Caged in Bone (The Ascension Series) Read online

  In a way, he kind of looked like Nash. Smelled a little like him too. That weird, unearthly scent of forest fires hung around both of them, even when neither had been anywhere near anything burning.

  Abel knew instantly what this man wanted, and a hard knot of dread clenched in his throat. A sense of inevitability.

  James Faulkner had come for Abel.

  Two

  When Michael awoke naturally rather than by the chime of the bells, he immediately knew something was wrong.

  Eve’s temple contained a clock that could be heard from anywhere in Shamain, the ethereal metropolis. It ran on the vibrations of ancient, flawless crystals that would never skip the smallest fraction of a second, and it hadn’t required adjustment—not once—since the foundation of the city.

  He dropped from his roost in downtown Shamain and landed on a bridge arching over the canal. There was already another angel waiting there: Azrael, the bookkeeper that worked in the building across the street from Michael. Azrael was a severe man who usually looked like he had been carved from particularly emotionless marble. Today, though, there was the faint crease of a line between his eyebrows.

  “The clock,” Michael said, lifting his eyes to the temple on the hill where the Tree had once been rooted. The temple was a tall column of white stone with its highest corridors built in the shape of stylized branches.

  “The clock,” Azrael agreed.

  They whipped their wings wide and lifted into the air. The city below glowed with cool blue light—illumination that was partially fueled by its few remaining inhabitants, and gradually dimming as the centuries passed. No new angels had been born since Eve’s death, and many others had moved to Earth or other ethereal dimensions rather than live on as curators of a dead city.

  Even so, Michael and Azrael weren’t the only angels to arrive at the base of Eve’s temple. Several of their brethren congregated on the perfectly maintained lawn, its emerald grass soft and moist under their feet.

  “What’s happened here?” asked Moroni when Michael landed.

  “Someone must have forgotten to wind the clock,” Michael said, knowing that it wasn’t possible even as he spoke the words. He was one of two angels that tended the temple district and the clock within Eve’s memorial. He had never forgotten to wind it. Raqib wouldn’t have, either.

  The answer didn’t seem to satisfy anyone, but nobody moved to enter the temple and find out the truth.

  Michael squared his shoulders. It was his clock to maintain; having it fail to chime meant that it was his duty to investigate as well.

  The angels stood aside as Michael climbed the stairs, legs leaden with dread. He approached a smooth, blank section of the temple wall and a golden door appeared at his touch. It was bordered on either side by stained glass windows that seemed so much darker than usual, as if there were curtains on the opposite side—which there were not.

  Michael pushed the door open.

  It was impossibly dark inside the temple considering that everything in Heaven glowed. There shouldn’t have been a single shadow in all of Shamain. Yet he could barely see a few feet beyond the threshold.

  He did, however, see a single foot, a bare ankle, and the curve of a woman’s calf in a puddle of silvery angel blood. There was a scrap of peach-colored cloth fluttering at her knee. Tattered feathers clung to the blood.

  Michael’s heart contracted.

  He stepped outside and pulled the door shut, heart hammering. The others had questioning looks on their faces. None seemed overly concerned. None had seen what Michael had seen.

  He was calm as he told Moroni, “Summon Nashriel.”

  Angels didn’t love each other like humans did. Love was weak. Friendship was ridiculous. They did, however, form alliances, and the strongest alliance was marriage. It was rare between angels, but not unheard of. There were benefits to joining lives in holy matrimony before the eyes of Adam and Eve, the ones who had made them. It was prestigious. It meant property and special responsibilities in the Heavenly court.

  When Leliel had suggested marriage to Nash during the First War, he had agreed. And at the time, if anyone had asked Nash Adamson if he loved Leliel, he would have said yes. He might have even meant it. He and Leliel were an excellent partnership in court. They advocated the same causes, held a large manor in the foothills, enjoyed one another’s company.

  Was that not love? The bond of companionship?

