Caged in Bone (The Ascension Series) (27 page)

But Abram couldn’t stop thinking about Levi—Levi, with all that swagger, like he thought he could make himself an Alpha by force of will; Levi, with his white leather jacket in the middle of a war zone; Levi, with his stricken look when he finally realized why he recognized Abram.

Something about Levi was bothering Abram, and he was going to figure out what.

He kept the radio turned on as he took the long drive into Northgate. It had been months since they could actually pick up radio stations; even the emergency broadcasts had ended in October. But the low static was a comforting alternative to total silence.

The white noise shifted to buzzing as he approached the fissure, growing louder and harsher as he drove down the mountain.

There was an unusual amount of light pollution in Northgate. Beams cut through the smoke of the fissure, highlighting the clouds and making falling snowflakes sparkle like dust motes. It was much more light than ever naturally emerged from Dis. And it couldn’t have been from the houses or businesses in what had once been the downtown area—they hadn’t had utility power for weeks.

He rolled down the driver’s side window as he moved deeper into town, following the beams of light through the trees. The air was always warmer here. The coldest winds didn’t reach the fissure, and the snow melted before it could collect on the ground.

The Union had erected barricades around the town square, each of them eight feet tall with electrified wire coiled around the top. It wouldn’t be enough to keep out a determined werewolf, but most demons would shy from the possibility of electric shock if they hadn’t already been driven away by the lights themselves. Abram couldn’t see the source of the light, but it was definitely coming from within the barricades.

There was no entrance through the barricades to the east, where Abram approached from; he followed fresh arrows spray-painted on old stop signs and tree trunks around to the south.

Abram was a block away from the southern edge of the square when all the lights cut out.

He was so startled by the sudden absence of light that he slammed on the brakes, skidding to a stop. He gripped the steering wheel in both hands as he stared out the windshield at the dark street. His headlights seemed incapable of penetrating the shadows.

A guttural scream drifted over the barricades, carried on a cold wind.

Abram hit the gas, closing the distance to the nearest wall. Either the Union hadn’t finished assembling it or they had intentionally left a gap to allow vehicles to enter. His headlights slid through the break in the barricades, across the grass, and onto Bain Marshall’s feet.

It was still brighter within the barricades, but now that light was all from hellfire within the fissure, shading everything in stark black or crimson. The Union had placed scaffolds around Bain Marshall like a cage, as if they were worried he might lift his marble feet and march into the mountains. There were pale red blurs in the grass—faces and hands, their unmoving bodies wearing black uniforms.

Flame gusted out of the fissure. Abram felt a wave of heat and shielded his face with his hand.

Through his fingers, he saw something furred and four-legged moving like quicksilver.

Its claws chewed through the grass as it darted back and forth, seeming to dodge, chase, and attack empty air. Abram could tell that its fur was the color of honey in the momentary flare of fire.

Levi.

It looked like the wolf had killed the Union surrounding the statue. But that made no sense—Levi had arrived with them. They were allies.

Fingers of terror crept through Abram’s chest as he grabbed the rifle out of his front seat. He hadn’t brought silver rounds with him. He hadn’t expected to need to shoot any werewolves.

Each step he took toward Bain Marshall, and the wolf still growling wildly at his feet, felt more difficult than the one before. He moved sluggishly through air that seemed to have solidified. His muscles were atrophying, heart struggling, lungs laboring to draw a breath of the smoky air that poured out of the fissure.

Abram struggled to think through the fear—trying to connect the pieces.

The scaffolding supported spotlights, which had no power.

Cables ran down the side of the scaffold.

There was a silent generator tucked behind Bain Marshall’s platform.

And, Abram realized, a werewolf would have no reason to turn off the lights before killing.

Levi wasn’t alone.

Through the shadows, Abram glimpsed short black hair, a wide grin, a skeletal figure. She moved so quickly that he couldn’t focus on her. He only saw a bony wrist and ankle and leering face.

It’s her. It’s Clotho. She’s come back for me.

She had already taken down all of the Union kopides that had been guarding the statue and the bridge. Levi was the only thing between the super-demon and Abram.

