Ruled by Steel (The Ascension Series #3) (39 page)

No. No, no, no…

Rylie turned back to the nightmare that had attacked Abel to see that the pieces were dragging themselves back together, reforming bit by bit into a full body again. The tendrils connecting them looked like melted wax. The wolf didn’t know what to make of that. She wasn’t used to the things she killed trying to come back.

She didn’t know what to do, but she didn’t need to.

The wolf attacked on instinct. She snapped her mouth shut on the pieces of nightmare, flinging it toward the fissure.

That
thing
had stabbed her mate.

Rylie was still shredding it apart when she realized that something was running at her and Abel.

Not something—someone.

Lincoln hurtled out of the darkness, a cleaver in each hand and a bloody grin on his face. She remembered that look from the night that he had burned Northgate. The wolf wasn’t impressed, but it filled Rylie with hate. He was coming to finish Abel. He was going to hurt her family. Her skull filled with cold murder.

She met him halfway.

The nightmares couldn’t be effectively bitten, but he could—theoretically. Rylie snapped at his legs. Her teeth sank into the leather but didn’t penetrate skin. It was too thick.

Lincoln slammed Rylie to the ground with super-strength and hacked at her side with the cleaver. She twisted out of the way. The point jammed into the asphalt next to her. He struggled to dislodge it and failed. The strength that had driven the blade into the ground wasn’t strong enough to free the blade again.

She twisted, thrashed, trying to bite him. He jerked his hands out of her reach and cackled like it was funny that she was trying to bite him.

“Hey, asshole!”

He twisted at the shout of a human voice—and a fist met his face as soon as he turned.

Lincoln sprawled to the ground, and Elise stepped into view.

She didn’t look quite like the woman that Rylie remembered from their last meeting. Elise had looked passably human then. There was nothing human about the way her skin glowed with brilliant inner fire, black eyes like endless pits, her hair blasted back by the winds from the fissure. She looked even more like a demon than those gaunt-faced nightmares had.

Elise leaped over Rylie as Lincoln began struggling to stand. She slammed her boot into the side of his head. 

He fell and didn’t move.

Rylie hoped that it had killed him.

Elise wrenched the cleaver out of the ground. “Silver,” Elise said with a scowl. She grabbed a fistful of fur at Rylie’s ruff and helped her stand. “Are you okay?” She rubbed the top of Rylie’s head between her ears. Wolves didn’t like being petted, but it was kind of a nice gesture, coming from her. Rylie managed a half-hearted wag of her tail.

Rylie padded to Abel’s side. His breathing was shallow and rapid. So much blood—it caked the side of his fur.

“I see. Okay, get him out of here,” Elise said. “I’ve got your back.”

She spun with the spear, plunging it into the throat of an attacking nightmare. Elise released it quickly. Electricity arced over it as soon as she let go, and the other demon vanished with a wail. The spear clattered to the ground.

Rylie braced her feet against the ground, ready to face another demon—but there were no attackers left. Elise had killed the last of them.

She swung around to see Abram alive. Most of the pack was standing.

No more nightmares.

But Abel was bleeding, and the fight wasn’t over.

Twenty

When silence fell
over Northgate again, Elise took a quick inventory of the survivors. All of the nightmares were gone—that was good. Aquiel was nowhere in sight. Also good. But there were only thirty-seven werewolves and, maybe, at a quick count, a hundred humans.

That was a lot of death.

A man with a gun strode toward her, and she tensed until she saw the similarity to Seth in his face. It was one of Rylie’s kids. The guy named Abram.

“You came at a good time,” he said, shaking her hand. He had a good, firm grip, and the contact made something spark in the back of Elise’s mind. He was a kopis, just like Seth had been. A natural born demon hunter. The only kind of man that could survive running with werewolves.

She glanced around. “Any angels?”

“None.”

“Fuckers,” she said.

The corner of his mouth twitched. “I don’t disagree.”

“Abel got stabbed,” Elise said, holding up the silver-bladed cleaver. “He probably wasn’t the only one. Whatever you guys have to do to heal those wounds, you need to do it fast.”

