Ruled by Steel (The Ascension Series #3)

by S. M. Reine

  Yes. She did want to discuss it. She was still angry from her talk with Neuma, and being near James didn’t help reduce that. Elise wanted nothing more than to beat James over the head and make him see sense, make him realize that what he was doing was insane, it was killing people, it needed to stop. But not now. Not yet.

  First, she had to fix what damage had already been caused, and that meant taking the Palace.

  Elise lowered her eyes to the notebook on his knees. “Show me.”

  “Draw as I do,” James said. “Begin lightly. The first one is the glamor.”

  He began to sketch parallel lines, going much more slowly than the last time she had watched him. Elise copied the unfamiliar motions. She had never been good at drawing, but she was deft with knives, and it wasn’t so different a motion—the slices and swoops, the jags.

  He spoke softly as they drew. “What the glamor displays will be slightly different depending on the marks you make. The one I use to make myself look more ordinary is simpler than yours needs to be. This line will make your hair appear shorter…this one will adjust the shape of your nose.”

  Elise continued to copy him. It only took a few minutes to complete the light lines, but her hand muscles cramped, and she had to set the pencil down.

  James peered over her shoulder. “Excellent. That will do. The next part will be more difficult.”

  She lifted her eyes from the paper to watch the land sliding past them, a little bit closer than it had been when she first arrived. She recognized the ports that they were skirting. “That’s Ireland,” she said, flexing her fingers to loosen them. She found herself smiling faintly. “Remember what happened in Dublin?”

  He obviously did because he smiled, too. It was all the way back in 2001, before Elise knew of the betrayal, when they had still been friends traveling the world together to fight evil and save lives. The Dublin incident hadn’t been funny at the time. Elise and James had been investigating a possessed castle that was allegedly killing tourists, and there was nothing to laugh about over that.

  After a long and difficult exorcism, Elise believed that she had neutralized the castle’s demons. She had celebrated by getting drunk—really drunk, with the help of some local university students and plenty of Guinness—and had proven that it was, in fact, possible for kopides to get alcohol poisoning.

  Elise had been unconscious in the hospital when James realized that the castle was still inhabited. They hadn’t had a demonic possession on their hands at all, but a rare spirit called a sidhe. The sidhe had almost killed him. Elise had dragged herself out of the hospital, backless gown and all, to save him.

  “It was the Guinness’s fault,” James said with a mischievous tilt to his mouth.

  “It was my fault,” she said. “I should have known better. I shouldn’t have drunk so much.”

  “You were young.”

  “Not all that young,” Elise said. She had been…what, nineteen, maybe twenty years old? She had already been killing demons for over a decade. She should have realized that she hadn’t neutralized the problem at Castle O’Reilly.

  “We survived,” James said. “That’s what matters.”

  His fingers curled around hers, and Elise was shocked that she could feel him so clearly. He was very firm. Very real.

  She pulled her hand away.

  “I’ll need to teach you the word,” James said. He kept his hand outstretched, but didn’t try to touch her again. “It will be easier if I can speak through you.”

  Her eyes narrowed. “What does that entail?”

  “No more intrusion than you’re already suffering, I assure you. I will speak, you will attempt to emulate me, and I can…well, let me show you. The ethereal tongue is very unlike its infernal counterpart.”

  Reluctantly, she nodded, and James took her hand again. The electric sting of magic coursed up her arm, setting the runes she already carried on fire.

  “Keep drawing,” he said. “Darker now.”

  He didn’t have to tell her. Elise’s hand was already moving over the page, thickening the guidelines that she had placed in perfect time with James’s drawings. It felt like his hand was controlling hers, too.

  Energy passed between them as he began to speak.

  In a way, it was just like speaking a word of power, which was a common way for powerful witches to activate their magic. But words of power weren’t words at all. They were only vocalizations. What James said had syllables, consonants, and vowels. It had structure to it. It had meaning.

  He spoke slowly, and Elise tried to emulate him, watching the shapes formed by his lips even as she continued to draw. Once she began speaking, it came on its own. The power flowed out of James and into Elise, through the pencil and out of her throat.

  She drew faster. The tip of the charcoal scratched on the page.

  The muscles in her hand and arm spasmed all the way to her shoulder, tensing her spine as the power built inside of her. It pressed against the inside of her ribcage. It compressed her lungs.

  And then the word was complete.

  Elise fell silent, tore her gaze from James’s, and looked down to see that her paper was glowing.

  She didn’t need his guidance to pull the rune off of the page. She traced it with her fingers and it responded in the same way the runes on the floor of the nightmare apartments had. It brightened, peeling off the paper to slither up her thumb, taking up space on the back of her wrist, where it glowed with the others.

  It had worked. Elise had spoken an angelic word and drawn a rune.

  She was breathless, wordless, unable to think of what she should say. It seemed like there should have been more to mark the event—an audience that could verify that they had witnessed someone who wasn’t a witch casting a spell. But there were no witnesses. Only James and Elise, ghostly in his mind, on the deck of a ship filled with unaware evacuees.

