Ruled by Steel (The Ascension Series #3)

by S. M. Reine

  Time slowed as the first of the fiends grew near. Elise could see the long lines of sputum drooping from their lips, the flex of abdominal and thigh muscles under leathery gray skin, the mindless fury in their eyes.

  Hundreds of them, one of her.

  Even for an immortal, they weren’t the best odds.

  The army crashed against Elise…and she fought.

  Jerica killed three of the brute guards on the battlements before Gerard climbed up to join her. He finished off the last of them.

  “You fight good for a human,” she panted.

  He wiped the blood off of his chin. “You’re pretty cool for a bitch that kicked me off my street corner and got me arrested by the Union,” Gerard said. He leaned over the railing to call down to a handful of the loyal humans that remained. “Head for the tower! We’re out of time—Aquiel’s gonna break through!”

  Jerica looked out the window. The drawbridge was lifted and Aquiel’s army was below, having closed in while she struggled against the guards. There was activity among them, like they still fought something.

  Her heart thundered with the realization that Aquiel was going to enter as soon as that fight ended and the drawbridge reopened.

  They had failed to take the Palace.

  Dizzying disappointment swelled in her. For an instant, Jerica wished that she had followed the slaves up the bridge, but she quickly quashed that. She wouldn’t let Aquiel take her. Better to die protecting the escape of the mortals than find out how he would punish a stray nightmare that had allied with her girlfriend rather than her master.

  “How many of our men are still out there?” Jerica asked.

  Gerard grimaced. “Just one.” He didn’t have to say Elise’s name. It hung between them, unspoken. “Where’s Neuma?”

  She jerked a thumb at the tower. “Following the army.” There was motion on the opposite walls as more of the nightmare guards dropped down, preparing to intercept them. They were sneaking up behind Gerard’s few remaining soldiers. “Do you have anything electrified left on you, Big G?”

  He laughed at the name. “No electricity. No nothing.”

  She handed him one of the cleavers.

  “Don’t lose it,” she said.

  And then Jerica and Gerard leaped down the wall to meet the nightmare guards head-on.

  They clashed against each other, metal on metal and flesh on flesh. Jerica was fatigued from the earlier fights, so the nightmare guards were faster than her now. Stronger, too. The slicing of cleavers was no more painful, but much more frequent, and they shredded her armor.

  She couldn’t seem to land any blows now. Didn’t matter if she could have—without a Taser, she couldn’t do anything permanent to the guards.

  But even if Jerica couldn’t kill the other nightmares, she could save the humans.

  One of the demons thrust a cleaver at Gerard’s back. He was too busy defending from another angle to notice.

  Jerica leaped in and knocked the blow aside.

  “Go for the bridge!” she shouted to the humans.

  The time it took to speak was too much time to lower her guard.

  The nightmare guard thrust its Taser into her gut. The electricity shocked over her, and she was gone before she could speak.

  When the last nightmare disappeared under a man’s spear, Gerard stared at the empty ground where Jerica had been standing before she got zapped. Like the other nightmares that had been killed, there was no indication of her death. No blood. No body. Just a void that the air rushed to fill.

  He’d seen friends die before—watched a few guys eat IEDs, a couple of suicide bombings, even friendly fire once. But there had been something so absolute and final about that. The explosions. The screams. People had obviously died, and the pain had been immediate and total.

  This was so silent.

  “We have to run,” Margo said, taking his arm. She was a slave that had been two cages down from Gerard in the kennels, and she had kind eyes. She knew what he was thinking about Jerica. But there was urgency in her voice, and he looked up to see why.

  The closed drawbridge was shaking. Aquiel was about to break through.

  “Let’s go,” he said.

  They all took the tower’s stairs two at a time, rushing up its twists and turns toward the crystal bridge.

  Gerard couldn’t seem to run fast enough, couldn’t catch his breath. Every inhale stabbed daggers through his ribs. His spine was sore from being upright for so long and his muscles were exhausted. But still he ran, fast enough to keep ahead of the other survivors.

