Ruled by Steel (The Ascension Series #3) (12 page)

Nash stuck his head into the first greenhouse to find it empty. The heavy, moist air smelled of ripe fruit. They had stolen mature plants from every nursery within a short drive. Summer had been put in charge of organizing the collection and initially balked at the idea of stealing, but changed her mind once she saw the riots in town. Staff had fled from their stores as desperate people swamped them. There had been no clerks to buy from.

Fortunately, between a half-dozen werewolves and one determined angel, they had gotten a lot of plants. It looked like a leafy rainforest inside the first greenhouse.

Nash let the flaps fall shut as he walked across the path to the other greenhouse.

That was where he found her.

Summer Gresham was sitting in the back of the structure on a folding chair. Her impossibly long legs were pulled to her chest, heels caught on the seat and chin resting on her knees. She was wearing cutoff shorts that revealed every inch of creamy brown flesh from hip to toe. A tank top hugged the curves of her waist and breasts.

She smiled when she saw him. She always smiled when she saw Nash, even when more than twenty living creatures had died on his blade that day and he didn’t think that there was anything about him worth smiling about. Even now, in the warm darkness of the greenhouse, he could see that it lit up her face. Her silvery eyes were as bright as the moon.

“You’re home,” she said, unfolding herself and standing. “You’re home.”

And then she was on him, arms wrapped around his waist, her fragrant curls tickling his nose, her soft body pressed to his. Nash closed his eyes and inhaled her scent deeply.

I’m home
, he thought.

Summer held him for a long time, and he didn’t try to stop her. Every time they reunited after a battle, it felt like their first embrace all over again. She drove the darkness out of the shadowy corners of his mind, burned away the images of the dead brutes and the bleeding boy.

When she lifted her head, her hands still didn’t stray from him. They wandered over his chest to the hilt of his sword, fiddling with the lapels of his jacket.

“I can’t believe you’re still wearing this,” Summer said, turning one of the buttons between her first finger and thumb. “You need armor.”

“I don’t need armor if they can’t touch me,” Nash said.

She snorted. “You’re not
that
good.” She wouldn’t meet his eyes. It wasn’t out of reverence. Summer was as reverent toward him as she was toward anything, which was to say, not at all.

He lifted her chin with a knuckle. “You’ve been crying,” he said softly, running a thumb over the damp track on her jaw.

Summer swiped her cheek dry. “I think it’s the humidity.”

He cupped her face in both hands and drank in the sight of her. He had thought that Summer was from Kemet the first time they met—the country now known as Egypt—because her features had the strength of pharaohs. If she had flaws, Nash was blind to them. Every inch of her was perfection, as he had verified with tongue and lips and fingers a hundred times over.

Angels may have been designed by Eve to be beautiful, but Eve’s imagination could never have conceived of Summer’s perfection.

“Tell me what’s bothering you,” Nash said. It was a command, but as kind a command as he could manage.

She sniffled. Her brow creased as she gestured at the plants. “There’s nothing to tell. I think I’ve got the watering schedules all worked out for the greenhouses. I’ve been emailing with Gran, and she—she knows everything, you know? If it grows in a garden, she’s mastered it.”

That was news. “You’ve contacted Gwyn?”

“She made it to London with the other evacuees,” Summer said. “She and her partner are fine.”

“I’m relieved.”

“No, you’re not,” she said, dropping her head again to stare at a potted orange tree.

His hands dropped to her shoulders, taking them in a firm grip.

“I care,” Nash said simply. The other angels might not care about a single life, but he did. Gwyneth Gresham had raised Summer and her twin brother, Abram. She was as good as a mother to them, and they loved her. Anything that Summer loved, Nash did, too—even if Gwyn had threatened to shoot him a couple of times.

Still, Summer didn’t look at him. “Yeah. Okay. I guess I missed dinner.”

Nash pulled her against his chest again, and she melted against him, all soft curves and sighs.

“You’re thinking of him,” he said.

