Ruled by Steel (The Ascension Series #3)

by S. M. Reine

  It still wasn’t enough. The wall sucked closed behind her as the nightmares congealed again, rapidly healing.

  Elise rushed down the streets, buildings flashing past her: the apartments, the butcher shops, the apothecaries, factories, and markets. They were a confusing blur of architecture. The windows were empty. The city was a skeleton, emptied by Aquiel’s recruitment. But not for long. As soon as the army returned, the city would be seething with Aquiel’s allies.

  She had to get to the Palace before everything else did.

  Elise caught up with the edge of the army almost a mile into town. They had broken into a run and were scattered throughout the street, led by the healthiest—Gerard and Neuma—and brought up from the rear by the weakest, the injured. It was the worst way for them to arrange themselves. It left the last of them vulnerable to the brutes. And as she watched, a brute closed in on a limping older woman, grabbed her by the throat, and squeezed her head off of her neck.

  Even as the brute devoured the woman, Elise dropped on top of him in a cloud and squeezed tight, rapidly condensing into a fist of darkness.

  And then she swallowed.

  She felt his muffled screams as clearly as she felt his infernal blood gushing into her. His skin disintegrated atom by atom. His bones became dust, which she devoured just as readily even though it burned. She had never absorbed such a hellborn into herself before. It felt like trying to swallow fire.

  It only took a moment to destroy the brute, but it left her with a heavy, nauseated feeling.

  There were more brutes chasing the last of the slaves. Several humans were pinned to the ground, being ripped apart, and the pathetic plate mail was doing nothing to save them.

  Elise sank into shadow and consumed those brutes, too.

  Her human army had noticed there was something else at its rear—something that looked like a nightmare—and a dozen of them turned to face her. There shouldn’t have been anything threatening about a group of humans that were unsteady on their feet and covered in sores, but they had car batteries strapped to their backs and electrified short swords. The weapons would work on Elise as well as any of the nightmares.

  She tossed the bones of a brute away, unable to finish eating him. More than two of them was far too much.

  The humans stared in horror at the pulp she left behind.

  “Get it!” shouted one of the slaves. “Fire!”

  Three of them rushed at her. Only three were brave enough to try to stop her.

  Elise reformed herself into her physical form, hands extended in a universal gesture of peace. “It’s me,” she said.

  They stopped in mid-step. One of them dropped a shield, and it clattered to the pavement.

  Most of the army hadn’t seen what Elise could do. They hadn’t known that she was as terrifying as most of the other demons in Dis. Until that moment, she had been nothing but a savior—the one person that had stood up to Belphegor.

  She expected them to be angry or fearful. Instead, they sagged with relief. Two of the men actually started grinning.

  “We’re safe,” one said to the other.

  Elise’s mouth stretched into a grimace. “Not yet.” If she didn’t hold the nightmares back, these humans would never reach the Palace. “Catch up with the rest of the army.” They didn’t move. She flung her hands out. “Go!”

  They ran, and Elise turned to face the darkness closing in on them. It was impossible to see beyond the nearest block. The nightmares were rushing toward her. She couldn’t see Belphegor beyond them, but she was sure that he couldn’t be far behind—he would be slower on foot than Elise, but he could grow as tall as a skyscraper, and “on foot” wasn’t all that slow when the feet in question were bigger than school buses.

  Elise had to handle the nightmares before they reached her.

  She let her full power flare bright, extending her arms as if to embrace them. Elise glowed brightly. Her hair melted into the shadows around her. And when she spoke, it was louder than the blast of wind through the gates of Hell.

  “Stop,” she said. “You will obey me.”

  They didn’t listen. Aquiel must have prepared them for her.

  So much for that.

  The nightmares crashed over her.

  Jerica reached the Palace first.

  She had been trying to stay to the rear of the army, but somehow ended up in front when they scattered, forcing her to dodge bolts of electricity. She could feel the other demons whispering words of hate at the sight of her. They said “traitor” and “cunt,” and she tried her best to ignore them.

