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

angels to arrive at the base of Eve’s temple. Several of their brethren congregated on the perfectly maintained lawn, its emerald grass soft and moist under their feet.
    “What’s happened here?” asked Moroni when Michael landed.
    “Someone must have forgotten to wind the clock,” Michael said, knowing that it wasn’t possible even as he spoke the words. He was one of two angels that tended the temple district and the clock within Eve’s memorial. He had never forgotten to wind it. Raqib wouldn’t have, either.
    The answer didn’t seem to satisfy anyone, but nobody moved to enter the temple and find out the truth.
    Michael squared his shoulders. It was his clock to maintain; having it fail to chime meant that it was his duty to investigate as well.
    The angels stood aside as Michael climbed the stairs, legs leaden with dread. He approached a smooth, blank section of the temple wall and a golden door appeared at his touch. It was bordered on either side by stained glass windows that seemed so much darker than usual, as if there were curtains on the opposite side—which there were not.
    Michael pushed the door open.
    It was impossibly dark inside the temple considering that everything in Heaven glowed. There shouldn’t have been a single shadow in all of Shamain. Yet he could barely see a few feet beyond the threshold.
    He did, however, see a single foot, a bare ankle, and the curve of a woman’s calf in a puddle of silvery angel blood. There was a scrap of peach-colored cloth fluttering at her knee. Tattered feathers clung to the blood.
    Michael’s heart contracted.
    He stepped outside and pulled the door shut, heart hammering. The others had questioning looks on their faces. None seemed overly concerned. None had seen what Michael had seen.
    He was calm as he told Moroni, “Summon Nashriel.”

    Angels didn’t love each other like humans did. Love was weak. Friendship was ridiculous. They did, however, form alliances, and the strongest alliance was marriage. It was rare between angels, but not unheard of. There were benefits to joining lives in holy matrimony before the eyes of Adam and Eve, the ones who had made them. It was prestigious. It meant property and special responsibilities in the Heavenly court.
    When Leliel had suggested marriage to Nash during the First War, he had agreed. And at the time, if anyone had asked Nash Adamson if he loved Leliel, he would have said yes. He might have even meant it. He and Leliel were an excellent partnership in court. They advocated the same causes, held a large manor in the foothills, enjoyed one another’s company.
    Was that not love? The bond of companionship?
    That was before Leliel learned that Nash had remained loyal to Adam in the war, before she had betrayed and imprisoned him in the Haven—and many years before Summer.
    Still, what he had shared with his ex-wife was different from what he had shared with other angels.
    He was not prepared to see her like this.
    Leliel looked like she had been forced to the ground rather than having fallen. One arm was bent backward. Her chin was twisted toward the opposite shoulder, leaving her chestnut hair to veil her face and bare her throat.
    Her throat. Lord, her throat.
    A ring of blood marked the side of her neck, shimmering with the silvery light that all angel blood did, though it seemed somewhat dulled. The puddle around her was smeared. It looked like someone had been wiping the blood with their fingers.
    Or licking it.
    Nash tugged on the lapels of his suit to flatten them over his chest, loosening the top button of his shirt. The temperature in Heaven was always like that of a warm seaside day, moist and pleasant, but he suddenly felt choked by his shirt.
    This was no more violent or ghastly than anything he had seen while fighting demons along the fissure. In fact, he had left behind a far bloodier battle against brutes in the American Midwest to respond to Moroni’s summons. But this was so much more