Ruled by Steel (The Ascension Series #3) (16 page)

And he had brought humans with him.

They were chained into a long line, wrists and ankles tethered. The two in front were crying. The three behind them looked like they had lost the ability to cry. They had the hollow stare and raw flesh of humans that had been in Hell for much too long.

“Hello?” the nightmare called, strolling through the empty room as a pair of lesser nightmares guarded the humans. The guards were probably nightmare Gray, half-human and half-demon, because they didn’t radiate nearly as much energy as the ringleader, and they could have passed for mortal if not for the black eyes and wide mouths.

Elise drifted lower, still invisible.

When nobody responded to the nightmare’s call, he said again, “Hello? I’ve got your annual delivery.”

Delivery?
Someone in the lab had been
ordering
humans from the Palace administration?

She slithered around the nightmare’s ankles and considered her options. The slaves would be unlikely to have any information she wanted, but the nightmare would, if she could get him tied down somehow. In fact, she might be able to get a lot of answers from him.

“Huh,” the nightmare said, as if surprised by something. Elise twisted around to see what.

He was staring between his feet at her—even though she should have been invisible.

The nightmare thrust a Taser into the center of Elise’s shadow.

She reformed into a single corporeal body with a shock that felt like stepping off the roof of a skyscraper. Elise slammed into the ground chest-down, hands slapping the concrete. Her mouth flooded with the taste of burned hair and blood. Her skin ached with the electrical shock.

He cackled with laughter, slamming his boot into the center of her back.

“Thought you’d play spy, huh?” he said, kneeling on her. His weight made her ribs creak. “What are you, fledgling mara? You’d know that I could see you if you were anything older.”

“Get off of me,” she said.

He drove the Taser into her ribs and shocked her again. Elise’s cry echoed off of the warehouse walls. It was almost painful enough to make her phase out—not to become invisible, but shatter completely. She wasn’t sure that she would be able to reform if he did that one more time.

“You’re not Belphegor’s thing, are you?” the nightmare hissed into her ear.

Instead of responding, Elise took quick inventory of her situation. Gerard was still downstairs. She had become corporeal again by surprise and hadn’t reformed with all of her belongings intact—she could see where she had dropped her gun and Taser a few feet away. But they weren’t the only things she had dropped. She was missing her left shoe and glove, too.

Wait, her glove. She had runes on that bare hand. Magic.

Elise grabbed the nightmare’s ankle and activated one of the wards.

It wasn’t an offensive spell, but it did the trick. It threw a wall between them. The nightmare was flung off of her.

The instant his weight was gone, she scrambled on all fours to grab her Taser.

Elise depressed the button as she whirled, trying to sink it into the gut of the nightmare that pursued her. But his arm was already lifted, too. Their forearms met. Arcs of electricity danced in the air between them.

She shoved his arm aside and threw a hard uppercut. It struck the nightmare with a faint squishing noise.

He stumbled, and she jumped on him. The Taser buried into his stomach, sinking into the spongy flesh where his small ribs should have been. Bright electrical arcs danced between his teeth, visible through his paper-thin cheeks. He exploded into shadow.

So much for questioning that one.

But there were two more nightmares pushing the humans back, trying to keep away from Elise. They were taking the slaves toward the door. Trying to escape.

Elise scooped the Beretta off of the ground and fired.

Neuma’s lesson helped. It helped a lot. It punched into the chest of the nearer nightmare, leaving a neat hole that didn’t heal. It also didn’t kill him—Gray or not, it would take more than a few holes to drop a nightmare.

Gerard came up the stairs. “Close the doors!” Elise ordered him, then turned her attention to the demon she had shot. “Who sent you here?”

“Fuck off,” he replied, jerking a cleaver out of his sheath.

She fired again. It hit him in the shoulder, making him reel. The human closest to him cried out and tried to run, but the chains were all tangled together. The escape attempt only made the slaves stumble.

“Who ordered the delivery of slaves?” Elise asked.

He came at her with the knife. Elise ducked under the swing, grabbed his throat, slammed him to the floor. Crouched on his arm and chest, it was easy to disarm him. She held the knife to his throat.

