Ruled by Steel (The Ascension Series #3)

by S. M. Reine

  Elise stepped into the basement, and she found the lab.

  There was a row of desks covered in equipment that must have been taken from an Earth lab—microscopes, scales, a centrifuge. They were all as dusty as the door. It had been a long time since anyone used them. They were backed by a wall of shelving, so Elise couldn’t see what was beyond them.

  “Anything interesting?” Gerard asked, squeezing through the door behind her.

  She frowned. “I told you to stay upstairs.”

  “I got curious.”

  “You may regret that,” she said. An unpleasant smell had reached her nose, and it reminded her of a butcher’s shop that had lost its refrigeration. Like a bloody pit of meat. Elise had been in one or two mass graves before—not intentionally—and she would never forget that sour odor.

  Once she rounded the shelving, she found a rickety metal table covered in a sheet. The cloth was soaked with red and brown fluids, and there was something lumpy underneath it. That was at least part of the origin of the meat smell.

  Gerard gagged behind her. “What in the…?”

  Elise jerked the sheet off of the table.

  At least, she tried to jerk the sheet off the table. She had to peel it away from the body underneath since the rotting flesh had adhered itself to the cloth. A hard tug pulled at least one layer of shriveled skin off with the sheet.

  There was a wolf on the slab. It was almost big enough to be a bear, and the wicked silver claws also weren’t typical of a normal wolf. But Elise had never seen a werewolf that bled ichor. Its muscles glistened black, as if saturated with oil. Most of the fur had fallen out. Its chest cavity was so rotten that its entire front half had collapsed in on itself like a jack-o-lantern left in the sun.

  Its lips were peeled back over gums that had no teeth. It looked like someone had broken them off and jammed silver thumbtacks in their place to stave off healing, permanently neutralizing the werewolf’s bite. The teeth were in a jar beside the table. Elise didn’t have to count them to know that some were missing.

  Nash had said that Abraxas deliberately infected some humans with the werewolf curse. It was no surprise to find a werewolf there.

  She lowered the sheet over the werewolf again.

  “What was that?” Gerard asked thickly. Judging by the way his emotions seethed around him, he was on the verge of vomiting.

  “Werewolf. Don’t throw up on any evidence.”

  He swallowed wetly. “Wasn’t planning on it.”

  She moved deeper into the room, stepping between aisles of sample jars. There were more teeth—some human, some werewolf, some demon. There was also an entire rack dedicated to fetuses suspended in some kind of gel. They were far too distorted to be able to tell what they would have become, but considering that they were pocked with slimy black marks like the werewolf’s muscles, Elise suspected that they weren’t human. There were skulls, too, dried out and picked clean by insects. It all looked unreal to her, more like Halloween decorations than actual creatures that had been pickled and picked apart and experimented upon.

  This wasn’t a lab that had been used for a few casual experiments. It had been a long, deliberate effort. Abraxas had been planning his super-army long before he obtained Elise’s blood.

  And she had been there with him so many years earlier—when he had been alone in the desert, unguarded, unsuspecting. She could have killed him and stopped it then.

  If only she had known.

  While Gerard poked through the fetuses, Elise broke into a locked cabinet at the other side of the room. There was a tray of teardrop-shaped vials inside. They sparked with magic out of the corner of her eyes, and Elise had no idea what the sparks of purple meant.

  She let her mind drift to James. He was still beside Brianna’s bed, filling yet another sheet of notebook paper with runes.

  Purple magic? she asked.

  He was too distracted to try to look through her eyes. It typically means regeneration, he thought back at her as he continued to draw. Sometimes duplication.

  “Duplication?” she echoed aloud, surprising herself with the sound of her voice.

  James focused on her. Where are you?

  She blocked him out and returned her attention to the cabinet.

  Each of the vials was a subtly different shape, but one of them was identical to the teardrop vial that Abraxas had used to hold Elise’s blood. There was a smudge of blood at the bottom of this vial, too, perhaps one or two drops. The label on the vial said “X.”

