Lost in Prophecy: An Urban Fantasy Novel (The Ascension Series) (Volume 5)

by S. M. Reine

  “Heya,” Leticia said, giving Elise a one-armed hug and a kiss on the cheek. “Good to see you.”

  “And you.” Elise had been missing the McIntyres. Life wasn’t the same without spending long weekends at their single wide outside Las Vegas, even though she had thought more than once that she hated having the kids climbing all over her for hours on end. They were already glued to her thighs and she barely had the urge to kick them back into the house. She even felt herself smiling.

  “Lucas is already working in the living room. Go on in and find him. Hey! Give Aunt Elise some breathing room!” Leticia grabbed her kids by the collars and shooed them back inside where it was warm and light.

  Elise followed more slowly, closing the door behind her and glancing out the windows before drawing the curtains. The McIntyres were living in a house that had belonged to Elise’s mother’s family. She was relatively confident that the wards were strong enough to hold out everything but the most determined and powerful attackers. The problem was that the only things likely to attack Elise would be both determined and powerful.

  Dana and Deb thundered up the narrow stairs to the second floor, making the house creak. “I get to do the braids this time!” That was the older girl.

  “No! I do braids!” The younger one. It was getting harder to tell their voices apart.

  Leticia gave Elise an apologetic grin. “Does this mean it’s beer o’clock?”

  “It’s always beer o’clock when your children are involved,” Elise said.

  “We have Leffe. It’s a pale ale. I’ll grab a couple for you and Lucas.”

  She disappeared down into the small pantry under the kitchen, and Elise headed into the living room.

  The living room had been seized by McIntyre for use as an office. He had boxes of papers everywhere, a few laptops plugged into one sagging American-to-European outlet converter, and guns scattered over the coffee table. He hadn’t been locking them up as much since Deb had hit two years old and proven that she knew all the basic rules of gun safety—treat them like they’re always loaded, don’t point at anything you don’t want to die, that kind of thing. Dana, for her part, was already a better shot than most adults. Probably better than Elise. It was safer to have the guns on hand for an unexpected attack than hide them from the girls anyway.

  McIntyre came in and grabbed a pair of assault rifles off the table, barely glancing at Elise. “Hey,” he grunted.

  “Hey,” she said.

  He moved most of the weapons onto a folding table he’d set up under a window and tossed a stack of paper onto the remaining space. It looked like at least two or three reams of printer paper.

  “More names,” McIntyre said.

  She grabbed the top sheet. “Missing people?”

  “Yep. Got another email. The list just keeps growing.”

  She swallowed around a hard lump in her throat, putting the page back down. “Anthony?”

  “Still no mention of him. Not on the lists, and not with my contacts.”

  Elise wasn’t sure if that was good news or not. It would have been one thing if he was dead—a bad thing, sure, but at least it would be something. Something to avenge. Something to grieve.

  Leticia returned, dodging Dana and Deb as the two crashed through the doorway at the same time.

  “If you don’t stop shrieking, girls, I am going to rip out your vocal chords and feed them to the crocodiles,” McIntyre said.

  “Daddy.” Dana rolled her eyes. “There are no crocodiles in France.”

  Elise took the Leffe from Leticia gratefully. The first two bottles were already uncapped.

  “Sure there are,” McIntyre said. “French crocodiles are the worst, and they’re gonna eat you. So shut your mouths.” There was no real heat in his voice. He was too distracted by searching for another power cord for the laptop that he had brought in with him.

  Elise sat cross-legged on the floor in front of the couch, glaring at another laptop’s monitor. She tuned out the activity behind her—two little girls fighting over a comb and box of rubber bands—and tossed back a swig of Leffe as she began scrolling through the names.

  “I don’t understand,” Elise said, her voice quiet under the shrieks of arguing children. “How is it possible that these people have been going missing for years in such large numbers and nobody has noticed?”

  McIntyre dragged a chair over to join her, plopping his girth down on the seat. Leticia had lost weight, but he’d bulked up, and not much of it muscle. His thighs draped over either side of the seat now. “People go missing all the time. A couple here, few more there. Easy not to notice.”

