Lost in Prophecy: An Urban Fantasy Novel (The Ascension Series) (Volume 5) (27 page)

Volac’s staff had abandoned the harvest days ago, and in the middle of work. There were bloody stumps where fresh hands should have been growing. Entire severed muscles had been abandoned, uneaten and untreated.

The House hadn’t been working for a long time. Maybe even weeks.

“Elise,” James said, voice filled with warning.

She turned.

Darkness surged alongside the plantation, and Elise followed the rising shadow with her eyes as it lifted to tower over the army.

Volac had been watching. She’d just been waiting for Elise to walk so deep into the House that she couldn’t escape easily.

She swelled from the earth behind the shattered building, even larger than Elise remembered. The curve of her back, only a shade darker than the sky behind her, reared above like a skyscraper. Volac’s transparent foot crushed the dusty ground only a few feet in front of Elise.

The puppet of a body descended in a swirl of skirts.

Elise jumped back, jerking her sword from its sheath. But Volac’s human-like body wasn’t attacking. It crumpled to the ground, empty. Volac had shed the puppet. No more need for deceit.

This was battle.

The air thrummed. Elise felt Volac’s massive body moving.

“Get into the canyons!” she roared.

The fiends didn’t escape in time. The foot lifted and then fell on top of the right-flanking demons. Because Volac was transparent, Elise could watch their gargoyle bodies pulverized into a bloody pulp of meat and shattered bone. Four of them died simultaneously. Two had run, but not fast enough, and their lower bodies were crushed under the edge of her foot.

Elise thrust her blade into the shadow. Her falchion connected with something thicker than air, and a gash opened in front of her, baring meat underneath. Ichor splattered from Volac’s injury.

It was a paper cut on a demon her size. The poison from Elise’s blade spread slowly, engulfing the shadow in tendrils of black that just barely outlined a heel the size of a school bus.

The remaining fiends leaped at Volac, catching on to her ankle, scrabbling up her calves.

She swatted them off. They fell around Elise.

Albrinck, the centurion of the ninth century, wasn’t even bothering to engage with Volac. He drove the gibborim through the fields of the flesh farms, onward to the canyon. The nightmares and their centurion, Endi, weren’t far behind.

They knew that there was no point in fighting something the size of Volac. More importantly, there was no point in fighting something that didn’t really exist in this dimension as more than a shadow.

Terah seemed to disagree. She was directing the fiends to regroup.

“Into the canyons, Terah!” Elise ordered again.

The demon wheeled around on the fell beast, firing her crossbow at Volac’s shadow. “You heard her! Move!” The surviving fiends struggled free and pounded toward the canyon.

Hopefully, Volac would be too large to follow. But Elise wasn’t going to count on it. Nothing about the demon’s form obeyed the laws of physics.

She had to hold Volac off long enough for the others to escape.

“Hey!” Elise shouted. “You’re in my hierarchy! This attack is not in my best interests!”

The limp doll on the ground seemed to speak. The tongue attached to the mask thrashed. “Isn’t it? You’re attempting to circumvent a system put in place by Aquiel’s administration—a system that benefits your administration as well—and it’s not in the Palace’s best interests for you to stop us. Even Belphegor wouldn’t want you to destroy my flesh farms, I don’t think.”

“How do you know? Have you spoken to him?”

That irritating giggle was no less obnoxious now that the demon was a giant, shadowy Zeppelin of a monster. “No, but I’m capable of making very educated guesses.”

The foot swung and connected with Elise. She went soaring past James. In a blink, she crashed inside the rubble of the plantation, surrounded by fragments of wood and showering dust.

Volac loomed over her. Elise could almost make out a face high in the shadow—two massive eyes and a gaping mouth with teeth like rusty nails.

“Let’s not play at civility anymore, shall we?” Volac asked.

She slammed her hand down on the building.

Elise phased just in time. The roof collapsed where she had been lying a moment before, but she was already standing outside the building, clutching her obsidian falchion in both hands.

Volac turned slowly. The instant the demon’s eyes fell on Elise, she felt her skin contract.

She wasn’t going to be able to phase again.

“Fuck,” Elise said.

