Ruled by Steel (The Ascension Series #3)

by S. M. Reine

  The next group was purchased by a man with cloven hooves and thighs covered in silky feathers. Some kind of satyr, most likely, although the wattle trembling under his chin hinted at a heritage crossbred with something far more powerful.

  Devadas supplied her with the information without needing to be prompted. “Vassago. He holds a House much smaller than yours just north of the Palace. He’s a record-keeper, a librarian. Typically keeps a dozen slaves on hand. He has a small army—about fifty strong, less than a century, although very highly trained. As he does much of his work outside of the Palace, he requires good protection.”

  Fifty strong. Not as many as Elise would have wanted, but better than the nothing she had now.

  “Librarian,” she echoed. “He would know a lot about the Palace, wouldn’t he?”

  “The librarians are rumored to know everything about the Palace,” Devadas said.

  When Vassago’s new slaves were marched off of the stage, they weren’t replaced. The crowd began to disperse quickly with mutters, leaving Elise and Devadas standing alone at the rear of an empty square.

  Humans were loaded into carts. Doors slammed, chains rattled, and wooden wheels groaned as they began to move.

  “Was that all?” Elise asked. They had only auctioned off thirty or so people.

  Devadas twisted his hands together, gazing up at the fissure. “Imports have been increasing in light of the war topside, but few are in condition for the usual reasons we auction mortals. Most are going to immediate processing.”

  Processing. The slaughterhouses. Elise glared up at the fissure, but she couldn’t see it through the smoke.

  “But troop movements have been slowing,” she said. “How many humans could they be bringing down?”

  “The spoils of war are being brought down by the usual means. They are brought through portals to Malebolge or Phlegethon and carried here.” Devadas cringed at her look, like he expected her to strike him. “It’s war, Father.”

  A war she fully intended on stopping, no matter how many fiends and slaves ended up tied around her neck.

  “Show me where Vassago lives,” Elise said.

  It took almost an hour for Elise to realize that she had been followed out of the auction square. Normally, she would have been alert enough that she would have sensed the minds of her pursuers before they were even within viewing range. People trying to be sneaky gave off outrageously obvious mental signals. But she had been leading Devadas away from the square thinking about the slaves that had been purchased by The Dark Man. She didn’t hear them coming until they were already picking up their pace to intercept.

  Elise glanced at Devadas first, trying to see if he was alert, if he might be an asset in the fight to come. He was withdrawn and fretting. Not enough time to warn him.

  She listened to the footsteps—it sounded like four creatures, perhaps five, and moving quickly.

  Ten yards away, five yards away.

  There was nobody else in sight. Not a chance that they were there for anyone but Elise.

  “Watch yourself,” she told Devadas, drawing her pistol from the small of her back.

  He gave her a startled look. “What do you mean?”

  Elise whirled and raised the gun in a smooth motion.

  The demons approaching them looked human for the most part, although the waxen texture of their skin and gashed mouths gave them away. They wore the livery of another House—not the black Palace garments, but red robes tied with black cord.

  Corporeal nightmares. Five of them. Elise wasn’t equipped to handle nightmares.

  Damn.

  Elise let her power flare as she had in the House of Abraxas, letting her skin glow and her energy leak. “Don’t come any closer,” she said in a booming voice that echoed over the street. It should have worked on nightmares—they were Yatam’s descendants and just as awed by the sight of the Father as anything else.

  But they kept running at her.

  She fired at the first one without any time to aim. The shot went wild. It missed the nightmare in the front and hit the woman behind him instead. It sank into her face, leaving a wound with ragged edges. But the injury didn’t last long. Even as Elise watched, the skin sealed shut around the bullet wound.

  And then the nightmares were on top of them.

  Two of them seized Elise’s arms, wrenching them behind her back. She heard a clatter of metal.

  Handcuffs?

  She scissor-kicked the third as he rushed her, using the grip on her arms as leverage. She had enough momentum to flip backwards, over her captors, and land on the street behind them.

  Elise grabbed their heads and smashed them together.

