Ruled by Steel (The Ascension Series #3) (15 page)

“But there’s nothing here, ma’am.”

“Don’t call me that,” Elise said.

She kept the gun aimed at the floor as she stepped deeper into the room, head tilted to the side to try to catch glimmers of magic out of the corners of her eyes. She was getting better at being able to spot latent spells—things like glamors, which might be able to hide the true contents of the room. There wasn’t anything to see. She also didn’t sense any other life within the building.

“There used to be beds in here,” Gerard said. “Lots of beds, like you’d see in Civil War movies. Some of the people he brought in got amputations, or dissections, or just random cutting. I think he was trying to see how many pieces he could take out of a human before they stopped working.”

“Did he work alone?”

“He always had help. Skinny guys. Tall and skinny.”

That could have been any number of demons, although Elise hadn’t seen any “tall and skinny” demons around the House since she’d been there.

The back wall of the warehouse was different from the other walls. It had metal siding.

She paced along the wall, rapping her knuckles lightly against the wall. Toward the middle, she hit something hollow. Elise could just barely make out a rusty rectangle set into the wall if she stepped back—a hidden door with no knob. Why use magic when mundane tricks worked just as well?

Elise slipped her fingernails between the crack, searching for a latch, a switch, anything that might make the hidden door swing open.

She caught something near the bottom of the door on the left-hand side. It clicked. The door opened.

On the other side waited a steep, dark set of stairs. There were no light switches or torches. Nothing to illuminate the path down. Good thing she didn’t need any light to be able to see.

“Dear Jesus,” Gerard said. The name made the hairs on the back of Elise’s neck lift.

“Stay here,” she said.

The stairs were latticed metal with texturing, the kind of pattern that would cut bare feet or weak soles. She climbed down carefully to find another door at the bottom that had been painted with infernal lettering. She wiped off a few layers of red dust to read “Do Not Enter.”

She had never been good at following instructions.

Elise stepped into the basement, and she found the lab.

There was a row of desks covered in equipment that must have been taken from an Earth lab—microscopes, scales, a centrifuge. They were all as dusty as the door. It had been a long time since anyone used them. They were backed by a wall of shelving, so Elise couldn’t see what was beyond them.

“Anything interesting?” Gerard asked, squeezing through the door behind her.

She frowned. “I told you to stay upstairs.”

“I got curious.”

“You may regret that,” she said. An unpleasant smell had reached her nose, and it reminded her of a butcher’s shop that had lost its refrigeration. Like a bloody pit of meat. Elise had been in one or two mass graves before—not intentionally—and she would never forget that sour odor.

Once she rounded the shelving, she found a rickety metal table covered in a sheet. The cloth was soaked with red and brown fluids, and there was something lumpy underneath it. That was at least part of the origin of the meat smell.

Gerard gagged behind her. “What in the…?”

Elise jerked the sheet off of the table.

At least, she tried to jerk the sheet off the table. She had to peel it away from the body underneath since the rotting flesh had adhered itself to the cloth. A hard tug pulled at least one layer of shriveled skin off with the sheet.

There was a wolf on the slab. It was almost big enough to be a bear, and the wicked silver claws also weren’t typical of a normal wolf. But Elise had never seen a werewolf that bled ichor. Its muscles glistened black, as if saturated with oil. Most of the fur had fallen out. Its chest cavity was so rotten that its entire front half had collapsed in on itself like a jack-o-lantern left in the sun.

Its lips were peeled back over gums that had no teeth. It looked like someone had broken them off and jammed silver thumbtacks in their place to stave off healing, permanently neutralizing the werewolf’s bite. The teeth were in a jar beside the table. Elise didn’t have to count them to know that some were missing.

Nash had said that Abraxas deliberately infected some humans with the werewolf curse. It was no surprise to find a werewolf there.

She lowered the sheet over the werewolf again.

“What was that?” Gerard asked thickly. Judging by the way his emotions seethed around him, he was on the verge of vomiting.

“Werewolf. Don’t throw up on any evidence.”

He swallowed wetly. “Wasn’t planning on it.”

