Caged in Bone (The Ascension Series)

by Reine, SM

  From high ground, he launched himself into motion again, watching for the telltale sign of white hair near the ground. The lower levels of the forest were thick and dark. Beasts glowing with inner light were easy enough to locate.

  James hurtled through the forest as he hunted.

  When he spotted the white fur again, he knew he was close.

  Killing such a creature was always a holy moment. Time slowed to a crawl, allowing James to appreciate the end as he plummeted through the air, spear cocked above him.

  The animal was a four-legged thing with a long neck and hooves. It was more feline than equine, a predator twice James’s size. Its eyes were pupilless silver.

  He launched the spear with all of the power coiled in his arm muscles.

  His weapon struck true an instant before he landed.

  The beast thrashed under James, but he held it down as its life ebbed, hands on its skull and knees braced on either side of its ribs. His spear had struck the heart. There was an easy way to reach it without damaging the bone—the most valuable part of the beast—and James seemed to have hit at the perfect angle. Within minutes, it was dead.

  “Excellent job,” said a voice above him.

  James looked up to see another man pushing through the trees to join him in the grove. He was bare-skinned and muscular, too. He carried a spear in one hand. But unlike James’s, the razor-edged point of his weapon danced with smokeless flame.

  All of the men had been hunting for many long weeks at James’s decree, and they hunted as predatory animals did: without armor, without their wings, and with only a single weapon. It was the noblest way to hunt.

  “Thank you,” James said. He felt a companionable smile spread over his lips. “How have your hunts been?”

  “They are equally fruitful. The city we build on the backs of these animals will be…incredible.” The man sighed out the last word.

  Yes, the most incredible of all cities. It would be the beginning of James’s legacy.

  James moved to pull the beast over his shoulders, but his new companion stopped him.

  “I’ll take it to Shamain,” he said. “You’re wanted elsewhere.”

  “Oh?” James asked, helping throw the animal over the other man’s back. It was huge, but they were both very strong. He was not staggered by its weight.

  “Eve is waiting for you,” said the man.

  James filled with warmth. His smile broadened. “Thank you, my son.”

  “Anything, Father.”

  White wings appeared at the man’s back. They were long, muscular, and similar in color to the fur of the dead animal thrown over his shoulders. They glowed with brilliant internal fire—even brighter than the sunlight above the canopy of trees. Within the forest, he was a blazing star.

  He flapped twice and lifted into the air, bearing the carcass back to the city.

  James turned to seek Eve.

  This was always where the dream grew hazy. The strange blur of forest, the way that time skipped, was an unsettling reminder of the unreality of his experiences. He felt like he was missing something important.

  But when the world settled around him again, he was still in the garden, and it was easy to forget that he was dreaming.

  He would have happily surrendered to dreams if she would always be there.

  James emerged from the trees to find a woman waiting for him beside the river. Her back faced him, and he allowed himself to drink in the sight of her unselfconsciously: the curve of her waist and hips, the graceful movement of her arm as she reached up to touch a glossy red apple that dangled from a low branch.

  With a twitch of her wrist, she plucked the apple free. James was filled with a strange sense of melancholy. The apple was severed and dead, its growth interrupted.

  “I hope your hunt went well,” she said without turning to look at him.

  “Always,” he said. “I would have enjoyed your company on it.”

  “I fear I lack the fortitude for death.” There was a hint of humor to her voice, as if she thought there was something funny about the statement, when there was really nothing funny about it at all.

  And once she turned, he saw why.

  It wasn’t Eve—it was Elise as she had been as a human, peach-skinned and auburn-haired. The bridge of her aquiline nose was hooked from being broken and healed incorrectly. That was Elise as she had been when she belonged to James. Naturally she would find it amusing to say that she didn’t like killing; it was Eve who disliked death, not Elise, who wore murder like a halo.

  The wrongness of seeing her here struck him all at once. And it only seemed more wrong when he realized that she wasn’t alone.

  Yatam stood behind her, his hands on her shoulders, sweeping the auburn curls aside to bare the long, pale line of her throat. James didn’t remember Yatam well. Their interactions had been mercifully brief. But he vaguely recalled the attractive oval of the man’s face, the almond curve to his eyes, the mysterious smile. Because those memories were so faint, James sometimes substituted Elise’s face for Yatam’s—they had become so similar now that they seemed interchangeable in some ways.

  Before he had died, Yatam had possessed so much power that he was nearly indistinguishable from the gods that had made him. He had been invulnerable.

  Yatam had taken Elise from James. He had drunk deep of her blood and spilled his own blood into her veins, and when she died, she had returned as a demon.

  “Look,” Yatam said, tracing a blue vein just underneath Elise’s skin. She had naturally possessed an almost translucent complexion. If she hadn’t spent so many days in the sun either jogging or slaughtering demons, she might have been as transparent as a ghost.

  “I don’t want to look,” James said.

  Elise took a bite of the apple. Her teeth sank into it with a wet crunch—and then she was bleeding. It slid down her neck in a hot, crimson line to pool between her breasts. Yatam licked along the side of her neck. “Taste it,” he said, “it’s good.” He smiled a bloody smile, teeth stained red. “It will change your life. In fact, it will change everyone’s lives.”