Her high, whining voice sliced through the night.

Abram…

He lifted the gun, tracking just ahead of Levi, watching for Clotho to reappear. He could shoot her. He was a great shot.

But Levi was so fast—barely more than a blur—and Abram was so slow. She ghosted into view long enough to slash her claw-like nails at Levi and then disappeared again.

She was trying to kill him, but a werewolf in its beast form was mostly immune to nightmares. He was faster. She didn’t have silver.

It was a stalemate. For now.

Abram imagined squeezing the trigger at the wrong moment and watching blood blossom in Levi’s fur. He imagined the yelp and the way he would stagger. Silver or not, that would level the playing field for Clotho. It would be the opening she needed to kill. Abram couldn’t take a shot, not until he was absolutely confident that he would be shooting the right thing.

He knew that he had fought nightmares before. He had been there the night that the first of the Scions escaped from Hell with nightmares chasing them. But Abram suddenly struggled to remember if shooting them would even work, or if they had used cleavers, or…something else. The fear was too thick. He couldn’t breathe through it, much less think.

His heart thudded as he sank to his knees.

Abram…

Clotho was going to kill Levi and come for him next.

The generator caught his eye again.

Electricity.

Electrified barbed wire, spotlights on the statue. Blood dripping down the walls. Suffocation.

He knew what needed to be done.

Abram dropped the gun. It didn’t matter if he was armed, not against Clotho, and it was too heavy to carry. His jacket made him heavy, too. He stripped it as he darted across the lawn, leaping onto the scaffolding to scramble toward the dangling cables. They had been disconnected from the spotlights.

There were bodies on the scaffolding—rotting, bloated bodies that looked like they had been left out in the sun for days, bellies swollen with gas, clouds of flies swarming around them. Blood under them, blood dripping down the scaffold.

Levi’s growls slid in and out of Abram’s ears. It fuzzed and distorted. His head roared with white noise.

Abram’s hands fumbled on the cables. It took three tries to plug in the first spotlight and flip the switch on the side.

Nothing.

The cables must have been disconnected on the other end, too.

He gripped the scaffold in both hands and looked down. Clotho had hit Levi. He was bleeding, absolutely
gushing
blood all over the grass, but it hadn’t slowed him. He bit her sleeve. She kicked him in the face.

Abram scrambled to the next light. Plugged it in.

His feet slipped in puddles of blood.

Two more spotlights.

The snow was crimson, dribbling from the clouds in hot, salty lines that burned on his face and hands. He gagged on smoke from the fissure as he reconnected the cables on the last of the lights.

He tried to climb down and slipped. Hit the ground hard.

Abram was stunned beside the generator, staring up at a bloody sky twisted with smoke and clouds and bleeding wounds.

Clotho appeared over him with her mindless grin.

Abram…

She saw into him, saw the depths of his heart, knew the truths inside. Her hands were only inches away. She was going to dig in and rip apart and there would be
so much blood
—

But Levi was there again, just as he had been before. He threw her over the generator with a toss of his head. Even as he bled from his throat, pouring his life out on the ground, there was mischief in Levi’s eyes. A challenge. As if he were saying,
Can’t you save your own ass once in a while?

Levi chased Clotho around the generator and disappeared.

Abram got to his knees. Found the end of the cables, where all the power cords for the spotlights merged into one.

The generator’s connector was on the side. He tried to jam it into place, but his vision had been doubled. His hands were slippery.

For the first time, he heard Clotho truly speak.

“Don’t do that,” she said. Her voice was shockingly normal, though flat and emotionless. She stood a few feet away beside the pylons latching Dis’s bridge to Earth, werewolf bites streaming ichor down her arms. “You want to let me kill this werewolf. It’s a mistake to let him finish what he’s doing, and I can promise that you will regret it.”

If that was meant to be some kind of compulsion, it wasn’t working.

Abram reconnected the cable. He flipped the switch.

And then there was light.

He was rewarded with Clotho’s scream. He lunged around the generator in time to see her frozen in the circle of light, clawing at her face, flesh peeling into darkness. The spotlights were far brighter than the one that the helicopter had carried, each of them a miniature sun flooding the lawn in front of Bain Marshall’s feet.

