Caged in Bone (The Ascension Series) Read online

  Trevin snapped to attention, shoulders bowed and gaze lowered. The submissive posture came to him instinctively. His inner wolf knew how not to get his ass kicked when the most dominant male in the pack came around smelling like that.

  Crystal, on the other hand, gave Abel a totally insolent look. She had never quite forgiven Abel for chasing after Rylie’s affections when Crystal had made it clear that she didn’t need to be chased. “Tell this douche that I’m entitled to at least half the closet,” she said. “You’re an Alpha. He has to do whatever you say.”

  Abel dropped the canvas on her box and pretended that he hadn’t heard her. “Set up the canopy for dinner.”

  She looked affronted by the order, but Trevin cut her off. “You got it, boss,” Trevin said.

  The Alpha was already gone, trudging away through the snow. Trevin turned to watch him go.

  As soon as Abel was out of eyesight, Crystal mimicked his growl. “Set up the canopy for dinner, obedient slave,” she said in an exaggerated baritone. “You set up the canvas, douchebag.”

  Trevin snorted. “Careful. That’s mutiny.”

  “Can’t be mutinous, we’re not pirates,” she snapped back instantly. Just like that, another fight.

  Trevin was ready for it. “They can still keelhaul you.”

  “Yeah? On what ship?”

  “On their razor-sharp silver Alpha claws,” he said, lifting his hands with his fingers curled into mock-paws.

  “Because that would totally make me respect his authority. Being a douchebag isn’t making people obey you? Double down on the douchebaggery! That’ll show ‘em.”

  Trevin opened his mouth to shoot a retort back at her, but then a piece of fluttering paper caught his eye. There was a note sticking out of the canvas. He grabbed it to find that it was addressed to Abel in Rylie’s handwriting. It was easy to identify her girly cursive. He had seen it enough on the cooking and cleaning schedules.

  “Uh oh,” Crystal said, plucking it out of his hand. “Looks like Rylie slipped Abel a present and he didn’t notice. Wanna bet it’s a sexy note? Ever wonder what an Alpha’s dirty talk is like?”

  He ripped it out of her hand again. “Don’t read that.”

  “Why not? It’s probably super filthy. ‘Oh baby, I can’t wait until you knot your giant wolf dong inside of me tonight.’”

  “You’re sick, Crystal.”

  “Come on, just take a look,” she said. “Nobody needs to know.”

  She jumped at him, but Trevin lifted his arm up high, holding the note out of her reach. “If you’re not going to set up the canopy, then find someone else to do it,” he said. “Before Abel realizes that we’re playing hot potato with the task he assigned to us.” He waved the note. “I’ll catch up with Abel.”

  Crystal thrust her middle finger at him. “Teachers’ pet.”

  “I’m going to take that as a promise,” he said, waggling his eyebrows at the obscene gesture.

  “In your dreams.”

  Trevin laughed, broke into a jog, and followed Abel’s footprints into the trees.

  He warmed up as he got moving, and the snow fell faster as he climbed into the higher elevations without pausing. That was something else that he enjoyed about having been bitten by a werewolf: the way he could run for days on end without his muscles tiring. He had been a teenager when he was bitten and on his college track team, so he had never been in bad shape. But a wolf’s stamina was far better than any human distance runner’s.

  The snow fell faster, softening Abel’s footsteps into shallow divots. Trevin sniffed the air. Abel’s visible trail was obscured, but his scent was strong as ever and easier to follow. Those stress hormones lit up the evening like blazing red alarms.

  He put on a burst of speed, eyes wide for any sight of the Alpha. Trevin had to be catching up to him. He’d left just a few seconds after Abel had.

  But even as the scent trail grew stronger, he still didn’t reach Abel. Not until he approached the top of the mountain, where the snow was almost knee-deep.

  Trevin glimpsed Abel up by the rocks and slowed. Abel was pacing along the fence that marked the edge of the wards. His face was twisted into a scowl, and that look made Trevin dart behind a tree instead of approaching.

  He knew that he should just call out and let Abel know that he was there. But the Alpha didn’t look like he was in the mood to find out that Trevin had a love letter for him.

