Lost in Prophecy: An Urban Fantasy Novel (The Ascension Series) (Volume 5) Read online

  “Do you obey the Father?” Her voice broke through the illusion, making his bones vibrate.

  Only then did he realize that he had made a horrible mistake.

  It was her.

  Cornelius had come face-to-face with the woman who had almost singlehandedly toppled Dis. Who had slaughtered both Abraxas and Aquiel, ancient and noble demons, in order to take their Palace. The woman who had forbidden slavery of mortals, enforcing her insane laws with cunning that few could comprehend. She was so very strong—much stronger than he had expected to see from someone naïve enough to carry a handgun into Hell.

  He did not obey the Father. He had not sworn allegiance to her. But he wasn’t foolish enough to defy a demon-god to her face. Not if he expected to survive.

  “Forgive me,” he whispered, crossing his arms over his chest, forming the X that was her icon.

  Her gloved hand rested on his forehead. The touch was light, but it made him tremble. She could have probably plucked the brain from his skull with as little effort as she had dismissed his thrall. “I have no interest in dispensing forgiveness. I just want a nightmare dredged from the pits.”

  “It’s not possible. They emerge of their own volition when they’re ready.”

  “This one is ready,” the Father said. “I’ll make her ready, dammit.”

  The sound of footsteps slapping against the ground drew his attention to the shore of the pit.

  Cornelius realized Rowland was attacking only a split-second before the other nightmare hurtled out of the mist, screaming a battle cry. He held a cleaver over his head.

  “Rowland, no!”

  The Father moved swiftly. She jerked a black box out of her boot. Her thumb depressed the button on the side. She drove it into Rowland’s gut.

  Blue lightning arced over his breastbone, wrapping him in wicked fingers of light.

  His cleaver sank into her shoulder—a final act of revenge.

  She had brought electricity to the Amniosium.

  Hot tears streaked down Cornelius’s cheeks.

  The Father ignored him, swearing under her breath. She reached back to touch the injury. “Dammit, Neuma!”

  Her succubus companion reached up to jerk the blade free. Sludgy amber blood oozed down the Father’s shoulder. “It’s okay, doll. He didn’t cut deep, and it’s only steel. You’ll be okay.”

  “I know,” the Father said. “But the bleeding—I can’t afford that, not if I end up having to use the runes.”

  “It’s okay. It’ll be okay.” It sounded as though Neuma were trying to convince herself.

  Cornelius barely registered the conversation the women were having above him. He stared at the place Rowland had been standing. The tang of electricity lingered in the air.

  The Father had used a mortal weapon to kill a nightmare. Now Rowland’s essence wisped down the hill, melding with the bubbling vat that cradled the monoentity of his brethren.

  He would be back. The nightmares always came back. But it wouldn’t be the same, this new life—rebirth changed a creature.

  Though Cornelius didn’t consider himself sentimental, his heart clenched at the idea that he had lost his long-time companion. “How dare you, Father?” he whispered.

  “I am a vengeful god,” she said dryly. She licked her own blood off the fingers of her gloves. The wound had already closed. “He attacked me and got what he deserved. The nightmare I want back—she didn’t deserve this. Will you help me retrieve her from the vat?”

  “It’s impossible,” Cornelius said.

  Neuma paced, twisting the whip in her fists. “He might be right. I don’t know, doll. Maybe this was a bad idea.”

  The Father was glaring hard at the Amniosium as Rowland settled into it, making the surface of the fluid roil anew, unsettling the balance. His death was one more of too many.

  “It’s calling to me,” the Father said.

  Neuma stopped pacing. “What do you mean, calling to you?”

  “I’m going in to get her.”

  “Elise, wait!”

  But the Father didn’t listen to her companion. She handed the gun and the Taser to Neuma, unzipped her leather body armor, and stepped out of it. She stripped off her underwear as well. The near-flawless body underneath was lean and lightly muscled. A long scar glistened on the inside of one forearm and a tattoo marked the same palm.

  She stood on the brink of the vat wearing nothing but a gold ring, hair blown out of her face by Malebolge’s wheezing winds.

