Lost in Prophecy: An Urban Fantasy Novel (The Ascension Series) (Volume 5) (18 page)

Abel tensed under her hands. “Don’t hurt them,” Rylie said, digging her fingernails into his skin. “These are Elise’s people.”

“Elise’s people? That looks a hell of a lot like the bitch herself.”

She wiped the tears from her eyes and looked again. He was right—Elise was leading a group of men wearing black leather body armor up the bridge, and she was in full battle gear herself, with Seth’s gun at her hip and her hair cinched into a tight knot.

Rylie blinked, and Elise was suddenly standing in front of her. She had crossed the last several thousand yards faster than a heartbeat.

“What happened?” Elise asked, brow furrowing. “What are you doing here?”

“Levi Riese,” Abel growled.

Her upper lip curled. She almost looked like a wolf herself. But when she spoke, her voice was surprisingly gentle. “Good to see you survived.”

“He took the pack,” Rylie said, blinking away her tears, trying to calm herself. “No, he didn’t take the pack—they just went with him. They didn’t want us in charge of them anymore.”

“And you let them kick you out?” Elise asked. “You’re an Alpha werewolf. You’re telling me you couldn’t just change and kill them?”

“Never thought I would agree with
you
,” Abel muttered.

“I could have changed, yes,” Rylie said, staring at her feet.

“So why didn’t you? Because you didn’t want to hurt anyone? Are you that idealistic?”

Her throat worked as she swallowed. “You wouldn’t understand.”

“Fuck,” Elise said with heat. She glared up at the fissure, still just a few hundred feet above them, as if trying to decide what to do. “I can’t deal with this bullshit right now. I’m going to have the guards escort you into the Palace to wait for me.”

“Where are you going?” Abel asked sharply.

Elise shot him a look, but addressed her guards. “You heard me. Get the Alphas into the Palace. Somewhere secure. And if anyone tries to approach them, assume that it’s an assassin and kill on sight.”

Rylie’s jaw dropped. “An assassin?”

“The Palace isn’t secure anymore,” Elise said. “Don’t eat anything.”

And with that, she dissolved into smoke and darted through the fissure.

Neuma paced alongside
Elise’s bed, chewing on her lacquered fingernail. She knew she was going to ruin a perfectly good manicure, but she couldn’t bring herself to stop. Not while Isaiah and Aniruddha were casting magic to try to save Lincoln’s life.

She could watch him fading, even now. He’d looked so strong and healthy when she’d spotted him throwing tantrums in the library earlier. Complaints aside, Lincoln had smelled amazing. Definitely her kind of lunch. And exactly the kind of pain in the ass that Elise needed to keep her in check.

Now he was weak. Frail.

Dying.

Neuma had watched more than a few men spiral toward death as she fucked the life out of them. She knew what a man looked like when he was past the point of no return. Lincoln wasn’t there yet, but he was approaching fast.

Aniruddha and Isaiah were arguing in quiet voices. The kind of hushed tone people took on in a funeral parlor.

“Healing magic is hard enough on Earth,” Isaiah was saying. “I managed to heal a headache once down here, but there’s a difference between an herbal analgesic and trying to keep someone’s heart from failing.”

“I don’t think it’s his heart,” Aniruddha said. He was calmer, more confident, but no less grim.

“But if we can keep his heart beating, we can keep blood flowing to his brain…last long enough for Elise to come back…”

Neuma tuned them out and increased her pacing range to the bedroom door and back. Her heels rapped loudly against the tile. Too loudly, considering a man was dying. Didn’t seem polite to be stomping around like that when he was on the brink of shuffling off his mortal coil. She kicked her shoes off and nudged them under the bed.

Shouts rose from beyond the bedroom wall.

The door slammed open, bouncing off of the wall. Azis and Gerard strode inside, dragging another man between them. He was wearing a linen apron and his face had been beaten into a bloody pulp.

Neuma stopped pacing. “The chef who made the pie?”

Gerard tossed him to her feet. “The one and only. We found him trying to get down into the dungeons.”

He hadn’t escaped out the gates because he had been trying to hide in the dungeons. Not real bright. Even if he’d gotten down there, he would have found himself caught in Jerica’s thrall. “I don’t recognize this guy.”

