Ruled by Steel (The Ascension Series #3) (40 page)

Removing that half of the spear made the rest of it slide out of her back, inch by inch. She could feel its splintered point move through her body. Lincoln watched her face closely as it continued to slip, his breathing growing choppier, a devilish smile splitting his face. The handle clattered to the linoleum.

“Too bad I’m not a megaira that feeds on pain,” he said, tugging on the electrical cable still embedded in Elise’s wound. She could feel it threading all the way through her. “This would taste
amazing
.”

Elise sagged flat against the counter, panting and sweating. The pain was better without the spear, but the foreign object had only been an annoyance, not the real trouble. The problem was that he had shocked most of her energy away, and she needed to feed.

“Pain won’t make me fear you,” Elise said.

“Maybe the right kind of pain,” Lincoln said with a shrug. “Let’s find out.”

Still holding on to the switch, he jerked a cleaver out of his sheath. Elise watched the motion of his hands. If he dropped the switch, or if she could take it from him, she could turn it on him. It wouldn’t have the same effect on Lincoln as it would on a nightmare outside of a human vessel, but it might fuck him up enough for her to escape.

He began wrapping the conductive wire around his cleaver. She wiggled her fingers under his knees, trying to get her hands free.

“You know, I’ve been thinking about what I’d want to do to you when you came back. You were a
big
problem last time we fought. You ruined months of preparation and embarrassed me in front of Aquiel.” Lincoln tied the wire off just short of the handle of the knife, giving himself something to hold on to without being shocked himself. “I decided that I wanted to mutilate you. Sort of like the cult was doing, you know? With the dog bites? And I’ve been practicing on bodies to get it right.”

He clicked the battery.

Another shock jolted through Elise’s body. She forgot about her hands—she forgot she even
had
hands—and lost herself in the pain.

When sensation returned, she felt sharp pain in her arm. She looked down to see that Lincoln had started digging fake tooth marks into her arm with the point of the knife while she was electrified, damaging her the way he had Devadas.

The incisions healed slowly as he worked. Much more slowly than usual. Electricity was how Elise had pierced her eyebrow, with a friend’s help, so she knew it was possible to shock her enough that she wouldn’t heal at all. And that battery still had a lot of charge.

She felt the first tingle of fear.

“There we go,” Lincoln said, pressing his knees harder into her hands. “That wasn’t so hard, was it? Now we should—”

An explosion rocked the diner.

His weight was suddenly gone. Elise saw him hit the shelves behind the counter out of the corner of her eye as if someone had thrown him, though she believed that they were alone. Everything hanging on the walls rattled with the tremors. The bar stools shivered. A bolt of silver-blue magic left a negative imprint on her vision as if lightning had struck.

She felt a flare of infernal energy, and then that, too, was gone.

The diner was quiet.

Elise had no idea what had happened to Lincoln, but she wasn’t waiting to find out. She rolled onto her side to peel the electrical wire out of her wound. It sort of tickled. She wasn’t used to having her innards tickled. The relief of having it out liquefied her muscles, and she was too weak to hold herself up. She slipped off the counter to the floor.

After all the electrical shocks, a three-foot fall didn’t hurt.

The bell over the diner door jingled. The hinges whined again.

A moment later, a hand appeared in her vision. It was covered in a leather glove, but there was a gap between the glove and sleeve, and through that she could see warm, dry skin marked with the faint imprint of tattoos. There was blood flowing under the surface.
Blood
.

Elise seized the arm, digging in her fingers. She was fading. She was going to lose herself, vanishing into the smoke of Hell, far from the battle where she was most needed. But if she could just have the blood—if she could just feed—

“I have you, Elise. Hang in there.”

That voice
.

Her gaze traveled up the sleeve—he was wearing a white cable knit sweater that brought out the olive tones in his skin—to the pulse throbbing at his throat, and then the sharp jaw covered in white five o’clock shadow, the angular cheekbones, the straight line of his nose.

James wasn’t wearing his glamor. He was silver-haired and ageless. His blue eyes cut through Elise.

