Lost in Prophecy: An Urban Fantasy Novel (The Ascension Series) (Volume 5) (12 page)

His throat worked. “I don’t even know what those are.” After a beat, he said, “Snake heads. Like Medusa. Never mind—I remember them from when I was possessed.”

“You probably won’t grow snakes,” Elise said. “If physical changes manifest in part-demon Gray, it’s during puberty. Your changes will only be in power.”

It didn’t look like the idea comforted him. He rubbed his fingertips along the floor again, clearing his throat. “Someone tried to clean this up. There are sponge marks.”

She bent close to the floor. Sniffed. In addition to the sour smell of wasted blood, she picked up the scent of lemon pine.

Demons didn’t clean their murder scenes.

“Witches, maybe,” she mused aloud, shoving her hands in her pockets so that Lincoln wouldn’t see that they were shaking. She was even hungrier now that she knew that Lincoln was unconsciously feeding off of her bad temper. She wanted to return the favor.

“What’s that about witches?”

“This might be a witch behavior. They’re known for cleaning up the scenes of their crimes. They’ll return to a site after the fact and wash away any indication of a ritual, murder, or…whatever else they might have done.” Witches were almost as creative as demons when the situation called for it.

“Do you sense magic?” Lincoln asked. His blood pressure was dropping again. The mention of crimes and murders didn’t faze him. This was his element—being on the scene of an investigation. Even Elise couldn’t shake him up enough to change that.

She would have to take off her warding ring to be sensitive enough to detect magic here. Since she was on Earth, taking off the ring would give James a direct route into her mind. Elise didn’t want James to see whom she was spending time with.

“No,” she said. “I don’t sense any magic.”

Elise lifted the phone’s receiver on Mayor Gregg’s desk. To her surprise, she got a dial tone. The artificial sound was painfully loud in the house’s silence.

“The mayor was trying to get everything back online,” Lincoln said. “He was doing a fine job. A damn fine job.” Past tense. He was already convinced that everyone was dead.

Nothing that Elise saw suggested otherwise.

She sat on the edge of the desk and dialed the only phone number she had memorized. It rang twice before McIntyre answered. “Hey,” he said. “‘Sup?”

Anyone else would have had questions about Elise’s whereabouts for the last several months, but not McIntyre. The sound of his voice was almost as good for her mood as a hot bath. “I need anything you can find about our anonymous benefactor.”

“Already looked him up. Haven’t found anything. The email he used leads back along a trail of empty email addresses that doesn’t go anywhere. Same with the bank account.”

“What about tracing his IP address?” Elise asked.

“There wasn’t one in the header info.”

“Proxy?”

“Nope. Just…missing. Wasn’t the only thing missing. The whole trail was weird.” McIntyre sighed, like he dreaded having to say anything else. “The bank account that deposited the money—it had gotten three thousand and sixty-two microdeposits in one hour before it transferred to us.”

“Three thousand…”

“You’re not going to guess who owns the accounts.” Without even a pause for her to answer, he said, “The missing people. Three thousand and sixty-two of them, anyway.”

Chilly frisson settled over Elise’s shoulders. She gripped the handset harder and said, “I don’t like any of this.”

“Me neither. I’d return the money and take you off the case, but…”

“Yeah,” Elise said. She wasn’t going to be able to drop it now, but she was going to need help. It had been a big enough mess before impossible bank account activity and people washing away crime scenes. “What’s Anthony’s ETA?”

“He doesn’t have one. I haven’t been able to reach him.”

Tendrils of fear sneaked into her heart. Not the kind of fear that a nightmare demon evoked, but the fear of realizing she had missed something—maybe something big.

Anthony would never have gone so long without contacting McIntyre or Elise.

“You didn’t tell me that,” she said, trying not to make it sound accusatory and failing. How could one of their trio go missing without the other two realizing it?

“Until I saw your email, I thought he was with you. Guess not.” McIntyre’s voice shook with frustration. He’d come to the same conclusion that she had.

She swallowed hard before speaking. “Is he on the list, Lucas?”

A moment of silence followed the question.

A very
long
moment of silence.

“No,” McIntyre said.

