Caged in Bone (The Ascension Series)

by Reine, SM

  It angled away from them, like it was slowly tipping in the opposite direction, beginning to fall off into nothingness.

  Belphegor spoke again in that strangely quiet voice. “Damnation. I’ll fix this.”

  In three steps, he strode away from her, crossing entire city blocks. He was following the line of fire back toward its origin.

  He moved fast, but not fast enough to fix the severed district of the city. As Rylie watched, it began to sink into the ground.

  Panic clawed at her heart. She ran to the edge of the chasm that had appeared around the edge of the district. The wall of fire on the other side was a bubble now, consuming the entire temple.

  “Abel!”

  With a loud crack, the fiery sphere dropped out of sight, leaving a gaping hole that was larger than a football field. Rylie could see the forest on the other side.

  A wordless scream wrenched from her chest, hands clapping over her mouth as she stared down at the sinking temple.

  Not sinking—falling.

  Its size dwindled quickly, and Rylie realized that she could see the Earth around its edges far below. There were clouds only a few hundred feet down and farmland miles below that. The entire block of the city containing Eve’s temple was hurtling toward America.

  Feet pattered on the street behind her. Rylie whirled to face Belphegor.

  Except that it wasn’t Belphegor. It was a human running up the street with a slight limp—James Faulkner. It looked like he had been battered by a tornado. His shirt was bloody on the right sleeve. He wasn’t wearing shoes.

  He skidded to a stop behind her and leaned over to look at the broken district that was tumbling away from them.

  “Pleasure to see you again, Rylie,” James said. “And my deepest apologies in advance.”

  “Apologies for what?”

  Heavier footfalls thudded behind them. Rylie turned to see Belphegor, twenty feet tall and hurtling toward them.

  James jerked Rylie against his body, one arm locked around her waist. She was too stupefied to push away from him. She had an instant to realize that he was soaking wet, that he smelled like apples and blood and buttered popcorn, and then his bare feet were slapping against the cobblestone.

  He launched off the edge of the city, carrying Rylie with him.

  The edge of the torn street slid under them. It disappeared.

  Then there was no ground under their feet. Nothing but a falling district of the ethereal city engulfed in white flame, clouds, and empty sky below.

  And, just like the temple, Rylie plummeted.

  Eighteen

  The sky was cracking open, Elise was caged, and all she could do was watch the fissure burn with angelfire.

  She had ripped the curtains off of the bathroom’s glass wall again. Clouds blocked the sunlight, and she was strong enough from feeding on James that the glow of angelfire barely stung now.

  The gash in the sky somehow seemed even more perverse than the fissure to Hell. It wasn’t surprising or strange for Dis to break through to Earth. Demons were creatures of chaos. They were always pushing their boundaries and trying to fuck up innocent life. Angels were, conversely, creatures of order, and the presence of such disorder meant that they had completely lost control.

  Worst of all, it meant that the angels were losing the fight.

  There was motion on the mountain outside the bathroom window. Elise’s attention focused on the squat figures climbing down the rocky, treeless slopes that were so harsh as to look like an alien world.

  Those weren’t native wildlife. They didn’t move like goats or any other herd animal. They almost…swarmed. Like insects.

  As they drew nearer, the gray light brightened their leathery flesh and glinted off bulging eyeballs.

  Fiends.

  They loped toward her, leaning on their knuckles, hurling their bodies down the jagged rocks. Even at this distance, she could pick out the individual brands on their arms. She had personally branded a few of them with her X mark on the base of their skulls. These were Neuma’s fiends.

  The demons gathered in front of the window and squeezed against the glass, as if they could will their molecules to slide through the solid surface. Neuma had been commanding their fear of Elise away by forbidding them from cowering when she glanced at them, ordering them to love and respect her. Now they wanted to cling to Elise.

  She frowned at the clustering fiends, considering what they might be able to do for her.

