Caged in Bone (The Ascension Series) (7 page)

Abram followed her gaze to the pylons marking the edge of the bridge. They were decorated with Christmas garlands. It must have been recent, because the tacky silver plastic hadn’t been caked in smoke yet. Red bows had been tied around the tops of the pylons.

“Cute,” Abram echoed. More like freaking weird. It was a bridge to Hell. Even if they had an alliance with the current demon in charge, for however long that lasted, it was still a goddamn bridge to Hell. No amount of holiday cheer would change that.

It must have been the Scions who put up the decorations. That was what the informal coalition that guarded the bridge called themselves. They weren’t anyone special, no soldiers or battle-capable witches—just a few humans with guns and a determination to keep the bridge safe. Abram didn’t think a couple dozen guys would stand a chance against the hordes if the bridge were breached, but it seemed to make everyone feel better.

Three Scions were watching the bridge that day. There were always at least three. They saluted Summer and Abram on approach.

She waved to the guards. “Hey, guys! How’s it hanging?”

“Tucked in my sock,” said a blond Scion who couldn’t have been older than seventeen. He snickered when he added, “Ma’am.”

Abram bristled, but Summer was laughing. “In your sock? I somehow doubt that.”

“I believe that’s called a
burn
, son,” said another Scion, an older man with a hunting rifle. The kid elbowed him and blushed furiously.

The people that had followed them from the cathedral spread around the fissure, murmuring among themselves. The Scions parted to allow Summer and Abram to stand at the top of the bridge, looking down on the crystalline path and trying not to gag on smoke.

Abram hated everything about homecoming days. He especially dreaded the arrival of the messenger that notified them of an impending homecoming since it was that succubus, Neuma, nine times out of ten. He could never guess what kind of ridiculous outfit she would be wearing. If it weren’t a metal bikini, it would be an elaborate costume made from demon bone and feathers, or sometimes full armor with the banner of the Palace trailing behind her.

She’d tried to seduce Abram twice, too. Wasn’t even subtle about how much she wanted his cock—her words, not his. It made his skin crawl.

Each time she climbed up the bridge, Neuma made a big presentation out of announcing that more slaves had been freed and would soon be coming “home,” all thanks to the glory of the Godslayer: father of all demons, ruler of the Palace of Dis, liberator of oppressed mortals.

Abram appreciated what the so-called “liberator” was doing. He had fought alongside Elise Kavanagh and knew she was the real deal. The terrifying-as-fuck, I-hope-I-never-have-to-fight-you real deal. But Neuma’s announcements always felt like a sales pitch, and Abram wasn’t much for the emotional manipulation. The fact that it so thoroughly awed the human inhabitants of Northgate just made it more annoying.

And the days that the humans actually arrived—it was even worse.

Summer spoke suddenly. “I see them. Hey, Josaiah? Bring the blankets over here.”

The witch dragged the cart to her side. She handed a blanket to Abram then picked up an armful for herself. They were woolen and itchy. Nothing fancy, but very warm.

A woman shouted from behind them. “Here they come!”

Abram returned his attention to the fissure. Human silhouettes were almost to the top of the crystal bridge, figures distorted as they passed between dimensions. They began to stagger as they broke through. Everything about Earth and Hell was different—the gravity, the light, the atmosphere, even the speed at which time passed. It was enough to put a lot of people into shock.

The first person to reach Earth’s soil hit her knees with a ragged sob. Her head had been shaved bald. There were visible sores on her cheeks and her palms were raw. Her left foot was missing. She walked on a stump wrapped in bandages.

Summer let out an
oh
of pain, as if she were the one covered in lesions. She kneeled beside the woman and wrapped her in a blanket. It wasn’t fast enough—the liberated slave was already shaking hard from the change in temperature.

“It’s okay,” Summer murmured, hugging the blanket around her shoulders, “you’re home now. You’re
home
.”

The woman just clutched Summer and sobbed.

Northgate’s inhabitants moved in as more people emerged from the smoke. Everyone had blankets and words of kindness. Worse, all of them had knowing expressions—because they’d all been there, suffered the same things, and knew what it was to be free.

Some voices rose in joy. Most were crying because it hurt.
Everything
hurt.

