Ascension: Sins of Eden Part 19

Her death still wouldn't bring Rylie back.

Abel hated this feeling of doubt. He hated all this G.o.dd.a.m.n guilt.

His anger had been defused, replaced by an emotion that wouldn't go away whether or not he got revenge. The grief itched and ached and made him feel cold deep down where the snow couldn't reach.

He sank his teeth into Leliel's other wing and ripped it away. The tang of silver blood was sour in his mouth.

She didn't scream-she barely whimpered.

Abel discarded her wing over the side of the mountain. Feathers ripped away in the wind. Halfway down the cliff, the wing vanished completely, sucked through one of those sinkholes into some other dimension. No way to tell where. Didn't really matter.

Leliel was wingless.

He shifted back into his human form as she got onto her knees, reaching back to feel the stubs where the appendages had been. Blood slicked her fingers. She gave a ragged sob. "Eve," she whispered like a prayer. Then she looked at Abram, running her wet fingers up his wrist. "Shoot me. Please."

He recoiled, mouth twisting. "No."

"Please!"

Leliel turned to Nash. "Don't make me live like this."

"The way things are going, none of us will live as we are for much longer." There wasn't even a hint of sympathy in his voice. He was as cold as the wind. "Feel free to pray that it ends swiftly in the meantime. You have an excellent working relationship with Belphegor, it seems. Perhaps he'll have the mercy for you that we lack."

Leliel cried hopeless tears, touching her stumps over and over, as if it might change what had happened to them. Her blood began to freeze on the snow.

"I'll remove this," Nash told them. "She can waste away her final hours in Heaven."

He lifted her into the sky. By the time Abel finished shifting out of his wolf body, they had vanished into the clouds. He watched their light vanish with a sinking feeling of regret.

Abel should have killed her.

His son glanced down the mountain. There was no real trail leading back to the gateway-just a steep climb. "Guess we better go."

But before he could start climbing, Abel asked, "Why does everyone want you dead? The angels. Those hybrids. Belphegor."

Abram lifted his chin and stared the werewolf Alpha down. "Does it matter?"

Evasion. Of course it mattered.

The only reason that Abel could think that they'd want Abram dead was to keep him from opening the gates to Eden, like the one waiting for them on the mountain below.

The only other guy whose blood had opened the gates had been dead for months.

The truth came over Abel with a wash of heat.

Abram wasn't his son. He was Seth's. That had to be it, right? It was the only reason that Belphegor would be out to kill him, after all.

He's not my son.

The thought raced through his mind over and over again.

Abel had been there when the kid was born. He'd been in the forest with Rylie as she labored, and he'd been the one to pull the tiny babies from her body. He'd held them in their first breaths and thought, Maybe I could get used to being a dad.

That was why Rylie had picked him as her mate over Seth. Because they'd produced a couple of babies together.

Now he and Abram were staring at each other, knee-deep in snow on top of the f.u.c.king Himalayas, of all places, so close to the sky that he could almost brush Heaven with his fingertips. And he was realizing that the one thing that he'd felt sure about-Rylie's choice, before she'd died-wasn't so certain after all.

Abram's shoulders sagged. He must have seen the realization come over Abel.

"I promised to do it," he said. "I already said I'd help open the gates."

"How can you think I care about that? The fact that you can open the gates at all means...f.u.c.k."

Abel didn't feel like he fit into his skin anymore. He didn't know who he was.

Abram wasn't his son. Rylie had carried secrets about Seth into the grave. Abel hadn't killed the angel who ordered his mate's murder when he had a chance.

He didn't know where he fit anymore.

"Come on, Abel," Abram said.

He didn't listen. Abel shapeshifted, and he ran.

Twelve.

Lucas McIntyre waited with a hand on his gun and an eye on the shadows.

The line of refugees stretched into the night, winding down the street, around the bakery, and vanishing into the fog beyond the train station. McIntyre stood apart from them, hanging out beside the line rather than among them, keeping an eye on the darkness in the alleys as people inched toward the evacuation point.

"Idiots," Leticia muttered, hugging Deb to her chest. The little girl was squirming against her shoulder, but Leticia's arms were steel, and she didn't set her down. It was so crowded that she would never be able to keep track of the toddler among the crush.

"Idiots," agreed Dana, the older sister.

McIntyre put a meaty finger to his lips and shook his head. "We're evacuees too. Remember?"

"Then we're also idiots." Leticia shifted Deb's weight to her opposite hip. "How much longer, Lucas?"

He glanced up the line at the barbed-wire fencing that had been erected around the town's perimeter. They were told that it was to keep demons out of the village, but that was total bulls.h.i.t; that kind of fence wouldn't do jack against anything that was threatening enough to fence out anyway.

It was meant to keep people in. Keep the roads clear. Make it so the military could move without civilian interference, for all the f.u.c.king good the military was going to do now.

They couldn't fix the hole that had eaten the farmhouse where McIntyre's family had been living, or drag the farmhouse back from Malebolge onto Earth. They couldn't make pieces of white stone stop raining from the sky and punching holes the size of dogs in roofs around the village. They definitely couldn't do anything about the brand f.u.c.king new river of magma bisecting the town.

n.o.body could do anything about those things. Not even McIntyre.

