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

soon dim with her death.
    They’d had healers in the last war, but the art of magecraft was long gone. Their documentation had burned in Eden’s library—as great a tragedy as the burning of the Tree itself. Once the master mages were killed in the battle with Yatai, there had been no hope of recovering them.
    Leliel’s life was out of his hands.
    “Teeth,” he mused, sitting on the bed beside her. She had been bitten on the neck. That wasn’t the preferred method of killing of any demon he knew.
    His fingers tracing along the ragged edge of the wound made Leliel stir. Her eyelids fluttered, opened to slits. She couldn’t seem to focus on him.
    “Nashriel,” she said.
    “I’m here. What happened to you?” It seemed rude to jump to the questions, but she was still pale, barely moving; if she were to die, he needed the truth first.
    Leliel struggled to swallow. Her breaths were shallow and raspy. “This is how history is made,” she whispered. “Not in epic battles sweeping across the planes of Hell, not in petty struggles at gas stations on Earth, not playing a game of tug-of-war over mortal lives.”
    His alarm grew. “What are you talking about?”
    “Life is cheap. Humans birth and die in the barest of blinks, and demons are no better. Battles on Earth are meaningless.”
    Nash had seen many of those battles firsthand while Leliel legislated from the comfortable safety of Shamain. Hot anger writhed like serpents in his belly. “What have you done?”
    She continued to speak, quieter than before, as if she were no longer speaking to him but only muttering to herself. He had to lean close to hear. “War is a game of minds played out in the meeting of leaders. Quiet back-room deals, oaths and allegiances, bribery.” Her eyes were closed now. She swallowed again.
    She was silent for so long that Nash feared that he had lost her. He seized her wrist. “Leliel. Speak to me.”
    “Everyone wants something,” Leliel finally said. “Anyone can be bought.” Her free hand lifted. She touched a finger to her forehead. “Look.”
    Her features were unblemished from the battle. She wasn’t gesturing to a wound.
    She was inviting him to look within her mind.
    Nash’s lip curled. Angels seldom got physically intimate with each other; a sharing of minds was considered to be far more appropriate for a married couple than sex. He had shared minds with Leliel many, many years in the past. He had no urge to do it again—to be that intimate with the woman who had accused him of sedition.
    He rubbed his palms down the front of his slacks and realized that they were spotted with her blood. He grimaced.
    She was in no position to speak what he needed to know.
    “Very well,” Nash said. “Just once more.” Summer would understand.
    He closed his eyes and opened his mind. Leliel’s thoughts were a dim, flickering light in the darkness, with none of the usual radiance that came from the mind of an angel.
    Nash reached for her mind and sank deep inside.
    She showed him the city from above.
    Leliel stood in front of a window, gazing through it to Shamain below. She felt swells of pride at the sight of it, knowing that she was all that stood between this beautiful land and utter, permanent darkness.
    This was a memory, not a fantasy. Nash understood intuitively that he was seeing something that Leliel had done earlier that morning. He was lodged deep in her mind, sensing what she sensed, thinking what she thought.
    Leliel stood in one of the highest branches of the temple. It was nothing but a delicate passage with a single room at the end, like an apple dangling from the tip of a twig. The gemstones set into the elaborate woodwork of the windows glowed with internal light, bathing Leliel’s flesh in tones of blue and gold.
    There was moisture beading the other side of the window. Though there were no clouds, a misty drizzle was falling on Shamain. It made a hazy gold halo over the tops of the buildings, which were