Ascension: Sins of Eden Part 32

The entire world flipped dizzyingly around him. The office building cracked, groaned, and tore free of its foundations.

Below him, the shattering city looked like nothing but scattered puzzle pieces. It was Los Angeles, he realized. He'd never been there, but he'd seen it in enough movies to recognize the Hollywood sign as the wind ripped him past it. Palm trees flipped through the air.

Terah tumbled ahead of him, spinning head over heels toward the vortex. Her mouth was open in a battle cry that he couldn't hear.

She faced the oncoming darkness as a warrior.

A sudden s.h.i.+ft in gravity yanked her into the depths of the black hole, making her vanish.

Abram was buffeted by a few more seconds of breathless turbulence-a few more seconds where Earth and h.e.l.l rolled around him. The debris swirling toward the dark heart of the void looked like a galaxy, in a way. Broad arms of stars and solar systems whirling around a center point.

It was kind of beautiful, all those pieces of Mount Anathema and Los Angeles intertwined in a spiraling dance.

Then he was caught in a well of gravity, too, and yanked laterally toward the same darkness as Terah. It grew to consume him. He couldn't breathe enough to cry out.

Abram entered the void.

He felt nothing.

Abel didn't have any warning when Mount Anathema inverted from a vertical face of stone to flip completely upside-down, but he still wasn't very surprised. He wouldn't have been surprised if the whole place had burst into flames and vanished, either.

It was the end of the world. The end of the universe.

There was no way it could get any worse than this.

He'd been hanging onto the chain Terah's demons had affixed to the ground, but the second lurch of the mountain made him lose his grip. The chain slid through his fingers.

Abel fell. Demons dropped around him. Ariane screamed and clutched at Marion as they, too, slipped from the magma tube and began to plummet.

Earth hurtled toward them.

A body slammed into Abel's, and he only realized that he hadn't b.u.mped into one of the others when the person he'd hit didn't let go. Arms wrapped around his chest. Feathers whirled around them as pumping wings dragged Abel back to Earth through a nearby sinkhole.

Cold air blasted around Abel, shocking the breath from him.

He was back over the snowy Himalayas.

Nash dropped him about ten feet above the ground, and Abel hit an instant later, slamming onto his back.

"f.u.c.k," he groaned.

The angel didn't bother apologizing before wheeling around to return to h.e.l.l.

Going from Dis in the midst of a volcanic eruption to an icy mountaintop threw Abel's body into instant shock. He s.h.i.+vered hard as he rolled onto his hands and knees, trying to regain his bearings.

Earth was lightless. Abel could barely see the ice underneath him. The wind blew stronger, too, and it instantly froze the sweat under his arms and on the back of his neck.

There was something wrong with that darkness, and with the wind. The roar was unnaturally loud. Maybe not a wind at all.

Squinting through the night, he recognized the sharp slope of the creva.s.se that sheltered Lilith's statue. The resort where they'd been keeping Rylie's body would be somewhere past it. Probably Summer, too. Wherever Nash was, Summer couldn't be far.

Abel got halfway up the creva.s.se before Nash deposited Ariane and Marion alongside him.

"Was there anyone else?" the angel asked, looping around them.

"Abram and some kid with an afro that Elise brought down." After a beat, Abel reluctantly added, "Also, Levi."

Nash was gone again in a flurry of feathers.

Ariane clutched her daughter to her chest, trying to shelter her from the cold as they struggled up the mountain.

She stopped when they reached the top of the slope.

"Oh no," Ariane said.

It took Abel a minute to figure out what had upset her. He couldn't see much of anything around them, even though werewolves had awesome night vision. The mountain that they were standing on was only a shade lighter than the black sky, and the mountain beyond that was so dark as to be nearly invisible.

Then he realized that the mountain beyond-what little he could see of it-was vanis.h.i.+ng.

A dark line crept over the ridge, turning it the same shade of impenetrable black as the sky beyond, which wasn't sky at all. It was the source of the roaring noise.

Something was coming at them. Or maybe it was more like nothing was coming at them.

A void.

Abel rushed inside the resort to find Summer, pale and unsmiling. She only managed a weak hug in greeting, and she felt almost as cold as he did.

"The rest of the pack went to investigate what's happening out there, with that big wall of darkness that's creeping in." She swallowed hard. "They never came back."

Ariane set Marion down on one of the supply crates in the center of the room. "I don't think they will."

Abel clenched his hands into fists. He was hovering over Rylie's shrouded body, trying to protect what remained of her, even though he had no idea what he was protecting her from, and he was pretty sure that she was far beyond being hurt.

"Why aren't they coming back?" he asked. "What is that out there? Is this another demon army or something? Because tell me where to go, and I will f.u.c.k them up." The spirit wolves felt weak inside of him, drained by the earlier battles, but he wasn't going to let anyone mess with his pack.

"There's nothing we can do." It was Elise's young companion. He had appeared in the doorway to the bathroom, and there was a strange light in his eyes-something that looked a lot like hope. "That's the end of this journey. The destination. You guys don't need to fight it."

Summer took a step toward him, staring hard at his face as though she recognized him. "The end? You mean, apocalypse?"