  That was before Leliel learned that Nash had remained loyal to Adam in the war, before she had betrayed and imprisoned him in the Haven—and many years before Summer.

  Still, what he had shared with his ex-wife was different from what he had shared with other angels.

  He was not prepared to see her like this.

  Leliel looked like she had been forced to the ground rather than having fallen. One arm was bent backward. Her chin was twisted toward the opposite shoulder, leaving her chestnut hair to veil her face and bare her throat.

  Her throat. Lord, her throat.

  A ring of blood marked the side of her neck, shimmering with the silvery light that all angel blood did, though it seemed somewhat dulled. The puddle around her was smeared. It looked like someone had been wiping the blood with their fingers.

  Or licking it.

  Nash tugged on the lapels of his suit to flatten them over his chest, loosening the top button of his shirt. The temperature in Heaven was always like that of a warm seaside day, moist and pleasant, but he suddenly felt choked by his shirt.

  This was no more violent or ghastly than anything he had seen while fighting demons along the fissure. In fact, he had left behind a far bloodier battle against brutes in the American Midwest to respond to Moroni’s summons. But this was so much more personal than a battle among cornfields. This was in their home.

  “Who found her?” Nash asked.

  It was Michael who spoke. “I did. The clock didn’t chime at seven this morning. When I came to investigate why…” The tips of his wings twitched in a gesture similar to a shrug.

  “Did the clock chime six?”

  “I was asleep. I don’t know.”

  Nash stepped back and lifted his eyes to the clock. He could see the rear of its face with starlight shining through. The hands pointed at the four thirty position.

  There were no services in Eve’s temple until the eleventh hour, and the attendants didn’t arrive until eight to maintain the murals and oil the gears. The building would have been empty during her assault. No witnesses. No suspects.

  He hiked up the legs of his slacks and kneeled beside her, careful not to touch any of her blood. It filled the tiniest cracks in the marble underneath her and blackened the white stone.

  “Why call for me?” Nash asked, gaze fixed upon Leliel’s slack face. He had kissed her lips many times before—the chaste, passionless kisses shared by angels. The sight of those lips turned bloodless blue nauseated him. “Because of our former union?”

  Michael shifted uncomfortably beyond the edge of the blood. Another angel entered the archway behind him, carrying cleaning equipment that looked out of place, too modern against the backdrop of the hallowed temple. “Because you’re the only one who seems prepared,” he said in a whisper.

  Nash suppressed a shudder. “Who else knows what’s happened?”

  “Only you and Raqib,” Michael said. “We’ve been discreet.”

  Nash touched Leliel’s throat. He almost startled when he felt the slow throb of a fading pulse.

  She was alive.

  “Don’t be discreet, Michael,” Nash said, gathering Leliel into his arms, unconcerned by the blood that she smeared over the breast of his shirt. “Spread it far and wide. Tell them all. Everyone needs to know so that they can prepare too.”

  Michael took a quick step back as Nash carried Leliel for the door. “Tell them what?”

  Nash hesitated on the threshold, gazing down at the wound on Leliel’s neck. It was easier to see the teeth marks with her head tipped back.
r />   “Shamain has been invaded,” Nash said.

  There was something of Eve’s features in Leliel’s face. Nash had always thought that Leliel had inherited more from their mother than most of Eve’s offspring. Their mother had taken particular pride in crafting her first daughter.

  Unconscious in bed, Leliel looked most like Eve had in her funeral. Nash still remembered viewing Eve’s body in her home, which later became the temple, and how terrible the cries of the angels had been at the sight of their dead mother.

  Nash looked up to see that several angels had followed him into Leliel’s bedroom. Michael and Azrael and Raqib milled around the door with stricken expressions, as if reliving the same memory that Nash was.

  “What are you doing?” he asked. It came out much harsher than he intended. “What if her assailant is still in the city? Form search parties.” They didn’t immediately move, and Nash barked, “You heard me.”

