Caged in Bone (The Ascension Series)

by Reine, SM

  “You save those people, the slaves,” Rylie said. “You took over an entire Palace in Hell to save them. Why would I ever be afraid of you?”

  Maybe because even now, Elise was thinking about her hunger. She was thinking about meat and the dark places inside a victim’s body and how easy it would be to crawl inside them. Elise’s mind didn’t even belong to herself anymore. It was torn between infernal instinct and Eve’s loving instincts and she didn’t know if she fit anywhere between the demon and the angel.

  Rylie should have been afraid of her. Elise was.

  Enough of this bullshit. Elise was done setting up the spells, and now they only needed to be activated.

  She opened the hallway door again. “I’ll activate these from outside so that I can leave without breaching them. As soon as the door shuts, you’re stuck in here until nightfall. Don’t try to leave. Understand?”

  Rylie didn’t seem to be in any condition to speak. She just nodded.

  Elise slammed the door behind her.

  Fucking werewolves.

  She waited until she heard Rylie lock the door, then activated the wards.

  Magic wrenched from her heart, making her pulse race, her vision blur. She didn’t even realize that she had fallen until the carpet was in her face, all abstract green patterns that made no sense to her fogged mind.

  Burning magical walls erected around the hotel room that looked and felt like fire.

  Hungry…

  The hallway was windowless, but she could suddenly feel the rising sun acutely.

  Magic hurt. It was daytime. She didn’t want to suffer anymore.

  Elise surrendered to oblivion.

  Cold. Hungry. Bright. Wet. What is this place?

  Elise’s eyes opened on the face of God.

  “Oh shit,” she hissed, scrambling into a sitting position, pushing herself backward until her shoulder slammed into a corner.

  It took her a moment of blinding panic to realize that she wasn’t really looking at God. It was a painting, and He didn’t look any more like the real thing than Michelangelo’s depiction in the Sistine Chapel did.

  She was in a church. There were no pews here, no priest at the altar. Her shoulder had banged into a table covered in brochures.

  She hauled herself into a standing position using the edge of the table. The fearful glare that His face had been painted into looked accusatory, as if the artist had known that Elise would be there in that instant and prepared Him to cast judgment upon the sins of her past life.

  Elise backed away from Him, boots slipping on floor tiles that didn’t look like they were original to the church. Hints of moonlight glowed beyond the stained glass windows. It cast an eerie twilight over the open nave.

  Memory returned to her slowly. She was in the Crane Hotel where she had left Rylie. It was nighttime, so she must have just spent the day phased out of existence. But she always jumped to Dis during the day, floating above the city in peaceful silence, and when she cast her mind backward, she remembered…nothing.

  Her abs cramped hard, and Elise doubled over as her vision swam.

  Hungry.

  Images of dripping meat filled her mind. Slabs of raw steak. Not beef, not pork—something much fattier. In her imagination, it glistened as it broke down underneath the hungry mouths of maggots, and Elise devoured all of it whole.

  She stumbled through the church, and then she was in a hotel lobby, unsure how she had gotten there.

  When she went to the sliding doors, they didn’t react to her, and she had to pat her body down to reassure herself that she was there—not an apparition that had failed to take form, but tangible with skin and bones and all the important things that made her able to exist alongside humans. She wore jeans. Boots. A bustier. A leather jacket. Gun at her back. Everything was normal there. The doors just didn’t have any power.

  Elise clutched her stomach as a low groan escaped her throat.

  Meat. Blood.

  She pulled a fist back and punched through the glass door.

  Elise shoved through the showering glass and emerged on the street. Cold, damp air slapped her in the face, sucking the breath out of her lungs. The shock of it was enough to bring her vision into sharp relief.

  Maybe she did know this city. The streets looked familiar.

  She turned and looked up at the hotel tower attached to the cathedral. Magic sparked on one of the highest floors. Those crimson flames looked like wards—magic that Elise had cast. It looked strange. She barely recalled casting it, as if the moments after sunrise had been wiped away with everything else.

  The absence of memory chilled her in a way that the snow covering the toes of her boots didn’t. Elise zipped her jacket to her throat. Took a few deep breaths that stung because they were so cold and wet, hostile to her demon lungs.

  It felt like months had passed since the last time that she had eaten anything, even though she now recalled feeding on Neuma early in the previous night, and devouring all those brutes before that. When she pushed up her sleeve to look at her forearm, she could see the faint outline of bone underneath. Even the glimpses of moonlight through the heavy purple clouds stung.

  She was starving again.

  “But why?” she asked the empty street.

  Shuffling noises.

  Elise turned to see shadows sliding through an alley near the intersection. There were no human minds there. And even though she couldn’t smell like Rylie did, she thought that she detected the faintest odor of damp soil.

  Rylie would be safe in the hotel room for a few more minutes. The wards were still intact.

  Elise followed the shadows.

  They had already gone down to D Street by the time she reached the intersection, sliding silently through the night without a single uttered word. But Elise realized that there were footprints in the snow—faint indentations no bigger than her own feet that had treads like those of hiking boots.

  Those shadows may not have been human, but they wore human clothes.

