Ruled by Steel (The Ascension Series #3)

by S. M. Reine

  “The whole region’s been evacuated for years,” Elise said.

  “Not Sun Valley,” Neuma said. “Folks didn’t have anywhere to evacuate to.”

  “Who’s at this address?”

  Her lips pressed into a frown. “Ten seconds, Elise. You won’t hear nothing about the money and shit after that.”

  Neuma was right. It would only take about ten seconds to cross dimensions. But she had already worn herself out with the first jump into Hell. Another round trip wouldn’t just waste time; it would waste her strength.

  Elise didn’t want to touch it, but Neuma physically took her hands and placed the envelope in them.

  “Come on,” Neuma said. “For me.”

  “Why? Because I owe you for your help?”

  She brushed a kiss over Elise’s cheek, hands tight on hers. Neuma had always smelled of strawberry lube and cheap liquor and probably always would, even if she never drank another drop in her life. Her lips were soft. “Because we’re friends,” Neuma said.

  On the last page of the inventory, which listed many of Abraxas’s personal possessions, Elise found a very interesting line item: “Whiskey, two bottles.” It was right above “cigars.”

  Maybe Neuma had been drinking after all.

  Elise found the booze in the bottom drawer of Abraxas’s desk. The whiskey was kept in those huge bottles they sold at liquor stores for business use—probably more than enough for the average person to enjoy on weekends for a year. For Elise, she anticipated two weeks of a peacefully fuzzy mind and no more.

  She paced his office as she poured whiskey into a gold goblet studded with pearls, which Neuma had listed as “fancy-ass gold cup” in her inventory. It gave the liquor a metallic flavor, but it was quickly burned away by the alcohol’s musky sting when Elise tossed it back.

  “Friends,” she muttered, pouring another glass. Neuma wanted her help because they were friends.

  Elise had a terrible track record with so-called friends. James had been a friend once. Much more than a friend. He had lied to her, betrayed her, left her to madness. McIntyre’s friendship with Elise had just about gotten his family killed. Lincoln Marshall, deputy of Northgate, might have become a friend. Then he had been possessed by a demon and gone missing.

  And then there was that thing, deposited on the slab under the office window, still shrouded in a black drape. That thing that she had hauled to Hell with her for safekeeping, whatever the fuck that was supposed to mean.

  Another failure to Elise’s friends.

  The envelope of money sat in the center of the desk. Whether it was the brightness of the paper or the pressure of expectation drawing her eye, she wasn’t sure, but she struggled to look away from it.

  The second and third shots of whiskey burned a path down her throat to her belly, where it settled uncomfortably, as if her body wasn’t sure what to do with it.

  Elise’s reluctance wasn’t just a matter of time, nor was it a matter of her finite strength. Standing under the fissure earlier that day, Elise had glimpsed James’s mind. He was escorting Brianna from the hospital. Probably another evacuation, probably because demons were climbing out of Malebolge and Phlegethon and salting the earth in their wake.

  The warding rings that Elise and James carried were meant to keep their minds separated, but Elise couldn’t use magic if she wore the ring. She had no fucking idea what James’s excuse was.

  If she went to Earth, even for a moment, he would see her. He would know what she was doing.

  “I don’t have time for this,” Elise told the shrouded figure on the slab.

  Someone knocked at the door. Elise frowned. Neuma and Jerica wouldn’t knock, and the fiends were all in the barracks, hidden away from her awe-inspiring visage. But the wards were strong—she hadn’t felt anyone enter or leave since they had returned.

  Elise opened the door. On the other side stood the slave that had emerged from the kennels sane and unharmed. The one with the tattoos that had played guitar outside Craven’s Casino.

  “Can I come in?” he asked.

  She stepped aside to let him in. He walked a little straighter than he had when first emerging from his cage, although a long time in captivity seemed to have given his spine a permanent hunch. He hadn’t bathed—there wasn’t nearly enough water for that—so he still smelled of sweat, though he had combed his hair back and donned clothes that Neuma must have found in the warehouse. He didn’t look quite civilized, but he looked as good as could be expected.

