Ruled by Steel (The Ascension Series #3) (44 page)
Read Ruled by Steel (The Ascension Series #3) Online
Authors: S.M. Reine
But she could feel the tension in his muscles, and she knew what it meant.
He hadn’t come back from the deliberation in Heaven just because he missed her.
“All of the angels are going to war now, aren’t they?” she asked, eyes closed, the point of his chin pressing against the top of her head. “The war’s going to get worse.”
“Yes,” he said. “They’ve decided to take decisive action. We can only hope it’s not too late.”
Summer’s eyes prickled. “You’ll go with them, won’t you?”
Again, he said, “Yes.”
She expected the answer, and it still hurt like being punched in the stomach. “I want to say I understand, but I don’t. You don’t owe anything to anyone. You’ve already done more than any of those assholes—and they’re only doing it to save themselves. They don’t even care about humanity. And this is your second war, Nash!”
He hooked a knuckle under her chin, lifting her face so that she had to look at him. “We all fought in the First War,” Nash said gently. “And we’ll all fight again. If we don’t, all of humanity may fall.” He stroked his thumb along her jaw, tracing its shape to the soft skin behind her ear. “I don’t fight for them, Summer. I fight for you.”
He took her hand, pressing a hard square into her palm. He closed his hand around hers so that her fingers curled around its hard edges.
Nash watched her intently as she lifted the box. Her breath caught in her throat.
It was a ring box.
“Is this…?” She couldn’t seem to finish the sentence.
“A promise,” Nash said simply.
Summer almost didn’t want to open the box. The mystery of what was inside was dizzying, tantalizing. It could be anything. Maybe it was another summoning stone. Or it could be a note that said, “Just kidding! I’m not really about to leave you to fight a bloody war against Hell,” which would be the best thing that Summer could imagine Nash giving her.
But she did open it, and it wasn’t a note.
It was a ring with an opal trapped within a delicate lacework of gold wire. It looked fragile and elegant. The stone itself was beautifully imperfect, as if Nash had somehow caught a sunset over an ocean within it. She lifted it out of the velvet, her heart frozen in mid-beat.
“Holy crap,” Summer breathed. “That thing’s bigger than my cat.” That was only a hyperbole because pretty much nothing was bigger than Sir Lumpy.
“If you’re comparing it to your beloved feline, I’ll assume it’s meant to be a compliment,” Nash said, lips curved into a lazy smile. But the smile didn’t hide the worry in his eyes. Like he seriously thought that Summer was going to reject the ring—and reject him.
A laugh bubbled out of her that sounded too sharp, almost like a cry. “Shut up and put this on my finger,” Summer said, shoving it at him.
“Is that a yes?” He held the ring out, trapped between his first finger and thumb. There was the faintest tremble in his hand. Nash Adamson, richest man in the Haven, ancient angel, and former soldier of God, was nervous.
She slipped her finger through it. Then she flung herself at him, arms around his neck and legs around his waist, and he staggered from the sudden weight.
Summer couldn’t speak. Grief wasn’t the only thing that was too powerful for words.
They kissed under the new moon, surrounded by the howls of the wolves and watched by Seth’s memorial. Nash’s lips tasted salty, and she wasn’t sure which one of them was crying.
He was still going to leave. A ring didn’t change that. It couldn’t stop the war or save the lives that had already been lost in it.
But it was a promise that he would be back, and it would be enough for Summer to keep living.
Summer tried to
stay awake to see the wolves come home the morning after the moon. She really did. But after laughing giddily with Nash for a while, followed by body-wracking sobs, and then all the comfort sex in a warm, shady grotto, she was just too exhausted to make it until morning. Consciousness was way too hard.
She woke up a few hours later to find that Nash had kept one promise—he hadn’t left her while she slept. He was still warm underneath her, wings spread around them to shelter her from the drizzle of snowmelt. He smelled like freshly cut grass, a wood stove in winter, the heat of the sun on wet soil. He was leaned back against a tree, she was leaning against him, and there was no bed more comfortable than being in his arms.
