Caged in Bone (The Ascension Series)

by Reine, SM

  His voice had dropped an octave, wracked with anger and guilt and bitterness. It radiated through their bond. Elise could taste how much he hated himself. What he showed in his jerky gestures and angry tone was barely the beginning of it. His loathing went so much deeper than that.

  “You never showed any of that to me,” Elise said, a little softer than before. The fact that she felt any sympathy ticked her off. That had to be Eve rearing her ugly head.

  “You had Malcolm.”

  “You’re telling me that you didn’t make a move despite being desperately, pathetically in love with me because I dated some drunken kopis for six months?”

  “I’m telling you that it made me realize that I was mistaken, and had no business in that part of your life,” he said.

  Or any part of her life, really. “I kissed you first.”

  “And until that time, I thought that my delusion was one-sided. I didn’t realize you reciprocated.” James raked a hand through his hair. “Everything was wrong, Elise. My immediate attraction to you was because of what happened to me in the garden. The rebirth that awakened my angel blood. All angels love you—I couldn’t let that control my thoughts, not when you were vulnerable and I was in a position of authority over you. It could never have been anything but abuse.”

  Funny, considering how the alternative had hurt her so much worse. Elise felt a trickle of blood down her neck and along the curve of her breast. She caught it on her thumb and absently sucked it into her mouth.

  James paused in his pacing, distracted by the sight of her working her tongue around the blood.

  When he spoke again, it was softer. “I cast a spell on myself then. I suppressed everything. Made myself…forget.”

  “That you loved me?”

  “And much of what happened in the garden, and all the other nightmares that haunted me.” He slid off the spine scabbard and tossed it to the bed. “It was the only way for us to survive together.”

  The spell that he cast on himself must have worked well. They had retired, James had continued withholding the truth from her, and he had gone on to have a long relationship with Stephanie Whyte. He had done it all while knowing that Elise wanted him.

  “Yet you let Him take me anyway,” Elise said.

  “I had no choice.” He pulled his bloody shirt off, touched the scar on his left pectoral. “I swore oaths.” She opened her mouth to speak, but he cut her off. “Yes, I should have warned you. I know that now. I should have told you the truth from the beginning.”

  Elise thought that he probably wanted her to say that it wouldn’t have mattered—that if she had known he was oath-sworn to God, obligated to deliver her to the garden, that she would have loved him anyway. It would have been a lie. Elise would have escaped James or killed him. Whatever she needed to do to stay out of the garden.

  She crawled toward him across the bed. She could see flickers of herself as viewed through James’s eyes. He had a difficult time looking away from her body (Perfection, he thought) even though the smears of his blood made his stomach twist. Their combined fluids dripped down the inside of her thigh.

  He didn’t stand when she approached. Elise crawled into his lap and reared over him on her knees, naked and bloody and expressionless.

  “Do you feel better now that you’ve apologized?” Elise asked flatly, catching his chin in a vise grip, forcing him to look up at her. The white stubble on his jaw felt like pinpricks against her skin. “Have you confessed all your sins? Are you prepared to repent to your god?”

  “You’re no god, and this isn’t a confession, Elise.” James sounded so gentle in contrast to the hard edge of her voice. “This is the honesty you’ve always deserved.”

  “Do you think that this will make it all better?”

  He swallowed hard. The knot in his throat bobbed. “No. I don’t.”

  “Good,” Elise said. “Because you haven’t stopped making mistakes.”

  Her pelvis molded to his stomach as she gazed down at him. His shoulders and arms were rigid as her fingertips dragged up the muscle.

  She had decided what she was going to do while he was still deep inside her, filling her body with his seed. Elise kept that decision locked inside of her where he couldn’t see.

  She swept her hair out of the way, over her shoulder, and pressed her lips to his ear.

  “You shouldn’t have fed me,” Elise whispered.

  Her hands locked over his throat.

