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

to pull out her failsafe.
    She wrenched off her other glove.
    The ethereal runes blazed to life, making her entire body shake, blanking out her vision so that all she could see were green shapes when she blinked. This magic had been waiting for her for weeks. She hadn’t dared use it—not when it weakened her so much.
    Now Gremory was slamming the gibborim’s head into the floor, and the gibborim wasn’t fighting back. Gremory got to his feet and turned to face Elise again.
    She unleashed the ethereal runes.
    Lightning lanced to Gremory, engulfing him in brilliant, burning light. It hurt. She was screaming. But it was so much more powerful than the warlock spell had been, and it was her only chance to kill him. There was no point containing something like Gremory for long.
    The spectators shrieked with pain. Many were demons, and just as susceptible to ethereal light as Elise.
    She didn’t stop to see if they were smart enough to run. She threw all of her strength into the spells, roaring as the magic ripped through her to consume Gremory.
    He didn’t have any of Belphegor’s anti-magic defenses. He fell.
    Elise stood over him for a full minute—about thirty seconds longer than she needed to—and kept pouring the rune magic into him, lighting up the interrogation room and the courtyard with nuclear white. She could actually watch as her skin faded away and the bones appeared underneath. But she kept electrocuting Gremory until he stopped moving, stopped breathing, until he was nothing but charcoal at her feet.
    Then there was nothing left in her. The magic cut off.
    She staggered, arms clutching her stomach. Hunger roared through her body.
    “Elise!” Gerard moved to catch her.
    She regained her footing and shoved him away. “Don’t,” she snarled. Just being near him made her hungrier. The heartbeats of her human guards made her salivate. Her body pulsed in time with their flowing blood.
    “You killed him,” said another guard, Aniruddha. “But he could have told us where Belphegor was.”
    Elise couldn’t respond. She stumbled toward the trap door.
    “He wasn’t going to talk,” Gerard said from behind her. He still sounded confident. Unbothered. His trust in Elise was unaffected. “Send a cleaning crew up here. We’ll fertilize the flesh gardens with Gremory’s ashes.”
    She wrenched open the exit and took a last glance around. The walkways had mostly cleared out, but not entirely. There were witnesses to Elise’s failure. Word would spread.
    Elise had finished her dance, and the judges had awarded her a row of zeroes.

    Onoskelis’s desk in the Great Library was unoccupied.
    “Where is she?” Elise snarled, whirling on the other librarian.
    Paimon squinted at her through gold-rimmed spectacles that magnified his eyes. “I take it that something of interest has happened?”
    Elise thrust her bare hand at him. “The warlock magic failed. That’s what happened.”
    Paimon slid his spectacles to the tip of his nose and studied her with cool indifference. The rune had burned into her skin, leaving the flesh blistered. Using the ethereal magic had drained her too much to heal it.
    In order to replenish her stores she was going to have to feed again, even though she had fed barely two days earlier. In the meantime, her stomach was a painful pit and every mortal she had passed on the way to the library had looked like meat to her.
    Elise had promised herself that she wouldn’t end up like this again.
    “I don’t know what’s become of Onoskelis,” Paimon said in the smoothest vo-ani that Elise had ever heard. His voice was melted butter. “The fact that she has gone missing would suggest that she’s no longer needed.”
    Clenching her hand into a fist again made the blisters stretch, but the ache helped her focus on his words rather than the beat of his heart. “No longer needed? Where, in the library? In service to the fucking Palace administration?”
    “There’s no need for