“He’s not a former slave,” Gerard said. “I don’t recognize him, either.” He shoved the man’s shoulder, hard. “Where’d you come from?”

The man trembled, staring around Elise’s quarters as though he had never seen the likes of them before. Her room was intimidating, just like anywhere else in the Palace—high buttresses, iron decorations, windows overlooking the city. Anyone who had spent any significant time in the Palace shouldn’t have been surprised by it.

“Well, getting this one to talk will be real easy,” Neuma said, jerking a spike out of her hair so that it tumbled around her shoulders. She held the point near his frightened, bulging eye. Sweat poured down his face. “At least I can torture you humans the normal way—by plucking your eyeball out, just like scoopin’ melon balls for a Halloween party.”

“I’ll tell you anything,” he said. “God, please just don’t hurt me.”

Neuma huffed. “You’re not even trying.” Kind of disappointing. She had a lot of frustration she would be happy to work out on him. “Who are you?”

“My name…” He swallowed hard. “My name’s Jacobi Nowacki.”

That meant nothing to her. She rolled the hairpin in her hand as she paced around him, skimming the energies that arced over his mind. Fear and desire were pretty similar, physically speaking. He wasn’t putting on a show to make himself look harmless. He was exactly as terrified as he looked—on the verge of losing bladder control, in fact.

Not much of an assassin.

“What did you put in that pie, lover boy?” Neuma asked, trailing her fingers through his hair. He didn’t have much. The top of his head was shiny and bald. She scraped his scalp with her fingernails.

He cringed. “I don’t know. It was given to me. I didn’t even think it was dangerous. There’s more in my pocket…”

Neuma took a quick step back. Anything that could kill Lincoln would kill her just as quickly.

Gerard patted Jacobi down and came up with a vial the size of his thumb. Fine black powder was collected at the bottom. “Gunpowder?” He moved to uncork it.

“Don’t do that!” Aniruddha crossed the room in three strides and snatched it out of his hand. “It reeks of magic and it almost killed Elise Kavanagh. You don’t want to let that out.”

Magic, huh?
That might mean a warlock. “Who gave this to you?” Neuma demanded. “Was it Belphegor?”

Jacobi’s panicked eyes flicked between her and Gerard. “What? Who’s Belphegor?”

“Who gave the vial to you?” Neuma asked again.

He hesitated.

She jabbed the silver spike into the muscle of his shoulder. Jacobi jerked back with a cry. “Levi!” he said. “Levi Riese gave it to me!”

She had been prepared to hear virtually any name from his lips in that moment—maybe even a friend of hers, someone living within the Palace that she and Elise trusted. How else would Sallosa have gotten a bespelled Taser? Who would have let in Jacobi in the first place?

But Levi’s name meant nothing to her.

Apparently she was the only one who didn’t recognize it. Isaiah gasped audibly. The other men exchanged dark looks.

“Levi Riese? Are you sure?” Isaiah asked. He yanked down the neck of Jacobi’s shirt. There was a tattoo of a bleeding apple over his heart.

“He only passed it on to me. He said it was a present for the Father, coming from someone else. I don’t know whom. That’s all the information I have!”

“Who’s Levi?” Neuma asked.

Jacobi cringed away from her as she trailed the point of the pin over his chest.

“He’s a werewolf in Northgate,” Isaiah said. “He’s with the Apple. He’s the reason I left St. Philomene’s.”

That was all she needed to know. Neuma turned to Gerard. “Send some guys to Earth,” she said. “I’m thinking the werewolf Alphas need protection.”

“That won’t be necessary,” Gerard said. “They’re already here.”

ELISE DESCENDED UPON
Reno, Nevada two hours before sunrise, unafraid of being caught by sunlight. It had been a long time since the sun had risen on Reno. Fledgling nightmares swarmed in the darkness, blotting out even the faintest rays of moonlight.

Once, Elise had treasured the small-town feel of Reno. It had been known as the Biggest Little City, and the slogan had been apt.

Nothing that she had enjoyed about the city remained—none of the trucks that served authentic slow-cooked
cabeza
burritos, the Art Town activities that once filled the nights with music, the food festivals and farmer’s markets and classic car shows. Even the Truckee, once her favorite jogging location, had been dammed near the source and now ran dry.

It hadn’t used to be like this, all wrecked cars and empty streets and burned-out buildings. It had been awake and alive, a twenty-four seven city.