Anthony had been with her for years. Before she had been a demon, before he had known that he was a kopis, back when the world was normal and good things sometimes happened. He was the one who had pulled her body from Lake Tahoe when she was resurrected as a demon. He
had stood at the gates of Heaven to wait for her return after killing Adam. He had remained her friend and confidant when she had nobody else to trust—nobody but McIntyre.

For all she knew, he had been missing for months.

“We need him,” she said, forcing herself to uncurl her fingers from the phone before she shattered it.

“I’ll put out the word.”

“Good. I’m going to come see you in a few hours.”

A grunt. “See you soon.”

She dropped the phone in its cradle.

Lincoln was leaning against the wall, watching her with his arms folded. “What’s the next move?”

A pressure headache was building in her skull and the wound on her chest was aching again. Elise stood slowly, and just the change in posture made her dizzy again.

“I don’t know,” she said, rubbing her forehead. “I need to think.”

Anthony gone missing. Assassination attempts in Dis. Wounds Elise wasn’t healing. Thousands of missing people. Thousands more slaves that still needed to be liberated. Neuma and Jerica. Lincoln.
James
.

What’s the next move?

“I’m taking you back to the Great Library to continue working with Isaiah and Aniruddha,” Elise said. Whatever came next, she could handle alone. She needed him where he was more useful. Where he could be helping Elise learn to cast the magic she needed to be strong enough to kill all her enemies.

“What? You can’t cut me out of this. I’m not going back.”

“This isn’t a debate.”

“The demon knew something was going to happen in Two Rivers,” Lincoln said, tapping his forehead with a knuckle. “Your answers—my answers—are in here somewhere, and that means you need me to investigate, not read books.”

“I need you learning to be a warlock, Lincoln,” Elise said. “I won’t be able to do anything for these people if you don’t. And, frankly, if you’re starting to manifest megaira powers, you’re too unreliable to be on the road with me.”

“But…this is why I’m here.” His fists shook with frustration. “This must be it.”

“You’re here because Gerard asked you to help me.”

“Do you think so?” Lincoln asked. “Do you honestly think it’s that easy? Because if one of your guys contacted me right before you stumbled across trouble with something Judy was doing—well, that’d be one big coincidence, Kavanagh, and I don’t know that I believe in coincidences. Do you?”

The obsidian falchion was a reminder of exactly how many coincidences were in her life.

She still wanted Lincoln safe in the library, where she wouldn’t lose him the way she had lost Anthony.

“Brace yourself,” Elise said.

He tensed, anticipating being phased again. But before she released her physical form, the bloody handprint on the wall caught her eye. On impulse, she bent down and licked it.

Lincoln sucked a breath in through his teeth.

Elise traced her tongue over her lips, pondering the flavor of the old blood. It had been there for at least three days. It was still heady with power. She could taste ice water and pine and the musk of fur.

Werewolf blood.

IT WAS RAINING
hard in Northgate, but the precipitation didn’t quite reach the streets surrounding the fissure; it evaporated into steam before hitting the pavement.

Rylie walked briskly through the storm, hood pulled over her head to protect herself. She tried not to look down into Hell. It was bad enough that she couldn’t tune out the scents—the melting human flesh, the burnt charcoal, the factories and smelters.

There seemed to be more Scions guarding the bridge than usual. A small crowd had gathered on the lawn surrounding the statue of Bain Marshall, most of them armed and all of them whispering.

Disturbance in the fissure? Rylie wasn’t sure that she wanted to know badly enough to stop. She hadn’t told anyone that she was going to be in Northgate, and she preferred to get back to the sanctuary without anyone catching on.

The wind picked up as she passed the edge of the bridge, carrying the scent of werewolves to her. It wasn’t just Scions talking over by Bain Marshall. Some of the pack were there, too. People who would be likely to report back to Abel.

Rylie quickened her pace.

As she passed, a woman unhitched herself from one of the bridge’s pylons and moved to walk alongside Rylie. Elise appeared to be unbothered by the rain. She didn’t even look like she was wet. Maybe she, like the fissure, repelled Earth’s natural weather.

A thrill of fear raced through Rylie. “What are you doing here again?” she asked without stopping. She liked Elise, she really did, but two visits in such a short period of time couldn’t be a good thing.