She moved deeper into the room, stepping between aisles of sample jars. There were more teeth—some human, some werewolf, some demon. There was also an entire rack dedicated to fetuses suspended in some kind of gel. They were far too distorted to be able to tell what they would have become, but considering that they were pocked with slimy black marks like the werewolf’s muscles, Elise suspected that they weren’t human. There were skulls, too, dried out and picked clean by insects. It all looked unreal to her, more like Halloween decorations than actual creatures that had been pickled and picked apart and experimented upon.

This wasn’t a lab that had been used for a few casual experiments. It had been a long, deliberate effort. Abraxas had been planning his super-army long before he obtained Elise’s blood.

And she had been there with him so many years earlier—when he had been alone in the desert, unguarded, unsuspecting. She could have killed him and stopped it then.

If only she had known.

While Gerard poked through the fetuses, Elise broke into a locked cabinet at the other side of the room. There was a tray of teardrop-shaped vials inside. They sparked with magic out of the corner of her eyes, and Elise had no idea what the sparks of purple meant.

She let her mind drift to James. He was still beside Brianna’s bed, filling yet another sheet of notebook paper with runes.

Purple magic?
she asked.

He was too distracted to try to look through her eyes.
It typically means regeneration
, he thought back at her as he continued to draw.
Sometimes duplication.

“Duplication?” she echoed aloud, surprising herself with the sound of her voice.

James focused on her.
Where are you
?

She blocked him out and returned her attention to the cabinet.

Each of the vials was a subtly different shape, but one of them was identical to the teardrop vial that Abraxas had used to hold Elise’s blood. There was a smudge of blood at the bottom of this vial, too, perhaps one or two drops. The label on the vial said “X.”

She pulled a sheet of parchment from under the tray. It was a guide to Abraxas’s shorthand. X meant “Godslayer.” Her heart accelerated at the sight of it.

Elise had accidentally destroyed the first vial of her blood. She had thought it was the only one in existence.

But Abraxas had made a second.

Her first instinct was to smash it. This was the cause of all the pain on Earth—these little smears of blood that Elise had given Abraxas had played a huge role in opening the fissure. If her blood could open the fissure, it might be able to close it, too. But this was blood that Elise no longer possessed. Ever since she had returned from the garden, the blood of the Tree ran through her veins; if she destroyed this vial, there would be no more.

Elise tucked the vial into the neck of her bustier without letting Gerard see it. It took all of her self-control not to show the heady excitement that burned in her veins.

“There’s another door over here,” Gerard called from the opposite end of the lab, behind yet another row of shelving. “Looks like it goes down farther. It says something on the wall, too, but I can’t read it.”

Elise slammed the cabinet doors shut and joined him. The sign Gerard had found said “detention cells.”

“I’m going down,” Elise said. She gave him with a hard look. “I want you to stay up here this time. I mean it. I need you to watch my back.”

He saluted again. “Yes, ma’am.”

Elise descended.

The detention level was a small, cramped basement. She couldn’t see very far down the long hallway, though she could tell that the right-hand side was broken up by cell doors, just like those she might find in a county jail. The air was thick with the scent of rotting meat and sickness. Punctured intestines smelled distinctively sour. She didn’t need to look into the cells to know that people had died here, and that they had died painfully.

But look into the cells she did. The first one was small, barely five feet by five feet, with no furnishing beyond a pair of shackles and a worktable covered in trash. The shackles were attached to the bare wrist bones of a human cadaver. There was a clipboard beside the door, and she lifted the sheet to read Abraxas’s notes. “Infected with X. Failure.” That was the same letter designation that was on the second vial of Elise’s blood.

She peered through the bars. The body that had been injected with X hadn’t died from some terrible infection; he had died from having his throat slit open. Apparently, Abraxas wasn’t a fan of disappointment.

The second cell was another werewolf, much like the one on the slab above, although it hadn’t been disemboweled. It looked like it had been starved to death. It was barely more than a furred skeleton chained with silver.

