Ruled by Steel (The Ascension Series #3) (29 page)

For a long time, even in the First War, Nash had agreed with that attitude. But when Elise said “three hundred people,” he thought of forty specific people that he would die to protect: the pack of wolves. His woman’s family.

These three hundred likely had family, too.

She seemed to take his hesitation as reluctance. A shadow crossed over her eyes. “I don’t
need
to ask you nicely, Nashriel.”

Those were the words she said. What he heard was,
Please help me, my son.

The world blurred around him. He forgot that he was in Hell. He could hear the groaning of the Tree’s shifting trunk, its leaves stretching wide to drink up the sunshine, and the bubble of the river that ran through its tangled roots.

He could almost see her face again. Her benevolent smile.

Nash shook the memory away to see Elise glaring at him.
Not Eve. Elise.

He reared back in disgust. “If you think that Eve’s voice will convince me—”

“This isn’t about Eve. This is about a lot of innocent lives.”

“Rich, coming from you. I find it hard to believe you’re so stirred by the plight of the slaves.”

She didn’t try to disagree with him. “Look at it this way. Once I get into the Palace, I can take control of the wards and prevent other demons from using the bridge. And I might be able to stop the fissure’s growth.” She reached into the neck of her shirt and extracted a vial. It was the width of her thumb at the top and narrowed to a point that looked like it could break skin. “This is similar to what was used to open the Hell gates in the first place.”

Nash reached out to take the vial. She drew back.

If what she said was true, then they could stop the creep of war on Summer’s home.

He stared at her hard, trying to decide if she might be lying. It was nigh impossible to read a demon’s mind. But if she was trying to deceive him, though, she showed no sign of it.

When he didn’t reply, she spoke again. “We’ll have to get past nightmares to reach the Palace. The slaves in this House need psychological repair and fortification against mental attacks. You’re an angel. You can dig down and fix them.”

“Slaves?” He opened his senses slightly, allowing himself to feel more of the horrors surrounding him. There were demons nearby—yes, many demons, all gathered in the barracks. They were blank slates. Probably some stupid lesser demons. Elise was utterly unreadable. But beyond her, in the building to which she gestured, there were mortals. Many of them.

“Slaves,” Elise confirmed.

He advanced on her, wings snapping wide behind him. The muscles of his back ached from the tension. “You have slaves?”

“I do now. I didn’t choose this. Trust me.”

Nash glared at her, looking for a hint of guilt in her expression that wasn’t there. Good Lord, but she was magnetic—he struggled to tear his eyes from her. Even as disgust coursed through him, there was no ignoring how desperately he longed to see her smile at him. This pretender. This usurper.

All angels were irresistibly compelled to love Elise, who carried the soul of Eve within her—the first angel, the mother of all those like Nash. But that fascination existed alongside the loathing. An internal war that Nash doubted could ever be won. “What’s happened to them?” he asked finally.

“They’ve spent years enjoying the TLC of Hell, they’re broken, they need to be fixed so they can get the revenge they’re desperately craving. Are you going to help me or not?”

Nash glared. “Whatever happens, you must promise to disassemble the bridge. I can’t touch it, nor can the wolves. We need a demon to do it.”

“The humans want me to leave the bridge intact so the slaves can escape.”

“I won’t touch a single slave mind unless you agree to it,” Nash said. “I can’t guarantee help from the angels. But if you agree to disassemble the bridge, I’ll protect your little ‘army’ from nightmare coercion, and…” He drew in a steadying breath. “I’ll ask the ethereal coalition to come to Earth.”

Her jaw tensed. “Fine.”

“There are hundreds of them?”

“Hundreds.”

“You realize that the bridge is already complete. The Palace could be sending demons to Northgate at this moment. Healing hundreds of minds will take time that we don’t have.”

Elise smiled thinly. “Then you’d better get started.”

Fifteen

Elise didn’t watch
Nash work on the slaves for very long. Three hundred people were going to take a lot of time to heal, and she had better things to do than watch. Most of the humans had broken down and cried the instant they saw him. He was a beautiful fragment of Heaven against the horrors of Hell—a reminder that there was something better beyond the black walls containing the House of Abraxas—and many were downright worshipful to see him. It was going to be a slow, tedious process.

