B7 Ascension Read online

  She reached back to loosen the falchion in her sheath.

  A wolf emerged from the trees, shapeshifting into human form. Most werewolves needed to wait for the Alpha to make the change, but not Summer Gresham. She was one of the few who had been born with the wolf spirit inside of her, and she switched between the two forms as easily as most people got dressed in the morning.

  The young woman was naked when she finished changing. Her skin steamed from contact with the freezing air. “You okay?” Summer asked, helping Anthony and Brianna climb from the pickup. She hadn’t noticed the man in the road.

  Benjamin bolted at the sound of her voice, veering to the left and vanishing into the trees.

  Elise tore herself from the crashed pickup and flashed through the night.

  For the past several weeks, she had been sick, incapable of feeding well enough to regain control of all of her powers. Now, she loosed herself into the night without hesitation. There wasn’t even a microgram of anathema powder remaining inside of her.

  More than that, she felt like she had fed on an entire army of victims, with blood and sex and flesh and fear, and she was strong enough to take on a second army if she wanted to.

  Elise saw everything as she expanded to fill the unnaturally dark night. She saw the werewolves closing in on the pickup, ripping the doors off to help Anthony and Brianna climb out. She saw the careful transfer of Rylie’s body to flat ground and Ariane Kavanagh emerging from a second vehicle behind them.

  She saw the angel named Nashriel skimming the border between air and void in the sky above, wheeling in circles as he watched for enemies that might threaten the wolf pack.

  Elise saw every inch of shadows under the canopy of the trees, between the grains of topsoil, deep within the layers of ice.

  And she saw Benjamin Flynn running.

  With a thought, she materialized in front of him, arms flung wide so that she formed a wall with her mortal body.

  Benjamin skidded to a stop before striking her. Now that they were closer, she realized he wasn’t impervious to the cold after all. His whole body was trembling, his lips pale, his runny nose frozen. He didn’t cut the most imposing figure.

  “What do you want with us?” Elise asked.

  He looked confused. “What do I want? What does that even mean?”

  She opened her mouth to reply, but wasn’t sure what to say. Something in his tone told her that he wouldn’t have understood.

  Benjamin shoved her.

  Elise let out a small cry of shock as she lost her grip on the trees and fell backwards.

  She never hit the ground. She flashed into shadow inches before she contacted ice.

  When she reappeared, she found herself standing in New Eden.

  Elise’s jaw dropped. Her boots crunched on frozen ground as she turned. That ground belonged in Russia. The trees framing her view of the city were likewise the trees of the tundra, with their desperate branches grasping for any brush of sunlight they could get in the long winters.

  Everything else surrounding her was ethereal. The frozen ground turned to white cobblestone a few feet to her left, and one of the angels’ newer buildings thrust toward the clouds, its upper floors of shimmering crystal hidden by storm clouds.

  Smoke spiraled into the black sky. Some of the trees were burning.

  Lightning flashed through the clouds over New Eden. For an instant, Elise glimpsed a familiar landscape high above her head: an icy road framed by forest and a pickup truck so far away that it looked to be half the size of her pinky nail.

  Benjamin had pushed her into another dimension.

  He was nowhere in sight now. When Elise searched for him with her other senses, ethereal power crashed over her, smothering her ability to sense anything else.

  This wasn’t just a vision. She was really in New Eden.

  Some part of her was perversely amused that she had stumbled back there after all it had taken to reach New Eden the first time. A much larger part of her was horrified by the implications.

  What other worlds would be spilling onto Earth next?

  She stormed deeper into New Eden, searching for Benjamin’s movement among the swaying branches. The wind was picking up. The city groaned and crumbled around her.

  Another consciousness pushed against hers, powerful and brief.

  Leliel.

  The angels knew Elise had come back.

  She raced down the twisting cobblestone road faster.

  Benjamin was scurrying over a bridge when she found him, rubbing the circulation back into his arms. On the other side of the road, Elise could see Earth again—not the tundra that they had left behind, but somewhere with waving grass the color of sunshine.