Didn't mean he couldn't try, though.

Dana hadn't looked down at the ground more than twice since the sky split open, no matter how many times McIntyre caught her at it. She was staring again now. There was nothing to see for the moment-the sky was overwhelmingly black. The hail of angel stone had stopped.

McIntyre tweaked her nose. "Watch the streets," he said gruffly. "That's where death comes from most of the time."

Leticia gave him a long-suffering look over their daughter's head. "Lucas."

"What?"

"Don't talk about death with them," she said.

He caught Dana's eye. She grinned at him and briefly lifted the hem of her shirt while her body was turned away from her mother. The girl was carrying a pistol tucked in the waistband of her jeans, small enough that even her tiny, delicate hand could fit around it.

She let the hem drop and made herself stop grinning. McIntyre ruffled her hair.

Dana would be fine.

The line inched forward. He craned around to see if the military was letting anyone through the fences.

No dice.

The attempted evacuees were muttering, getting restless, looking angry. Things were going to get ugly. McIntyre could tell.

"Idiots," Leticia muttered again.

Infernal energy crawled down McIntyre's spine. He turned to look for the source, but he didn't see anything. Usually didn't, though. n.o.body ever saw the worst things coming.

The alleys behind him were awful dark, though. The lights that the military had set up along the roads couldn't penetrate it.

Seemed like he and his family had played bait long enough.

Leticia caught where he was looking. "Are we through?"

McIntyre kept watching those shadows. The feeling of infernal power crawling down his spine only confirmed what he'd told his kid-that death usually came from the streets.

"Yeah. We're through." He dropped a kiss on his wife's lips, kissed the top of little Deb's head, ruffled Dana's hair again.

"Guess we're giving up on the evacuation," Leticia said a little too loudly. In fact, they'd never been planning to evacuate. McIntyre had just wanted to make it easy for their family to be located.

"I'll look for another way out," he said. "You head on back to the camp."

Before she left, Leticia grabbed and kissed him again, longer this time, until Deb started trying to kick him in the chest.

Then they left. The line moved forward to fill in the s.p.a.ce that they'd occupied.

McIntyre watched his wife and children walk away from him, hand resting on his sidearm. He got a lot of weird looks for carrying a pair of handguns the first few weeks they lived in France. Like he was a criminal, a madman.

He'd stopped getting so many weird looks once the demons started spreading through Europe after the Breaking. And n.o.body looked twice at him now.

n.o.body noticed when he followed his family from a few blocks back-n.o.body but the darkness.

All the noise of people and life faded when he got just a few hundred yards into the fog. Leticia and the kids had receded to tiny shadows in the distance, little glimpses of motion against all the shuttered buildings. The French, they sure loved their shutters. Did a pretty good job keeping refugees from breaking into the houses, but couldn't hold anything scary out.

A shadow flashed across the street between McIntyre and his family.

He drew one of his guns. Eased the safety off.

The shadow grew and kept growing until it was the size and shape of a woman. A woman creeping up on Leticia.

Just another block...

McIntyre strayed to the right, moving along the brick wall. Aside from the curve of hips, the shadow-woman didn't look much like a woman at all-not with the way she bled into the night.

But that was because she wasn't really a woman, or even a normal demon. She was a Fate. Clotho. A nightmare infused with Elise's weird f.u.c.king blood.

She was close to his family. Too close.

Few more steps. Come on.

Leticia stopped in front of a house. Deb had finally squirmed out of her arms.

McIntyre's heart stopped when he saw his baby girl whirl around and come racing toward him. "Daddy!" Her tiny voice echoed.

The shadow-woman was in the way. She swooped in on Deb, lifting her arms, darkness billowing around her like a cloak.

That demon crossed a line of wire placed across the street.

"Tish!" McIntyre roared.

His wife reached inside the doorway of the house. He couldn't see what she was doing, but knew that she was going for the lever. And he knew that she had flipped it when the lights came on.

Spotlights blazed to life around the street, blazing down on Clotho as her hands swiped inches from Deb's face.

Clotho arched and screamed. She was a horrible thing to see in the light. Her face looked like a grinning mask attached underneath a choppy haircut, the edges of her lips drawn toward her ears in a permanent, skull-like leer. Even when she screamed, she was smiling.

She rushed toward the edge of the light.

But McIntyre had a lever of his own on this side of the circle, tucked in the edge of a window frame. Not the best wiring, but he'd had to do it himself with about twenty minutes of warning. When it electrified the wire around the circle, he felt pretty good.

Clotho slammed into the wire. Her scream turned shrill.

Dana swooped in and dragged her sister away. McIntyre didn't breathe until both of them were out of the cage of light. Away from the demon.

Leticia grabbed both her daughters and ran. This time, they really ran-not trying to lure the Fate to attack, but trying to escape. They were smart enough to know to stay out of McIntyre's way when it came time to slay the demons.

He paced the outer edge of the circle until they were gone from his sight. No breaks in the wiring. He'd done better than he thought.