  A small hand grabbed Elise’s hair and jerked. “Hey!” she snapped over her shoulder. “Gentle!”

  “Sorry, Aunt Elise,” Dana said, sounding truly contrite. More sharply, she added, “Deb! Gentle with her hair!”

  “I braid it,” Deb announced.

  It felt like hyenas were attacking Elise’s skull, but if she could ignore the ache of the wound still carved into her chest, she could surely ignore a couple of kids playing with her hair.

  She was going to need a lot more beer, though.

  “I’m working with Lincoln Marshall again,” she said loudly enough that McIntyre could hear her over his daughters.

  “Deputy Pretty Boy? How’s that going for you?”

  “It’s interesting. Let’s put it that way. He led me to an entire town of people gone missing, so we believe that Abraxas and Aquiel are somehow involved.” Elise ran a quick search on his list for the names of the mayor and his wife from Two Rivers. She didn’t find it. “Is this list complete?”

  “I haven’t put all the new names in yet.” He grabbed the top two inches of the printed version and shoved it at her. “These just showed up this morning.”

  “Showed up?”

  “In an envelope on my front door.”

  The hairs on the back of Elise’s neck stood on end, and it wasn’t because the rest of her hair was being yanked. “Someone got through the wards.”

  “But didn’t attack,” McIntyre said. “Just dropped off the list.”

  “How the fuck did someone get through the wards?”

  “Aunt Elise!” Deb cried. “Bad words!”

  She gave McIntyre a flat look, and he shrugged. “Them’s the rules. You gotta pay up.” He snorted into his Leffe and took another sip. “If I do, you sure as hockey pucks do.”

  “Oh, for fuck’s sake,” she muttered under her breath, patting down her pockets. She didn’t have any spare change to put in the Bad Words Jar. She did, however, have two of Neuma’s steel hair clips in her pocket. She shoved them at the younger girl. “Here. Take those and shut up.”

  The distraction worked. The kids started fighting over the pretty jewelry.

  “Leticia says that the wards didn’t register intruders this morning. Nobody crossed through since our last trip to the grocery store,” McIntyre said. “Been almost two weeks.”

  Elise’s hands froze on the list that she had been flipping through. “Are you sure you’re alone on the property?”

  “Searched it a dozen times over.”

  Her eyes fell on the names of the missing people from Two Rivers. McIntyre must have gotten the names at the same time that she had.

  Her head suddenly jerked to the side. Hard. A sticky fist had just jammed one of Neuma’s clips into place over her ear. It pinched against her scalp. “I had a single page of these names show up in the Palace today.” Elise lifted her eyebrows at McIntyre. “Along with my obsidian falchion.”

  He rubbed his whiskers. The lines of his hands were caked with gun oil. “Gotta say, Elise…”

  “I don’t like it, either.”

  “This isn’t some demon shit.”

  “I don’t know what else it could be.” Who could have retrieved her falchion from the pits of Hell? Perhaps more importantly, who would have cause to return it to her?

  And who the fuck could leave a list of names in France and Hell
on the same day?

  Elise set the newest part of the list back on the table. She couldn’t lean very far forward; the girls were now braiding her hair in earnest and wouldn’t relinquish their grips. “I want you to pull every single one of these names that begins with the letter B, whether first name or last. I also want you to correlate all the names to potential geographic locations.”

  “Gonna take a while. I don’t have a lot of power.” He swept a hand at his collection of ancient, mismatched laptops. “What you see is what I’ve got.”

  “Then you better start soon. I might be able to connect you with a werewolf computer wizard who can give you extra CPUs.” Assuming that Summer and Nash ever returned from their pre-honeymoon, anyway.

  “You sure we want to?” McIntyre sat back in his chair. “I mean, someone’s painting big red arrows for us. Someone wants us to find these people, or whatever’s killed these people. Someone that’s got powers we’ve never run into before.” He tongued his labret plug, shaking his head slowly. “Whatever those arrows are pointing at, I dunno if we want to find out.”

