Caged in Bone (The Ascension Series)

by Reine, SM

  “Void—like space?”

  “Less than that.”

  Summer lifted her eyebrows. “Huh?”

  They stopped once he reached the chamber at the bottom. It was an open, arching cavern, much like the crystal caves, though sanded down until the walls were smooth. Seven equidistant waterfalls made the walls seem to shimmer, draining into a basin that would pump the water back to the surface of the city.

  The image of an apple was inlaid into the floor: a single spherical fruit surrounded by tangling vines. Nash and Summer stood in the center of it.

  He let his eyes sweep over the darkness of the chamber. Sourceless blue-gray light filled the room, barely bright enough for Nash to see the waterfalls.

  “This is a former transit hub, where all angels used to enter and exit Shamain through fissures,” he explained. “The canals converge here. They are the blood in the veins of the city, and the primary source of our city’s glow.”

  And it was dark enough that an extremely determined demon might be able to hide there. But he didn’t sense any demons nearby. He thought he would know if something infernal violated the sanctity of the chamber.

  That didn’t mean that Atropos hadn’t passed through.

  “Where are the fissures?” Summer asked.

  Nash stepped through the waterfall, holding his wings wide enough to shelter Summer as she followed.

  There was another, smaller chamber on the other side that hadn’t had its crystals filed down to smoothness. It was like standing inside a large geode. Nash had to brace his feet very carefully on the ridged floor to keep steady, though Summer was nimble and graceful on the crystals.

  All of the formations pointed toward the center of the room, where a single light hung suspended.

  It was brighter than the tiny stars in the city, but dimmer than a sun. It pulsed with a silent heartbeat. A hushed song whispered through the chamber as though the light were trying to share its melody with Nash.

  A fissure.

  It was the physical junction between dimensions—the place that Shamain connected with Earth and other Heavens. This one, he knew, let out somewhere on Earth, though he wasn’t sure where.

  The easiest way to find out would be to pass through and see what they found on the other side. And hopefully Atropos would be there to answer for what she had done to Leliel.

  “Wow,” Summer whispered reverently. “Just like in the Haven.”

  “Indeed.” He held his palm toward the fissure to feel its warmth. “We’ll need to inspect each of these to determine where Atropos entered and exited.”

  “No, we won’t.” She turned to walk out of the chamber, balancing carefully on the crystals.

  Summer never failed to surprise him. Even now. “Why not?”

  “Atropos didn’t exit through a fissure,” Summer said. She walked along the wall, inhaling deeply. She had drenched herself on the way out of the last chamber. Her curls clung damply to her shoulders. “Her freshest scent is on the stairs. She did come down here, but she also left the normal way—through the streets.”

  She plunged into the next chamber without waiting for him.

  Nash stood in the threshold, letting the waterfall pour off his arched wings. Summer sniffed at the air surrounding the second fissure, which was a pale, twinkling shade of pink.

  “How could she have left on the streets? It’s too bright for her up there,” Nash said.

  Summer returned to him. “How did she get down here in the first place?” It was a rhetorical question; she knew that he wasn’t sure. But she did have a point.

  “You think that someone’s helping her,” he said. “Escorting her somehow.”

  “How much do you trust the other angels?”

  A week earlier, Nash would have said that he trusted them all with his life. They were a family. Some hated each other, but there was love at the core of it, and an interest in their mutual safety. That was before Leliel had deliberately allowed Atropos into Shamain.

  Leliel couldn’t have been helping Atropos. She was still unconscious, on the verge of death.

  That didn’t mean another angel couldn’t have turned traitor.

  Suddenly, Nash regretted bringing Summer to Shamain. He tailed her closely as she sniffed around the third chamber and stopped her when she went to enter the fourth.

  “We should leave,” he said, glancing up the stairs longingly.

  “But there’s something in there,” Summer said, brushing him aside to enter the next fissure cave.

  “Summer, wait.”

  She stopped just inside the waterfall, her hourglass silhouette motionless on the other side of the veil.

