summer’s hands again and hugged it. “I mean, I went to bed with him last night, and our bed doesn’t smell like him. Our bathroom doesn’t smell like him.” She plucked at her shirt. Tears glistened on her cheeks. “I don’t have his smell on me at all.”

  “And you didn’t see footprints or any other sign that he walked out of there?” Abram said. “Or tire tracks, maybe?”

  “It snowed too much.” She gave a disbelieving laugh. “But even if he flew out of there, everything should still smell like him. He was all over the sanctuary yesterday. He’s all over the sanctuary every day.”

  One of the werewolves jogged toward them, stopping at the bottom of the stairs. Abram had trained with Trevin a few times, running sprints and doing drills. He was a nice guy. Fun to hang out with. Today, he was all seriousness.

  “We’ve swept the streets,” Trevin said. “There’s no sign of Abel. The inhabited buildings have been checked too, but we’re moving into the abandoned structures next.”

  “What have you been scenting?” Rylie asked.

  “Nothing out of the ordinary.”

  Rylie made a horrible noise, a mix between a sob and a whimper. Summer wrapped her up in a hug.

  “What’s within the range of ordinary?” Abram asked, dropping down a step to address Trevin quietly. “Are demons ordinary?”

  “The demons we know. Neuma and Elise are the only ones that come up this way, and they’re the only ones that we’re smelling.”

  “Thanks, Trevin,” Abram said. He meant it to be a dismissal, but the werewolf didn’t leave.

  “I have another thought,” Trevin said. “If you want to hear it.”

  Rylie wiped her cheeks dry. “Anything you have.”

  Trevin shuffled his feet, hands jammed deep into his pockets. “Are you sure he didn’t leave on his own?”

  “Why would you say that?”

  He looked like he was struggling with himself, searching for words in the slushy snow at his feet. “He was acting…weird…yesterday. I saw him damage the fence surrounding the sanctuary.”

  “I doubt he was damaging it,” Summer said. “He was probably fixing it. I mean, there’s always something to fix with that thing. We didn’t build it very well and it’s out in the forest where any animal can run it over. Sections have collapsed under snow twice already.”

  “He dug up a crystal and broke it.” Trevin shrugged helplessly. “I don’t know anything about the magic that protects us, but that looked kind of bad to me.”

  Rylie gaped at him. She was shredding the hem of the sweater’s sleeve now, her fingernails working quickly even as the rest of her was frozen still.

  “A crystal,” Summer said.

  “A quartz, like this big.” Trevin held up a fist.

  Abram had guarded Stephanie Whyte while she redid the wards a few weeks earlier. He hadn’t been there for the original casting—it had been a big secret affair, and only Rylie and Abel had gone to that—but he had seen Stephanie digging up crystals too. She hadn’t broken them, though. She had chanted over them, sprinkled some herbs, and reburied them.

  Trevin was right. It did sound bad.

  Really bad.

  “No,” Rylie said. “No. It’s just not possible. Abel was fixing something. He couldn’t make himself disappear like that.”

  Abram didn’t know what to believe. He paced, hands cupped behind his head, gazing up at the sky. No hints of sunlight remained now. They never did for long. Even when it wasn’t actively stormy, the smoke gushing from the fissure kept the air thoroughly hazy. Their relationship with the demons in charge below had improved, but the emissions hadn’t.

  He mulled over the facts. Abel might not have been breaking the wards, but he had tampered with the fence. They also knew that there was no smell of him anywhere. A werewolf couldn’t have done it.

  If there was a connection between those two things, he didn’t see it. But they were living on top of a fissure to Hell. If there were a demon that could pull something like that of
f, it would have probably passed through Northgate.

  If anyone knew about that, it would have to be the woman in charge.

  “I think it’s time we get outside help,” Abram said.

  Four

  Living on top of the fissure for weeks hadn’t made it less frightening, and standing over it made Rylie’s heart race. She’d met dozens of people who had escaped that smoky darkness and had seen their wounds. She could imagine what they might have suffered all too well, and she’d been having nightmares about it. The kind of dreams that made her wake up gasping for air.

  And now she and Abram were going inside for help.