  There were bodies, both human and demon, spread across each floor. The number of dead kept increasing until he reached the thirteenth floor of the main tower.

  That was where he found the army.

  The other men were in active combat, tangled with a final group of nightmares. Gerard didn’t even think before jumping into the fight this time. His blood was still hot from the other fights, his adrenaline high, and it was almost instinct to take a Taser from a dead friend whose throat had been slit—don’t think about Franz, not yet—and extinguish another demon.

  The fight was almost over before he joined it. The only surviving fiends were cowed against the wall being beaten by a handful of his friends. Working out some anger issues, probably.

  But there was nothing between them and the bridge.

  Somehow, the flow of the fight had pushed Gerard to the edge of the crystal bridge, and now his eyes tracked its length up toward the fissure. It was as beautiful as it was terrible. The nearest pylons were black spikes clutching the tower with sheets of shimmering crystal stretched between them. But higher up, there was no railing—nothing between the edge and a very long drop.

  And at the top, Gerard could see dark blue clouds.

  He couldn’t remember the last time he had seen that color. Blue. It used to be his favorite.

  Gerard turned and stared at all the eager humans waiting to climb it. Everyone was injured and bloody. A few were limping. Most were still armed. There definitely weren’t even two hundred of them left out of the original three hundred, yet they still looked filled with hope.

  They had been meant to help secure the Palace. Instead, they had run. A lot of their friends had died. Jerica was gone. Aquiel was outside the gates now.

  There was no fixing that now. He couldn’t go back and make the army stand their ground.

  Thud.

  The tower trembled, and Gerard knew that the drawbridge had fallen.

  If the humans didn’t get up the bridge now, they would be trapped inside the Palace with Aquiel’s army—an army that was headed for the bridge, too. It felt wrong to flee. But if he didn’t, he might as well throw himself on one of the spears now and join Jerica in oblivion, or wherever electrocuted nightmares ended up. He’d never been brave enough to ask.

  “Go,” Gerard said, stepping off the foot of the bridge to clear the path. “Everyone needs to go!”

  That was all the motivation that they needed.

  They shoved past him, flooding the bridge. Hope and grief and fear mingled in his veins. His eyes burned at the sight of the slaves that he’d been incarcerated with rushing toward Earth.

  He waited until they were all on the bridge before moving to join them.

  “Gerard!”

  He turned at the sound of someone calling his name. Neuma ran toward him, sprinting up the stairs. Her right eye was glued shut with blood.

  “What happened?” he asked, catching her when she stumbled.

  “The slaves,” she said. “I tried to stop them. They got pissed at me when I got in the way, and they attacked. I had to fucking hide from my supposed fucking allies! Fuck them, fuck all of them!” Her voice rose on every word until she was screaming up the bridge at the retreating backs of the army.

  “I’m sorry,” Gerard said. It didn’t make up for any of it. It also didn’t make her any less angry. But it seemed to be what Neuma needed, because she burst into tears.

>   “Those assholes deserve to fall off the bridge and splatter on the streets of Dis,” she said, wiping at her runny nose with her sleeve.

  He clenched his jaw. He didn’t want to hear a demon talking about them like that—not when it had been demons that had enslaved them in the first place.

  But it had also been demons that freed them.

  It was only then that he remembered that he had seen Elise. Anger could come later. He pulled the knife out his belt and held it up. “Elise told me to give this to you,” Gerard said.

  She unsheathed it. The blade was covered in blood.

  It didn’t make any sense to him, but Neuma’s eyes brightened. “Oh my fluffy lord Jesus,” she breathed. “Where is she now?”

  “Outside the gates, last I saw. Trying to delay Aquiel,” Gerard said. The tower was still shaking. He could hear shouting at the bottom of the stairs. He didn’t need to say that he thought Elise was probably dead.

  Neuma’s eyes widened, but there was no fear in them. Only determination. “And Jerica?”

  “They got her,” he said.

  A tear burned a path down her cheek. “Those fuckers.”