  She pulled a sheet of parchment from under the tray. It was a guide to Abraxas’s shorthand. X meant “Godslayer.” Her heart accelerated at the sight of it.

  Elise had accidentally destroyed the first vial of her blood. She had thought it was the only one in existence.

  But Abraxas had made a second.

  Her first instinct was to smash it. This was the cause of all the pain on Earth—these little smears of blood that Elise had given Abraxas had played a huge role in opening the fissure. If her blood could open the fissure, it might be able to close it, too. But this was blood that Elise no longer possessed. Ever since she had returned from the garden, the blood of the Tree ran through her veins; if she destroyed this vial, there would be no more.

  Elise tucked the vial into the neck of her bustier without letting Gerard see it. It took all of her self-control not to show the heady excitement that burned in her veins.

  “There’s another door over here,” Gerard called from the opposite end of the lab, behind yet another row of shelving. “Looks like it goes down farther. It says something on the wall, too, but I can’t read it.”

  Elise slammed the cabinet doors shut and joined him. The sign Gerard had found said “detention cells.”

  “I’m going down,” Elise said. She gave him with a hard look. “I want you to stay up here this time. I mean it. I need you to watch my back.”

  He saluted again. “Yes, ma’am.”

  Elise descended.

  The detention level was a small, cramped basement. She couldn’t see very far down the long hallway, though she could tell that the right-hand side was broken up by cell doors, just like those she might find in a county jail. The air was thick with the scent of rotting meat and sickness. Punctured intestines smelled distinctively sour. She didn’t need to look into the cells to know that people had died here, and that they had died painfully.

  But look into the cells she did. The first one was small, barely five feet by five feet, with no furnishing beyond a pair of shackles and a worktable covered in trash. The shackles were attached to the bare wrist bones of a human cadaver. There was a clipboard beside the door, and she lifted the sheet to read Abraxas’s notes. “Infected with X. Failure.” That was the same letter designation that was on the second vial of Elise’s blood.

  She peered through the bars. The body that had been injected with X hadn’t died from some terrible infection; he had died from having his throat slit open. Apparently, Abraxas wasn’t a fan of disappointment.

  The second cell was another werewolf, much like the one on the slab above, although it hadn’t been disemboweled. It looked like it had been starved to death. It was barely more than a furred skeleton chained with silver.

  The third cell smelled worse than the others, and approaching the open bars nearly overwhelmed her with the stink of rotting flesh. Elise breathed shallowly through her mouth as she looked for Abraxas’s notes on this one. The clipboard had been removed, leaving a bare patch of wall behind it.

  Elise opened the door and stepped inside.

  It took her a few seconds to realize what she was seeing. There were two large, raptor-like feet, which belonged to the same body as the bull’s head. The hooves and muscular chest belonged to a second body. They were half-angel, half-demon hybrids, and whatever had happened to them had made their flesh boil. Elise had never seen a hybrid killed by anything physical other than ripping the wings off and having the spinal cord severed.

  Her boots
squished in tissue as she picked her way over to the work table beside the hybrids. Elise dug through the pile of trash in the corner, pulling apart bloody tissues in search of an indication of what they had been given.

  She found a glass vial at the bottom of the pile. It was marked with two letters: “XW.” Elise’s blood, and werewolf saliva. It must have been the saliva that had killed them. Another failed experiment by Abraxas. As horrible as it was to see, she could only be grateful that it had been such a spectacular failure. Elise didn’t want to imagine how difficult it would be to kill a hybrid with a werewolf’s hardiness.

  Abraxas had been putting anything and everything together to see what he could get out of it. He must have known that infecting hybrids with werewolf saliva would mean losing two valuable members of an army. For fuck’s sake, two hybrids could kill an entire town’s worth of humans if the victims were caught off guard. But he had wanted to see what would happen if they were infected anyway.

  “My blood and werewolf saliva,” she murmured, turning the empty syringe over in her fingers. There was still a smear of something unpleasantly brown at the bottom.