  An electric sizzling noise reached her ears. She turned to see another nightmare holding a black box—not a gun, but something long and square. Lightning arced from the metal prongs at the end, dancing in snakelike cords.

  A Taser.

  She fired the gun at his hand twice, trying to hit the device and break it. She missed. The bullets smacked into the building behind him.

  “Fuck it,” she grunted, tucking the pistol away.

  The nightmare swung it at her, and she ducked under it, pushing off of her rear foot to drive her shoulder into his gut. He grunted, absorbing the impact of the blow without staggering. He drove the bony spike of his elbow into her back.

  Elise hit the ground. She felt a boot connect with the back of her head—not nearly as much of a worry as the growing sound of electricity above her.

  Twisting onto her back, she flipped onto her feet again.

  He thrust the Taser at her, and she leaped away, watching its prongs come within inches of her stomach. The sight brought sweat to the back of her neck. She had used electricity before to deliberately injure herself and knew that a strong enough shock could drop her like nothing else could.

  The nightmare swung again. She slammed her forearm into his, knocking him off-target.

  Elise wrenched the Taser out of the nightmare’s grip and shoved it in his mouth.

  She hadn’t used such a device before, but it wasn’t hard to figure out how it operated. Push the button. Watch the fireworks. A low buzz crackled through the air, muffled by spongy cheeks. The nightmare somehow screamed around the Taser. It was an ugly, gurgling noise.

  It exploded into a sticky smoke that reeked of brimstone.

  Elise didn’t wait to see if it might return to its corporeal form. She swung the Taser, still electrified, at the next nightmare.

  Her close-range combat skills were far better than her abilities with a gun. She buried it in the nightmare’s gut and watched it dissipate, too. The scraps of remaining ichor splashed at the ground and vanished at the contact.

  “Help!” Devadas cried. The useless fuck had fallen to the sidewalk, arms covering his head as another demon kicked and stomped at him.

  Elise rolled her eyes and jammed the Taser in its back. It disappeared as quickly as the first two had. It also had a Taser, which clattered to the ground at her feet.

  There were still two remaining—but they were backing away now, eyes wide and hands raised.

  “What do you want from me?” Elise asked, holding one Taser in each hand. “Who sent you?”

  They turned and fled.

  Devadas picked himself up slowly, coiling his tail tightly around him. Even upright, he was still tiny and shrunken with fear, barely to her shoulders. “Insanity,” he groaned, holding his ribs. He was covered in welts that would soon become terrible bruises. Unlike the nightmares, he was very corporeal and had plenty of bones to break. “Assault on another demon within blocks of the market. In the days of the Council, that never would have happened.”

  “Will you die?” Elise asked.

  He blinked in confusion. “No, but…”

  Then he was fine. She turned from him to focus on her newest acquisitions—a pair of matching Tasers, which fit neatly into her palms. They looked like TV remote controls that only had an on-off button. One of them humm
ed when she pressed it. The other didn’t react.

  One down, one functioning. It would have to be good enough.

  Elise turned the Taser that still worked over in her hands. She didn’t know much about such devices, but she thought it looked too expensive to be a consumer-grade device. It was sturdy. Very well built. Maybe something the military or police used.

  Where a group of demons could have gotten military Tasers wasn’t nearly as much of a concern as the fact that they had them at all.

  Only two things could hurt Elise: light and electricity. There were no great sources of light in Hell; most demons preferred to live a life in constant twilight. But they had somehow obtained electricity, which meant that they had known that they would need it. Furthermore, the nightmares hadn’t been impressed by the sight of the Father. They had been warned.

  The assault was deliberate. Someone knew Elise was in Hell.

  Reaching Vassago’s house from the slave market required a long walk around the walls of the Palace of Dis. Elise had been avoiding it since she returned to Hell, but there was no way to stay away now.

  The Palace loomed out of the ashen darkness of the city, towering high overhead in black spires of iron and obsidian. The tallest of the towers had fallen during Elise’s last visit. The curve of buildings against the sky looked empty without it.

