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

by S. M. Reine

  “Hey!” Elise darted for him.

  James gestured, making a small circle with his hand. Light blossomed from his fingertips. The magic struck Elise in a dizzying surge and she missed a step, staggered, sank to her knees.

  Volac shimmered.

  And then the demon was yanked through to Dis.

  The entire demon—not just her shadow. She was no longer invisible. She was a behemoth, a thing even bigger than Aquiel had been, and far more ugly. Her legs were numerous, her head broad and flat and triangular, the sores on her skin gushing mucus that smelled like rotten milk and burned like fire.

  Elise was standing underneath Volac’s chest. The view right above her was of an open mouth filled with thousands of angular teeth. Elise couldn’t see the sky anymore, or the plantation. She was surrounded by pitted flesh and a dozen thick legs covered in razor-sharp spines.

  Her jaw dropped open.

  “James,” she said, “why the fuck did you just do that?”

  He grabbed her hand. “Now we run.” He hauled her toward Volac’s head—at least, what Elise assumed was Volac’s head—which was hanging over the flesh farms.

  A mighty shriek rent the air, so loud that it was like crushing Elise’s skull between two rocks. The legs stumbled. Volac began to fall.

  Elise didn’t watch. She ran as fast as her corporeal legs could carry her, James’s fingers tangled with hers, breath caught in her throat and hair streaming behind her.

  One of the legs swept out and smashed into the ground in front of them, cratering the rock. Debris pelted their legs. James skidded to a stop, pushed Elise to the right. “That way, go quickly—”

  “I’m going as quickly as I fucking can!”

  They were caught in a maze of Volac’s legs as they buckled, creating earthquakes each time a knee connected with the ground. The hands jutting from the flesh farms reached for Elise as she passed, fingers straining, catching at her boots. She leaped over them. Kicked them away. She couldn’t hurt or help them. She would be lucky to save herself.

  James fell with a shout, hand ripped from Elise’s. She whirled to find him on the ground. His leg was pinned under Volac’s sagging belly.

  Her heart leaped into the back of her throat.

  She jumped over him before the weighty flesh could roll onto his chest, bracing it with both hands over her head. Elise’s strength, like many demons, wasn’t limited by muscle, but by her power—and she was very powerful. But she had never felt anything as heavy as Volac before. She gritted her teeth and strained to push the rolls of flesh off of James, but she couldn’t even get an inch.

  James flicked a spell into the air.

  Magic rippled through Volac’s skin, making it shiver against Elise’s fingers. Then it splattered.

  The flesh liquefied near the ground, opening a huge hole in the skin that twitched and seized. Ichor slopped over Elise.

  James pulled his leg free, slacks caked to his leg by the blood, and scrambled to his feet.

  They ran side by side, the hot wind of Dis in their faces. Elise heard Volac continuing to fall but didn’t look back. They passed the empty slave quarters only to hear the wood shattering under Volac’s weight a moment later.

  And then there was nowhere to run.

  They stopped on the edge of the cliff. The army was farther up the ridge, taking a path down into the canyon, led by Terah.

  Elise gripped James’s arm and prepared to jump.

  But Volac finished settling, and her last leg sprawled out a good six feet away from them.

  They were safe.

  James and Elise stood on the edge of the cliff for a long moment, trying to catch their breaths. Flattened out, Volac took up almost the entire front of her property, like a ruddy beached whale struggling to breathe despite its weight.

  She wasn’t dead—not yet—but she couldn’t move, either.

  Elise took in the sheer size of the demon and all the assorted pieces that she could see, and she couldn’t pick out any of the normal limbs she would have expected to find. She had no idea if Volac was facing them. She couldn’t even see the gates over the swell of her back.

  The demon wasn’t moving. They really were safe.

  “That could have been a really bad fucking idea, James,” Elise said.

