Caged in Bone (The Ascension Series) (26 page)

Yemiel and Michael were behind them like silent, disapproving escorts, glowering at Summer as though they had just discovered rats infesting their kitchen. Both were loyal to him, as much as any angel could be loyal to a traitor like Nash. That didn’t mean that they approved of the company he kept.

Pinpoints of disembodied light swirled around Nash’s wings as they walked downtown, toward the center of the tree that the city was meant to resemble. The little stars moved like insects but weren’t truly alive. They were one more remnant of magecraft—a defense that remained after the First War, not a decoration.

All of the trees had their lanterns intact. There were as many stars as he expected. The city was bright.

How could Atropos have gotten in?

“Search the temple again,” Nash told Yemiel and Michael, who gave a short bow and left him.

He was confident that there was nothing in the temple. He had searched it twice himself. But he knew where they needed to go next, and he wouldn’t take the angels with him.

There was only one dark place in the city.

Summer cupped the stars in her hands, holding them captive in the cage of her fingers. “Are they alive?” she asked, lifting them to her ear as if to listen to a quiet song.

“They’re ancient, mindless magic,” Nash said. Which was mostly true. Summer didn’t need to know how the stars had been made.

It sickened him to see her holding them, so he took her wrists. Her fingers fell open. The stars cast glowing patterns on her skin as they drifted away.

Summer grinned at him. “Let’s move here. Not permanently, but like…a winter home. Somewhere to escape the snow of the sanctuary. It’s beautiful.”

Not anywhere near as beautiful as she was. The look in her eyes made his heart feel like it was swelling. She deserved so much better than Shamain.

“We can talk about it later,” he said. They couldn’t let themselves be distracted by fantasies, not when they still needed to find Atropos. He pulled her to the other end of the bridge. “If you like this, then you’ll especially like what I have to show you now.”

Summer followed him willingly to the center of Shamain. The square was marked by a statue of Adam and Eve that had been sculpted as a wedding present, both of their features cast in life size, with love in their empty stone eyes as they gazed eternally at each other. They stood on a platform over a narrow part of the canal, tall enough that gondolas could pass underneath, but narrow enough that only the most confident pilots attempted it.

“Who are they?” Summer asked.

“The mother and father of angels,” Nash said. “Adam and Eve.”

Summer had grown up in the Haven—a world without mortal mythology—and the names were meaningless to her. Her expression didn’t change. “I take it that the memorial means they’re not living anymore?” she asked, touching his arm gently.

Nash put his hand over hers. The question filled him with unexpected grief.

Uriel had told him that angels had lobbied for the removal of that statue after Adam killed His wife, but there hadn’t been adequate votes for it. Many angels refused to acknowledge what Adam had done even now. They liked the illusion of security provided by their mother and father’s statue. The fools.

“Yes,” he said. “They’re gone.”

Nash waved a hand at the statue, and the cobblestones split underneath them to expose another path.

Summer’s jaw dropped as stairs appeared under the canal. Crystalline waters sluiced over the retaining walls and sent drizzling waterfalls down the center of the staircase. Nash’s feet were submerged in the shallow waters as he stepped to the top of the stairs.

“I can carry you down. It’s very wet.” He opened his arms to Summer.

She laughed. “You kidding?”

Summer splashed past him gracelessly, jumping from stair to stair as though she were playing in puddles after a rainfall. She didn’t care that it soaked her to the knees. She trailed her hands through the waterfalls as she descended.

Nash walked briskly behind her, keeping the tips of his wings lifted from the water, the feathers curved over his head so that his hair wouldn’t be dampened. He was not as charmed by the idea of being wet.

The last thing he saw before vanishing underground was Adam’s blank stare.

The stairs kept curving down, deeper and deeper. The walls were painted with twisting vines that seemed to chase them down.

“How long is this?” Summer asked.

“It goes to the bottommost edge of Shamain,” Nash said. “This is a self-contained world, much like the Haven. It exists within a large sphere. If we tunneled any deeper, we would have broken through to void.”

“Void—like space?”

“Less than that.”

