Caged in Bone (The Ascension Series) Read Online Free PDF Page A

personal than a battle among cornfields. This was in their home.
    “Who found her?” Nash asked.
    It was Michael who spoke. “I did. The clock didn’t chime at seven this morning. When I came to investigate why…” The tips of his wings twitched in a gesture similar to a shrug.
    “Did the clock chime six?”
    “I was asleep. I don’t know.”
    Nash stepped back and lifted his eyes to the clock. He could see the rear of its face with starlight shining through. The hands pointed at the four thirty position.
    There were no services in Eve’s temple until the eleventh hour, and the attendants didn’t arrive until eight to maintain the murals and oil the gears. The building would have been empty during her assault. No witnesses. No suspects.
    He hiked up the legs of his slacks and kneeled beside her, careful not to touch any of her blood. It filled the tiniest cracks in the marble underneath her and blackened the white stone.
    “Why call for me?” Nash asked, gaze fixed upon Leliel’s slack face. He had kissed her lips many times before—the chaste, passionless kisses shared by angels. The sight of those lips turned bloodless blue nauseated him. “Because of our former union?”
    Michael shifted uncomfortably beyond the edge of the blood. Another angel entered the archway behind him, carrying cleaning equipment that looked out of place, too modern against the backdrop of the hallowed temple. “Because you’re the only one who seems prepared,” he said in a whisper.
    Nash suppressed a shudder. “Who else knows what’s happened?”
    “Only you and Raqib,” Michael said. “We’ve been discreet.”
    Nash touched Leliel’s throat. He almost startled when he felt the slow throb of a fading pulse.
    She was alive.
    “Don’t be discreet, Michael,” Nash said, gathering Leliel into his arms, unconcerned by the blood that she smeared over the breast of his shirt. “Spread it far and wide. Tell them all. Everyone needs to know so that they can prepare too.”
    Michael took a quick step back as Nash carried Leliel for the door. “Tell them what?”
    Nash hesitated on the threshold, gazing down at the wound on Leliel’s neck. It was easier to see the teeth marks with her head tipped back.
    “Shamain has been invaded,” Nash said.

    There was something of Eve’s features in Leliel’s face. Nash had always thought that Leliel had inherited more from their mother than most of Eve’s offspring. Their mother had taken particular pride in crafting her first daughter.
    Unconscious in bed, Leliel looked most like Eve had in her funeral. Nash still remembered viewing Eve’s body in her home, which later became the temple, and how terrible the cries of the angels had been at the sight of their dead mother.
    Nash looked up to see that several angels had followed him into Leliel’s bedroom. Michael and Azrael and Raqib milled around the door with stricken expressions, as if reliving the same memory that Nash was.
    “What are you doing?” he asked. It came out much harsher than he intended. “What if her assailant is still in the city? Form search parties.” They didn’t immediately move, and Nash barked, “You heard me.”
    They left, and Nash was alone with Leliel in her bedroom. It had once been their bedroom, before the trial had stripped him of his titles, property, and marriage. She had changed much in the centuries that had passed. All of the furniture had been replaced. She had also had several new portraits commissioned from master artists on the walls, and they were only portraits of Leliel now. The ones that had included Nash were long gone.
    Being in that room was a strange trip through time, and an entirely unwelcome one. He would have preferred to be back on the battlefront.
    Nash washed the blood from Leliel’s wounds, found the sheets where she had always kept them, and tidied the bed. Once that was done, there was nothing he could do but wait to see if Leliel would awaken, or if the city would