  “No,” James said, anger surging inside of him, building to a fever pitch. “No!”

  He swung at Yatam and missed. The demon was already gone.

  James stumbled from too much momentum, landing on all fours beside the river Mnemosyne. The water was still that day. As unbroken as a mirror.

  He could see his own face—but it wasn’t his.

  That dark skin, curled hair, and powerful jaw belonged to Adam. The first man. The God that had killed so many, burned the garden, and imprisoned Elise.

  Just like James had.

  He had lured her through the gateway. Rendered her unconscious. Carried her to the bed he had prepared for her, settled her gently under the sheets, removed her shoes and jacket. Kissed her forehead before leaving, even though he knew he had no right to touch her, kiss her, miss the feel of her skin against his. Especially not when he was imprisoning her as Adam had once done.

  And now he looked like Him.

  He was Him.

  No!

  James tried to turn from his reflection, but gravity had doubled, tripled. The lead weight of his muscles dragged him toward the water. He hit the surface. It frothed over him, stinging and cold.

  He expected the painful jolt of hitting the bottom, but he never reached it.

  James just kept sinking.

  “Are you going to sleep all fucking day?”

  Abel’s voice.

  James struggled to surface on the rocky shores of consciousness.

  His eyes peeled open. Abel stood over him, arms folded, disapproval etching his features. It was dark outside. It had been daylight when James had stretched out on Pamela’s couch to catch a few minutes of rest.

  After dreaming of that glorious garden, the real world looked colorless and ugly in comparison.

  James had only meant to take a short nap—fifteen minutes, perhaps, but no more. All the magic that
he had been casting was exhausting. Even though ethereal magic was fueled by the greater universe, it still had to go through James, and he felt like a sieve that had an entire beach’s worth of sand forced through it.

  The fact that he kept having vivid dreams whenever he slept didn’t help. Not one bit. It felt like he hadn’t slept at all.

  Somehow he had meant to close his eyes for a few minutes and passed out for an hour and a half, according to the clock on the wall. He probably would have slept longer if not for the man glowering at him from the foot of the sofa.

  James sat up, rubbing the back of his neck. There was a scabbard tucked between his body and the back of the couch. The steel falchion had been strapped into it so that it didn’t easily slip free, and when he rested his hand on the hilt, he found it warmed by his body heat. “Is everything all right?”

  “Me and Rylie are ready to go now,” Abel said.

  James massaged his fingers into his eyes, trying to wipe away his visions of ancient forests that he had never seen before. “Excellent,” he said, his voice hoarse. “I hope you and Rylie came to some kind of amicable resolution.”

  The look that Abel gave him clearly said that they hadn’t, and that it was none of James’s business.

  That kind of hostility was nothing new. It was the only way that Abel had communicated with him since they left the sanctuary together. Abel may have accepted James’s role in Seth’s death and decided that it wasn’t worth fighting over—yet—but that didn’t mean that he had forgiven James. Or even liked him.

  The attitude was irritating, but it was exactly the kind of petty issue that helped ground James in reality. He ran his hands over the seat of the couch underneath him. Focused on the grain of the wood floor. Listened to the wind blowing tree branches against the side of Pamela’s cabin. Smelled the Pine Sol that he had used on Pamela’s side table just that morning.

  This was reality. This house with an angry, impatient man staring at him—not the garden with Yatam drinking blood from Eve’s neck.

  Elise’s neck. Not Eve’s.

  “Damn,” James sighed, standing up. He stretched his back out more out of habit than necessity. He didn’t often get stiff or sore anymore. He pulled the spine scabbard on over his shirt, buckling it under his arms. The weight of the falchion was solid and reassuring against his back.

  Rylie emerged from the guest bedroom that Abel had been sleeping in, carrying a motorcycle’s saddlebag over her shoulder. “Are we leaving?”

  James pulled his jacket on over the sword, patting the pockets to make sure that he had his notebook. “Yes, I’m ready.”

  She breezed out the front door without even looking at Abel. It wasn’t that she was ignoring or dismissing him—if James hadn’t believed Rylie to be an honest, uncomplicated woman, he would have thought that she was hiding something.

  Rylie was already halfway up the hill by the time James and Abel got outside. The snow was falling harder. It was soft under their feet, forcing them to trudge into the trees.

  Abel was staring at Rylie’s back so hard that it looked like his gold eyes might burn a hole through her jacket.

  “I’m going to give you a piece of advice that I once gave your brother,” James said in a low voice, knowing that Rylie would be able to hear it if she cared to do so. “There is nothing worse in this universe than being alone.”

  “What’s that supposed to mean?” Abel asked, as though James had just told him that his mother smelled like a garbage disposal.

  Seth had taken the advice much more gracefully. If there was anything that he had learned about Abel in their days together, it was that the younger man wasn’t one for philosophy and introspection. James could try to explain what it felt like to wander through Limbo for most of eternity, lose his son to Eden, and the woman he loved to bitter hatred, and Abel simply wouldn’t understand. He didn’t have the capacity for it.