  James moved almost as quickly as she did. His gloved fingers wrapped around her wrists as she pressed the heels of her palms into his esophagus and forced his back flat to the bed.

  He was strong, but she was stronger now that she was flush with his blood and the fever of sex. She could see through the flesh to the veins within, and with just a little pressure, she compressed them and severed the flow of blood.

  James’s jaw was clenched tight. He stared at her with stoic resolve as he tried to force her arms away. It was a token effort. He had to know that he couldn’t make her release her grip.

  “I want you to know that this isn’t only about what you did to me,” Elise said, pressing him a little harder into the mattress. A red flush climbed his jaw. “This is about what we did to Seth. You and I, we killed him together. We owe the pack a debt now. You keep making things worse for Rylie and it’s up to me to repay what we owe.”

  He reached for her with his mind. Is this the only way?

  “Maybe,” she said.

  The press of his hands on her wrists weakened.

  Even that slight slackening of his grip made fear scythe through her heart. It was the first sign of fading life, this time without the intoxication of his blood and body to distract her. And the idea that she might lose him, even to her own hands, was frightening.

  Elise had killed hundreds—maybe thousands—of demons, humans, and angels before. Many of them had died for crimes much less than those James had committed.

  But she couldn’t kill him.

  She couldn’t blame that weakness on Eve.

  Elise lifted a fraction of an inch. It was enough.

  He took her by the wrists, moved her hands off of his throat. She didn’t fight him this time. Blood roared as circulation returned to his skull.

  James panted. She could taste how sweet the oxygen was to him.

  “Abel is safe,” he said as soon as he caught his breath, struggling to prop himself onto his elbows. “He left with me willingly, Elise. He wants to help me find Nathaniel.”

  The name was like a Taser to the gut. She sucked in a breath. “This isn’t about Nate and you know it.”

  He sat up, hands on her hips to keep her balanced on top of him. “Not just him, no.” A fire sparked in his eyes, flaring between their minds. “I won’t lie to you. I will never lie to you again.”

  It’s too late for that to matter. “I don’t care if Abel thinks he left willingly or not. You coerced him. You always do.”

  “I made promises and he trusted me,” James said. His hands traced down the backs of her shoulders, down her arms, cupped her elbows. Such tenderness when she had just attempted to choke him. He still wasn’t afraid of her.

  It was incredible how much she wanted to forgive him when he spoke like that, touched her like that. It was everything her broken human heart had ever wanted.

  “What if I asked you to leave with me?” Elise asked. “Forget this war. Forget the Origin. Forget demons and angels. Just you and me somewhere—anywhere you want, anywhere we can be left alone. Would you do it?”

  “This war will touch everything.”

  “I have the Palace of Dis. It’s warded. Impenetrable. It could be an island.”

  “Only you would consider Hell a romantic retreat,” James said with a hint of a smile. “I can’t abandon this now—not after everything I’ve done.” She moved to stand, but he held her in place. “Abel saw reason. You can, too. Just think of all the things that I can do if I have this power—think of what we can do. Every mista
ke can be fixed. Every life that we’ve lost can be restored. Not just Seth, but every other innocent. We could redirect the bullet that killed Betty. We could make sure Malcolm wasn’t standing beside you when the Union fired. Aunt Pamela, Lucinde, everyone in Reno that fell to Yatai—”

  Every name drove deep into her like a dagger. Elise covered his mouth with her fingers, not to smother him, but to silence him. “We can’t change the past, James.”

  “But we can,” he whispered with urgency, lips tickling her palm. “We can change it all, save everyone, fix any mistake. We can make the world everything we want.”

  “That’s the problem we’ve always had, Adam,” Elise said, tracing her thumb over his bottom lip. “I never wanted everything. I only ever wanted you.”

  He pulled back. He was staring at her, pale with shock.

  “What?”

  “I wanted to trust you,” she said. “I did trust you. All the power and promises in the universe can’t change who you are and what you did to me.”

  He caught her hand, stopping her from raking her nails through his hair. “What did you just call me, Elise?”

