Lost in Prophecy: An Urban Fantasy Novel (The Ascension Series) (Volume 5) (23 page)

“There are wards on all the Houses,” Lincoln said. “She’s not going to let us in.”

“But Volac is in my hierarchy, and I’m at the top now,” Elise said. “The wards won’t keep me out. We just have to make sure that she doesn’t see us coming.”

The City of
Dis was peaceful from above. She used to drift over Dis every day while avoiding daylight on Earth, and she’d watched so many horrible things happen to the humans within the city—slaves dragged to butcher shops, skinned in the streets, and cooked for food.

Elise’s legions had changed the face of the districts, shifting chaos into order. Humans outside the Houses were as safe as she could make them. Some free men even dared to walk alone, without escorts.

It almost seemed to make all the trouble worth it.

She flitted to the outskirts of town and felt a buzz of warmth as she slipped through Volac’s wards. Elise set down at the bottom of the canyon. Lincoln staggered, gasping for air, clawing at his throat.

She touched his arm. “Breathe, Deputy.”

It took him too long to catch his breath—much longer than it usually took her allies—and when he did, he still looked too pale. “I’m fine,” he rasped.

He wasn’t fine, and if James didn’t find a cure for him, he wasn’t going to be fine ever again.

“Good,” Elise said, thumping him on the back. “Where are we going?”

“Why are you asking me?”

“Davithon’s memories sent me here. He was working with Aquiel, so he probably worked with you.”

Lincoln looked around the canyon. Its walls were surprisingly smooth, almost as though they had been carved out by water, although Elise imagined that it must have been something more like magma. The stone had been compressed into layers of alternating rust-brown and orange.

A winding path led deeper into the canyon, narrow and steep. That was where Lincoln headed.

“Remember something?” she asked.

“No,” Lincoln said. “Yes.” He groaned and rubbed at his temples. “Yeah, this definitely looks familiar.”

Their footfalls echoed in the distance, bouncing off of the curved stone. The bloody sky was only visible in a sliver high above their heads, split by a single bolt of gray-blue that Elise didn’t dare look at for long.

She walked briskly, eyes open wide, watching the shadows for a sign of Volac’s near-invisible mass. She was looking so hard for a threat that she didn’t notice when her companion stopped.

“Wait,” Lincoln said. “In here.”

He had paused in front of a narrow opening in the cliff. It was only four feet tall, and it vanished into darkness.

“What’s in there?” Elise asked.

Lincoln shrugged helplessly. “I don’t know.”

She stooped and walked inside.

The passage constricted around them as they walked deeper, squeezing until Elise’s shoulders were too broad to fit. She turned to an angle. Watched Lincoln following her, face pale in the darkness, feeling his way along the walls with arms outstretched.

They kept walking, and it kept constricting.

“Lincoln,” she began.

“It ends,” he said. “I know it ends.”

It did.

Elise squeezed through a slit that was barely large enough for her to sidle through, and then she was
there
, and she understood instantly that it was the place that they had been looking for.

The cavern under the flesh farms was broad and vast, made from the same clay-colored stone that looked like it had been hollowed out by water. Ancient stalactites hung from the roof. And among those rocky crags dangled bare human feet, some limp, some twitching, all of them far too high to be within Elise’s reach.

They really were directly underneath the flesh farms.

But as horrifying as the feet hanging from the rock were, Elise still couldn’t tear her gaze from what was below them.

For a moment, Elise thought that the hole was filled with water, but what she saw on the other side wasn’t the bottom of a pool. She saw distant fires and dark shapes that gave her a sense of immense scale.

They were standing on the brink of a portal.

“There’s another road down here that goes through the flesh farms,” Lincoln said, jerking his chin toward the opposite side of the portal. “That path’s a lot bigger, but it’s exposed. You couldn’t reach it without Volac knowing about it.”

Elise squinted at the portal. On the other side, she could make out something that looked like a long, curved tibia. It was so distorted that she had a difficult time determining its scale. Her eyes traveled over a jagged ridge below the tibia, trying to decide if she was looking at small rocks or something else like…buildings?

