B7 Ascension Read online

  “I don’t know,” Elise said.

  Leliel actually looked heartbroken. “All right. Try this and see if it works.”

  She rested her hand on the forehead of the man on the slab. Elise felt a small surge of power, and the man’s eyes opened. His expression remained blank as the stone spears began to withdraw from him. He woke slowly, the dream falling away from him.

  Elise sheathed her swords and put her hand on the forehead of another victim. “Tell me what you did to wake him up.”

  “If you still have Eve within you, she’ll know what to do.”

  She felt nothing while touching the human except stirring hunger. Her dominant demon side had a thousand ideas for constructive activities to do with an unconscious mortal. Neuma had described how to mount someone while they slept, inject sexual nightmares into their mind, and feed off of the energy. Elise was pretty confident she could follow those instructions.

  Eve had nothing for her.

  Elise dropped her hand. “Guess I can’t do it.”

  Magma oozed past the stairs, contacting the water dribbling from another dimension. Steam jetted toward the roof of the cavern with a hiss.

  “I’ll summon the survivors to help me,” Leliel said. “We’ll return as many to Earth as possible.”

  “Why should I believe you’ll do that? You dragged everyone here in the first place.”

  “We can’t feed off of them. We also can’t stay in this city. We’ll have to take refuge on Earth.” And an Earth populated by as many humans as possible was the best way for angels to continue to feed.

  Well, at least Leliel was being honest for once.

  Elise stepped back before the stream of magma could contact the toe of her boots.

  If this was New Eden, then what was happening on Earth?

  “You don’t have much time.” She slipped back into the shadows under the stairs so that she could phase. “Make it fast.”

  “As fast as possible,” Leliel said.

  Elise paused before slipping into darkness. “Just because you regret the damage that’s happened here doesn’t mean you’re not culpable for it. We’re not done here, you and me.”

  The angel was pale. “Vengeance changes nothing.”

  “You’d be surprised.”

  Elise phased back to the Earth portal—and, she hoped, Benjamin.

  Three

  Gora Hotel wasn’t unoccupied when the werewolf pack arrived.

  Five minutes later, it was completely empty.

  “Everybody, get out!” Abel roared as he slammed through the front doors mid-shapeshift.

  The family that had been sitting in the entryway scattered, screaming. The desk clerk lasted a few seconds longer—until she saw the rest of the werewolf pack entering behind Abel.

  Most were in human form again. The others remained in their half-wolf juvenile forms, towering above everyone else with shaggy fur on their shoulders and fangs like knives.

  Abram allowed the clerk to escape before shuffling into the hotel with his hands wrapped around the legs of his mother’s body. Summer held Rylie by the shoulders. His twin sister’s cheeks were streaked with tears, her normally bouncy curls limp, her whole body trembling. They’d covered Rylie in a blanket so that they wouldn’t have to keep looking at her, but seeing her once had been enough. Rylie’s pained expression had been immortalized in stone, and Abram had memorized it instantly.

  Gora Hotel was an old hunting lodge outside Belogorsk, all of its furniture comprised of huge slabs of wood decorated by antlers and boar skins—including the coffee table. More than enough room for an obsidian corpse.

  Carefully, Abram and Summer lowered Rylie to its surface. The blanket had slipped off of one of her blackened feet. He pulled it back into place and tucked it underneath her so that she wouldn’t be exposed again.

  “Watch her,” Abel snapped. His voice was no less growling now that he was fully human again. His eyes blazed a brighter shade of gold than usual. His pupils looked entirely animal. It was like some part of him had completely lost control of his humanity when Rylie died.

  Abram didn’t have an inner wolf, but he glared back with equal anger.

  Meeting Abel’s gaze with his head held high should have been a challenge to dominance that the Alpha couldn’t ignore. Now Abel didn’t seem to react at all. He wasn’t really looking at Abram. He wasn’t really looking at anything.