  “What is that?” she whispered. The words made Nash’s heart stop beating.

  He shoved through the water.

  The fourth fissure led to somewhere near sub-Saharan Africa, if Nash was correlating his ancient geography correctly to modern day. It pulsed gently with the color of savannah skies.

  And on the crystal wall beyond the fissure, there was a rune.

  Its diameter was greater than the width of Nash’s extended wings, and it glowed with negative light, turning the surrounding crystals a colorless shade of dusty red. Dark threads laced the surrounding crystals with slender black veins.

  The sight of it threw Nash to the time before his long imprisonment in the Haven, all the way back to the First War. The time before the Treaty of Dis had forbidden ethereal and infernal magics.

  Atropos had been there. And she had cast an ancient warlock spell.

  It seemed to be triggered by Nash’s presence. The vivid light of his wings drained out of the feathers. The darkness grew.

  He reacted too slowly, seizing Summer, pulling her against his chest, engulfing both of them in the cocoon of his wings.

  “No,” he said, although he wasn’t sure what he was denying.

  Shadow pulsed.

  The crystals exploded—and so did the fissure.

  Fourteen

  Levi disappeared sometime after eight. Abram wasn’t sure of the exact time the werewolf went missing; he knew that he had seen Levi when Toshiko started to serve dinner, which was around eight, but Levi wasn’t there during cleanup at nine.

  Yasir’s face brightened when he saw Abram approaching. “There you are,” he said, offering a tablet computer to Abram. “I wanted you to look at this.”

  He took the tablet. There was a map on the screen, but despite Yasir’s eagerness, Abram was too distracted to get any information from it. He had last seen Levi here—with the Union personnel, arranging supply crates, working with his jacket off to display his flexing werewolf muscles.

  Yasir was talking about the map.

  “We marked out the boundaries that we could see from above in the helicopter, but this is some dense forest here,” he said. “We couldn’t find where the fence disappeared here, here, or…here.” Yasir pointed at different sectors of the map with his stylus. “Can you fill in the blanks?”

  “Why?”

  “So we can make sure the wards are complete.”

  Right, the Union had promised to fix that. He gazed at the highlighted sectors on the map. His father was the one who had always maintained and patrolled the fence; Abram wasn’t certain of its exact position surrounding the sanctuary. But he sketched out his rough guesses.

  “Where’s Levi?” Abram asked as he zoomed out to get a broad view of the map.

  Yasir took the tablet back. “Levi? He went back to help guard the Bain Marshall statue.”

  Abram hadn’t seen any Union vehicles leave. He’d wanted Levi helping the Union within the sanctuary so that Abram could keep an eye on him.

  “Do you have more people coming soon?” Abram pressed. “Is the Union escorting Stephanie Whyte and Bekah Riese?”

  Yasir looked startled. “Stephanie?”

  “The doctor. High priestess of the Half Moon Bay Coven.”

  “Oh,” he said. There was the barest pause before he said, “Yeah, Levi mention
ed that she’d be out here later. She has an escort.”

  Levi mentioned. So Yasir hadn’t spoken to Stephanie personally.

  When was the last time anyone had spoken to Stephanie personally?

  “When are we expecting to be attacked?” Abram asked.

  Yasir turned the screen on his tablet off. “We’re tracking Belphegor’s troop movements. Trust me, we’ll have ample warning.”

  That wasn’t an answer. “Are they close?”

  “His army never needs to rest and can jump between locations with strategic use of the fissure’s interdimensional distortion capabilities. Anywhere on this continent is close. Like I said, though, we’ll have warning when they come this way.” Yasir patted him on the shoulder. “You should join the last Scion training session of the night. They’re including a debriefing at the end.”

  The commander left to speak to a witch who had returned from the forest, and Abram watched them speak from a distance. He didn’t bother joining the training. He couldn’t imagine they’d get any more specific about Belphegor’s movements.