She started running.

James was still standing outside the flesh farms, watching the army pour into the canyon. Elise grabbed his arm as she passed. “Move, James!”

“Excuse me,” he said, brushing her hand away.

He stepped between Elise and Volac and pulled off his glove.

One of Volac’s fists swept through the air, blasting a torrential wind over the grounds. James’s scarves whipped around him. She was going to crush him, too.

“Hey!” Elise darted for him.

James gestured, making a small circle with his hand. Light blossomed from his fingertips. The magic struck Elise in a dizzying surge and she missed a step, staggered, sank to her knees.

Volac shimmered.

And then the demon was yanked through to Dis.

The entire demon—not just her shadow. She was no longer invisible. She was a behemoth, a thing even bigger than Aquiel had been, and far more ugly. Her legs were numerous, her head broad and flat and triangular, the sores on her skin gushing mucus that smelled like rotten milk and burned like fire.

Elise was standing underneath Volac’s chest. The view right above her was of an open mouth filled with thousands of angular teeth. Elise couldn’t see the sky anymore, or the plantation. She was surrounded by pitted flesh and a dozen thick legs covered in razor-sharp spines.

Her jaw dropped open.

“James,” she said, “why the fuck did you just do that?”

He grabbed her hand. “
Now
we run.” He hauled her toward Volac’s head—at least, what Elise assumed was Volac’s head—which was hanging over the flesh farms.

A mighty shriek rent the air, so loud that it was like crushing Elise’s skull between two rocks. The legs stumbled. Volac began to fall.

Elise didn’t watch. She ran as fast as her corporeal legs could carry her, James’s fingers tangled with hers, breath caught in her throat and hair streaming behind her.

One of the legs swept out and smashed into the ground in front of them, cratering the rock. Debris pelted their legs. James skidded to a stop, pushed Elise to the right. “That way, go quickly—”

“I’m going as quickly as I fucking can!”

They were caught in a maze of Volac’s legs as they buckled, creating earthquakes each time a knee connected with the ground. The hands jutting from the flesh farms reached for Elise as she passed, fingers straining, catching at her boots. She leaped over them. Kicked them away. She couldn’t hurt or help them. She would be lucky to save herself.

James fell with a shout, hand ripped from Elise’s. She whirled to find him on the ground. His leg was pinned under Volac’s sagging belly.

Her heart leaped into the back of her throat.

She jumped over him before the weighty flesh could roll onto his chest, bracing it with both hands over her head. Elise’s strength, like many demons, wasn’t limited by muscle, but by her power—and she was very powerful. But she had never felt anything as heavy as Volac before. She gritted her teeth and strained to push the rolls of flesh off of James, but she couldn’t even get an inch.

James flicked a spell into the air.

Magic rippled through Volac’s skin, making it shiver against Elise’s fingers. Then it splattered.

The flesh liquefied near the ground, opening a huge hole in the skin that twitched and seized. Ichor slopped over Elise.

James pulled his leg free, slacks caked to his leg by the blood, and scrambled to his feet.

They ran side by side, the hot wind of Dis in their faces. Elise heard Volac continuing to fall but didn’t look back. They passed the empty slave quarters only to hear the wood shattering under Volac’s weight a moment later.

And then there was nowhere to run.

They stopped on the edge of the cliff. The army was farther up the ridge, taking a path down into the canyon, led by Terah.

Elise gripped James’s arm and prepared to jump.

But Volac finished settling, and her last leg sprawled out a good six feet away from them.

They were safe.

James and Elise stood on the edge of the cliff for a long moment, trying to catch their breaths. Flattened out, Volac took up almost the entire front of her property, like a ruddy beached whale struggling to breathe despite its weight.

She wasn’t dead—not yet—but she couldn’t move, either.

Elise took in the sheer size of the demon and all the assorted pieces that she could see, and she couldn’t pick out any of the normal limbs she would have expected to find. She had no idea if Volac was facing them. She couldn’t even see the gates over the swell of her back.

The demon wasn’t moving. They really were safe.

“That could have been a really bad fucking idea, James,” Elise said.

