Ruled by Steel (The Ascension Series #3) (35 page)

“He’s not. I think he’s with the infernal army marching in from the wastelands. I’m going to have to go there before I can join you at the Palace.”

“This would have been good to know earlier, doll. I thought you were going to be there with us when we took the Palace.”

“I trust you to take care of it. You’re strong, Neuma. Much stronger than I ever gave you credit for.”

Neuma’s lips blossomed into a smile. “Took you long enough to notice.” She lifted the vial labeled X. It was the only one that had been marked. “What’s this?”

“My blood. That goes to the fissure above once we’re on—”

A loud
crack
echoed through the air. Jerica and the milling army fell silent, and three hundred faces turned toward Elise to look up the mountain.

The crack turned to a rumble, and then hot air gusted down the hill as clouds of dust lifted behind the House of Abraxas. There were dark shapes in the clouds. They rushed toward the army, and Elise heard the shouts before she could make out the faces.

Brutes. Dozens of brutes—a kind of demon twice as massive as a human with their faces set into their chests and enough strength to snap spines with a single finger.

Not
the kind of demons that would be hurt by electricity.

They had broken through the mine.

Chaos erupted among the human army. They were unprepared. They picked up weapons, donned shields, tried to move to face the rushing nightmares.

But if they turned on the lights and started activating their electrified weapons there, they were going to hit Elise. Worse, they were going to get themselves slaughtered.

Jerica was shouting. “Open the gates! Open them
now
!”

Elise exploded into darkness. The humans might have been unequipped for brutes, but she wasn’t. This was exactly the kind of creature she could take down on her own.

She flew up the mountain, twisting between the rushing demons, filling the spaces between them. It was a quick way to count. Ten, fifteen, twenty—were there really fifty brutes? Aquiel must have sent them through to surprise her.

The nightmares outside the gates hadn’t been a genuine attack. They had been a distraction.

The larger she became, the more of the property she could see: the house, the church, the empty kennels, the cleaning stations, the barracks. She watched the humans flood through the gates to the street, and she could taste the electric zing of their weapons discharging at the shadows beyond. They cut a path straight through the swarm. They might be fine if Elise could keep the brutes off their backs.

She stayed within the walls as she expanded, growing large enough to cover the brutes in darkness. They stumbled within her fog. She struggled to surround them all.

As soon as she had stretched to her limit, engulfing almost half of the brutes, she began to squeeze. To swallow.

And then something cold thrust through her—something that looked very much like a pale, bony arm.

Elise lost control. She frayed at the edges.

Let them go
, said a powerful voice that reverberated through her. The command was impossible to ignore.

She snapped back into her body, hitting the ground hard enough to make the world spin around her. The brutes ran past her. She jerked her knees to her chest, threw her arms over her head, trying to protect herself from their boots.

When they were gone—through the gates, following her little army—Elise was left facing a single demon.

She didn’t need to go looking for Belphegor.

He had found her.

Eighteen

Leading an infernal
army looked like it suited Belphegor just as well as the Stewardship had. He was wearing armor that put the fiends’ plate mail to shame: well-fitted, flame-scorched iron plates that bristled with spikes from every edge. Even the shoulders and wrists of his gauntlets looked like they could kill with a casual gesture.

A crimson cloak hung to his ankles, tattered at the hem from his journey through Abraxas’s mines. Only his frowning mouth was visible under the ridged helm, but Elise didn’t need to see his empty eyes to recognize the skeletal shape of his jaw. She all but smelled the death on him.

There was a head at his belt. A human head. It was suspended by its hair, mouth hanging open in an eternally slack-jawed stare. Elise had seen that flat nose and brunette hair on one of the slaves—one of the witches that had been planning to enchant the army’s weapons. What had Gerard said her name was? Tina?

He had said she had gone missing. Now they knew why.

Belphegor grabbed Elise by the arm and lifted her to her feet. The gauntlets were clawed. The iron points dug into her bicep. “You’ve liberated the slaves only to sacrifice them to Aquiel’s nightmares,” he said in a mild voice. “You should be embarrassed.”