Her fingers curled in his shirt. “I’ve been thinking about him constantly.” Her voice broke on the last syllable. She began to tremble. “Even when I’m trying not to. I need to be strong for Rylie—she’s so much worse than I am, and she needs me to be strong for her. But I can’t get him out of my head. That’s…that’s why I’ve been hiding in here, and I’m not proud of it.”

It had been only weeks since Summer’s uncle, Seth Wilder, had died in battle. He had been at the crux of the Breaking. Rylie was still too inconsolable to give a coherent account of how he had died, but she said that he had saved her. It was a good death. A noble death.

The quality of a death didn’t make it better or worse. He was still gone from Summer’s life. From the pack’s life.

Nash could say nothing to help Summer heal from the heartache of losing Seth. Words were inadequate. Meaningless. What she—and the entire pack—needed was time. But even if Nash couldn’t help her with words, he could remind her that she was still living and breathing and young.

He drew away from her enough to shed the sword, dropping it on a row of cinderblocks supporting a shelf of herbs. Anywhere he was with Summer was no place for weapons.

She stretched onto her toes and kissed him, clutching his shirt in both fists.

“Don’t leave again,” she whispered against his lips. She tasted like salty tears.

Nash couldn’t make that promise. He would leave again—as soon as she slept, he would leave. He needed to.

He didn’t tell her that. That was the future, and they were in this moment.

He spread his coat over the tarp and lowered Summer to it. She was pliant in his arms, utterly trusting, and she gazed up at him with tearful eyes that somehow only made her more beautiful.

Nash didn’t speak as he touched her, showing her the love and regret that he couldn’t put into words. He removed her clothing and kissed the flesh it had covered, sheltering them under the canopy of his wings as their bodies moved together.

Even grief couldn’t dim Summer’s glow. She was the sun, the moon, and the stars in his arms. His entire universe.

She was the reason that Nash would go back to war that night to kill a hundred more demons, and the reason that he would fight to survive.

Summer was the reason that Nash would always come home.

There were supposed
to be seven stages of grief. Rylie couldn’t remember them all, but she thought that there was meant to be denial, and bargaining, and something about getting angry. She knew that it ended with acceptance. They had definitely discussed acceptance in her high school psychology class.

It was all wrong. Rylie couldn’t experience denial over what she had seen happen to Seth. There was nobody to bargain with. If there were a God watching over her, then Seth never would have died in the first place. She lived in a hostile, miserable, unfriendly world that hated her, hated her family, wanted them to suffer. But she wasn’t angry about it, either. There was no room for anger. And she would definitely never accept what had happened to him.

For weeks, she had felt like she was drowning. There was air somewhere above her but she couldn’t reach it. She was immersed deep in the black pit of the ocean, cold and hostile, with no light and no hope for survival. Yet she didn’t die. Damn it, she didn’t
die
, and that made it so much worse.

Her bedroom had begun to take on a strange odor since she had started spending so much time in it. Rylie had started cleaning it every day, bleaching all of the surfaces, changing her sheets in the morning and washing them in the evening, but there was still this
smell
. It made her think of cemeteries. Grassy fields peppered with tombstones. Weeping angels of gray stone. Churches and a low mist and hollow silence, within and without. She wasn’t sure that the smell came from her—it certainly wasn’t something she had eaten, because she wasn’t eating much at all—and after a while, she started to wonder if she might just be imagining it.

She was sinking, falling, unable to swim.

Rylie had emerged for the full and new moons, guiding the pack through the transformation, leading them on a silent chase through the forest. It was easier to deal with the pain as a wolf because the wolf didn’t care about pain. It didn’t care about drowning. It only cared about the moist soil under its feet, the strange acid smell of smoke drifting over the forest, the crimson tinge to a normally blue sky.

That was probably why Abel had stopped changing back at all.

She saw him through her bedroom window, stalking along the lake. Fog clung to the waterfall and the cliffs and the surface of the water. He was a grim, a black dog, a creature marking his brother’s death. Abel hadn’t lost weight like Rylie had. Somehow, he had grown larger as a wolf, as though the beast were inflated by his anger.

Rylie pressed her hand to the cold pane of glass and watched him prowl beyond.

“Abel,” she murmured.