  Elise tried to understand what he was saying and why he looked so stricken, but her mind was as blank as it had been after fighting the basandere. “James,” she said. The name was right on her lips. She couldn’t imagine having said anything else.

  “Adam,” he said. “You called me Adam.”

  Thunder rolled over the temple.

  For a moment, they didn’t move. His hands were locked on hers. She stared at him, numb to the name that had come from her lips.

  The sound of thunder grew. A resounding crack shook the windows and walls. The bed trembled.

  When Elise tried to stand again, James didn’t stop her. He pulled the curtains aside. A sliver of sunlight fell on his face.

  Elise slipped behind him to look over his shoulder, standing in his shadow. Gray fire rolled across the sky. It coiled out of a gash that bisected the clouds all the way to the vanishing point of the horizon. It looked so strange that she felt a moment of total disorientation, like she had to be dreaming, or had gone insane.

  But then she imagined the world flipped upside down and realized that the gray slice looked very much like the fissure in America.

  Heaven had been broken.

  Somehow, she wasn’t surprised. And James didn’t seem to be, either.

  “Well,” he said. “That might explain what happened with the door.”

  “What door?”

  “In Colorado.” James grabbed a spare shirt out of the wreckage of the dresser—he had left clothing for himself, too—and pulled it on, leaving the bottom untucked. He shrugged into the spine scabbard. “It shut after Rylie and Abel entered Heaven, and I wasn’t able to follow. I thought it was a problem with my door. This means it’s a problem with Shamain.”

  His hands froze in the middle of buckling the scabbard’s straps, eyes going distant, as if he had suddenly realized something.

  “What are you thinking?” she asked. She could have pulled it out of his mind, but she was tired of sharing thoughts with James.

  “This suggests an external fissure, much like the one leading into Hell,” he said. “But my door connects internally. It shouldn’t have been affected.”

  “And?”

  “And if there’s been a problem with Shamain’s integrity on both sides, then we might have a much larger problem than we did with the Breaking.” He pulled out his notebook and flipped through the pages.

  He was preparing to abandon her in that damn cage.

  She grabbed his bicep. “Let me out,” Elise said. “Let me fix this.”

  He gazed up at the sky with resignation. “I don’t think anyone can fix this.” His eyes flicked to hers. “And I still can’t let you leave here.” James reached to touch her cheek with his gloved hand. “I’m sorry, Elise. I’ll come back when this is done. We can talk about…everything.”

  “If you leave here without releasing me, then I won’t have anything to say to you,” Elise said.

  His brow creased. “Very well.”

  Maybe she could grab his notebook, find the teleportation spell before he disappeared…

  But James seemed to have predicted that thought. He triggered a page without any warning, without even speaking aloud, and he disappeared.

  Sixteen

  For a few breathless moments, Shamain was the most incredible thing that Rylie had ever seen.

  She had heard stories of what life was like in Heaven. Nash had shared tales of his origins over several nights by bonfires in the sanctuary, before the Breaking, before he had been forced to leave and fight demons on American soil.

  Nash had a way with words, as Rylie guessed anyone who had been alive for approximately eternity would have to be. He had told them of the elaborate mansions and sprawling orchards. He had talked about the spiral streets, the frescoes, the carvings that decorated even the most mundane fixtures.

  “It’s a city of light,” he had said, “of eternal dawn and starlight. It glows with the soul of every angel that has ever been born.”

  Rylie had struggled to imagine that. Now she didn’t need to.

  Shamain was everything he had said and more.

  “Oh, wow,” Rylie whispered. She and Abel had stepped through the door in Boulder to find themselves on the highest level of an open-walled structure with white columns. Gauzy white curtains fluttered in a soft breeze. The bejeweled sky was carpeted by endless stars.

  There were canals—actual canals, just like in Venice, which Rylie had visited with her parents once on summer vacation. Every building looked like a sculptor’s artistic masterpiece. Even the tiles on the nearest roof had been imprinted with the elaborate carving of vines and leaves.