  If the House of Abraxas was a self-sustaining village, then the Palace was its own city. Over the crenellated walls, Elise could make out the shape of the building where her father, the former Inquisitor, had tortured the demons that he arrested. She could see the apartments where visiting touchstones used to live, as well as the Council members’ quarters, all linked together by delicate iron bridges that looked like they should have snapped under the hard desert winds. They were heavily trafficked by demons that flitted from one door to another, black shapes against a red sky.

  They had been rebuilding the grand tower for some years. For now, it was mostly a honeycomb of exposed steel climbed by black brick, but there were already the beginnings of a crystalline bridge being constructed at its apex. Unlike the others, this bridge didn’t lead to another. It would soon climb all the way to the fissure—if Elise didn’t do anything about it.

  From the ground, the Palace’s roofs were an impressive sight. Like the bottom half of a fanged jaw jutting from the ground. Even with a thirty-foot-tall wall between them, heavily warded with magic both mortal and infernal, Elise couldn’t shake the uncomfortable feeling that it might bite down on her.

  In contrast, Vassago’s house seemed almost mundane. It emulated old Victorian homes Elise had seen on the East Coast with bay windows and red brick. The gate was tall, but not so tall she couldn’t have jumped over it; the barbed wire was a better disincentive than the height, and the runes stamped on his gate better still. They were used to incorporeal attacks in Hell. Elise wouldn’t be able to phase into Vassago’s house any more than she had been able to phase into the House of Abraxas.

  She peered through the wrought iron gate to the garden. Human hands jutted from the flowerbeds in front of his windows. They hadn’t been tended in a long time; some of them had wilted, limp at the wrists, and others had overgrown nails ribboning from their fingertips. The fear that had been keeping the citizenry of Dis out of the streets had been keeping Vassago from gardening, too.

  “He may not be home,” Devadas said in a high, almost whining voice. “We shouldn’t allow ourselves to remain exposed for long.”

  “Is there a doorbell?” she asked, searching the brick gates for a button or pull cord.

  “There are likely guards watching from within. If they wanted us to visit, they would open the door.”

  She frowned. “What about spontaneous visitors?”

  “Only Stewards can cross the wards,” he said. “We’re bound to restrictive contracts that prevent us from causing trouble. You can’t visit without his permission.”

  “But Stewards can,” Elise said.

  He shook his head. “Oh, no. No. I don’t think so.” In his fear, he had reared up on his tail, growing a full foot and flaring out his hood. The right side of his face was a swollen bruise. “There are rules. Regulations. Customs.”

  Funny. Elise considered it customary to kill demons that annoyed her. They were breaking all kinds of “customs” that day.

  She seized him by the hood, jerking his head down to her level. With the other hand, she drew the pistol from the small of her back and pressed it into his stomach. He twitched at the touch of cold metal. “Go in and tell them that I’m here to speak to Vassago,” Elise said. She didn’t bother putting any threat into her tone. The pistol did all the threatening for her.

  When she released him, he dry-washed his hands and tipped his head down as if muttering a prayer.

  An unseen clock tower chimed Tuesday. Time was passing quickly. It had already been a month on Earth since the fissure opened, and every moment that they waited, more people would be dying.

  Elise slipped her finger over the trigger. A disabled naga could communicate as easily as a whole one. She tried to decide where she would shoot him—the tail, or the chest?

  She didn’t get time to decide. Devadas opened the gates, and she took her finger off the trigger again.

  The gates fell shut behind him as he slithered inside, tail flicking behind him. The hands planted in the garden stretched toward him as he passed, straining at their roots to touch his scales, though he kept out of reach.

  The door opened silently, and Devadas entered.

  Elise waited. The clock chimed Wednesday, which meant that another day had passed on Earth and that more ruin would have crept over the world she had left behind. “What’s taking so damn long?” she muttered, peering through the gates.

