Ruled by Steel (The Ascension Series #3) (30 page)

“I have to go to Earth in a minute,” Elise said. “I’m not strong enough to take everyone back, but I could drop you off.”

The offer startled him. Hopeful eyes flicked toward the fissure. “On Earth?”

“Yes.”

“Why me? Why not someone else?”

“You’ve served your time,” she said. “You helped me at the lab. You’ve organized the army. You don’t need to risk your life more than you already have.”

He lowered his gaze again, jaw set and shoulders squared. “With all due respect, ma’am, I’d rather lead my friends into the Palace and see them up the bridge myself.”

Elise shrugged. “Suit yourself.” She stepped into the open air. It was warm and welcoming, though she could smell rain faintly on the wind—an unpleasant indication of the weather beyond the fissure.

The slaves had been organized into groups by Neuma and Jerica near the front gate, and they were all working on assembling their weapons now—wrapping wire around spears and shields, creating weapons that would be able to cut through nightmares as soon as they had a charge.

Nash strode toward them, wings lifted again, ready to continue his work on the slaves.

Elise caught Neuma’s eye around his shoulder and lifted the envelope. The half-succubus mouthed, “Thank you.”

Then Nash extended his wings, blocking her view of Neuma.

Elise closed her eyes and jumped to Earth.

Elise appeared on
Sun Valley Boulevard—a deceptively fancy name for a road cutting through the heart of a miserable town. There was a locals’ casino to her left and a gas station to her right. The prices on the sign had been ripped down to bare the light bulbs inside. The parking lots were empty. The sunset was spotted by orange-tinted clouds, as if they were on the verge of raining blood. The buildings were dark.

Her boots ground on broken glass as she headed north. There were cars abandoned on either side of the road in frozen, bumper-to-bumper traffic. All of the cars were missing headlights and windshields. Many were missing the hoods, as well, with their innards picked apart for scrap. It felt like standing on an avenue of the dead, only slightly less miserable than Hell itself.

She checked the address on the envelope again and walked faster.

Sun Valley, like Reno and Sparks, should have been empty. The smoke that clogged the air had hung over the region for years now. It had nothing to do with the fissures and everything to do with the destruction that had been wrought in Reno in 2009. There was no electricity or jobs or anything else required for civilized life to continue.

And yet there were still people in Sun Valley. Elise saw children playing in the street farther up the hill; they kicked a soccer ball missing half its patches between them, oblivious to the desolation and creeping approach of darkness.

A woman shouted, “Night is coming!”

The children picked up their soccer ball and hurried inside. Elise watched until they vanished behind a screen door before continuing down the road.

People shuffled from empty building to empty building, casting furtive glances at the mountains, checking the position of the sun. Trying to get home before dark.

The streets rapidly emptied, except for the parking lot of what had once been a Scolari’s grocery store. A line of people stood behind barbed wire fencing, supervised by men in large black pickups. The Union must have been bringing supplies into town, feeding the people that hadn’t left—either by choice or because they had nowhere to go.

Elise jerked the lapels of her jacket up to hide her face. The condition of her clothes was too good for her to pass as one of the survivors. She wouldn’t fool anyone. She could only hope they wouldn’t notice her.

A Union official standing near the doors looked at her. She felt his eyes cut through the night.

Elise blinked out of existence and reappeared on the corner of Fifth Street, putting a discount shopping center between them. She didn’t linger to see if he would come looking.

Lupin Drive was a few blocks up the hill to the east, beyond miles of broken fences and boarded-up windows. It was hard to tell the difference between the places that people lived and the places that had been taken by squalor. There was one mobile home entirely hidden by piles of trash bags, but she could feel an entire family living inside it.

Door locks clicked as she passed many of the homes. She caught several frightened faces staring at her through windows before curtains were drawn, too. As if the people recognized her.

They didn’t recognize her. They recognized her pale skin, her black hair, the leather. Reno was still inhabited by many of the demons that had destroyed the city in 2009.

According to Neuma, the evenings were owned by nightmares—not just the corporeal kind, but the incorporeal shadows that swarmed in the darkness, shattering any mind that dared pass through. They thought she was one of them. They thought she was going to hurt them.