  James’s spells had been cast to contain her. He hadn’t expected an exterior assault on such a remote mountain peak.

  Maybe the spells weren’t as strong on the other side.

  Elise pressed her palm to the glass, condensation haloing her fingers. “Let me out.”

  A fiend pulled back a few feet. Launched off the ground. Rammed its shoulder into the glass.

  Bang.

  The entire window frame shuddered. James’s magic flared, jamming pinpricks of pain into her forehead.

  A second and third jumped at the same time.

  Bang.

  Elise stepped away from the glass and crackling wards, anticipation rising as the light of the angelfire grew. The fissure was still growing. The burning gray light haloed Neuma’s fiends in an unearthly glow.

  They jumped faster, harder, slamming their elbows and foreheads and shoulders into the glass.

  James’s spells strained, already weakened by Elise’s earlier attack.

  They were about to break.

  She needed to prepare to leave. She turned to look for a pair of pants—and almost tripped over a long piece of carved obsidian.

  It was a sword. It had a single cutting edge and a curved blade, the flat of which was imprinted with religious runes: crucifixes and pentagrams, a Star of David, an ankh. The crossguard hooked over the knuckles, allowing the wielder to punch enemies with the hilt without breaking her hand.

  The sight of the sword filled Elise with an icy chill.

  The falchion had been a gift from her father, Isaac, on her seventh birthday. She had carved those symbols herself as a teenager. She had been holding it when ichor consumed the steel and turned it to demon stone. She had used it to kill Seth Wilder as the earth split open underneath them.

  She had also been the one to fling the falchion into the deepest pits of Hell and watch it burn.

  Elise dropped to her knees, hands hovering over the blade. She didn’t dare touch it.

  It had found her.

  She had abandoned it, burned it, and somehow it had found her.

  A wind breezed over her fingers and the sword, ruffling her hair. Elise could almost hear voices in it. Words of admonition, promises of vengeance, reassurance that she would soon need that falchion again.

  She wouldn’t touch that sword. She wouldn’t take it.

  Glass cracked. She turned to see it spider web and explode around a fiend’s fist, showering crystalline shards over the bathroom tile.

  The fiends’ toenails scrabbled against the floor as they ran to her, slipping on glass, touching her with stubby-fingered hands. Elise barely felt any of it. She was frozen over the falchion, trapped between the knowledge that it hadn’t been there seconds before and the sheer impossibility of its existence.

  Demon fingers stroked her hair, thighs, and shoulders. They snorted her scent and pressed their cheeks to her even as their eyes rolled with fear. Neuma may have commanded them to act like they loved her, but that didn’t change their natural reaction to the immensity of her demon power. It just made their mouths foam, their fingers shake.

  Elise backed away from the sword. Her pants were on the edge of the tub. She watched the falchion as she pulled them on.

  It didn’t move. It was only a sword, after all.

  Now that the fiends had broken through James’s cage, his spells were shattered, spilling into the air with a gush of cerulean light. Many of the runes were useless now. Some remained intact.

  Elise stepped out of the bathroom wall to stand i
n the whipping wind beyond. From outside she could see even more of the ethereal bone surrounding the house, and all of the spells that James had plastered to it. She could strip some of those away and take them with her. She could steal James’s strongest magic.

  She wasn’t hungry now, but the memory of the pain hadn’t faded. Using those runes would kill her, or worse—make her kill innocents to save herself. But magic was her only advantage against demons like Belphegor and any angels that might attack her.

  After a moment’s hesitation, Elise held out her hands.

  “Come here,” she said.

  Spells slithered off of the building and climbed up her arms. The faint ache of hunger immediately set in again as the glowing magic shifted from blue to red, settling against her flesh, hiding underneath her clothing.

  Elise drank down James’s spells until her body was shaking.

  One last time. This would be the final time she dared to cast magic.