Summer lifted her eyebrows. “Huh?”

They stopped once he reached the chamber at the bottom. It was an open, arching cavern, much like the crystal caves, though sanded down until the walls were smooth. Seven equidistant waterfalls made the walls seem to shimmer, draining into a basin that would pump the water back to the surface of the city.

The image of an apple was inlaid into the floor: a single spherical fruit surrounded by tangling vines. Nash and Summer stood in the center of it.

He let his eyes sweep over the darkness of the chamber. Sourceless blue-gray light filled the room, barely bright enough for Nash to see the waterfalls.

“This is a former transit hub, where all angels used to enter and exit Shamain through fissures,” he explained. “The canals converge here. They are the blood in the veins of the city, and the primary source of our city’s glow.”

And it was dark enough that an extremely determined demon might be able to hide there. But he didn’t sense any demons nearby. He thought he would know if something infernal violated the sanctity of the chamber.

That didn’t mean that Atropos hadn’t passed through.

“Where are the fissures?” Summer asked.

Nash stepped through the waterfall, holding his wings wide enough to shelter Summer as she followed.

There was another, smaller chamber on the other side that hadn’t had its crystals filed down to smoothness. It was like standing inside a large geode. Nash had to brace his feet very carefully on the ridged floor to keep steady, though Summer was nimble and graceful on the crystals.

All of the formations pointed toward the center of the room, where a single light hung suspended.

It was brighter than the tiny stars in the city, but dimmer than a sun. It pulsed with a silent heartbeat. A hushed song whispered through the chamber as though the light were trying to share its melody with Nash.

A fissure.

It was the physical junction between dimensions—the place that Shamain connected with Earth and other Heavens. This one, he knew, let out somewhere on Earth, though he wasn’t sure where.

The easiest way to find out would be to pass through and see what they found on the other side. And hopefully Atropos would be there to answer for what she had done to Leliel.

“Wow,” Summer whispered reverently. “Just like in the Haven.”

“Indeed.” He held his palm toward the fissure to feel its warmth. “We’ll need to inspect each of these to determine where Atropos entered and exited.”

“No, we won’t.” She turned to walk out of the chamber, balancing carefully on the crystals.

Summer never failed to surprise him. Even now. “Why not?”

“Atropos didn’t exit through a fissure,” Summer said. She walked along the wall, inhaling deeply. She had drenched herself on the way out of the last chamber. Her curls clung damply to her shoulders. “Her freshest scent is on the stairs. She did come down here, but she also left the normal way—through the streets.”

She plunged into the next chamber without waiting for him.

Nash stood in the threshold, letting the waterfall pour off his arched wings. Summer sniffed at the air surrounding the second fissure, which was a pale, twinkling shade of pink.

“How could she have left on the streets? It’s too bright for her up there,” Nash said.

Summer returned to him. “How did she get down here in the first place?” It was a rhetorical question; she knew that he wasn’t sure. But she did have a point.

“You think that someone’s helping her,” he said. “Escorting her somehow.”

“How much do you trust the other angels?”

A week earlier, Nash would have said that he trusted them all with his life. They were a family. Some hated each other, but there was love at the core of it, and an interest in their mutual safety. That was before Leliel had deliberately allowed Atropos into Shamain.

Leliel couldn’t have been helping Atropos. She was still unconscious, on the verge of death.

That didn’t mean another angel couldn’t have turned traitor.

Suddenly, Nash regretted bringing Summer to Shamain. He tailed her closely as she sniffed around the third chamber and stopped her when she went to enter the fourth.

“We should leave,” he said, glancing up the stairs longingly.

“But there’s something in there,” Summer said, brushing him aside to enter the next fissure cave.

“Summer, wait.”

She stopped just inside the waterfall, her hourglass silhouette motionless on the other side of the veil.

“What is
that
?” she whispered. The words made Nash’s heart stop beating.

He shoved through the water.

The fourth fissure led to somewhere near sub-Saharan Africa, if Nash was correlating his ancient geography correctly to modern day. It pulsed gently with the color of savannah skies.

And on the crystal wall beyond the fissure, there was a rune.

