Lost in Prophecy: An Urban Fantasy Novel (The Ascension Series) (Volume 5) (33 page)

His tongue lolled out the side of his mouth, leaving drool on her leather pants.

A faint smile crept over her lips and his tail wagged harder.

“Belphegor wants me to do it. If he wants it, then the result can only favor him. I bet there’s something in New Eden he wants. Or else he wants me to focus my attention on the angels so that I don’t notice what he’s doing.” Not that she had any clue where he had gone after Shamain fell anyway.

Thinking aloud wasn’t making the choice any more obvious.

War was an awful thing to conduct. Just as terrible, in many ways, as what had been done to the angels’ victims. She would have to beat down the city’s walls and force her army down New Eden’s gullet.

But her army wasn’t very strong. It was oversized, undersupplied, and disobedient. And Heaven wasn’t exactly across a mountain range or some other inconvenient geographic feature. It was in another dimension. She’d have to move the entire army to Malebolge before she could even reach New Eden.

Then demons would die. Angels would die. And the mortals would be caught in the crossfire.

But if she did nothing, then the survivors would never escape. Rylie would look at her with those big, heartbroken eyes. Thousands of lives would be lost—maybe more—because Elise hadn’t forced the angels to come to heel.

It would all be on her shoulders.

Ace whined again. Her fingers had stopped moving.

She resumed scratching, and his tail resumed thumping.

The door to the throne room opened. She could hear the voices of Gerard and the centurions outside, waiting for her to tell them what they were going to do. Whether they were about to go to war or concede to the angels and remain in Dis.

James entered and shut the door behind him. His veils were loose around his neck, letting her see the tension around his eyes, the lines bracketing his mouth.

“Benjamin?” she asked.

“Asleep. He’s as restful as I can make him. But he roused briefly, and I spoke with him.”

Her interest was piqued. “What did he say?”

“He had a message for you, actually,” James said. “He wanted me to tell you that Marion’s in New Eden.”

Elise froze.

Marion is in New Eden
.

Her hands began to shake.

“She can’t be there,” Elise said. “I would have heard.”

But why would he lie?

Benjamin seemed to want her to invade New Eden more than anyone else. If it was because of Marion…

“Who is Marion?” James asked as Elise stood, careful not to prick herself on the iron thorns of her chair.

She took Ace’s chain, wrapped it around her fist, and led him through the banners toward the door. He trotted at her side, tail swishing, head lifted.

James hurried to keep up with her, too. “Elise, who is Marion?”

She paused in front of the doors, closing her eyes, collecting herself. This would be the beginning of her most important performance of all. She needed to be strong, without a hint of weakness—not just for the sake of the victims in New Eden, but for Marion. Elise couldn’t falter. She couldn’t fail.

“Elise?” James’s voice sounded like it was a thousand miles away.

She threw the doors open.

There were more than a dozen faces waiting on the other side, and they all fell silent one by one as they realized that Elise had arrived.

She looked between her guards, from Gerard to Aniruddha, to Isaiah and Azis. Even Neuma, Jerica, and Terah were waiting for her verdict. Her most trusted friends and allies. People that she wouldn’t want to subject to war for anything.

Almost
anything.

Elise clenched her fist on the chain hard enough to keep her hands from trembling.

“Prepare the army. We’re invading New Eden.”

Abram rode the
motorcycle with the radio turned off, enjoying the grumble of the engine and the wind whipping over his helmet.

It felt good to be back on Earth. He had never thought that he would be happy to see this miserable place, so much more gray and broken than the Haven where he had grown up, but at least it wasn’t New Eden. It didn’t smell like apples. There weren’t so many angels that he felt like he was having an ice pick stabbed through his skull. He didn’t have creepy stone vines drinking his blood.

There were lots of pluses to being on Earth, even if it still wasn’t home.

The long drive didn’t last long enough. Mountains soon turned to fields, and he reached the farm where Shamain’s temple district had crashed that winter. Ethereal buildings jutted out of the corn like bones in a disturbed grave.

His tires jittered against the broken cobblestone as he climbed into the ruins. The Union wasn’t around anymore, so nobody tried to stop him. They had been stationed there for a couple of weeks after the temple fell, but now there weren’t even cameras monitoring the site. Apparently the Union was stretched too thin after the Breaking to worry about anything that wasn’t an active threat.

If ethereal ruins weren’t an active threat, Abram didn’t want to know what warranted their attention.

His headlight crept up a pair of bare legs standing in the middle of the road and then shined on a woman’s face. He stopped the motorcycle a couple of feet away.

It was Summer.

“What are you doing here?” she asked, hands planted on her hips. The look she gave him was chillingly reminiscent of the looks Gran used to give them when they got into trouble as kids.

It was the full moon. She should have been running with Rylie and Abel. He had counted on that to allow him to disappear without anyone noticing, but apparently there was no eluding his twin sister’s attention.

He dismounted from the motorcycle, setting the helmet on the seat. “I have to know.”

“Know what?”

He brushed past her. She turned and followed him, matching him stride for stride.

Abram wasn’t trying to push his sister out. He’d never been a man of many words, and he just didn’t know how to begin to tell her what had led him to Shamain’s crashed temple.

