Caged in Bone (The Ascension Series) (3 page)

There were humans among the werewolves—former slaves that had become friends with members of the pack, or in a couple of cases, significant others. There was a woman on Paetrick’s lap that still smelled faintly of brimstone. It took weeks to wash out of their hair, if they had any.

Rylie wasn’t among them. Abel would have been able to pick out her scent from the others’ if she had been there. It didn’t seem like she had ever been at dinner.

He didn’t care about everyone else. He wasn’t going to waste his last hours with people who barely acknowledged his existence, much less as their Alpha. People who, like Abram, still thought that Seth had always been in charge and wished that he would come back.

Instead, he followed Rylie’s scent toward their cottage. The trail was fading. She’d been there for at least an hour now.

He found a note stuffed in the doorjamb. Abel removed it. It was one of the sheets of notebook paper from the kitchens, the kind that Summer used to track inventory, folded into thirds and taped shut at the bottom. His name was written on the front in Rylie’s handwriting.

He opened it. “I’m grateful for you.”
That was all it said.

Abel stepped back to look at the windows. There was a faint light coming from the bathroom, and he knew that she was waiting for him.

His pulse accelerated. Hot blood coursed through him.

He stepped into the cottage.

Rylie was standing in the doorway of the bathroom wearing a robe and fidgeting with the tie. Her hair was loose around her shoulders. Her smile was nervous. If she smelled the mausoleum’s incense on Abel, she didn’t show it.

Abel leaned around to look over her shoulder. The bathrooms of the cottages were ridiculously tiny, so it had taken a lot of clever placement to fit two-dozen tapers in the room. It lit everything up with a pinkish-orange hue, haloing Rylie with warm light. The tub steamed with hot water.

The sight of it was so far from the frigid memorial to Seth above the icy cliff that he almost didn’t know what to make of it. His hands stung as the warmth crept into him, shifting his body temperature into high gear.

“Shower time?” she asked brightly, and he turned his attention back to her.

The bathrobe was sheer. It shouldn’t have taken Abel so long to realize that he could see every one of Rylie’s curves through it. The slope of her waist, the small swells of her breasts, the gap between her thighs. He was pretty sure he had never seen her wear that robe before. He would have remembered it.

Rylie was trying to seduce him. She was
actually
trying to seduce him.

Being with her was usually like their runs in the forest on the full moons—like she was always just out of reach, no more than a tantalizing flash of gold through the trees, sometimes physically there but seldom emotionally present. Always a hunt. She had never come to him like this before, reaching out to him, actually trying to be sexy. She was always sexy, whether or not she knew it, but it was the kind of unthinking, subtle sensuality that came to a woman naturally, in her movement and scent and the way she bit her lip, and this was deliberate, even though Rylie always had sex with the lights off and didn’t own a scrap of lingerie, and his brain was overloading with the newness and shock of it all.

It filled him with a strange, confused feeling that he didn’t know how to identify. It was somewhere between possessive heat and panic, all tangled up in fear and regret and self-loathing at what he knew would have to come afterward.

Say something good
, he thought.
For the love of God, say the right thing
.

“That,” he said, “is a bath, not a shower. You promised me a shower.”

Her whole body seemed to cringe at the criticism. Her white-knuckled grip on the robe tie trembled. “Sorry. It’s dumb. I’ll put out the candles.”

Fuck. That was not good
.

He couldn’t say or do anything right. Still never as good as Seth. Not with their kids, not with the pack, not with Rylie.

“No, I didn’t mean—fuck it, Rylie, shut your mouth,” Abel said, and then he was kissing her, trying to show her what he meant with his tongue and fingers instead of the goddamn words that always failed him.

She was so soft and warm. She tasted like the forest, and like
Rylie
, the woman that he had always wanted to own yet never could reach.

And tonight, she had come to him.

He thought back to the note: “I’m grateful for you.” And he wanted to tell her the same thing. He was so fucking grateful that she ever wanted him at all, even when he was wrong and messed up in every way. But it seemed impossible and pointless to try to speak when he was pulling off the robe, shoving her into the bathroom, pushing her up against the wall.

