Caged in Bone (The Ascension Series) (30 page)

“We didn’t get to talk about us after you killed Adam. You left too quickly. And when else will we get to speak? The next time we’re facing down over the fissure to Hell?”

She rolled her eyes. So the relationship talk was happening whether she wanted it to or not. She was in his cage, after all. “Okay. When, exactly, were you imagining this?” she asked, propping her head up on one arm. She was fine remaining drenched in his blood while he hurried to clean up.

“Always. From the beginning.”

“Hmm,” Elise said. She didn’t need words to tell him that the “always” was strange. They had begun traveling together when she was sixteen and he was twenty-eight.

He must have heard the disapproval. His eyebrows dropped low. “Yes. I know. And you can imagine how much I hated myself for that. I thought that I was sick. Perverse.”

“Well,” she said. No argument there.

James flung the towel into the corner. He had brought bandages with him, too. He started patching up his wrist.

“After we found out about your physical condition—the androgen insensitivity—I couldn’t stop thinking about the implications of it. The fact that you would likely always struggle with intimacy on a physical level, in addition to the emotional aspects of it. The fact that you could never bear children. It seemed so damn unfair that a world that had already plotted against you in so many ways would deal these final, bitter blows. And yes, I entertained the idea that I could be the one to show you that life didn’t need to be like that.”

His voice had dropped an octave, wracked with anger and guilt and bitterness. It radiated through their bond. Elise could taste how much he hated himself. What he showed in his jerky gestures and angry tone was barely the beginning of it. His loathing went so much deeper than that.

“You never showed any of that to me,” Elise said, a little softer than before. The fact that she felt any sympathy ticked her off. That had to be Eve rearing her ugly head.

“You had Malcolm.”

“You’re telling me that you didn’t make a move despite being desperately, pathetically in love with me because I dated some drunken kopis for six months?”

“I’m telling you that it made me realize that I was mistaken, and had no business in that part of your life,” he said.

Or any part of her life, really. “I kissed you first.”

“And until that time, I thought that my delusion was one-sided. I didn’t realize you reciprocated.” James raked a hand through his hair. “Everything was wrong, Elise. My immediate attraction to you was because of what happened to me in the garden. The rebirth that awakened my angel blood. All angels love you—I couldn’t let that control my thoughts, not when you were vulnerable and I was in a position of authority over you. It could never have been anything but abuse.”

Funny, considering how the alternative had hurt her so much worse. Elise felt a trickle of blood down her neck and along the curve of her breast. She caught it on her thumb and absently sucked it into her mouth.

James paused in his pacing, distracted by the sight of her working her tongue around the blood.

When he spoke again, it was softer. “I cast a spell on myself then. I suppressed everything. Made myself…forget.”

“That you loved me?”

“And much of what happened in the garden, and all the other nightmares that haunted me.” He slid off the spine scabbard and tossed it to the bed. “It was the only way for us to survive together.”

The spell that he cast on himself must have worked well. They had retired, James had continued withholding the truth from her, and he had gone on to have a long relationship with Stephanie Whyte. He had done it all while knowing that Elise wanted him.

“Yet you let Him take me anyway,” Elise said.

“I had no choice.” He pulled his bloody shirt off, touched the scar on his left pectoral. “I swore oaths.” She opened her mouth to speak, but he cut her off. “Yes, I should have warned you. I know that now. I should have told you the truth from the beginning.”

Elise thought that he probably wanted her to say that it wouldn’t have mattered—that if she had known he was oath-sworn to God, obligated to deliver her to the garden, that she would have loved him anyway. It would have been a lie. Elise would have escaped James or killed him. Whatever she needed to do to stay out of the garden.

She crawled toward him across the bed. She could see flickers of herself as viewed through James’s eyes. He had a difficult time looking away from her body (
Perfection
, he thought) even though the smears of his blood made his stomach twist. Their combined fluids dripped down the inside of her thigh.

He didn’t stand when she approached. Elise crawled into his lap and reared over him on her knees, naked and bloody and expressionless.