  And the smells. It was all citrus and lavender and salt water—and, weirdly, buttered popcorn.

  If only Summer could have seen this. She would have loved it.

  Rylie turned to smile at Abel, but he wasn’t smiling back. He glared around them, hands tight on the strap of the backpack, knuckles gray.

  It reminded her of why they had come. That as soon as James joined them, they were going to have to find Eve’s temple so that they could try to unlock one more door to Eden. Which meant that Abel was about to spill blood for the same cause that had killed Seth.

  The words she had been about to say died on her tongue. Grief crushed her heart.

  “It’s beautiful,” she said weakly, if only because she needed to say something to break the painful silence.

  That was when the city went dark.

  It began toward the center of the city, where the glow had been brightest. Then the street around it darkened too, and it spread from street to street like a black hole was consuming Shamain one block at a time. The sapphire flows of the canals slowed.

  Rylie gripped one of the pale columns as the city below them disappeared. It felt like the ground was vanishing. Like they were going to be consumed.

  “What’s happening? Is this normal?” she asked.

  Abel didn’t have a response, but she knew it wasn’t normal at all.

  Something had gone wrong.

  Rylie turned to go back through the gate the way that they had come, but it had blacked out, too. The door to Earth was gone.

  And James hadn’t joined them.

  Trepidation spiked and exploded into panic. They were in an unfamiliar city—not just foreign, but in an entirely different dimension—without the man that had planned to guide them, and it looked like the entire place had just been infected with some shadowy disease.

  The darkness crawled toward them. It was a big city, but not that big. It wouldn’t be long before the building they had landed in went dark, too.

  A rumble shook the floor, like there had been an explosion at the epicenter of the shadow and just managed to reach them. It groaned like thunder.

  “Shit,” Abel said with gusto.

  “What do we do?” Rylie asked, keeping a
hand on the pillar, nails digging into the stone. It was the only thing holding her up now.

  “We’re gonna do what we came to do.” He hefted the bag. “We’re going to get this to Eve’s temple.”

  “Just like that? Stick to the plan?” She felt like she was on the brink of hysterics. She knew that the reaction was insane, but she couldn’t stop. She couldn’t breathe.

  “Faulkner’s gonna get here,” Abel said. “And when he does, no matter what’s going on down there, he’s gonna open this door. I don’t care if the angels have all dropped dead. We’re getting Seth back.”

  Until that moment, Rylie had been intending to ruin those plans—to fight back against James and maybe even Abel, if that was what it would take to stop this hunt for Eden and save her mate’s life. But now that was unthinkable. They had to survive.

  And for now, that meant getting to Eve’s temple, where James would expect to find them.

  Wind blew over them. It was colder than it should have been, with an icy bite that penetrated her sweater.

  The darkness fell over them.

  It wasn’t as absolute as it initially seemed. She had pretty good night vision as a werewolf; it had only been the contrast of the glowing pillars around them that had made everything else seem so dark. Rylie could still make out Abel’s face. She could see the shapes of the buildings below them.

  The shadow wasn’t a demon like Elise. If it had been, she wouldn’t have been able to see anything, much less breathe.

  Abel stepped up to the edge of the pillars.

  “Eve’s temple,” he said, pointing across the city at the silhouette of a giant tree that towered over the other buildings. It had to be at least ten miles away. For a werewolf on Earth, that wasn’t far at all. For a pair of werewolves in Heaven, it might as well have been across a vast ocean. “Ready to go?”

  “No,” Rylie said.

  Abel took her hand. “Yeah,” he said, “I know.”

  They jumped down together.

  It was sickeningly counterintuitive to run toward the depths of the darkness rather than away. Even Rylie’s wolf, usually a calm hunter, struggled against it. She could feel cobblestone under her paws and make out the shapes of gray buildings around them, yet she still felt like she was being sucked into a black hole.