"Genesis." He sounded giddy. "n.o.body dies here. Everything ends, but Elise will bring you all back. Everyone survives. You're all going to be okay."

"If Belphegor allows it," Ariane said.

His smile faded a fraction. His gaze went distant. "Yeah. Elise still has to beat him. But..." He pressed his knuckles against his forehead. "There are a lot of possibilities. I don't know."

"Who the h.e.l.l are you?" Abel asked.

"Just call me Flynn," he said. "Or don't call me anything at all. Forget you ever saw me." He turned to Marion. "I need to go home."

She brushed her hands off on her skirt and jumped off the crate.

Ariane wrapped her arms around her daughter. "No."

"She just needs to open the door," Flynn said. "The last door she'll ever have to open."

Abel glanced outside the window. It was hard to tell, but he thought the void was drawing closer. The wind was definitely getting louder. The whole building was starting to shake.

"This door go somewhere better than here?" he asked.

"Oh yeah," Flynn said. "I'll meet you there."

"What the f.u.c.k is that supposed to mean?"

Marion broke free of her mother. She went to the wall and knocked.

Another door appeared. This one didn't look like the ordinary household door that she'd opened earlier. It was plain gray slate, a rectangular slab with no handle.

Flynn clapped both hands over his mouth, shoulders shaking. Abel couldn't tell if he was laughing or crying.

"Home," Flynn said. "It's home. You can't go with me. n.o.body can go with me. What's over there-I'll have to meet you on the other side."

"Why? What is it?" Summer asked. She looked like she was contemplating making a break for the door. Why not? If they were all about to die anyway, they might as well go out fighting for life.

That's my girl.

Abel edged toward her, prepared to make a jump, too.

If Elise's friend here wanted to go through that door, then he sure as h.e.l.l did, too.

Nash strode into the room, wings flared behind him. He was covered in crimson dust, missing clumps of feathers, and utterly alone. "We have to go."

"Levi?" Ariane asked. "The wolf boy?"

"Gone," Nash said curtly.

Summer's jaw dropped. "He died?"

"He was sucked into that." The angel thrust his finger toward the window and the darkness beyond it.

Before anyone could react, the ground shook. The floor broke at the center of the atrium. A crack raced from one wall to the other as half of the building buckled.

The wall by the bedroom groaned and cracked as the roof collapsed.

Abel's first thought was, Rylie.

He bowed himself over her body as the debris blasted across the room. Wood fragments pelted his back.

The healing fever immediately swept over him, but the destruction wasn't done. The rest of the wall collapsed too, kicking up a cloud of dust where the roof fell-and obscured Flynn, Marion, Ariane, and the door.

With that much falling debris, there was no way that they could have avoided instant death.

"No!" Summer cried, launching herself toward them.

Nash stopped her by hooking his arm around her midsection. "We can't do anything for them," he said. "We can't do anything for any of them."

"Get her out of here," Abel said, holding Rylie's shroud in both fists.

The angel nodded and stretched out his wings.

Summer turned terrified eyes on him. "Wait-Abel!"

Nash wrenched her out of the building before the dust could even settle. Abel thought he heard her shouting as the angel lifted her out of the wreckage and flew away, but it was hard to tell. The mountain was getting awfully noisy.

With the roof sagging over Abel, there was nothing to shelter him from the scream of the wind. It blasted the dust away. He didn't see anyone standing where the walls had fallen. Didn't see any bodies, either, or smell any blood, but that didn't mean much.

Either way, Flynn and the women were gone, and that strange doorway along with them.

There was no escape for Abel now.

The shattered pieces of the walls began lifting off of the ground, pulled into the sky. The immense darkness was just a few feet away now. It had crept all the way up to the building's doorstep.

The wind whipped the blanket off of Rylie's obsidian body, and Abel came face to face with his dead mate.

Rylie hadn't changed even as the crates around them were torn into the sky. She didn't have even the smallest chip from being smashed with debris. There was no sign that the maw above him could even lift her body from the mountain.

"I'm sorry," Abel said, clutching her shoulders, digging his fingers in so that he couldn't be ripped away from her. The deafening roar of wind drowned out his words. "I'm sorry I didn't save you, I'm sorry I didn't fix things with your son, and I'm sorry that thinking about Seth still p.i.s.ses me the f.u.c.k off-"

A crate clipped his side, knocking the breath from his lungs and cutting him off.

The edge of the atrium had vanished into the darkness now, and there was nothing beyond-no mountains, no sky, not even another dimension. Just a whole lot of nothing.

Void. Oblivion.

Death.

Abel was so close to it that the roaring seemed to be gone, replaced by horrible, aching silence. He couldn't tell if it was that his hearing had gone out or if that void had eaten the sound just like it ate the roof and walls and every single other mountain in the range.

Even when it pulled everything else away, he didn't let it pull him from Rylie. He gripped her harder. Bowed his forehead to hers. Shut his eyes, felt the chill of the obsidian against his skin, and imagined it was the warm flesh of his mate.

"If I could do it again, I would fix everything," Abel said. "If I had one more chance-"

The void sucked oxygen away from him. His body lifted from the ground. His fingers slipped on Rylie's arms. Still, she didn't move. Not even when the darkness ate the floor all the way up to his side.

And then Abel lost his grip.