Caged in Bone (The Ascension Series) (20 page)

Elise thought of all the ways she could feed, blood and body, and knew that there was something else in this witch that she could eat. It was surging the center of his brain and shooting signals all down his nerves. It made his heart pound and his skin flush. Not unlike arousal—but something even more nourishing.

Fear.

Her free hand clenched on the neck of his shirt and ripped it open down the chest. He tried to punch her. She slapped his hands away, backhanded him hard enough to leave him dazed. Then she made short work of his undershirt and exposed bare flesh.

There was barely any hair on his abdomen. His skin was smooth over dense muscle. Waxed. Also unlike James.

She raked her nails over his left pectoral.

“Help!” he shouted. “Someone—help me!”

Elise slapped him again. She heard a
crack
—something in his jaw breaking. He gave a sharp cry.

“Tell me,” she whispered, leaning hard against his chest. “Tell me what the coven’s doing here. Tell me where James is. Tell me what he’s done to Abel.”

Panic washed over his every nerve, delicious and crimson.

He had the information she needed. Elise could probably extract it from him. With this much fear in him, she could have convinced him of just about anything. But the matter of James and Abel seemed to wane in importance compared to the sound of his pounding heart.

There was a gaping hunger inside of her that this man could fill.

“Don’t,” he whispered. It was pathetically quiet. His eyes didn’t focus on her—they didn’t focus on anything.

Elise squeezed her hand and began to draw the fear out of his heart.

His whimpers intensified as she pulled deep, watching the play of nightmares across his brain. This man was afraid of the darkness. He was afraid of spiders and small spaces.

She pushed the images into him.

Fear me
, she thought, and he did.

It was delicious.

“Elise—don’t do this.”

She froze. Lifted her head.

James was standing in the doorway. Not a witch that resembled James, but James himself, with the kind of scruff on his jaw that meant he had gone a week without shaving. Bolts of gray hair framed his chin. He always looked older when he didn’t shave. The tribal tattoo-like markings that peeked out of the collar of his button-down shirt didn’t change that.

The look he was giving her was caught somewhere between horror and worry. Worry for her, or for the man she had pinned to the floor?

She looked down at him. Her fingernails dug into the muscles of his chest, making red welts lift where their skin contacted. The rest of him was almost colorless. She could feel his pounding heart beginning to fade. The fear was fading as he slipped into unconsciousness, too, but she instinctively knew that she could keep the juices flowing as long as he was alive.

Elise was trying to feed off of him like a nightmare demon.

The shock of realizing what she was doing, and having James catch her at it, wasn’t strong enough to make her release him.

She was
so
hungry.

“I need this,” she whispered, digging her fingertips into his pectorals. “I
need
it, James.”

“I refuse to believe that you’ve succumbed to…this,” James said. “You’re better than that.”

An insane laugh bubbled from her throat. “Am I?” Wasn’t this what the woman who ran Hell should do?

“Let Leander go. You could kill him.”

“I could die without him,” Elise said. She was constantly teetering on the brink now. Always just inches from losing her balance and falling into a black precipice where there would be no light, no body, no consciousness. A place worse than death.

James stepped forward. Hesitated. It looked like he wanted to touch her, but the fact that he didn’t spoke volumes about his presence—or lack thereof. Elise wasn’t imagining the slight blur to the edges of his hair and shoulders. “I know why you’ve come here. You want me—so come and get me. I’m not far from you.”

And then there was an image in her mind. She saw the outside of Pamela’s house, a trail leading into the forest, and felt the understanding that he would be at the end.

“I came to kill you,” Elise said.

His expression said that he already knew. He had probably been expecting it since the moment he decided to abduct Abel. Maybe it had even been one of his motivations.

He had to know what she was going to do to him.

“Please,” James said. “Let Leander go.”

Elise lifted her hands from the witch. Leander—his name was Leander. The fact he had a name meant that he had a life and identity. He wasn’t a demon in Hell that had earned Elise’s less than favorable attentions. He was just a witch in a coven that she hated, a witch too young to have been involved in her sacrifice to God. There were a lot of witches who deserved her ire. He wasn’t one of them.