She lasted longer than he expected. Long enough that Levi could pin her to the ground with one giant wolf paw as she thrashed helplessly.

Skin faded, bones emerged. Then those too flaked away.

All that remained was a smudge of ichor on the grass.

Suddenly, Abram could breathe. He sucked in a lungful of air that was sweet enough to make his head spin. The world fell into sharp relief around him, no longer nightmarishly dark but brighter than any day he had seen since the Breaking.

Abram heard voices and looked up to see one of the people on the scaffold standing. He had imagined the damage to the bodies up there. Most were dead, but not rotten; several were still perfectly healthy—stunned but alive. Several of the witches on the lawn had survived too. Even Levi wasn’t bleeding as much as he had imagined.

It was Clotho’s fear that had filled his mind with those visions. They were hallucinations and nothing more.

He wasn’t sure if he was relieved that it hadn’t been real, or ashamed that he had so easily fallen for it.

Levi shifted back into his human form, fur falling away to bare long stretches of tanned skin and muscular flesh. As soon as he had a human face again, Levi met Abram’s eyes and smiled. That smile was even brighter than the spotlights. Downright dazzling. “Good job,” he said. “Guess you aren’t totally useless.”

He stooped beside his clothing and picked through them, pulling out a pair of boxers, a torn sock.

Abram stepped away from the rumbling generator and peered down into the fissure. “Where did she come from? The bridge?”

“Out there,” Levi said, waving vaguely at the town. “Lucky thing I was here to stop her.” He plucked a glass vial out of his leather jacket. “Here we go.”

The Union witches had sprung into motion as soon as Clotho was gone, picking up crystals and chalk, bowls of herbs, plastic bags.

In the darkness, Abram hadn’t noticed that the witches were casting a spell within the barricades. They had inscribed a massive circle of power over the town square. It took up most of the lawn and encircled Bain Marshall’s feet.

“What is this?” Abram asked.

Nobody responded.

One of the witches closed the circle of power with a pinch of salt. Levi handed her the glass vial out of his leather jacket.

There was blood inside the vial.

“That should be enough,” he said. “Let’s finish this.”

Shock washed over Abram.
You want to let me kill this werewolf
, Clotho had said. She hadn’t been attacking randomly.

She had been trying to stop the Union from casting a spell.

Could the kibbeth that had attacked earlier have been trying to
protect
the statue of Bain Marshall?

“Stop!” Abram shouted as he jumped for his rifle. His hands fell on it. He brought it up and swung around to aim at the witch with the glass vial.

It was too late. She had already uncorked the bottle and tipped it over.

He could only watch as blood splashed on the altar—

—and the sky shattered.

Abram never shouted,
screamed, or panicked. That was Summer’s job. She was the emotional twin—the one who overreacted to everything with total glee, as if life was better experienced by embracing the bad parts as much as the good parts. He was the rock. The one who kept Summer’s hot head from carrying her into the stratosphere.

But Summer wasn’t there to get mad, and Abram couldn’t think of a more appropriate reaction to whatever the fuck Levi and the Union had just done.

He pulled back a fist and snapped it across the werewolf’s face.

It was like punching one of the Union’s tanks. Levi took the blow without flinching and grabbed Abram’s fist before he could land another.

Abram jerked Levi toward him, kneed him in the stomach, sent him to the ground.

The sky was breaking apart over them. A point of flat gray light had appeared high above Bain Marshall’s head and was spreading like cracks in a windshield after a car accident. The circling helicopter looked tiny in comparison to the split.

Wind blew harder, blasting the snow over the town square, making the barricades rattle. A storm was rising and they were at the crux of it.

Abram tossed Levi into a pylon. He hit it hard enough to make the entire bridge shake.

Then he turned to the spell that the Union had cast, staring at the circle of power, the candles and salt. There had to be a way to fix this. Some way to reverse the damage, reset the spell, fix the growing crack in the sky that made it look like there was a giant gray eye staring down at them.