  Maybe Abraxas hadn’t been wasteful. Maybe he had believed that there was more to Elise’s blood than she knew.

  She dropped the vial and left the cell. It was a little easier to breathe away from the pile of dissolved flesh that was the hybrids, and not just because of the smell.

  The next cell was mercifully empty. But the door on the final cell stood open.

  Devadas was inside.

  “Oh, shit,” Elise swore, grabbing the bars of the door. His wrists were shackled above his head, and the end of his tail had been severed so that the stump dangled just short of the ground, dripping blood into a shining black puddle. He wasn’t moving.

  Elise drew her gun and moved inside, searching for a key to Devadas’s shackles among the rusted examination tools on the table. She found it underneath bloody pliers that were still clutching one of his fangs.

  She reached up to unlock one shackle, then the other. He sagged against her. The naga was a lot heavier than he looked; she had to set the gun down in order to lower him gently to the floor.

  Elise pressed her hand to his throat, though she wasn’t sure that was where a snake-man would even keep his pulse. Didn’t matter. There was no sign of life in him.

  “Damn it all,” she muttered, rolling him onto his back.

  Whoever had taken him from Vassago’s house had taken their time torturing him. The scales below his waist had been ripped out one by one. Elise tilted his chin to inspect his face—judging by the sunken cheeks and bloody lips, more than just his fangs had been removed.

  She thumbed his bottom lip down. He had no tongue, either.

  That wasn’t the end of the damage. His hands had also been severed at the wrists. Rings of punctures marked his forearms, mimicking a bite wound.

  Just like Vassago.

  With a growing sense of dread, Elise searched the rest of his body. She found the signature on the soft skin at his lower back. It was another initial “J” with a messy heart.

  “What the hell?” she whispered.

  How could Vassago’s killer possibly be connected to Abraxas? It couldn’t have been Belphegor—he had still been detained when Devadas went missing, and there was no sign that the Steward had ever been there.

  Who the fuck was J?

  “Elise!” Gerard’s voice came hissing from the end of the cellblock. Elise grabbed her gun and peered around the door of the cell. He stood in the doorway, framed by the light. “There’s someone here.”

  Elise drifted through the ground floor of the lab, looking down on the intruder.

  Judging by the yellow skin that clung to his bones like spider webs, she was betting on him being a nightmare. But he wasn’t one of the nightmares that had attacked her in the alley. He wore similar clothing—the same livery of the new occupants of the Palace. There was a cleaver in one of his hip holsters and a Taser in the other.

  And he had brought humans with him.

  They were chained into a long line, wrists and ankles tethered. The two in front were crying. The three behind them looked like they had lost the ability to cry. They had the hollow stare and raw flesh of humans that had been in Hell for much too long.

  “Hello?” the nightmare called, strolling through the empty room as a pair of lesser nightmares guarded the humans. The guards were probably nightmare Gray, half-human and half-demon, because they didn’t radiate nearly as much energy as the ringleader, and they could have passed for mortal if not for the black eyes and wide mouths.

  Elise drifted lower, still invisible.

  When nobody responded to the nightmare’s call, he said again, “Hello? I’ve got your annual delivery.”

  Delivery? Someone in the lab had been ordering humans from the Palace administration?

  She slithered around the nightmare’s ankles and considered her options. The slaves would be unlikely to have any information she wanted, but the nightmare would, if she could get him tied down somehow. In fact, she might be able to get a lot of answers from him.

  “Huh,” the nightmare said, as if surprised by something. Elise twisted around to see what.

  He was staring between his feet at her—even though she should have been invisible.

  The nightmare thrust a Taser into the center of Elise’s shadow.

  She reformed into a single corporeal body with a shock that felt like stepping off the roof of a skyscraper. Elise slammed into the ground chest-down, hands slapping the concrete. Her mouth flooded with the taste of burned hair and blood. Her skin ached with the electrical shock.

  He cackled with laughter, slamming his boot into the center of her back.