  “But Anthony…” Elise said.

  “He’s not on the list.”

  “He didn’t just vanish, either.” Not Anthony. He would never have gone down without a fight. She didn’t want to believe he could have gone down at all.

  Her head jerked to the side again.

  “Hey!” she barked, twisting to look at the girls seated on the couch behind her.

  Deb pulled desperately on the end of one braid that she had gotten knotted around a hair tie. “It’s stuck!”

  Elise flicked her wrist, and a knife appeared in her hand. The look she gave the kids would have made any adult shit their pants and run. The girls were not impressed. They kept pulling on her battered braid.

  “Don’t stab my kids, Kavanagh,” McIntyre said, squinting at the laptop.

  “If I haven’t stabbed them before, I’m not going to do it now.” Elise cut the rubber band off the bottom of her hair, taking more than a few strands along with it.

  “No!” Deb protested.

  “Use the bands without the metal joiners,” Leticia called from the kitchen. “Even demon hair tangles.”

  Dana delicately pulled a few of the braids together, sliding a bow around the end. “You look pretty, Aunt Elise.”

  Elise moved to cut the bow off, too, but McIntyre’s glare stopped her. She clenched her jaw and lowered the knife.

  She drained her beer.

  “When I finish your geographic location thing, I’m gonna cross-reference this with police databases for missing people,” McIntyre said. His second chin wobbled when he shook his head. “I think this is big, Elise. Biggest case we’ve ever done.”

  Leticia came into the room again. Instead of more Leffe, she had a cell phone and a stack of freshly printed pages. “Here you go,” she said. McIntyre had already printed all of the B names for Elise. “This phone is magicked so that it won’t short circuit in Hell, but you’ll still have to be on Earth to make calls. No satellites or cell towers in Dis, you know.”

  It was a crappy flip phone with a tiny screen and rubber padding around the edges. Looked like the kids had been decorating it. There were pink pony stickers on the back.

  “Thanks,” Elise said dryly, pocketing it.

  She stood, ignoring the wails of complaint from the kids.

  “I’ll call as soon as I get a lead on Anthony,” McIntyre said, hauling Deb into his lap. The girl had added a few bows to her own hair, as well. It stuck out in five different directions. “Watch out for yourself, Kavanagh.”

  She rubbed her aching chest through her shirt. “I’ll try.”

  Eight

  MERE HOURS HAD passed since Elise dropped Lincoln off in the Palace of Dis, and when she returned, Gerard was still disposing of the bodies of Sallosa’s attendants. She could smell blood within the large bucket he carried.

  She peered into the mouth of the bucket. There was nothing inside but a meaty sludge.

  “I see you’ve got the grinder working again,” Elise said.

  Gerard heaved the bucket over a low iron fence and set it on the ground before climbing in after it. The hands within the Palace’s flesh gardens seemed to sense the presence of the puréed bodies, reaching toward it with straining fingers.

  “Just needed a little elbow grease,” he said, and he tipped the bucket.

  The slurry of blood, meat, and fat sloughed over the hands. The fingers trembled. Elise thought she could sense an inaudible sigh of relief.

  He slopped the rest down the rows, tapped the bucket until it was empty, and then climbed back onto the other side.

  “The House of Volac,” Elise said.

  “Already on it. They caught wind of the executions. Volac herself has requested a meeting with you. An amiable one, she says. Feel free to bring as many guards as you want and all that.”

  “I just killed her daughter and all her attendants.”

  “This is Hell,” Gerard said. “That’s kind of like sending flowers before a first date.” He set the bucket outside the door to the kitchens without going inside. When Elise moved to head for the gates, he stepped in front of her, blocking her path. “Did you eat since the thing with Gremory?”

  Elise set her jaw. “Yes.” It was true. She had devoured several of Sallosa’s centuria, which had restored a lot of the energy lost in casting ethereal magic, if not quite enough to heal her.

