Lost in Prophecy: An Urban Fantasy Novel (The Ascension Series) (Volume 5) (3 page)

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.”

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 currently 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.

The survivors weren’t even half of the creatures living in the Palace, though. Elise had begun allowing certain demons to live within the battlements. She trusted few members of Belphegor’s army—
her
army—and kept most of them outside her defenses, where they wouldn’t be able to easily stage a coup; instead, she had taken in the artisans and servants, the lowest of the low who served with gratitude.

These demon additions to her staff had stalls in the new market, too. Products made from human byproducts weren’t permitted, but there were an impressive number of handcrafted tools and trinkets made from Dis’s more natural resources: blown glass, stone cookware, harpy wool blankets.

When Hell wasn’t murderous, it could be downright beautiful.

A hush fell over the market as Elise passed through the stalls, heading toward the interrogation room. She had been spending so much time with the army outside the walls that people freaked out when they saw her within the Palace. Neuma said it was because they admired her; Gerard claimed it was fear.

Neither of those were pleasant possibilities.

By the time she reached the ladder into the interrogation room, her face was fixed into a severe frown and tension was knotted between her shoulders. The nearby walkways were filling with people, all eager to watch.

The interrogation room was a suspended platform surrounded by magical walls that allowed spectators to watch the proceedings within. It used to be where the Inquisitor plied his trade—a role occupied by Elise’s father in the previous administration, the irony of which did not escape her—but now it was the best place to torture high-profile prisoners.

The wards were inviolable. And everyone could see exactly how merciful Elise was toward those who didn’t obey the Father.

Every time she went in there, it was like being on stage again. Elise hadn’t performed in years, not since she and James had advertised their fledgling dance studio by participating in competitions. She had never been a fan of the attention, but James had thrived on it.

She couldn’t hide behind a dance partner anymore. Elise was a soloist now, and with a blade rather than high-heeled shoes and a fixed smile.

The corner of her mouth quirked at what James would have thought of Elise’s latest performances.

She climbed hand-over-hand into the interrogation room. Gremory was supervised by a group of human guards and a single gibborim. He was so large that he had to crouch to fit under the arched roof. Elise wished she had seen how he managed to get into the room in the first place.

The prisoner was chained on his knees with his arms above his head. His scale armor had been stripped away, leaving his muscular, human-like body bared to the harsh air of Dis. His skin was bone-white and translucent. Red veins gripped his ribs and crawled down his thighs.

“Father,” Gremory said, “what a pleasure to meet you.”

Elise didn’t bother replying.

Gremory had been Belphegor’s praetor when he still possessed the army. They were also the same type of demon, although Gremory was much weaker. That didn’t mean much. Considering Belphegor’s power, it would have been hard for anyone to match him.

“We found him trying to lead one of your centuria away,” Gerard explained, taking position beside the gibborim. “The twenty-sixth.”

Elise lifted an eyebrow. It wasn’t surprising that Gremory had been trying to undermine her, but the twenty-sixth had been camping right by the gates—a dangerous place for a dissident to appear. “Were they leaving willingly?”

“It seems so. He was trying to transport them to the House of Volac.”

That House wasn’t allied with her yet, but she did have its daughter, Sallosa, as centurion of another century. More dissent within the ranks. “Send men to watch the thirtieth century—the one that Sallosa is commanding. Reassign the twenty-sixth to the wasteland perimeter. Kill the ones that resist.”

“Sure we shouldn’t kill them all?” Gerard asked.

Tempting. But Elise couldn’t kill every single demon that didn’t like her. Besides, she’d needed to move more forces into the hostile wastelands anyway. The forces she sent to patrol there kept going missing. Might as well put the centuries that disobeyed at risk.

“You heard my order,” Elise said.

Gerard sent one of his men out to take care of the twenty-sixth centuria. The trap door opened and slammed shut again.

Elise held out her hand. Without asking, Gerard gave her a knife.

Gremory’s eyes tracked the motion of the blade. There was no fear in his eyes. Elise would have to see if she could change that attitude.

“What’s at the House of Volac? Is that where you were going to meet Belphegor?”

The answer came from him easily. No threatening required. “He’s not there. I was merely planning to run an errand for him.”

“Then where is he?” she asked, circling Gremory.

“You already know that I won’t tell you. Attempt to torture me.”

He sounded so calm about it.

Elise’s eyes flicked up to the walkways ringing the room. Half of the Palace was watching. She needed to handle this as she did all things—swiftly, and without bullshit.

She stepped close to Gremory. “This isn’t going to end well,” she muttered. “We don’t need to do it like this. It’s a waste of time.”

“However long you waste attempting to beat information out of me is entirely within your control, Father.” A lazy smirk curved over his lips, and it was unsettling on a face so similar to Belphegor’s. Belphegor didn’t smile. Not like that. “There’s an alternative way to reach my master, you know. Let me go. I’ll arrange the meeting.”