  “What are you doing?” Cornelius asked, struggling to his feet.

  She swan-dived into the Amniosium and vanished.

  Neuma braced herself for terror as Elise plunged into the pit of seething nightmares.

  The instant her pale toes disappeared, slipping under the surface with barely a ripple, her protective aura vanished, too. Neuma was only a half-succubus, meaning that the other half of her was human. She was susceptible to most of the same things humans were. That included nightmare thrall.

  And now she was alone in the place where nightmares were born.

  She clenched her fist around the handle of the whip as terror clawed up the back of her skull, gaining traction on her mind.

  “No!” shouted the birthing attendant, flinging a hand at the ripple left behind by Elise’s dive. He stumbled for the pit.

  Neuma introduced the braided end of the whip to his ankles with a snap of her wrist. It lashed around him. She jerked him off of his feet, and he gave an extremely satisfying grunt as he hit the ground.

  “Don’t you dare screw with her,” Neuma said, planting a boot on his chest.

  He gazed up at her with desperate eyes. “She will unbalance everything. She could destroy the Amniosium.” His supplication was gratifying. He didn’t know that Neuma was a flickering candle in comparison to Elise’s bonfire, and he feared her even as his fear sucked the breath out of her lungs.

  Neuma did well enough in the City of Dis, but Malebolge was much wilder. To the locals, half-blooded Gray were no better than mortals. As long as nobody realized what she was—or, more precisely, what she wasn’t—she enjoyed some vicarious benefits as Elise’s right hand. Demons seemed to regard them as nearly equal.

  She couldn’t show the fear. She had to remain in control.

  Disturbing mental images penetrated her resolve. She thought of dark rooms that smelled of feces and a woman screaming shrilly. A woman who needed her, a woman who Neuma simultaneously wished would die and hoped would never leave her.

  It’s just the thrall. She pushed it away.

  “Please,” the birth attendant said, drawing her attention to him again. “Malebolge is already struggling. The pit’s status is…tenuous.”

  Neuma leaned her weight harder on him, digging her spiked heel into his spongy flesh. “Shut your face. It’s done. She’s in there. Just gotta wait for her to come out on her own now.”

  And wait they did.

  She stood on the birth attendant for several minutes without any sign of Elise within the pit. Not so much as an air bubble broke the surface. The entire time, Neuma struggled against the choking fear, overwhelmed by horrible thoughts that pushed back when she tried to dismiss them.

  It didn’t help that she could hear the rioters outside the gate. Elise had made the mistake of phasing them into the market, claiming that nobody would recognize them, or at least, that nobody would care.

  She had been wrong. Everyone had known who they were. One glance at the livery and everything had gone fucking insane.

  Dis wasn’t happy to have Elise residing in the Palace, but Malebolge was furious she even dared to exist.

  It wouldn’t matter soon. Bringing Malebolge to heel wasn’t on the to-do list—not with so much left to do in Dis. Once they had what they wanted from the Amniosium, Neuma and Elise could phase away and forget this hideous, stinking place existed.

  Elise just needed to come out now. If she didn’t, then how would Neuma get back to Dis?

  “Please c
ome out,” Neuma whispered, trying not to follow her spiraling thoughts down to their dark conclusion—the idea that Elise might never return.

  “There!” said the nightmare suddenly.

  Elise’s head broke the surface. Her hair was plastered to her cheeks, forehead, shoulders; the primordial soup of nightmares drizzled from the tip of her nose.

  Neuma darted to the edge, heart fluttering wildly, but stopped on the brink.

  Another handful of staggering steps, and Elise’s chest emerged. A head rested against her breasts.

  Not a head—a skull.

  “Babe,” Neuma whimpered.

  Step by torturous step, Elise rose from the pit. A body dangled in her arms, little more than a collection of bones and connective tissue, lacking enough flesh to be obviously male or female—barely even humanoid. The bones looked to be molding, but Neuma knew it was the growth of new flesh.

  The sight cracked Neuma’s heart in half. She wanted to plunge into the surf to help, but didn’t dare. Elise had the power of the father of all demons woven into the fiber of her being. Neuma was just a really ambitious bartender. She wasn’t sure she’d survive the skinny-dip.