  “You sure? With all due respect, ma’am, you’re not looking good. I’ll follow you down into the maw of the Coccytus if you want. You know that. But if we’re going to do that, I want to follow you when you’re already at your best.”

  “You’re not coming with me to the House of Volac. I need you and Neuma to remain inside the Palace.” Gerard and Neuma were both bound to the Palace’s magic, just like Elise. At least one of them had to be within it at all times.

  “I don’t want my men following you if you can’t protect them, either,” Gerard said.

  “Neuma’s not available to feed me properly.”

  “There are a lot of guys around here that would work as good substitutes. You’re in charge. You can just order it. Anyone you want.”

  She thought of Lincoln—Lincoln in a hot shower, their slippery bodies intertwined; Lincoln plunging an electrified spear between her ribs and dragging her through town as she screamed.

  “When is the meeting with Volac?” she asked.

  He rubbed a hand down his face. Sighed. “Earliest possible convenience.”

  Elise continued toward the gate.

  “Also, the deputy’s having fits in the Great Library,” Gerard said, hurrying to keep up with her. “Apparently he’s pissed about having babysitters. He wants free rein of the Palace. Isaiah’s not having much fun trying to get the guy to focus, either.”

  When it rains… “Fuck the both of them,” Elise said. That was all the stamina she could muster to deal with their bullshit for the time being. Rylie, Stephanie, and the McIntyre kids had worn the very last of her patience thin. “Mobilize my personal guards. We’re going to the House of Volac now.”

  Felicity whipped out her Taser and zapped the steward. They had jacked up the power source so that it could discharge all at once, and the force of it blasted the demon off his feet and slammed him hard against the wall.

  Nikolaj fell, bleeding.

  “Get him out of here!” Elise shouted.

  Edwin grabbed the wounded guard by the collar and hauled him out the door.

  Elise moved to follow, but Volac’s hand shot out and seized her arm. She hadn’t realized that she was even within the demon’s reach. “Don’t be in such a rush to leave,” Volac said. “You simply must stay for dinner.”

  Elise tried to wrench free, but the demon was too strong. Instead she tried to phase away, diffusing into the shadowy corners of the room.

  Her flesh held firm.

  She’d run into only one demon that could do that before—keep her from pha
sing, forcing her to remain in her human form—and that had been Aquiel, the demon prince of nightmares and another of Belphegor’s allies. Must have been a talent the whole hierarchy had.

  Bad talent for Elise’s sake.

  The rusted points of Volac’s fangs buried into the meat of Elise’s bicep. Pain flamed up her shoulder, down to her fingertips, clawed at her heart.

  She screamed as she ripped free of Volac, leaving ragged slivers of flesh behind in the demon’s mouth. The demon’s tongue lashed over her own face, tasting Elise’s amber blood. A strange gleam filled Volac’s eyes. “Delicious.”

  “Get down!” Felicity shouted.

  Elise hugged her arm to her body and leaped out of the way. A half-second later, the guard opened fire on Volac.

  The bullets didn’t even hit. They vanished in midair.

  Volac rose from the fainting couch. There were no legs under her voluminous skirts. Silk swirled around her as the room darkened, turning her into the core of a black hole.

  Her arm lashed out again. It extended, unbound by physical limitations of bone, and her hand closed around Felicity’s throat.

  With a jerk, she beheaded the guard.

  Volac’s power slammed into Elise. Her energy was so much larger than it should have been. It was like the large-chested woman with nails in her gums was only a hand puppet for an even larger demon—one that Elise could sense, but not see.

  The weight of her aura smashed into Elise. She had thought that the nightmare on the shore of the Amniosium was surprisingly strong, but it was nothing compared to Volac. Her power was out of this world. Elise felt herself bending under it.

  Clenching her fists, Elise bared her teeth and pushed back.

  They clashed, demon against demon, slamming into each other like two nuclear warheads. The walls of the sunroom ripped away around them. Glass shattered, showering into Elise’s hair, slicing into her arms. Volac’s wig was flung into the wind, baring a head underneath with no skull, skin wrapped around a pulsing brain.