Ruled by Steel (The Ascension Series #3)

by S. M. Reine

  She eased inside, eyes flicking from the empty doorways to the shattered windows. She didn’t see Devadas, and she sensed no minds.

  Her soles crunched on broken glass as she advanced, grinding it into the tile floors. Elise peeked through the left-hand door into the study. The shelves looked as if a mighty fist had smashed down the center to snap them all in half, and parchment was scattered across the floor like oversized flakes of ash. There were no intact books or scrolls remaining.

  A scrap of something with the consistency of tissue paper fluttered on the edge of a wingback chair. Elise lifted it with the nose of her gun. Golden scales dusted from the skin.

  “Devadas?” Elise asked, raising her voice. It echoed off of the silent walls. “Vassago?”

  Her eyes traveled from that scrap of skin to the edge of the desk, where a few more fingernail-sized scales had been shed. The trail led through the study, beyond the foyer, and into the hall. Framed paintings had been knocked askew. A long scrape gouged the wallpaper as though someone had run a claw along the length of the hallway.

  The back door hung open on one hinge. A lawn dotted with iron trees stood beyond it. The quarters where Vassago had probably kept his brutes were dark, the doors open and windows shattered.

  The quiet as she stepped into his backyard was unsettling. There should have been city noises. Even though the main streets were empty, the rear of his house butted up against the kinds of alleys that demons had been using to get around the City of Dis. Yet she heard no voices or movement. Either he had spells keeping his property quiet, or there were no demons in the alleys anymore, either.

  The door to the barracks was unlocked. Elise pushed it open.

  Vassago had been keeping his brutes in something that looked very much like stables. There was chalk spread over the floor to soak up bodily fluids. There was a wall covered in hooks that were most likely meant to hold weapons. Blood smeared the floor, turning the chalk red.

  All of the brutes were gone. Devadas also wasn’t there.

  Elise stepped out into the silent lawn again, glaring up at the Palace over the roof of Vassago’s house. The carapaces of workers crawling over the bridge in progress glimmered in the light from the fissure. It looked like a nest of ants had been unleashed on the scaffolding.

  Sweat leaped to her skin and her pulse accelerated. The sun was shining through the fissure again.

  Elise jumped back into Vassago’s home.

  No Steward meant no management for her new House. No Vassago meant no information. Empty barracks meant that she couldn’t take the guards. She was exactly where she had started when she had broken free of Belphegor, except that hours had passed and more people on Earth would be dead for the delay.

  Elise was halfway back to the study when she heard a soft noise like tearing paper.

  She froze in the hallway to listen, fingers tensed on the gun.

  There it was again—another tearing, a clicking, a rustle. The soft noises didn’t come from the study. They came from deeper within the building.

  Elise moved between the framed paintings into the dimness of a hallway beyond. Her senses were alert for any hint of movement, but she was alone in the hall; the noises were coming from the other side of a door. She hovered her ear beside it.

  There was something moving in the room beyond. Something small, something alive.

  Elise adjusted her grip on the gun, leaned back, and delivered a powerful kick next to the door handle.

  Hinges groaned open. She jumped into the room with the pistol lifted, processing her surroundings in an instant—it was a kitchen, with a cold fire pit to the left, pots hanging on the right, an open window. A body was sprawled in the middle of the floor with feathered thighs and cloven hooves.

  Vassago.

  A bird was crouched on his forehead, talons digging into the pallid flesh without drawing blood. It was black and the size of a small cat, but there were no feathers on its head, baring an ugly skull that had been worn smooth by sandblasted wasteland winds. A gore crow. Carrion eaters, not killers. Must have entered through the window.

  The crow ripped a shred of flesh off of Vassago’s face and snapped it down, silver beak clacking.

  Elise swung a kick at it. “Get off of him.” The crow flared its wings with a cackle. She aimed the second kick directly at its exposed skull and missed—it had fluttered to the counter, digging its talons into the edge.

