Lost in Prophecy: An Urban Fantasy Novel (The Ascension Series) (Volume 5) (24 page)

“You said you were going to show me something.”

James tossed the veils onto her couch and produced a book from his pocket. “This was among the books on Lincoln’s desk.”

Elise turned it over in her hands. “This is ethereal.”

“Indeed it is. From the library.” He didn’t mean the Great Library.

Elise’s eyes fell shut. She could remember the library in Eden through Eve’s memories, beginning from the time they had broken ground on it, through the construction, and all the way to completion. It had put Dis’s library to shame. Instead of being a single tower, it had been a grand, sprawling compound of solariums and studies, filled with trees growing through the foundations.

She didn’t remember it burning. That had happened shortly after Eve’s murder. But Elise knew that it had burned, and that no books had survived.

Except this one, apparently.

Elise fanned through the pages. She couldn’t read any of them. “This is the missing information?”

“It verifies everything that I’d only suspected. The singular source of power for all angels, demons, and humans. The threads that tie it all together.” James flipped to a page in the back without removing it from her hands. “In this chapter, it says how to manipulate it. Specifically, how to sever someone from that source of power.”

She would have to take his word for it. “So you can do this to Lincoln.”

“I believe so.”

Elise shut the book, rubbing her thumb over the engraved cover. It tingled with the memory of ethereal magic. “How do you know it won’t just kill him?”

“I don’t,” James said.

She pushed it back into his hands. “If he wants you to do it, then you have my blessing. Now can you do something about this?” She spread either side of her jacket, pulled down the neck of her shirt. The wound from Sallosa’s blade was still raw. James sucked in a hard breath.

“How did that happen?” He took his reading glasses from the pocket of his shirt and put them on to look closer.

“A daughter of the House of Volac tried to assassinate me.”

“With what, exactly? What could have left so much damage?”

She opened a chest sitting beside her couch, revealing Sallosa’s flamberge. Elise didn’t withdraw it. She didn’t plan on touching it ever again, if possible.

James wasn’t nearly as cautious. He lifted it from the velvet, one hand on the hilt, blade balanced on his fingers. He gazed along its glistening length. It caught the torchlight and reflected a gold slash across his eyes.

“Yes,” he said slowly. “Yes, this will help.”

“With what?”

“Don’t you see it?” James stepped back from Elise, swinging it in a wide, graceful arc with a flick of his wrist. He’d never been as good with swords as she was, but she’d taught him a thing or two. When the blade caught the light, it seemed to shimmer with fire. “This blade is enchanted. House of Volac, you said? I don’t think they have the knowledge to forge such a thing.”

Elise didn’t have the faintest clue. Volac was clever and powerful. Who knew what she could do? “Maybe they don’t have the knowledge anymore, but I’d expect a weapon like that to be passed down over the years.”

“That House has always been occupied by farmers.” He grimaced. “One of the few that grows new flesh from cadavers for use as leather and food. Quite a, uh, talent, if that’s what you want to call it, and certainly skilled in those respects. Generals and soldiers? Never. Smiths? Even less likely. Nobody within their family made this. It was sold to them by someone who knows how to craft warlock magic.”

“Or gifted to them,” Elise said.

“Thinking of anyone in particular?”

Belphegor would have been the obvious suspect, except that he didn’t seem to want her dead. “No. I don’t know.”

“Well, if we can access the House’s financial records, we can determine if they could afford such a sword, and if so, who sold it. There should be copies in the Palace.”

“I doubt it. The House of Volac has been hiding and falsifying records.”

He made a thoughtful noise, rubbing his chin. “Alternatively, I might be able to trace the magic to its root. I don’t need to know how to replicate it to deconstruct it.” He set the flamberge down again, continuing to mutter about records, spells, and tracking magic.

Elise had missed this. James Faulkner, with all his arcane knowledge, and the ease and clarity with which he knew how to find the things that he didn’t yet know. He was the reason that she had lacked.

She hated herself for being so happy to have him puzzling over that damn flamberge.

“That might lead me back to the enemy most intent on killing me this week, but in the meantime, it doesn’t fix this.” Elise pointed at the neck of her shirt again.