“Do you feel better now that you’ve apologized?” Elise asked flatly, catching his chin in a vise grip, forcing him to look up at her. The white stubble on his jaw felt like pinpricks against her skin. “Have you confessed all your sins? Are you prepared to repent to your god?”

“You’re no god, and this isn’t a confession, Elise.” James sounded so gentle in contrast to the hard edge of her voice. “This is the honesty you’ve always deserved.”

“Do you think that this will make it all better?”

He swallowed hard. The knot in his throat bobbed. “No. I don’t.”

“Good,” Elise said. “Because you haven’t stopped making mistakes.”

Her pelvis molded to his stomach as she gazed down at him. His shoulders and arms were rigid as her fingertips dragged up the muscle.

She had decided what she was going to do while he was still deep inside her, filling her body with his seed. Elise kept that decision locked inside of her where he couldn’t see.

She swept her hair out of the way, over her shoulder, and pressed her lips to his ear.

“You shouldn’t have fed me,” Elise whispered.

Her hands locked over his throat.

James moved almost as quickly as she did. His gloved fingers wrapped around her wrists as she pressed the heels of her palms into his esophagus and forced his back flat to the bed.

He was strong, but she was stronger now that she was flush with his blood and the fever of sex. She could see through the flesh to the veins within, and with just a little pressure, she compressed them and severed the flow of blood.

James’s jaw was clenched tight. He stared at her with stoic resolve as he tried to force her arms away. It was a token effort. He had to know that he couldn’t make her release her grip.

“I want you to know that this isn’t only about what you did to me,” Elise said, pressing him a little harder into the mattress. A red flush climbed his jaw. “This is about what we did to Seth. You and I, we killed him together. We owe the pack a debt now. You keep making things worse for Rylie and it’s up to me to repay what we owe.”

He reached for her with his mind.
Is this the only way
?

“Maybe,” she said.

The press of his hands on her wrists weakened.

Even that slight slackening of his grip made fear scythe through her heart. It was the first sign of fading life, this time without the intoxication of his blood and body to distract her. And the idea that she might lose him, even to her own hands, was frightening.

Elise had killed hundreds—maybe thousands—of demons, humans, and angels before. Many of them had died for crimes much less than those James had committed.

But she couldn’t kill him.

She couldn’t blame that weakness on Eve.

Elise lifted a fraction of an inch. It was enough.

He took her by the wrists, moved her hands off of his throat. She didn’t fight him this time. Blood roared as circulation returned to his skull.

James panted. She could taste how sweet the oxygen was to him.

“Abel is safe,” he said as soon as he caught his breath, struggling to prop himself onto his elbows. “He left with me willingly, Elise. He wants to help me find Nathaniel.”

The name was like a Taser to the gut. She sucked in a breath. “This isn’t about Nate and you know it.”

He sat up, hands on her hips to keep her balanced on top of him. “Not just him, no.” A fire sparked in his eyes, flaring between their minds. “I won’t lie to you. I will never lie to you again.”

It’s too late for that to matter
. “I don’t care if Abel thinks he left willingly or not. You coerced him. You always do.”

“I made promises and he trusted me,” James said. His hands traced down the backs of her shoulders, down her arms, cupped her elbows. Such tenderness when she had just attempted to choke him. He
still
wasn’t afraid of her.

It was incredible how much she wanted to forgive him when he spoke like that, touched her like that. It was everything her broken human heart had ever wanted.

“What if I asked you to leave with me?” Elise asked. “Forget this war. Forget the Origin. Forget demons and angels. Just you and me somewhere—anywhere you want, anywhere we can be left alone. Would you do it?”

“This war will touch everything.”

“I have the Palace of Dis. It’s warded. Impenetrable. It could be an island.”

“Only you would consider Hell a romantic retreat,” James said with a hint of a smile. “I can’t abandon this now—not after everything I’ve done.” She moved to stand, but he held her in place. “Abel saw reason. You can, too. Just think of all the things that I can do if I have this power—think of what
we
can do. Every mistake can be fixed. Every life that we’ve lost can be restored. Not just Seth, but every other innocent. We could redirect the bullet that killed Betty. We could make sure Malcolm wasn’t standing beside you when the Union fired. Aunt Pamela, Lucinde, everyone in Reno that fell to Yatai—”

Every name drove deep into her like a dagger. Elise covered his mouth with her fingers, not to smother him, but to silence him. “We can’t change the past, James.”