Rylie didn’t need words, either. She repeated the message from her note with the way she touched him. She showed him that she didn’t see any of the scars—not the twisted flesh crawling down his jaw and not the ones on the inside that made him such an awful Alpha. Her touch was pure love. He didn’t deserve it, but he took it, just like he always had. Even when it had belonged to his brother instead.

Not thinking about Seth. Not thinking about tomorrow. Do the right thing for once.

He devoured her gasps, pushed himself between her legs. He held her so tightly that his hands left imprints on her skin. The candles were so close that he could feel the searing heat on his shoulder.

Rylie pulled herself against him hard, her need as urgent as his.

Don’t think about tomorrow.

Abel surrendered to instinct and didn’t think at all.

Abel had no
idea how long he rested beside Rylie and watched the pattern of moonlight on her skin, the shape of branches and pine needles darkening her flat stomach. He knew that the shadow of the curtain had moved from her collarbone down to her elbow, and then vanished. The moon was moving. Hiding behind the clouds. Time was passing, no matter how much he wanted it to stop and give him the rest of eternity in bed beside his mate.

She was sleeping deep. Her chest rose and fell with even breaths. He brushed his fingers over the fine blond hairs on her stomach as it moved, tracing the lines of shadows on the hollows of her ribs.

He could have stayed there forever with her, alone in the cottage, just the two of them.

But they weren’t alone, not really. The ghost of his brother loomed above that damn cliff. Dead, but still watchful.

When he finally, reluctantly checked the clock, it was midnight. The final day was over.

Abel kissed Rylie on the shoulder. She didn’t stir.

He got out of bed, got dressed, and went for a walk.

Abel stood at the entrance of the greenhouses with his thumbs hooked in his pockets, gazing down at the sanctuary under heavy snowfall. The canopy had been disassembled, dinner cleared out. A couple of werewolves were still wandering around, laughing loudly, voices echoing off the trees. They were probably drinking. It was the only thing to do in the sanctuary on a Friday night, especially since they couldn’t go visit other towns to party anymore.

It didn’t take long for the drinking werewolves to disappear into their homes. The lights in the cottages blinked out one by one, darkening the snow. In a few long minutes, everything was silent and peaceful, like a fucking Christmas card.

He guessed Rylie would think it looked pretty. To him, it looked an awful lot like a cemetery, even if it only had one grave in it.

He’d had a good day in that cemetery. As good a day as he could manage, ongoing fuckups with Abram aside. He had gotten down and did the hard work an Alpha didn’t have to do. He had spent time with Rylie. And that was about all the goodness a man like him could hope for.

Every second of it had hurt.

“Hello, Abel.”

A man was suddenly standing beyond the edge of the greenhouses. The fact that he had gotten so close without alerting Abel’s werewolf senses made the back of his neck prickle.

They were almost at eye-level with each other, though Abel’s boots gave him an inch of height advantage. This other man was olive-skinned and dark-haired with pale blue eyes that seemed to glow in the darkness. He wore a cable knit sweater and hiking boots that were damp with melting snow, which meant that he had walked into the sanctuary from Northgate, entering through the hole in the wards.

In a way, he kind of looked like Nash. Smelled a little like him too. That weird, unearthly scent of forest fires hung around both of them, even when neither had been anywhere near anything burning.

Abel knew instantly what this man wanted, and a hard knot of dread clenched in his throat. A sense of inevitability.

James Faulkner had come for Abel.

When Michael awoke
naturally rather than by the chime of the bells, he immediately knew something was wrong.

Eve’s temple contained a clock that could be heard from anywhere in Shamain, the ethereal metropolis. It ran on the vibrations of ancient, flawless crystals that would never skip the smallest fraction of a second, and it hadn’t required adjustment—not once—since the foundation of the city.

He dropped from his roost in downtown Shamain and landed on a bridge arching over the canal. There was already another angel waiting there: Azrael, the bookkeeper that worked in the building across the street from Michael. Azrael was a severe man who usually looked like he had been carved from particularly emotionless marble. Today, though, there was the faint crease of a line between his eyebrows.

