Lost in Prophecy: An Urban Fantasy Novel (The Ascension Series) (Volume 5) (14 page)

“I’m working with Lincoln Marshall again,” she said loudly enough that McIntyre could hear her over his daughters.

“Deputy Pretty Boy? How’s that going for you?”

“It’s interesting. Let’s put it that way. He led me to an entire town of people gone missing, so we believe that Abraxas and Aquiel are somehow involved.” Elise ran a quick search on his list for the names of the mayor and his wife from Two Rivers. She didn’t find it. “Is this list complete?”

“I haven’t put all the new names in yet.” He grabbed the top two inches of the printed version and shoved it at her. “These just showed up this morning.”

“Showed up?”

“In an envelope on my front door.”

The hairs on the back of Elise’s neck stood on end, and it wasn’t because the rest of her hair was being yanked. “Someone got through the wards.”

“But didn’t attack,” McIntyre said. “Just dropped off the list.”

“How the fuck did someone get through the wards?”

“Aunt Elise!” Deb cried. “
Bad words
!”

She gave McIntyre a flat look, and he shrugged. “Them’s the rules. You gotta pay up.” He snorted into his Leffe and took another sip. “If I do, you sure as hockey pucks do.”

“Oh, for fuck’s sake,” she muttered under her breath, patting down her pockets. She didn’t have any spare change to put in the Bad Words Jar. She did, however, have two of Neuma’s steel hair clips in her pocket. She shoved them at the younger girl. “Here. Take those and shut up.”

The distraction worked. The kids started fighting over the pretty jewelry.

“Leticia says that the wards didn’t register intruders this morning. Nobody crossed through since our last trip to the grocery store,” McIntyre said. “Been almost two weeks.”

Elise’s hands froze on the list that she had been flipping through. “Are you sure you’re alone on the property?”

“Searched it a dozen times over.”

Her eyes fell on the names of the missing people from Two Rivers. McIntyre must have gotten the names at the same time that she had.

Her head suddenly jerked to the side. Hard. A sticky fist had just jammed one of Neuma’s clips into place over her ear. It pinched against her scalp. “I had a single page of these names show up in the Palace today.” Elise lifted her eyebrows at McIntyre. “Along with my obsidian falchion.”

He rubbed his whiskers. The lines of his hands were caked with gun oil. “Gotta say, Elise…”

“I don’t like it, either.”

“This isn’t some demon shit.”

“I don’t know what else it could be.” Who could have retrieved her falchion from the pits of Hell? Perhaps more importantly, who would have cause to return it to her?

And who the fuck could leave a list of names in France and Hell on the same day?

Elise set the newest part of the list back on the table. She couldn’t lean very far forward; the girls were now braiding her hair in earnest and wouldn’t relinquish their grips. “I want you to pull every single one of these names that begins with the letter B, whether first name or last. I also want you to correlate all the names to potential geographic locations.”

“Gonna take a while. I don’t have a lot of power.” He swept a hand at his collection of ancient, mismatched laptops. “What you see is what I’ve got.”

“Then you better start soon. I might be able to connect you with a werewolf computer wizard who can give you extra CPUs.” Assuming that Summer and Nash ever returned from their pre-honeymoon, anyway.

“You sure we want to?” McIntyre sat back in his chair. “I mean, someone’s painting big red arrows for us. Someone wants us to find these people, or whatever’s killed these people. Someone that’s got powers we’ve never run into before.” He tongued his labret plug, shaking his head slowly. “Whatever those arrows are pointing at, I dunno if we want to find out.”

“But Anthony…” Elise said.

“He’s not on the list.”

“He didn’t just vanish, either.” Not Anthony. He would never have gone down without a fight. She didn’t want to believe he could have gone down at all.

Her head jerked to the side again.

“Hey!” she barked, twisting to look at the girls seated on the couch behind her.

Deb pulled desperately on the end of one braid that she had gotten knotted around a hair tie. “It’s stuck!”

Elise flicked her wrist, and a knife appeared in her hand. The look she gave the kids would have made any adult shit their pants and run. The girls were not impressed. They kept pulling on her battered braid.

“Don’t stab my kids, Kavanagh,” McIntyre said, squinting at the laptop.

