Caged in Bone (The Ascension Series)

by Reine, SM

  “No,” Rylie admitted, “but I don’t need it. You can phase with it. I’ll run the normal way.” She wiggled her hands to indicate paws.

  Elise drummed her fingers on the seat. They couldn’t argue about this for long. They had been driving too long, and sunrise was pressing against her senses. She needed shelter as soon as possible. “There are demons out there. Demons that don’t have a problem with sunlight.”

  “I can be sneaky.” Rylie shucked off her sweater. She was wearing a white knee-length dress underneath with spaghetti straps and lace around the chest.

  “I won’t be able to save you if you get into trouble.”

  She rolled her eyes. “I think I can handle myself for a few hours without you, thanks.”

  Rylie had a point. She was an Alpha, after all.

  “Eat anything that looks at you sideways,” Elise said.

  “Or, you know, run away.”

  A reluctant smile tugged at the corner of Elise’s mouth. “Suit yourself. Want anything out of the bags before I take them away?”

  “No, I’m good.” But Rylie did strip quickly and stuff her clothing into the bags. She stood, skinny and shivering, on the side of the road. She looked ridiculously vulnerable like that.

  Fortunately, she wouldn’t be human for long.

  Elise couldn’t wait around to make sure that Rylie changed safely. They were out of time. “See you tonight.”

  She wrapped herself around the motorcycle and phased into darkness—but not into Hell. She had spotted an abandoned motel a few miles back, and it only took a moment’s thought to return herself there. She appeared in one of its rooms, motorcycle and all, and rushed to throw sheets over the windows and block the cracks in the door with pillows.

  By the time she was done, overcast sunlight was beating against the walls of the motel. Elise could feel it like a brand against the back of her eyelids.

  She dragged herself into the closet, shut the door, and rested.

  The day passed so much more slowly when she needed to hold on to her skin the entire time. Elise hadn’t been able to return to Hell the day before—she had simply lost those hours, as if they had completely vanished. And the gnawing hunger that had consumed her since eating the basandere was only getting worse.

  If Elise let herself drift away, she was worried she might never come back.

  Slow as the hours passed in that miserable little closet, they did pass, second by second and minute by minute. Elise cleaned blood out from underneath her black fingernails with a knife. She scraped dirt off of the treads of her boots. After a few hours of boredom, she gathered her hair in her fist and sawed at it with the knife until it swung at shoulder length. The hairs she severed vanished before hitting the floor.

  Elise felt the sun creep across the sky as she entertained herself with idle tasks. She spent the worst hours at midday with her eyes shut and her arms over her head, heart pounding, sweat drenching her shoulders. But that faded too.

  Her afternoon was spent poring over the spells remaining in James’s notebook and covering her limbs with runes waiting to be unleashed. She wondered how many of them might be able to kill James. She also wondered briefly about how his blood might feel flooding her mouth, and then decided that wasn’t an entertaining thought at all.

  Once she started down that train of thought, she couldn’t stop. Elise was going to have to decide what to do about James sooner or later—probably sooner, now that they were approaching Boulder.

  Elise was angry with him. That hadn’t faded with time. Nor had her sense of betrayal.

  But she had never planned on killing him.

  Not when she learned that he had inadvertently caused the deaths of so many people in Northgate, not when he had exorcised her to Hell, and not even when he had gone behind her back to cut a deal with Abraxas. He was selfish and wrong-headed, but he was James, for fuck’s sake. Her aspis. The man who had held her hand through painful doctors’ appointments, sat beside her through long nights healing deadly wounds, and taught her how to dance.

  Elise had promised him that she would find him once she was ready to forgive him. She had meant it at the time. The fact that James kept making it harder and harder for her to find that forgiveness didn’t mean that she didn’t still hope that it would happen someday.

  The knowledge that nightfall might mean that James’s time had come made Elise wish, for a moment, that the sun would slow its painful march across the sky.