  The fiends were still clustered around the falchion inside, sniffing its blade and studying it like a piece of fine art. That sword would give her an advantage too, but it wasn’t worth it. Nothing was worth the cost of wielding that blade.

  She addressed the fiends in the infernal tongue. It came to her as easily as English now. “Hold your breath. We need to move fast.”

  They climbed out of the broken window to cluster around her, and she engulfed the fiends in her shadow.

  Elise darted into the night.

  When scary-ass demons like Atropos and Lachesis bailed, it could only mean bad things. Really bad things.

  As in, “the entire hill suddenly rotating ten degrees” kinds of bad things.

  Summer was still shaking off the shock of having been rammed face-first into the wall of fire when she realized that the demons had vanished, leaving her and Abel alone by Eve’s temple. The wall of fire was still growing. It looked like it was going to form a dome over the stylized branches of the temple, enclosing them in some kind of magical bubble.

  Abel’s body rippled as he shifted into a human form. The first words he said once he had a mouth were, “What the fuck?”

  Which was about when the hill tilted under them.

  The initial jerk wasn’t bad, but Summer wasn’t expecting it. She stumbled into Abel. Knocked them both to the grass.

  The entire hill lurched under them again, harder this time.

  That led to the second words out of Abel’s mouth: “Get in the tree!”

  Summer wanted to tell him that she didn’t think it would help. Somewhere in her growing hysteria, she had realized that they were falling out of Heaven and that it might be enough to pulverize even a werewolf and his shape-shifting daughter beyond the point of super healing. That was going to happen whether they were inside or outside or standing upside-down on their heads.

  They were officially, completely screwed.

  What was it you were supposed to do in the event of a tornado? Get in a bathtub, pull a mattress over your head? What were the odds that would work when falling out of Heaven?

  Yeah, probably zero.

  Abel all but tossed Summer through the hole in the trunk and followed her inside.

  Everything that Summer had found beautiful about Shamain was present in the temple, too. The detailed designs of its walls, floors, and stairs had been crafted with particular attention and love. There was a clockwork heart suspended above her with seemingly no supports. Angels were consummate artists.

  Unfortunately, that artistry was tilting under her feet, and Summer had to grab a curtain hanging from the wall to keep from falling on her ass.

  “What are we doing here?” she asked, clutching the velvety material to her chest.

  “Falling,” Abel said as he shoved a fistful of crystals back into the backpack he had been carrying. He scrambled around the tilting floor to gather up the other supplies as well, which were rolling from the lawn through the door as the ground pitched further. “Dying.”

  “No, not here, I mean—here!” She swept her arms out at the surrounding temple.

  “There was supposed to be a gate to Eden in here. James was going to open it and become God so we could resurrect Seth.”

  Like it was such a normal thing to just…become God. How the heck was that supposed to work?

  And resurrect Seth?

  “You weren’t abducted, were you?” Summer asked.

  Abel opened his mouth, probably to defend himself by saying something awful, like he always did.

  The floor jerked hard enough that her hands slipped on the curtain. She reached for it and missed. Summer knocked into Abel, slamming both of them into the wall.

  Her heart rose into her throat. Her head filled with a rushing sound, and she tasted vomit at the back of her throat.

  The view outside the windows was changing. Getting brighter, even beyond the wall of angelfire.

  They were in free fall.

  Abel wasn’t trying to grab the last of the supplies anymore. He was leaning against the wall and he had a tight grip on Summer’s shoulders. “Sorry I was gonna miss your wedding,” Abel said. “And that I was such a dick about it. Nash is all right, I guess.”

  Hysterical giggles welled from Summer’s chest. Abel was saying goodbye. He didn’t think that getting into Eve’s temple was likely to save them, either. “Thanks, Abel, but we’re not going to die.” Yeah, denying it out loud was definitely going to change their horrible, pancaked fate.

  Thump.

  The walls shuddered and Summer flinched. But they hadn’t hit something—something had hit them.