“If I haven’t stabbed them before, I’m not going to do it now.” Elise cut the rubber band off the bottom of her hair, taking more than a few strands along with it.

“No!” Deb protested.

“Use the bands without the metal joiners,” Leticia called from the kitchen. “Even demon hair tangles.”

Dana delicately pulled a few of the braids together, sliding a bow around the end. “You look pretty, Aunt Elise.”

Elise moved to cut the bow off, too, but McIntyre’s glare stopped her. She clenched her jaw and lowered the knife.

She drained her beer.

“When I finish your geographic location thing, I’m gonna cross-reference this with police databases for missing people,” McIntyre said. His second chin wobbled when he shook his head. “I think this is big, Elise. Biggest case we’ve ever done.”

Leticia came into the room again. Instead of more Leffe, she had a cell phone and a stack of freshly printed pages. “Here you go,” she said. McIntyre had already printed all of the B names for Elise. “This phone is magicked so that it won’t short circuit in Hell, but you’ll still have to be on Earth to make calls. No satellites or cell towers in Dis, you know.”

It was a crappy flip phone with a tiny screen and rubber padding around the edges. Looked like the kids had been decorating it. There were pink pony stickers on the back.

“Thanks,” Elise said dryly, pocketing it.

She stood, ignoring the wails of complaint from the kids.

“I’ll call as soon as I get a lead on Anthony,” McIntyre said, hauling Deb into his lap. The girl had added a few bows to her own hair, as well. It stuck out in five different directions. “Watch out for yourself, Kavanagh.”

She rubbed her aching chest through her shirt. “I’ll try.”

MERE HOURS HAD
passed since Elise dropped Lincoln off in the Palace of Dis, and when she returned, Gerard was still disposing of the bodies of Sallosa’s attendants. She could smell blood within the large bucket he carried.

She peered into the mouth of the bucket. There was nothing inside but a meaty sludge.

“I see you’ve got the grinder working again,” Elise said.

Gerard heaved the bucket over a low iron fence and set it on the ground before climbing in after it. The hands within the Palace’s flesh gardens seemed to sense the presence of the puréed bodies, reaching toward it with straining fingers.

“Just needed a little elbow grease,” he said, and he tipped the bucket.

The slurry of blood, meat, and fat sloughed over the hands. The fingers trembled. Elise thought she could sense an inaudible sigh of relief.

He slopped the rest down the rows, tapped the bucket until it was empty, and then climbed back onto the other side.

“The House of Volac,” Elise said.

“Already on it. They caught wind of the executions. Volac herself has requested a meeting with you. An amiable one, she says. Feel free to bring as many guards as you want and all that.”

“I just killed her daughter and all her attendants.”

“This is Hell,” Gerard said. “That’s kind of like sending flowers before a first date.” He set the bucket outside the door to the kitchens without going inside. When Elise moved to head for the gates, he stepped in front of her, blocking her path. “Did you eat since the thing with Gremory?”

Elise set her jaw. “Yes.” It was true. She had devoured several of Sallosa’s centuria, which had restored a lot of the energy lost in casting ethereal magic, if not quite enough to heal her.

“You sure? With all due respect, ma’am, you’re not looking good. I’ll follow you down into the maw of the Coccytus if you want. You know that. But if we’re going to do that, I want to follow you when you’re already at your best.”

“You’re not coming with me to the House of Volac. I need you and Neuma to remain inside the Palace.” Gerard and Neuma were both bound to the Palace’s magic, just like Elise. At least one of them had to be within it at all times.

“I don’t want my men following you if you can’t protect them, either,” Gerard said.

“Neuma’s not available to feed me properly.”

“There are a lot of guys around here that would work as good substitutes. You’re in charge. You can just order it. Anyone you want.”

She thought of Lincoln—Lincoln in a hot shower, their slippery bodies intertwined; Lincoln plunging an electrified spear between her ribs and dragging her through town as she screamed.

“When is the meeting with Volac?” she asked.

He rubbed a hand down his face. Sighed. “Earliest possible convenience.”

Elise continued toward the gate.

“Also, the deputy’s having fits in the Great Library,” Gerard said, hurrying to keep up with her. “Apparently he’s pissed about having babysitters. He wants free rein of the Palace. Isaiah’s not having much fun trying to get the guy to focus, either.”