  “I only mean that you and Rylie are lucky to have one another,” James said. “You should appreciate it.”

  Abel glared. “It’s none of your fucking business, Faulkner.”

  Very well. His wisdom was wasted on Abel anyway.

  They walked the rest of the way to the clearing in silence.

  The gateway was humming quietly when James reached it. The silent trembling spread through the trees, made the ground underneath him vibrate with every step.

  It was like the gate recognized him for the first time. He had been working with this ethereal stone for months, gradually recovering fragments from various archaeological sites, matching the severed segments, reassembling them with careful magic and Sophie’s help. It had never glowed for him. Not like it did upon his approach now.

  The portal spell he had used to trick Elise was still glowing. James almost hadn’t expected her to fall for it, but the fact that she had was no credit to his ability; the spell had been based upon Nathaniel’s magic.

  It wasn’t parental pride speaking when James said that his son was an exceptional witch. The boy had been the first human to ever have command over interdimensional magic. He could step between dimensions. Summon objects and people from anywhere else in the world with a single rune. James had even seen him move an entire universe before, lifting and shifting it with the force of his mind.

  James still didn’t understand Nathaniel’s magic. It was far more nuanced and complex than anything he had written before. Opening a tear between two different spots on Earth had been a graceless spell hacked together from James’s best guesses at Nathaniel’s technique, and the fact that it worked at all shocked him—but it was still a far cry from his son’s artistry.

  The magic was deployed. It would be easy to activate and return to Elise.

  It wasn’t too late to free her.

  But the gate was buzzing, warm with the activation from Elise’s mark. James was so close to the third gate to Eden, and this one would be the most difficult to reach.

  This was the last big barrier to reaching Nathaniel and the Origin.

  James should have been excited. But he couldn’t shake the image of Elise unconscious in bed, and the slimy feeling that his dream of Yatam drinking her blood had left behind.

  “How’s this work?” Rylie asked, reminding James that there was something he should be doing.

  “Ah,” he said, rubbing his gloved hands together and blowing on them. “Well. This is an ethereal gate, left on Earth during the First War to make travel between dimensions easier. It requires two ethereal marks to open it to Shamain. Elise has one mark, which she unknowingly applied when she passed through. I have the second. All I need to do is touch it, and…” James pressed a hand to the pillar.

  The marks ringing the gate swelled to life.

  A line of light split the air from capstone to ground and spread to fill the door.

  Through the shimmering gash, James glimpsed white buildings among swaying green trees, eternal dawn, and a smattering of stars. It was a sky that had never been touched by Hell’s smoke. A pure place. And, for an instant, he could remember the city as it had been in the beginning—nothing more than a few houses built on top of a freshwater spring.

  He shook away the vision and stepped back. “There,” he said huskily, sweeping a hand toward the gateway like a waiter seating Rylie and Abel at a restaurant. “That’s all it takes.”

  The light that splashed over the werewolves made them look pale.

  “Just gotta get to Eve’s temple,” Abel muttered. James had debriefed him on their destination twice to make sure that he understood it, and had even showed him the temple’s location on a map.

  James handed the backpack filled with ritual supplies to Abel, but he addressed Rylie. “It might be dangerous if we’re caught by the angels on the other side. They don’t take kindly to intruders. You’d be safer here with my coven.” He didn’t mind having her along—in fact, he thought that her presence would motivate Abel—but he felt obligated to offer her an out one last time.

  “Not happening,
” she said. She grabbed Abel’s arm. “You said Eve’s temple, right? Okay. Let’s get this over with.”

  Without waiting for James’s instruction, Rylie pulled her mate through the door.

  The glow engulfed them. Their bodies blurred and brightened at the edges.

  And then they were in Heaven.

  The door wasn’t like an ordinary glass window, so Rylie and Abel disappeared as soon as they had passed through, giving James an unobstructed view of Shamain.

  There was nothing to prevent him from seeing that the city went dark a half-second after the werewolves were gone.

  A concussion rippled through the door. The hum from the pillars grew louder as the glow emanating from the buildings on the other side vanished, radiating from the center out to the edges of the city. The stars blinked out one at a time. Shadows consumed the forest.

  Finally, silently, the door disappeared.

  James stared at where it had been a moment before, stunned by the quiet way that Heaven had vanished.

  Had the door broken? Or had Shamain really just gone dark?

  He thrust his arm between the pillars, but there was nothing to touch anymore. There was nothing but air in the door, with forest and snow on the other side.

  Rylie and Abel were gone. Unreachable.

  “This is not good,” James said to the nothingness inside the gateway.

  Had he assembled the door incorrectly? Had some stray stone shaken loose of its moorings? He ran his hands over the pillars, but it no longer responded to his touch, and he couldn’t find where it might have been broken. His worry grew as he inspected the places where the cracks had been joined.

  He must have imagined Shamain darkening on the other side. The alternative was…impossible.

  The sound of voices drew his attention away from the gateway. He turned to see Sophie approaching, bundled up in a warm jacket, her round face framed by earmuffs and graying hair. She was accompanied by Isabelle and Alex, other members of the White Ash Coven that had joined James when he reformed their ranks.