She materialized a couple of blocks away from her destination and took the time to walk the rest of the way, skirting along the edge of the dry river underneath trees that had been bare for years. The once-grassy Idlewild Park was an empty dirt lot with rotten, collapsed playground equipment. A swing hung by a single chain, swaying in the wind.

A familiar brick building rose out of the darkness a couple of blocks away. Its front door was already standing open. The sign on the lawn still said “Motion and Dance,” but it was dark.

The strains of piano drew her into the dance hall. The reflection of a pale-skinned, dark-haired woman followed her along the mirrors as she approached the lone piano in the corner.

The man who played it had his head bowed over the keys, eyes closed, fingers sliding up and down the ivory with smooth grace. He played a complex tune of rising and falling chords as though he had three hands instead of two. His feet pumped the pedals, easily transitioning the nonsense scales between emotions. Angry and harsh. Wistful and bitter. Sweet and sad.

Elise stopped beside the piano. Without looking up, James transitioned the scales to a morose, down-tempo version of “Für Elise.”

His little joke. Acknowledging her presence without actually acknowledging her. Giving a nod to a time long past that Elise had moved beyond, but James hadn’t.

“This is pathetic,” Elise said.

He didn’t stop playing. The tune swelled. She had never heard him play the song like this before—in fact, she had never heard
anyone
play the song like this before, with so much meaning behind the melody.

Elise clenched her jaw. She didn’t like the way the music dragged at her heart with razorblades.

He stopped playing.

“I need your help,” she said in the fading echo of the strings that followed.

James finally lifted his head to look at her. Gone was the black hair and olive skin. His features were smooth and ageless, as though he were an effigy to the man she had known sculpted in marble. Combined with his pale, haunted eyes, the whiteness of his hair made him look old at first glance, but his face didn’t have a single wrinkle.

He touched one key. And then another. Two became four became eight. Slowly, James began to play “Orpheus in the Underworld” as though it were a funeral dirge.

She drummed her fingernails on her arm, annoyance tightening like a corkscrew in the back of her neck. “I’m not Eurydice.”

“You want me to follow you into Hell.” His voice was hoarse. It sounded like it had been a long time since he’d had reason to speak.

“Yes,” Elise said. “I want you to follow me into Hell. I want you to help me save lives. Something that I thought we had a mutual interest in.”

“We’ve never agreed on the means, or whether the end justifies them.”

She clenched her jaw. Unclenched it. Forced herself to relax. It was obvious that James thought the means justified the end. He had manipulated a murderous cult, cut a deal with Abraxas, and tried to hold Elise captive in order to achieve his end.

His problem wasn’t with ruthlessness. His problem was the fact that Elise was still a demon and doing demon things in a world filled with other demons very much like her.

Angels didn’t think much of lesser creatures like demons or humans, and James was very much angelic Gray. Elise didn’t expect him to prove himself better than his base natures—but she had hoped he would.

Apparently, she had hoped naïvely.

“It’s about Lincoln,” she said.

“Lincoln Marshall?”

She didn’t like the way James said that name. “No, Abraham Lincoln.”

“I’m surprised our noble former president ended up in Hell.”

Funny. So very funny. “Lincoln’s been poisoned. My witches can’t heal him. He’ll die if you don’t help me.”

“Help you? You mean, help
him
,” James said.

“Us,” she said.

James played on, leaning into the music, rocking gently from side to side with the beat.

“It’s not just Lincoln. People have been taken. A lot of people. Entire towns are disappearing under my nose. I’m not strong enough to save them—not without magic. My librarians left me everything I need to learn how to cast warlock magic, but it’s impossible for me to decipher alone.”

“Very well.” He finished the verse of “Orpheus” with a dark flourish of sharps and flats. He pushed back the bench and stood.

Elise had forgotten how tall he was. He had never struck her as a particularly large man when they lived together; outside the dance hall, he was soft-spoken, with a quick wit that belied his size. The lofty grace of angels had been passed down his line, and the height along with it.

It had been months since Elise walked among angels, and she wasn’t used to feeling small.

He gazed down at her with pale, penetrating eyes. Elise couldn’t resist glancing down to see if his wrist had healed where she had bitten him—
mangled
him—with her teeth, and she wasn’t sure if she was disappointed to see that there was no scar.