Ruled by Steel (The Ascension Series #3)

by S. M. Reine

  He clenched his hand around hers.

  Nash climbed to the top of the pulpit, Summer at his back, and looked out at the glory of Shamain beyond the columns.

  The city was as wondrous as Dis was foul. Everything was built of glossy white stone and glass; the daytime starlight rained warm rays upon them, so bright and clear that it felt as though the stars might break through the sky to drop upon the city. He knew that there must have been a hundred angels watching him, although he couldn’t see any of them individually. With all of their wings illuminated, they were nothing more than a mass of light, their gray figures indistinct among the torrent of feathers.

  A few hundred angels wasn’t all that remained of their species, but it was more than enough to end the worst of the fighting in North America if they organized themselves.

  He could only hope that they would see sense.

  “It’s so bright,” Summer whispered. “I can’t see anyone.”

  He shielded her with his body. It would be even worse for her, with her keen werewolf eyesight. She wouldn’t even be able to tell that there was an arena, much less living people within it. “Don’t look,” he murmured. “I will take care of the talking.”

  She nodded and remained behind him.

  He turned to address the angels.

  “Hail and well met, brethren. I come with poor tidings.” His voice echoed over the courthouse.

  Voices swirled around him. The angels weren’t speaking aloud—they didn’t need to do that—but Nash could feel the words within their minds, their emotions, their trepidation.

  He had their attention, but barely.

  “The war worsens below,” Nash went on, gripping the pulpit with both hands to stare into the light of his brethren. He flared his wings wide behind him. It might have been centuries since they regarded him as one of their noblest warriors, but he intended to remind them of exactly how powerful he used to be. “The small contingent I’ve been given is fighting an excellent fight, but the numbers from Hell are too many. It’s useless to target the symptoms until we can resolve the illness at its core.”

  The female voice rose above the others again. “Interesting assessment from a traitor.”

  Nash turned to see who had spoken. He wasn’t surprised to see Leliel standing in front of the angels, distinct from the others with her wings dimmed. She was as beautiful as she had always been—olive-skinned, willowy, and swathed in a gauzy, peach-colored gown. But her sneer was unbecoming.

  It seemed fitting that the ethereal coalition would put his ex-wife forward as his opposition.

  Cruel, but fitting.

  “You know the truth of what happened, Leliel,” Nash said. “You personally absolved me of my sins by allowing me to leave the Haven.”

  “I didn’t expect you to be such trouble when I did.”

  He frowned. Nash had hoped that they could remain civil once Leliel agreed that he had served a fair sentence for his crimes. Apparently, that would not be the case.

  Leliel went on.

  “You act as though we’re oblivious to what has been occurring in Hell. We’re no fools, Nashriel. We have scouts exploring the fissure routinely. Malebolge has been filled with riots, but no organized army. And the City of Dis is quiet. There’s no army. There aren’t even many citizens left within city limits. They’ve fled—cowardly as demons are.”

  “Just because you’ve seen no army doesn’t mean it’s not there.” He turned to address the others before she could argue. “I have been in contact with someone on the other side, and we’ve formulated a plan to narrow one of the fastest-growing segments along the American east. Uriel and I noticed that a bridge, a highway, has been constructed between worlds to accelerate the domination of Heaven and Earth, and there is an army waiting to cross it. That’s why I was in Hell. I have been seeking allies to form a solution.”

  “An ally from the other side?” Leliel asked, interrupting him. “You mean a demon.”

  Nash’s hands tensed on the pulpit, but he tried to keep his expression composed. “Yes. She’s a demon.”

  “Go on. Not just any demon, is she?”

  The murmur of voices had cut off completely, leaving him standing among tense silence.

  “The Godslayer,” he finally admitted. Nash lifted his hands to try to quiet the responding roar. “Control yourselves!”

  They didn’t seem to hear him. Everyone knew what Elise Kavanagh had done by now. Even though Araboth, the world that had contained Adam for so long, had been quarantined since the end of the First War, everyone had felt its destruction. And everyone knew that Metaraon was gone, too. It hadn’t taken much time for the angels to piece the truth together after Adam’s assassination.

