Caged in Bone (The Ascension Series) (13 page)

Rylie went to do as she was told, and Elise slammed the camper shell shut again. She watched Rylie walk toward the road. She was so tiny among the vastness of the farms, a pinpoint of white against the silhouetted silo. Hard to believe someone so young could be so deadly, yet still fail to miss important details.

There hadn’t been anything rotten under the camper shell.

The windshield was just as opaque with ash as everything else at the gas station, so Elise couldn’t see inside. When she wiped some of it off with her sleeve, she found that the inside was covered in condensation.

Elise tested the handle on the passenger’s door. It was unlocked.

With a final glance at Rylie to make sure she wasn’t paying attention, Elise opened the door.

She had found the gas station’s greedy owners.

They had been an overweight couple, possibly middle-aged, though it was hard to tell underneath the bloat of rot. The man was slumped over the steering wheel. His stomach had split open, and there was something writhing inside the glistening flesh. His wife was holding another one of those red canisters in her lap.

There were tiny bullet holes on the driver’s window that Elise hadn’t seen from this side. The owners had paid for their greed.

Elise stared at the open wound on the man’s belly. The blood was cold. The meat was being devoured.

She could clearly imagine reaching over and taking a bite of the ragged flesh. Sinking her teeth into the spongy fat. Swallowing down the adipose tissue, maggots and all.

“Ready to go,” Rylie called.

Elise slammed the door shut and pressed her back to it, staring up at the cloudy sky.

What the fuck?

She had deliberately eaten a cadaver once. Just once. And she had accidentally eaten the bodies of the dead humans by the fissure earlier that night, but only because it was too difficult not to. But it had made her feel sick every time, like she was poisoning herself.

She had never
craved
it before.

Rylie waved the red canister at her. Even in the darkness, her pale hair was so bright. “Hey! Did you hear me? I’m all done.”

Elise phased to her side, as far from the pickup as she could get without leaving the Alpha behind.

“Are we full?” she asked.

Rylie blinked and stepped back, startled by the sudden movement. “Yeah, to the top.”

“Good.” Elise’s mouth felt sticky with saliva. She swallowed hard. “Thanks.”

“Maybe we should take the pickup instead,” Rylie suggested. “We could carry more supplies that way, and I bet we could still fit the motorcycle in the back for later use.”

Elise pushed her sleeve up her wrist and activated the tracking spell again. Her stomach lurched with vertigo and she tasted blood on the back of her tongue.

A red light darted toward the west.

“Forget the pickup,” Elise said. “Let’s go.”

They came upon
the first abandoned city shortly before dawn.

With no speed limits, no traffic, and no police, Elise and Rylie tore through the night as if they were flying above the pavement. Rural roads became an interstate highway. Highways became freeways. And then the farms became homes.

The fringes of suburbia were unsettlingly quiet in the glow of false dawn. There were no engines, no commuters lined up outside coffee shops. The snow was three inches deep without a single tire tread or footprint.

Elise felt the weight of the light on the back of her neck. They were too far from the fissure for the ash layer to protect her from the sun, and she didn’t trust the rising wind; it would blow away the fog before midmorning. Elise wasn’t going to risk pressing on. Even though James had a strong head start, she would only delay the hunt further if she broke herself beyond the ability to reform.

“We’ll spend the day here,” she shouted over the sound of the engine.

“Here?” Rylie didn’t sound happy about it, but there was no way for her to stop Elise as they slipped off a freeway exit.

The motorcycle’s grumbles echoed off of the towers downtown. The glass-walled offices reflected their faces back at them as they slid past. There were cars parked on either side of the road, askew as if hurriedly abandoned, and all of the parking meters had their flags standing.

Elise slowed to search for a good hiding place—somewhere that good-intentioned witches wouldn’t have warded, yet still comfortable enough to house Rylie for the day.

“Do you see that?” Rylie asked. There was a tremor in her voice.

Elise didn’t respond, but she watched out of the corners of her eye as they passed an art museum. There were shadows in the courtyard behind the modern art sculpture. They flashed behind a brick wall and disappeared.

Those weren’t human shadows. She didn’t sense human minds, either. It was like there was a hissing void where the shadows stood.

“What do you smell?” Elise asked.

“Soil,” Rylie said after a moment. “Dark places. Caves.”

“You don’t recognize it?” Elise asked.