  He stormed up the stairs. Judging by the muffled sounds of shouts and screams that followed, he was clearing out the rest of the hotel, too.

  “What’s with the roaring?” Anthony asked, entering the lobby with one arm around Brianna and his other hand gripping Ariane’s.

  Abram had been introduced to these people in Oymyakon. He knew that they were somehow important, that they had come to help Elise rescue the pack. Abram didn’t want to talk to them.

  It was Paetrick, another one of the werewolves, who said, “I think we’ve just claimed the hotel.”

  “I’ll make sure he doesn’t bite anyone,” Anthony said, settling the witches down by the fire and drawing a gun.

  There was no way that confronting Abel with a gun could be anything resembling a good idea. Abram thought about stopping him.

  But he didn’t follow when Anthony mounted the stairs and disappeared.

  Abram dropped onto the couch beside the table and stared at Rylie. Summer hovered nearby, too antsy to sit, gnawing on her thumbnail as she gazed at that blanket with the same intensity as her brother.

  They hadn’t talked about what had happened yet. The silence from Summer was worse than crying.

  He didn’t have tears inside of him. He felt hollow.

  Abram had only had a mother for a few months. He’d had a father for even less time than that. Both had died the same way, and he got to possess a permanent reminder of their deaths in the form of these hideous statues.

  He’d spent so much time in the mausoleum with Seth after his death that he thought that he’d become inured to the full-body shock of grief, but it was back again, even more powerful than before.

  Abram didn’t even think that he’d ever told Rylie that he loved her.

  “I can’t,” Summer said, breaking their silence. “I can’t do this.”

  They didn’t have a choice. It was already done. She was dead and she wasn’t coming back.

  None of those words would have comforted Summer, so Abram didn’t say them. She followed Anthony upstairs, passing more escaping hotel guests.

  With all of the mundane inhabitants of Gora Hotel evacuated, there would be plenty of room to house the too-large party that they’d dragged away from Oymyakon. The old members of the pack, the new members of the pack, Elise’s friends.

  Considering that they had no way to get more than fifty goddamn people from Russia back to Northgate, it was probably best that they’d picked a building where they would be comfortable for an indefinite length of time.

  It didn’t seem too important to rush back home at this point anyway. Abram had been watching the sky. It seemed that “home” was about as likely to exist in a week as the rest of the world—which was to say, not at all.

  Maybe it was better that Rylie had died before she had to live through that. At least she wouldn’t have to deal with the fear, the fighting, and the pain at the end.

  It would have been nice to see her smile again, though.

  Abram sat with her body as more people moved into the lobby, and the rest of the hotel’s inhabitants vanished. Nash carried James Faulkner into one of the rooms upstairs. The floor above thumped and creaked. Abel’s growl made everything shake, even muffled by the walls. Werewolves settled onto the other couches.

  Levi entered last and sat beside Abram.

  He expected to see satisfaction in Levi’s eyes. After all, he’d hated both Rylie and Abel for years. He’d never made it a secret that he wanted both of them out of the pack, no matter what it took, and now he had half of that victory in Rylie’s death.

  B
ut Levi looked just as pained as Abram felt.

  “In high school, I dated this guy named Tate,” Levi said. “Tate Peterson. You’ve probably heard of him.”

  Abram had. The Peterson family had been the driving force behind the Preternatural Regulation Act. After the assassination of Senator Peterson, his grandson Tate had become the face of the movement, speaking for his family, giving humanity to the grief. He’d managed to stir an entire nation to revolt against preternaturals, and that was before the Breaking had dumped a war in the laps of people worldwide.

  That Tate Peterson.

  Levi was a dick, but he was also a werewolf. The idea that he’d dated someone whose entire career had been built on ruining the lives of preternaturals had a kind of sickening irony to it.

  “Can’t imagine that,” Abram said. His voice felt like it was stuck in his throat.

  “Tate wasn’t a politician, then. He was a stoner and a gamer. And he didn’t know about me.” Levi gazed at Rylie. “He didn’t know about her, either. They were best friends until she got sick with silver poisoning. She killed his mother in a delusional rampage.”