  “But it wasn’t. That demon’s true form was in a parallel dimension,” James said. “When I saw the size of its projection, I assumed that it was forced to project itself to Dis because it wouldn’t be able to survive here. There are other infernal worlds without gravity, or with fluid instead of air, to support creatures that size. By pulling her through…”

  Volac was a beached whale. It was nauseating to see—and yet, somehow, deeply satisfying.

  “Another one of Nathaniel’s spells?” Elise asked.

  “Yes, it’s a trick I figured out from his work. Impressive, isn’t it?”

  “Yeah. I guess it is.”

  James smiled. Warmth radiated through their bond. He was happy to be fighting at Elise’s side again—working together rather than working against each other.

  Reluctantly, she smiled back.

  By the time Elise and James caught up, the centuries had already made their way down to the portal cavern at the bottom of the canyon. The path was too narrow to fit the fiends more than five abreast, and the gibborim had to edge in sideways. Elise pushed past them.

  Terah and her fell beast stood at the edge of the portal, the reins looped over her fist.

  “Malebolge,” she said with a dark smile. “It’s been too long.”

  “Not long enough,” James muttered, staring at the leg through the shimmering fissure.

  Elise surveyed the roof of the cavern. Several of the human legs were hanging lower than they had been when Elise had visited with Lincoln, as if having Volac fall on the farms had hammered them partway through the earth. Nothing else had changed. There was nothing to indicate that anyone had been through lately, either going in or coming out.

  Her human guards were arrayed around the bottom of the path. Elise glanced at James before addressing them. “I want you all to stay here and guard this side of the portal. I’ll take the centuries through. Make sure that nobody follows us.”

  “With all due respect, I think I should go with you,” Azis said.

  She would have preferred that, too. But James was right. Malebolge was no place for mortals. The breeding ground of nightmares would have been bad enough for people without tortured pasts; for humans formerly enslaved by demons, it could easily break even the strongest of them. Even Azis.

  “I need you here, watching our backs,” Elise said in a tone that brooked no room for argument. She turned to face Terah and the other centurions. Albrinck and Endi were both incubi—brothers, actually—and about as obedient as one could hope from demons that lived in an infernal metropolis. “When we arrive in Malebolge, our goal is to secure all humans or human products. We aren’t taking control of the city. Bring anything you find back here and hold it for me to inspect. Understood?”

  Terah nodded and turned to pass the instructions onto the fiends. As soon as she finished talking, they started hurling themselves through the portal, leaping over the edge without hesitation. When they connected with its shimmering surface, they vanished.

  The collection of nightmares followed next, and then the gibborim.

  Elise waited for all of them to pass, then moved to leap.

  “Father,” Terah said.

  She paused. “Yes?”

  “I just wanted to say…thank you. This is enjoyable.”

  Damn demons.

  That wasn’t Elise’s thought. She shot a look at James, but he was scratching his eyebrow and looking elsewhere, feigning innocence.

  “You’re welcome, Terah,” Elise said.

  She grabbed James by the sleeve, jerked him to her side, and jumped.

  Seventeen

  ELISE AND JAMES emerged from the portal to find chaos.

  She slammed onto her knees
at the top of stairs hewn from bone. James hit a few inches ahead of her and slipped down several steps before catching himself.

  “Good Lord,” he said, staring out at the city.

  They had appeared within the ribcage of Malebolge. The bones curved around them, forming a high canopy with edges highlighted by distant fire. The tissue within the ribs had rotted, growing massive mold configurations that had been hollowed out into buildings.

  The gibborim were already tearing away doors and reaching inside to jerk demons out onto the streets of the spine—some newborn nightmares that looked very much like Jerica, and others for which Elise had no name.

  Elise’s gaze moved past the gibborim, following the line of the street down toward the pelvis. It was like standing on top of a hill in San Francisco, except that the streets were framed by tissue instead of cramped buildings, and the city spilled out underneath the small ribs and spread around the hips.

  And Malebolge was still rioting.