  The sky was blue over there. Benjamin was fleeing to a place where the sky hadn’t yet shattered, where it would be too bright for Elise to give chase.

  She had to catch him while he was still in New Eden.

  Rage erupted inside of her. She didn’t fight it. She embraced it, fed into it, and unleashed nightmarish fear in a wave.

  “Stop!” Elise shouted, and he did.

  Benjamin cried out as he fell, clutching his chest.

  She sank the hooks of her power into him. Once caught, it was trivial to make his fear grow, paralyzing him as he struggled to breathe.

  But what strange fears for Benjamin to have. Through the ropes of energy tying them together, she could see his nightmares played out like a movie: a blond woman drenched in her own blood, a towering Tree that Elise hadn’t seen intact for years, a dark garden that she had never visited at all.

  She stopped at his side, but Benjamin didn’t see her. He writhed, clawing at his back, as if trying to rip away wings that weren’t there.

  “Let me go!” he cried.

  Elise eased her power away from him.

  Color slowly returned to Benjamin’s cheeks as he panted on the ground. His palms were dirty with Earth soil where he had fallen. The knees of his jeans were ripped.

  Elise could think of a thousand questions for him, starting with “How did you escape Dis?” and ending with “This is all your fault, isn’t it?” But she had no idea how long she could hold on to Benjamin, and only one of those questions mattered. “You told me that Marion was in New Eden,” Elise said. “She’s not here. I don’t think she’s ever been here.”

  “I lied,” Benjamin gasped.

  “But why?”

  “Because I wanted you to go back here. I wanted you to punish the angels for what they’ve done. I think. I’m not sure.”

  And she had taken the bait without thinking twice.

  Anger burned in the pit of her stomach. She didn’t appreciate being manipulated, especially not when those manipulations had led to the walls between all of the universes falling apart.

  “Why do you care what the angels have done? Did they take someone you care about? Is that why we’ve come back?”

  “I don’t know anyone here. It’s just that they killed Nathaniel’s mother,” Benjamin said. “I hate angels. I hate all of them.”

  The sound of Nathaniel’s name from Benjamin’s lips stunned her. He spoke with such heat.

  Metaraon had indeed killed Nathaniel’s mother, a woman who James had once been engaged to marry, but that angel was dead now. Adam had ripped his head off.

  It made no sense at all that Benjamin cared who had murdered Hannah Pritchard.

  “Then where is Marion?” Elise asked.

  “I took her somewhere safe, where nobody would be able to find her. Not even me. It was for her own good. She’s a mage, you know. Leliel would have taken her. Or James would have.” Hatred twisted Benjamin’s features. “You know what happens whenever James gets involved.”

  Not long ago, she would have agreed with that sentiment. She wasn’t sure that she still didn’t.

  Benjamin shouldn’t have known James at all.

  “Have you seen him in your visions of the future?” Elise asked. Benjamin Flynn was a precognitive; he knew
her with uncomfortable intimacy because he had seen her in previous visions. “James and Nathaniel—have you been having premonitions of them?”

  “No. God, no,” Benjamin said. He gripped his head in both hands. “Yes. All the time.” He lunged for her. Elise took a quick step back, but he still managed to catch her shoulders, clinging to her desperately. Thunder rolled over New Eden, followed by the conflicting scents of rain and smoke. “I still see you, Elise. I know you. I never wanted to hurt you, but I hate you. How could you do this to me?”

  His touch made her flesh roil. “I think the visions have damaged your mind. We need to isolate you from them again.”

  “Like the Union did?” He laughed bitterly. “Their equipment failed. They thought they were cutting off premonitions, but they were trying to sever me from godhood. No matter what they do, I’ll become him again. Men are too weak to control me now.”

  He was rambling. Insane.

  “James can—” Elise cut herself off. No, James couldn’t do anything. He was never going to use magic to heal someone ever again. “I can do magic now, Benjamin.”