  She may have been a nightmare, but at least she wasn’t Aquiel’s bitch.

  The Palace emerged from the tangle of streets. The sight of her target gave Jerica renewed strength, and she put on a burst of speed, pumping a fist high in the air to signal the army behind her.

  The guards watching the entrance to the Palace of Dis weren’t expecting one of their own to arrive with three hundred humans behind her. The handful of them standing on the drawbridge looked shocked at the sight of it. One of them actually dropped his blade.

  Jerica drew her cleaver as she rushed.

  She met them with blades drawn.

  Nightmares didn’t fight like humans did. They were little more than rubbery flesh barely contained by infernal energy; they could twist, distort, and bend like nothing that had bones could. She had decapitated the first of the guards before they even realized that she was a threat.

  She exchanged blows with the guards, sliding under their swipes and kicking them away when they attempted to return attack. They had the training, but Jerica had the will—and the advance warning.

  A knife sank into her side. She wrenched away from it only to have a slash opened on her chest. She severed the arm of the nightmare and it hit the ground with a splatter of ichor.

  Jerica cut them down. The other nightmares fell and quickly began to heal.

  But the army got to them first.

  One of the slaves, Aniruddha, flung his shield at the nearest body. It was still electrically charged. The instant it contacted a nightmare, the demon exploded. The other humans fell on the rest of the guards, stabbing and kicking and making them vanish one by one.

  A hundred nightmares were nothing in the face of electricity and spotlights. The army slashed through them. Jerica soon broke through the end of the tunnel and stood triumphantly on Palace grounds.

  “Get in here!” Jerica shouted to the mortals, pointing into the depths of the Palace. “Get off the streets!”

  She had formed a somewhat elegant plan after her last visit to the Palace—having the humans get up on the walls to take down the nightmare guards, waiting for the soul links to switch, and finally converging on the bridge. But Jerica hadn’t had enough time to convey that plan to the humans.

  The army spilled through the open gates. And as soon as they saw the bridge, half of them bolted for it.

  Jerica tried to stop them by standing in their way, but the humans just rushed past her, shoulders bumping into her hard enough to make her stagger.

  “Wait, wait!”

  The mortals were deaf to her pleas.

  Demons poured off the battlements, sliding down ladders and exploding out of the other towers. The Palace guards and the slave army met like two fronts of a storm in a whirl of blades and electric explosions.

  A spear swung toward Jerica. She leaped backward, out of the way.

  She couldn’t be in the thick of it—not unless she wanted to get reduced to primordial ooze.

  Jerica darted to the relative safety of the tower, pressing herself into a corner to watch the humans. Half of them were struggling toward the stairs. Climbing to the bridge, to home.

  She caught sight of Neuma on the other side of the tower. She was following the survivors up the stairs. When she saw Jerica, she mouthed, “I’ll get them.” She was way too optimistic about her ability to stop the retreat, but Jerica was too far away to stop her.

  Betwee
n them, there was total chaos.

  There were more nightmares here, but the army cut right through them, using the electrified weapons to shatter them one at a time. But it wasn’t just nightmares. There were fiends and brutes, at least a couple of megaira, even a lamia—the humans attacked them all the same.

  “We need to get on the walls!” Jerica shouted from the back of the crowd, briefly exchanging blows with a fiend before skewering it on her cleaver.

  She might as well have not bothered yelling at all.

  The first floor of the tower emptied as the front of the army climbed the stairs. Within moments, only fifty humans remained with Jerica, including Gerard. The humans had killed a dozen demons at the bottom of the tower. They had also lost one of their own—a slave named Kate, whose lifeless body was pinned under the now-dead lamia. The rest of the so-called army had left her corpse behind just as readily as they had abandoned Jerica.

  She whirled on Gerard. “What the fuck was that, man? This wasn’t the plan!”

  “I know, I know,” he said. He turned to the survivors. “You all heard Jerica. We need to hold the walls! You three, watch the entrance. The rest of you, get on the battlements.”