“We need to talk,” Elise said.

Rylie glanced over her shoulder at the road leading to St. Philomene’s, and all of the people who were now blocking that route. How much had Elise seen? Did she know who Rylie had just been visiting?

“I’m on my way back to the sanctuary. I have to make sure that everything’s coming together for dinner. I can’t really talk right now.”

“Tough shit. This is more important than dinner. Are you missing any werewolves?”

“What do you mean?”

Elise’s voice sharpened. “What do you think I mean? Has anyone in your pack left or disappeared?”

Heat crept up Rylie’s cheeks. She had assumed that Elise had somehow learned about the problem with the other werewolves wanting to change the Scions into monsters just like them. “Everyone’s still in the sanctuary and Northgate, tripping over each other every time we turn around. We could use a few of them disappearing, actually, just to make it a little easier to breathe.”

Elise didn’t smile. Her hard look made Rylie’s intestines just about shrivel up on themselves.

“How many werewolves exist outside of the pack?” Elise asked.

“I don’t think—I mean, I’m not sure. Not many. There shouldn’t be any at all, but I can’t guarantee that all of them sought me out when I got called to become Alpha.”

“There’s at least one. I found werewolf blood today.”

Rylie’s eyes widened. “In Hell?”

“Close. Two Rivers, Georgia.”

She gnawed on her bottom lip, considering. That blood couldn’t have come from one of her wolves. The last werewolf they had brought into the pack was Katja, and she had been forcibly infected with the curse by a demon. That meant that there must have been a stray werewolf in Dis at some point—someone that could have performed the bite, and later escaped to make more.

But no werewolves had climbed out of Dis using the bridge. If there were any wolves in Hell, they were still down there.

“I don’t have any reason to think there’s a werewolf in Georgia,” Rylie said.

“Well, I do. I want you to give me a werewolf,” Elise said.

“
Give
you a werewolf?”

“Someone with a good nose to help me investigate problems I’m having, including this smear of werewolf blood in Georgia.”

“Someone to take down to Hell, you mean,” Rylie said.

“Eventually, yes.”

Rylie tried to imagine a werewolf living in Dis. That place had been haunting her ever since the fissure ripped open and bared the dark city lurking beyond. The fact that she had now been there personally—twice—didn’t change how much it frightened her. If anything, experiencing everything in intimate detail had made it so much worse.

The hands that grew out of the ground. The smell of melting human flesh. The obsidian
everything
.

It was nothing like Gray Mountain, where werewolves had originated from, and where the pack belonged. They were creatures of the earth and trees. They needed the moon to thrive.

They didn’t belong in that alien wasteland below.

“Please don’t ask for this,” Rylie said. Elise opened her mouth, but she pushed on. “I want to help. You know I want to help. You’ve done so much for us. But werewolves in Hell—we’d waste away. I can’t ask anyone to do that.”

“If you won’t command it, then put out a request for volunteers.”

Someone would definitely volunteer if Rylie asked. The werewolves were becoming bolder ever since Abel had last stirred them to fight against the nightmares—much bolder than Rylie was comfortable with.

These people had come to her looking for guidance. An Alpha to take care of them. In the last few years, she believed they had become family more than friends. But the stress of being in the pack, and the stress of the Breaking, had started to turn these normal people hard.

It scared her sometimes.

“I could ask for volunteers,” she said reluctantly. Elise didn’t seem to hear the response. She stiffened, pushing Rylie behind her. “What’s wrong?”

“We have company.”

Company came in the form of a woman with strawberry-blond hair twisted in an elegant bun. Rylie had been so distressed by the idea of sending a werewolf down to Hell that she hadn’t noticed the doctor approaching on the road from St. Philomene’s Cathedral. “I must say, it’s interesting seeing the two of you together.” Stephanie Whyte twirled the umbrella on her shoulder, making the tangle of vines printed on the inside swirl. She smelled of latex, antiseptic, silicone. “You don’t seem like the likeliest of friends.”

Levi was standing behind her, half-concealed by the parasol. He hung back with hands in his pockets and looked annoyed. Considering how frequently he looked like that, it might have just been his normal face. Rylie wasn’t sure.