  It didn’t.

  Eventually, she felt the sun dip behind the snow-capped mountains, veiled by smoke and clouds.

  Night had come.

  Elise checked the ends of her hair one more time, trimmed an uneven hair behind her ear. Then she flicked the knife shut, shoved the notebook in her back pocket, and emerged from the closet.

  The motorcycle was waiting for her.

  She slung her leg over the seat, wrapped her hands around the handlebars. The hunger started creeping up on her again as soon as she started to move. It had gnawed at her all day, but remaining dormant seemed to have made it easier to ignore. She wasn’t even trying to fight yet and she was already struggling not to think of blood and meat.

  There was no time to return to Hell and feed on Neuma. Rylie was surely closing in on Boulder—and on James.

  Elise would have to confront James while starving.

  “No way this could go badly,” she muttered, leaning all her weight on the motorcycle as she pushed up her sleeve to find the tracking spell. She focused on Rylie’s belongings instead of the warding ring as she activated it.

  A red light zipped toward the west, slightly south, like a compass orienting toward Rylie. Always west.

  Elise phased.

  Elise darted toward Colorado as a shadow, halfway between woman and darkness.

  She found the wolf only a handful of miles from Boulder. Rylie had covered an incredible amount of distance during the daylight hours while Elise had wasted away in the closet. The only way she could have possibly gotten that far was by running without breaks at full tilt.

  Golden fur flashed through the trees in the mountains. Rylie was going to pass Boulder like that, and for a moment, Elise wondered why. Then her vision traveled ahead and she realized that she recognized the area. She recognized the streets, the houses, even the forest itself.

  James may have masked his smell and Abel’s, but he hadn’t managed to erase all traces of his coven. That was what Rylie was following.

  The werewolf was going after the White Ash Coven.

  Elise waited until Rylie was about to cross the road, then landed on the pavement in front of her and set the motorcycle down. The wolf skidded to a halt on the ice.

  “You’ve covered a lot of ground today,” Elise said by way of greeting. “Were you planning to fight James on your own?”

  Rylie’s ears perked, but she couldn’t respond without shifting back, which didn’t look to be in the plan. The fur on her legs and underbelly had captured clumps of fluffy snow. Her eyes were bright and alert without any hint of fatigue, and she wasn’t breathing hard.

  The amount of energy it took to sustain that was insane. Elise had never seen another creature that could do it. And, not for the first time, she wished that the pack could be hers to use.

  Today, that power was hers. She only needed to find James and point Rylie at him.

  The wolf was waiting for Elise to tell her what to do, where to go. She hesitated, fingernails digging into the handlebar of the motorcycle. “There’s a service road that runs behind the coven’s neighborhood,” Elise said. “We can approach from that way without being seen.”

  Rylie gave a halfhearted wag of her tail in acknowledgment.

  Elise kicked the stand on the bike, throttled the engine. When she took off, the werewolf was at her side, keeping pace with long, easy strides.

  They raced through the night together, tires cracking against the ice, paws kicking up plumes of snow. Elise didn’t signal to Rylie before taking the
right-hand fork deeper into the forest. The wolf just seemed to know where they were going as easily as though they had been hunting together for years and years. Elise turned and Rylie turned. They moved as one.

  As the road twisted around the mountain, the back of the White Ash Coven’s neighborhood appeared. Elise glimpsed brick walls through the trees. Every witch’s house had greenhouses, empty chicken coops, oversized gardens, lawns big enough for generations of children to run around in them.

  The smell of smoke reached Elise. That wasn’t right—there shouldn’t have been smoke, not in Colorado. But when they reached the top of the hill, she saw why.

  There was a bonfire on the road between the houses. It smelled like artificial fabric, rubber, melting plastic. The witches had emptied many of the coven’s abandoned houses of their furniture to warm the winter air. The brilliant flames cast long shadows of the dancing witches against the snow-covered yards.