  Allying with Adam at the end of the First War had been considered a betrayal. But the woman who had killed Him was still something else, something much worse. Though none of them wanted Adam to rule, most of them also hadn’t wanted Him dead.

  The shouts spreading over the arena weren’t happy. Nash stood strong against them, staring down the glow of the ethereal coalition. Some of them were throwing around words like “traitor” again. They didn’t seem to realize how hypocritical it was to consider him a traitor for both remaining loyal to Adam and for allying himself with the woman that had killed him, too.

  “Cooperation from Yatam and Teleklos was necessary to end the First War and create the walls that protected us for so long,” Nash said. “The Godslayer is no better or worse than them. Set your feelings about her aside and see reason. The only way we will be able to stop the Second War before it reaches our doorstep is to destroy this bridge, close the fissure, and kill the armies that remain.”

  “We are well defended here,” Leliel said. “We have constructed our own walls. They will not be able to reach us here, even if they do have a bridge to Earth.”

  Telling them that the walls protecting the holy lands of Zebul and Shamain wouldn’t be strong enough to stand against the assault wouldn’t endear him to them. Instead, he asked, “But what of the human slaves in Hell? They can’t escape and close the fissure without our assistance. Will we throw them to the hungry hordes?”

  “Perhaps you’ve been gone too long to realize this, but the mortals are far more capable of defending themselves now than they were in the First War. They have weapons. Electricity. They may be stinking monkeys, but they are deadly monkeys, and they will have to earn their survival as we do.”

  Summer tensed behind Nash. At another time, he might have laughed at her annoyance—not in mockery, but because he completely agreed with her. “Monkeys?” she muttered. “Monkeys?” She spoke quietly, but a human voice was loud enough to penetrate the murmurs in the courthouse.

  The angels fell silent. They didn’t appreciate her criticism.

  “You brought that mortal here,” Leliel said disdainfully. “Why? To illustrate that your sympathies lie below, rather than where they belong?”

  Nash pulled Summer in front of him. “Look at this woman.” He didn’t want to release Summer’s shoulders, so he didn’t, though he knew that it was considered in poor taste to touch mortals. A murmur rose at the sight of it. “She is the best that Earth has to offer. She is brilliant and compassionate. She feels and thinks as we do; she is driven by passions fiercer than ours. You must see the purity within her.”

  “All I see is fascination,” Leliel spat. Nash grimaced at the accusation.

  “Fascination” was a word that angels used instead of “love.” They considered it a disease to fall in love with a human, because in a way, it was. When angels loved, it was intense and passionate beyond all rationality.

  They hadn’t realized that fascination would be a problem until angels fought on Earth’s battlefronts in the First War. They lost almost as many of their number to mortal fascination as they did to death. Nash had witnessed it several times and thought it a horrible thing to behold—the obsession, the yearning, the feverishness of it all. Humans were vulnerable, so fascination made ang
els vulnerable. It made them weak.

  The disease had been considered incurable. That part was true, if only because it wasn’t a disease at all.

  “Fascination is a myth,” Nash said. “I’m not ‘fascinated’ with Summer Gresham. I have not lost my mind. I have not become sickened.”

  Leliel’s beautiful face twisted into a scowl. “Then what?”

  “I love her,” he said simply.

  That caused a greater stir than his initial request had. The lights and colors swirled more fiercely around him as the angels’ voices rose. If Nash wanted, he could have picked out specific protests and accusations, but he didn’t want to.

  Summer had turned to look at him at that declaration, and she was smiling. That was the smile he lived for.

  “I know you can all sense how bright her inner light is,” Nash said. “How well those like her would feed us all.”

  “Creep,” she said against his chest with no small amount of affection.