He stalked along the lake, glaring into the sanctuary with golden eyes. He picked up his pace near the rocks and disappeared again.

Rylie let her hand fall. A clammy handprint remained where she had been touching.

It was never going to end. She would never be okay again.

She realized that her thumb hurt, and looked down to see that she was gripping Seth’s fang earring too tightly in her other hand again. Its point pressed into her skin hard enough to leave a deep indentation. Rylie forced her hand to relax.

Pushing the window open, she allowed the chilly air to flood into her bedroom. Rylie closed her eyes and inhaled deeply. Information washed over her—the damp hint of approaching snowfall, ice that had already formed high on the mountain, cooking meat and the gas that fueled the stoves.

She also smelled buttery popcorn.

Her eyes popped open.

“Nash?” she whispered. He always smelled like popcorn to her. Summer said that he smelled like bonfires, so it seemed that everyone smelled and felt and saw something different when it came to angels. Rylie didn’t understand why her perception was popcorn, but it never failed to give away his presence, since werewolves didn’t eat it.

It was always good to see Nash. He made Summer smile. But he would have news of the war, too. The war that Rylie had failed to prevent, and that Seth had died for.

Somehow, she found herself standing, and she walked to the front door of the cottage. She pulled a sweater over her head. She walked into the open air outside, crisp and chilly with the approach of winter, and it was still too hard to breathe.

The pack was having dinner. Thank goodness for Summer and Abram—they had been working through the grief, taking the lead in organizing meals for the pack, helping them prepare for winter. They were so
functional
. Rylie didn’t want to begrudge them their normality, but she hated how easy it was for them. The truth that was drowning her didn’t hurt them.

She walked to the edge of the street and peered down at the pack sitting at the tables. Nash had been there, but his scent was already fading. He had moved on. Rylie didn’t have the energy to seek him out.

She turned from the lights of the main street and walked.

Somehow, she found herself behind the split rail fence separating the lake from the cottages. There was cold, soggy dirt between her toes. Water sloshed to her ankles.

Rylie stared into the lake and thought about diving in.

She wasn’t sure how long she stood there. She could feel the moon crawling across the sky, but couldn’t connect its movements to the passage of time.

Eventually—a few minutes later, an hour later—she smelled popcorn again.

Nash strolled down the beach toward her, barefooted with his jacket flung over one shoulder. He smelled like Summer all over, even more than he smelled like popcorn. The oils she put in her hair to control her curls was on his skin. Their sweat was mingled. She was even on his every exhale. He had just been with her in a very carnal way.

At first, it had been embarrassing that Rylie could tell every time her pack members had sex, and doubly embarrassing when her daughter returned from the Haven with a boyfriend that she was
very
intimate with. But there were only so many times a girl could be embarrassed before growing numb to it. At least Summer was happy.

“Rylie,” he greeted with a small bow. It was too formal for the pack, but where mothers-in-law and werewolf Alphas were concerned, Nash seemed to think that a little extra formality couldn’t hurt. As long as she didn’t expect him to do the dishes, he could be really nice.

“Don’t do that bowing thing,” Rylie said. “I feel like I should be bowing to you. You’re the war hero,” she said.

“We’re all doing our duties.” Nash had shown a lot more respect for Rylie since he had learned of her attempt to prevent the Breaking. He wouldn’t have respected her so much if he had known the full story.

Rylie dragged her bottom lip between her teeth. “So is Summer asleep?”

He glanced down at himself, smoothing a hand down his chest, as if looking for a visible sign of what he had been doing. “Yes. She’s in our cottage now.”

That was good. Summer deserved the rest.

Rylie turned to gaze out at the lake again, and Nash stood just behind her, beyond the reach of the waves.

“Evacuations are progressing more quickly in the West than they have in the East,” he said. His words were quick and clipped, as though reporting to a general. “Populations are condensing at the port cities and hundreds of ships depart daily. Any ship that brings supplies to the front leaves with as many humans as can fit on it. It will be weeks, perhaps months, before a full evacuation is possible—the invaders are interfering with travelers reaching the harbors.”