  They left, and Nash was alone with Leliel in her bedroom. It had once been their bedroom, before the trial had stripped him of his titles, property, and marriage. She had changed much in the centuries that had passed. All of the furniture had been replaced. She had also had several new portraits commissioned from master artists on the walls, and they were only portraits of Leliel now. The ones that had included Nash were long gone.

  Being in that room was a strange trip through time, and an entirely unwelcome one. He would have preferred to be back on the battlefront.

  Nash washed the blood from Leliel’s wounds, found the sheets where she had always kept them, and tidied the bed. Once that was done, there was nothing he could do but wait to see if Leliel would awaken, or if the city would soon dim with her death.

  They’d had healers in the last war, but the art of magecraft was long gone. Their documentation had burned in Eden’s library—as great a tragedy as the burning of the Tree itself. Once the master mages were killed in the battle with Yatai, there had been no hope of recovering them.

  Leliel’s life was out of his hands.

  “Teeth,” he mused, sitting on the bed beside her. She had been bitten on the neck. That wasn’t the preferred method of killing of any demon he knew.

  His fingers tracing along the ragged edge of the wound made Leliel stir. Her eyelids fluttered, opened to slits. She couldn’t seem to focus on him.

  “Nashriel,” she said.

  “I’m here. What happened to you?” It seemed rude to jump to the questions, but she was still pale, barely moving; if she were to die, he needed the truth first.

  Leliel struggled to swallow. Her breaths were shallow and raspy. “This is how history is made,” she whispered. “Not in epic battles sweeping across the planes of Hell, not in petty struggles at gas stations on Earth, not playing a game of tug-of-war over mortal lives.”

  His alarm grew. “What are you talking about?”

  “Life is cheap. Humans birth and die in the barest of blinks, and demons are no better. Battles on Earth are meaningless.”

  Nash had seen many of those battles firsthand while Leliel legislated from the comfortable safety of Shamain. Hot anger writhed like serpents in his belly. “What have you done?”

  She continued to speak, quieter than before, as if she were no longer speaking to him but only muttering to herself. He had to lean close to hear. “War is a game of minds played out in the meeting of leaders. Quiet back-room deals, oaths and allegiances, bribery.” Her eyes were closed now. She swallowed again.

  She was silent for so long that Nash feared that he had lost her. He seized her wrist. “Leliel. Speak to me.”

  “Everyone wants something,” Leliel finally said. “Anyone can be bought.” Her free hand lifted. She touched a finger to her forehead. “Look.”

  Her features were unblemished from the battle. She wasn’t gesturing to a wound.

  She was inviting him to look within her mind.

  Nash’s lip curled. Angels seldom got physically intimate with each other; a sharing of minds was considered to be far more appropriate for a married couple than sex. He had shared minds with Leliel many, many years in the past. He had no urge to do it again—to be that intimate with the woman who had accused him of sedition.

  He rubbed his palms down the front of his slacks and realized that they were spotted with her blood. He grimaced.

  She was in no position to speak what he needed to know.

  “Very well,” Nash said. “Just once more.” Summer would understand.

  He closed his eyes and opened his mind. Leliel’s thoughts were a dim, flickering light in the darkness, with none of the usual radiance that came from the mind of an angel.

  Nash reached for her mind and sank deep inside.

  She showed him the city from above.

  Leliel stood in front of a window, gazing through it to Shamain below. She felt swells of pride at the sight of it, knowing that she was all that stood between this beautiful land and utter, permanent darkness.

  This was a memory, not a fantasy. Nash understood intuitively that he was seeing something that Leliel had done earlier that morning. He was lodged deep in her mind, sensing what she sensed, thinking what she thought.

  Leliel stood in one of the highest branches of the temple. It was nothing but a delicate passage with a single room at the end, like an apple dangling from the tip of a twig. The gemstones set into the elaborate woodwork of the windows glowed with internal light, bathing Leliel’s flesh in tones of blue and gold.

