Ruled by Steel (The Ascension Series #3)

by S. M. Reine

  What was this about we?

  “Can’t anyone listen to an order?” Elise asked, but there was nobody nearby to hear her.

  Belphegor wasn’t in the house, the kennels, the workshops, or the barracks. Elise checked most of the buildings personally, although the last had to be inspected by Neuma—the fiends were still hiding in the barracks, and they had an irritating habit of urinating on themselves whenever they saw Elise now.

  “He has to be here somewhere,” she said, following Neuma through the crates in the storage room. “I felt someone enter the compound. I didn’t feel anyone leave. There are only so many places he could have gone.”

  “I don’t know.” Neuma stopped at the back wall, spreading her arms wide to indicate the empty space. “Do you see him? I don’t see him.”

  Of course she didn’t fucking see him. Belphegor wasn’t there. “Then we’ll just have to go find him,” Elise said. “Where’s the ammunition?”

  Neuma led her to a crate that she had inventoried earlier. It was just past the strange ethereal ruins that Abraxas had been hiding. “I got a question. Maybe a stupid question. Why do we need to get him if he’s safely off the property? He’s a scary fuck and I don’t mind having him out of the house.”

  Elise popped the magazine on the Beretta and compared it to a few other loaded magazines nestled within the packing peanuts, looking for one that was the same size. She tried one, but it didn’t fit. It took her two more tries to pull a magazine out of the crate that fit the Beretta. “He’s seen me here. He knows who I am and what I’m doing. I can’t have him organizing a strike against me.”

  “Doll, you already had nightmares dropped on your ass. People already know you’re here.”

  “But Belphegor knows what I can do,” Elise said.

  “You’re a demon in Hell. You might be the big guns, but you’ve still got the same abilities as anyone else here.”

  But there was no other demon that could cast magic. Aside from the prestige of Yatam’s blood, it was her only advantage.

  Elise loaded the Beretta with her gloved hand. Maybe it didn’t matter that Belphegor knew that she could cast magic. What good could she do with those anyway? They weren’t going to help her in a fight. If she faced him again, she was fucked.

  She’d have to try to recover the wards that had initially held him.

  “Let’s go,” Elise said.

  Gerard stopped them outside the door to the storage room. A pair of other humans milled behind him, dressed in outdated and ill-fitting clothing that Abraxas had collected over the years. “The perimeter is clear,” Gerard said. “I put Franz and Javier on the walls to watch for intruders, but I don’t think we’ll find anything.”

  Elise was inclined to believe that was true. Somehow, Belphegor must have escaped the wards without her being able to feel it.

  “Where else could we even begin searching?” Neuma asked.

  “Why don’t you look for Belphegor at Abraxas’s other place?” Gerard suggested.

  Elise stopped mid-step. She rounded on him. “What other place?”

  Gerard didn’t shrink under her stare like most people did. The same thing that had kept his mind intact during enslavement kept him from having the common sense to know when Elise was pissed off. “The place he takes the slaves,” he said.

  “We already looked at the kennels.”

  “No, yeah, that’s where they go after he’s done processing them,” Gerard said. “But it wasn’t the first place most of them go after the auction. Most people I saw brought in went through the lab first.”

  Cold heat washed over Elise. The lab.

  She had been wondering why she had found no indication of Abraxas’s experimentation in the House, but she had begun to assume that he had simply destroyed or removed everything when he began his campaign on Earth. It had never occurred to her that there might be another property.

  “Do you know where the lab is?” Elise asked.

  “I could probably find it,” Gerard said. “They took me there when they first bought me, but I’ve been here for so long that it wasn’t a lab yet. He wasn’t doing all the stuff with the blood then. It was just the werewolves and stuff, and I didn’t end up getting bitten.”

  “Do whatever you need to do to prepare for a fight, Gerard,” she said. “You’re taking me to the lab.”

  While Jerica searched for body armor that fit Gerard, Elise returned to Belphegor’s playroom. It was as quiet and empty as it had been when she left.

  Ace sniffed around the scorch marks that used to be Elise’s runes. She kneeled to inspect the shattered floor a second time, rubbing her hands on the stone to see if the spells might respond. But there was nothing to recover. The runes had left ashen marks upon the tile, and nothing more.

  “Damn,” she said.

  Elise pulled the glove off of her hand to look at what remained. She tried to stretch out her twitching fingers. There were no more warding spells slithering over her knuckles. There were no more offensive spells, either. She only had the three that had concealed her belongings, which would be as useless against Belphegor as lead bullets.

  Impressive.

  James’s voice whispered through the back of her mind, and Elise couldn’t tell if she was imagining it, or if he were somehow speaking directly into her mind through the dimensions. She clenched her fist.

  Elise couldn’t let James into her mind—didn’t want to let him know what she was doing. But she felt his presence growing anyway. It seemed like the harder she concentrated on pushing him out, the more quickly his consciousness melted into hers.

  She blinked, and in that fraction of a second, she could see a hospital bed in front of her. It mingled with the sight of Ace’s wagging tail as he turned a circle in the corner and flopped onto his side.

  “Get out,” Elise said aloud. “Get out of my head and stay out.”