  She grabbed Elise the instant that she reached the edge of the pit. “That was insane!”

  Elise collapsed to her knees, holding the pieces of the nightmare to her heart. “I’m going to drop her,” she said, voice ragged. “Help me.”

  Neuma quickly moved to take the fragile bones of the nightmare into her own arms.

  The nightmare exhaled. Her eyelids peeled open. White-filmed eyes gazed blindly above. The tongue moved inside her mouth, but without real lips, she could form no words. She only groaned.

  The nightmare was alive. For the love of all that was holy—she was aware.

  “You cruel bastards,” said the nightmare on the ground a few feet away. He stared at them in horror.

  Neuma ignored him. “Babe,” she whispered again. Tears stung her eyes as she pressed a kiss to the top of the exposed skull. The bone was strangely cold against her lips. “I got you. I won’t let you go again. I got you.” She repeated it under her breath like a prayer.

  “Come on.” Elise wrapped her arm around Neuma’s shoulders. “Let’s get Jerica back to the Palace.”

  Two

  THEY TOOK WHAT remained of Jerica to feed upon Elise’s enemies.

  Elise set Jerica carefully inside an iron cage padded by blankets. They were a thoughtful gesture from Neuma, but not entirely useful. Compared to having one’s body reduced to ichor and forced to reform cell by cell, lying on a hard surface was probably negligibly painful. Worse, Jerica’s filmy, still-forming skin was sticking to the cloth, and it tore the fragile tissue when Elise tried to adjust her.

  “You’ll be okay soon,” Neuma whispered, wiggling her fingers through the bars to touch Jerica’s knuckles.

  The nightmare didn’t reply.

  Elise seized a chain as wide as her forearms and hooked it to the center of the cage. Then she heaved her weight on the opposite end, using a pulley to jerk the cage into the air. It swayed over their heads.

  She pushed Jerica’s cage out over the dungeons—a series of warded rooms with no roofs, allowing Elise to watch the misery of her prisoners like a scientist looking upon rats in a maze.

  For months now, Elise had been going from House to House in the City of Dis to demand fealty. Most demons had ignored her. Others had laughed. And she had allowed most of them to get away with that…on her first visit. She was not quite as understanding on the second visit, especially if the Householders started fighting back.

  Those assholes got tossed in the dungeons. It wasn’t the most diplomatic response, but it was extremely satisfying.

  Seeing the bourgeois of Hell forced to live in sparsely furnished cells hadn’t lost its entertainment factor. They had nothing but hard beds and a few pages of fiend-skin paper so that they could write to their Houses of origin. The latter wasn’t a gesture of sympathy so much as practicality; Houses needed to be run, even when their leaders were holding unwilling court in the Palace.

  “Do you think it’ll take long?” Neuma asked, clinging to Elise’s arm. “Jerica’s healing, I mean.”

  Elise lifted a shoulder in a shrug. “No way to tell.”

  Few of the prisoners had human blood in them, so they would be the only ones susceptible to Jerica’s thrall. Those prisoners were about to have a few very bad weeks. Starving, newborn nightmares were hungry creatures. Jerica wouldn’t be able to take it easy on them even if she wanted to.

  Neuma and Elise stood on the mezzanine in silence, watching Jerica shudder. Below, the prisoners were beginning to react to the presence of a nightmare feeding off of them. Or, to be more precise, the woman who had brought the nightmare.

  Shouted threats echoed through the hollow chamber.

  “I will rape your children’s eye sockets for what you’ve done to me, you dumb bitch!” That was Davithon from the House of Courevore.

  And from a lamia in the back corner of the dungeon: “You will regret this! Release me now and your death will be swift!”

  Others were trying to bribe her for their freedom, and a few even begged, but the threats were far more prevalent. None of them were saying what she wanted to hear: “I will release my human slaves and agree to abide by your laws.”

  Was that really so hard?