He sucked in a gasp when she pulled away from him. The vein of fear was still there. She only needed to puncture it and keep drinking.

“Leander,” James said, reaching down to brush a hand over the man’s forehead.

The touch of magic made his eyes shock open. Leander focused on James, focused on Elise, and then scrambled away from her on all fours.

“Oh my gods,” he said, “oh my
gods
.” He coughed, hacked, spit blood onto the floor. There was still terror in his rolling eyes.

Elise had done that to him.

She wanted to do it again.

But she managed to keep her hands locked on to her thighs as James said, “Run, Leander, go to the bonfire,” and she didn’t chase when the terrified young witch slammed out the door and vanished into the snowy night.

The door banged shut behind him.

They were alone, Elise and this vision of James. She glared up at him from the floor. Her hands were shaking. She got no sense of fear from James, or anything else that could feed her.

“You asshole,” Elise said. “It wasn’t enough that we killed Seth. You had to go for Abel, too. You couldn’t leave Rylie and her pack alone.”

James didn’t look like he even heard her. He was still gazing at her with those painfully pitying eyes.

“What has become of you?” he asked.

It was like a knife through her stomach. Even now, through all her anger, his disapproval cut so deep.

“If you’ve hurt Abel…” She didn’t finish the sentence because she wasn’t sure what to threaten him with.

James seemed to understand the implications. “I’ll see you soon,” he said, and he sounded sad about it.

He left her with lingering hunger and the image of a trail in her mind.

“Who was that?”
Rylie asked when Elise stepped out of the house.

Elise was surprised to find Rylie dressing herself on the front lawn—she had forgotten that she wasn’t alone. “It was a witch guarding the house,” Elise said. “We need to get out of here before he alerts the coven.”

Rylie paled. “But James…?”

“I know where he is. They’re close.”

Elise grabbed the saddlebags from the motorcycle then strode down the trail James had shown her. Rylie followed.

It was hard to stay upright. Elise was only barely aware of her body outside the painful pit of her stomach, and trying to put one foot in front of the other felt as difficult as walking a tightrope. Sampling Leander hadn’t sated her. Not one iota. She was hungrier than she had been before she tapped into his fear.

“There’s no gateway around here,” Rylie said, so warm and alive at Elise’s side. “I looked everywhere within about a mile. It doesn’t help that I still can’t smell anything, so James and Abel are both masked. Are you sure they’re near?”

“They’re near,” Elise said grimly.

Rylie started walking faster.

They hiked the trail in silence, moving as quickly as they could through the snow. The cold seeped through Elise’s jacket and numbed her bones, but she barely noticed it. Her mind was back with Leander, dwelling on the taste of his fear and how quickly she had forgotten why she was there.

That kind of single-mindedness from a demon like her was dangerous.

Maybe even deadly.

“Something is wrong with me,” Elise said suddenly.

Rylie picked up her pace to walk alongside her. “What do you mean? The hunger?”

“How little control I have over it. I’ve been a demon for over three years. I should understand the limits of my power.” She spread her fingers. The nails were black again. “The demon that made me like this was five thousand years old. He could walk in daylight and melt the locks off of doors. He passed for human. He didn’t feed constantly.”

“He might not have always been like that. Five thousand years is a long time.”

Very long. Elise couldn’t begin to fathom what it would be like to see that many centuries.

Yatam had been obsessed with suicide when she met him. Elise had been happy to give him the death he longed for, as insane as the desire had seemed to her. Now she had his power and was, presumably, as immortal as he had been.

What if this hunger lasted for five thousand years? Would she want to die too?

She would have killed Leander if James hadn’t stopped her, and this was only the beginning.

“When we fought in Northgate that first time, you bit me,” Elise said. “It hurt more than any wound I’ve had since I became…this. For some reason, I’m weak to werewolves.”

Rylie’s brow furrowed. “Do you think that I did this to you somehow? Made you hungry?”