  I’m not trying to get into your mind, James responded. It seems you’re creeping into mine.

  If she was imagining his voice, then it was a frustratingly convincing hallucination.

  She glanced around the room once more, as though expecting to see Belphegor hiding behind her in the corner. It was unsettling to be in the place where he had bound her, threatened her with that studded phallus, the hooks and spurs. But it was hers now. She was, unfortunately, secure in that room.

  Elise allowed her eyes to fall shut.

  James was in a chair beside a hospital bed. His feet were on top of a rolling suitcase with a notebook spread across his lap; a pencil was limp in his gloved hand. Elise wanted to see who was in the hospital bed. As if driven by her will, James leaned forward.

  Brianna looked very much like Snow White in her glass sarcophagus. She was tiny and pale, hands folded on her chest, an IV taped to the back of her hand. Saline hung from the pole beside her. There were no machines breathing for her now, no sensors besides the pulse oximeter. She looked like she was sleeping.

  Beyond her stood another bed—and another, and another, all down a long row, each of them strapped to the wall. There was very little room between them. Nobody was intended to get out of bed while they were there.

  “It’s a ship,” James said. She heard him as clearly as though it was her own voice.

  “What are hospital beds doing on a ship?”

  “Evacuating.” He leaned back in his chair again. It was chilly in the ship; she could almost feel his arm hairs standing on end. “The Union is evacuating hundreds of thousands of people every day.”

  Elise didn’t want to believe that the war could have gotten so bad so quickly. She was working as fast as she could, and it wasn’t fast enough.

  She sank back against the wall. Chains rattled softly around her as she shifted to get comfortable.

  “Why are you evacuating? Out of Eden gates you can reach by car?” Elise asked.

  His sigh felt like it came from her lungs. “What’s happened to Brianna… I need to see her to safety.”

  “Is s
he still useful to you in a coma?”

  “Elise.”

  “Well? What can you do with a broken aspis?” She didn’t bother keeping the venom out of her tone. “Can you still pull enough energy through her to open your damn doors?”

  She expected James to respond in kind. She wanted him to be angry. But he only sounded exhausted when he said, “Is it so hard to believe that I feel a sense of responsibility for her?”

  Elise clenched her hands into fists on her knees. Was it hard to believe he could feel responsible for something he had done wrong? No, not really. James had always been so fucking responsible. It was, however, difficult to imagine that he might have thought that he had done anything wrong. Brianna and Seth had been a means to an end. What was wrong with that?

  She saw James’s eyes slide shut, and his thoughts rolled through hers. It was as soft as the whisper of wind through tree branches. Ten, nine, eight, seven…damn it all, Elise…six, five… He was counting backwards, trying not to be frustrated with her.

  “I want you out of my head,” she interrupted. “Put the warding ring on.”

  “You have one, too. You can use it just as well as I can,” James said. His voice was even clearer with his eyes shut. She could almost believe that they were sitting together, side-by-side against the wall.

  “I need the runes,” Elise said. It was the only advantage she had against Belphegor.

  “You’re running out.”

  “I’ll make more,” she said.

  Faint surprise radiated through them. “Have you figured out how to do that? Are you writing spells now?”

  “No,” Elise admitted after a moment’s hesitation. “But I will. I was close before.”

  James’s eyes opened again. He looked down at his notebook, and she saw what he had been drawing with the pencil: new spells, not yet imbued with magic. Some of them were familiar. Others looked sloppy, like he was still figuring out what he wanted to do.

  “There’s a trick to it,” he whispered, removing one of his gloves. He had so many runes on those fingers. His shoulder immediately began to tighten with the intensity of it. “Watch.” He turned to a blank page in his notebook. The pencil’s point danced over the coarse paper, sketching out a vague shape. It soon formed a sphere with three intersecting lines.

  Destruction, he thought by way of explanation, silently filling her with the image of a firestorm engulfing a body.

  And then he exhaled and really began to draw.

  It wasn’t a sigh—it was a word, though not a word in any language Elise knew. She had heard him speak words of power before, but this came from deep within him. It made her bones vibrate like a bell. He held the breath for an impossibly long time as he drew the lines darker and darker on the symbol. It became more complex, with swirling loops and a few sharp points.

  Magic flared on the page.

  James continued to whisper as the graphite marks lifted, glowing a faint shade of blue just above the paper. He cupped his hand beside it. The symbol crawled onto his skin beside its brethren, making him glow just a little brighter.

  Finally, he released the word of power. The rune remained affixed to his flesh—and the page was blank.

  It took a moment for Elise to remember that she wasn’t really part of James, that she was in Belphegor’s playroom and not on a ship heading across the Pacific Ocean. She shuddered. “What was that?” Elise asked.

  James pulled the glove on, making the runes dormant. “That was a word in the ethereal tongue. Magecraft. As far as I know, it’s the only way to make this sort of magic.” She felt him smile faintly. “You’re the first that I’ve shown that to.”

  “Magecraft,” she echoed.