  Elise continued to follow, phasing to the next alley and the next. Each return to her corporeal form jarred her like being struck at the base of her skull with a hammer. She stopped phasing and started walking in the path of the footprints instead.

  The hotel tower faded into the flurrying snow behind her, indistinguishable from the other decorations of the city surrounding it. More buildings emerged in front of Elise. The city seemed endless.

  Still, the shadows walked.

  Their footsteps terminated in front of a broken window. Elise had to rub her eyes before she could focus on the sign. It was a small grocery store on the first floor of an apartment building. Shards of glass shimmered in the snow like fragments of ice.

  Her quarry had gone inside.

  Elise slipped in after them.

  Now she heard voices, though she couldn’t see who was speaking.

  “Don’t think there’s anything left, Joseba,” said a woman. “They cleared this one out like everything else.”

  “They had to have left something.”

  Elise didn’t dare phase into a mist, but she let herself fade somewhat into shadow, hair bleeding into the darkness behind her and skin fading. She slipped between aisles to pursue the voices.

  She found them pushing through empty boxes and toppled shelves in the rear of the store.

  “We can wait until we get outside the city,” the woman said. She had hair styled into a fauxhawk and was about a foot shorter than her companion, no more than four and a half feet tall. Her jeans had been rolled and cuffed at the ankle to keep from dragging in the snow.

  Her companion was Elise’s height and stocky. He had a broad, friendly face. “We can’t wait,” he said. “I bet they’ve forgotten something edible. Just have to keep looking.”

  “Do Twinkies even sound any good to you? Come on, Joseba.”

  Motion drew her gaze to the storage room door. There was more motion beyond the window. These two weren’t alone.

&nb
sp; “It doesn’t matter what sounds good. This is what we have. We won’t get anything better until we reach Boulder.”

  They were going to Boulder? Elise almost forgot to keep herself hidden.

  Boulder was where James’s family came from. That was where the White Ash Coven used to live.

  Elise’s eyes dropped to the hips of the woman. She wore a heavy iron chain where most people would have worn a belt. The man wore iron knuckledusters over his gloves and heavy earrings that made his earlobes sag. They were brown-skinned, brown-haired, as earthy as the smells that Rylie had described to Elise.

  Basandere.

  The creatures were no more from Hell than werewolves were. They were spirits of the earth that had largely died out in the Industrial Era, like the golems and sidhe. Most kopides only classified them as demons in order to make them conveniently fall under the deadly jurisdiction of demon hunters.

  Elise had encountered them before, both as a human and after her resurrection. They hadn’t been a problem when she was still alive. But her last fight with a basandere had ended badly—real badly. She had nearly been decapitated when the spirit she fought used his chain as a ligature.

  She had healed at human speed after that. Weeks of recovery under the attentive care of Anthony and McIntyre.

  And there were three of them on their way to Boulder.

  This wasn’t easy prey. Elise wasn’t the right one to fight them. Rylie would be able to kill or contain the basandere, since werewolves were earth spirits too, and at the top of the food chain.

  But it felt like her stomach was folding inside out and trying to devour itself.

  The sound of their pulsing heartbeats grew. They may not have been human, but they had blood coursing through their bodies. Elise wondered if it would taste like the iron that they wrapped around their bodies for safety and energy. Would it be bitter or delicious?

  She didn’t dare swallow them, not when there was so much iron on their bodies. They were too well defended.

  But the blood—she could drink the blood.

  Elise’s hunger was only growing the longer that she looked at them. Her hands were shaking.

  Maybe just a taste.

  She reformed into her corporeal body.

  The female basandere jerked with surprise, taking a step back. “Jainko,” she hissed as her male companion moved in front of her.

  He looked angry to see Elise. “This is our salvage,” Joseba said, pounding his armored fist into the opposite palm. “Get out, succubus whore.”

  Elise stepped over the boxes, and they stepped back, keeping a shelf between them. “I don’t think that’s a succubus,” the woman said as if Elise wasn’t there, as if she couldn’t hear what they were saying. “I think that’s—she might be—oh, Joseba—”

  The storage room door opened, and the third basandere emerged. He looked older than the other two. More tired. “What is this?” he asked.

  “She’s fucking up our salvage,” Joseba said.

  The older man’s eyes flicked to Elise. His mind was a blank wall, but surprise registered clearly on his face. “You idiot,” he said softly, “it’s her.”

  Joseba immediately swung a fist at her. Elise ducked under it, stepped to the side just in time for him to strike again and miss.

  They recognized her. They had been following her. She needed to know why.

  But all she wanted to do was eat.

  “I’ll cut you,” Joseba said. There was a knife in his hand. She didn’t recall seeing him draw it. The blade was simply there all of a sudden, and it didn’t shine like steel did. It had the dull look of iron. It didn’t need to be sharp to be deadly, especially in his hands.

  Elise touched her throat, recalling the pain of being choked by the other basandere.

  The memory stirred her from her hunger for a moment. She pushed away all the mental images of beating hearts and bloody wounds and tried to focus on her surroundings. “Put the knife down,” Elise said.

  “Don’t be stupid, Joseba,” the older man said warningly.