Abram wiped his sweating upper lip dry on his sleeve. “Damn. We’ll need to get all of the injured werewolves back to the sanctuary fast. If we can just get them to change…”

He kept talking, but Elise didn’t hear him. Her eyes skimmed the clearing. It felt like something was still amiss. They had won the battle with heavy casualties, yes, but the total absence of demons felt wrong, even though she knew that nightmares always vanished when shocked by electricity.

But a human possessed by a nightmare shouldn’t have disappeared.

Fuck
.

“—if you can help us move them,” Abram said, “then I think—”

Elise interrupted him. “Do you see the deputy anywhere?” she asked. “Lincoln Marshall, a human man in demon armor. He’s got bulging veins and bleeding eyes.”

“I saw him,” Abram said, frowning deeply, “but I don’t see him now.”

Rylie gave a short yip, catching Elise’s attention. Rylie stood over Abel, whose entire body shook with seizures as he shifted back to human, but she was staring pointedly up the street.

A man was sprinting away from the battle, disappearing into the smoky haze a couple of blocks away.

Lincoln was fleeing.

Elise had made the mistake of letting Lincoln leave the last time she had been in Northgate. If she had followed him quickly enough, she might have been able to catch him before he made it to Hell. She might have been able to keep him from killing Vassago and Devadas and however many other victims he had taken since then. She might have been able to save him.

She wasn’t going to let him escape again.

“Hold the fissure! Don’t let anything else through!” she shouted to the werewolves.

Elise still couldn’t turn incorporeal. Aquiel’s influence was too strong, even through the fissure. Instead, she ran as fast as she could, fists pumping and chest heaving.

Lincoln was as fast as she was. By the time she reached the end of the block, he had already vanished around the corner and made it to the next turn.

“Fuck,” she hissed.

Elise chased him down to the next stoplight, and then through a park toward the church. He doubled back after that without even looking to see if she was still behind him.

Where was he going? Shouldn’t he have been running back to the fissure to try to help Aquiel? There wasn’t any apparent pattern to his turns—he was just
running
.

She was almost to the edge of town when he disappeared completely.

Elise skidded around a corner to realize that she couldn’t see Lincoln anywhere. He hadn’t gone back the way that they had come, nor did he seem to have taken the only other street, which led toward the grocery store. He was just…gone.

She pounded her fist into her hand, turning to look in each direction again.

He had to have gone
somewhere
. Maybe into one of the buildings, or down an alley that she hadn’t noticed—

The world turned white with pain.

Elise hit the ground before she even realized that she was falling. Her skin was transparent. She could see her bones through the skin of her wrist, the veins seeming to float around them in a tangled web, pulsing with every beat of her sluggish heart.

Her chest wouldn’t go flat to the ground. It felt like she had fallen on something—like a spike thrusting into her breastbone.

She looked down.

No, she hadn’t fallen on something—someone had driven one of the electrified spears through her back. They had pushed it in hard enough to break through her ribs and emerge from the other side just underneath her breastbone. The metal wire had loosened from the spear and caught on her skin. That was what she was propped up on. A spear. She had been skewered.

Elise groaned as she pushed against the ground, trying to dislodge the spear from the earth, but it had been pushed in too far and the angle was bad. The handle was a good four feet long. She couldn’t lift herself off of it. Every little motion sent shocks of pain through her again.

The pain wasn’t as bad as the electricity had been, and that had only been a momentary jolt. If she could just find Neuma to help her break free…

Boots stepped in front of her, leather-clad legs, a pair of cleavers strapped to muscular thighs.

Damn
.

Lincoln hadn’t been running randomly. He had been leading Elise away from her allies.

“I haven’t gotten to tell you yet that I like your little toys a lot,” Lincoln said, crouching in front of her so that Elise could see his face. “They’re clever. Nice way to use my peoples’ weapons against them. I should have known better than to equip them with something that could hurt them, but it seemed like the only way to be prepared for you. I did come prepared for your puppies, though. So I guess we’re even.”

Elise’s knees and toes kicked uselessly against the street. She swiped at him and missed. He was too far away. “You’ve lost,” she growled, which didn’t sound very convincing when she couldn’t even get her feet under her. “I’ve got the Palace. The werewolf pack is holding the fissure. Nothing else is coming over that bridge.”