  “Just do it,” he whispered under his breath. Abel wasn’t exactly friendly, but he was a good guy. He wouldn’t take his mood out on Trevin.

  Probably.

  Trevin was still deliberating with himself when he heard a loud snap. He leaned around the tree to see that Abel was holding one of the fence posts in his hands. He had wrenched it clean out of the ground, concrete pier and all, snow and dirt clinging to its base. He tossed it aside.

  The Alpha dropped to his knees and began to dig. It only took a minute for him to come up with something else—a piece of quartz crystal the size of his fist.

  All thoughts of approaching Abel fled from Trevin’s mind. He was transfixed by the way the stone gleamed in the dull gray light. Bringing it into the air filled his nose with the faint scent of herbs and essential oils.

  The smell brought to mind a memory of a witch that had visited the sanctuary earlier that year: Stephanie Whyte, the doctor with the strawberry-blond hair. She had received a shipment of crystals like that from her coven in California.

  That crystal was one of the things that she had used to protect the sanctuary with wards. It was magicked.

  Abel smashed it against a rock. It gave an audible crack and split into two pieces.

  Trevin bit back a gasp.

  Just as casually as he had broken it, Abel reburied one half, then tossed the other aside. He put the fence post back in its hole and kicked snow around the edges to help conceal the fact that it had been disturbed before taking off down the mountain.

  Trevin stared at the note crumpled in his hand.

  There had to be a good reason for breaking the crystal. Maybe he was fixing something. Trevin didn’t know enough about magic to guess.

  It had to be pack business. Something that Abel and Rylie had agreed on without talking to the rest of the pack.

  The Alpha wouldn’t deliberately weaken the wards protecting all of them…would he?

  Later that night, Abel stood in the mausoleum where his brother had been interned. He braced his hands on the edge of the table and gazed into Seth’s immobile face.

  It was warmer in the mausoleum than some of the cottages, but Abel shivered deep in his bones. The candles flickered in the breeze. There had always been a few candles around Seth, like it was a religious monument. He’d avoided making this pilgrimage for a while. He didn’t want to run into anyone worshiping his perfect dead brother. Abram was constantly visiting Seth, just like he’d constantly visited Seth during life. The two of them had been tight, real tight, bonding over their kopis instincts and being boring and whatever else demon hunters liked to talk about.

  But Abram was a quiet, kind of morose guy. He probably got off on visiting with Seth’s dead body and being miserable about it. Abel wasn’t like that. He didn’t want to dwell in his pain.

  He wanted to forget that Seth had gone and died on him.

  The bastard.

  Abram’s refusal from that morning rankled. Abel wondered what he had been doing in the mausoleum. Was he the one that had replaced the burned-out candles with new tapers? Had he been the one to bring up a park bench so that folks could sit in quiet, angsty misery with the corpse for hours on end? Or had he just gone to hide where he knew Abel wouldn’t follow?

  He didn’t know Abram well enough to guess at his motives. But it all came down to one simple fact: Even as a corpse, Seth was better than Abel.

  That was the most convincing reason to avoid the mausoleum. But even though Abel had been avoiding Seth, he needed to take one more look. It was too easy to remember Seth th
e way he had been when he was alive. Kind of annoying. Way too smart for his own good. Clever. Funny.

  Abel needed to see what he had become to make sure that he remembered how awful Seth’s death had been.

  So here was his brother. A stone corpse that looked just as horrified now as he had been in the instant of death. The guy that Abram would rather spend time with than his own father.

  “You’re a punk ass bitch,” Abel told Seth. “Always will be. Doesn’t matter how dead you are.”

  He thought about saying something else. If he’d thought to say goodbye to his brother instead of harassing him the last time they talked, what would he have said? It probably would have been something insulting, maybe, “Back off my mate and kids, I’m worth their attention too.” Nothing he’d be proud of saying goodbye with.

  Anyway, this wasn’t a goodbye. Not really.

  “You better be fucking grateful,” Abel said, and then he turned from Seth’s body and stepped outside.

