Ruled by Steel (The Ascension Series #3) (26 page)

And then Elise heard another growl. A much quieter growl than the one coming from Aquiel, but no less vicious.

She twisted to look over the side of his black knuckles.

Ace was on the cliffs above them. He leaped and landed on Aquiel’s face.

The pit bull was tiny in comparison to the great demon, but not so tiny that his jaws couldn’t grip Aquiel’s eyelid. He ripped his head back and shredded the skin. Aquiel roared. His hand clenched tighter around her for an instant, her ribs creaked, and Elise squeezed out a pained gasp. But then the hand loosened—not much, barely enough room to bring her other arm out.

Elise threw both of her arms over her head and sucked in her breath. She slid out of his grip.

She struck the rocks on her side.

Aquiel was reeling, stomping his hooves, thrashing. His massive hand swatted Ace off of his face.

Elise leaped forward with her arms outstretched.

Ace hit her hard, and she wrapped her body around him as they fell, rolling down the hill toward the entrance of the caverns. She had the presence of mind to grab his mouth before he could bite her, but he didn’t attempt it—the instant he was out of her arms, he was lunging at Aquiel again, thirsty for another taste of demon blood.

“No,” Elise said, snagging his spiked collar. “Other way. Run!”

She yanked Ace into the tunnels with her, hoping that it would be too small for Aquiel to follow. She still couldn’t turn incorporeal—whatever Aquiel had done to force her into her physical body was still in effect. But she could run, she was fast, and she was small.

Elise and Ace shot into the tunnels. She felt pressure-sensitive panels on the floor sink underneath her feet; magma gushed into the air behind her, hot enough to singe her hair. It splashed over the floor in her wake.

She dared cast a glance over her shoulder. Aquiel was too big for the tunnel, but his arm wasn’t. His hand thrust through the tunnel after her. Burning welts lifted on his flesh, but he still pushed through the magma as if he couldn’t feel it.

“Go, go, go!” she yelled to Ace.

They scrambled around a corner in the tunnel, and Aquiel’s hand swiped at her back. The claw on his forefinger raked the back of her shirt.

Elise had reached the cavern with the statues again. She stopped at the feet of the trio, chest heaving, and turned to watch Aquiel’s hand withdraw from the tunnel.

There was another sound—the distant rumbling of his voice, as if he were shouting. She didn’t think he was shouting at her.

He was sending his army after them.

Elise swore and jammed Seth’s gun into the back of her belt again.

They had a head start, but Ace was limping now—he couldn’t put weight on his rear paw. Whatever fit of insanity had seized him long enough to save Elise and make a break for it had faded. Aquiel must have injured him in the attack.

“Come on,” she said, grabbing him around the ribcage with her arms. He kicked wildly as she ran.

She heard yelling. The army was already in the tunnels behind them.

When they broke into the chamber with the pit of magma, she felt a shift within herself. She had gotten far enough from Aquiel to be free of his grip.
Finally
.

Elise phased into darkness with Ace, lifting him into the air. They swirled through the gases spewed by the magma river, past the elevator, and into the entry tunnel. She felt the darkness compressing around her as Aquiel’s weight bore down on her again. He tightened on her like a fist.

With a sickening
pop
, she turned corporeal again.

She dropped Ace on the ledge, but missed it herself. She slid over the side. Her scrabbling fingers caught the edge of the cliff, just barely—her legs dangled hundreds of feet above the magma.

Elise could see movement on the other side: nightmares following her, little more than a black fog with an occasional flash of limbs inside of it. They wouldn’t be slowed by the magma lake or the elevator. They would be able to leap onto the ledge just as easily as she had.

Groaning at the effort, she hauled herself over the edge of the pit. Ace was waiting for her. His ears were perked forward and his wounded paw was tucked under his belly.

“Good boy,” she grunted, rolling onto the floor next to him.

He growled.

She could feel the nightmares creeping up behind her. All of the heat was sucked out of the air, blotting out the light from the magma lake.

“Godslayer!”

The roar shook the tunnel, making rock shower from the ceiling. Elise shot a look over her shoulder.