  “What do you want?” Elise asked, returning to the desk to refill her glass with whiskey.

  “Name’s Gerard,” he said. He thrust a hand toward her to shake.

  She gave him a level look. “I know.”

  “I’m helping with the slaves, ma’am. Trying to get them all out of the kennels.”

  “And how is that going?”

  He jammed his hands into the pockets of his jeans, giving a shrug. “Got a few of them out. Three or four, all new guys from the last purchase.” He said that word like it was filthy.

  “Three or four” among hundreds. Virtually none.

  Elise tipped back the glass of whiskey. It seemed to be getting stronger, somehow; it burned her nose when she swallowed.

  “I’ve been helping get the water to them,” Gerard said. “Most of them are drinking. It’s good. A few are trying to keep doing the routine that those ugly fucks used to walk us through—one of them punched me when I tried to stop him. That’s not as good. They’re all pretty fucked up, ma’am.”

  Her eyes tracked Gerard’s motion around the room. He made erratic gestures with his hands, twitching as though swatting at invisible flies, scratching the sores on his neck. He paced to the window. Then to the desk.

  He was the best. The sanest. The first to leave his cage.

  Elise wondered if there was any point in giving food and water to slaves that were hardly more than vegetables.

  “They’re never gonna get out of their cages like this,” Gerard went on, unbothered by her lack of response. “Their brains are broken, and that’s not gonna get better where they are. The kennels are shit.”

  “Move them to the house,” Elise said. “Bodily, if need be. It’s not their homes, but it’s significantly more comfortable than where they are now.”

  “I got a better idea. I’m thinking if we can’t get them to the house, why not get the house to them? Move some of this fancy stuff out to the kennels. Make it a better place to be. See if we can’t put some life in them, you know?”

  He wanted her permission to raid Abraxas’s house. She had no attachment to anything there, no need for anything of his that wasn’t an army. She pointed at the door with her cup, and whiskey sloshed onto her wrist. “Take anything you want except books, scrolls, papers—I need those. You also can’t touch this room or Belphegor’s room. The rest is yours. Rearrange. Enjoy.”

  He smiled a broad, gap-toothed smile, leaning back against the table on which the shrouded form rested. “You’re as good as they said, ma’am.”

  Elise frowned. “Don’t touch that.” Gerard blinked at her stupidly. Her tone sharpened. “The table. Get away from it.”

  He jerked away, wiping his hands off on his t-shirt. “What’s under the blanket?”

  She stepped between him and the table. “Drink?” she asked, holding up the goblet.

  “Better not,” Gerard said. “Been dry for four years, plus however long I’ve been in Hell.” He gazed up at her with watery, red-veined eyes. He would have been a short man even if his spine hadn’t been hunched, maybe two inches over five feet. “Getting all my buddies out of their cages isn’t the end game, you know.”

  “Then what is?” Elise asked.

  “Home,” Gerard said. He pointed toward the sky.

  She turned her gaze to the ceiling. Through the crystal skylight, she could see the eternal darkness of Hell’s sky. It was night as far as demons considered it—the period in which the creatures that needed to rest got the
ir sleep. The sky was only fractionally darker.

  He wasn’t indicating the sky. He was indicating what was beyond the fissure.

  Elise hadn’t given thought to taking the slaves “home”—back to Earth. She had enough worries on her plate without worrying about that.

  Her frown deepened and her head throbbed. “I’ll think about it,” she said.

  “No, you won’t,” Gerard said. “That’s a bullshit answer. That’s trying to get me out of your cozy room so you can be alone with its big bed and big bottle of whiskey.”

  Elise set the goblet down on the table. It thudded against stone. She loomed over him and said, very carefully, “I will think about it.”

  “Yes, ma’am,” he said. She couldn’t tell if his salute was serious or not.

  He left.