James reached for her. She took a quick step back.

“I was just going to try to heal you,” he said.

She clenched her fists. “You don’t need to touch me for that.”

“Actually…”

He moved toward her again, and Elise stiffened, but didn’t try to escape. He traced a gloved finger along the edge of the wound. “It looks painful,” he said softly.

It was. But Elise could no longer remember a time when her heart hadn’t ached, wound or not, so it didn’t seem to matter all that much anymore.

James removed his glove, revealing the blue symbols slithering over the back of his hand and between his fingers. It was a runic language in which Elise had become fluent; she could see that he was prepared to cast several impressive trans-dimensional and warding spells. He urged one onto the tip of his forefinger. It was brighter than the others—a healing rune.

She braced herself for it to hurt. It was ethereal magic, after all. Angel magic didn’t play nicely with demon flesh.

But she wasn’t prepared for exactly how much it would hurt.

White-hot shock jolted through her. Elise’s teeth ached, her bones shook, and her skin felt like it caught fire. She wrenched away from him with a cry.
“Hey!”

Startled, James drew his hand back. “Damn.”

“Damn” was right. Elise’s heart was pounding, forcing fresh amber blood through the unhealed wound. The sludge dribbled down her chest.

She braced a hand on the back of her couch, gritting her teeth as the pain kept building. His magic crawled over her like spiders with needles for legs. “What the fuck was that?”

“A healing spell,” James said, looking around the room. “Paper—I need paper.”

Elise pointed at the door to her office. He retrieved a pad of paper and stick of charcoal and returned, pulling her to the couch.

Once she was seated, he shoved the paper into her hands.

“Draw,” he said.

“What?”

“Draw a warlock rune for healing.”

She had seen a lot of runes in Onoskelis’s books, but hadn’t known what any of them meant. The only way she had been able to craft runes to torture Gremory was by testing them first to see what they did. None of them had healed.

“You’ll have to be more specific.” Her hand shook as she wrapped it around the charcoal pencil. Every beat of her heart felt like a fresh stab wound.

He ripped a page off of the notepad. “Follow my lead.”

Even though James had only hours to study the books in the library, he drew a rune with confidence. Not a looping, graceful ethereal rune, but a hard-edged mess of spikes. A warlock rune.

As he drew, he said a word, harsh and bitter sounding. It must have been a word of power, but he was ethereal Gray; he couldn’t speak words in ancient
vo-ani
the way a demon could have. Elise had no idea what he was saying. Her instinctive understanding of the infernal tongue didn’t extend to its archaic form.

When she repeated it, he shook his head.

“Harsher,” he said. “More in the back of your throat.”

“It feels like someone’s sawing through my breastbone,” Elise said through gritted teeth. It had been hard enough to cast warlock magic the first time, when she had been well fed and uninjured.

“Try it. Please.”

Elise repeated the word, trying to mimic Onoskelis’s accent. This time she felt it punch through her gut, making her skin warm. Orange magic flared on the page. The rune caught fire.

Yelping, she tossed the notebook to the floor.

The rune hung in the air, waiting for her.

“Take it,” James said, his eyes bright with more than just a reflection of the flames.

Heart thudding, Elise reached out and cupped the fire.

It didn’t burn. The rune crept onto her hand and settled into her skin with a familiar feeling—similar to the ethereal runes, but without the pain. It was like slipping into a hot bath with Neuma. It melted her muscles and drove away the pain of being touched by James’s attempt at a healing spell.

She had cast a warlock spell. Again. But this one wasn’t flickering like her last attempts. It was bright and strong.

Elise didn’t need any further instruction to activate it. She didn’t even need to speak. With a thought, the rune flared again, gushing smoke over her flesh.

Her chest throbbed. She pulled down the neck of her shirt to see what was happening, and found the skin on her breast puckering, drawing in on itself. The bleeding slowed. The bone underneath disappeared from view and the bruises faded.

James watched intently, smiling faintly. “Yes,” he said. “Excellent.”

The pain vanished. Elise wiped away the blood, and the skin underneath was untouched.

She had done it. She had cast her first successful warlock rune.