  The streets seethed with nightmares and brutes and a thousand other demon breeds. Some of the buildings were on fire, sending spirals of black smoke into the air. Screams carried on the air, echoing hollowly off of the inside of the ribcage, falling flat against the tender flesh of the rotting structures.

  Terah’s fell beast clung to the stairs a few yards below. She watched the burning with satisfaction in her eyes, hair fluttering around her jaw, stirred by a wind that stunk of decay. “Search!” she crowed. “Kill anyone who gets in your way!”

  The fiends spread out, vanishing into the crowd. Elise jerked her Taser from its sheath at her hip and tested it by pressing the button. It snapped to life, arcing with electricity just a few dangerous inches from her skin.

  “See anything different, James?” she asked.

  His eyes swept the city. “I never came to this part. We only passed through the market and climbed onto the shoulder. But…that’s changed.” He pointed at the pelvic cavity. “There’s a lot more down there now.”

  It was a place to start. “Stick close,” Elise said, glancing over her shoulder. The fissure leading back to Dis was nowhere in sight. They would need to find another route to leave again.

  Later. After she had found out what had happened to everyone…for better or worse.

  Elise led the way down into the market. A cluster of nightmares wearing ruddy orange leather spotted them and rushed.

  She lifted the Taser so they could see it—a silent warning.

  Still, they charged.

  When she had brought Neuma into Malebolge to rescue Jerica, she had done it with as little fanfare as possible, trying—and failing—to avoid attention. But now she wanted them to know she was coming. She wanted them all to know that the Father had arrived and wasn’t going to put up with the victimization of mortals.

  Elise allowed her power to flare. Her skin frayed. Shadow erupted from her, blackening the surrounding air.

  “Stop.” Her voice resonated, echoing. “Don’t come near me.”

  The nightmare in the forefront tripped over her own feet, crashing to her knees. “Father,” she gasped.

  With her power expanding, Elise could see all around them. She reached into the shadows of the buildings the gibborim raided. There were demons inside. Many demons. Not a single mortal—not even slaves.

  She allowed her shadow to grow as she stepped past the nightmares. They didn’t attack her.

  The market was chaotic, but everything seemed to slow as Elise descended into it, watching nightmares drop to their knees around her. They were smart enough not to fight her. But many of them had been bred by Yatam, the demon who had given her his power, the original Father; the other demons, with twisted and inhuman bodies, were not. And they had no sense of reverence at the sight of her.

  A chisav hurtled toward her, four large hands thudding against the bone street. Elise sidestepped its charge and buried the Taser in its side.

  Electricity crackled. It jerked, lost its balance, and collapsed.

  It tried to stir. She kicked it in the head.

  Elise studied her surroundings with her boot on its flank. Terah was higher in the city with the fiends and gibborim, tearing through the rioters with little effort. Within the market itself, there were dozens of booths with their wares spread across tables for any passersby to browse.

  Elise searched for human byproducts and didn’t see anything. Not so much as a brush made of bone. There were plenty of crafts made from fiends and other lesser demons, but nothing that had been mortal.

  That was far stranger than if she had found human cadavers everywhere. Trade in human products had always been strong.

  Where had everything gone?

  “What were they selling the last time you came through here?” Elise asked, turning to address James.

  He wasn’t standing behind her.

  Her eyes flicked over the crowd, searching for a hint of white among all the demons carrying torches and cudgels. She couldn’t see him anywhere.

  Elise stretched out her senses, opening her mind to his, and glimpsed him climbing a stairway of bone that led up onto the chest of Malebolge.

  James was leaving.

  Her stomach twisted. She should have known that he was going along with her too easily. It was no surprise that he had his own agenda—not at this point. But he had said that he wasn’t going to lie anymore. She had believed him.

  Elise took a final glance at the army sweeping the streets of Malebolge. If there were any human survivors, the centurions would find them.

  She had more personal business to attend to.

  Relaxing her grip on her skin, Elise flitted into darkness.