It was full darkness by the time Elise located the address on Neuma’s makeshift envelope.

For as long as Elise had known them, the McIntyres had lived in a mobile home. It was a well-maintained singlewide that was aging gracefully; they replaced the carpet every few years, had new furniture, kept the windows modern. 1014 Lupin Drive was nothing like the McIntyres’ home. A low wall circled the property, covered in years of gang tags and spray-painted curses. The lawn was a tangle of dried foxtails. The windows on the west side were missing, replaced by trash bags that fluttered in the wind. A screen door whined on its hinges with every gust of cold wind.

Neuma had told Elise to put the envelope in a mailbox, but all she found was a shattered stump of wood jutting out of the dirt. No mailbox.

Elise pushed open the gate and stepped through. The stairs groaned under her feet. There were minds inside, human minds, although they left a strange taste on the back of her tongue. Almost like the slaves in the House of Abraxas did.

Elise knocked on the door.

After a moment, it opened a sliver. An eye peered through the crack. “Neuma?”

She lifted the envelope. “Neuma sent me.”

The door opened.

The man on the other side had to be at least eighty years old. He was a man with Latino features, a fringe of white hair, and a graying beard. “Come on in,” he said, glancing up at the darkened sky.

Elise stepped in and he shut the door behind her. She couldn’t stop staring at the old man. She recognized the shape of his nose and the twinkle of humor in his eyes.

“Are you…?” She couldn’t seem to finish the sentence. This man was so old, so fragile. Absolutely nothing like the woman that had followed Elise to Hell and helped her take the House of Abraxas.

He gave her a squinty-eyed stare. “You look a lot like Neuma.”

“You too,” Elise said.

He barked a laugh. “I should oughta. She’s my big sister.”

Big sister?

Elise looked around the mobile home with renewed interest. The walls were decorated with vintage posters, pin-ups, a photo of an old drive-in lit by neon in front of a starry sky. The appliances were relatively modern. There were magnets advertising Craven’s Casino on the refrigerator. The bread on the counter was covered in fuzzy green mold.

“I’m Franklin,” he said, swatting everything off of the counter into an open trash bag on the floor, including the unplugged toaster. The loaf of bread fell out onto the floor and he nudged it aside. “Sorry about the house. Been hard keeping up with my arthritis the way it is lately, and it’s only getting worse as it gets colder. Nights are long now. Seems like they’ve been long for ages.”

Elise frowned. “Let me take care of that.” She piled everything into the trash bag and pulled the yellow cords to tighten it.

She kept an eye on him as she collected garbage. It was so strange to see this man who looked like Neuma, but so many years older, with skin so much darker than hers. He smelled like he hadn’t showered in weeks. The scent of aging hung around him—foot creams and sweat and decaying skin.

And this was Neuma’s
younger
brother.

Franklin kept talking. “Haven’t seen Neuma in a while. Guess that’s why you’re here? She finally dead?”

“Neuma’s fine,” Elise said.

He grunted. “What’s her excuse, then? Where she been?”

“She asked me to bring this to you,” Elise began, holding out the envelope.

She was interrupted by a door creaking open. A short, heavyset woman shuffled into the room. Her hair was like brambles. She clutched an over-filled purse to her chest, out of which bulged three paperbacks and a roll of tattered toilet paper.

Franklin wheezed a sigh of annoyance. “Hey. Hey, Lorena!”

She didn’t look at him. She walked into the living room, picked up another book, and tried to fit it into her purse. Franklin gave Elise an apologetic look, like this embarrassed him.

This woman looked even more like Neuma than Franklin did. She was beautiful in a way, somewhere under the mess of her hair and the terrycloth robe. She was graceful, too, even as she attempted to jam one more book into a purse that already had too many.

“Get back to bed, Lorena,” Franklin said, waving the rolled up newspaper at her. “You’re not supposed to be outta bed this late. You know that.”

“Go fuck yourself,” she said. It took obvious effort to shape the words properly, and the words still came out slightly slurred.

He waved the newspaper more emphatically. “Don’t you go talking like that! You’re stupid, not blind. I know you can see we got a guest with us!”

“Fuck you,” Lorena said again, pivoting to shuffle back toward the room.