“Nothing that wasn’t already in the Palace, and only until we take the soul links back. Once Aquiel kills the other two links, the walls will be easier to breach.” A sultry smile crossed his lips. “And once
you’re
dead, there will be nothing stopping us from taking the Palace back.”

“You can’t kill me,” Elise said. Warm fluid dripped out of her mouth, down her lip, splashed on the dirt. It was the color of amber.

Lincoln grabbed the top of the spear. “Why don’t we see if that’s true?”

Click
.

Electricity poured through Elise’s body.

She was nothing but pain. Her every cell felt like it was being ripped apart, fragmenting, turning her into shattered glass. It was like paper cuts, like being skinned, like broken bones and having her fingernails ripped out all at once.

And still, Aquiel wouldn’t let her turn incorporeal.

When the shock ended, Elise felt herself being dragged across the asphalt. Lincoln was still holding the spear. He was pulling her along with it like the way she sometimes dragged Ace along for walks, except that its flanged point was still caught on her breastbone.

Elise tried to shout. “Rylie,” she said, and it only came out as a gurgling rasp. Her lungs wouldn’t expand. She wondered if the spear had punctured them.

“Fun fact about being a nightmare of my prestige,” Lincoln said in a conversational tone. “You learn that there are a lot of ways to skin a cat. When nightmares are young, the way they evoke fear is primitive. They have to brute-force it with their powers. You’re immune to that, of course, and you somehow made your pitiful army immune to it, but it doesn’t mean you can’t feel
any
fear. It doesn’t mean I can’t feed off of you.”

He glanced at her over his shoulder and winked a bloody eye. Ichor oozed fresh from his tear duct and slid down his cheek.

“It just means I have to find some other way to inspire you. And I have plenty of ideas. There’s really no rush to kill you—we can take our sweet time.”

Elise wasn’t afraid—she was
pissed
—and fear wasn’t among her standard emotions, so she didn’t see that changing anytime soon. But something about Lincoln’s words made her think of Devadas in the cell.

Just because she wasn’t afraid didn’t mean she wanted to see how creative Lincoln could get with her.

She twisted on the end of the spear. She should have been strong enough to snap the handle, but the two shocks had drained a lot of energy out of her, and it didn’t work. So she wrapped her hands around the sharp point and tried to push it down so that it wouldn’t be caught on her breastbone. The force from being dragged was too much.

“Fuck,” she groaned.

“That’s the spirit,” Lincoln said.

Hinges whined. The sidewalk under Elise turned to linoleum. A door swung shut behind them.

She strained her head back to see that Lincoln had dragged her into a restaurant with dust-covered stools, dingy booths, and walls decorated with quirky memorabilia. It was Poppy’s Diner. Elise and Lincoln had gone there together before. They had shared pie and milkshakes for breakfast. Elise didn’t eat human food for fuel or fun, but Lincoln liked it, and she had been enjoying his company.

That was before he had become a spear-toting madman, when he had only been a deputy with dubious ethics whose blood and body Elise craved.

Things had changed.

Lincoln tossed her onto Poppy’s counter. The spear turned inside of her, squeezing against her bones. Her back arched from lying on the handle.

“Do you want to share a cherry pie?” he asked, hopping up to straddle her pelvis. His leather pants creaked. He had unwound the cables from the handle of the spear and held the electrical switch. “I know how much you
love
pie and milkshakes.”

“Sure,” Elise said through gritted teeth. She grabbed at his hands, but he swatted them aside easily. “Take your spear and go get me a pie.”

He chuckled and pinned her hands under his knees when she kept grabbing for him. “I bet you want this out, don’t you?”

Lincoln grabbed the end of the spear and shoved. Its hilt snapped inside of her.

Elise clenched her jaw and didn’t make a sound, but she couldn’t keep from jerking. Her spine bowed. Her heels drummed against the counter.

With a wet slurp, he pulled the point of the spear out of her. It left a gaping hole in her stomach. The tank top was destroyed. Hell, her
skin
was destroyed, and Elise suspected she’d be able to see bone if she could lift her head enough to look inside.