  Elise paced. She needed to do something. Find Vassago’s killer. Find a way to take the Palace without an army so she could stop that bridge from being constructed. But instead, Neuma wanted her running mail around, and Gerard wanted her to save all of his friends, and everyone had all of these ridiculous expectations that had nothing to do with Elise’s goals. And who was thinking about what she needed? Who else was considering what the greater good required? Nobody. Only Elise.

  She ditched the goblet and tipped back the entire bottle of whiskey. It required both hands to support its bulky size. Once her stomach was full and she couldn’t feel her throat, she stuck it into the drawer of Abraxas’s desk again. She bumped the drawer shut with her hip.

  “Home,” she muttered. “Friendship.” It must have been nighttime on Earth, too. The sky was bloody beyond Abraxas’s crystal windows, painting the office with a violet tinge. It suited her mood.

  She crossed the room to the shrouded body and folded the cloth back.

  Underneath, there was something that looked like a very morbid statue of a human man, carved with careful detail. The tank top was ribbed. Elise could see the outline of abdominal muscles underneath. Had it been cut from solid marble, it would have had to be the work of one of the greatest sculptors who ever lived.

  But there was no artist that could so perfectly capture the anguish of the moments before death—the way a man looked as his blood was deprived of oxygen and began to fade.

  That was because the body under the shroud wasn’t a sculpture.

  Seth Wilder was permanently frozen the way that he had died. One of his hands was lifted, reaching for the face of a woman that no longer kneeled by his side. The other was clutched to his chest. Elise rested her hand on top of his. She could even feel the texture of calluses on the side of his thumb from the manual labor he had done in his very young life.

  Elise had no idea if she was immortal yet—she suspected she would be, like Yatam had been before her, but it was impossible to judge whether or not she was aging by looking at her. She had only been a demon for three years. The test would be fifty years from now, a hundred.

  But Seth had already been immortalized. He would always be a twenty-one-year-old werewolf hunter.

  She touched the edge of the bandage on his neck, which had been turned to stone like the rest of him, clothing included. There was no way to see the injury that Elise had left underneath.

  It had only been hours before his death when she had fed from him, and a few hours earlier when she had agreed to give him a job with her coalition of kopides. He was a teammate. Maybe he had been a teammate for only a few hours—nothing in comparison to the fraternity she had developed with McIntyre and Anthony—but a teammate nevertheless. With that came the implicit promise of protection.

  Instead, she had been careless and gutted him with a sword. Elise could still hear Rylie’s screams.

  And Neuma and Gerard were obsessing about stupid things like home.

  “We’re not done yet, Seth,” Elise said. “There’s still time.”

  As far as she knew, neither of them was going to change. Not until the sun engulfed the Earth and ended time as they knew it.

  Elise hadn’t failed Seth until she gave up seeking the cure.

  Six

  There were times when Nash felt like he had lived for an eternity.

  He recalled his banishment from Heaven as clearly as he recalled events only four hours prior—how he had been beaten, bloodied, and utterly alone. Isolation had been so quiet after the war he left behind. Never had a day passed without screams rending the air, the stink of death shrouding cities, fleshless bodies tangled in town squares waiting to be burned.

  There was no screaming or death in the Haven where he had been imprisoned. The only noise had been a gentle breeze stirring Nash’s feathers.

  The Haven had been a strange place to spend the millennia. It was a small, artificial world, much like a fishbowl. Time ran much faster there than it did in reality. Even as he had suffered for days, weeks, years, only minutes passed on Earth. His torture had been extended into infinity. It was a perfect prison for someone that his fellow angels considered to be a traitor.

  He had so many terrible memories from his time incarcerated. Summer had calculated the years once—an outrageous number that he had been quick to forget. She was happy to label his misery. He was not. Nash only wanted to remember the good days, few as they were, and most of which had happened after the day that Summer Gresham stumbled into his life.

  Yes, there were definitely times that he felt like he had lived for an eternity. In many ways, he had. No entity had suffered through as many lonely millennia as he had and lived to tell the tale.

  And yet now, with one hand lifting a sword blazing with angelfire, he felt like no time had passed at all.