“The clock,” Michael said, lifting his eyes to the temple on the hill where the Tree had once been rooted. The temple was a tall column of white stone with its highest corridors built in the shape of stylized branches.

“The clock,” Azrael agreed.

They whipped their wings wide and lifted into the air. The city below glowed with cool blue light—illumination that was partially fueled by its few remaining inhabitants, and gradually dimming as the centuries passed. No new angels had been born since Eve’s death, and many others had moved to Earth or other ethereal dimensions rather than live on as curators of a dead city.

Even so, Michael and Azrael weren’t the only angels to arrive at the base of Eve’s temple. Several of their brethren congregated on the perfectly maintained lawn, its emerald grass soft and moist under their feet.

“What’s happened here?” asked Moroni when Michael landed.

“Someone must have forgotten to wind the clock,” Michael said, knowing that it wasn’t possible even as he spoke the words. He was one of two angels that tended the temple district and the clock within Eve’s memorial. He had never forgotten to wind it. Raqib wouldn’t have, either.

The answer didn’t seem to satisfy anyone, but nobody moved to enter the temple and find out the truth.

Michael squared his shoulders. It was his clock to maintain; having it fail to chime meant that it was his duty to investigate as well.

The angels stood aside as Michael climbed the stairs, legs leaden with dread. He approached a smooth, blank section of the temple wall and a golden door appeared at his touch. It was bordered on either side by stained glass windows that seemed so much darker than usual, as if there were curtains on the opposite side—which there were not.

Michael pushed the door open.

It was impossibly dark inside the temple considering that everything in Heaven glowed. There shouldn’t have been a single shadow in all of Shamain. Yet he could barely see a few feet beyond the threshold.

He did, however, see a single foot, a bare ankle, and the curve of a woman’s calf in a puddle of silvery angel blood. There was a scrap of peach-colored cloth fluttering at her knee. Tattered feathers clung to the blood.

Michael’s heart contracted.

He stepped outside and pulled the door shut, heart hammering. The others had questioning looks on their faces. None seemed overly concerned. None had seen what Michael had seen.

He was calm as he told Moroni, “Summon Nashriel.”

Angels didn’t love
each other like humans did. Love was weak. Friendship was ridiculous. They did, however, form alliances, and the strongest alliance was marriage. It was rare between angels, but not unheard of. There were benefits to joining lives in holy matrimony before the eyes of Adam and Eve, the ones who had made them. It was prestigious. It meant property and special responsibilities in the Heavenly court.

When Leliel had suggested marriage to Nash during the First War, he had agreed. And at the time, if anyone had asked Nash Adamson if he loved Leliel, he would have said yes. He might have even meant it. He and Leliel were an excellent partnership in court. They advocated the same causes, held a large manor in the foothills, enjoyed one another’s company.

Was that not love? The bond of companionship?

That was before Leliel learned that Nash had remained loyal to Adam in the war, before she had betrayed and imprisoned him in the Haven—and many years before Summer.

Still, what he had shared with his ex-wife was different from what he had shared with other angels.

He was not prepared to see her like this.

Leliel looked like she had been forced to the ground rather than having fallen. One arm was bent backward. Her chin was twisted toward the opposite shoulder, leaving her chestnut hair to veil her face and bare her throat.

Her throat. Lord, her throat.

A ring of blood marked the side of her neck, shimmering with the silvery light that all angel blood did, though it seemed somewhat dulled. The puddle around her was smeared. It looked like someone had been wiping the blood with their fingers.

Or licking it.

Nash tugged on the lapels of his suit to flatten them over his chest, loosening the top button of his shirt. The temperature in Heaven was always like that of a warm seaside day, moist and pleasant, but he suddenly felt choked by his shirt.

This was no more violent or ghastly than anything he had seen while fighting demons along the fissure. In fact, he had left behind a far bloodier battle against brutes in the American Midwest to respond to Moroni’s summons. But this was so much more personal than a battle among cornfields. This was in their home.