  They stood on the uppermost edge of the bridge for a few long moments without going into the fissure. Abram seemed to be waiting for Rylie to make a move, but her feet felt like they were locked to the earth.

  She took her son’s hand and was surprised to find that his palm was sweaty—he looked so calm. “You’ll be fine,” he said, squeezing her fingers tightly. “I won’t let anything hurt you.”

  She gave a shaky laugh. “I was thinking the same thing about you.”

  The corner of his mouth lifted and the corners of his eyes creased. A quiet Abram smile. “Let’s get down there.”

  They stepped onto the bridge.

  Rylie didn’t feel anything for the first step, or the second. By the third she became aware of the way that the black metal radiated heat through the soles of her sheepskin boots. The fourth was like stepping into warm, sludgy molasses.

  She might have stopped or stepped back, but Abram kept going forward. With their hands joined, she had no choice but to stick by his side.

  The air tightened around them as it slid up her calves, her thighs, her hips. It wasn’t liquid like an ocean tide. It was steel shackles. It clamped down on her ribs and squeezed the breath from her lungs.

  Rylie shut her eyes and took the final step.

  Time compressed. Her heart was beating too fast, her lungs fluttering with impossibly fast inhalations and exhalations. Her pulse throbbed in her temples. The wolf was momentarily smell-blind, and the loss of her most important sense peaked her panic.

  It was hot. Too hot.

  She tried to grip Abram’s hand tighter, but she couldn’t tell where he was. Everything was dark. Her hands were separate from her body. She had no feet or face or flesh.

  Just as quickly as it had left her, sensation returned in a rush that overwhelmed her mind. It was still too dark to see, but she could hear—oh God, she could hear, and the air was filled with screams. The wolf knew what it sounded like when prey was dying, the way that it kicked and squealed, and this was nothing like that. It was a chorus of unending pain that wouldn’t be punctuated by merciful death. It was unnatural. Rylie dropped Abram’s hand to press her hands over her ears.

  Heat washed over her skin. Dry air dried out her throat and made her eyes ache as they struggled to adjust to the dim lighting. She smelled sweet-fleshed meat. Not the smell of cooking beef or pork, but something much…stickier. It made her stomach turn with nausea almost as strongly as the overpowering stench of sulfur.

  She didn’t like this—any of it—and neither did the wolf.

  Rylie needed out.

  She tried to backtrack, sliding her feet up the slick surface. She felt heavy and slow. The weight of her clothing seemed to have tripled.

  Her heel caught the edge of the bridge. She flung out her arms, suddenly unbalanced—and Abram caught her wrist.

  “Careful,” he said, and then he dissolved into a coughing fit.

  Rylie froze and let Abram pull her back onto safety. She held his arm in both hands, probably too tightly, as she took her first clear look at the City of Dis.

  The smoke spewed by the factories made it too hazy to make out much. The smog was tossed by wild gusts of wind that blasted red dust over Rylie’s jacket. It felt like sandpaper on her face. She was torn between shedding her winter clothes and pulling it tighter around her body, too hot for a coat yet too painful to expose skin.

  She settled for lifting her hood and squinting against the dust. The black city was spread underneath them in jagged spires and fragmented neighborhoods. The streets were warped. Looking down made her dizzy because the crystal bridge that seemed so bright and shimmering from Earth was nearly transparent here, and it looked like she was walking on nothing.

  Rylie couldn’t quite see the tower at the bottom of the bridge, but the occasional glimpses of a silhouetted obelisk were enough to make her start moving.

  “It’s so much worse than I expected,” Abram rasped as they walked.

  She couldn’t agree. The immense gravity, the brutal air, the smoke—all it needed was a few men with pointy red tails and it would be exactly what she had expected.

  The walk down the bridge felt impossibly long. The city grew underneath them with every step, giving her a better view of all the mismatched buildings, the dirt and asphalt roads, the open fields that would have looked like farms if the soil hadn’t been so crimson. The tower finally peeked out of the smoke when they were halfway down. It was made of black brick that reflected no light, a flat rectangle topped by an iron spire. The floor where the bridge connected was entirely open aside from railings as thin and bent as spider legs.

  They were almost there. They were almost off the bridge.