She was too surprised to see him, and too weak, to attempt to fight against him as he gently lifted her to her feet. She knew she must have been staring at him slack-jawed, but couldn’t seem to stop herself. 

He peeled the pieces of her shirt aside to look at the wounds. “How did he manage this?”

She swallowed hard. “I made a stupid mistake. He jumped me.”

His eyes traveled over the wreckage of the diner. “And he had an electrified spear, I see. You’re lucky you’re still in this dimension.”

“Aquiel won’t let me turn incorporeal,” Elise said.

He leaned her against the counter. She could see Lincoln on the floor on the other side with blood oozing from a wound on his forehead. It wasn’t spraying with the usual force of a wound on a possessed person. His veins weren’t bulging anymore, either.

“He’s exorcised,” James said, pulling off one of his gloves and using his bare hand to gently inspect her wounded arm. The brush of his skin against hers hurt like sunlight. Like he was too bright, too dangerous, for her to be close to him. “You’re safe.”

She didn’t feel safe—not when she could tell Aquiel was still near, and especially not with James touching her like that. “How did you exorcise him that fast? I can’t even do that without some ritual.”

“Hmm.” He made sure that she was steady on her feet with the counter’s help, then took a small notebook out of his back pocket. He started to draw a rune, glancing occasionally at her wounded stomach, as if evaluating what kind of spell he should cast. “It seems that my magic is stronger when I, ah…panic. I merely pointed at him through the window and let loose.” He gave an embarrassed shrug. “It seems to have worked.”

It seemed to have blown Lincoln across the room. Hell of a power boost.

And it was for her.

Elise shut her eyes against the dizzy spell that struck her at that moment. “Forget the healing spell. We have to get back to the fissure. The pack—”

“Has everything under control, last I saw. You’ll be useless in a fight until you’re healed.” He looked the rest of her over for wounds with clinical briskness, feeling her scalp, the back of her neck, her other arm. “Considering how terrible you look, you’re mostly unharmed. The only issue is…this.” He gently pressed a bare hand to the wound in her stomach, the runes on his trembling fingers brightening her skin. She flinched.

He caught her eyes. The look of concern was so familiar, even if his pale features weren’t. It was the same look he had given her after a thousand other nearly fatal wounds.

“What are you doing here, James?” Elise asked, pushing his hand off of her stomach. “You were in Ireland.”

He resumed drawing. “I was diverted.” He whispered an ethereal word, making the rune glow. It was a convenient excuse not to give a real answer to her question. “This might hurt,” he said, peeling the rune off the page so that it danced over his fingers.

“It’s not going to work on me, James.”

He activated it anyway. The magic flared through her with a cold shock, almost as painful as the electricity. She dug her hands into the countertop behind her. His hand was the only thing that kept her from falling completely.

When the magic faded, she wasn’t healed.

If not for the excruciating pain that remained, the look of shock on James’s face would have been extremely rewarding. He looked down at the blank page, and then back at Elise. “Why…? But I healed you the last time we were in Northgate.”

Elise’s knees refused to hold her up. She could smell Lincoln’s blood from the other side of the counter and wanted to go to him—not to make sure he was okay, but to drink. “I healed because I fed. The fact that you tried to heal me at the same time was coincidental.”

“Fed?” James asked. “What do you mean? What do you need, exactly?”

He didn’t know. It hadn’t occurred to him that Elise, as a demon, would need to feed like demons did. She didn’t have the strength to explain it. She couldn’t even manage to tear her eyes from the faint throb of his pulse in his throat.

“James,” she breathed, digging her fingernails into his shoulders. “All I need from you right now is food.”

“Food? You mean…?”

“Blood,” Elise said. The delicious, powerful angel blood just under the surface of his skin.

His eyes widened.

Elise pressed her lips against the pulse in his throat and his spine stiffened.

Blood
.

A distant thudding broke through the air. James jerked away from her, and Elise was torn between relief and annoyance. “Wait here,” he said, helping her sit on a bar stool so that he could look out the window. Whatever he saw on the other side filled his eyes with grim anger. “Something’s happening at the bridge.”