  It was a blizzard outside, though the wind wasn’t blowing. Visibility was terrible beyond the edge of the river. The trees and air and clouds were a uniform shade of gray. But even though it was miserable out, the pack was having dinner down at the bottom of the valley. He couldn’t see them, but he could hear the laughter and smell the food Rylie had helped cook.

  Abel hiked down into the valley, taking a trail that he had shoveled early that morning. The snow was already several inches deep again—thinner under the trees, but with drifts that covered his ankles. There was no way to tell that he had worked on it at all.

  The next morning someone would have to shovel it again, and probably the morning after that.

  It wouldn’t be Abel’s problem.

  The glow of warm orange light emerged from the gray haze. Abel stood outside the canopy Trevin had assembled. Someone had set up heaters to keep the pack warm as they ate, and it cast a warm red glow on the revelry.

  There were humans among the werewolves—former slaves that had become friends with members of the pack, or in a couple of cases, significant others. There was a woman on Paetrick’s lap that still smelled faintly of brimstone. It took weeks to wash out of their hair, if they had any.

  Rylie wasn’t among them. Abel would have been able to pick out her scent from the others’ if she had been there. It didn’t seem like she had ever been at dinner.

  He didn’t care about everyone else. He wasn’t going to waste his last hours with people who barely acknowledged his existence, much less as their Alpha. People who, like Abram, still thought that Seth had always been in charge and wished that he would come back.

  Instead, he followed Rylie’s scent toward their cottage. The trail was fading. She’d been there for at least an hour now.

  He found a note stuffed in the doorjamb. Abel removed it. It was one of the sheets of notebook paper from the kitchens, the kind that Summer used to track inventory, folded into thirds and taped shut at the bottom. His name was written on the front in Rylie’s handwriting.

  He opened it. “I’m grateful for you.” That was all it said.

  Abel stepped back to look at the windows. There was a faint light coming from the bathroom, and he knew that she was waiting for him.

  His pulse accelerated. Hot blood coursed through him.

  He stepped into the cottage.

  Rylie was standing in the doorway of the bathroom wearing a robe and fidgeting with the tie. Her hair was loose around her shoulders. Her smile was nervous. If she smelled the mausoleum’s incense on Abel, she didn’t show it.

  Abel leaned around to look over her shoulder. The bathrooms of the cottages were ridiculously tiny, so it had taken a lot of clever placement to fit two-dozen tapers in the room. It lit everything up with a pinkish-orange hue, haloing Rylie with warm light. The tub steamed with hot water.

  The sight of it was so far from the frigid memorial to Seth above the icy cliff that he almost didn’t know what to make of it. His hands stung as the warmth crept into him, shifting his body temperature into high gear.

  “Shower time?” she asked brightly, and he turned his attention back to her.

  The bathrobe was sheer. It shouldn’t have taken Abel so long to realize that he could see every one of Rylie’s curves through it. The slope of her waist, the small swells of her breasts, the gap between her thighs. He was pretty sure he had never seen her wear that robe before. He would have remembered it.

  Rylie was trying to seduce him. She was actually trying to seduce him.

  Being with her was usually like their runs in the forest on the full moons—like she was always just out of reach, no more than a tantalizing flash of gold through the trees, sometimes physically there but seldom emotionally present. Always a hunt. She had never come to him like this before, reaching out to him, actually trying to be sexy. She was always sexy, whether or not she knew it, but it was the kind of unthinking, subtle sensuality that came to a woman naturally, in her movement and scent and the way she bit her lip, and this was deliberate, even though Rylie always had sex with the lights off and didn’t own a scrap of lingerie, and his brain was overloading with the newness and shock of it all.

  It filled him with a strange, confused feeling that he didn’t know how to identify. It was somewhere between possessive heat and panic, all tangled up in fear and regret and self-loathing at what he knew would have to come afterward.

  Say something good, he thought. For the love of God, say the right thing.

  “That,” he said, “is a bath, not a shower. You promised me a shower.”