She wrinkled her nose. “No, but I’ve been smelling it on and off since Northgate. Would it be paranoid if I said that I think it’s following us?”

Not paranoid enough. She should have mentioned it earlier.

They needed somewhere
really
secure.

Elise’s eyes fell on the building she needed when they turned down C Street. It was a hotel with gothic architecture, all gray slate and relief carvings with the kind of front door that belonged on a cathedral. The ground floor was old. The tower rearing above it was new. A sign in front said “Crane Hotel: A Historical Site” in bold, modern letters.

“Here?” Rylie asked.

Elise nodded once.

Rylie slipped off the motorcycle and approached the motion-activated doors. They didn’t react to her presence. She wedged her fingers between the cracks of the doors, forcing them open with as little effort as it took an average person to open a jar of pickles.

“Come on,” she said, standing aside to let Elise pass. Her eyes were on the street around them, cheeks pink with cold.

Elise put the engine into a low gear and half-walked the motorcycle into the lobby of the hotel, leaving a streak of brown snowmelt in her wake. The floor was marble with gold accents, and an open archway at the far end of the bell desk led into what had once been the main body of the cathedral.

But there was no magic here—what had once been hallowed, consecrated ground had been violated by a corporation. It had the shape of a magical fortress without the actual magic intact. Perfect.

“We still have a few hours until the sun comes out, I think,” Rylie said, peering through the doors that she had forced to shut once more. “I don’t want to stop in this city. Not if something is following us.”

The kickstand made an unpleasant scraping noise against the marble as Elise dismounted. She didn’t like the idea of stopping at the Crane Hotel much either, but she could make sure that whoever was following wouldn’t be able to get at them. She tugged her right glove off with her teeth. “You want to spend the day down here or in a hotel room upstairs?”

Rylie turned to take in the impressive sight of the lobby. She shivered and rubbed her upper arms. “Hotel room.”

Elise slung the saddlebags over her shoulder and they went upstairs.

The rooms were modest, obviously intended for business travelers—not fancy, but with all of the appliances that would make extended stays comfortable, assuming there had been electricity. There was a kitchenette, a bathroom, a separate bedroom. Elise tossed their belongings on the desk.

“Stay in here and don’t come out until I return,” Elise said, flicking spells at the windows, the door, even the walls. She didn’t activate them yet.

“How long will you be gone?” Rylie asked, gazing around the room with frightened doe eyes.

“Until nightfall.”

Fear rolled off of Rylie in waves. She nodded and hugged herself tighter, taking a big step back as Elise passed her to tag the bathroom with another warding rune.

“I don’t want to feed on you,” Elise said over her shoulder as she affixed the rune to the ventilation duct.

Rylie looked startled. “What?”

“Every time I’ve looked at you since you walked in on Neuma and me, your brain signals have gone insane. You don’t need to be afraid. I don’t want to feed off of you, sexually or otherwise.”

Rylie exploded into laughter.

It wasn’t the reaction Elise expected. She stared hard at Rylie as the Alpha tried to smother her giggles with her hands.

“I’m not afraid you’re going to hit on me,” Rylie said after an awkward minute, once she became coherent again. “Oh my God. Really? Even if you did, do you think it’s hard to say ‘no thanks’ or something?”

Elise kept her expression carefully blank. The runes on her twitching fingertips hung in the air, momentarily forgotten.

Rylie swallowed down more giggles. “I am afraid, but it’s not about the—the sex thing. I know you’re not going to try to feed on me. You’re not like that.”

“But you are afraid of me.” Elise flicked an extra rune at the front door, just to make sure. “And you don’t like Neuma.”

“I’m not used to demons. She’s weird.”

“And I’m not?”

Rylie’s laughter cut off. Tears streaked her cheeks. “The last time we tried to save the world, we killed Seth, and I keep remembering it when you’re around. I’m so afraid of losing Abel that sometimes it’s like I can’t breathe. But…it’s not because you, not like that.”

And now she was crying.

Elise stood back, utterly baffled by the swing in moods, every muscle tense.

Rylie cried with her whole body. Like every fiber of her being was committed to experiencing her emotions. It was as off-putting as though if Rylie had peeled off her skin and stood in front of Elise with the muscles and blood vessels exposed—maybe even more so. She would know what to do with a skinned zombie. Emotions, not so much.

“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.