“But we
can
,” he whispered with urgency, lips tickling her palm. “We can change it all, save everyone, fix any mistake. We can make the world everything we want.”

“That’s the problem we’ve always had, Adam,” Elise said, tracing her thumb over his bottom lip. “I never wanted
everything
. I only ever wanted you.”

He pulled back. He was staring at her, pale with shock.

“
What
?”

“I wanted to trust you,” she said. “I did trust you. All the power and promises in the universe can’t change who you are and what you did to me.”

He caught her hand, stopping her from raking her nails through his hair. “What did you just call me, Elise?”

Elise tried to understand what he was saying and why he looked so stricken, but her mind was as blank as it had been after fighting the basandere. “James,” she said. The name was right on her lips. She couldn’t imagine having said anything else.

“Adam,” he said. “You called me Adam.”

Thunder rolled over the temple.

For a moment, they didn’t move. His hands were locked on hers. She stared at him, numb to the name that had come from her lips.

The sound of thunder grew. A resounding
crack
shook the windows and walls. The bed trembled.

When Elise tried to stand again, James didn’t stop her. He pulled the curtains aside. A sliver of sunlight fell on his face.

Elise slipped behind him to look over his shoulder, standing in his shadow. Gray fire rolled across the sky. It coiled out of a gash that bisected the clouds all the way to the vanishing point of the horizon. It looked so strange that she felt a moment of total disorientation, like she had to be dreaming, or had gone insane.

But then she imagined the world flipped upside down and realized that the gray slice looked very much like the fissure in America.

Heaven had been broken.

Somehow, she wasn’t surprised. And James didn’t seem to be, either.

“Well,” he said. “That might explain what happened with the door.”

“What door?”

“In Colorado.” James grabbed a spare shirt out of the wreckage of the dresser—he had left clothing for himself, too—and pulled it on, leaving the bottom untucked. He shrugged into the spine scabbard. “It shut after Rylie and Abel entered Heaven, and I wasn’t able to follow. I thought it was a problem with my door. This means it’s a problem with Shamain.”

His hands froze in the middle of buckling the scabbard’s straps, eyes going distant, as if he had suddenly realized something.

“What are you thinking?” she asked. She could have pulled it out of his mind, but she was tired of sharing thoughts with James.

“This suggests an external fissure, much like the one leading into Hell,” he said. “But my door connects internally. It shouldn’t have been affected.”

“And?”

“And if there’s been a problem with Shamain’s integrity on both sides, then we might have a much larger problem than we did with the Breaking.” He pulled out his notebook and flipped through the pages.

He was preparing to abandon her in that damn cage.

She grabbed his bicep. “Let me out,” Elise said. “Let me fix this.”

He gazed up at the sky with resignation. “I don’t think anyone can fix this.” His eyes flicked to hers. “And I still can’t let you leave here.” James reached to touch her cheek with his gloved hand. “I’m sorry, Elise. I’ll come back when this is done. We can talk about…everything.”

“If you leave here without releasing me, then I won’t have anything to say to you,” Elise said.

His brow creased. “Very well.”

Maybe she could grab his notebook, find the teleportation spell before he disappeared…

But James seemed to have predicted that thought. He triggered a page without any warning, without even speaking aloud, and he disappeared.

For a few
breathless moments, Shamain was the most incredible thing that Rylie had ever seen.

She had heard stories of what life was like in Heaven. Nash had shared tales of his origins over several nights by bonfires in the sanctuary, before the Breaking, before he had been forced to leave and fight demons on American soil.

Nash had a way with words, as Rylie guessed anyone who had been alive for approximately eternity would have to be. He had told them of the elaborate mansions and sprawling orchards. He had talked about the spiral streets, the frescoes, the carvings that decorated even the most mundane fixtures.