  It watched her with an empty eye socket as she dropped beside Vassago’s body.

  Hopefully, there had been no useful evidence on the demon’s face, as it was now pocked with beak marks and totally useless. Elise’s hand traveled down his bare, sunken chest, feeling for a pulse and finding none.

  The wound on his stomach appeared to have been delivered by a blade. The entry point was three inches across and slightly diagonal, aimed toward the heart. Elise didn’t need to check to know that it had most likely reached the target. Vassago would have survived if his heart hadn’t been pierced.

  She turned his hairy arm over to get a better look at the other injuries he had sustained. These, too, were knife marks, but they had been sliced in parallel lines as if to emulate claws. Weirdly, on the fleshy portion of his bicep, Vassago had received a circle of puncture wounds—almost like a symbolic representation of teeth, though they would never pass for a bite.

  The damage was meticulous. Unless Vassago had consented to receiving the injuries—always a possibility with demons—they had probably been delivered postmortem.

  The careful, isolated nature of the cuts didn’t look sadistic. No, someone had left a message on this demon’s body.

  Elise dropped his arm and wiped her hands off on a dishtowel. Vassago was dead and Devadas was gone, but she wasn’t without a lead after all. If she could find the cutter, she might be able to find her Steward—and maybe the missing brute guards, as well.

  “Get out,” she said, waving her arm at the gore crow.

  It cawed its annoyance and dropped onto the cadaver just inches from Elise, totally unafraid of her. It bent down to bite at Vassago’s shoulder.

  Elise almost kicked it again—until she saw that it was biting at another knife wound.

  She kneeled to look closer, shoving its wing aside with a flurry of brittle feathers. On Vassago’s shoulder, someone had signed their initial with the point of the knife. It looked like a ragged J. They had also cut a relatively neat heart in his flesh, peeling off the skin to leave a glistening red valentine. It looked absurdly feminine. All it needed was a few X’s and O’s to complete the signature.

  Vassago’s death was a love letter. But to whom?

  Elise stepped out of Vassago’s house. She heard voices and rustling leather before she could see anything on the street beyond the wall. Someone was out there.

  She slipped behind the wall, dropping the stack of papers she had collected from Vassago’s office as she crouched low. The garden of hands strained away from her.

  “…what that bitch did to my leg? Look at it.”

  “No, I’m not going to look at it. What the fuck is wrong with you? Put that away.”

  They were speaking English.

  It was surprising enough that Elise almost stepped out to take a look at them. The accents were so authentically human that she almost believed that they were escaped slaves. But she didn’t sense the flash of mortal minds—whatever was talking on the street was definitely not human.

  “When do you think Absalon will come back from Malebolge?” asked one of the demons.

  “Shit, I don’t know. At least a week or two. We really jacked up the power on these—they’re pretty nasty.”

  “She’s not going to be happy.”

  “No shit she’s not going to be happy. You get to tell her what happened.”

  Elise waited until the sound of movement almost passed her, then peered through the gate.

  It was a pair of nightmares. She recognized the weapon that one of them was holding—a Taser. It was the surv
ivors from the group that had assaulted her and Devadas outside the auction. She drew her Taser again, but the nightmares didn’t move in her direction. They were moving for the closed door into the Palace.

  They stood on the road in front of the door arguing about who was going to tell “her” what had happened to the nightmares that Elise had rendered incorporeal.

  One of them knocked. As she watched, the door swung open. They continued to argue as they entered.

  Through the momentary hole in the wall, Elise could see the bustle of fiends and nightmares, and the bridge beyond. Her assailants walked into the crowd as though it were normal. As though they belonged. There were other nightmares waiting for them, and they wore similarly colored clothing. It must have been the new Palace livery.

  The gate fell shut.

  Elise was shocked to motionlessness.

  She hadn’t just been attacked by someone that was out to get her. She had been attacked by whoever was now in charge of the City of Dis.