Elise would be unstoppable.

Her moment of excitement quickly faded to a more typical, pragmatic kind of worry. “Why did your spell hurt me so much? I’ve cast hundreds of ethereal runes before.”

“That’s probably why. It’s like an allergy. The first time an individual is stung by a bee, they may not react. The third or fourth sting can kill with anaphylactic shock. You’ve grown more sensitive to it.” James took her hand, rubbing his thumb over the lingering warmth where the rune had been momentarily positioned. “I noticed that the second warlock rune I cast started to hurt.”

“You’ve been casting warlock magic?”

“While I was in the library and you were roaming elsewhere, yes. It wasn’t too difficult to figure out. Warlock magic is shockingly similar to magecrafting. And it seems that I can cast it with some effort by drawing off of your strength in much the same way you can cast ethereal magic with my help.”

“That would have been great to know earlier,” Elise said. “Why didn’t you tell me?”

The corner of his mouth lifted. “I just did.”

But if she had known earlier, she could have cast warlock spells before going to the House of Volac. Now the army was already mobilizing, Gerard was preparing her personal guard, and they had no time to delay.

But she still knew how to do it now. She could cast magic without killing herself again.

The possibilities…

“Thanks,” Elise said. “We’ll need to do more work on this.”

His eyes creased at the corners in a millimeter smile. “Yes. We will.” Special emphasis on “we.”

He was still holding her hand, and Elise didn’t try to pull away from him. She was hungry again. Her healing spell had soothed the pain of the ethereal magic, but she had fed Lincoln earlier, and Neuma wasn’t offering up her blood for the time being.

But James was here. His blood tasted best of all. There was more than an hour until Elise intended to leave for the House of Volac.

The fact that she hadn’t pulled away hadn’t gone unnoticed by James. “What’s between you and Lincoln?” he asked, brushing his thumb over her bottom lip.

Between Elise and Lincoln? Lust, mostly. Maybe some shade of friendship. A sense of responsibility over for his safety. Hunger.

“Why?” she asked.

His thumb stilled at the center of her lip where it was fullest, hand cupping her jaw. “You know why.”

“I don’t owe anything to you. I don’t belong to you. Even if you tried to lock me in a cage so you could keep me like some pet.”

“We belong to each other. More permanent than marriage, more fatal than—”

“Don’t,” Elise said.

“Lincoln Marshall doesn’t love you.”

“I wouldn’t want him to.”

James dipped his head to hers. The brush of his lips was almost enough to unravel everything—her resolve, her anger, even her very skin.

“I’ll heal him for you,” James said, the words breezing over her lips. His hands crept into her hair. His fingers tangled in the hair at the nape of her neck. “But I won’t remain in the Palace and study in that library if it means watching you fall in love with another man. Watching you with Anthony and Malcolm very nearly killed me. I can’t do that again.”

“I never loved either of them,” she said.

Not the way he meant, anyway. But Elise was beginning to understand that love came in many forms—even for her, even before Eve had taken up residence in her soul. She had loved them as friends and brothers. Still loved Anthony, in fact. Enough that she would plunge into Malebolge to search for him among the missing souls without hesitation.

But they weren’t James. Nobody was James.

She closed her eyes, rested her forehead against his. “You’ve done too much to me. I can’t forgive you.” She hesitated, warring with herself, then pushed on. “But if you’re going to stay in the Palace with me, then we could still…”

Elise didn’t finish the sentence.

She didn’t need to.

He kissed her hard, letting his months or years or centuries of loneliness into it, pushing her against the back of the couch. Elise wrapped her arms around his neck, digging her fingers into his back through his shirt. She wanted to shred it with her fingernails. Expose his skin.

He tasted like forbidden fruit that Elise had sampled too many times. She could lose herself to him, lose herself to the maddening promises his lips made that James would not keep, and the intense pleasure of their united bodies. It would have been enough to drive a weaker woman to addiction, but far more destructive than any drug.

James broke away for air, but she followed, catching his lips again instantly. She wanted to consume his very breath.

“Wait.” He traced his thumb along the line of her bottom lip again, skin sliding against their mingled saliva. “There need to be rules.”