  She waited until they were gone to grab Gerard by the breastplate, jerking him close to hiss, “Did you know they were going to do this?”

  “They’d been talking about it,” Gerard said, “but I kept trying to talk them out of it, and I’d hoped—”

  Thud.

  An impact shook the entire tower, almost tossing her off of her feet.

  Jerica rushed to the doorway to look outside. Nightmares were rushing around the defenses as smoke rose from beyond, somewhere in the city. In a flash, she scaled a ladder to the top of the walls. She felt the impact two more times while she climbed.

  Thud. Thud. A steady rhythm.

  Almost like footsteps.

  She leaned out the window.

  The wall of nightmares had dispersed, but now there were demons swarming the city from the east. They were coming down the mountain in huge numbers—maybe tens of thousands, although it was impossible to distinguish detail at that distance.

  Aquiel, Prince of Nightmares and tyrannical bastard, was behind them. It was his footsteps she heard.

  Jerica turned at the sound of footsteps to see more Palace guards coming at her. A dozen brutes. And most of the human army was scaling the tower without her, chasing freedom, leaving the ones who remained loyal pinned in a meat grinder.

  “We are so boned,” Jerica whispered.

  Elise rushed the gates of the Palace with thousands of nightmares at her back. They buzzed around her in a tangle of energy. It was impossible to see through them to the streets below. And as they contracted around her, filling more of the air, she felt herself begin to shrink.

  She had fought many strong enemies—angel-demon hybrids, an entire bar’s worth of succubi, a cult of murderous men—but there was nothing that she could do against creatures that she couldn’t touch or swallow. Nothing but run.

  Thud.

  Reverberations shuddered throughout the city and rippled over the nightmares.

  All of the shadow scattered, leaving Elise alone in open air. She glimpsed the twisted streets of Dis below her and realized that she had gone off-course in the confusion.

  And the streets were no longer empty.

  They seethed with corporeal demons, led by fiends rolling along on their knuckles and knobby feet, followed by skeletal creatures with flaming eye sockets. Elise’s vision followed the ranks up the slope toward the mountains—up toward the street where a massive demon prince walked, shaking the earth with every strike of his cloven hooves.

  He was tall enough that his horned head brushed the smoke that hung over the city, and his leathery skin was mottled with purple-black bruising. Huge gashes bared glistening bone. The side of his skull was still sunken from where the mine had fallen on him. The eyelid that Ace had ripped off was still gone, leaving an unfocused eyeball rolling in its socket.

  Aquiel lived. He marched.

  He was coming for her.

  It wasn’t shock that made Elise turn corporeal again, but a wave of his power. It jerked her out of the air. She hit the street.

  She tumbled head over feet, skidding to a stop in a gutter.

  Feet slammed into her as the army rushed past. Elise scrambled over the curb onto the sidewalk on all fours, trying to escape.

  A hand closed on her hair, jerking her to her feet.

  “What’s this?” asked a demon in the infernal tongue.

  In the face of an army, Elise felt her worry bleed away to the cold, analytical mind of a killer. She took a quick glance at her momentary captor—he was twice her height with a serpentine head, long fangs, and a slender body—and immediately assessed the weak points in his throat and belly.

  She drove her elbow into his stomach with a battle cry, shocking him into dropping her. Elise whirled and snapped her boot into the side of his head. He fell.

  A brute stood behind him, focusing its slitted eyes on her. They had no bottom jaws—major weakness.

  He reached for her, and Elise shoved her fist down his throat.

  Thud. Thud.

  Aquiel was only a few miles away. Even at that distance, she had to tilt her head back to look at his eyes.

  She had been expecting to face Belphegor again—not Aquiel. Both were equally impossible for her to kill in her current condition.

  Elise ripped through the brute’s tissue-like internal organs with her nails. Ichor bubbled in its throat and gushed over her wrist.

  “Grab her!” called an incubus in scale armor.

  Incubi were corporeal. Physically weak. Same vulnerabilities as a human.

