Lost in Prophecy: An Urban Fantasy Novel (The Ascension Series) (Volume 5) (28 page)

Terah’s fell beast clung to the stairs a few yards below. She watched the burning with satisfaction in her eyes, hair fluttering around her jaw, stirred by a wind that stunk of decay. “Search!” she crowed. “Kill anyone who gets in your way!”

The fiends spread out, vanishing into the crowd. Elise jerked her Taser from its sheath at her hip and tested it by pressing the button. It snapped to life, arcing with electricity just a few dangerous inches from her skin.

“See anything different, James?” she asked.

His eyes swept the city. “I never came to this part. We only passed through the market and climbed onto the shoulder. But…that’s changed.” He pointed at the pelvic cavity. “There’s a lot more down there now.”

It was a place to start. “Stick close,” Elise said, glancing over her shoulder. The fissure leading back to Dis was nowhere in sight. They would need to find another route to leave again.

Later. After she had found out what had happened to everyone…for better or worse.

Elise led the way down into the market. A cluster of nightmares wearing ruddy orange leather spotted them and rushed.

She lifted the Taser so they could see it—a silent warning.

Still, they charged.

When she had brought Neuma into Malebolge to rescue Jerica, she had done it with as little fanfare as possible, trying—and failing—to avoid attention. But now she wanted them to know she was coming. She wanted them all to know that the Father had arrived and wasn’t going to put up with the victimization of mortals.

Elise allowed her power to flare. Her skin frayed. Shadow erupted from her, blackening the surrounding air.

“Stop.” Her voice resonated, echoing. “Don’t come near me.”

The nightmare in the forefront tripped over her own feet, crashing to her knees. “Father,” she gasped.

With her power expanding, Elise could see all around them. She reached into the shadows of the buildings the gibborim raided. There were demons inside. Many demons. Not a single mortal—not even slaves.

She allowed her shadow to grow as she stepped past the nightmares. They didn’t attack her.

The market was chaotic, but everything seemed to slow as Elise descended into it, watching nightmares drop to their knees around her. They were smart enough not to fight her. But many of them had been bred by Yatam, the demon who had given her his power, the original Father; the other demons, with twisted and inhuman bodies, were not. And they had no sense of reverence at the sight of her.

A chisav hurtled toward her, four large hands thudding against the bone street. Elise sidestepped its charge and buried the Taser in its side.

Electricity crackled. It jerked, lost its balance, and collapsed.

It tried to stir. She kicked it in the head.

Elise studied her surroundings with her boot on its flank. Terah was higher in the city with the fiends and gibborim, tearing through the rioters with little effort. Within the market itself, there were dozens of booths with their wares spread across tables for any passersby to browse.

Elise searched for human byproducts and didn’t see anything. Not so much as a brush made of bone. There were plenty of crafts made from fiends and other lesser demons, but nothing that had been mortal.

That was far stranger than if she had found human cadavers everywhere. Trade in human products had always been strong.

Where had everything gone?

“What were they selling the last time you came through here?” Elise asked, turning to address James.

He wasn’t standing behind her.

Her eyes flicked over the crowd, searching for a hint of white among all the demons carrying torches and cudgels. She couldn’t see him anywhere.

Elise stretched out her senses, opening her mind to his, and glimpsed him climbing a stairway of bone that led up onto the chest of Malebolge.

James was leaving.

Her stomach twisted. She should have known that he was going along with her too easily. It was no surprise that he had his own agenda—not at this point. But he had said that he wasn’t going to lie anymore. She had believed him.

Elise took a final glance at the army sweeping the streets of Malebolge. If there were any human survivors, the centurions would find them.

She had more personal business to attend to.

Relaxing her grip on her skin, Elise flitted into darkness.

ON THE OTHER
side of the door, Elise and James slipped outside of time.

Her entire life was condensed to a pinpoint that hovered in front of her like a tiny, burning star. All instants were visible simultaneously.

She saw herself birthed in a city of light, and the first time her father, Isaac, had placed a blade in her hands, and the moment that Elise had glimpsed James through a witch’s bonfire. She saw the moment that she had fallen to her death in Reno, Nevada. And then the moment that Anthony had dredged her new body out of the choppy, frozen waters of Lake Tahoe.