  “I know. I know.”

  “If anyone’s strong enough to repair you, it’s me,” Elise said. “Let’s figure this out. There’s still time to save you, and save the world.”

  A laugh shivered through his body. A tear dripped down his cheek. “It’s too late. It’s much too late.”

  “It’s not too late until we’re all dead.”

  “How do you know that we aren’t?” Benjamin asked. “You’re going to destroy the world, Elise. How could you?”

  Crack. The bridge behind them snapped in half. The pieces fell into the canal, washing downstream.

  Elise pushed Benjamin away before they could fall in.

  The ground grew hot under her feet, just a few feet from the wavering image of Earth. She could feel it through the thick soles of her boots.

  The long grass caught fire.

  “Watch out!” Benjamin dragged Elise under the shelter of another tree that wasn’t yet burning. Its low branches shielded them from the wind.

  Elise watched in horror as the street collapsed in on itself, exposing a burning core of magma underneath. Red-hot fire flowed like an underground river.

  That shouldn’t have been underneath Heaven.

  “What’s going on?” Elise asked, clutching Benjamin’s shirt in a fist. “What have you done?”

  “It’s Belphegor.” His eyes were suddenly clear, as if struck for the first time by sanity. “Yeah, Belphegor. That’s why I came looking for you. I almost forgot because of all the threads—because the messages are so unclear now, and I can’t… No.” He shook his head as if to clear it. “I have to warn you what he did before I forget again.”

  “What? Belphegor?” It had been weeks since she’d heard anything from him. She was half-convinced that he had just wanted to sit back and enjoy watching Elise wage war for no good reason.

  Benjamin’s voice dropped to an urgent whisper. “As soon as the walls fell, he joined me. I let him in. If he could find me, that means he’ll find her. He’ll find Marion. And—and now he’s gone into the Origin.”

  Elise’s heart plummeted.

  The Origin was the central point from which everything in the universe had spawned. It had also bestowed the powers of God upon Adam, who had once been an ordinary man.

  Which meant that Belphegor now had those powers too.

  A fresh plume of magma erupted from the ground behind Benjamin, so close that it seared Elise’s eyebrows. It smelled of sulfur. It smelled of home.

  Because Belphegor was causing it. He had become God and was trying to make Heaven into Hell.

  The molten fire flowed into the canal, drying the last of the water with a sizzle and streaking deeper into the city. When it brushed the roots of the trees dangling into the canal, they caught fire.

  Before long, New Eden wasn’t going to exist at all.

  The open hole between Heaven and Earth wavered harder. Elise couldn’t tell if it was closing or if the heat from the magma was just making it shimmer.

  “Get to Earth, Benjamin,” Elise said, pulling free of his grip. “Get through there, find somewhere as safe as possible, and wait for me to find you. I will find you.”

  “What are you going to do?” Benjamin asked.

  “There are still humans in New Eden,” she said. “I’m not going to let them burn.”

  Most of the bodies that Elise passed in New Eden had been killed by her hand just hours earlier, though she couldn’t recall slaughtering them.

  Her memory was good enough that she could remember what she had eaten for lunch with Anthony at the Hard Rock Casino’s buffet last April—but she couldn’t remember this. Surrendering herself to Eve had done her a small favor. For once, her memory was blissfully fuzzy.

  Elise could still tell which ones she had killed because their wounds oozed with ichor from the obsidian falchion.

  She was surprised to see how many more had died in the time since. Several burned corpses were half-submerged in magma, and those definitely weren’t her work. A few hung from the lower branches of scorched trees, and some smoldered among the orchards. Elise lost count of the additional dead around two dozen.

  The survivors still hadn’t abandoned New Eden. Angels whirled through the smoky sky, their wings lonely points of white light against the darkness of the void beyond, carrying water from the remaining canals to extinguish fires.

  Elise spotted one accidentally crossing into another dimension. He swooped toward a tree, skimmed a wavering patch of air, and vanished.