Aquiel had somehow fit into the cavern. The nightmares rippled around him like a desert mirage, sliding over his shoulders, clinging to his horns, stirring on every exhalation. He smelled of brimstone. He blotted out all light.

He must have been able to turn incorporeal, too.

“Shit, shit,
shit
,” Elise muttered. “Run, boy!”

She didn’t need to tell him. He was already shooting up the tunnel at an awkward lope, foot dragging behind him. Elise shielded him from Aquiel with her body as she peeled her glove off.

Aquiel reached into the tunnel, and Elise jumped out of the way of his hand, tucking her legs to somersault into the corner. He was big and clumsy—by the time he reached around to the other side, she was already on her feet.

She jumped back when he swiped for her again. His claws whistled an inch from her shirt.

As he passed, Elise drew the gun with one hand and the jar with the other. She emptied the clip into his hand. The prick of bullets in his magma-burned skin made blood gush over his knuckles. Elise ducked under his fingers and lifted the jar.

She had it—she had Aquiel’s blood.

Elise flung out her hand, speaking a word of power.

The destruction rune activated.

She turned her face away from the brilliant light that flared from her palm. It sucked all of the strength out of her, channeling it through the earth, the mountain above, the magma below.

And everything exploded.

For a fleeting, rewarding instant, Elise saw the anger and shock on Aquiel’s face—and then a piece of the mountain above dislodged and smashed into the back of his head. It slammed his skull to the ledge. His head snapped back. He cried out, but it was cut off as another piece smashed into his face. Blood gushed from the wound and slopped over Elise’s feet.

The entire cavern began to collapse. Boulders rained around them.

Elise ran.

The wisps of incorporeal nightmares darted around her, but she swatted them away, pummeling at nothing with elbows and fists. The left wall of the tunnel crumbled in on itself. A chunk of ceiling crashed in front of her, and she leaped over it in time for the opposite wall to collapse, smashing shut on Aquiel’s outstretched arm.

She didn’t look back again. She just kept running.

Within a few steps, she felt Aquiel’s control release again—whether it was because the collapse had killed him or he had let her go, she wasn’t sure, and she didn’t care.

Elise exploded into shadow.

In a heartbeat, she stood outside the mouth of the tunnel. She reformed beside the end of the tracks and watched as the mountain consumed the tunnel that Abraxas’s forces had so carefully carved out. Ace had flopped down a few feet away, sweaty and panting and covered in black dust. He was safe.

The land slid above and below. With a final, mighty groan, the entrance collapsed.

Even after the opening was nothing but rubble, Elise could hear everything inside shifting, shattering, settling into a new configuration. The mountain above her had an obvious indentation where the rocks had caved in. Aquiel, and all of his nightmares, were trapped inside—hopefully permanently.

The humans were
raiding the warehouse when Elise climbed down from the mine to return to the House. The hair on the back of her neck stood on end when she realized that they were hauling crates out into the open air, spreading their contents across the ground. They had found the weapons. They had spears and shields and the short swords that the fiends liked to use.

Neuma was helping them.

“What are you doing?” Elise asked, jerking her away from one of the open crates.

“Hey, Elise,” she said. Neuma brushed red dust off of Elise’s shoulder. She was completely coated in debris from the mines. “Have you been up on the walls?”

“I’ve been busy,” she said curtly.

“Get up there. Take a look.”

Elise flashed to the walls. She looked through the window at the streets surrounding the House of Abraxas and found them as empty as ever—but farther into the city, closer to the Palace, darkness was seething. It was like a dense mist that consumed a row of buildings at a time, inching forward at walking pace, slow but sure.

She stretched her senses beyond the walls. Her mind glanced off of the darkness like hitting a sheet of ice and sliding away. But Elise recognized the flavor of the energies.

Someone was sending nightmares after her.

Belphegor.

It didn’t matter. He didn’t have Devadas’s other hand. He wouldn’t be able to get inside. But it also meant that anyone who wanted to go back to the Palace would have to go through the nightmares first.

Elise slammed her fist into the opposite palm, shoulders tense, jaw clenched. Belphegor and Lincoln weren’t waiting for the army to move in from the wastelands. This was it. This was the fight.