This part—
this
was the worst part. Not Neuma’s grandstanding and come-ons. The pain, the crying, having to see the evidence of what the demons were doing in Hell.

Abram’s shoulders were knotted with tension. His motions were stiff and mechanical as he caught an old woman who almost collapsed.

“I’ve got you,” he said gruffly.

She stared at him, eyes wide but unseeing. “Who are you?” she asked, fingers traveling over his face. He almost pulled away until he realized that her gaze wasn’t blank with shock. She had been blinded in Hell.

“I’m Abram,” he said. “I’m here to help.”

“Abram.” She echoed it like a prayer.

There was a tractor with a flatbed nearby that would transport the liberated to the cathedral. Abram lifted the old woman onto it.

“I have kids,” she told him. “I need to find them.”

“We’ll see what we can do,” Abram said, swallowing down pangs of grief. Time moved much more slowly in Hell than on Earth. If this woman had children when she went to Hell, chances were good that they weren’t children anymore—or alive at all.

She smiled blankly at him. “Thank you.”

He returned to the Scions and took count of the slaves that had been brought back. Fifteen this time. The biggest homecoming day they’d had was thirty; often, it was no more than three or four people. Fifteen was good. That meant Elise must have gotten compliance from a small House.

A woman wearing six-inch heels strolled from the bridge, unperturbed by the shift in dimension. She had sleek black hair down to her elbows and small breasts that were held in place by a leather strap. When she spotted Abram, she smirked and strolled toward him.

Neuma.

The back of Abram’s neck prickled. Elise usually escorted the slaves to Earth, not Neuma. The succubus did PR. Elise did the actual dirty work. “Where is she?” Abram asked out the corner of his mouth as he opened a new box of blankets and handed one to a Scion.

“Personal business,” Neuma said airily.

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

She peeked into another box to check its contents. It was a delivery of clothes salvaged from the homes in Northgate, intended to be taken to Hell to clothe newly freed slaves. She lifted the box to her shoulder and threw him a glance as she walked back toward the bridge. “Don’t ask questions.”

Abram watched her until she vanished through the fissure again, crawling back to the dark pit from whence she came.

At least she hadn’t hit on him this time. Christmas miracle.

As he helped Summer carry a man to the tractor, he kept his eyes on the surrounding crowd, watchful for any incidents. If there was going to be a breakdown, it was often here and now. Right when the emotions were surging high.

He wasn’t surprised when he heard gasps. It filled him with a sense of dread and inevitability.

Abram waded into the crowd to find out what had gone wrong this time—another suicide jumping off the bridge halfway up, maybe.

But the source of the disturbance wasn’t the fissure. It was coming from the opposite direction.

He was stunned to see Rylie, white-blond hair a tangled mess about her face, panic in her eyes. She ran through the crowd to his side.

There hadn’t been a lot of time to get to know his mother since returning from the Haven, but they’d already been through a lot of pain as a family. He knew what she looked like when she was grieving. But this fear, this abject terror—this was something that he had never seen before.

“Is he with you? Where is he?” she asked.

“Whoa,” Abram said as she grabbed him. “Who are you looking for? What’s wrong?”

Her fingers dug into his biceps. “It’s Abel. He’s—he’s
gone
.”

Abram had seen
a lot of disturbing things in the last few weeks, but nothing disturbed him more than watching an entire pack of werewolves sweep Northgate and find no hint of Abel’s scent.

“It’s like he was never here at all,” Rylie said, wringing a sweater in her hands. It was one of Abel’s, and it was covered in his fur. He had worn it every full and new moon since the autumn nights had started to get too cold for nudity. It should have smelled of Abel’s skin and sweat and the oils in his hair.

But Rylie said it didn’t.

They were standing on the steps of St. Philomene’s Cathedral in the crisp morning air. The eaves hung heavy with icicles that caught the sun, diffusing the light into gold sparkles on the church’s siding. But the snow surrounding them had been trampled into a brown, slushy mess by the boots of the pack and Scions as they swept the town.

Summer took it out of Rylie’s hands as gently as possible, then lifted the hood to her nose and sniffed. Her eyes widened. “I smell you, Rylie, but not him.”