The third cell smelled worse than the others, and approaching the open bars nearly overwhelmed her with the stink of rotting flesh. Elise breathed shallowly through her mouth as she looked for Abraxas’s notes on this one. The clipboard had been removed, leaving a bare patch of wall behind it.

Elise opened the door and stepped inside.

It took her a few seconds to realize what she was seeing. There were two large, raptor-like feet, which belonged to the same body as the bull’s head. The hooves and muscular chest belonged to a second body. They were half-angel, half-demon hybrids, and whatever had happened to them had made their flesh boil. Elise had never seen a hybrid killed by anything physical other than ripping the wings off and having the spinal cord severed.

Her boots squished in tissue as she picked her way over to the work table beside the hybrids. Elise dug through the pile of trash in the corner, pulling apart bloody tissues in search of an indication of what they had been given.

She found a glass vial at the bottom of the pile. It was marked with two letters: “XW.” Elise’s blood, and werewolf saliva. It must have been the saliva that had killed them. Another failed experiment by Abraxas. As horrible as it was to see, she could only be grateful that it had been such a spectacular failure. Elise didn’t want to imagine how difficult it would be to kill a hybrid with a werewolf’s hardiness.

Abraxas had been putting anything and everything together to see what he could get out of it. He must have known that infecting hybrids with werewolf saliva would mean losing two valuable members of an army. For fuck’s sake, two hybrids could kill an entire town’s worth of humans if the victims were caught off guard. But he had wanted to see what would happen if they were infected anyway.

“My blood
and
werewolf saliva,” she murmured, turning the empty syringe over in her fingers. There was still a smear of something unpleasantly brown at the bottom.

Maybe Abraxas hadn’t been wasteful. Maybe he had believed that there was more to Elise’s blood than she knew.

She dropped the vial and left the cell. It was a little easier to breathe away from the pile of dissolved flesh that was the hybrids, and not just because of the smell.

The next cell was mercifully empty. But the door on the final cell stood open.

Devadas was inside.

“Oh, shit,” Elise swore, grabbing the bars of the door. His wrists were shackled above his head, and the end of his tail had been severed so that the stump dangled just short of the ground, dripping blood into a shining black puddle. He wasn’t moving.

Elise drew her gun and moved inside, searching for a key to Devadas’s shackles among the rusted examination tools on the table. She found it underneath bloody pliers that were still clutching one of his fangs.

She reached up to unlock one shackle, then the other. He sagged against her. The naga was a lot heavier than he looked; she had to set the gun down in order to lower him gently to the floor.

Elise pressed her hand to his throat, though she wasn’t sure that was where a snake-man would even keep his pulse. Didn’t matter. There was no sign of life in him.

“Damn it all,” she muttered, rolling him onto his back.

Whoever had taken him from Vassago’s house had taken their time torturing him. The scales below his waist had been ripped out one by one. Elise tilted his chin to inspect his face—judging by the sunken cheeks and bloody lips, more than just his fangs had been removed.

She thumbed his bottom lip down. He had no tongue, either.

That wasn’t the end of the damage. His hands had also been severed at the wrists. Rings of punctures marked his forearms, mimicking a bite wound.

Just like Vassago.

With a growing sense of dread, Elise searched the rest of his body. She found the signature on the soft skin at his lower back. It was another initial “J” with a messy heart.

“What the hell?” she whispered.

How could Vassago’s killer possibly be connected to Abraxas? It couldn’t have been Belphegor—he had still been detained when Devadas went missing, and there was no sign that the Steward had ever been there.

Who the
fuck
was J?

“Elise!” Gerard’s voice came hissing from the end of the cellblock. Elise grabbed her gun and peered around the door of the cell. He stood in the doorway, framed by the light. “There’s someone here.”

Elise drifted through
the ground floor of the lab, looking down on the intruder.

Judging by the yellow skin that clung to his bones like spider webs, she was betting on him being a nightmare. But he wasn’t one of the nightmares that had attacked her in the alley. He wore similar clothing—the same livery of the new occupants of the Palace. There was a cleaver in one of his hip holsters and a Taser in the other.