  She drew the Beretta 9mm and popped two shots off at him. The first missed. The second smacked him in the chin, snapping his head back. His megaira companion shouted in shock and lunged for Elise, but too late—she had already bolted.

  She fired another shot over her shoulder as she fled into the alley. The responding shriek was rewarding.

  The alley twisted between the sagging walls of the buildings. Elise darted around a split trash bag and leaped over a dire rat. When she shoved through a chain link gate, gore crows exploded into the air, vanishing into the darkness.

  There were still footsteps behind her. She ran faster, chest heaving, gun tight in hand.

  Elise turned a corner and found herself among more demons—not soldiers, but civilians. These were the demons that hadn’t joined the army, and instead fled the streets for the relative safety of the alleyways. Life looked relatively normal here. There was a makeshift market in the widest place between buildings, shadowed by tattered awnings. They served crow meat on skewers. A jeweler sold polished human teeth.

  They shouted at Elise as she pushed past them. She tried to avoid a chisav and slammed her shoulder into a cart, tossing it onto its side. The seller leaped away from his spilled oils.

  “Hey!”

  Elise bounced off of a broad chest. Massive hands seized her arms. She looked up to see that she was in the grip of a gibborim. He looked stunned to see her.

  “It’s you,” he said. And then, in a whisper, “Father.”

  A clatter rose from the other end of the alley. She twisted to see members of Aquiel’s army following—the bleeding incubus, a handful of fiends, a nightmare.

  She jerked free of the gibborim and ran.

  Elise thought she heard the demons in the market fighting against Aquiel’s soldiers, but she didn’t stop to watch.

  Whatever the shopkeepers had done, it kept her attackers off her six. A half-mile of sloshing through shit-filled alleys later, she felt Aquiel’s grip lift.

  The instant she could, she turned to shadow and darted across the city.

  Gerard and a handful of other humans were holding the entrance to the Palace. As Elise watched from above, Gerard thrust his spear deep into the belly of a nightmare guard and squeezed the switch on its handle. It gav
e a sharp hiss-pop. Electricity arced over the nightmare’s skin, dancing in bright lines from the tips of its hair to its fingers. It exploded.

  In her incorporeal form, Elise could almost make out the cracks between dimensions. She saw the nightmare fade away into the Malebolge, returning to the pit from whence all nightmares originated.

  Thud. Thud.

  The trembling returned Elise’s attention to the immediate moment. Aquiel’s army was right behind her—only a half-mile and closing fast.

  “Gates need to close!” Gerard shouted into the darkness. “Any survivors need to get in here now!”

  Elise landed beside him. Gerard jumped at her sudden appearance, swinging the spear at her. She stepped back. It whistled close enough to stir her hair.

  “Watch it,” Elise said.

  His cheeks reddened with embarrassment. “Sorry, sorry, I didn’t realize.”

  She shoved him through the bridge. “Close the gate now.”

  “But the survivors—”

  “There are no survivors,” she said. “Close it!”

  “Are you coming?” Gerard asked, shuffling backward without taking his eyes off of the approaching army behind Elise.

  Was she coming? No. The wards were still in Aquiel’s favor. If she fought him inside the walls, she would lose. Her odds were better if she could keep him out of the Palace. Negligibly slim, but better. “Trade you,” she said, tossing the knife bloodied by Belphegor at Gerard. He caught it smoothly then passed the spear to her. “Make sure the knife gets to Neuma. Now go.”

  He didn’t ask again. He operated the wheel for the drawbridge, and Elise leaped off the edge to watch it close. The metal grid of the portcullis slid over the shut door, sealing her out of the Palace.

  Thud. Thud.

  She turned to face the army. Aquiel was still miles away, but close enough that she couldn’t turn incorporeal again.

  The front lines of demons rushing at her were mostly fiends—most of which could have been easily swallowed if she could phase into her other form. But that was out of the question. Elise put a fresh magazine into the Beretta before hefting the spear. It wasn’t as good as a sword, but she could make do.