“No. That’s not what I’m saying—and it wouldn’t matter if you had. It only matters that you can stop me.” She plucked at a string dangling from the wrist of her glove. “There were three of us in the beginning. Adam, Eve, and Lilith. Man, angel, demon. I don’t think it was an accident that we were all so different. It’s all a system of checks and balances, power pitted against power.” Elise snapped off the string and flicked it to the ground. “If I lose control, you should take me down.”

The girl stopped short. Elise was four steps ahead by the time she realized it.

“I can’t kill you,” Rylie said.

Sympathy surged in Elise. She ignored it.

“I know that you hate what you are and what it allows you to do. I realize that what I’m asking of you is a terrible thing. But the fact that you’re a killing machine is a gift, Rylie, and maybe it’s a gift meant to keep me in check.”

Elise expected her to refuse again, but Rylie’s face had gone thoughtful. “A gift,” she repeated, as if rolling the words over in her mind. “Funny choice of words.”

“Will you do it?” she pressed. It seemed so important to know now, before they faced James.

“I don’t think I could hurt you.”

“Maybe you can’t,” Elise said, “but the wolf can.”

Rylie didn’t say no or yes. She didn’t say anything. But there was a shift between them—an understanding.

There were no coincidences in this world. Elise refused to believe that of all the demons and angels in Hell and Heaven, of all the humans walking the Earth, that she had crossed paths with an Alpha werewolf by mere
mistake
.

Elise had only been able to kill God because she had been made that way. And she had found the woman that might be able to kill her shortly after becoming a demon with uncontrollable thirst.

No accidents. No coincidences. It was all, somehow, elegant design.

She was certain of it.

Rylie kept walking. “What are we going to do about James?” she asked, gaze fixed to the trail ahead of them.

“Kill him,” Elise said. At some point when she had been thinking about checks and balances, she had realized that she was the check that James needed. He had taken the entire world off-balance in pursuit of Eden. She had to set things right—whether or not she liked it.

“Even if Abel is safe?” Rylie asked. “There’s nothing else we could do about him?”

James’s death didn’t seem to have even occurred to her as a possibility. How could he have done so much to her family and still be worthy of Rylie’s forgiveness?

“I don’t think so,” Elise said.

Rylie looked sad. “Dawn’s coming. Just a few more minutes.”

She was right. Elise had been trying to ignore it, but it was pushing against the fringes of her mind. No matter how long the night, no matter how much ash the fissure spewed, the day would always come back.

“Let’s get Abel,” Elise said.

The long trail
terminated in a clearing that looked familiar to Elise, though she couldn’t quite put her finger on why. It was a wide, open ring of trees dusted with snow like any of a thousand identical clearings she could probably find in that forest.

Except for the ethereal gate that stood in the center.

“What is that?” Rylie breathed, moving to step around a fallen log.

Elise caught her arm. “Wait.”

The air hummed with energy, and it wasn’t all from the gateway. Elise tipped her head to search for magic in the corner of her eyes.

There were spells in this clearing, very few of them new. They had been grown into the forest, stamped into the earth, woven into the fibers of the flora. The ghosts of a thousand other spells remained on top of that.

This had been Pamela’s clearing, Elise realized with a jolt. When she had lived with Pamela Faulkner, there had been one clearing that was always off-limits. The trail leading there had been obstructed by rope to make it clear Elise wasn’t welcome.

But Elise had still seen the clearing before. Pamela had healed her wounds beside it as the White Ash Coven danced sky-clad around a bonfire at the center. The wildness of the witches had been frightening to Elise as a little girl. The heavy drumming, their cries to the night sky, the pain of the wounds that Elise associated with them—it had haunted her dreams for years after that.

That clearing had been the first place that Elise glimpsed James. Seemed appropriate that it should be the place where she finally dealt with him.

She extended a hand past the log to feel the air. Magic hummed around her. It was old power, decades’ worth of it. All of it latent.

The only new magic fell around the gateway.

“I think it’s safe,” Elise said.

She stepped in front of Rylie anyway, letting the Alpha follow behind.