  Instead, Abram slipped past Yasir, grabbed a rifle, and got in one of the pack’s pickups.

  The Union allowed him to pass their checkpoint without stopping. Abram hadn’t really expected them to try to keep him inside, but he still felt like he was waiting for the Union’s attitude to swing in the other direction—from helpful to combative—no matter what Yasir had said or how trustworthy Seth had believed him to be.

  It comforted him to see the men and women milling around the pass with guns, though. Knowing that if Clotho showed up again, or any other part of Belphegor’s army, they would shoot to kill.

  The pack was safer with the Union than they were without.

  But Abram couldn’t stop thinking about Levi—Levi, with all that swagger, like he thought he could make himself an Alpha by force of will; Levi, with his white leather jacket in the middle of a war zone; Levi, with his stricken look when he finally realized why he recognized Abram.

  Something about Levi was bothering Abram, and he was going to figure out what.

  He kept the radio turned on as he took the long drive into Northgate. It had been months since they could actually pick up radio stations; even the emergency broadcasts had ended in October. But the low static was a comforting alternative to total silence.

  The white noise shifted to buzzing as he approached the fissure, growing louder and harsher as he drove down the mountain.

  There was an unusual amount of light pollution in Northgate. Beams cut through the smoke of the fissure, highlighting the clouds and making falling snowflakes sparkle like dust motes. It was much more light than ever naturally emerged from Dis. And it couldn’t have been from the houses or businesses in what had once been the downtown area—they hadn’t had utility power for weeks.

  He rolled down the driver’s side window as he moved deeper into town, following the beams of light through the trees. The air was always warmer here. The coldest winds didn’t reach the fissure, and the snow melted before it could collect on the ground.

  The Union had erected barricades around the town square, each of them eight feet tall with electrified wire coiled around the top. It wouldn’t be enough to keep out a determined werewolf, but most demons would shy from the possibility of electric shock if they hadn’t already been driven away by the lights themselves. Abram couldn’t see the source of the light, but it was definitely coming from within the barricades.

  There was no entrance through the barricades to the east, where Abram approached from; he followed fresh arrows spray-painted on old stop signs and tree trunks around to the south.

  Abram was a block away from the southern edge of the square when all the lights cut out.

  He was so startled by the sudden absence of light that he slammed on the brakes, skidding to a stop. He gripped the steering wheel in both hands as he stared out the windshield at the dark street. His headlights seemed incapable of penetrating the shadows.

  A guttural scream drifted over the barricades, carried on a cold wind.

  Abram hit the gas, closing the distance to the nearest wall. Either the Union hadn’t finished assembling it or they had intentionally left a gap to allow vehicles to enter. His headlights slid through the break in the barricades, across the grass, and onto Bain Marshall’s feet.

  It was still brighter within the barricades, but now that light was all from hellfire within the fissure, shading everything in stark black or crimson. The Union had placed scaffolds around Bain Marshall like a cage, as if they were worried he might lift his marble feet and march into the mountains. There were pale red blurs in the grass—faces and hands, their unmoving bodies wearing black uniforms.

  Flame gusted out of the fissure. Abram felt a wave of heat and shielded his face with his hand.

  Through his fingers, he saw something furred and four-legged moving like quicksilver.

  Its claws chewed through the grass as it darted back and forth, seeming to dodge, chase, and attack empty air. Abram could tell that its fur was the color of honey in the momentary flare of fire.

  Levi.

  It looked like the wolf had killed the Union surrounding the statue. But that made no sense—Levi had arrived with them. They were allies.

  Fingers of terror crept through Abram’s chest as he grabbed the rifle out of his front seat. He hadn’t brought silver rounds with him. He hadn’t expected to need to shoot any werewolves.

  Each step he took toward Bain Marshall, and the wolf still growling wildly at his feet, felt more difficult than the one before. He moved sluggishly through air that seemed to have solidified. His muscles were atrophying, heart struggling, lungs laboring to draw a breath of the smoky air that poured out of the fissure.