  Abram hadn’t known that, either. Seemed like he was learning all kinds of shit he didn’t want to know that day. “Shut up, Levi. Not right now.”

  “Listen to me, asshole,” Levi said. “I’m getting at something sympathetic.”

  Abram seriously doubted it.

  When he didn’t respond, Levi tried to go on. “When Tate found his mom dead—”

  “I told you to shut up.”

  Levi’s mouth clamped shut. His eyes narrowed. “Fine. You know what? Fine. I don’t care.”

  Abram got to his feet. He couldn’t stay in the hotel anymore. It was too crowded with people he couldn’t stand.

  He slammed through the front doors to stand outside the hotel. Considering the gracelessness with which Abel had evacuated the hotel, he wouldn’t have been surprised to find local law enforcement waiting for them, but the only activity on the street was people jumping into cars to drive away.

  Rural Russia was a far cry from Northgate, but it still reminded him of his home town had after the Breaking. All the smoke, the panic, the breaking glass. Nobody even looked at him.

  Most people seemed to have their attention for nothing but the shattered sky.

  Abram chose not to look up at it again. It was dizzying to see flashes of another city above him, and it terrified him to know there was nothing to be done about it. He almost envied the residents of Belogorsk for thinking that there was somewhere they could run to escape it all.

  He’d thought that he would feel better getting away from Levi, Rylie’s body, and the sounds of Abel’s grief. There was something impersonal about the panic on the street. He could deal with that.

  But Abram could still hear Summer crying somewhere upstairs, in one of the rooms with the windows opened to the cold winter air. Her ragged sobs punched right through his heart.

  Screams erupted farther down the street.

  Abram had become so numb to people panicking that he didn’t look up, at first. It was only when they kept screaming that he turned to investigate what was wrong.

  A pair of creatures was walking up the street. Superficially, neither of them looked all that similar. One had scaly feet like a bird’s and bull horns; the other was red-skinned and more human-like. Both towered over the people running from them. Both had shriveled black wings that dripped ichor.

  Rylie had told him a little about the hybrid offspring of angels and demons before. She’d been reluctant to talk about fighting them in Las Vegas, but what little she had said was more than enough for Abram to know he couldn’t beat them.

  They must have been looking for Elise.

  He drew his handgun as he backed toward the hotel. Rylie had been able to kill the hybrids—surely Abel could too, if he was done throwing tantrums.

  Abram wasn’t looking where he was going. His heel caught on a rock in the middle of the road. He stumbled.

  When he looked up again, there was only a single hybrid approaching on the road. The other one was missing.

  His senses screamed out.

  It was behind him.

  Normally, his reflexes were fantastic. After spending his childhood trying to keep up with a shapeshifter twin, he was almost as fast as one of the werewolves. But the sheer force of the power pouring off of the hybrid stunned him.

  It felt like a hand crushing his skull, claws on the inside of his ribs. His throat contracted. His eyes blurred.

  He raised the gun too slowly.

  The hybrid’s hand lashed toward him before he could even think to react.

  Ichor splattered over Abram’s face, and the hybrid’s almost-human expression went blank. Its black eyes unfocused. Abram looked down to see a blade thrust through the hybrid’s chest. Someone had come to save him—someone other than a werewolf.

  It dropped at his feet. A man stood behind its body, drenched in blood to his shoulders, hands gripping the hilt of his sword. He wore a white button-down that was stained by older blood, and the hems of his slacks were ripped.

  James Faulkner was awake.

  He raised the sword and hacked again and again, butchering the hybrid’s wings before it could roll over. It swiped for Abram’s ankles with clawed hands, but he leaped out of its reach.

  Once the wings were gone, James brought the sword plunging down at the center of its back and impaled the heart.

  The hybrid struggled against the ground, gushing ichor over the street. Its struggles pulled the sword from James’s hands. But the witch was prepared; he had another knife, and he used it to slit the hybrid’s throat.