  “Mages” were angels skilled in the use of magic, like how “warlock” was an archaic term indicating a demon that could cast spells. Neither mages nor warlocks had existed for a very, very long time. And magecraft had always been an obscure, difficult art that had only become more obscure once the Treaty of Dis forbade it. It didn’t surprise her at all that James, of all people, would have recovered the ability to do it first.

  “I don’t think you’ll be able to do it on your own,” he went on. He kept his gaze affixed to the notebook as he flipped through the pages as if he wanted Elise to see as many of the marks as possible. “But I think you’ll be able to draw that energy through me.” He stopped on the back page of his notebook, which had a single half-designed rune on it. “Elise, I think you’ll be able to write magic like I do.”

  As long as she let him stay in her head.

  She needed the wards to entrap Belphegor, but she would have to let James into her life again to do it. Was it worth the victory? Conceding that much of herself to someone who had betrayed her?

  Rather than respond to James, she opened her eyes.

  The instant that she had her vision back, she felt her contact with James fragment, grow distant again. His reality faded and hers returned. She was still in Belphegor’s office, the chains dangling beside her and Ace snoring a few feet away. There was no moist sea air, no gentle rocking of a ship. Just hard tile and dry air and one extremely powerful demon that had gone missing.

  She looked down at her hand. The destruction rune that James had drawn was affixed to her skin as firmly as it had been to his.

  Could this kill Belphegor? she asked James silently as he slipped out of her mind. He had been in the House of Abraxas before; he had seen what the demon could do.

  Yes, he said.

  Elise pushed to her feet and went to find Gerard.

  Eight

  The lab was on the outskirts of the city, almost at the edge of the wasteland. It looked like a low, rectangular building with a single story, although Elise could tell by the low-set windows that there was more underneath. It was a nondescript warehouse in a neighborhood of other nondescript warehouses, rather like walking into an industrial compound.

  It had a large garage door on the front and frosted windows that Elise couldn’t see through. She crouched to inspect the padlock at the bottom of the door.

  “I don’t want to go in there,” Gerard said. It was the first time he had shown real fear since being pulled from the kennels, and the too-large leather suit he wore over his frail body didn’t seem to give him any sense of safety.

  Elise didn’t need Gerard as backup, but she also couldn’t exactly allow him to walk back to the House without her. The two of them had come alone, allowing Neuma and Jerica to continue dealing with the slaves, so Gerard was stuck with her.

  “You can stay inside and watch the front door. Make sure nobody goes in or out.” She drew her gun. The extra magazines were heavy in the pockets of her jacket.

  He eyed the Beretta. “I’d like one of those.”

  “Too bad,” she said.

  She aimed at the lock, turned her face away, and fired. The lock snapped. Shrapnel pinged into the metal siding of the building.

  Elise slid the garage door up. There was nothing on the other side but an empty concrete room with a few hooks and chains dangling from the ceiling. The light was tinted orange by the frosted glass, casting dusty bars of light in lines toward the back of the room. It was big enough to be a hangar for a small airplane, and Elise’s motions echoed hollowly when she was inside.

  “Looks like he cleaned it out,” Gerard said.

  She stepped back onto the street again and took a second look at the building. Those were definitely basement windows set low, near the grounds.

  “Come on,” she said, pushing him inside and shutting the door halfway behind him. She propped it open with a rusty pipe that looked like it had fallen from the ceiling.

  “But there’s nothing here, ma’am.”

  “Don’t call me that,” Elise said.

  She kept the gun aimed at the floor as she stepped deeper into the room, head tilted to the side to try to catch glimmers of magic out of the corners of her eyes. She was getting better at being able to spot latent spells—things like glamors, which might
be able to hide the true contents of the room. There wasn’t anything to see. She also didn’t sense any other life within the building.

  “There used to be beds in here,” Gerard said. “Lots of beds, like you’d see in Civil War movies. Some of the people he brought in got amputations, or dissections, or just random cutting. I think he was trying to see how many pieces he could take out of a human before they stopped working.”

  “Did he work alone?”

  “He always had help. Skinny guys. Tall and skinny.”

  That could have been any number of demons, although Elise hadn’t seen any “tall and skinny” demons around the House since she’d been there.

  The back wall of the warehouse was different from the other walls. It had metal siding.

  She paced along the wall, rapping her knuckles lightly against the wall. Toward the middle, she hit something hollow. Elise could just barely make out a rusty rectangle set into the wall if she stepped back—a hidden door with no knob. Why use magic when mundane tricks worked just as well?

  Elise slipped her fingernails between the crack, searching for a latch, a switch, anything that might make the hidden door swing open.

  She caught something near the bottom of the door on the left-hand side. It clicked. The door opened.

  On the other side waited a steep, dark set of stairs. There were no light switches or torches. Nothing to illuminate the path down. Good thing she didn’t need any light to be able to see.

  “Dear Jesus,” Gerard said. The name made the hairs on the back of Elise’s neck lift.

  “Stay here,” she said.

  The stairs were latticed metal with texturing, the kind of pattern that would cut bare feet or weak soles. She climbed down carefully to find another door at the bottom that had been painted with infernal lettering. She wiped off a few layers of red dust to read “Do Not Enter.”

  She had never been good at following instructions.