Franklin kept the newspaper raised, as if considering swatting her with it. He didn’t lower it until she was out of range. Lorena had shut the door behind her when she came out; now she struggled with the door handle.

“Schizophrenic,” Franklin said with a shrug. “Probably demented, but we ain’t got a doctor to say it. And retarded. Like some fucked up in the head eight year old, ain’t never grown up, though she sure whored herself around good enough. Two miscarriages and one abortion and three adoptions, two of ‘em just as retarded as she is. Had to get her plumbing yanked out to stop her and she still got gonorrhea and all that other stuff. Ain’t that a fuckin’ life?”

Lorena was still struggling with the doorknob to her bedroom. Elise set the envelope on the counter, keeping it away from a sticky meat wrapper that hadn’t been swept off by Franklin’s quick attempt at cleaning.

“Let me get that for you,” she said, reaching around her to twist the handle.

The woman reared back with a look of horror, mouth twisted and eyes wide. She saw Elise now. Really saw her. “Don’t touch me! Don’t you fucking touch me!” Her voice reached a high, shrill pitch, almost like a scream.

Elise jerked back, every line of her body going tense. Her adrenaline spiked. Her instincts told her she was about to be attacked. But the woman only stared at her, chest rising and falling as she panted, with a white-knuckled grip on her purse.

“I won’t touch you,” Elise said.

The panic faded from Lorena’s eyes, fraction by fraction.

“All right,” she said. And then, “Neuma?”

Elise touched her hair self-consciously. Her features were nothing like Neuma’s, but with the same pale skin and dark hair, she had frequently thought that they could be sisters. But this was Neuma’s sister here. This old, frightened woman in a bathrobe.

Before she could think of what to say, Lorena slipped into the room. Through the doorway, Elise could see that there was a lantern on the table between two twin beds, one of them stained with human effluence. That was the one that Lorena approached. She started to set her purse down, then shot a suspicious look at Elise and clutched it harder.

“I thought you weren’t coming back,” Lorena said. “What are you doing back? Are you here to help?”

“Yes,” Elise finally said. “I’m here to help.”

“Get me into bed.”

Such wild swings between suspicion and trust, recognition and confusion.

Elise stepped in close, but didn’t help Lorena sit. Her stomach twisted at the sight of the soiled sheets. She didn’t want Neuma’s sister sitting in it.

“Do you have clean sheets?” Elise asked. Franklin was watching from the doorway.

“Think so,” he said. “In the linen closet.”

She left Lorena clutching her purse and checked the so-called linen closet—a cubby in the bathroom, the floor of which was scattered with cat litter, although there was no cat to be seen. There were towels that smelled like mildew but no sheets. She found a pair on top of the laundry basket that were dusty, though far less dirty than what Lorena already had. It looked like nothing had been washed since Neuma left Reno.

Elise changed the sheets on Lorena’s bed. Then she took Lorena’s elbow and helped lower her to the edge of the mattress.

“Don’t touch my purse,” Lorena said by way of thanks.

Elise bundled the sheets up and shoved them into the laundry basket. There was so much that needed to be done, just in the bedroom—crumpled toilet paper collected from the floor, the windows opened so that it could be aired out, the patchy brown carpet vacuumed, the tobacco-stained walls scrubbed. But for now, Lorena wasn’t resting on soiled sheets, and that would have to be good enough.

“You’re a beautiful woman,” the woman said as she wriggled down in bed. Her movements were slow, pained. “Very beautiful. I used to be beautiful, but you’re still beautiful, and you’ll always be beautiful.”

The compliment wasn’t meant for her, but Elise said, “Thank you.”

Franklin closed the door softly behind her when she stepped out. He shrugged again without speaking, as if the gesture were an apology.

“Why haven’t you left Sun Valley?” Elise asked him, keeping her voice low so that Lorena wouldn’t hear it through the thin walls.

“On what horse?” he scoffed. “The Union didn’t bother evacuating us. They barely bother feeding us. We never had a car, don’t have any family to stay with. It’s fine. This is our home.”

It was a rotting mausoleum.

Elise picked up the envelope again and put it firmly in Franklin’s hand.