  There was moisture beading the other side of the window. Though there were no clouds, a misty drizzle was falling on Shamain. It made a hazy gold halo over the tops of the buildings, which were roofed with white tile. On the opposite hill she could see the coliseum where the ethereal coalition met while angels moved through the streets far below. They were calm, unaware that Leliel was about to save all of their lives.

  How? Nash wondered. He had heard of no impending battles or negotiations.

  But Leliel was confident that the war was approaching its end.

  “Where are you?” Leliel murmured. Her breath fogged the window and blurred her view of the canals.

  For a moment Nash thought that she was addressing him, but Leliel’s memory was unaware of its passenger. She was speaking to someone else that hadn’t yet arrived.

  A whisper sighed through the room, and Leliel turned to see if someone had joined her. But even though she thought that she had heard cloth slithering across the floor, she was alone. All that she found behind her was a mural of Eve in her early days: the most beautiful of all angels, with her arms extended in the eternal offer of an embrace. Sapphire blue curtains framed her, held back by gold cord.

  Eve’s pale eyes were knowing, as if she realized what Leliel was doing and was saddened.

  Leliel decided that her perception was nothing more than a sentimental hallucination. She tugged the knot on the cord and let the curtains fall closed over Eve, shielding her painted face.

  She lifted her dress at the knees and moved into the hallway. Long windows allowed the starlight to splash on the floor as she searched for the person she expected to meet.

  As she walked, she extinguished the last of the lamps in the temple and drew more curtains, allowing relative darkness to fall over the hallway—as dark as anything could ever become in Heaven. The twilit blue that remained was dim enough that Leliel needed to allow her eyes to adjust to it.

  The center floors of Eve’s temple were occupied by the heart of a massive clock. Its gears grinded softly against each other, metal rubbing on metal as a pendulum kept the seconds. Each gear was as tall as Leliel when her wings were lifted, and she could feel the vibrations in her hollow bones.

  She rested her hands on the railing and leaned over to look down through the rotating gears.

  There was someone standing in the center of the floor below.

  This individual did not glow with the light of angels. In fact, he or she seemed to suck the light out of the temple, darkening the bottom floor as though it
were filled with a black fog. Nash felt sick to see it.

  That thing, whatever it was, did not belong in Shamain.

  “Up here,” Leliel called softly, as though afraid someone would hear.

  The darkness on the first floor vanished. She heard slithering behind her.

  Leliel spun to find that the creature had reappeared at her back. An uncomfortable chill sank over her flesh. Ordinarily, demons shouldn’t have been able to phase through the glow of the ethereal city. But the curtained windows and extinguished lamps were enough to allow the demon to jump floors as easily as she would have on Earth.

  This woman was of average height and unremarkable in appearance, interchangeable with any number of demons with her black hair and pallid flesh. She wore a leather bustier that was the ruddy color of an Irishman’s cheeks. Her head lolled to the side as though her neck were broken. Her hair fell over her eyes, obscuring them.

  For an instant, Leliel believed that it was the current ruler of the Palace of Dis: Elise Kavanagh, murderer of Adam. But this was not the Godslayer. There was nothing human in this creature, breasts and hips and pouting red lips aside.

  This was Atropos, a megaira. Leliel had met her once before when dealing with Belphegor. He had at least two of these…things.

  The knowledge that Leliel had seen Belphegor recently came as a shock to Nash, though no more shocking than the realization that she had orchestrated this meeting. She had invited a demon into Shamain deliberately. She had darkened the temple to make it hospitable. And she must have told Atropos how to get in.

  Leliel was speaking. “Did Belphegor send you as liaison?”

  Atropos didn’t reply.

  “I wanted to talk to your master and your master alone,” Leliel said. “I won’t settle for a liaison. Return to him and tell him this.”

  Atropos didn’t move except to twitch. This twitch rippled through all of the frozen muscles, making her flesh shiver and her lips tremble.