“But it wasn’t. That demon’s true form was in a parallel dimension,” James said. “When I saw the size of its projection, I assumed that it was forced to project itself to Dis because it wouldn’t be able to survive here. There are other infernal worlds without gravity, or with fluid instead of air, to support creatures that size. By pulling her through…”

Volac
was
a beached whale. It was nauseating to see—and yet, somehow, deeply satisfying.

“Another one of Nathaniel’s spells?” Elise asked.

“Yes, it’s a trick I figured out from his work. Impressive, isn’t it?”

“Yeah. I guess it is.”

James smiled. Warmth radiated through their bond. He was happy to be fighting at Elise’s side again—working together rather than working against each other.

Reluctantly, she smiled back.

By the time
Elise and James caught up, the centuries had already made their way down to the portal cavern at the bottom of the canyon. The path was too narrow to fit the fiends more than five abreast, and the gibborim had to edge in sideways. Elise pushed past them.

Terah and her fell beast stood at the edge of the portal, the reins looped over her fist.
 

“Malebolge,” she said with a dark smile. “It’s been too long.”

“Not long enough,” James muttered, staring at the leg through the shimmering fissure.

Elise surveyed the roof of the cavern. Several of the human legs were hanging lower than they had been when Elise had visited with Lincoln, as if having Volac fall on the farms had hammered them partway through the earth. Nothing else had changed. There was nothing to indicate that anyone had been through lately, either going in or coming out.

Her human guards were arrayed around the bottom of the path. Elise glanced at James before addressing them. “I want you all to stay here and guard this side of the portal. I’ll take the centuries through. Make sure that nobody follows us.”

“With all due respect, I think I should go with you,” Azis said.

She would have preferred that, too. But James was right. Malebolge was no place for mortals. The breeding ground of nightmares would have been bad enough for people without tortured pasts; for humans formerly enslaved by demons, it could easily break even the strongest of them. Even Azis.

“I need you here, watching our backs,” Elise said in a tone that brooked no room for argument. She turned to face Terah and the other centurions. Albrinck and Endi were both incubi—brothers, actually—and about as obedient as one could hope from demons that lived in an infernal metropolis. “When we arrive in Malebolge, our goal is to secure all humans or human products. We aren’t taking control of the city. Bring anything you find back here and hold it for me to inspect. Understood?”

Terah nodded and turned to pass the instructions onto the fiends. As soon as she finished talking, they started hurling themselves through the portal, leaping over the edge without hesitation. When they connected with its shimmering surface, they vanished.

The collection of nightmares followed next, and then the gibborim.

Elise waited for all of them to pass, then moved to leap.

“Father,” Terah said.

She paused. “Yes?”

“I just wanted to say…thank you. This is enjoyable.”

Damn demons.

That wasn’t Elise’s thought. She shot a look at James, but he was scratching his eyebrow and looking elsewhere, feigning innocence.

“You’re welcome, Terah,” Elise said.

She grabbed James by the sleeve, jerked him to her side, and jumped.

ELISE AND JAMES
emerged from the portal to find chaos.

She slammed onto her knees at the top of stairs hewn from bone. James hit a few inches ahead of her and slipped down several steps before catching himself.

“Good Lord,” he said, staring out at the city.

They had appeared within the ribcage of Malebolge. The bones curved around them, forming a high canopy with edges highlighted by distant fire. The tissue within the ribs had rotted, growing massive mold configurations that had been hollowed out into buildings.

The gibborim were already tearing away doors and reaching inside to jerk demons out onto the streets of the spine—some newborn nightmares that looked very much like Jerica, and others for which Elise had no name.

Elise’s gaze moved past the gibborim, following the line of the street down toward the pelvis. It was like standing on top of a hill in San Francisco, except that the streets were framed by tissue instead of cramped buildings, and the city spilled out underneath the small ribs and spread around the hips.

And Malebolge was still rioting.

The streets seethed with nightmares and brutes and a thousand other demon breeds. Some of the buildings were on fire, sending spirals of black smoke into the air. Screams carried on the air, echoing hollowly off of the inside of the ribcage, falling flat against the tender flesh of the rotting structures.