There was almost something robotic about the calmness with which he spoke. He must have been boiling with a need for revenge, but he sounded utterly emotionless. If he had feelings, none of them were betrayed through the eye slits on his helm.

Elise yanked her glove off. He caught her fist and crushed it with sickening pops of bone.

“Don’t,” Belphegor said.

With her free hand, she jerked the ethereal dagger out of her boot and plunged it down through the bottom of his helm and into his throat.

Energy crackled between them as the tip buried into his flesh. Blood gushed over her hand, colder than the Arctic Ocean.

Elise staggered away from him with a groan, clutching her arm. The chill of the blood hurt a thousand times worse than having him crush her hand. Bones healed instantly—this was something else. His blood froze the cloth of her sleeve and began crawling toward her shoulder, so she shook off her jacket before it could climb all the way to her face.

Belphegor wrenched the knife from his throat and tossed it aside.

“Ineffectual,” Belphegor said.

Elise grabbed the knife, heart pounding. It was covered in his blood. She had the last of the three samples she needed to break the soul links in the Palace.

But the other two were with Neuma—and there were fifty brutes, thousands of nightmares, and one very bad demon between them.

He clamped his hand on her shoulder. She flashed into her incorporeal form, releasing herself from his grip. But he seized her shadow and immediately jerked her back into her body again. It was even worse the second time. Her organs felt like they were being compressed.

“There are many incorporeal demons in Hell, Godslayer. Nothing you do will surprise me. Your every action is anticipated,” Belphegor said. “Soon, the nightmares will break your slaves and the brutes will bring them back, and the House will be restored under my name.” He pulled her against the hard metal of his breastplate. “We will finish what I started.”

“Not a fucking chance,” Elise said.

She flashed a few inches away from him, just out of reach, and didn’t bother trying to stay incorporeal. She couldn’t cast magic while she was incorporeal anyway.

Elise lifted her twitching fist and unleashed James’s destructive spell.

Her eardrums popped and her sinuses filled with the sharp scent of copper. Magic thrust through her, shoved across dimensions from James’s core of power, and lanced from her fingers. It brightened the hellish twilight with flashes of red and blue.

The spell struck Belphegor in the chest—and diffused.

Elise froze, arm extended, only able to gape as the magic skittered over his armor.

It didn’t even hurt him.

Belphegor advanced on her, armor clanking, cape whipped behind him by the wind. “As I said, your actions are anticipated. I have fought warlocks before. I remember the counter-spells.” He jiggled the slave’s head at his hip. “And I know how to coerce a witch to enchant my armor for me.”

Hope spiraled away from her, sucked into the darkness of the city beyond the walls.

Elise couldn’t swallow Belphegor, stab him, or use James’s magic against him.

She would have to run.

He reached for her, but she didn’t let him grab her again.

Elise flashed into shadow and followed the army through the gates, surrendering the House of Abraxas to Belphegor.

The nightmares seethed
around Elise, thicker and darker than ocean tides at night. They formed a wall of infernal energy that even she couldn’t penetrate. There was no darkness for her to slip through when they filled Hell’s brutal air with their bodies.

But the slave army had cut a channel through them. The army had done better than Elise expected with the spears and shields. It was as though they had ripped a bleeding wound into the mass of demons.

It still wasn’t enough. The wall sucked closed behind her as the nightmares congealed again, rapidly healing.

Elise rushed down the streets, buildings flashing past her: the apartments, the butcher shops, the apothecaries, factories, and markets. They were a confusing blur of architecture. The windows were empty. The city was a skeleton, emptied by Aquiel’s recruitment. But not for long. As soon as the army returned, the city would be seething with Aquiel’s allies.

She had to get to the Palace before everything else did.