While he had been in New Eden, connected to the city, he’d had dreams. But not the kind of dreams that Elise had described the other victims experiencing. They weren’t blissful visions of winning a high school basketball game or eating dinner with family or going on bike rides through the Appalachians.

Abram had been dreaming of a garden.

It had been bigger than a city, with a giant tree at the center. Its trunk was wide enough that Northgate could have fit comfortably inside. The branches had formed a canopy over most of the garden, and there were juicy red apples on most of the branches.

That had been the entirety of his dream. A big tree. A garden. Red apples.

There hadn’t been mythology in the Haven, but Levi had given him a crash course in Adam, Eve, and the place called Eden. He’d talked about them the same way that he had talked about history, like Mesopotamia and Julius Caesar, like they weren’t part of some primitive religion but actual fact.

And Abram was definitely dreaming of Eden.

The grass outside Eve’s temple was yellow and hard, unlike the garden in his dream. Earth winter had been brutal on Shamain’s ruins. Even the stone buildings had cracked and lost their luster. A mural rimming the base of the temple had turned to little more than a colorless blob.

“Guess there isn’t much weather in Heaven,” Summer said, rubbing her hand over the mural. The paint crumbled under her fingers. She wiped it off on the hip of her button-down dress. “Seriously, Abram, what are you doing here? Talk to me.”

“I have to know,” he repeated.

His footsteps echoed as he stepped into the temple. Summer had told him all about the “super extremely awesome” clock that had been inside the building, but there was no sign of the giant cogs now. It was empty all the way up through the mezzanine.

He mounted the stairs. Summer spoke behind him. “Did you see Nash while you were in New Eden?”

“Yes,” Abram said. He was surprised that Elise hadn’t told her.

“And?”

“You won’t want to know.”

“I just need to know if he’s okay,” Summer said. “He hasn’t checked in with me. He always checks in with me.”

Abram had never liked Nash, but now he kind of hated him. Regardless, his sister loved the angel. That had to count for something. “He’ll probably survive. The other angels found him.”

She sucked in a breath. “What happened?”

“Elise happened.”

Summer pressed her lips together. Anger flashed through her eyes. “He attacked her first, didn’t he? I told him not to try to take her head-on. Dammit, Nash…”

“Like I said,” Abram said. “He’ll probably be fine.” If it was “fine” to be trapped in New Eden with angels that must have considered Nash an enemy by now.

“So we failed,” Summer said. “We didn’t stop the war.”

Maybe if they hadn’t tried to take the war into their own hands, it wouldn’t have happened in the first place. Maybe Levi wouldn’t be locked behind glass underneath New Eden.

He didn’t respond, letting his anger burn silently inside of him. But Summer knew. She always knew.

“Are you okay, Abram?”

Was he okay? His wrists were still bleeding intermittently. Those dreams were driving him crazy. And he was the only escapee of an abduction that had ended up claiming the pack he considered family, albeit family that he didn’t like all that much.

“I’m fine,” he said gruffly.

They reached the top of the temple. Summer didn’t immediately join him on the walkway. She hung back on the stairs, chewing on the inside of her mouth. “If you’re going where I think you’re going…”

The room with the lock for Eden—the old Eden, not New Eden—was down that hallway.

“You don’t have to come,” he said, turning his back on her. He could find it on his own.

He ran his hands over another mural, this one much better preserved than the one on the outside of the building. It depicted some kind of female angel with soft brown hair and a sad smile in a lush garden, very much like the one Abram had been dreaming about.

Summer fidgeted beside him, twisting her hands.

“We should go back home,” she said.

Home? Northgate wasn’t home. The sanctuary wasn’t home.

Abram’s fingers brushed a crack in the wall. He dug his fingers in and hauled the door open, revealing a short hallway and a round room on the other side.

He stepped through.

There was a statue of a woman at the center of the room. It was the same angel from the mural, her arms open as if inviting him to embrace her.

The elements of the ritual that Summer had described were still intact. There was a large rug that had been woven by James Faulkner to use as a circle of power and an altar smeared with dried blood. This was where both Abel and Summer had tried—and failed—to open the lock.

Because the mural had been closed, the Union hadn’t broken in to mess with James’s ritual. Everything was still in place.

It didn’t look like much. After everything that Summer had said about that catastrophic day, Abram had expected a lot more out of one of Eden’s locks.

He picked up a ritual knife with an elaborate hilt and a shining steel blade.

“Abram,” Summer said with more urgency.

He clenched his fist around the cutting edge and felt it bite into his flesh.

Blood dripped down the heel of his palm, off his wrist, and onto the feet of the statue. Just a few drops.
Drip, drip, drip.

A humming filled the air, and the statue began to move. Her hands turned toward each other, lifting toward her breast. She assumed a prayer position, head bowed, eyes closed.

Energy crackled above her, filling the room with brilliant white light. Abram flung up an arm to shield his eyes.

As he watched, the energy widened into a circle, allowing him to see the garden he had been dreaming of, filled with emerald green trees and a brilliant blue sky.

His blood had opened another one of the locks to Eden.

Dear reader,

Thanks for joining me for yet another story. Book six,
Torn by Fury
, will be available in summer 2014. If you’d like to know when it comes out, visit
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Happy reading!

Sara (SM Reine)

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