Elise saw Nathaniel, pallid in death, and reborn in the form of an angel with wet, limp wings hanging from his shoulder blades.

Eve’s life was all tangled up with hers, too. A life in a beautiful garden, doted upon by all of the children she had birthed out of love, and the once-human man that had become God. She saw the moment that she had realized she was in love with Adam, and the moment He strangled her to death, terminating her eternal life.

She couldn’t tell the difference between Adam’s sins and James’s betrayal anymore.

All condensed to a heartbeat.

And then her feet connected with the ground, shocking her back to reality, slamming her into her body once more.

Elise was on all fours, and she didn’t immediately try to stand. She bowed her forehead to her hands. Her cheeks were damp. She struggled to reorient herself to reality in this new dimension—an ethereal city she didn’t recognize.

It was the sound of James’s heaving beside her that grounded her. Shifting dimensions was a huge shock for anyone. James was still mortal enough that he didn’t take well to passing between worlds. Doorways usually weren’t as bad as phasing, but that had been no ordinary door.

“Did you see?” James gasped. “The way they built Eden and Shamain…”

“No,” Elise said curtly. “I didn’t see.”

She got to her feet and looked behind her, searching for the door that they had passed through. It was set high above her in a smooth wall—too high for humans to reach, but not so high that an angel couldn’t fly to it. Elise doubted that the wall would have been climbable by even the most determined mortal.

It didn’t look like anyone was inclined to attempt it anyway. Elise sensed a lot of sluggish heartbeats in the room, but nobody was moving.

They had landed in a cavernous room with a ceiling so high that she couldn’t see it. A damp mist clung to her ankles. She could barely make out a few stone spheres scattered across the sloping floor, some as small as coconuts, some as large as cars. They looked like they had grown out of the soil. Elise knew that if she broke the smaller stones free, she would find that they had roots and were hollow on the inside.

There were slabs beside many of the larger spheres, something between tables and beds carved from rough-hewn stone. That was where all of the bodies were reclining.

James’s feeling of nausea at what he saw in the room was so powerful that it actually staggered Elise. “Stop it,” she snapped. “Stop
feeling
so much.”

“I can’t.” He drew in a shuddering breath. “It looks so much like Araboth.”

Elise approached the nearest slab, holding her breath. There was a man she didn’t recognize lying on it with his eyes closed. A spear driven into his wrist led down into the ground. His thought patterns were peaceful. Like he was having deep, happy dreams from which he might never rouse.

It really was like they had stepped through the door and back into Araboth.

Back into Elise’s nightmares.

She shut her eyes, and for a few brief seconds, she allowed herself to panic. She surrendered to her pounding heart and wild thoughts.
I’m back in the garden. He’s not dead. I’m going to have to do it all again. I’ll be trapped this time—I’ll lose myself. I’ll lose everything. He’ll keep me and I will never escape.

Elise knew that James was going to pick up on it, but she pushed him out of her mind and focused on the fear.

Then she forced it to drain out of her.

Slowly, she counted back from ten, hands shaking.

When she reached one, she wiped her palms on the front of her jacket, clenched her fists, and unclenched them. She wasn’t shaking anymore. She wasn’t afraid.

Elise opened her eyes to see James watching her. Heartache was etched all over his face. “It’s not Araboth,” he said.

“I know.” She was done being afraid of Adam. Unlike James, she wasn’t going to let ghosts haunt her life.

Composed, she brushed her fingers over the forehead of the man on the slab. His skin was clammy. He didn’t react to her touch.

“One of the missing thousands, I take it,” James said.

Elise moved down the sloping path toward the center of the room. The man wasn’t alone. She started out counting the slumbering bodies, but there were too many. She lost count.

None of their faces were familiar to her. There was no apparent theme to the collection, either. All seemed to be adults. None were visibly pregnant. Aside from that, they spanned all races, all ages, all genders.

She wasn’t sure if she was relieved that she couldn’t see Anthony.