  “Thought you’d play spy, huh?” he said, kneeling on her. His weight made her ribs creak. “What are you, fledgling mara? You’d know that I could see you if you were anything older.”

  “Get off of me,” she said.

  He drove the Taser into her ribs and shocked her again. Elise’s cry echoed off of the warehouse walls. It was almost painful enough to make her phase out—not to become invisible, but shatter completely. She wasn’t sure that she would be able to reform if he did that one more time.

  “You’re not Belphegor’s thing, are you?” the nightmare hissed into her ear.

  Instead of responding, Elise took quick inventory of her situation. Gerard was still downstairs. She had become corporeal again by surprise and hadn’t reformed with all of her belongings intact—she could see where she had dropped her gun and Taser a few feet away. But they weren’t the only things she had dropped. She was missing her left shoe and glove, too.

  Wait, her glove. She had runes on that bare hand. Magic.

  Elise grabbed the nightmare’s ankle and activated one of the wards.

  It wasn’t an offensive spell, but it did the trick. It threw a wall between them. The nightmare was flung off of her.

  The instant his weight was gone, she scrambled on all fours to grab her Taser.

  Elise depressed the button as she whirled, trying to sink it into the gut of the nightmare that pursued her. But his arm was already lifted, too. Their forearms met. Arcs of electricity danced in the air between them.

  She shoved his arm aside and threw a hard uppercut. It struck the nightmare with a faint squishing noise.

  He stumbled, and she jumped on him. The Taser buried into his stomach, sinking into the spongy flesh where his small ribs should have been. Bright electrical arcs danced between his teeth, visible through his paper-thin cheeks. He exploded into shadow.

  So much for questioning that one.

  But there were two more nightmares pushing the humans back, trying to keep away from Elise. They were taking the slaves toward the door. Trying to escape.

  Elise scooped the Beretta off of the ground and fired.

  Neuma’s lesson helped. It helped a lot. It punched into the chest of the nearer nightmare, leaving a neat hole that didn’t heal. It
also didn’t kill him—Gray or not, it would take more than a few holes to drop a nightmare.

  Gerard came up the stairs. “Close the doors!” Elise ordered him, then turned her attention to the demon she had shot. “Who sent you here?”

  “Fuck off,” he replied, jerking a cleaver out of his sheath.

  She fired again. It hit him in the shoulder, making him reel. The human closest to him cried out and tried to run, but the chains were all tangled together. The escape attempt only made the slaves stumble.

  “Who ordered the delivery of slaves?” Elise asked.

  He came at her with the knife. Elise ducked under the swing, grabbed his throat, slammed him to the floor. Crouched on his arm and chest, it was easy to disarm him. She held the knife to his throat.

  He twisted, looking for his final companion. “Help me, Crosby!” Crosby didn’t come. He was flattened to the wall, paralyzed by fear.

  “Who sent you?” Elise asked again, pressing the cleaver under his chin.

  “My master,” he said. “He’s got a trade agreement with the lab’s owner. He sends slaves over every Earth year.”

  “Who’s your master?”

  “Someone scarier than you,” he croaked out.

  Elise leaned on the knife.

  It wasn’t hard to sever his neck. Half-blooded nightmares were almost as spongy as their full-blooded kin. It took a little extra pressure to sever the spinal cord, but not much.

  Blood spurted from the stump she left behind. It slicked her hands. Elise grimaced as she stood.

  “What do you know?” she asked the last Gray.

  “Aquiel, it’s Aquiel,” he said, flinching away from her even though she hadn’t approached him. “He’s our master, he took the Palace, he’s organizing the army.”

  Aquiel. She shouldn’t have been surprised. He was the Prince of Nightmares, and he had already made it obvious that he was looking to invade Earth. But that still wasn’t the answer that she had been expecting. Aquiel was as big as he was powerful. Literally, the size of a big building. He didn’t have the ability to get into the lab and fuck around with bodies, and he certainly wouldn’t sign them with a J.