  Rylie picked up her pace.

  But then a pair of people stepped in their way, blocking the path at the very bottom.

  They looked to be human enough, although Rylie had begun to mistrust her eyesight in that regard. She had encountered a few too many people that had turned out to bleed ichor. The wind was blowing in the wrong direction and she couldn’t pick up the scent of their flesh, only the scent of brimstone.

  These people wore leather from head to toe: high-necked jackets with padded elbows, belts that hung heavy with shimmering gold charms, loose leather slacks, thick-soled boots. Veils covered their hair and jaws. There were red darts on the shoulders and hips of their uniforms. Both looked to be middle-aged and male. One had a beard halfway down his chest and the other was round enough that he looked like a boulder come to life.

  Human or not, they looked convincingly intimidating. Abram stepped in front of Rylie.

  “We’re here to see Elise,” he said.

  After her moment of surprise faded, common sense took over. Rylie could heal almost anything these guards could inflict. Abram couldn’t. She pushed him aside gently.

  The bearded guard gave her a skeptical look. “What’s your affiliation?”

  “Affiliation?” she asked.

  “Yeah, what’s your species and faction?”

  Rylie frowned. “What are you?”

  That seemed to be the wrong answer. Boulder Guy drew a hand from behind his back. He was holding an oversized Taser, the kind with a trigger that looked like it probably shot electrified spikes.

  The wolf surged in her, responding to the unspoken threat.

  Were they going to have to fight here, on a bridge with no railings and a thousand-foot drop off the side?

  A woman spoke from behind the guards. “What’s going on here, guys?”

  Beardy turned. “Intruders, ma’am.”

  “Intruders?” The speaker strolled into view. It was Neuma, wearing a simple black mini-dress without shoes. She gave Abram a long, slow look from head to toe.

  “We need to speak with Elise,” he said again. “The sooner the better.”

  A lazy smile crossed Neuma’s face. “You want to talk with the prime minister? I can do that.” She waved the guards away. “Don’t worry about these puppies, boys. They’re with me.”

  Neuma was not a reassuring escort through the grounds of the Palace. She walked briskly without looking behind her to make sure they were following. Rylie kept stopping to look at stained glass windows, sconces carved out of bone, doorways that looked more like mouths wanting to bite. Only Abram’s nudges kept her from getting left behind.

  The spiral path down the
tower felt almost as long as the bridge had been. At least most of the walls were closed. Rylie shucked her jacket, folded it over her arm.

  One of the open walls gave her a clear view of the Palace walls. The roads beyond were filled with tents—an encampment pressed against the battlements. Something big and black floated in the sky near the horizon.

  “What is that?” Rylie asked.

  “Kibbeth,” Neuma said. “Troop transport. Don’t worry, it’s going for another part of the fissure. We’ve got an eye on it.”

  That almost made it sound like the thing was alive. Rylie was happy when they went down another floor and lost sight of it. “Where’s Elise?” she asked tentatively.

  Neuma shot a glance over her shoulder, lips curved into a smirk, but didn’t respond.

  They stepped out onto the bustling grounds of the Palace. Rylie could smell that most of the people walking along the black stone paths were human, but she had no idea what to make of the more exotic scents. So many of the creatures here smelled dry, dusty, ancient; others smelled like oozing sickness. Visually, she couldn’t tell most people in the crowd apart from one another. Most of them were in the black leather uniforms with red stripes. A few others were in street clothes, like anyone Rylie might run into back home. She figured that they had to be the humans until she passed a short man too close and got a noseful of brimstone.

  Humans, demons. There was no distinguishing them.

  Neuma led them around another tower toward a set of stairs sunk into the ground. Motion caught Rylie’s eye when they rounded the corner of the building, and she stopped in her tracks.

  There was a garden between two of the structures, fenced off with more spidery iron that looked too fragile to support its own weight. The soft clay looked freshly tilled, watered, and labeled. Normal garden stuff, like they were preparing to grow pumpkins or something.

  Except that each mound of earth had a human hand jutting out of it.

  The fingers were spread wide, palms exposed to the sky. Each one had a slightly different skin color. One of them had manicured nails.