  “I’m so—”

  “Don’t say you’re sorry again.” Neuma straightened her spine, fist clenched around Elise’s dagger. “Gerard, I’ve got good news and I’ve got bad news. Bad news is, you’re not going up that bridge. Good news is, we’re going to make Aquiel fucking pay. You ready?”

  Neuma’s sudden determination was what Gerard needed to refocus. The humans were gone, but maybe they hadn’t taken all hope with them.

  “How?” he asked.

  She extracted a glass vial from the neck of her leather armor. All its label said was X. “With this.”

  “Okay,” Gerard said. “Tell me what to do.”

  The two of them rushed down the stairs of the tower, heading for the depths of the Palace.

  They didn’t see the human with bleeding eyes, a square jaw, and slave leather armor that followed the army up the bridge with his own contingent of nightmares.

  Nineteen

  The snow began to fall more heavily as the werewolf pack left for Northgate. It was sticking in the mountains, dusting the trees with silver and white. Their paw prints left ankle-deep tracks in the foothills by the time they reached the edge of town.

  The streets of Northgate were warm underneath Rylie’s paws—perfectly dry.

  It was strange to walk through a ghost town that Rylie remembered as thriving and whole. She could pick up scents of people she knew on the ground, like the priest that had replaced Father Night at St. Philomene’s Cathedral, that crazy old guy always ranting about fish outside the florist’s, the family that ran the consignment store. They were spectral smells, like the streets were haunted by their memory.

  Rylie could also smell angels and demons. It was a much more recent scent. She and Abel followed it to the fissure, the pack close behind their tails.

  The statue of Bain Marshall still had his hand outstretched, but now his hand was suspended over a gash in the earth at his feet. He was the only thing visible through the smoke, and even then only in occasional flashes as the smoke stirred around him with the swirl of winter breezes. The air near the statue smelled terrible, too, like sulfur and smoke and raw meat.

  After Nash’s warning and Abel’s urgency, Rylie had expected to find demons at Bain Marshall’s feet, not a quiet section of fissure. She had thought there would be blood and death waiting for them. But the town was so silent that she could hear snowmelt dripping off of roofs onto the bare ground below.

  There was no Nash or Summer, and that meant that there were no angels, either.

  They were alone.

  A hand rubbed along Rylie’s flank, and she looked up to see that Abram was petting her even as he watched around them, wary and alert. “I’m sure they’ll be here soon. Don’t worry.”

  She didn’t have any way to tell him that she hadn’t been worrying—which would have been a lie anyway—so she only jammed her nose into his hand in acknowledgment. Her son was wearing Kevlar under his winter jacket. It made him bulky and slow in comparison to the pack, but the peace of mind was worth it. Rylie had made everyone travel at his pace so that he wouldn’t be left behind.

  The wind coming out of the fissure was a deep groan that grew louder as Rylie and Abel advanced to its edge. Abel had described the crystal bridge to her, but it was much more impressive to see in person, especially with the glimpse of the City of Dis below.

  Rylie had grown up believing in God and Hell. She remembered her childhood pastor warning them all about what happened to those who sinned. Her mother, Jessica, had occasionally used the threat of God’s watchfulness to get her to go to bed on time. Rylie used to stay awake late at night thinking of fire and little horned demons with tridents. It had haunted her nightmares until Jessica grudgingly admitted that religion was only a myth, so go to sleep, okay?

  She had never, in all of her frightened childhood years, imagined a sprawling black metropolis like Dis. It looked so industrial. The tangle of streets far below made her head swim, like if she tried to track a single path around the city, she might get dizzy and fall in. She couldn’t see any demons at that distance, but she had seen some when she was in Las Vegas, and the idea that such a big city might be filled with creatures like that instilled in her a deep sense of fear.

  It had been years since Rylie worried about Hell, but she knew that she would be having nightmares about it again.

  Abel nudged her back from the fissure, then jerked his muzzle at the bridge. She followed his gaze down and her stomach flipped.