After Nash had worked on the first dozen slaves, Elise left and prepared herself to jump to Earth. Neuma had found armor for her among the warehouse where the slaves had picked their weapons, but she set that aside for now—if she was going to stop off in mortal-occupied areas of Earth, she needed to pass for mortal. Instead, she donned a leather jacket, hid Seth’s pistol underneath, and tied her hair back.

Neuma had moved the ethereal artifacts from the warehouse into Abraxas’s office for safekeeping, and the fragments hummed as Elise walked around them. They were responding to the ethereal mark hidden under one of her gloves. Like they were asking her to assemble them into a gate and open it wide.

Elise ignored the request.

She was surprised to see that the gate’s pieces weren’t the only ethereal artifacts on the pile, though. There were also an assortment of maps and a chest of smaller objects—bejeweled chalices, gold-bladed weapons, some jewelry. Abraxas must have been collecting for a long time. Maybe since the First War. Elise grabbed one of the golden knives and tucked it into her boot.

As she rose from her crouch, something far more mundane caught her eye.

Neuma’s envelope was still on the desk.

Elise traced its edges with her fingertip. She was going to have to go back to Earth to pick up batteries anyway. It wouldn’t take much longer to phase between the hardware store and the address that Neuma had given her.

“You win, Neuma,” she muttered, tucking the envelope under her arm against her better judgment.

Her door opened and Nash entered, stepping in at an angle to avoid bumping his wings. He glanced around the office with obvious disdain. He wasn’t wearing his jacket anymore, revealing a bloody slash in his shirt.

It had only been a few minutes since she left him. Elise frowned.

“Are you already done?” she asked.

He looked like he was about to reply, but was distracted by the sight of the ethereal artifacts behind her. Nash walked toward them. “What are
these
doing
here
?”

“They were collected by the last guy who ran the House. I can only think that he wanted to use the gate to cross into Heaven.” Elise shrugged. “I’m not going to assemble it. You don’t need to worry.”

“These artifacts belong in Heaven.”

She scooped a ring out of the box and lobbed it at him. “Take them. Take anything you want. I don’t care.”

“Eve’s ring,” Nash said, turning the delicate jewelry over in his hand. She didn’t bother looking closely enough to see if she recognized it.

“Are you done?” Elise asked again, sharper than before.

“I’m resting,” Nash said, pocketing the ring. “Protecting the minds of the slaves is more difficult than I expected. What did you do to these people?”

“Nothing except free them.”

“It seems that they’ve been significantly damaged, and not by typical trauma,” Nash said. “They show signs of being fed off of for months, perhaps years, by an extremely powerful demon. Some are hardly even human anymore.”

An extremely powerful demon? Elise didn’t think that Belphegor had been into that kind of harm. Maybe Aquiel hadn’t just been sending slaves to Abraxas’s lab—Abraxas could have been letting Aquiel eat from his collection, too.

It was worse than she had imagined. She sank into Abraxas’s desk chair, leaning her elbows on the desk. “Can you fix them?”

He frowned. “No. I can’t
fix
them. I believe I can prevent further damage, but what good will that do? You can’t allow these people to approach the nightmares beyond the wall. Despite my best efforts, you may shatter their minds permanently.”

“How many are that bad?”

“Almost half.”

There were already so few slaves. Elise shook her head. “If they want to go, I’m not going to stop them. It sounds like they need to get to Earth as quickly as possible anyway.”

Nash paced the room, frustration turning his movements short and jerky. “Then let’s take them back ourselves, you and I. If we both worked at it, we could do it within a matter of hours.” He was walking from Seth’s body and back to the opposite wall again. Elise grew tenser each time he approached the table on which Seth rested.

“That would take too long, and it would be exhausting. We’d be useless in the fight,” Elise said. “No, Nash. Just patch them together. Do whatever you can and don’t worry about the rest.”

His wings snapped out wide. “You foolish
demon
—”

He cut off, mouth dropping open.

Nash’s wing had brushed the shroud and swept it off of Seth’s feet. Before Elise could stand, he whipped the blanket off of the body.