  Only then did the hybrid stop moving. James jerked the sword out of its back.

  “Are you all right?” he asked Abram.

  “I’m fine.” Abram looked over the other man again. He couldn’t tell how much of that blood belonged to the hybrid and how much belonged to James. “What about you?”

  The second hybrid rushed toward them, claws chewing into the street. “I’ve been better,” James said. He ducked under its hand, twisted, hacked at its wing.

  They’d lost the element of surprise and James’s blow didn’t hit. The hybrid backhanded James, sending him flying across the street.

  He hit the wall and didn’t get up again.

  Abram fired at the hybrid’s chest as it charged him. He saw the bullets smack into its muscle, but aside from tiny blood splatters, he might as well have been lobbing pebbles at it. And the thing was fast. By the time he realized that his gun wasn’t having any effect, it was too late to get out of the way.

  The hybrid lowered its head an instant before he hit.

  Horns slammed into Abram’s gut, just under the ribs. All of the breath whooshed out of his lungs.

  His back struck the wall of the hotel. Stone cracked. It was like being pinned by a car—he couldn’t breathe.

  Abram struggled to shove the horns away. He was an avid weightlifter in the prime of his life, as strong as a kopis could reasonably expect to become, yet he couldn’t budge the hybrid. Kopis or not, he was nothing against the combined strength of angels and demons shoved into a single, red-fleshed vessel.

  Ichor dribbled off the horns and slicked his palms. He lost his grip. The hybrid reared back then swung his head again, catching Abram and tossing him into the air.

  He landed on the street ten feet away, facedown. The world spun dizzily around him.

  Abram didn’t have his gun anymore, but James had dropped his sword on the other side of the street. He struggled onto his hands and knees to crawl for it.

  Heavy footfalls pounded into the ground behind him. The earth shivered.

  His fingers brushed the hilt of the falchion.

  Abram rolled over just as the hybrid reached him. That massive clawed foot was coming right for his face.

  He thrust the sword into the softest part of the sole.

  Black blood gushed over him. The hybrid jerked back wit
h an ear-splitting shout, ripping the sword from Abram’s hands.

  Human hands clamped down on his arm. “Run,” James urged, yanking Abram to his feet.

  That seemed like decent advice.

  The men bolted away from the hotel toward the nearest parked car that had been abandoned by the village’s evacuees. They only made it about fifty feet.

  James roared as the hybrid grabbed the back of his neck in a crushing grip. “Get the wings, Abram!” he squeezed out as he was lifted off of his feet. “Rip them off!”

  Abram jumped behind the car. A half-second later, James’s body struck the hood, shattering the windshield. The man tried to get up—pretty admirable, considering that he was bleeding from his hairline and looked like he was probably concussed. He slumped to the hood again.

  The hybrid shoved the car aside effortlessly, exposing Abram.

  Rip the wings off? How? The sword was nowhere in sight, his gun was gone, and he didn’t think that the houses behind him were likely to have easily accessed weapons.

  Abram turned to run again, knowing he would be too slow. He braced himself for the punch of horns into his back.

  But it never came.

  A werewolf roared behind him. Abram whirled to see a bear-sized wolf on the hybrid’s back, claws digging into its shoulders, teeth worrying at the base of the wings. His fur was shaggy and dark. His eyes were filled with hate—an emotion foreign to the wolf spirit.

  Abel.

  The hybrid shrieked and thrashed, trying to toss the werewolf off of him.

  One hard tear, and the right-hand wing came free. Abel tossed it aside. Sticky black feathers stuck to his muzzle and the smell of singed hair filled the air. The ichor was burning him. He dived in to chew at the other wing, ripping it free in just a few bites.

  He jumped off before the hybrid tumbled to the ground. Ichor dripped from his muzzle.

  Abel wasn’t done with his victim yet, though. He was just getting a better angle to rip into its back.

  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.