  She didn’t know what kind of formalities they might be observing in there. Blood of Yatam or not, the culture of demons was foreign to her, and especially the culture of the wealthy creatures that controlled the city. There was always a chance that Vassago had killed Devadas for the intrusion—not the most heartbreaking thought, although she had just been growing attached to the idea of letting him run the House of Abraxas for her.

  While she waited, she watched the fissure and the passing of day into night and back again. It had been harder for her to tell that time was passing when she first arrived, but now it was easier to tell what the shifting light meant. The touch of sunlight made the sky slightly more orange, whereas the usual crimson of Hell seemed more violet when it was night.

  No kibbeths crossed the distance between Dis and Earth now. The large, flying demons had been used heavily on the first day to transport the remnants of Abraxas’s army to the surface like living ferries, but they had finished crossing over. The emptiness that followed wasn’t peaceful. It was anticipant.

  If Elise closed her eyes, she could imagine what was happening to everyone that remained on Earth. The fissures had gashed open North America like a giant X, severing it into bleeding quarters. It had been the worst in Las Vegas, initially. It had been the first to fall to Abraxas’s army. She knew that some people had been evacuated, but she also knew that many more had been devoured; all that remained now was wasteland.

  Abraxas had been only one piece in a vast machine, and killing him hadn’t stopped the army. She had seen the progression on the news when she visited Earth long enough to pick up Neuma and Jerica: the march of demons on Washington DC, the mandatory evacuations, the chaos as people tried to flee to countryside that was no safer than the urban centers. It was the Union’s wet dream. They hadn’t declared martial law by the time she visited last, but now, over a month after the first strike, she was sure that they would have. The country was finally theirs.

  The images that filled her mind didn’t belong to her. Elise could clearly imagine chain-link fences, black-suited Union soldiers clutching assault weapons, buses filled with civilians. Everything bristled with barbed wire. The sky was a smoky slate-gray, and the sun was a red disc in the sky no bigger t
han a penny. She smelled the campfire smell of uncontrolled wildfires, the stink of human sweat.

  In her mind’s eye, she was striding alongside a gurney, one hand on the metal railing of the bed. That hand was wearing a leather glove. Elise so often wore gloves that it didn’t strike her at first that the image was too vivid, yet unfamiliar, to have come from her imagination.

  Shouts drifted in and out of her ears as she tried to focus on the woman in the hospital bed. Elise recognized that pixie-like face, framed by brunette hair that only made her pallor seem starker. It was Brianna, the woman that James had called his new high priestess. She was connected to tubes and being carried toward a line of ambulances that were evacuating a hospital.

  Which meant that the gloved hand Elise saw belonged to James.

  He was bleeding into her mind.

  Crash.

  Elise’s eyes flew open. That sound hadn’t been in her mind.

  It was a shock to look around and realize that she was still standing between the gates of the Palace of Dis and the gates of Vassago’s home. She whirled to look through the wrought iron bars.

  One of Vassago’s windows had been broken. Shards of glass were scattered over the stairs, showering the garden of hands so that the fingers cringed away. Elise’s eyes fell on a candlestick on the lawn. Someone had flung it from the window inside. Probably not a sign that Vassago wanted to invite her in.

  She took a step toward his gate before remembering that Devadas had said she couldn’t enter. But there had to be a way inside—some part of his defenses that could be penetrated.

  Elise wasn’t given time to find one. The gates swung open in unison with the front door.

  In the wake of the shattering window, it was eerily silent. She drew the gun, turned off the safety, and aimed it at the ground as she moved inside. The garden of hands didn’t reach for her the way that they had reached for Devadas. They curled away, bending as far as they could without ripping free of the hard earth.

  She peered through the front door.

  From outside, Vassago’s home could have passed for Victorian. Inside was a different story. Between the sconces and heavy wood furniture, it would have fit in a medieval castle just as well. Vassago seemed to be a fan of fine art. Paintings hung from every wall in a mixture of different styles: lush Renaissance curves, the hard lines of post-modern art, impressionistic smudges. Each was framed with heavy drapes. There were a lot of shadows in the room between the flickering candlelight and the curtains.