Ruled by Steel (The Ascension Series #3)

by S. M. Reine

  It only lasted for a moment, yet all but the strongest of nightmares should have been turned to smoke.

  When the light faded, the nightmares were still there.

  Nash had momentarily blinded himself, and he wasn’t prepared to see the second nightmare rushing him, cleavers drawn. He threw himself out of the way, beating his wings to lift himself a few inches off the ground. She danced toward him, and he danced back, knocking aside her blades with his sword.

  He had much more power, but she was faster. She lunged and twisted under his guard and he felt the hot bite of her knife along his ribcage.

  The pain awakened a fury inside Nash that he hadn’t known for many millennia. It was a thirst for vengeance. For death.

  He smashed one wing into the nightmare’s back, and the powerful blow sent her sprawling. He leaped on top of her and ripped his sword through her body. It was sharp enough that it cut through the earth as easily as it did her spongy flesh, bisecting her from hip to neck.

  Ichor splashed him. He kicked aside the left half of her body before it could rejoin with the right.

  A shout warned him that another nightmare was coming at him.

  Nash turned a few seconds too late, lifting his blade. But the nightmare was already too close for him to bring the saber up in time.

  A black blur struck his attacker. Abel snarled as he pinned the nightmare to the ground, ripping into it.

  “The pylons!” Uriel shouted. He was dueling with the remaining nightmare on the other side of the statue of Bain Marshall. That left Nash the only one that wasn’t locked in combat—the only one that still might be able to disassemble the bridge.

  He grabbed one twitching half of the nightmare he had cut open and tossed it into the fissure, separating it from its other half.

  Then he focused on the pylons again. They had advanced a few more feet, like creepers sinking into the bricks of an old house.

  He couldn’t cut it with his sword. That was new. It used to be that the fiery blades could cut through anything—even the siege machines. Obviously, the long years had given the demons plenty of time to create new technology.

  Nash reached into the pylon and touched a cog.

  An electric shock scythed up his arm, gripping his chest.

  His heart stopped beating.

  For an endless moment, he was aware of the emptiness in his chest, the ache of blood gone still. When his heart skipped and restarted, it felt like his skin was covered in crawling ants.

  He couldn’t touch the infernal machines with his skin or his blade.

  “Damn,” Nash said, hefting his sword again. It felt much heavier after the shock. He struggled to lift it.

  Fortunately, Uriel was tossing his opponent into the fissure, and Abel had chewed the final nightmare into a pulp that didn’t resemble a human. Fortunate because it meant he didn’t have to fight—but unfortunate because they had already finished their work on the bridge and it was clamped to the earth. It wasn’t going anywhere.

  Uriel helped him stand. “Did you figure it out?”

  “No,” Nash said curtly.

  He kicked a few of the wriggling pieces of Abel’s prey into the fissure. The werewolf stood tall and proud, shredded flesh dangling from his jaws. “Where did you find that?” Uriel asked, pulling a face at Abel.

  “Show some respect,” Nash said. “He’s Alpha.” Uriel obviously didn’t think that made Abel any more special than any other mortal, but they had bigger worries than the angels’ rather low opinion of humans. Nash addressed Abel. “Can you touch the pylons?”

  Abel trotted over and sniffed the metal. He didn’t bother touching it. He just shook his head.

  Two angels and an Alpha werewolf, and they were helpless to sever the bridge between Hell and Earth.

  “Those three won’t be the end of it,” Uriel said. “This thing looks like a freeway.”

  “That’s because it is,” Nash said.

  If angels and mortals couldn’t touch it, then that meant that the only thing that might be able to help them was a demon.

  But what demon would willingly attempt to disassemble the bridge?

  Nashriel…

  He turned at the sound of his name, but all he saw were dark buildings and empty streets like tombstones in the haze. There was nobody in the darkness—or, at least, nobody he could see. But there were people that couldn’t be seen in shadow.

  He thought he recognized that voice.