  “Simple enough, once you know what you’re doing,” James said. He sounded just as stunned as she was. “I expect you can do others without my guidance once you know more of the words.”

  “Could anyone do this?” Elise asked. “Anyone who knows the words and what to draw?”

  He was rubbing his thumb over the back of her knuckles. “Maybe, if ‘anyone’ also happens to be a godlike demon with incredible powers.”

  “You’re not a god.”

  “Not yet,” James said. The reminder of what he meant to do killed the wonder of the moment. Elise tried to pull away, but he didn’t release her until he had urged his rune onto her hand as well. “You can save mine for later. Let’s test your magecrafting now with the glamor that you’ve made, just to be sure it’s functional.”

  Elise turned her palm over to look at the runes swirling between her fingers. The new ones were so much clearer and more vibrant than the others. “Will it work in this dream?”

  “Yes, I believe so,” he said. “Give it a try.”

  She set the paper and pencil aside. The moment that they were out of contact with her body, they vanished.

  Elise stood, and she could feel James’s eyes following her every motion. She couldn’t meet his gaze. She didn’t want to see the regret, or any of the numerous other thoughts of his that she was struggling to block out of her mind. Colder now…almost see right through her…learning to cast… It was a jumble of nonsense words. Elise tried to tune them out.

  Letting out a slow breath, she ignited the rune she had drawn.

  It was the first time she had attempted to craft a spell of her own. And the chances were good that she was the first non-angel to try to cast ethereal magic at all. Nothing happened immediately, and it validated her worry that it wouldn’t work.

  But then she felt a tug.

  Another cord of magic looped out of James, just as it had when she had written the spell. It connected securely under her breastbone. The pull felt so strong that she staggered.

  Her vision turned white. She gave a cry of alarm, rubbing at her burning face.


  “No, wait,” James said. He was suddenly standing in front of her. He took her wrists, pulling her hands gently away. “That’s…that’s normal. A momentary effect.” He sounded awed. She didn’t like the way he was looking at her.

  “Did it work?” Elise asked. Her voice didn’t seem to have changed.

  He swallowed hard. “It worked.”

  Elise spread her hands in front of her. The skin wasn’t pale, glowing white—it was a dark peach with freckles on her wrists. There were visible pores.

  “What do I look like?” Elise asked, trying to touch the hair at her shoulder. It wasn’t there. The hair that normally fell to her back was now only to her jaw. She traced her hands over her crown, down the back of her head.

  She had curls.

  James was struck speechless, and Elise realized what he had made her look like. Or, to be more precise, whom he had made her look like.

  “You asshole,” she said.

  “It’s easier to make subtle changes,” he said. “It seemed to be the easiest way to disguise you.”

  Elise whirled to face the window in the wall behind them. She didn’t have a reflection. She wasn’t really there, after all. But she knew what she would see if there had been a reflection: her hair would be mahogany brown that shined red in the sunlight, her nose would be long and hooked, her eyes would be hazel, her face would be even more freckled than her forearms.

  She looked like herself—before she died, when she had still been human.

  When she had still loved James.

  He was talking, trying to recover, and Elise didn’t want to hear a single goddamn thing he had to say.

  “How long will this last?” she interrupted.

  “As long as you’re conscious, for certain,” James said. “Most witches lose control over their glamors when they fall asleep, but I suppose that won’t be a problem for you. I wouldn’t recommend phasing until you’re done with it, just to be certain. You can willfully disengage it by removing the rune from your hand as well.”

  “Do you have any other offensive spells, like the one you gave me last time?” she asked tightly, jaw clenched, arms folded tight over her chest.

  “A few,” James said. “Some that cause instant suffocation, others that increase the rate of bleeding from preexisting wounds, one that can create a rather impressive explosion—”

  “Let me see the one that explodes.”

  He flipped to another page in his notebook and showed it to her. The symbol was far more jagged than the glamor, as though he had been drawing shattered glass. He had only outlined it lightly. It wasn’t active yet.

  “Do you want it? It might be too challenging for you to speak the word on your own,” he said. “I’ll have to guide you through its creation.”

  She stared hard at the rune, trying to dedicate it to memory. There wasn’t a chance in any of the seven Hells that Elise was going to let him so intimately into her mind and body again to draw yet another rune. Elise wasn’t going to spend one more moment with him.

  She couldn’t believe she had let him pick her appearance. Control her.

  With one final look at the rune, Elise jerked on her glove.

  “Don’t contact me again,” she said.

  Pain creased his forehead. “Elise—“

  She opened her eyes.

  Elise was gone. James stared at the place where she had been standing. Her appearance was all but imprinted on his retinas.

  He should never have drawn that glamor.

  It wasn’t just that she had been angered by it—Elise was always angry with him now; it was a state to which he’d become accustomed. It was that the magic had been so convincing. He hadn’t expected Elise’s first spell to create such a perfect likeness of her human self, from the angry slant of her eyebrows to the deceptively delicate point of her chin.

  Watching the specter of the woman she had been slipping away made him feel like he had lost her all over again.

