Caged in Bone (The Ascension Series) (31 page)

“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.

The strange, inhuman design of the city was almost as disorienting as the darkness itself, but Abel seemed to know where they were going. The clicking of his nails echoed through the darkness and made an easy trail for Rylie to follow. She shadowed him, nose almost to his tail.

Only a few minutes into their run, Abel stopped abruptly.

Rylie almost struck his side. She nuzzled his flank in silent questioning, but he stared fixedly at the street in front of them without acknowledging her, and she lifted her head to see why.

Then she realized there was no street in front of them at all.

They were on the brink of a wide courtyard where the canals converged, but half of the courtyard itself was missing. The ground had sunk in underneath a statue at its center. The canals drained into the cavernous opening.

There was no sign of what had caused the destruction—only the destruction itself. Rylie didn’t smell gunpowder or chemicals or anything else that could indicate a bomb.

But she did smell demons.

Abel trotted around the edge of the sinkhole, heading for the street beyond that would lead to Eve’s temple. The artificial tree looked no larger now than it had a few minutes ago, although Rylie knew that they must have crossed at least half the distance now.

She was about to follow him when she smelled buttered popcorn—and something else that was far more familiar.

Rylie stopped. Turned back to the chasm.

Why did she smell family?

Without waiting to see if Abel would follow, Rylie climbed to the edge of the sinkhole and sniffed around the broken stones. She definitely smelled her pack. It was a musky, earthy smell, like icy rivers and pine trees and decaying plants. All werewolves smelled like Gray Mountain, the place where Rylie had been bitten. It wasn’t a smell that belonged in Shamain.

She couldn’t see what was within the dark chasm, but she couldn’t leave until she found the source of the werewolf odor. Rylie leaped lightly down the rubble.

Abel was behind her in a moment. He snapped his jaw at her ear in admonishment, as if to say,
What were you thinking, coming back here?

Rylie lowered her head and sniffed. After a beat, he followed suit.

His gold eyes sharpened.

He smelled it, too.

Abel was at her side as she climbed down. She found the remnants of spiral stairs and followed them underneath the statue, ducking under the bent leg of the marble woman to slink into a cavern.

Shattered crystal crunched under Rylie’s step as she paused at the bottom of the stairs. There wasn’t much cavern to explore. Most of it had collapsed and what little space remained was filling with water from the canals.

But then she saw a swirl of crimson slicking the surface of the small lake forming under the statue—blood.

The smell of wounded prey hit her at the same time. A dying animal.

“Someone help!”

The familiar voice rang out softly from deeper in the cave.

Rylie slammed back into her human body and was hip-deep in the warm waters of Shamain before she had even considered the alternatives. “Summer!” she yelled back as she sloshed through the flooded wreckage, shoving a car-sized boulder aside to clear a path. Water swirled to fill the hole she had made.

Abel cursed behind her. He had turned back, too, and set the bag that James had given him on a high, dry rock before slipping in.

Pieces of white stone from the canals had collapsed against each other, preventing Rylie from reaching Summer. They were wedged together. She couldn’t move them.

“Hurry,” Summer begged from the other side. “I think he’s—I think he’s dying, Mom!”

The desperation in her daughter’s voice was like a kick to the chest. Rylie sucked in a lungful of air and dived under the surface of the water, kicking rapidly to swim through a narrow gap to the other side.

Rylie had swum in lakes and rivers before, in luxurious spas and Olympic swimming pools. She associated water with muffled quiet and the sound of her own heart. But as this water rushed to fill her ears, Rylie wasn’t greeted by silence.

There were voices in the water. Whispers and sighs.

She erupted from the flood with a ragged gasp, clutching the other side of the broken canal to hold herself up.

Summer was stranded on a sheet of polished crystal that had been cracked by the collapse. One of her legs was twisted oddly, trapped underneath a rock. “Hurry,” she said, “
please
.”

Rylie dragged herself out of the water. Once she saw what was on the other side of the rock trapping Summer, she sucked in a hard gasp.

Nash’s entire left side had been crushed—his arm, his ribs, his leg. He was a bloody mess of feathers and ragged skin. One wing was bent pitifully behind his head. He was healing slowly. Much more slowly than a werewolf. And the fact that he was still unconscious could only mean that it was even worse than it looked.

But within the protective circle of his other arm and wing rested Summer, who looked like she had narrowly avoided being crushed. She pushed at the rubble pinning her down but couldn’t move it; even her strength wasn’t enough against the awkward angle without any leverage.

Abel sloshed out of the water behind Rylie as she braced her hands against the rubble and pushed.

With a groan, they shifted the rock enough for Summer to pull her leg out.

“What are you doing here?” Rylie asked, cupping her daughter’s face in her hands, searching her for any signs of concussion. She didn’t think werewolves could get concussions, but after everything that had happened to them that day, she wasn’t going to rule it out.

“Nash asked me up to help him search the fissures because there was a demon,” Summer said. She pushed Rylie’s hands away. “Something—something happened. Help me get him out.”

“Something happened,” Abel said. “No
shit
,
something happened.”

Summer elaborated. “An explosion. It was demon magic.”

With Rylie’s help, she moved the stones crushing Nash’s side. His skin had been absolutely shredded, baring glistening muscle underneath. His scent was that of an animal near death.

The wreckage surrounding them gave a dangerous groan. Abel had shifted some of the roof out of the way, freeing enough room to carry Nash to the stairs without having to swim. But it was also making the entire sinkhole shift.

“Move fast,” he said, bracing his arms against the wall to hold it upright, sweat beading his forehead. “Real fast.”

Summer picked Nash up as easily as though he weighed nothing. Angels were hollow-boned, and Summer was as strong as any other werewolf—her ankle had already healed from being smashed under the rock.

The walls cracked like glaciers. Fragments of stone plopped into the water.

Rylie clambered up onto the first stair and held her arms out to take Nash from Summer as soon as she had crossed the water.

Abel released the wall and followed them.

The ground above them began collapsing. Rylie took Nash’s legs, Summer took his shoulders, and they rushed up the stairs with his body hanging limp between them.

As they climbed to the surface, the stairs slid under them. The street sagged.

They leaped onto the cobblestone just as the rest of the sinkhole caved in under them.

Rylie’s grip on Nash slipped. There was too much blood to keep hold of him. She winced as Summer sagged under his sudden weight, sinking to her knees beside him.

“You stupid idiot moron,” Summer said tearfully, pulling Nash’s head into her lap, smoothing her hand over his forehead. “You big dumb
bird
. I heal faster than you do. You shouldn’t have—you didn’t—”

Abel touched Summer’s shoulder. “He didn’t have a choice,” he said. “I’d’ve done the same thing.”

It might have been the first time that Abel had said anything less uncritical about Nash. Summer looked so overwhelmed by gratitude that Rylie thought she might cry. Instead, she buried her face into Abel’s chest and shuddered.

The air shifted, swirled around them.

Rylie looked up in time to see a figure descending from the sky.

An angel landed beside them, bare feet connecting with the street, feathers whispering against the cobblestones. His wings looked like those of an eagle. His hair was a glistening white-gold. Rylie didn’t even think before shifting back into her wolf body and putting herself between him and Summer.

The sight of her form twisting as she shifted made the angel take a step back, as if he had never seen a werewolf change on command before.

“What is this?” he hissed, putting a hand on the saber at his waist.

Abel growled, but Summer put a hand on his arm, holding him at bay as she glared up at the angel. “Nash is dying, Michael,” she said, all hints of her tears gone, burned away by a fierce heat. “We were looking for your demon and there was some kind of…evil magic down there. It blew up the cavern. It made the fissures disappear.”