  “Another attack?” Uriel asked, noticing Nash’s inattention.

  Nash’s eyes flicked over the trees and streets, searching for the origin. His hand rested on the hilt of his sword. He was tempted to draw it—to be ready for attack in a heartbeat—but he didn’t want to alarm the others when he didn’t know that there was anything wrong.

  Abel was prowling around the ichor-splattered ground, sniffing the edge of the bridge without touching it. “I think we’ll need to prepare the pack for another attack,” Nash told him. “A bigger attack.” With a sharp nod, Abel loped up the road toward the forest.

  As soon as he was gone, Uriel spoke. “A pack of werewolves against an infernal army?” He shook his head. “I appreciate your optimism, Nash, but that’s not going to cut it. We should consider this fissure totally breached. We need to warn the coalition in Shamain. You know that’s going to be the next stop once the demons flatten Earth.”

  “If you want to go to Heaven, then go. But there’s still a fight for those brave enough to face it,” Nash said.

  “There’s a difference between bravery and an obstinate refusal to see when you’ve lost.” The other angel’s wings flared back. He lifted off, hovering a few feet away from Nash. “I’ll see you soon, I hope?”

  “Possibly,” Nash said.

  Uriel took off.

  And then there was the voice again.

  Nashriel…

  It didn’t come from anywhere around him at all. The name came from deep within. It was a voice that he knew even better than Summer’s—a voice from his distant past that he could never forget in the depths of his heart.

  That was Eve’s voice.

  He was being summoned.

  The Treaty of Dis, which had been forged to end the First War, had constructed impenetrable walls between Heaven and Hell. Angels and demons could go to Earth, but they could not cross into one another’s homelands. No angels in Dis, no demons in Shamain.

  But the Treaty had been shattered at some point—when, the angels were not sure, but they believed the dissolution may have begun as long as thirty years ago.

  There was nothing to prevent angels from entering Hell anymore.

  That didn’t mean it was easy or pleasant.

  Nash stood over the fissure, hot air blasting his jacket around his body so that it flapped like a cape. The black city was far below. Dis was a sprawling, unholy tumor in the middle of the wastelands, a blight on the face of all the universes.

  His sword was at the ready, but nobody was trying to crawl up the bridge at the moment. The path down to the city was clear, as far as he could tell through the sticky gray smoke.

  He turned his eyes up to the moon a final time and didn’t find it. The clouds had taken over the sky again. A steady drizzle began to fall, hissing where it hit the fissure. Steam billowed through the air.

  Uriel and Abel were both gone. For now, the town was quiet. There was nobody to witness the steaming fissure but him. Good thing, too, because if another angel saw him entering Dis, there would be Hell to pay. Literally.

  Nashriel…

  He grimaced and sheathed his sword. “I’m coming.” He didn’t exactly have a choice. There was no arguing with that voice.

  Nash inhaled a lungful of relatively clean air and almost choked on the sulfur smell. It was still better than what he would be breathing from that point forward.

  He stepped over the edge.

  The fissure was not a physical opening; he did not merely plummet through open air. When his body crossed the boundary
between universes, it was like punching through a brick wall, and the pain of it radiated through every one of his joints. He suffocated, struggling to breathe—the air was so thick, like trying to inhale boiling water—and his eyes watered at the sting of dust.

  Time compressed. Thoughts and memories squeezed through him like clay through a fine-meshed sifter. Millennia of loneliness punctuated by Summer’s light flashed past.

  His aching heart raced, and then slowed.

  For a moment, he could not see. He could not move.

  Then his vision cleared, and he saw Dis stretched below him. The shining bridge curved toward a half-finished tower and the black spires surrounding it.

  Dis had always been an abomination, but it was a vast abomination now, covering more land than San Francisco. Demons had always modeled their constructions in Dis after the worst humanity had to offer; even from above, Nash could pick out blocks meant to look like the worst neighborhoods in Detroit, Mosul, and Juarez.