Elise had witnessed both James and Nathaniel like this in Araboth: stretched out on stone slabs with roots driven into their veins, unconscious and near death. But they had been arranged like that so that they could be resurrected as angels.

“What are they doing to these people?” Elise asked. “They can’t all be ethereal Gray, can they?” As far as she knew, only those who already had angel blood within them could be reborn as angels, like James and Nathaniel had been.

James looked disturbed. “All I can think is that it tastes amazing here.”

It took a moment for that to sink in.

The humans were having bright, shiny dreams, caught in sleep with their bodies’ fluids feeding into the hatchery. Demons didn’t care for beautiful dreams. A human in a happy, restive state did nothing for the average demon.

For angels, however, it was like a buffet. And as an ethereal Gray, James was feeding off of the kind of energy that angels loved the most.

“This is a farm,” Elise said.

“I think so.”

“The demons have been selling humans to angels.” She felt numb. Unable to be angry, unable to feel another modicum of horror. “The angels are corralling humans for food.”

“I see stairs,” James said gently, stirring her from her shock.

He was right. There was a staircase at the center of the dark cavern. Elise stopped trying to identify bodies and focused on it. The stairs spanned the distance from the floor to the high ceiling.

“It feels like there’s a nexus above,” he said. “Some kind of concentration of this…energy. We should investigate it.”

Before she could move for the stairs, a shuffling noise echoed through the cavern. A shadowy figure emerged from the mist on the opposite side of the staircase.

Elise drew the Beretta and stepped in front of James. “Stop right there,” she said. “Take another step and I’ll shoot to kill.”

“Who is that?” the responding voice was hoarse, quiet. Familiar.

Elise’s gun didn’t waver. “Identify yourself.”

“I’m Abram Gresham,” he said. “Where am I? What’s going on?”

She sighed and lowered the Beretta. Relief swept over her—not merely the relief at having found one of the missing people, but relief at the idea that she wasn’t going to have to tell Rylie that her son was dead. “I’m Elise Kavanagh. This man is James Faulkner. We’ve come to save you.”

Abram staggered forward. He had been stripped down to his underwear. Blood flowed freely from his wrists, and his skin was ashen gray and slicked with sweat. He’d been on one of those slabs with the stone spikes buried in his arms, trapped in sleep.

James must have noticed the same things that Elise had. “How did you escape?”

“Escape what?” Abram looked around the room as if he didn’t quite see it. Shivers slid over his body. He wrapped his arms around himself, hugging himself tight. The vulnerable posture was strangely reminiscent of Rylie, though it was strange seeing it on such a big man instead of a petite blond girl.

Elise holstered Seth’s Beretta. “I’m going to take a look at you. I won’t hurt you. Understand?”

He nodded.

She took his chin in her hand, thumbing back his eyelids. The whites of his eyes were bloodshot. At the contact, she could easily distinguish his heartbeat from those bodies sleeping around them, and she could tell that he was still healthy and strong. Shaken up, disoriented, but not harmed. He hadn’t lost significant amounts of blood.

“What’s the last thing you remember before being brought here?” she asked.

He didn’t move, remaining pliant in her hands. “Rylie and Abel walking into the fissure.”

So he had been there? He had seen the pack rejecting their Alphas, and hadn’t done anything to stop it? “That’s the last thing?” Elise asked.

The amount of effort he put into thinking looked physically painful. “Levi brought two members of the pack into Northgate to swear allegiance to him. But Abel had changed them into werewolves, and Levi couldn’t change them back. And then…” He scrubbed a hand over his closely shorn scalp. “Damn. They took us all.”

Elise grimaced. “Okay. James, get Abram back to the door. See if you can find a way to reach it. I’m going to head up the stairs, see if I can figure out what’s going on.”

She expected James to protest, but she was surprised when Abram said, “I can’t go until we find Levi.”

“Levi? The guy who took over Rylie’s pack?”

“Yes,” Abram said.

Elise suddenly recalled the two different types of deodorant in Levi’s trailer, and thinking that he must have had a male roommate. Or a boyfriend. “Oh,” she said. Abel was going to
love
that.