  The tinkling sounds of shattering glass punctured the night. There were voices and laughter as people talked over each other.

  Warm anger pooled in Elise’s stomach. How many of these people had been in the White Ash Coven when they were preparing to assassinate Adam? How many had contributed to grooming Elise for a bloody destiny that she had never wanted? And how many had only enlisted with James now because they believed in his vision of a world where he was God?

  Elise didn’t really care. They were all guilty in one way or another. Those happy voices wouldn’t be lifted in laughter for long.

  But she couldn’t approach the bonfire. What had been built for revelry served just as well as a defense against demons like her.

  Rylie was watching them too, ears perked forward, weight on her forelegs, as if preparing to leap.

  “Do you smell him yet?” Elise asked.

  The wolf shook her head.

  Pushing up her sleeve, Elise activated the tracking spell again, focused on the warding ring in her bra. The red light flitted away from the coven. Deeper into the mountains.

  They wouldn’t need to attempt to approach the bonfire and confront the witches. Elise wasn’t sure if she was disappointed or not. “Let’s keep going.”

  Rylie took the lead, nose to the ice.

  The bonfire celebration and the surrounding houses disappeared behind them. Elise triggered the spell again with another wrench of her gut and sweep of electricity across her skin. It was still heading in the same direction.

  The service road forked again, turning into a dirt trail, and Elise realized that she knew where James was hiding.

  Pamela’s house.

  The late high priestess of the White Ash Coven had always lived separately from the other witches, giving her the privacy required for intense study. She had owned a hundred acres to herself. No civilization in sight. The perfect place for James to hide.

  The trail to Pamela’s house had always felt impossibly long to Elise when she visited as a child, but on a motorcycle it only took a few minutes to reach the cabin in the woods. It was a dark, squat building overgrown with ivy that didn’t look nearly as intimidating as Elise remembered. In fact, it looked awfully…small.

  All of the curtains were pulled. It was dark and quiet.

  She stopped the motorcycle in front of the steps. Elise dismounted, but didn’t climb onto Pamela’s porch yet. Rylie stood next to her, looking prepared to hunt or fight or whatever else Elise told her to do.

  James was inside. He was waiting for them.

  If she told Rylie to go in, they would never have a chance to speak. She wouldn’t be able to ask him why he had chosen death instead of freedom. It would be an immediate, bloody battle.

  It was the right thing to do.

  But Elise said, “Look for a gateway. They’re big. It has to be outside somewhere. I’ll check inside the house.”

  Rylie acknowledged her by leaping into the bushes, golden fur vanishing with a flash of her tail. She didn’t even question the order. She trusted that Elise wouldn’t confront James without her.

  The rustling in the woods faded immediately. Rylie was gone.

  Elise entered Pamela’s house to face James.

  Ten

  The smell of Pamela’s overpowering perfume had faded in the decade since she died, but not vanished. When Elise entered her living room, she could still smell the flowers and vanilla musk that the witch had bathed in each morning.

  That scent transported Elise back to her teenage years as a young kopis living with Pamela. She used to think that being cloistered with the high priestess was a punishment—a way for Isaac, her demon-hunting father, to show Elise that she was not as important as his duties.

  Elise hadn’t known what Pamela and the coven really meant to her until much later.

  She closed the door behind her and let her eyes adjust to the relative darkness of the room. Pamela had been a fan of romance novels with swooning women on the covers, and the pink and gold spines still filled the bookshelves beside the fireplace. She had literally hundreds of them alongside her herbal dictionaries, encyclopedias, and mythology reference books.

  The shelves were dusty, but the furniture was not. The couch had been removed, the wingback chairs rearranged. It seemed the coven had been using Pamela’s home as a group ritual space.

  Elise pushed back her sleeve and touched a finger to the locator spell.

  Her gut wrenched. The warding ring burned.

  The red light blazed a path down the hall and vanished through Pamela’s office door.

  Elise held her breath as she pushed the door open.