  “Listen to him,” Elise said. “Put the knife down and tell me why you’re following me.” It was hard to let the adrenaline subside when he was holding a weapon and all she could wonder was whether it was sharp enough to draw blood.

  “Joseba,” the woman said urgently.

  He lunged at her, thrusting the knife toward her heart.

  Elise wasn’t there when his fist reached the place where her breastbone had been. She was suddenly behind him, crouched on top of a shelf. He spun and dived again.

  She knocked his forearm aside.

  “Last warning,” she said. He was lucky to have had any warnings at all.

  He thrust the knife toward her stomach. Elise dodged as easily as she had the first time, and Joseba tripped over his own feet. He tried to catch himself on the bent side of a shelf and hissed with pain, pulling his hand back.

  The scent of blood filled the air. Droplets splattered on the linoleum.

  Hungry.

  Elise moved.

  She kicked the small woman in the face, sending her to the floor. It gave Elise a clear path to Joseba.

  In two long strides, she was on top of him, riding him into the shelves, sending more empty boxes showering to the floor. Metal buckled under his back. His head slammed into the shelf.

  Elise seized his wrist, banged his knuckles into the edge of the metal. He released the dagger.

  She slashed it across his throat.

  Turned out that it was sharp enough to cut cleanly. Clean and deep.

  The woman was screaming behind Elise, but all she heard was the thundering of Joseba’s heart as it pumped blood out of the gaping hole in his neck, pouring down his chest. It gushed over her hands. It was warm as the desert wind and smelled like canyons, the sage that grew between the stones, the moist places where hot springs and geysers emerged from the earth. Hot sun on wet rocks.

  Elise sucked her wetted hand into her mouth.

  He tasted like iron.

  Good. More.

  He was gurgling, trying to scream through an esophagus that had been severed and was filling with arterial blood. He only had a few seconds, a couple of torturously short minutes at best. The blood wouldn’t be as sweet after that.

  Elise buried her face in his throat and drank. Her tongue delved into the wound. Her lips found the jugular and latched on.

  Something struck the side of Elise’s head.

  Her skull rang out as the world exploded around her, filling her ears with a rushing sound. She slammed into the boxes. Her blood-drenched hands and chin were suddenly cold, so very cold, and she was still hungry.

  Footsteps slipped and scrabbled against the linoleum.

  “No! Joseba!”

  “Get his feet,” said the old man. “Fast.”

  Shuffling. Scraping.

  The other two were fleeing, and they were carrying their companion between them.

  Her neck ached too much to move. Dammit, the man must have hit her with a chain—she had dropped her guard, focused on feeding, and hadn’t made sure that the others were gone first.

  She wouldn’t make the same mistake again.

  By the time she got to her knees, they were gone, leaving splattered blood that led out the front windows that they had broken to enter in the first place.

  Elise staggered after them. She tripped, sank to her knees. Her hands slipped in the trail of blood.

  She sucked on her gloved fingers, licking them clean.

  Good, but not enough.

  Never enough.

  Elise could see their retreating shadows beyond the broken window, already a block away. Moving fast despite the burden of Joseba’s body.

  She phased.

  The grocery store disappeared around her. She had a delirious moment of travel, aware that the street was darting underneath her, and then she was standing in the intersection in front of the basandere.

  Her body shocked into its corporeal form again. Sh
e licked the blood off of her wrist, seeking a moment of strength in the taste. It filled her with visions of desert canyons. The stripes on a cavern wall that showed where stones had been compressed by the immense weight of time. Joseba had been young, but his blood was ageless.

  The old man realized that Elise was standing in their path and slipped in the snow, almost falling. He had his arms wrapped under Joseba’s armpits. The woman had him by the ankles. He sagged between them, dead weight. Elise could feel his blood growing cold, aging far too rapidly, and it filled her with anger.

  “Leave us alone,” said the woman. “You already killed him!”

  They tried to run in the other direction. Elise blocked them. “Why were you following us?” she asked.

  “We weren’t going to hurt you,” the older man said. “We’re not assassins; we’re shepherds.”

  “Shepherding me toward what? Boulder?”

  The woman turned pleading eyes on the older man. “They’ll kill us.”

  “I’ll kill you,” Elise said.

  “Belphegor, it’s Belphegor,” said the man, shifting his grip on the body. “He wanted us to make sure that you made it to Boulder. That’s all. We were hired to catch you if you turned around, send you back, perhaps hurt you a little—but not kill.”

  Belphegor wanted Elise in Boulder.

  Why?

  Elise could tell that these people didn’t know. She would let the surviving basandere run. They could run all they liked—it wouldn’t matter. Once Belphegor realized that they had failed, they would be dead too.

  They will be dead soon, she realized. The blood will be wasted.

  If they stood there much longer, drenched in the blood of their companion, then Belphegor wouldn’t have to worry about killing them. “Give him to me,” Elise said, jerking her chin toward the body between them. “Drop him and run as fast as you can.”

  The old man and the woman exchanged looks. Basandere couldn’t communicate telepathically, as far as Elise knew, but they shared the kind of meaningful looks that spoke volumes. The decision was made silently.