  There were shapes moving on the bridge.

  “Something’s coming up,” Abram shouted to the rest of the pack. “Spread out! Get ready!”

  Rylie reached out with her mind to pull on her pack’s energy, pushing their human minds away so that the more wolfish consciousness could emerge. The wolf knew no fear. It only knew the hunt. They all needed that calm sureness now.

  In the moments that those dark shapes approached, Rylie took a final look at her pack—calm before battle. Though most of the wolves looked nothing like the humans that they could become, she recognized all of them at a quick sniff. Crystal was a slender, leggy wolf haloed by a sticky-sweet herbal smell. Toshiko was sprightly and determined. Paetrick almost looked more like a red-furred bear because he was so stocky. They were all her family.

  How many of them were about to die?

  Abel growled and bristled as the first of the dark shapes emerged from the fissure. His muscles were rock-hard with tension as he prepared to jump. Abram lifted a rifle to his shoulder, sighting down its length.

  Rylie sniffed the air.

  The newcomers weren’t demons—they were human.

  She jumped in front of Abel to keep him from attacking. The sudden motion startled Abram. “What’s wrong?” he asked.

  The humans staggered as they crossed through the fissure, but soon regained their footing, flesh steaming in the cold air. They saw the wolves and the air filled with the scent panic. They shouted battle cries. Rylie understood that they were speaking English, but the flood of adrenaline pouring off of them made her inner wolf swell, and she suddenly couldn’t understand them.

  But she could imagine what they were thinking. They had just come out of Hell, where they had probably been suffering, only to find forty horse-sized wolves waiting for them.

  No wonder they were ready to fight.

  Abram stepped forward. “Wait!” he shouted, hands lifted, holding the rifle by the barrel so he couldn’t fire. “We’re here to help!”

  The humans froze at the sight of another human—one that was obviously not being mauled by the massive wolves behind him. “Who are you?” asked a nearby woman. She was holding the strangest weapon that Rylie had ever seen. It was a spear that bristled with copper wire, attached by a cable to her backpack. Rylie couldn’t begin to imagine what it was supposed to do.

  “My
name’s Abram Gresham,” he said. “This is a werewolf pack.”

  Murmurs spread through the humans, and Rylie took another tentative sniff of them. They smelled injured. It wasn’t just the superficial wounds that bloodied their faces and hands; they were covered in demon ichor, blisters, and burns, as if they had walked too close to fire. These people had been in Hell for a long time.

  It was strange to watch their faces as they looked around the town surrounding them. Rylie was horrified by what had become of Northgate, but most of them looked thrilled beyond reason—relieved, hopeful, almost giddy. They didn’t care that the buildings were covered in ash and that the town was empty. They only cared that they were home. Warm sympathy blossomed in Rylie’s heart.

  “Werewolves?” the woman asked with a nervous laugh.

  “They’re not going to hurt you,” Abram said firmly. “We’ve come to help.”

  Rylie caught the eyes of a few of her more trustworthy wolves—Trevin, Crystal, Pedro—and flicked her tail. It was hard to convey complex commands with mere body language, but they got the hint when she pulled at them with her Alpha energies.

  They trotted forward. The humans tensed and lifted their weapons.

  She let Abram continue to speak for them.

  “What happened down there?” he asked. “Were you followed? Are demons coming?”

  “I don’t know,” the woman said. “We had to fight through so much to get here—the tower was empty, but there’s a lot more demons in the city. Millions. We’ve got to get out of here before they follow.”

  “We have a sanctuary,” Abram said, gesturing at the three werewolves that Rylie had urged forward. “Follow these three. They can take you to—”

  The woman interrupted him with a strangled cry. Her shriek was cut off abruptly as the point of a cleaver thrust through her throat. Blood fountained down her throat.

  With a hard jerk, her head was severed.

  She fell.

  Behind her stood Lincoln Marshall and two dozen demons wearing black leather, each of which had a stranglehold on a human. They had climbed out of the fissure unseen and taken the humans from behind.