He twisted, looking for his final companion. “Help me, Crosby!” Crosby didn’t come. He was flattened to the wall, paralyzed by fear.

“Who sent you?” Elise asked again, pressing the cleaver under his chin.

“My master,” he said. “He’s got a trade agreement with the lab’s owner. He sends slaves over every Earth year.”

“Who’s your master?”

“Someone scarier than you,” he croaked out.

Elise leaned on the knife.

It wasn’t hard to sever his neck. Half-blooded nightmares were almost as spongy as their full-blooded kin. It took a little extra pressure to sever the spinal cord, but not much.

Blood spurted from the stump she left behind. It slicked her hands. Elise grimaced as she stood.

“What do you know?” she asked the last Gray.

“Aquiel, it’s Aquiel,” he said, flinching away from her even though she hadn’t approached him. “He’s our master, he took the Palace, he’s organizing the army.”

Aquiel
. She shouldn’t have been surprised. He was the Prince of Nightmares, and he had already made it obvious that he was looking to invade Earth. But that still wasn’t the answer that she had been expecting. Aquiel was as big as he was powerful. Literally, the size of a big building. He didn’t have the ability to get into the lab and fuck around with bodies, and he certainly wouldn’t sign them with a J.

“Do you know what agreement he had with Abraxas?” Elise asked.

“I don’t know,
I don’t know
. Just that we sent him slaves for experimentation sometimes.” He was sweating. He tossed his cleaver to the floor and held up his empty hands. “I’m just a little guy. Nobody cares about me.”

She believed him.

Her hands were gloved with blood to the wrist, dripping with cherry-red gloss. She slashed her hands down the wall, as if to scrape the palms clean. The gesture left behind a large, bloody X in its wake.

She wasn’t done. She dipped her hands in the nightmare Gray’s blood once more and drew two slashes through each leg of the X, then finger-painted a few characters underneath. When she was done, she turned to look at the destruction—the body, the blood, the terrified slaves, and the nightmare that was still guarding them.

Elise caught the eye of the surviving Gray and pointed to the symbol she had drawn. “This lab belonged to Abraxas. It’s mine now. Tell your master. Tell everyone. Tell them the entire city will be mine, and I’ll do
that
to anyone that disagrees.” She pointed to the decapitated guard.

His mouth worked soundlessly.

She expected Gerard to be equally stunned, but once he had closed the front door, he shot a grin at her. Maybe being enslaved
had
left him crazy.

Gerard went to the humans to inspect the locks. “You okay?” he asked them.

A man on the end started screaming. Over and over, just a wordless scream, like he thought that whatever had held him before couldn’t be worse than what he had seen Elise do now.

She rolled her eyes and walked over to help break the chains. “Do you know what they wanted from you guys?” Elise asked, snapping the links between the first and second slaves.

“They hurt us,” said a woman. Her voice was lovely and deep, almost like she might sing. She twisted to show Elise her back. She had been lashed and cut. Blood had dried in streams down her back. Nightmares only fed off of fear, not pain—but if this woman feared pain, then that was exactly what Aquiel’s army would have done to ripen her for the eating.

Elise’s eyes tracked over the others. They weren’t visibly hurt. The nightmares must have found other fears to feed on.

“Where are you from?” Elise asked as she snapped the next chain.

The lashed woman looked surprised by the question. “Tacoma,” she said. “It’s—it’s near Seattle. They picked me up there during the Breaking.”

Anger surged in Elise. These were prisoners of war kept as food and labor. They had been taken from the fissures Abraxas had created—and that Elise had failed to close.

“Who did this to you, exactly?” Elise asked.

“All of them,” she said with a tremor in her lovely, warm voice. “Including that one.” She nodded to the last nightmare Gray.

He was taking her moment of distraction as an opportunity to escape. He sprinted for the door, flinging it open again and darting outside.

Elise had planned on letting him escape. She had thought that he would be useful to let everyone know that she was taking over. But now crimson fury blurred her vision.

Aquiel already knew she was there. She didn’t need a messenger.