“Nothing at the sanctuary smells like him.” Rylie snagged the sweater out of Summer’s hands again and hugged it. “I mean, I went to bed with him last night, and our bed doesn’t smell like him. Our bathroom doesn’t smell like him.” She plucked at her shirt. Tears glistened on her cheeks. “
I
don’t have his smell on me at all.”

“And you didn’t see footprints or any other sign that he walked out of there?” Abram said. “Or tire tracks, maybe?”

“It snowed too much.” She gave a disbelieving laugh. “But even if he flew
out of there, everything should still smell like him. He was all over the sanctuary yesterday. He’s all over the sanctuary
every
day.”

One of the werewolves jogged toward them, stopping at the bottom of the stairs. Abram had trained with Trevin a few times, running sprints and doing drills. He was a nice guy. Fun to hang out with. Today, he was all seriousness.

“We’ve swept the streets,” Trevin said. “There’s no sign of Abel. The inhabited buildings have been checked too, but we’re moving into the abandoned structures next.”

“What have you been scenting?” Rylie asked.

“Nothing out of the ordinary.”

Rylie made a horrible noise, a mix between a sob and a whimper. Summer wrapped her up in a hug.

“What’s within the range of ordinary?” Abram asked, dropping down a step to address Trevin quietly. “Are demons ordinary?”

“The demons we know. Neuma and Elise are the only ones that come up this way, and they’re the only ones that we’re smelling.”

“Thanks, Trevin,” Abram said. He meant it to be a dismissal, but the werewolf didn’t leave.

“I have another thought,” Trevin said. “If you want to hear it.”

Rylie wiped her cheeks dry. “Anything you have.”

Trevin shuffled his feet, hands jammed deep into his pockets. “Are you sure he didn’t leave on his own?”

“Why would you say that?”

He looked like he was struggling with himself, searching for words in the slushy snow at his feet. “He was acting…weird…yesterday. I saw him damage the fence surrounding the sanctuary.”

“I doubt he was
damaging
it,” Summer said. “He was probably fixing it. I mean, there’s always something to fix with that thing. We didn’t build it very well and it’s out in the forest where any animal can run it over. Sections have collapsed under snow twice already.”

“He dug up a crystal and broke it.” Trevin shrugged helplessly. “I don’t know anything about the magic that protects us, but that looked kind of bad to me.”

Rylie gaped at him. She was shredding the hem of the sweater’s sleeve now, her fingernails working quickly even as the rest of her was frozen still.

“A crystal,” Summer said.

“A quartz, like this big.” Trevin held up a fist.

Abram had guarded Stephanie Whyte while she redid the wards a few weeks earlier. He hadn’t been there for the original casting—it had been a big secret affair, and only Rylie and Abel had gone to that—but he had seen Stephanie digging up crystals too. She hadn’t broken them, though. She had chanted over them, sprinkled some herbs, and reburied them.

Trevin was right. It did sound bad.

Really bad.

“No,” Rylie said. “No. It’s just not possible. Abel was fixing something. He couldn’t make himself disappear like that.”

Abram didn’t know what to believe. He paced, hands cupped behind his head, gazing up at the sky. No hints of sunlight remained now. They never did for long. Even when it wasn’t actively stormy, the smoke gushing from the fissure kept the air thoroughly hazy. Their relationship with the demons in charge below had improved, but the emissions hadn’t.

He mulled over the facts. Abel might not have been breaking the wards, but he had tampered with the fence. They also knew that there was no smell of him anywhere. A werewolf couldn’t have done it.

If there was a connection between those two things, he didn’t see it. But they were living on top of a fissure to Hell. If there were a demon that could pull something like that off, it would have probably passed through Northgate.

If anyone knew about that, it would have to be the woman in charge.

“I think it’s time we get outside help,” Abram said.

Living on top
of the fissure for weeks hadn’t made it less frightening, and standing over it made Rylie’s heart race. She’d met dozens of people who had escaped that smoky darkness and had seen their wounds. She could imagine what they might have suffered all too well, and she’d been having nightmares about it. The kind of dreams that made her wake up gasping for air.

And now she and Abram were going inside for help.

They stood on the uppermost edge of the bridge for a few long moments without going into the fissure. Abram seemed to be waiting for Rylie to make a move, but her feet felt like they were locked to the earth.