It was a skyline.

And that bone was definitely large. She was looking at one of the legs of Malebolge.

Heat washed over her as she realized what it meant.

The two dimensions shouldn’t have been connected so seamlessly—certainly not at the bottom of a canyon at the back of the House of Volac. There were approved pathways between the worlds—portals that the Palace controlled—but this was a gaping hole big enough for Aquiel to have dropped through without scraping his elbows.

Abraxas hadn’t just been tearing open fissures between Dis and Earth. He had torn open a fissure between Dis and Malebolge, as well.

“I remember this,” Lincoln said. “I’ve been here before.” His eyes unfocused, lost in memory. “I was escorting people. There must have been…dozens of them. They were human.”

“This is how they’ve been getting the slaves out of Dis without being detected,” Elise said, gazing down into the shimmering pool. “They haven’t been killing them or passing them through portals. They’ve been marching them.”

It was equally feasible that humans could have been transported directly from Earth to Malebolge, too. There shouldn’t have been any portals there, either, but at this point, nothing that Abraxas had done could surprise her.

“But why Malebolge?” Lincoln asked.

She searched her memories of retrieving Jerica. She hadn’t seen any signs of unusual industry within the mass of the cadaver—nothing that was unusual for Hell, anyway. She wouldn’t even know where to begin looking for something new or different. Until Elise had traveled down the borehole, she had never been in Malebolge.

But she knew someone who had.

ELISE FOUND JAMES
sitting on a bridge between two towers with his legs dangling over the side and his arms wrapped around the railing. He wore the veils that several of Elise’s guards chose to wear while patrolling the barricades, though they looked much stranger hanging over the shoulders of his white cotton shirt than they did over leather.

She dropped beside him, letting her feet hang over the edge like his. Even though she knew that she couldn’t be killed by a fall—she could phase into shadow long before hitting the ground—it still made her stomach twist to look all the way down at the courtyard so far below them, at the city stretched beyond the walls, and feel the wind making the towers sway gently. She was just one snapped cable away from a very long fall.

He didn’t acknowledge her presence. He only glared at Dis. The curve of his nose and mouth were faintly visible through the veils, so she could tell that he was frowning.

“I need you to come with me to Malebolge,” Elise said. “I need you to be my guide through the city.”

His pale eyes seemed to glow from within the shadows of the shroud. “Okay.”

Elise waited for him to say something else. To threaten her, set conditions, or make an ultimatum. But James turned back to the courtyard, blue light of the fissure reflecting on his irises, and ignored her.

“We leave in two hours,” she said.

“Okay.”

His hand was resting on the bridge between them. It would be so easy to move her own hand two inches to the left, brushing her skin against his, opening the bond between them.

Elise folded her hands in her lap.

“What about Lincoln’s cure?”

He gave some thought to the question, hands tightening on the bridge’s railing. “The reason that angels are so much stronger than demons is that there are fewer of them,” James said. “There are millions of demons. Perhaps billions of them. Each time one dies, the rest are strengthened infinitesimally.”

She frowned. “That’s not true.”

“No?”

“The strength of demons versus angels was determined by the Treaty of Dis. They decided angels should get more power because they were fewer in number, but it’s not like if you killed every angel but one, the survivor would have near-infinite strength.”

“That’s what they said, isn’t it?”

She could tell a rhetorical question when she heard one. “You think that all demons get their strength from a sole, finite power base.”

“We know that nightmares do. You’ve seen it yourself. Who’s to say that it’s not like that to some degree for all demons?”

“History.”

James made a noncommittal noise. “The entire universe is bound together by invisible fibers. It’s how we cast magic. It’s how men with precognition see the future. It’s how kopides and aspides connect their lives to one another.” The wind blew harder, like an invisible hand lifting the veils over his forehead, momentarily baring his eyebrows. His hair was white again. He didn’t seem to bother with his glamor when Elise was around.

“What does this have to do with Lincoln?”

“Everything. This might be the way to cure him.”