  Five

  Crash. The sound of the vase shattering seemed to reach Elise’s ears before the sound of the gunshot itself, but once it did, her entire body felt like it had been smashed with a mallet. She lowered the pistol and shut her eyes to absorb the shock of the noise, the impact, and what squeezing the trigger meant.

  She was frequently in gunfights, watching people shoot other people, and sometimes even on the receiving end of the bullets. Yet it was strange to have the pistol heating in her hands. The explosion, so close to her ears, would do no permanent damage—nothing did anymore—but it jarred her to hear it.

  Firing a gun was nothing like killing with a sword.

  But the sword was gone, and the Beretta 9mm was hers now. It wasn’t enough to know how to use it. She needed to be good at it.

  After the failure at Vassago’s home, Elise had returned to the House of Abraxas to form a new strategy. Unfortunately, she didn’t have one. Maybe what had happened to Vassago had been a personal vendetta unrelated to Palace politics; maybe it was a sign of worsening violence in the city. Elise wouldn’t know until she found out what had happened to Devadas.

  Would finding that killer lead her closer to the Palace, or would it lead her down a rabbit hole that would waste long days on Earth?

  The idea of going through Vassago’s papers to piece together a puzzle—a puzzle whose contents would only be discernible by what they lacked, rather than what she possessed—was as palatable as freeing Belphegor from his imprisonment under Ace’s watchful eye.

  And so here she was, wasting time in an entirely different way, by practicing target shooting behind the House of Abraxas.

  Blowing out a breath, Elise lifted the gun again. Feet braced, swiveling at the waist, she aimed down the length of her arms at the next vase. They had been pulled out of storage by Neuma and had been identified by Jerica as valuable infernal artifacts. They were more than decorations—they were little ceramic pieces of history.

  Elise squeezed the trigger.

  The shot went too far left and punched into the wall behind her target. This time it wasn’t the sound of the gunshot that hurt, but the impact into the wards. It felt like she had been shot in the chest.

  Sinking to one knee, Elise shut her eyes and focused on breathing.

  It wasn’t the first time she had fired a gun. Her father, a legendary demon hunter in his own right, had demonstrated the use of most weapons to her. They had gone shooting once so that he could show her how firearms worked. It was hardly the depth of instruction she had received on swords, since he had thought that a gun was putting too much space between hunter and prey.

  Since then, Elise had fired a submachine gun and a shotgun once. She had hit the targets that she needed to. They hadn’t been killed in a graceful way, but they had been killed nonetheless.

  A pistol was much more precise. Elise didn’t like the weight of it, the shape of the trigger guard, the texture against her palms.

  But she was done with swords.

  Standing, she fired at the same vase again, and hit the wards instead of the ceramic yet again. It was a second, more powerful punch to the gut. She cringed.

  “You suck at this,” Neuma said, sauntering toward Elise. She had lost the body armor in favor of something more her usual style: a strip of leather over her breasts, another strip crossed over her hips, and metal heels. She looked like she was ready to go on stage at Original Sin, the fetish club that they had surrendered to apocalypse in Las Vegas. She did not look like she was ready for a fight.

  “Where did you find those shoes?” Elise asked, shaking out her shoulder. She was tense all over. Fighting the recoil made her shoulder sore.

  Neuma spun on one shoe, making her inky hair twirl behind her. “Abraxas’s digs. Think he must have had girlfriends. Or he was a transvestite. Either way, they’re sexy. You like?”

  Elise didn’t like or dislike them. Her thoughts about footwear began and ended with how well they would serve her purposes, and fashion typically wasn’t a factor. But the fact that Neuma was thinking about steel stilettos when Elise was trying to figure out how she was going to take over the Palace of Dis did give her a few opinions—none of them favorable.

  “Are you done with the inventory already?” she asked. It was intended to be a criticism, and a reminder of what Neuma was supposed to actually be doing. Elise was surprised when Neuma pulled a notebook seemingly out of nowhere.