She smiled at him, curling her fingers in his shirt. That huge rock was still gleaming on her finger. “What time is it?” she asked, snuggling under his chin, like she could climb inside of his heart if she just flattened herself hard enough against his chest.
“Almost sunrise,” he murmured into her hair.
Summer peered through the canopy of his feathers. Crystalline snow hung on the tips of his wings. Beyond that, the sky was navy.
Footsteps approached beyond the trees.
Rylie and Abel had returned. They were human and snow-soaked, feet dragging with exhaustion. If they were human again, with the pack trailing behind them, then it really was sunrise. A new dawn, a new day. The beginning of life after Seth.
Summer wanted to show Rylie what Nash had given her, but she didn’t get up. Once she got up, Nash would have to leave. She just wasn’t ready for the day to start—or for the war to continue.
She watched Rylie and Abel pass in silence. Their hands were joined, heads bowed together, shoulders touching.
They were in their own world. Everything else could wait.
Rylie and Abel retreated to her cabin together, and they didn’t come out for a long time. Summer took that as a good sign—that even in grief, staring in the face of war, they could all find happiness.
She could only hope that it would be enough.
The pack mourned
Seth for what felt like an eternity. Abel watched them pass in and out of the mausoleum without joining them, separate from their grief. Everyone visited at least a handful of times. Even all those humans that had stuck around after the fissure battle. Abram was almost as frequent a visitor as Rylie, who seemed like she never left the damn grave.
But eventually, Summer drew both of them away, and a night came when nobody was visiting Seth’s body.
It was only then that Abel went into the mausoleum carrying a bottle of tequila.
He had been drinking enough that he had a hard time walking straight—no small feat for a werewolf, whose speedy metabolism meant that he needed enough alcohol to kill three humans before he could get drunk. But he had been working hard at it for days, and recuperating from silver poisoning seemed to have made it a little easier to get drunk. He finally had a satisfying buzz that numbed the horrible shock of seeing Seth dead again.
Until he had taken Seth’s body from Elise, Abel hadn’t really believed that his brother was gone. Rylie hadn’t been talking about what had happened, after all, and there hadn’t been a body. He’d thought, maybe she was confused. Maybe Seth had just gone missing.
Seth had always been the smarter brother. If anyone could have survived the Breaking and everything that followed, it should have been Seth.
“But here you are,” Abel said, staggering to Seth’s side. “Look at you, you ugly fuck. Here you are.”
He had been placed in the center of the room. There were flowers around his body, some candles, a cross with his name in the middle. The reverence made Abel want to gag. He kicked aside a basket of flowers and knocked a candle over. Abel stomped it out before the flames could spread. It cleared enough room for him to stand by his brother.
Abel stared at Seth’s face. Stone aside, it was him. No sculptor could have captured his features so perfectly. That acne scar on his chin. The nose that came from their mother. The shared slope of their brow. It was some magic bullshit that had preserved his body, but it was definitely him.
There was no hint of life in him. Abel would have known if there was. He would have felt it.
Seth really was dead.
“For fuck’s sake, man,” he said, hand tightening on the neck of the tequila bottle, “you weren’t supposed to die first.”
He had never planned on burying his baby brother. They were hunters, sure, and hunting was dangerous, but Abel was older. He was reckless. Seth was the baby, and this was just so fucking
wrong
.
Abel took another long drink, and the sting of tequila was as bad as the sting in his eyes.
He pounded his empty fist on Seth’s chest. If it had been any other stone, the blow would have been hard enough to crack it—Abel couldn’t have held back if he wanted to. But all that happened was that his wrist ached. Abel hit him again, and again, and then he smashed the empty bottle on the floor and that still wasn’t enough to bring him back.