She held her breath as he looked over Seth.

“My God,” he said. “Is this…?” Elise couldn’t bring herself to respond, but it didn’t seem to matter. A look of mingled horror and disgust twisted Nash’s features. “This is Lilith’s curse. How is this possible?”

Elise steepled her fingers behind the desk, working the response over in her mind.
Lilith’s curse.
There was a name for it after all—a name that Onoskelis might recognize. “He was injured by a weapon that carried the…curse. It wasn’t the wound itself that killed him.”

The angel’s hand fell on Seth’s stomach, where the gash was immortalized in stone. “A sword.”

She swallowed down the shards of her regret. “If there’s a cure, it’ll be in the Palace library,” Elise said. “After I’ve let the slaves out and closed the bridge, that’s going to be my first priority. I’ll find a cure.”

“A cure?” Nash barked a harsh laugh. “A
cure
for Lilith’s curse?” He rounded on her, bracing his hands on the edge of her desk to stare deep into her eyes. “There is no cure for Lilith’s curse.”

Elise glared back at him, hand creeping toward her pistol. “You can’t be sure of that.”

“She swept over Shamain like a plague,” he said. “She came upon us with her children, those twins—Yatam and Yatai. The man fought like nothing I had ever seen, but the women were something else entirely. Lilith and Yatai didn’t need to fight. They only needed to touch my brethren with a lick of shadow and turn them to stone. They killed a hundred of us just like
that
.” Nash jabbed a finger at Seth’s body.

Elise could almost see what he was describing as though she had witnessed it—not the battle itself, but the aftermath. She could imagine Shamain’s shimmering silver towers among emerald green forests, the streets of glossy white cobblestone, and the broken wings of angels who had died upon them. Eve had been there.

“There is no cure, Godslayer,” Nash said again, with finality in his voice. “We ripped apart Heaven and Earth in search of one—and Hell, too. Nothing short of Adam’s blessing could revive those cursed by Lilith. Nothing could heal the harm that they rained upon us.”

He swallowed hard, his throat working. He straightened. Loosened the collar of his suit shirt.

Dangerous silence stretched between them as he paced to Seth, hovering a hand over his body again.

“I had never seen Lilith’s curse take a weapon before,” Nash said without looking at her, “but if it had, I imagine it would have looked very much like your obsidian blade.” His fingers rested on the wound for a brief moment.

She lifted an eyebrow. Had Rylie not told the pack what Elise had done? It sounded like Nash was guessing.

“You need to send him home,” he said.

“I’ll take him there after I cure him.”

“No,” he said. “He’s dead, Elise, and his family needs him now. They need a chance to face what happened and be at peace.” Nash folded his wings back as he faced her. “When I return to Earth, let me take Seth’s body home.”

“You’re not going back to Earth. You’re going to Heaven to get the angels for me.”

“You’re a fool if you think they’ll come,” he said.

Elise pushed back the chair and stood. “And you’re the fool who agreed to try. I need to pick up supplies for the army. You need to finish working on them. We’re short on time, Nashriel—stop wasting it.” She took the shroud from his fist and settled it over Seth again.

Gerard was waiting
for Elise outside the office. “The nightmares are right outside our walls now.”

“How close?” she asked, ignoring Nash as he followed them down the hall.

“Inches,” he said. “It’s like they can’t touch us.”

The wards were holding strong. If Elise couldn’t even feel their assault, then it meant they were doing even better than she expected. She glanced out the hallway window at the battlements. Darkness churned beyond the crenellations—close but harmless.

“Also, Tina’s gone missing,” Gerard said.

Elise frowned. “Tina?”

“One of the witches that was going to enchant the weapons. Josaiah’s doing fine on his own, but I’m worried. I don’t know where she could have gone.”

Maybe she had decided to run rather than face the fear of battle. There was no point in trying to track her down—she couldn’t have gone far. If she didn’t want to fight, that was her business.

Elise strode toward the kennels, still holding the envelope, and glanced back at Gerard. He looked as prepared as any of the humans could have been. He had strengthened from the extra food and water and exercise over the last few days, and now he stood a little taller than before.