Gerard took a step, but Elise stayed him with a hard look. “He’s mine,” she said.

The nightmare was already on the street when she caught him. He was fast, she had to give him that. But not fast enough.

Elise appeared in front of him. He skidded to a stop and tried to turn in the other direction. She seized him by the back of the neck and slammed her knee into his face once, twice, hard enough to make the blood flow. The third strike was hard enough to drop him.

“Don’t,” he cried, “please!”

Elise shoved him flat to the street when he tried to get up again.

The thing was, full-blooded nightmares that reached maturity in Hell could slip between corporeality and incorporeality like Elise, and were essentially untouchable.

Half-blood Gray were not.

Elise shoved the second nightmare’s face against the concrete, mouth stretched wide against the curb. His teeth gritted against the ground. He whimpered as he tried to speak, but no coherent sounds came out.

Her foot smashed into the back of his head.

Message delivered
.

Elise tried to
tune out all the crying as she hauled the slaves back to the House of Abraxas. Let Gerard worry about them—he was the one talking them down from the panic, trying to make them realize that Elise was different from the demons that had taken them in the first place. She didn’t have the patience for it.

Even as she drove away with a half-dozen slaves beside her, crammed into the seats of the Mack truck, her mind was back at the lab with Devadas’s body. The jagged J. The heart. The gashes meant to look like something had bitten him.

Aquiel wasn’t the murderer. It couldn’t be Belphegor.

It just didn’t make sense.

It was a short drive back to the House through empty streets. The gates of the House of Abraxas opened when Elise approached. The wards welcomed her with a warm
ping
and a hint of warning that made her feel like she was going to throw up. Something had changed while she was gone, although she couldn’t tell what at a glance.

“What happened?” she asked Jerica as soon as she dropped out of the truck.

The nightmare blinked in confusion. “What are you talking about?”

“The wards are registering an alarm.”

“Nothing happened while you were gone,” Jerica said. “Nothing bad, anyway.” She glanced back at the kennels.

Elise followed her gaze. Cold shock washed over her as she realized that she and Jerica weren’t alone in front of the House. There were dozens of wind-burned humans clustered in the door to the kennels as if afraid to emerge. They gazed at Elise with fright in their eyes.

“What are they doing?” she asked in a low voice.

“They’ve just started coming out,” Jerica said. Her lips barely moved when she spoke, as if afraid they would hear her. “Ever since Gerard moved a bunch of furniture in there, they’ve been roaming more, but staying in the kennels. This is the first time they’ve actually looked outside. Brave little gerbils.”

Elise snorted. “I hope we have room for a few more,” she said dryly, rounding the Mack truck to open the passenger side door.

Gerard helped the slaves that they had rescued climb down. They were in comparatively better condition than the ones that had been in the kennels; their hair hadn’t been encrusted with the wasteland’s dust yet, and they didn’t look quite as haunted. “Oh my God,” a woman whispered at the sight of the main entrance to the house with its toothed archway.

“It’s all right,” Gerard said, taking her shoulders. “You’re safe here.”

Elise almost laughed at that.
Safe
. It wasn’t a word that she would use for the situation.

“Where is this?” asked another of the new slaves. The fact that he could speak so clearly meant that he must have been a very recent acquisition; most of the humans that had been around longer than a few days all spoke as though they had smoked a pack a day for thirty years.

“The House of the Father,” Gerard said.

Elise’s eyelid twitched. “Get them settled,” she said, rubbing a hand down her face.

“Kennels?” he asked. “Staff quarters?”

“Dealer’s choice,” she said. She leaned in close to his ear so that the humans wouldn’t be able to hear them. “But for fuck’s sake, keep them out of my way.” She straightened. “Jerica, follow me.”

They strode toward the doors of the main house. Elise could feel the eyes of the slaves tracking her path. They couldn’t seem to tear their gazes from her.

Neuma met them at the front door of the house. She was holding a cloth bag in her hands, and her grimace faded only momentarily when she saw that Elise had returned, alive and mostly unharmed.

“I think I know how someone got into the House to let Belphegor out,” Neuma said. “Look what I found ditched outside the north gates.”