  She phased from one side of the city to the cemetery at its center. They would need a much bigger hill to fit memorials for all the angels killed in New Eden that day. Although considering the rate at which Belphegor’s fire approached the hill, the angels would soon be lucky to have any cemetery at all.

  Elise strode toward the stairs at the center of the hill, sword drawn, eyes open for any sign that the angels were coming for her. It seemed that they were far too absorbed in their suicidal struggle to fight her.

  There was another sinkhole between dimensions near the top of the spiral stairs. Elise hesitated above it, looking down into an endless puddle of blue-black fluid. It dribbled waterfalls onto the steps. That sinkhole might have led to one of Earth’s oceans. It also could have been opening into Phlegethon, or even Zebul—neither of which Elise wanted to visit.

  The air hummed as she skirted around it and descended.

  All of the mist that had clung to the cavern underneath the cemetery had dispersed, but the smoke from the fires above was climbing, not dropping. The air was still breathable. The mortals unconscious on the stone slabs were unaffected by the catastrophe above.

  Hope stirred in Elise’s chest.

  Maybe, just maybe, she was going to get to save these people.

  But save them for what? An Earth that was falling apart?

  She stepped off of the stairs into an inch of water and examined a man resting on the nearest slab. He was naked. Stone spikes were embedded directly into the veins at his wrists. His eyes danced under his eyelids.

  The man’s dreams were so vivid that she could glimpse them through his brain signals: he imagined that he was running barefoot on a desert trail, chest heaving with pleasant exertion, a dog by his side.

  Opening his eyes to Heaven on fire was going to be a hell of a wake-up call.

  Elise moved to jerk his arms free of the stone spikes.

  “Don’t do that.”

  She lifted her sword as she turned to address the speaker. It was an angel wearing a filmy peach gown, her hair tumbling over her shoulders, blood smeared on her hands.

  Leliel. Eve’s first and most beloved daughter.

  Eve almost always had something to say about running into another angel, especially one as important as Leliel, but she was silent within Elise this time. Maybe James had healed Elise so damn well that the first angel was gone completely. She co
uld only hope.

  “Give it up,” Elise said. “Your city’s lost. Let these people go.”

  “He’ll die if you tear him away from the support system like that,” Leliel said.

  “Then how do I free them? Is there a master switch that will let everyone go?”

  “They were never meant to be released. There’s no easy way to wake them.”

  “But there is a way.”

  Leliel gazed across the room, anguish twisting her beautiful features into a hideous mask. Magma was starting to drip down the wall of the cavern, making the angel glow crimson.

  “This wasn’t supposed to happen,” she said. “We were only attempting to isolate ourselves, not shatter the universe. We worked on our machines and hybridized magic for years with Metaraon’s assistance—there’s no reason that it shouldn’t have worked.”

  “Someone could have sabotaged it,” Elise said.

  “But why? A shattered world benefits no one.”

  No one except the demon trying to get into Eden. “Who else helped you with the severance?” Elise asked.

  Leliel looked uncomfortable. “Infernal architects. Abraxas.”

  “Belphegor.”

  “Yes, Belphegor worked closely with Abraxas and Aquiel.”

  But only Belphegor had wanted into Eden. The other demons had wanted to isolate the angels for selfish reasons—removing the only faction that might have been able to keep them from conquering Earth. Maybe they would have succeeded in their imperialism if Elise hadn’t intervened.

  Belphegor’s sights had been set on something much larger the entire time.

  “I’m going to fix this,” Elise said. The dripping magma was cooking bodies of the sleeping mortals nearest the walls. “How do I free these people, Leliel?”

  Something in Elise’s expression must have convinced Leliel that there wasn’t any point in arguing anymore. “You have to wake them up gently. Only angels can do it.” She gave Elise an appraising look. “Is she still there? My mother?”

  Elise turned her attention inward, searching for the spirit that had been riding her since she escaped imprisonment in the Tree.

  There was a faint glimmer of the ethereal inside of her—very faint—but Eve was still silent.