  Unlike the living room, Pamela’s office was a time capsule. All of her books were in order and her desk was untouched. The circle of power she had built into the floor looked like it had been well maintained, and all of her crystals had been polished until shining.

  A crimson glow emanated from the corner of the room behind a wingback chair. Elise ripped it away from the wall.

  Behind it stood a locked chest no bigger than a jewelry box. All of Elise’s magical tracking lights had adhered themselves to its lid like a dozen sleeping fireflies.

  She already knew that James couldn’t be inside, that she had somehow done the spell wrong. But she had to open it anyway.

  The inside was lined with velvet. The collection of objects it held looked random at a glance—a scrap of blue cotton, a pair of broken reading glasses, a pen engraved with the words “Motion & Dance,” a men’s wristwatch that Elise had bought for James one Christmas. And there was a blue rune glowing on the underside of the lid.

  She knew what that spell was meant to do.

  Her tracking spell had found James, all right. It had found the box that he had enchanted to look magically indistinguishable from him.

  He had lured her to the wrong place.

  Elise snapped the box shut, fingers tightening on the wood until it groaned. James had known that Rylie would get Elise involved in the search for Abel, and he had ensured that they wouldn’t be able to find him—not by smell, and not by magic.

  They had just driven across the entire damn country to find him, and he probably wasn’t even in the same state as his coven.

  Elise hurled the box across the office with a roar. It smashed into Pamela’s perfectly maintained shelves and knocked a row of her books to the floor in a shower of paper and shattering glass.

  “How could I have been so stupid?” she hissed.

  She shouldn’t have been looking for James; she should have been looking for gateways that James hadn’t opened yet and tried to get ahead of him. Instead, he had thoroughly outwitted her attempts to find and kill him. They were still three steps behind him, just as they had always been.

  Elise strode to the box and stomped on it with her heel, breaking the wood, shattering the spell inside.

  This time when she activated her tracking spell, it extinguished in front of her. It didn’t go to the box. It also didn’t go to James himself. He was warded against being magically located.

  Eli
se shoved the books off of another shelf, swept the crystals off of Pamela’s desk onto the floor. Glass shattered.

  She gripped the shelf in both hands, tempted to tear it off the wall, throw it into Pamela’s desk, destroy the office that seemed to be a monument to the White Ash Coven’s machinations. Her muscles tensed in preparation. But a sound elsewhere in the house made her freeze.

  Elise had just heard a door shut.

  She wasn’t alone in the house.

  Elise phased to Pamela’s office door and looked out. A man was slipping through the living room. He had been in the kitchen and was trying to reach the front door without her noticing.

  James?

  This man had charcoal black hair and reading glasses, but he didn’t look anything like James aside from that. His stature was too slight and he couldn’t have been any older than thirty. But he was a witch. A dark-haired witch that radiated magic and wore glasses similar to those that James did when he was reading a book. The resemblance was enough.

  Elise’s stomach cramped again, even stronger than before. It wasn’t just hunger consuming her senses. It was the idea of James, the tangled mix of anger and frustration and longing. The memory of their hands touching after killing Aquiel. The way he had looked when she thanked him for his help.

  This wasn’t James, but they were similar enough that Elise almost didn’t care.

  The witch stopped when he saw her, freezing like a mouse that knew the hawk was closing in with talons extended. The thoughts that flashed across his mind were too obvious not to read. He had been guarding Pamela’s house, assigned by the coven to watch for her. He had been meant to escape without notice as soon as she arrived.

  He had failed.

  The witch bolted toward the door.

  Elise reached it first.

  He skidded to a halt just inches from her, eyes widening. He backpedaled. Stumbled over his own feet.

  “Goddess!” he cried.

  She leaped onto him, grabbed his shirt, shoved him to the floor.

  The cry of pain when his head bounced off the wood didn’t sound like James, either. She silenced him with a hand over his mouth. His eyes were wide over her fingers.