“Fuck you, Seth,” Abel said, swinging another punch at him and missing. His vision had doubled, quadrupled. He couldn’t even hit a stationary object.
He slid to the base of the table, sitting next to Seth among the shards of glass and singed flowers.
Even when he wasn’t looking at the body anymore, that face was impossible to get out of his head. Seth’s death mask looked a lot like his face when he’d realized Rylie was leaving him for Abel. That horrible, crushed look of a man who
knew
his life was over.
Abel wanted to say something else to Seth. There was a lot of bullshit he should have said. Like how he was sorry for taking Rylie—but that wouldn’t have helped anyway, because Abel wasn’t really sorry; he had always
needed
Rylie in a way that Seth didn’t. And wasn’t that a horrible thing to think now that his brother was dead? That he was still glad that he had come out on top?
He wanted to say that Seth should have been Alpha all along, because he was the responsible one, the good guy, the man that could make the hard decisions and do it right.
Abel wanted to apologize for being a jackass.
None of it mattered. Seth was in a better place—a place where he wasn’t hurting. With, like, angels and haloes and harps and shit. There was no doubt in Abel’s mind that if human souls could end up in some lush Heaven with hot naked ladies, Seth would have been first in line to end up there.
Except that Abel knew angels. He was going to have an angel as a son-in-law—what kind of fucked up shit was
that
?—and there was no Heaven for human souls. It was a place where those douchebags hung out talking about how much they hated mortals. That was it.
No, there was no Heaven like that, and Seth was gone.
The door opened, and a tall figure ducked into the room. At first glance, Abel expected it to be Nash. He stood in preparation of meeting him. But then the smell reached him, and the man stepped into the candlelight, and Abel realized that it wasn’t Nash after all.
James held his empty hands in front of him. Abel had seen what the witch could do. He knew that being empty-handed didn’t mean nothing.
Abel loosed a low growl, his fingertips itching as claws emerged from the nails. He had never been able to selectively shift like Rylie had. He hadn’t thought it was possible. But seeing this man at Seth’s grave made him angry enough that the wolf wanted to leap out and rip James’s throat open.
“I’ve come to pay my respects,” James said in a careful, soothing voice. “And to apologize.”
“For what?” Abel bit out. His teeth felt loose in his mouth. Jesus, he was going to lose it. He wondered if James knew how close he was to dying.
“For my role in what happened,” the witch said. He nodded to Seth’s body.
“The fuck do you mean?”
James’s face registered mild surprise. “You don’t know?”
Abel crossed the room in two steps and seized James by the throat, sinking his claws lightly into his neck. The scent of blood flooded the air. The witch tensed, but didn’t fight back. “Did you kill my brother?” Abel asked.
James didn’t look afraid. He should have been.
Just say yes. Say yes, and I’ll fucking kill you right here. Say it.
“I didn’t kill him,” James said, “but I know how to bring him back.”
Shock swept over Abel. He dropped his hand and stepped back, heartbeat pounding in his temples.
“What?” he asked.
James straightened his shirt, dabbed his fingertips at the wounds on his neck, frowned at the sight of blood. “I understand that you’re angry, Abel, but I want nothing more than to help your family. I thought that you might like to know what you can do to make all of this heartbreak…vanish.” He swept a hand through the air, and the remaining candles flickered.
Abel’s eyes traveled over the shattered glass and up the table to his brother’s body. Was he really gone? Could he still be saved?
What did James know that Abel didn’t?
“I’m listening,” Abel said.
Dear reader,
Thanks for joining me for yet another book! I’m working hard on the next book in the series,
Caged in Bone
. If you’d like to know when it comes out, visit
my website
to sign up for my
new release email alerts
.
I hope you’ll also leave a review with your thoughts on the site where you bought this. It helps other readers find the series, and it would mean a lot to me!
Thanks so much for your ongoing support. Happy reading!
Sara (SM Reine)
http://facebook.com/authorsmreine
Table of Contents