  Eighteen

  ON THE OTHER side of the door, Elise and James slipped outside of time.

  Her entire life was condensed to a pinpoint that hovered in front of her like a tiny, burning star. All instants were visible simultaneously.

  She saw herself birthed in a city of light, and the first time her father, Isaac, had placed a blade in her hands, and the moment that Elise had glimpsed James through a witch’s bonfire. She saw the moment that she had fallen to her death in Reno, Nevada. And then the moment that Anthony had dredged her new body out of the choppy, frozen waters of Lake Tahoe.

  Elise saw Nathaniel, pallid in death, and reborn in the form of an angel with wet, limp wings hanging from his shoulder blades.

  Eve’s life was all tangled up with hers, too. A life in a beautiful garden, doted upon by all of the children she had birthed out of love, and the once-human man that had become God. She saw the moment that she had realized she was in love with Adam, and the moment He strangled her to death, terminating her eternal life.

  She couldn’t tell the difference between Adam’s sins and James’s betrayal anymore.

  All condensed to a heartbeat.

  And then her feet connected with the ground, shocking her back to reality, slamming her into her body once more.

  Elise was on all fours, and she didn’t immediately try to stand. She bowed her forehead to her hands. Her cheeks were damp. She struggled to reorient herself to reality in this new dimension—an ethereal city she didn’t recognize.

  It was the sound of James’s heaving beside her that grounded her. Shifting dimensions was a huge shock for anyone. James was still mortal enough that he didn’t take well to passing between worlds. Doorways usually weren’t as bad as phasing, but that had been no ordinary door.

  “Did you see?” James gasped. “The way they built Eden and Shamain…”

  “No,” Elise said curtly. “I didn’t see.”

  She got to her feet and looked behind her, searching for the door that they had passed through. It was set high above her in a smooth wall—too high for humans to reach, but not so high that an angel couldn’t fly to it. Elise doubted that the wall would have been climbable by even the most determined mortal.

  It didn’t look like anyone was inclined to attempt it anyway. Elise sensed a lot of sluggish heartbeats in the room,
but nobody was moving.

  They had landed in a cavernous room with a ceiling so high that she couldn’t see it. A damp mist clung to her ankles. She could barely make out a few stone spheres scattered across the sloping floor, some as small as coconuts, some as large as cars. They looked like they had grown out of the soil. Elise knew that if she broke the smaller stones free, she would find that they had roots and were hollow on the inside.

  There were slabs beside many of the larger spheres, something between tables and beds carved from rough-hewn stone. That was where all of the bodies were reclining.

  James’s feeling of nausea at what he saw in the room was so powerful that it actually staggered Elise. “Stop it,” she snapped. “Stop feeling so much.”

  “I can’t.” He drew in a shuddering breath. “It looks so much like Araboth.”

  Elise approached the nearest slab, holding her breath. There was a man she didn’t recognize lying on it with his eyes closed. A spear driven into his wrist led down into the ground. His thought patterns were peaceful. Like he was having deep, happy dreams from which he might never rouse.

  It really was like they had stepped through the door and back into Araboth.

  Back into Elise’s nightmares.

  She shut her eyes, and for a few brief seconds, she allowed herself to panic. She surrendered to her pounding heart and wild thoughts. I’m back in the garden. He’s not dead. I’m going to have to do it all again. I’ll be trapped this time—I’ll lose myself. I’ll lose everything. He’ll keep me and I will never escape.

  Elise knew that James was going to pick up on it, but she pushed him out of her mind and focused on the fear.

  Then she forced it to drain out of her.

  Slowly, she counted back from ten, hands shaking.

  When she reached one, she wiped her palms on the front of her jacket, clenched her fists, and unclenched them. She wasn’t shaking anymore. She wasn’t afraid.

  Elise opened her eyes to see James watching her. Heartache was etched all over his face. “It’s not Araboth,” he said.