The fact that he was telling her that rather than acting on it didn’t make it sound like the solution would be a positive one. “Will it kill him?”

“Possibly,” James said. “He’s already a dead man if I do nothing, so I don’t see how that matters.”

He was probably right. “Then do it. Heal him.”

“You don’t know what you’re asking me to do yet. There are some things worse than dying.”

She swallowed hard. Sitting next to James without touching him, knowing what he had done to her yet being unable to push him out of her mind and life—that was, in its own way, far worse than dying. “I know.”

He finally looked at her. His white-blue eyes seemed to cut right through her skin to the core of her thoughts underneath. With a single finger, he tugged down the edge of his veils, baring his jaw, the white stubble, his strangely ageless features. With all of his illusions cast aside, he didn’t look any more human than she did. Not anymore.

“The anathema powder seems to affect a demon’s tie to this greater pool of energy,” James said. “It’s poisoning his very life force. Unfortunately, I don’t believe that there’s any way to reverse the effects of the anathema powder now that it has catalyzed.”

“So the only cure is death.”

“Or cutting him off from the source. If he weren’t a demon, he wouldn’t be poisoned.”

“That’s useless to us,” Elise said.

“Not necessarily.” James sighed. “I’ve been developing a new kind of magic ever since Shamain fell.”

Of course he had.

“Something more powerful than ethereal magic,” Elise said. “Something that will let you into Eden.”

“No. That’s not the goal.”

“But it could be a side effect.”

He looked pained. “If I’m not searching for greater power, then what am I doing, Elise? What else is there?”

He could be fighting the war that Elise was, trying to save people from bondage in Hell. Or he could be helping the werewolf pack fight off the Apple. He could be healing people that were wounded on Earth, trying help the good people of Two Rivers restore utility power, or any of a thousand other completely noble causes.

The fact was that James didn’t care about anyone other than himself anymore. There were no noble causes when nobody mattered.

“Okay. Fine. What have you learned to do?” she asked.

“To make a long story short, I’m trying to manipulate the aforementioned threads directly. Trying to learn the language of the universe so that I can become fluent and speak new realities, so to speak. I haven’t accomplished it yet,” he admitted. “However, I think that I might be able to sever Lincoln from the core of infernal power.” The one that Elise seriously doubted even existed. “If it does what I think, the effects would be threefold: the anathema powder would no longer sicken him, a huge amount of energy would be released in the severance, and—”

“Lincoln wouldn’t be a demon anymore,” Elise said.

“His physical attributes wouldn’t change, but he wouldn’t have any of the other problems. None of the hungers, or any of the powers, weaknesses, or potential longevity.”

“So…mortal.”

“He would be effectively human again, yes.”

“Doesn’t sound like much of a solution, considering that you haven’t been able to cast that kind of magic before.”

“I was missing information before,” James said.

“And you aren’t now?”

He stood, offering a hand to help her up. “Let me show you. We should discuss this somewhere private, where we won’t be overheard.”

Elise got to her feet without touching him.

“My rooms will work,” she said.

They walked through
the halls of the Palace together, Elise leading the way and James at her back. Everyone they passed bowed when they saw her. She nodded back at them.

A mixture of amusement and irritation radiated from James behind her. He thought it was funny that she had vassals.

She couldn’t wait to see how amusing he found her army.

Neuma wasn’t in the rooms when they arrived, and most of her belongings were gone, too. She hadn’t wasted any time in moving out and moving on. Elise stepped aside to let James in, shutting the door behind them and locking it.

He walked to the windows and looked out at the Palace as he unwound the veils. The crimson light from outside made him seem to glow. “You can’t even see where I blew a hole into the battlements anymore,” he remarked.

“They had it repaired before I took charge. Good thing, too. I wouldn’t have the time or resources to do it myself.”

“My apologies. If I’d known that you were going to be taking charge of the evil Hell-castle that imprisoned me, I might have tried to be more delicate about escaping.” He didn’t bother trying to conceal his disapproval, and Elise didn’t bother rising to take the bait.