Its diameter was greater than the width of Nash’s extended wings, and it glowed with negative light, turning the surrounding crystals a colorless shade of dusty red. Dark threads laced the surrounding crystals with slender black veins.

The sight of it threw Nash to the time before his long imprisonment in the Haven, all the way back to the First War. The time before the Treaty of Dis had forbidden ethereal and infernal magics.

Atropos
had
been there. And she had cast an ancient warlock spell.

It seemed to be triggered by Nash’s presence. The vivid light of his wings drained out of the feathers. The darkness grew.

He reacted too slowly, seizing Summer, pulling her against his chest, engulfing both of them in the cocoon of his wings.

“No,” he said, although he wasn’t sure what he was denying.

Shadow pulsed.

The crystals exploded—and so did the fissure.

Levi disappeared sometime
after eight. Abram wasn’t sure of the exact time the werewolf went missing; he knew that he had seen Levi when Toshiko started to serve dinner, which was around eight, but Levi wasn’t there during cleanup at nine.

Yasir’s face brightened when he saw Abram approaching. “There you are,” he said, offering a tablet computer to Abram. “I wanted you to look at this.”

He took the tablet. There was a map on the screen, but despite Yasir’s eagerness, Abram was too distracted to get any information from it. He had last seen Levi here—with the Union personnel, arranging supply crates, working with his jacket off to display his flexing werewolf muscles.

Yasir was talking about the map.

“We marked out the boundaries that we could see from above in the helicopter, but this is some dense forest here,” he said. “We couldn’t find where the fence disappeared here, here, or…here.” Yasir pointed at different sectors of the map with his stylus. “Can you fill in the blanks?”

“Why?”

“So we can make sure the wards are complete.”

Right, the Union had promised to fix that. He gazed at the highlighted sectors on the map. His father was the one who had always maintained and patrolled the fence; Abram wasn’t certain of its exact position surrounding the sanctuary. But he sketched out his rough guesses.

“Where’s Levi?” Abram asked as he zoomed out to get a broad view of the map.

Yasir took the tablet back. “Levi? He went back to help guard the Bain Marshall statue.”

Abram hadn’t seen any Union vehicles leave. He’d wanted Levi helping the Union within the sanctuary so that Abram could keep an eye on him.

“Do you have more people coming soon?” Abram pressed. “Is the Union escorting Stephanie Whyte and Bekah Riese?”

Yasir looked startled. “Stephanie?”

“The doctor. High priestess of the Half Moon Bay Coven.”

“Oh,” he said. There was the barest pause before he said, “Yeah, Levi mentioned that she’d be out here later. She has an escort.”

Levi mentioned
. So Yasir hadn’t spoken to Stephanie personally.

When was the last time
anyone
had spoken to Stephanie personally?

“When are we expecting to be attacked?” Abram asked.

Yasir turned the screen on his tablet off. “We’re tracking Belphegor’s troop movements. Trust me, we’ll have ample warning.”

That wasn’t an answer. “Are they close?”

“His army never needs to rest and can jump between locations with strategic use of the fissure’s interdimensional distortion capabilities. Anywhere on this continent is close. Like I said, though, we’ll have warning when they come this way.” Yasir patted him on the shoulder. “You should join the last Scion training session of the night. They’re including a debriefing at the end.”

The commander left to speak to a witch who had returned from the forest, and Abram watched them speak from a distance. He didn’t bother joining the training. He couldn’t imagine they’d get any more specific about Belphegor’s movements.

Instead, Abram slipped past Yasir, grabbed a rifle, and got in one of the pack’s pickups.

The Union allowed him to pass their checkpoint without stopping. Abram hadn’t really expected them to try to keep him inside, but he still felt like he was waiting for the Union’s attitude to swing in the other direction—from helpful to combative—no matter what Yasir had said or how trustworthy Seth had believed him to be.

It comforted him to see the men and women milling around the pass with guns, though. Knowing that if Clotho showed up again, or any other part of Belphegor’s army, they would shoot to kill.

The pack was safer with the Union than they were without.