  War hadn’t changed. War never changed.

  The demon screamed as Nash drove his blade into its gut. The wound was instantly cauterized. He didn’t have to inspect the injury to know this to be a fact—he had pulled apart many demons postmortem in the last war to determine the easiest ways to kill them. He clearly recalled the autopsies of those killed by flaming swords. The blackened flesh curled in at the edges. The cooked meat around the insertion wound.

  It was not the stab, the killing blow, that made the demon choke on its own blood. It was Nash’s fist in the demon’s throat, ripping the esophagus free.

  That was, he had learned long ago, the easiest way to kill a brute.

  He unsheathed his sword from the brute’s body. It toppled at his feet, limp and motionless. Nash kicked it over so that its back was bared and drove the blade in one more time, ensuring that the spine would be severed.

  Silence settled over the 7-Eleven parking lot as Nash straightened to inspect the damage. One of the worst fracture points of the fissure was only two blocks away; more than twenty brutes had dragged themselves from Hell to assault the travelers attempting to refuel on their way to the evacuation point. Seven humans had died before Nash intervened. Seven innocent mortals on top of thousands of others.

  Though the convenience store was not a familiar sight, the demon bodies were. Brutes had never been able to interbreed with Earth-bound creatures, and as such were not suited to the atmosphere or gravity of that dimension; they would have died within hours of arrival anyway. But that was plenty of time to kill many humans and disrupt the evacuation lines.

  A suicide mission.

  “Idiots,” Nash muttered under his breath, eyes sweeping over the sagging, sunken bodies of the demons between the gas pumps. Twenty brutes. What fool had sacrificed twenty perfectly good brutes?

  With a twist of his wrist, he disengaged the flames on the blade of his sword. When it wasn’t alight, it was a fairly ordinary-looking saber. Its blade had been folded in the fires of Heaven until the cutting edge could only be measured on the atomic level. It could cut through anything. Demons, their weapons, asphalt. Anything that stood between Nash and the safety of the humans who needed him.

  A choked sound reached his ears, and his eyes snapped up to the corner of the 7-Eleven, expecting to see a brute that had not yet died. He found a woman hugging her son inst
ead. They were both bloodied. The child’s arm had been bitten and oozed with black fluid, but he was alive.

  They were the only ones aside from Nash that were so lucky.

  “Take him to the checkpoint as quickly as you can,” Nash said. “They will be able to treat that bite before it becomes infected.”

  Tears streamed down the mother’s round face. “Infected?”

  He wanted to stretch his wings and take flight, leaving behind that assault to find the next. There would always be a “next time,” at least until Hell was crushed, and the ethereal forces were sorely outnumbered. But the fear in her eyes reminded him of family. Not blood family, but the family he had chosen—the family that made him want to fight.

  “It’s treatable,” he said again, as gently as possible.

  “The checkpoint’s two hours away in a car,” she whispered. “And our car…” She hugged her son tighter and glared at a white sedan at gas pump three. Its tires were flat.

  Two hours by car. Lord above.

  Nash glanced around again, but there was nothing to see. The discount guitar store across the intersection was darkened, its windows shattered. The traffic lights blinked red. It was midday, but the sky was orange-gray, choking with smoke. The evacuees traveling by car had already been rerouted around that 7-Eleven to another gas station two blocks away.

  Nobody was close enough to help this mother and child.

  He sheathed his sword at his hip. “Here,” Nash said, dropping to one knee and opening his arms.

  The woman and son didn’t immediately approach him. He knew he cut an intimidating figure in his business suit with a blade at his side and the wings at his back. Each wing was longer than he was tall—long enough to carry a man well over six feet tall through the air, even when he had passengers.

  The boy broke away first. He was perhaps seven years old, with a dirt-smudged face and tousled hair. He was pale from blood loss, fear, sickness. Brave child, considering he had just watched the angel slaughter twenty brutes singlehandedly.

  “The sword’s cool,” said the boy.

  “Perhaps I will let you hold it at the checkpoint,” Nash said.