  Elise was tempted to just kill the lot of them, communicating with demons in the way that she had learned as a girl-child. She didn’t need compliance if they were dead. She could crack their skulls and their battlements and free the mortals that way, too.

  But what a pain in the ass that would be. The Houses wouldn’t run themselves, and Elise sure as heck wasn’t taking on that much responsibility. She just wanted these assholes to get their shit together and obey her. If she left the city’s governing structure largely untouched, Dis would continue to run after she achieved her goals and returned to Earth.

  Elise was increasingly doubtful such a day would ever come.

  She leaned over the banister. “Listen,” she said. She barely had to raise her voice for the word to carry throughout the entire room. Whoever had designed the dungeon had done great with the acoustics. It had been carved directly into the igneous rock deep underneath the Palace, and the faceted walls multiplied every sound a dozen times. Unfortunately, after capturing so many prisoners, the noise could get cacophonous.

  Such as when all of them started screaming and roaring in response to Elise’s voice.

  She waited until they quieted down again, counting to ten inside her head. And then twenty. And then thirty. Eventually, they fell quiet.

  Davithon was the nearest of them. He was an ugly little demon that dressed as a fop, wearing a curled wig and a white domino mask. A black tongue lashed from his fanged mouth. He had no legs and hovered a few feet above the floor, arms stretched above him—trying to reach her, but unable to pass the invisible roof on his cell.

  Face to face, he was a little scary. From above, his clawing was laughable.

  “You can all earn your freedom by releasing the slaves and swearing fealty,” Elise said, looking specifically at Davithon. His House alone had nineteen slaves. “Let me know when you’ve changed your minds.”

  She backed away from the edge as they all resumed gnashing their teeth.

  Whatever.

  Neuma was standing back a few feet, gazing up at Jerica. She didn’t seem to have heard Elise’s latest attempts at negotiation, which were about as effective as all her previous attempts.

  “Let’s go upstairs,” Elise said. “Gerard’s waiting.”

  “I’d like to stay,” Neuma said. “I’m half-human. Jerica can feed on me, too.”

  “Do you think that she would want you to sacrifice your mental health for her rebirth?”

  “Doesn’t matter all that much to me. She needs it. I’ll give it to her.”

  Elise didn’t like that. It wasn’t that Neuma was the only person that Elise cur
rently used to feed her own demonic hungers—she just didn’t like the thought of Neuma being forced to relive her worst nightmares over and over. It would break her long before Jerica became strong.

  “Don’t martyr yourself,” Elise said.

  Neuma’s eyes glistened. “Love is sacrifice.”

  The words corkscrewed right into Elise’s belly. Her jaw hardened.

  She nodded once, lips sealed against further arguments, and Neuma pulled up a folding chair to sit at the edge of the mezzanine. The half-succubus could just barely reach the edge of Jerica’s cage if she reached out. She hooked one long finger in the bar and managed a trembling smile at the nightmare’s shivering bones.

  Elise left without looking back at them, but the image of the two together was permanently burned into the backs of her eyes.

  Gerard met Elise in the hallway outside her rooms. She wasn’t sure how he knew that she had returned from Malebolge, but he always seemed to know where everyone was in the Palace at any given moment. For a human, Gerard pulled off the illusion of omnipresence pretty well.

  “We caught him,” he announced, unable to contain a wide grin.

  Elise didn’t smile back, but dark satisfaction uncurled in her heart. “Finally.”

  She changed directions and Gerard fell into step beside her. He wore her livery, though he had stripped off the jacket and wore a Black Parade t-shirt instead, which matched the leather boots surprisingly well.

  “Where have you taken Gremory?” Elise asked.

  “We’ve got him in the interrogation room. It’s the only place that the wards are strong enough. Plus, the chains are designed for his breed.”

  Gerard had done well, as always. She didn’t have to force her smile of gratitude.

  He held open the doors to the courtyard, allowing Elise to exit first. The Palace of Dis had never been busier. A new market had sprung up within the walls, trading goods brought down from Earth, and it had become the primary source of supplies for the Palace’s human residents. And she had a lot of residents to care for now. Of the thousand or so slaves that she had rescued, a full third of them had remained to help.