  Abram struggled to think through the fear—trying to connect the pieces.

  The scaffolding supported spotlights, which had no power.

  Cables ran down the side of the scaffold.

  There was a silent generator tucked behind Bain Marshall’s platform.

  And, Abram realized, a werewolf would have no reason to turn off the lights before killing.

  Levi wasn’t alone.

  Through the shadows, Abram glimpsed short black hair, a wide grin, a skeletal figure. She moved so quickly that he couldn’t focus on her. He only saw a bony wrist and ankle and leering face.

  It’s her. It’s Clotho. She’s come back for me.

  She had already taken down all of the Union kopides that had been guarding the statue and the bridge. Levi was the only thing between the super-demon and Abram.

  Her high, whining voice sliced through the night.

  Abram…

  He lifted the gun, tracking just ahead of Levi, watching for Clotho to reappear. He could shoot her. He was a great shot.

  But Levi was so fast—barely more than a blur—and Abram was so slow. She ghosted into view long enough to slash her claw-like nails at Levi and then disappeared again.

  She was trying to kill him, but a werewolf in its beast form was mostly immune to nightmares. He was faster. She didn’t have silver.

  It was a stalemate. For now.

  Abram imagined squeezing the trigger at the wrong moment and watching blood blossom in Levi’s fur. He imagined the yelp and the way he would stagger. Silver or not, that would level the playing field for Clotho. It would be the opening she needed to kill. Abram couldn’t take a shot, not until he was absolutely confident that he would be shooting the right thing.

  He knew that he had fought nightmares before. He had been there the night that the first of the Scions escaped from Hell with nightmares chasing them. But Abram suddenly struggled to remember if shooting them would even work, or if they had used cleavers, or…something else. The fear was too thick. He couldn’t breathe through it, much less think.

  His heart thudded as he sank to his knees.

  Abram…

  Clotho was going to kill Levi and come for him next.

  The generator caught
his eye again.

  Electricity.

  Electrified barbed wire, spotlights on the statue. Blood dripping down the walls. Suffocation.

  He knew what needed to be done.

  Abram dropped the gun. It didn’t matter if he was armed, not against Clotho, and it was too heavy to carry. His jacket made him heavy, too. He stripped it as he darted across the lawn, leaping onto the scaffolding to scramble toward the dangling cables. They had been disconnected from the spotlights.

  There were bodies on the scaffolding—rotting, bloated bodies that looked like they had been left out in the sun for days, bellies swollen with gas, clouds of flies swarming around them. Blood under them, blood dripping down the scaffold.

  Levi’s growls slid in and out of Abram’s ears. It fuzzed and distorted. His head roared with white noise.

  Abram’s hands fumbled on the cables. It took three tries to plug in the first spotlight and flip the switch on the side.

  Nothing.

  The cables must have been disconnected on the other end, too.

  He gripped the scaffold in both hands and looked down. Clotho had hit Levi. He was bleeding, absolutely gushing blood all over the grass, but it hadn’t slowed him. He bit her sleeve. She kicked him in the face.

  Abram scrambled to the next light. Plugged it in.

  His feet slipped in puddles of blood.

  Two more spotlights.

  The snow was crimson, dribbling from the clouds in hot, salty lines that burned on his face and hands. He gagged on smoke from the fissure as he reconnected the cables on the last of the lights.

  He tried to climb down and slipped. Hit the ground hard.

  Abram was stunned beside the generator, staring up at a bloody sky twisted with smoke and clouds and bleeding wounds.

  Clotho appeared over him with her mindless grin.

  Abram…

  She saw into him, saw the depths of his heart, knew the truths inside. Her hands were only inches away. She was going to dig in and rip apart and there would be so much blood—

  But Levi was there again, just as he had been before. He threw her over the generator with a toss of his head. Even as he bled from his throat, pouring his life out on the ground, there was mischief in Levi’s eyes. A challenge. As if he were saying, Can’t you save your own ass once in a while?