Elise caught up with the edge of the army almost a mile into town. They had broken into a run and were scattered throughout the street, led by the healthiest—Gerard and Neuma—and brought up from the rear by the weakest, the injured. It was the worst way for them to arrange themselves. It left the last of them vulnerable to the brutes. And as she watched, a brute closed in on a limping older woman, grabbed her by the throat, and squeezed her head off of her neck.

Even as the brute devoured the woman, Elise dropped on top of him in a cloud and squeezed tight, rapidly condensing into a fist of darkness.

And then she swallowed.

She felt his muffled screams as clearly as she felt his infernal blood gushing into her. His skin disintegrated atom by atom. His bones became dust, which she devoured just as readily even though it burned. She had never absorbed such a hellborn into herself before. It felt like trying to swallow fire.

It only took a moment to destroy the brute, but it left her with a heavy, nauseated feeling.

There were more brutes chasing the last of the slaves. Several humans were pinned to the ground, being ripped apart, and the pathetic plate mail was doing nothing to save them.

Elise sank into shadow and consumed those brutes, too.

Her human army had noticed there was something else at its rear—something that looked like a nightmare—and a dozen of them turned to face her. There shouldn’t have been anything threatening about a group of humans that were unsteady on their feet and covered in sores, but they had car batteries strapped to their backs and electrified short swords. The weapons would work on Elise as well as any of the nightmares.

She tossed the bones of a brute away, unable to finish eating him. More than two of them was far too much.

The humans stared in horror at the pulp she left behind.

“Get it!” shouted one of the slaves. “Fire!”

Three of them rushed at her. Only three were brave enough to try to stop her.

Elise reformed herself into her physical form, hands extended in a universal gesture of peace. “It’s me,” she said.

They stopped in mid-step. One of them dropped a shield, and it clattered to the pavement.

Most of the army hadn’t seen what Elise could do. They hadn’t known that she was as terrifying as most of the other demons in Dis. Until that moment, she had been nothing but a savior—the one person that had stood up to Belphegor.

She expected them to be angry or fearful. Instead, they sagged with relief. Two of the men actually started grinning.

“We’re safe,” one said to the other.

Elise’s mouth stretched into a grimace. “Not yet.” If she didn’t hold the nightmares back, these humans would never reach the Palace. “Catch up with the rest of the army.” They didn’t move. She flung her hands out. “Go!”

They ran, and Elise turned to face the darkness closing in on them. It was impossible to see beyond the nearest block. The nightmares were rushing toward her. She couldn’t see Belphegor beyond them, but she was sure that he couldn’t be far behind—he would be slower on foot than Elise, but he could grow as tall as a skyscraper, and “on foot” wasn’t all that slow when the feet in question were bigger than school buses.

Elise had to handle the nightmares before they reached her.

She let her full power flare bright, extending her arms as if to embrace them. Elise glowed brightly. Her hair melted into the shadows around her. And when she spoke, it was louder than the blast of wind through the gates of Hell.

“Stop,” she said. “You will obey me.”

They didn’t listen. Aquiel must have prepared them for her.

So much for
that
.

The nightmares crashed over her.

Jerica reached the
Palace first.

She had been trying to stay to the rear of the army, but somehow ended up in front when they scattered, forcing her to dodge bolts of electricity. She could feel the other demons whispering words of hate at the sight of her. They said “traitor” and “cunt,” and she tried her best to ignore them.

She may have been a nightmare, but at least she wasn’t Aquiel’s bitch.

The Palace emerged from the tangle of streets. The sight of her target gave Jerica renewed strength, and she put on a burst of speed, pumping a fist high in the air to signal the army behind her.

The guards watching the entrance to the Palace of Dis weren’t expecting one of their own to arrive with three hundred humans behind her. The handful of them standing on the drawbridge looked shocked at the sight of it. One of them actually dropped his blade.

Jerica drew her cleaver as she rushed.

She met them with blades drawn.

Nightmares didn’t fight like humans did. They were little more than rubbery flesh barely contained by infernal energy; they could twist, distort, and bend like nothing that had bones could. She had decapitated the first of the guards before they even realized that she was a threat.