And she still didn’t have an army. All she had was two vials of blood.

“I think it’ll take ‘em about an hour to get here,” Neuma said, climbing the ladder to join Elise on the wall. She was armored again. She had found a whip somewhere—probably one of Belphegor’s toys—and carried her favored weapon coiled around her arm like a snake. “The slaves guarding the walls noticed it first, and now Gerard’s arming them. They want to protect the House. Elise, they want to protect
us
.”

Shock jolted through her. “What?”

It was Gerard who responded as he approached from the nearest guard tower. He was freshly scrubbed and had shaved his hair to the scalp, leaving a militaristic stubble in its wake. “We noticed that you’re doing something here, something big,” Gerard said. “You need an army. That’s what’s going on, right?”

An army, information, Belphegor’s death, an entire Palace.

“Yes,” she said, because it was easier than elaborating.

“We want to fight for you.”

Elise frowned. Jerica had counted the humans on the property, so she knew that they numbered three hundred. It was roughly equal to the number of fiends she would have had if things had gone differently. But there was a huge difference between a fiend and a human. Fiends were naturally tough-skinned and, with a strong master, fearless in battle. They were dangerous with weapons or unarmed.

Humans were soft. They needed armor and guns to present a threat. And guns wouldn’t do anything for a human fighting against a nightmare—not that they were likely to make it that far, considering that a nightmare’s glance could paralyze most mortals.

“I don’t think that would be helpful to me,” Elise said.

“Why, because everyone was too scared to leave the kennels?” He thumped a fist against his sunken chest. “Fear makes you strong.”

“Fear makes you useless. Aquiel’s loaded the Palace with nightmares. You can’t hurt them, and you would be lucky to stay sane under an assault for longer than a few seconds.”

“But nightmares can be zapped,” Gerard said. “Look at this.” He held up the Taser that Elise had left behind with Jerica. She wondered how long he had been carrying it. “Electricity’s not supposed to work in Hell, but this does. It’s got a spell on it.”

Elise tilted her head from side to side, trying to see magic out of the corners of her eyes. The guy had to be crazy—he was a mundane, and there was no way he could know that there was magic on the Taser. And yet there it was, only visible if she tipped her head at a forty-five-degree angle: a flicker of yellow energy. Elise never would have noticed it on her own. “How did you discover that?”

“Tina and Josaiah are witches,” Gerard said. “They pointed it out to me.
And
they think that they can replicate it.” Now he looked excited. “There were a lot of Tasers in Abraxas’s warehouse—I bet that’s where the Palace nightmares got them in the first place. These ones are drained, but I figure if we can get batteries that are already charged, we can jury-rig some nasty weapons. Neuma said you could jump to Earth and grab what we need.”

Elise glanced at Neuma, whose gaze was fixed on the forces sliding up the streets.

Neuma still wants me to deliver that damn money for her.
That was what this was about. Not batteries, but that stupid envelope.

Yet if what Gerard said was true—if they could bring human technology into Hell and have it function—then that could open an entire world’s worth of hurt for the nightmares. The cogs in Elise’s head were turning. “The nightmares could still crush you before you touched them.”

But Elise was already formulating a plan.

If they had weapons, then there might be ways to shield the humans from mental assault. Magic, maybe—if Elise was willing to talk to James again, which she wasn’t. But thinking of James led her to thinking about his angel blood, and what angels could do to men.

If she had three hundred humans immune to nightmares and a handful of Tasers…
that
could be useful to her.

“One thing,” Gerard said, interrupting her train of thought. “If we fight for you, we need something in return.”

“What?”

“Don’t destroy the bridge,” he said. “There are thousands of slaves in Hell. Maybe tens of thousands, or hundreds, I don’t know. Leave it standing so we can use it to go home, and so all the other slaves in Dis can be free, too.”

Elise pointed toward the peak of Mount Anathema. “There’s a huge army of demons marching around that mountain as we speak. Do you realize what will happen if that bridge is still intact when the army arrives?”

“Nothing, if you hold it down,” Gerard said.

“It’s irresponsibly risky.”

His eyes were bright with excitement. “It could save everyone.”