  Yet even Dis looked sick by its own standards. A black mist clung to the blocks surrounding the Palace, radiating toward the mountains. It blotted out entire square kilometers. And it was sliding toward a large House poised at the edge of the city.

  That was where the voice was coming from.

  Nash plummeted toward the House, swooping around to give the bridge a wide berth. There was plenty of time for him to gaze at the spider web of the streets, the iron spires of the tallest buildings, the glint of red light on the bone accents. There were humans in this city, far too many humans, but their minds did not read to him like shining stars as most mortals’ did—they were dim, flickering, about to be snuffed. Many of them blinked out even as he fell, taken by the butcher’s knife.

  He flared out his wings and caught a burning gust of wind, slowing his descent. He swooped over the city, trying to fly through the smoke spewing from factories that smelled like cooking meat so he would not easily be spotted.

  Now that he was on the other side, the voice was clearer.

  I need you, Nashriel.

  In those gentle words, he could hear a demand. She had never ordered her children like that before.

  And she had never been in such a hideous pit before, either. That voice belonged in a beautiful garden nestled among the roots of the Tree. It belonged under warm blue skies in sunshine, not trapped in a filthy stinking hive of demons.

  That was because that voice wasn’t his mother, Eve, at all.

  She beckoned to him from the House built into a mountain. It was heavily warded—it had been years since Nash had seen infernal magic, but he still recognized the sour tang of it—but the wards allowed him to pass just as easily as the sanctuary’s had. She was prepared to receive him.

  In the first instant that he saw her, he could have sworn that she was a slight woman with olive-dark skin and rich, shining cascades of mahogany hair. Her eyes should have been blue, the same pale blue as the summer sky at midday. Her face would be round, her nose turned up at the end, her lips perpetually smiling as if everything she saw pleased her—because everything always did.

  But Nash’s vision was momentarily obscured by smoke, and when it cleared, he saw the truth of the woman. Her appearance did not match the voice that had summoned him.

  She was a foot shorter than him, but the way that she glared at him made her look at least ten feet tall. Her nose was a fraction too big for her face, and her eyebrows gave her a look of hawkish anger. She stood in front of the main house in the compound, arms akimbo, and her pale skin glowed against the darkness of the mountain surrounding her.

  Even wearing ordinary jeans and a tank top, she was every inch the kind of royalty Nash expected to see in Hell—demanding, haughty, angry.

  Elise Kavanagh. The Godslayer.

  Nash landed in front of her. The moment he touched down, he felt heavier than usual, as if his bones had grown denser. It required conscious effort to keep his wings lifted and remain standing.

  It wasn’t his first time in Hell, but his last visitation had been at the forefront of an invasion—an attempt to topple Dis some years before the Treaty had been formed. It had been a futile battle. Individually, angels were far superior in strength and intelligence than demons; in the infernal homelands, they were too easily overpowered. It didn’t help that everything about the nether worlds was sickening to angels. The air, the gravity, the light. Every dusty breeze felt like sandpaper raked over his skin.

  Nash didn’t dare show any sign of weakness. He kept his spine straightened and stared down his nose at Elise.

  “You summoned me,” he said. Anger tensed his every muscle, making his hands ball into fists, his wings arch over him.

  Elise flicked a feather off her shoulder to the ground. “I did.”

  “You summoned me with her words.”

  “I need your help,” she said. That was what came from her mouth, but what Nash heard was, Help me, Nashriel, in that other voice.

  “In other circumstances, I might have been impressed by your gall,” he said, “but you have incredibly poor timing.” As if there were ever a good time for the ghost of his mother to haunt him.

  She didn’t seem to care what he said. She squared her shoulders. “Let’s make this fast. Okay? I’m going to take the Palace, Nashriel, and it’s going to be a fucking mess. There’s a huge army marching in from the desert beyond Mount Anathema. We have to get to the bridge before they do. You might be able to reduce the casualties if you play nice.”