  “There are others like her. In some ways, they are all like her. They are a passionate species. They love each other. They love us. I saw it when I visited a group of liberated slaves in Hell—they are truly worshipful, and we should work to deserve that worship.” The voices were growing again, almost shouts now. They weren’t just communicating mentally. They had started speaking, too, just like Leliel. He had to raise his voice to be heard. “Without mortals, there will be no angels. We will starve.”

  “Sentimental nonsense,” Leliel said.

  Nash shot a hard look at her. “There is going to be a battle tonight in Northgate. It will be our chance to destroy the bridge and save victims of Hell’s cruelty. I’m asking—begging—all of you to join me on Earth to end this fight with minimal human casualties.”

  “You claim that there will be a battle with no evidence. We have seen Dis, Nashriel! We have seen that pitiful, swaying bridge that they have cobbled together. There is no threat.”

  “If you believe that, then you will all die,” he spat.

  Leliel turned to the floor as if listening to their thoughts. He wasn’t sure how she could possibly be capable of pulling coherency out of the tide of voices. “Yes, fine,” she said. “We can send more scouts down and take time to consider this. We’ll vote after more information and an opportunity to deliberate.”

  “Deliberate? This fight is tonight.” Nash pounded a fist on the pulpit. “We must mobilize now!”

  “We ‘must’ not do anything. We will fight this war on our terms and when we feel it’s necessary,” Leliel said.

  Summer grabbed his arm. “This is bullshit. Let’s get out of here.”

  “Yes, Nashriel,” Leliel said mockingly. “Why don’t you two get out of here?”

  He flared his wings wide in preparation for flight, Summer tight against his chest. “My name,” he said, “is Nash.”

  Seventeen

  When Elise returned to Hell, she couldn’t bring herself to go straight to Neuma and Jerica. She set two shopping carts’ worth of supplies near the front door of Abraxas’s house where they would quickly be found and then staggered to the barracks.

  It had been harder to bring supplies down than she anticipated, especially after the fight against Aquiel. Her skin had lost its glow, her hair was limp, and her stomach was cramping.

  Elise needed to feed.

  The fiends hadn’t left the barracks since the initial takeover of the House of Abraxas. As soon as Elise entered, they dropped to their knees again, prostrating themselves on the ground with their bulging foreheads between their knees and stubby hands clasped.

  She was going to have to release them at some point. This was no life for any creature, even the stupidest of demons. Turning them loose into the wastelands, letting them become feral, would be better than starving in the barracks. Living in constant terror of the woman that had killed their master and taken their House.

  First, she needed to eat a few of them.

  Elise folded her arms as she studied the fiends to conceal the fact that she was trembling with hunger. She had swallowed her enemies before—it had always been the easiest way to kill hybrids, after all. But she had never swallowed demons outside of battle. Helpless, stupid demons that would be incapable of fighting back.

  How was she supposed to pick? They all looked the same. They might as well have been hamburgers waiting to be eaten. It didn’t matter which cow the meat came from.

  When Elise stepped forward, a fiend to the left lifted its head to stare at her with frightened, bulging eyes.

  There was intelligence in its gaze—faint, but present. It looked at her very much like the slaves had looked at Nashriel. Worshipful. Hopeful. Fearful. And something about that intelligent yet not-quite-there look made her think of Neuma’s sister, Lorena, who was in many ways just as helpless, though still worthy of a good life. A life that Neuma had long worked to protect.

  Elise was the Father, and the fiends were waiting for her to do something godlike.

  She had absolutely no desire to kill any of them.

  She couldn’t do it.

  Elise found her way to a guard tower without running into anyone, although she wasn’t sure how. She could sense the distress of the human slaves, who were much more alert and determined after Nash’s attentions. They were putting together their weapons, almost ready to attack the nightmares outside the gate. The air was thick with their bloodlust.

  Soon, they would need her to lead them, whether or not she had fed. And it looked like she wasn’t going to be able to. She slumped to the floor in front of the arrow loop—a narrow slit cut into the wall—and dropped her head into her hands. Elise felt weak. Nauseatingly so. But it didn’t make her as sick as the idea of killing the hapless fiends.