  Elise quickly flipped through it. There were ten pages of notes in Neuma’s tiny, girlish handwriting, filled with loops and slashes that somehow looked as suggestive as the sway of her hips when she walked.

  “There’s a couple pages on stuff I found in Abraxas’s bedroom, too,” Neuma said. “Books and stuff. I’ll go through the library later, but that’s basically everything.”

  Elise lifted an eyebrow. “Great.”

  “Don’t look so surprised. I ran a casino all on my own for months, you know. I got skills.”

  “That’s a word for it,” Elise said. Satisfied with Neuma’s handiwork, she tucked the notebook in the back pocket of her jeans and lifted the gun again, aiming it at the vase that she had already missed twice.

  Neuma watched, hands planted on the gentle curves of her hips, as Elise fired again—and the bullet smacked into the rock on which the vase was planted, rather than the vase itself. Fortunately, it didn’t hit the wards that time. Elise didn’t eat food anymore, but she was sure her body would figure out how to vomit if she had to absorb that pain again so soon.

  “Yeah, you really suck,” Neuma said. “Your problem’s your stance. You’re not shooting a bow and arrow.”

  “What do you know about it?”

  “Lots, actually.” She slunk behind Elise. Neuma’s hands were cool on her shoulders, sliding down her biceps to support her elbows. Neuma repositioned her arms and grip. “Used to go shooting all the time with my brother and his friends. I’m not exactly a sharpshooter, but I hit what I’m aiming at more’n nine times outta ten.” Her breath was warm on the back of Elise’s neck.

  Elise twisted to look at Neuma over her shoulder. “You have a brother?”

  Neuma just smiled and rubbed her cheek on Elise’s in an almost feline gesture. “Eyes forward, doll.” With their hands together, Neuma’s breasts pressed to her back, Elise aimed again. The half-succubus made a few more minute adjustments. Then she whispered, “Don’t forget to relax into it.”

  Elise relaxed. She fired.

  The vase shattered.

  Neuma stepped back, giving her space, and Elise rolled out her shoulders again. It didn’t hurt as much this time.

  Without extra help, she fired two more times and destroyed the two remaining vases. She instinctively understood what Neuma had been showing her; once she did it properly the first time, subsequent times were merely a matter of repetition.

  “Fast learner,” Neuma said as Elise engaged the safety and jammed the gun in her belt again.

  “Thanks for the help.”


  “No problem.” She held up an envelope—yet another item that she shouldn’t have been able to hide on her nearly-naked body. “Now we can talk about this.”

  Elise recoiled. “What is that?”

  “Money,” Neuma said. “From the crate in storage.”

  Upon closer look, Elise realized it wasn’t really an envelope; it was a piece of paper that had been folded over, stuffed with money, and sealed shut with wax. Considering the bulge, it could have been a lot of money. Maybe a few tens of thousands.

  More distractions. Obsessions. “I told you that you can’t have that money.”

  “And I think you’re being an asshole. Look, I need a favor, doll. I came to Hell when you snapped your fingers, I dragged my girlfriend along, I ran through the gates of the House of fucking Abraxas when it seemed suicidal.”

  Elise turned her eyes skyward, trying to find a center of calm within herself. “Fine. Take whatever money you want. Take every pair of shoes in the damn house.”

  Neuma snorted. “Don’t be a cunt, Elise. I don’t want the money for myself. What the fuck am I going to do with money here? I want you to take it to the address on the envelope and stick it in the mailbox. That’s it. I know how you pop between dimensions. It won’t take you, like, ten seconds.”

  She held the envelope out, giving Elise an expectant look.

  Without touching it, Elise tilted her head to read the address, which was written in the same girlish handwriting as the inventory. The address was located on Lupin Drive in Sun Valley, a town north of Reno that used to hold the record for the largest trailer park west of the Mississippi. If Nevada had a body, Sun Valley would have been its stinking asshole.