When it rains…
“Fuck the both of them,” Elise said. That was all the stamina she could muster to deal with their bullshit for the time being. Rylie, Stephanie, and the McIntyre kids had worn the very last of her patience thin. “Mobilize my personal guards. We’re going to the House of Volac now.”

Felicity whipped out
her Taser and zapped the steward. They had jacked up the power source so that it could discharge all at once, and the force of it blasted the demon off his feet and slammed him hard against the wall.

Nikolaj fell, bleeding.

“Get him out of here!” Elise shouted.

Edwin grabbed the wounded guard by the collar and hauled him out the door.

Elise moved to follow, but Volac’s hand shot out and seized her arm. She hadn’t realized that she was even within the demon’s reach. “Don’t be in such a rush to leave,” Volac said. “You simply
must
stay for dinner.”

Elise tried to wrench free, but the demon was too strong. Instead she tried to phase away, diffusing into the shadowy corners of the room.

Her flesh held firm.

She’d run into only one demon that could do that before—keep her from phasing, forcing her to remain in her human form—and that had been Aquiel, the demon prince of nightmares and another of Belphegor’s allies. Must have been a talent the whole hierarchy had.

Bad talent for Elise’s sake.

The rusted points of Volac’s fangs buried into the meat of Elise’s bicep. Pain flamed up her shoulder, down to her fingertips, clawed at her heart.

She screamed as she ripped free of Volac, leaving ragged slivers of flesh behind in the demon’s mouth. The demon’s tongue lashed over her own face, tasting Elise’s amber blood. A strange gleam filled Volac’s eyes. “Delicious.”

“Get down!” Felicity shouted.

Elise hugged her arm to her body and leaped out of the way. A half-second later, the guard opened fire on Volac.

The bullets didn’t even hit. They vanished in midair.

Volac rose from the fainting couch. There were no legs under her voluminous skirts. Silk swirled around her as the room darkened, turning her into the core of a black hole.

Her arm lashed out again. It extended, unbound by physical limitations of bone, and her hand closed around Felicity’s throat.

With a jerk, she beheaded the guard.

Volac’s power slammed into Elise. Her energy was so much larger than it should have been. It was like the large-chested woman with nails in her gums was only a hand puppet for an even larger demon—one that Elise could sense, but not see.

The weight of her aura smashed into Elise. She had thought that the nightmare on the shore of the Amniosium was surprisingly strong, but it was nothing compared to Volac. Her power was out of this world. Elise felt herself bending under it.

Clenching her fists, Elise bared her teeth and pushed back.

They clashed, demon against demon, slamming into each other like two nuclear warheads. The walls of the sunroom ripped away around them. Glass shattered, showering into Elise’s hair, slicing into her arms. Volac’s wig was flung into the wind, baring a head underneath with no skull, skin wrapped around a pulsing brain.

Elise stood strong against the tides of energy that Volac shoved at her, and the energy hurricaned around them harder.

But, slowly, Elise was worn down.

She staggered, trying to concentrate all of her energy on smashing Volac into nothingness. If she could just peel away into darkness, she could consume the demon—devour her physical form, make it part of herself. But Volac’s grip was too tight. Elise’s powers weren’t enough.

Elise didn’t have any ethereal runes left. She didn’t have any infernal runes, either. She had no magic left to help her stand up against the power of one of Dis’s oldest Houses.

So Elise ran.

She wrenched herself away from Volac, breaking the eye contact. It was harder than it should have been.

Her boots pounded against the wooden floors as she rushed through the antechamber, echoing hollowly within the facade of Volac’s plantation home. Wood cracked behind her. All that priceless Earth mahogany shattered as though smashed by a wrecking ball, peppering the back of Elise’s jacket, pelting her head.

“Please, don’t leave,” Volac cackled. “I so seldom entertain visitors!”

Elise launched off the stairs just as the entire house boomed behind her, making the ground shudder. It sounded like it was imploding under the weight of Volac’s power and the demon didn’t even care.

She was closing in.

The truck was waiting outside the gates, beyond Volac’s soul-linked wards, where, hopefully, it would still work.

She put all her energy into her legs, pumping her fists, hair streaming behind her as she ran. The path trembled under her feet. Stone began to crack. Volac was chewing through the earth in her pursuit.