  Summer looked up to see a pair of faces peering through the hole in the tree, framed by dangling curtains. She recognized both of those faces. Rylie’s expression was almost the exact same oh shit we’re going to die look that Summer was pretty sure she had, and James’s look of calm determination was definitely not helping.

  The instant of relief Summer felt at the sight of Rylie was immediately shattered by the realization that Rylie was on the falling temple, too.

  “Great,” Abel said. “Now we’re going to die as a family.”

  James helped Rylie drop down and then followed.

  “Don’t be melodramatic. Nobody is going to die today.” James pushed up his sleeves and twisted his arms around to look at the faded brown tattoos on them. “Now where is that spell…?”

  Summer crouched over the next window and looked down. The angelfire was deteriorating as they fell. Wispy clouds rushed past them and then vanished. There was a farm beyond it. A really close farm.

  “Do something, Faulkner!” Abel roared.

  “I have a spell for this,” James said, calm even as he jerked off his gloves. “I can cushion the fall.”

  But Summer’s feet were trying to come off the surface she was standing on. They were accelerating faster. The farm was growing.

  Another thud shook the temple, and Summer thought for a second of blinding fear that they had struck.

  Then she saw the giant, skeletal hand punch through the wall of the temple.

  James shouted as he jumped away. His reaction was too slow. The fist was almost as wide as he was tall, and it slapped him against the opposite wall.

  Summer grabbed Rylie and jerked her away from the second swipe of the skeleton hand. It was a stupid, pointless gesture—just like Nash trying to protect her from the collapse in Shamain had been pointless—but she had to do something. And as she wrapped her arms around her mom, she thought about how nice it felt to hug her now. Maybe that was why Nash had done what he did. Not because he thought it would save him, but because he’d wanted to die embracing someone he loved.

  Bony fingers ripped away the wall of the temple, revealing a square white face with endlessly black eyes.

  Fiery magic uncoiled from James’s hands. It lit his face from underneath with crackling white-blue light. But the attack had delayed him for too long—he had no time to cast a spell, whether to counter-attack or slow their fall.

  The
ground rose to meet the window and the demon crouched on the wall.

  They struck, and there was darkness.

  Elise raced over a world darkened by smoke and clouds in search of the central point of the tear. The damage to the sky was centralized over America. No surprises there.

  She rematerialized in a field of corn underneath the worst of the tear. The stalks were yellow and shriveled. They sounded like bags of clattering bones when the growing wind beat at them.

  The fiends clustered tightly around Elise’s legs, nails digging into her jeans, faces buried against her knees. The gray light of the torn sky was burning them, just as it burned her. Standing directly under the worst of it would drain whatever strength she had gotten from James before long.

  She had to do something to fix it, and fast.

  A dark shape was moving inside the gray. James had said that there was something wrong with Shamain, something far greater than a few closed doors, and now she realized what he had meant.

  The city was falling out of the sky.

  As it passed through the tear, its edges rippled like a mirage. It shifted through the dimensions slowly, but once the edge broke free of the fissure, it began to move faster. And what was worse, Elise could sense life on the crumbling section of city—not ethereal life, but mortal life. Werewolf life.

  “Fuck me,” Elise said.

  She couldn’t leap into the sky and grab them. The top of the district was surrounded by protective angelfire even as it fell. She might be able to find a way in, given the time to explore, but she didn’t have that time.

  The rest of Shamain was pushing against the fissure, as though it might soon follow that district onto Earth. The piece that had already broken away was accelerating. It grew in her vision, turning from a dot that she could cover with her thumb into something almost as big as her fist.

  It was going to strike the cornfield that she was standing in.

  Elise didn’t have time to save the fiends. She would be lucky if she could save the werewolves.

  There was only one thing she could do.

  “Run,” Elise told the fiends with all the weight of her will, urging them to flee, hoping they wouldn’t be stupid enough to run deeper into the corn.