Elise limped back
to the statue of Bain Marshall, James bent low to half-carry her with one of her arms gripping his shoulder and his arm looped around her waist for support. Every step was a fresh shock through her fragile skin. She clenched her jaw.

“I have to ask something before we return to the fissure,” he said. “Have you spoken to Anthony lately?”

Was he joking? She cast a sideways look at him, but he looked completely serious. “Not since I went to Hell. Have you?”

A pause. “No, of course not. I’ve just been wondering—are you all right?”

A bitter laugh escaped her. “I’m breathing through a hole the size of your fist in my abdomen.”

“That’s not what I meant,” James said, pausing in mid-step. “Are you okay?” The way he pitched it, she could tell that he didn’t mean the smoke rising from the fissure, her long days in Hell, the failure to save so much of the mortal army.

It was tempting to tell him the truth. Elise wanted to tell him that she wasn’t okay. She hadn’t been okay since she found out that James wasn’t who she thought he was, and there was nothing that could fill the holes he had left behind in her life—not Anthony and McIntyre, not all the hunting, not learning to write magic and trying to conquer Hell with steel and blood. There was a big part of her that felt like none of this would have happened if it hadn’t been for James. But everything was worse without him.

“I’m fine,” Elise said. A stupid, horrible lie.

James began to speak. “I wish that I could—”

Thud
.

The earth shook below them, interrupting him.

Elise broke free of him and rushed to the edge of the town square, holding on to the corner of an accountant’s office building for balance.

Aquiel was on Earth.

The remaining wolf pack stood between her and him, ground scattered with bodies both human and otherwise. The survivors were insignificant pinpricks in front of his hooves. He was taller than Bain Marshall, taller than the sky.

She was dizzy with pain, and the sight of the battle lost was almost enough to make her succumb to the void. But the fact that she
could
feel herself on the verge of becoming incorporeal meant that Aquiel had relinquished his hold on her—or been forced to relinquish it.

It was then that she realized that a handful of angels floated in front of Aquiel without having to flap their wings, lifted by the brilliant glow of energy.

Nash’s reinforcements had arrived after all.

It didn’t matter. It was too late for most of the humans and too late for Elise. The light scalded her. When she tried to grab James, her arm slipped through his shoulders as though she were a ghost.

She dug her fingers into the ground and tried to focus on the tactile sensation of it: soil between her fingers, the pain in her gut, the tangible world.

Elise was about to lose herself.

“Your demands mean nothing to me,” Aquiel was saying, voice shaking through downtown Northgate. “This world is mine. I have set hoof upon it and will feast on the flesh and fears of every mortal in my reach.”

She thought that the angels must have been responding to him, but all she heard was a skull-shattering chime. Elise bowed her forehead to the ground and pressed her hands over her ears. She could see through her elbows and watch the blood in her veins coursing through her arteries.

James’s body curved around hers, shielding her from the light. It wasn’t enough. The glow was pulling her apart. She was fraying.

“They’re not going to be able to kill him,” she mumbled. He was too great, and Earth had become Hellish enough that it was practically his home territory now. The angels didn’t stand a chance that close to the fissure.

“I know they can’t. I’ll get the angels out of the way.” He took her wrist, lifting her hand to his mouth. “And then
you
can kill him. You can get closer than I could. Make it swift.” He pressed a kiss to her palm. A shiver rolled down her spine.

But he hadn’t been merely kissing her. He still had at least one trick up his sleeve that he hadn’t taught her—he had whispered an ethereal rune straight onto her hand.

Elise stared at the glowing rune. It was shot through with both blue and red. Their individual colors. It resembled the destruction rune that she had wasted on Belphegor with his enchanted armor, but far more complex, and so much brighter.

She curled her fingers around the rune. Her skeletal fist trembled.

“Okay,” she said.

He tugged off his gloves and tucked them into his belt, leaving them folded over his hip. “This could be loud,” he warned.

Then James turned and lifted both hands.

For an instant, he was bathed in stinging light, his flesh a wash of crystalline daylight, white hair outlined in brilliant blue.