Ascension: Sins of Eden Part 4

Abram didn't want to watch. He jogged over to the car, keeping the werewolf in the corner of his eye as he checked on James. The man was still conscious, but dazed. He would need medical attention.

Not bad for a fight against a hybrid without magic.

Why hadn't he used magic? Abram's eyes traveled to the man's hands. He'd never seen the witch without gloves, but now his skin was exposed and there wasn't a rune in sight.

Abel howled his victory. It echoed over the street.

The hybrid was dead at his feet.

Abram staggered toward him. Adrenaline quickly drained away now that both hybrids were dead and he began to feel the pain of his wounds. James wasn't the only one who would need medical attention soon. There was blood on Abram's jacket. He must have been gored by the hybrid and hadn't even noticed it.

Abel shifted back slowly. Fur gave way to human flesh, bones rearranging, blood spraying on the pavement.

Eventually, Abel stood where the beast had been, an intimidating six and a half feet tall. Scars marked the side of his face and chest, all the way down to his hips. As a human, Abel looked almost as much like a monster as his wolf.

"Thanks for the save," Abram said.

The Alpha grunted.

It was the first time they had spoken since Rylie had been killed, and Abram didn't know what to say next. It wasn't necessarily that he was surprised that Abel had come to his rescue, but that Abel had even noticed something was wrong. He'd never paid all that much attention to Abram.

"How'd you know to come?" Abram asked.

Abel was strangely gentle as he lifted James from the hood of the car and tossed the witch over his shoulder. "I smelled 'em. Warned James, because he was there and he'd just woken up, then changed and followed him down."

"Well...thanks."

"You're my son," Abel said. "They can't have you, too." His voice cracked when he said it, and it wasn't because of his usual growl. The unemotional mask slipped from his features. There was so much pain in him-like he'd been the one to have a werewolf rip out his heart through his back.

Abram stopped walking. Rylie must not have told Abel that Abram was Seth's son-not his.

At another time, he would have told Abel the truth happily. He would have enjoyed watching the anguish. Now he couldn't bring himself to say it.

"Get inside," Abel said, kicking the door open and edging in with James dangling over his back. "Not safe out here."

Elise pa.s.sed through a sinkhole and returned to Earth. Benjamin Flynn wasn't waiting for her on the other side. She was certain that it was the escape route he had taken, but it looked nothing like the place she had glimpsed earlier.

Daylight had vanished during her return to the cavern under New Eden's cemetery. The gra.s.sy plain was consumed by fire all the way to the mountains whose outline she glimpsed through the smoke.

Those weren't the looming black mountains of Dis, either. There were pine trees. There was even a little bit of snow left on the peak where the fires had yet to touch.

Elise was on Earth, but it burned like h.e.l.l.

And G.o.dd.a.m.n Benjamin Flynn wasn't there.

Frustration clawed at her as she phased into a sky flickering with hints of other worlds, places that were red and violet and orange. She was buffeted by tides that had never been able to touch her incorporeal form before as more sinkholes opened between worlds.

From above, she saw more plains burning, more mountains. She thought she might be in Canada. She phased west, keeping an eye out for sunlight-dangerous to her shadow form.

Elise never hit morning.

There was no more morning to find. The sun couldn't penetrate the shredded sky and complete night had fallen over Earth. At last, Elise could travel freely.

It was a dream for demons. Belphegor was making Earth just like home sweet home.

Elise crossed the roiling ocean and found Anthony's pickup in the ditch where she had left it, then followed the road to the nearest village. The residents were streaming from the buildings, taking cars, trains, and rickety carts in every direction, mostly toward the sh.o.r.e, as though they hoped that there might be safety at the docks.

There wasn't safety for anyone. Not anymore.

She followed the mingling mental signals of kopides and werewolves and reappeared outside a hotel. She found herself ankle-deep in b.l.o.o.d.y remains.

Elise lifted a foot to look at the corpse. Sticky black ichor left a long string between her sole and the body. Definitely one of Belphegor's hybrids.

He'd made a mistake attacking a hotel under werewolf occupation.

When Elise appeared in the lobby, Ariane was waiting for her by the fireplace. She was uninjured. One less thing to worry about.

Elise scanned the others seated around the room. The half-wolves had been turned back to their human forms and milled by the fireplace in ill-fitting clothes, hands cupped around steaming mugs. Nash and Summer were gone. So were many of the rescued wolves. Not many familiar faces.

"What happened out there?" Elise asked her mother. "What's everyone doing?"

"We were attacked," Ariane said, looking fl.u.s.tered. She held a potion bottle in each hand. They both glowed faintly with hints of gold-healing magic.

"Anyone dead?" she asked.

"No, but they seem to have been specifically targeting Abram."

The young man was on the couch behind her, head cradled in his palms, blood staining his shirt. A werewolf attended to his wounds, wrapping bandages around Abram's arm. It was the guy who had always hung around Stephanie Whyte-Levi, the would-be Alpha who had driven Rylie and Abel out of Northgate.

Elise frowned. "You were attacked by hybrids?"

"Pretty sure it was me," Abram said without looking up.

"They never attempted to enter the hotel," Ariane said. "Most of us weren't even aware of the attack. It was over too quickly."

But why would Belphegor want Abram dead? Like Summer, he had come from Abel's line. His blood was different from that of Seth's. He wouldn't be able to open the locks to Eden anyway.

Unless...