  He felt colder now, and far lonelier than he had at any other point in the voyage. The deck swayed gently underneath him, shifting a few degrees from side to side, fore to aft, just noticeable enough to disorient him.

  The carrier sliced through steel-blue ocean at a rapid clip. The deck was damp and empty, since the wind was too strong for most people to be outside. The salty air was almost intolerably cold on James’s skin, too. He had sweaters, but hadn’t thought to bring a jacket with him during the sudden evacuation—he had left his peacoat behind at the site where he had excavated the statue of Metaraon, and there had been no time to get another if he wanted to escort Brianna across the ocean.

  James gazed out at the water and he saw Hell.

  Elise had returned to the House of Abraxas. He had only been there once before, and barely glimpsed it through her vision, but he recognized the stark architecture. She had already sketched out the destruction rune that he had shown her. Now she was striding down the halls with renewed purpose.

  She was going to do something wonderful in Hell, he knew. Something deadly and dangerous and impossible, but wonderful. That was what Elise always did.

  Lord, he missed her. Even when their conversations were punctuated with her hateful accusations, he missed her. And he missed her all the more after the nearness of their joined minds. If he could have been in Hell to support her—if she would have allowed him to help her—he would have been there.

  But James was dealing with his other responsibility: delivering Brianna to people who could heal her, since the Union had declined to continue care for a comatose witch that wasn’t in their ranks. In her current condition, she was no more than a costly burden.

  Now he was taking her to the coven in Ireland. He had friends there. A phone call and a quick explanation of what Brianna was suffering from had been enough to get their cooperation. The Talamh Coven were specialists in aspides that had lost their kopides. They would help Brianna come out of her coma. They would help the gaping wound in her magic heal—maybe not enough that she would be able to safely cast a spell again, but hopefully enough that she would be able to leave her vegetative state.

  The fact that the next door to Eden was in Waterford had very little to do with James’s decision to escort Brianna.

  “What does it matter?” he muttered, glaring out at the crashing waves. He could go to Waterford, locate the door, create the altar, but he was still missing two major pieces. He couldn’t draw on Elise’s strength to open the door, even if she had been on Earth. And the other piece of the puzzle was still back in North America at the werewolf sanctuary, grieving his brother’s death.

  Two doors down, and James’s goal was even further from his reach than it had been before either door was opened.

  A spark of red light caught his gaze and snapped him from his thoughts.

  Frowning, James stepped back from the railing and looked down, trying to figure out what he had seen.

  A red dot danced over the chest of his sweater. He touched it with a hand, and the dot transferred to his glove instead.

  It was from a laser.

  James only had an instant to connect the dot of a red laser over his heart to a sniper rifle. Time extended, distorted, filling his head with the white noise of shock.

  He threw himself behind one of the shipping containers on the deck.

  Bang!

  The sound of the shot was reduced by the windy roar, but the ping of lead hitting the deck was unmistakable.

  James flattened his back to the container, its cold leeching through his sweater, and tried to calm his pounding heart.

  Who the hell is shooting at me on a ship in the middle of the goddamn ocean?

  It couldn’t be the Union. If they had realized that James Faulkner was the one escorting Brianna, he never would have made it onto the ship in the first place. He was confident that his forged documents and glamor were adequate to hide his identity. As far as they knew, he was Brianna’s uncle, a man of seventy-some years that worked in a menial administrative job.
Not the type of man worth assassinating.

  James glanced around the shipping container. The red dot immediately slithered over him again.

  He jerked back.

  Bang!

  A second shot hit the container next to his head. His ears rang, momentarily deafened by the crack of metal on metal.

  The thing about fog was that it gave the laser a visible path, and he had seen that it led to the top of a shipping container on the other end of the deck. If he followed that laser, he would find the shooter.

  James needed to react before the sniper could move to a better position.

  He jerked off his glove and took a half-second inventory of the swirling symbols. They had multiplied during his time on the transport. Boredom was an outstanding excuse to do nothing but read books and craft spells. Wind. That was what he needed. James caught the rune between his fingers.

  He leaped around the edge of the container, pointed in the direction of the sniper, and spoke a word of power.

  Magic blasted from him. The wind took weight, blasting away the fog in a column as thick as a school bus, and pounded into the shipping container hard enough to make it tremble.

  Bang!

  He had stood still for too long to cast the spell. James dodged too late. Pain lanced over his bicep, burning and immediate, and he clutched it with a cry.

  But there was no sign of the red dot or the sniper now—he had been thrown from the top of the shipping container.

  Though his vision blurred with pain, James launched into a run across the slippery deck. He skidded around the corner of the container and saw a man sprawled on the floor behind it, gun inches from his hand.

  James kicked the rifle aside.

  “Who are you?” he demanded, voice sucked away by the cold wind. The sniper didn’t move or respond. Unconscious.

  He took a quick glance at his arm—grazed by the bullet, burning like fire but not seriously injured—before dropping to a crouch on his assailant’s chest. The assassin was wearing a ski mask. The eyes visible through the slit were closed.

  James ripped the mask away.

  He almost fell over when he recognized the face underneath. The triangular face, the darkly tanned skin—James knew his assassin very well.