  Her whole body seemed to cringe at the criticism. Her white-knuckled grip on the robe tie trembled. “Sorry. It’s dumb. I’ll put out the candles.”

  Fuck. That was not good.

  He couldn’t say or do anything right. Still never as good as Seth. Not with their kids, not with the pack, not with Rylie.

  “No, I didn’t mean—fuck it, Rylie, shut your mouth,” Abel said, and then he was kissing her, trying to show her what he meant with his tongue and fingers instead of the goddamn words that always failed him.

  She was so soft and warm. She tasted like the forest, and like Rylie, the woman that he had always wanted to own yet never could reach.

  And tonight, she had come to him.

  He thought back to the note: “I’m grateful for you.” And he wanted to tell her the same thing. He was so fucking grateful that she ever wanted him at all, even when he was wrong and messed up in every way. But it seemed impossible and pointless to try to speak when he was pulling off the robe, shoving her into the bathroom, pushing her up against the wall.

  Rylie didn’t need words, either. She repeated the message from her note with the way she touched him. She showed him that she didn’t see any of the scars—not the twisted flesh crawling down his jaw and not the ones on the inside that made him such an awful Alpha. Her touch was pure love. He didn’t deserve it, but he took it, just like he always had. Even when it had belonged to his brother instead.

  Not thinking about Seth. Not thinking about tomorrow. Do the right thing for once.

  He devoured her gasps, pushed himself between her legs. He held her so tightly that his hands left imprints on her skin. The candles were so close that he could feel the searing heat on his shoulder.

  Rylie pulled herself against him hard, her need as urgent as his.

  Don’t think about tomorrow.

  Abel surrendered to instinct and didn’t think at all.

  Abel had no idea how long he rested beside Rylie and watched the pattern of moonlight on her skin, the shape of branches and pine needles darkening her flat stomach. He knew that the shadow of the curtain had moved from her collarbone down to her elbow, and then vanished. The moon was moving. Hiding behind the clouds. Time was passing, no matter how much he wanted it to stop and give him the rest of eternity in bed beside his mate.

  She was sleeping deep. Her chest rose and fell with even breaths. He brushed his fingers over the fine blond hairs on her stomach as it m
oved, tracing the lines of shadows on the hollows of her ribs.

  He could have stayed there forever with her, alone in the cottage, just the two of them.

  But they weren’t alone, not really. The ghost of his brother loomed above that damn cliff. Dead, but still watchful.

  When he finally, reluctantly checked the clock, it was midnight. The final day was over.

  Abel kissed Rylie on the shoulder. She didn’t stir.

  He got out of bed, got dressed, and went for a walk.

  Abel stood at the entrance of the greenhouses with his thumbs hooked in his pockets, gazing down at the sanctuary under heavy snowfall. The canopy had been disassembled, dinner cleared out. A couple of werewolves were still wandering around, laughing loudly, voices echoing off the trees. They were probably drinking. It was the only thing to do in the sanctuary on a Friday night, especially since they couldn’t go visit other towns to party anymore.

  It didn’t take long for the drinking werewolves to disappear into their homes. The lights in the cottages blinked out one by one, darkening the snow. In a few long minutes, everything was silent and peaceful, like a fucking Christmas card.

  He guessed Rylie would think it looked pretty. To him, it looked an awful lot like a cemetery, even if it only had one grave in it.

  He’d had a good day in that cemetery. As good a day as he could manage, ongoing fuckups with Abram aside. He had gotten down and did the hard work an Alpha didn’t have to do. He had spent time with Rylie. And that was about all the goodness a man like him could hope for.

  Every second of it had hurt.

  “Hello, Abel.”

  A man was suddenly standing beyond the edge of the greenhouses. The fact that he had gotten so close without alerting Abel’s werewolf senses made the back of his neck prickle.

  They were almost at eye-level with each other, though Abel’s boots gave him an inch of height advantage. This other man was olive-skinned and dark-haired with pale blue eyes that seemed to glow in the darkness. He wore a cable knit sweater and hiking boots that were damp with melting snow, which meant that he had walked into the sanctuary from Northgate, entering through the hole in the wards.