  The sound of his full name, Nashriel, coming from human lips made his wings curl with annoyance. “Call me Nash,” he said. It was the name Summer had given him, and he loved it as he loved her.

  “Fine. Nash. This is what I need from you. First of all, I need a way to transport about three hundred humans safely away from the fissure as fast as possible, so I’ll need you to get the other angels.”

  “Get the angels?” he scoffed. “It’s not like calling a dog. I’ve been trying to get the angels to help me on Earth since the Breaking. Why do you think they would come when you beckon?”

  “Because you’re going to ask very nicely,” Elise said, “and a lot of people might die if they don’t. You see, we’re going to go there.” She thrust a finger toward the tower and the bridge and the fissure beyond. “We’re not going to be able to kill everything between here and there, so we’re going to hit it at a run, and we might have a phalanx of nightmares on our asses. If you’ve got the angels ready on the other side, we can stop them there.”

  Nash frowned, rolling the idea over in his mind. The fact was that angels didn’t consider human life to be a great priority. Certainly not three hundred of them. They needed a few mortals to survive so that angels could feed off of them, but a lot of cattle could die and the loss would be meaningless to them.

  For a long time, even in the First War, Nash had agreed with that attitude. But when Elise said “three hundred people,” he thought of forty specific people that he would die to protect: the pack of wolves. His woman’s family.

  These three hundred likely had family, too.

  She seemed to take his hesitation as reluctance. A shadow crossed over her eyes. “I don’t need to ask you nicely, Nashriel.”

  Those were the words she said. What he heard was, Please help me, my son.

  The world blurred around him. He forgot that he was in Hell. He could hear the groaning of the Tree’s shifting trunk, its leaves stretching wide to drink up the sunshine, and the bubble of the river that ran through its tangled roots.

  He could almost see her face again. Her benevolent smile.

  Nash shook the memory away to see Elise glaring at him. Not Eve. Elise.

  He reared back in disgust. “If you think that Eve’s voice will convince me—”

  “This isn’t about Eve. This is about a lot of innocent lives.”

  “Rich, coming from you. I find it hard to believe you’re so stirred by the plight of the slaves.”

  She didn’t try to disagree with hi
m. “Look at it this way. Once I get into the Palace, I can take control of the wards and prevent other demons from using the bridge. And I might be able to stop the fissure’s growth.” She reached into the neck of her shirt and extracted a vial. It was the width of her thumb at the top and narrowed to a point that looked like it could break skin. “This is similar to what was used to open the Hell gates in the first place.”

  Nash reached out to take the vial. She drew back.

  If what she said was true, then they could stop the creep of war on Summer’s home.

  He stared at her hard, trying to decide if she might be lying. It was nigh impossible to read a demon’s mind. But if she was trying to deceive him, though, she showed no sign of it.

  When he didn’t reply, she spoke again. “We’ll have to get past nightmares to reach the Palace. The slaves in this House need psychological repair and fortification against mental attacks. You’re an angel. You can dig down and fix them.”

  “Slaves?” He opened his senses slightly, allowing himself to feel more of the horrors surrounding him. There were demons nearby—yes, many demons, all gathered in the barracks. They were blank slates. Probably some stupid lesser demons. Elise was utterly unreadable. But beyond her, in the building to which she gestured, there were mortals. Many of them.

  “Slaves,” Elise confirmed.

  He advanced on her, wings snapping wide behind him. The muscles of his back ached from the tension. “You have slaves?”

  “I do now. I didn’t choose this. Trust me.”

  Nash glared at her, looking for a hint of guilt in her expression that wasn’t there. Good Lord, but she was magnetic—he struggled to tear his eyes from her. Even as disgust coursed through him, there was no ignoring how desperately he longed to see her smile at him. This pretender. This usurper.

  All angels were irresistibly compelled to love Elise, who carried the soul of Eve within her—the first angel, the mother of all those like Nash. But that fascination existed alongside the loathing. An internal war that Nash doubted could ever be won. “What’s happened to them?” he asked finally.