  “Is this you, Eve?” Elise hissed under her breath. “What’s your fucking problem?”

  The angel within didn’t respond. Eve wasn’t a conscious force that Elise could hold a conversation with, and she definitely wasn’t going to react to derision.

  No, this inability to feed—this weakness—couldn’t be blamed on the angel.

  Seeing Neuma’s family had fucked up her head. Being responsible for so many damn humans wasn’t helping. All she had wanted to do was close the fissure, stop the demons from attacking, save the Earth. She wasn’t prepared for how hard it was to see the actual victims of the war.

  She reached out to James again and found nothing but silence. Her stomach twisted. She could have used words of confidence—assurances that she wasn’t weak, but learning to be sympathetic, and that it would make her stronger someday. It would be a fucking lie, but a good one. A necessary lie.

  The door opened, and Neuma climbed into the guard tower. She looked so little like her childhood photograph. Now that Elise knew what she had looked like when she had been innocent and young, it was easier to pick out the hard lines of age in her face—not actual wrinkles, but something about her expression that spoke of decades of hardship and wisdom. Elise had never thought of her as wise before.

  “We found the stuff you left,” Neuma said. “Did you deliver the envelope?”

  “I did,” Elise said without looking at her. She didn’t want to see the gratitude on the younger, more beautiful, healthier version of Lorena’s face. She picked herself up off the floor and glanced outside at the misty swirl of nightmares beyond the wards.

  “Then what are you doing in here?”

  She lifted her hand to show Neuma the black fingernails. Her skin was subtly grayer than usual. Two dimension jumps and using all that magic to kill Belphegor had drained her of the energy she retained from feeding on Seth. “I need to feed before I can fight. I went to the barracks to kill some fiends, but…” She couldn’t say aloud that she had failed. It felt weak enough without having to say it.

  Neuma ran her fingers through a lock of Elise’s hair, letting it fall over her shoulder again. “There’s an easier way,” she said softly. “You don’t gotta kill anything if it’s going to make you hate yoursel
f.”

  Elise finally looked at her. Neuma was in full armor—not just the old Palace leathers they had stolen, but weighed down by a few pieces of plate armor on top of it, as well. She had a breastplate and vambraces. Though she was a small woman, they fit her surprisingly well.

  It would have been so much easier if Neuma had encouraged Elise. She wanted an excuse to do it. Some kind of justification. “You wanted me to feed off of Abraxas when we held him captive,” Elise said. “I can’t believe you think that these are innocents.” She paced the wall. The black smoke of nightmares slid past on the other side like a taunt.

  “I don’t. Don’t get me wrong, doll, I’m all in favor of killing when something’s gotta be killed. You don’t last long as an overlord of an entire territory if you’re not willing to slaughter and maim and torture.” Neuma grabbed Elise’s elbow, stopping her in mid-stride. “But you’ve got it in your head that feeding has to make you miserable. It doesn’t. Don’t kill if you’re going to hate yourself for it. There’re other ways to eat.”

  She didn’t need to say what she was thinking. Neuma’s gaze raked down Elise’s body, making it clear that she had entirely sexual ideas of how she might feed.

  Elise’s instinctive reaction was to brush off Neuma—again—just as she had brushed off Neuma’s come-ons a dozen other times over the years. But this time, she actually thought about it.

  Was it so much better to kill than to just have sex?

  Her glare slid off of her face. Her mind was a whirl with feeding off of Lincoln, and how he had been possessed—or how Seth had died right after she fed from him. Neuma knew about both incidents now. She knew, and she was still offering herself.

  “Stop thinking about it and do it,” Neuma said, stripping off her breastplate and dropping it to the floor with a clatter. “We don’t have forever.”

  “I could kill you,” Elise said. “I almost killed Seth. I did kill Seth.”

  She shoved Elise to the wall. “We’re not doing anything life threatening. You make me come, you drink it up, you’re good for the fight. Don’t make this so damn hard on yourself, doll. Don’t make it complicated.”