Her eyes tracked to the body on the coffee table, set at the center of the lobby like a memorial.

If Rylie had any secrets left to her, she wasn't going to be the one to tell them.

"Huh," Elise said.

Abram finally met her eyes. He looked worried. Why? Worried because he'd been attacked, or because he didn't want Elise to know that he had been fathered by Seth after all?

The werewolf bandaging him stood. "We've got to get somewhere safer before the full moon. If we can get everyone to California, we've got another werewolf sanctuary there. We can fit the whole pack there."

Elise arched an eyebrow. It was optimistic of him to think that there would be another full moon.

"We're still a few hours of driving from the nearest port, and whatever ship we hijack won't be fast," Abram said. "Might have to handle the moon here."

"Abel's not up for handling an entire pack," Levi said. "He can't even handle being in the same room as anyone else."

The petty arguments rankled. Levi was acting as though werewolf packs and leadership mattered anymore. Nothing mattered-whether they were in Russia or the United States or on the f.u.c.king moon, everyone was going to die if Elise didn't figure out how to kill Belphegor.

She wasn't going to listen to it. She stormed away from Abram and Levi.

Ariane sped to catch Elise before she could leave the lobby. "Where are you going, ma fille?"

"I'm going to go talk to Anthony," Elise said. "We need a plan." She gave her mother a brief, searching look. She wanted to promise that the plan would involve some Hail Mary to find Marion and bring her back to safety, but how could she promise that when nowhere was safe? "You can help if you want," she finished, knowing it wasn't enough.

She put a foot on the stairs, but Ariane caught her arm, stopping her.

"What?" Elise asked. "Is it a problem with Anthony?"

"No." Ariane hesitated. "It's James. He's awake."

Four.

Every inch of James's body hurt.

He'd forgotten what it was like to be so d.a.m.n vulnerable to injury. When Abel had alerted him to the hybrid attack, he'd thought only to react how he normally would have: by engaging them immediately. James hadn't remembered until he was halfway down the stairs, falchion in hand, that he wasn't entirely sure he would have supernatural strength anymore.

He certainly hadn't forgotten that his access to magic was gone. It was a yawning hole in his heart and mind, an absent limb, a loss of awareness that felt like walking around under partial sedation.

And yet he had gone out there to fight the hybrid anyway.

Needles shot down James's spine as he shifted in a leather chair. He had definitely overestimated his ability to confront creatures that powerful, especially once he'd killed the first with relative ease-only because he'd surprised it.

To heal Elise, he had severed himself from everything magical, ethereal, and infernal. Perhaps he should have considered trying to sever himself from his misplaced sense of heroism as well.

"d.a.m.n," he groaned, lifting the hem of his shirt to see how the bruises were developing.

Ariane's potions had given him a head start on healing. The purple marks all over his body were already yellowing at the edges. He would need weeks to reach prime physical condition, if he could consider any condition his body would now reach to be "prime."

James gritted his teeth and turned back to the desk.

He was using the hotel's stationary to draw runes. He'd attacked the task with an unreasonable amount of hope that was quickly turning to frustration.

The paper was only wood pulp, the pencil only graphite. He could still draw the runes, but there was no magic in them.

His fist tightened on the pencil until it snapped in half. James lunged to his feet and hurled the pieces across the room.

"d.a.m.n it all!"

The pencils bounced off of another person's chest and landed on the floor, spinning across the wood.

Shock froze James beside the desk.

Nathaniel Pritchard, James's missing son, stood beside the bed. He rubbed his chest with a look of hurt. "Why did you do that?"

James's jaw dropped.

When he'd run into Benjamin Flynn in Araboth, he had begun to suspect that Benjamin was Nathaniel's attempt at manifesting on Earth despite being trapped in Eden. But now Nathaniel was in the room, and James felt like he didn't know anything at all.

He had grown so much. He looked like he was almost an adult. His hair was tousled and brown, his shoulders broad, his eyes pale blue. His jaw had lost its childish point, becoming squarer, and was faintly shadowed with a humorously patchy beard.

"Nathaniel?" James whispered.

Anger flashed in the young man's eyes. "What? Didn't you want to see me? Guess nothing's changed that much over the years."

The door to the hotel room opened. Startled, James glanced over his shoulder to see who it was and saw Ariane entering.

By the time he turned back again, Nathaniel was gone.

"How do you feel?" Ariane asked, slipping through the doorway. She hadn't seen Nathaniel.

Had the boy really visited James for that brief second, or was he discovering another side effect of his sudden mortality-insanity?

"James?" Ariane prompted.

He didn't know what to say.

Ariane looked pitying. She definitely thought that he was losing his grip on sanity. "Are you ready for visitors?"

He finally asked, "Visitors?"

She opened the door wider. Elise stood behind Ariane.

Her skin was glowing milk, her lips a shade of red almost as dark as her black eyes. Her hair faded into the shadows behind her. All signs of a perfectly healthy demon.

Elise also looked angry.

"I'll leave you alone," Ariane said, slipping away.

James's heart hadn't had time to slow since he'd seen Nathaniel in his room, and now it beat inside his ribcage like it was trying to punch out of his breastbone.

Fear crawled over the back of his neck as he met Elise's gaze. There was nothing on the other side. None of the awareness that he'd shared with her for so many years. Every sc.r.a.p of the kopis and aspis bond was gone.

He couldn't even tell what she was thinking when she looked at him, taking her time to study his body, his face, his hair.