Ruled by Steel (The Ascension Series #3) (6 page)

“I don’t know. Does it matter? It can’t be true. A prince would fly his banner and make it known that he was occupying the Palace, wouldn’t he?”

She would have thought so. Anyone that was strong enough to take the Palace—even a Palace that no longer maintained the Treaty—should have been capable of controlling the entire city. It would require an army, or at least cooperation from most of the Houses.

Elise kept an eye on the Palace in the distance as she guided Jerica and the Mack truck to her target.

They stopped in front of a block of apartments that towered above the other buildings, like a gravestone among dead grass. Jerica had suggested it to Elise as a convenient hideout in case things went south at the House. The black obelisk had been built for demons that could turn incorporeal—things that didn’t need traditional doors, but benefited from the vantage point of towering belfries.

The apartments were empty now. The same height that had made the twenty-story apartment building convenient for visiting nightmares put its roof too close to the fissure for paranoid hellborn. Not that being a mile underneath was
close
, exactly, but still two hundred feet closer to the fissure than the streets.

Devadas shied back at the street-level entrance. Inside the apartment, there was no light. It wasn’t meant to accommodate things that needed eyes, after all.

“In there?” he asked. “What’s in
there
?”

“That’s not your concern,” Elise said, gesturing to Jerica to help her back the trailer up to the apartments. She indicated for the nightmare to stop a few inches shy of the door.

Inside, Elise could see perfectly. There were no floors in the traditional sense—only a few platforms connected by a spiral stair where sludgy, half-corporeal nightmares could practice growing legs and trying to walk. Each floor was suspended from the platform above it by wire cables, and everything swayed every time the wind blew hard.

She climbed the steep stairs. Devadas hesitated a moment before following, hands outstretched to touch the steps in front of his face. His tail rippled, contracted, smoothed, and he pushed himself up the stairs behind her.

Elise had chosen a platform halfway up the tower and marked it with a few runes. Within the triangle of the marks, she couldn’t see anything with her eyes. But the taste of magic flooded her tongue. Her skull buzzed.

Devadas bumped into her back.

“Sorry,” he whispered, though there was no point in keeping his voice down in the empty building.

She kneeled beside the nearest rune. “Stay right there,” she told him, and she urged the rune back onto her hand, encouraging it to peel free of the stone and climb back to its safe place between her fingers. Elise had only managed to recycle a rune once before—she had been practicing for less than three days, after all—and she held her breath as she attempted it again.

With a grudging twist of magic, the rune climbed onto her fingers. Elise’s heart contracted. She hadn’t actually expected it to work, but the rune was on her hand now, lonely and glimmering, lighting up her flesh like captive starlight. Her fingers began to twitch. She clenched her fist to slow the spasms.

Devadas shielded his eyes against the glow. “What…?”

The spell concealing Elise’s personal belongings broke once there were only two runes instead of three. Everything she had been storing there faded into view within seconds. In the dim light of the illuminated rune, her clothes looked washed-out and gray, almost as colorless as they were in total darkness. They were folded in front of a larger shape concealed by a black blanket, almost as big as a twin bed.

It hadn’t been easy for Elise to figure out how to hide everything, but the illusion had been effective. Devadas rewarded her with a gasp.

She lifted the other two runes more quickly than she had the first. Something in the back of her mind resonated with pleasure—or pride. But it wasn’t her emotion, and it didn’t come from inside of her. For a moment, she could smell aftershave and cinnamon gum, the musk of sweat, and see pale blue eyes as if they were tattooed on the insides of her eyelids. It was like having someone hovering over her back, hands almost touching her shoulders, breathing warm air onto her neck.

It faded as soon as she felt it, but Elise knew exactly what it meant.

She tamped down a growing sense of worry and grabbed the clothes off of the ground. It was the outfit she had been wearing when she came to Hell: leather leggings, the kind of boots Neuma would have called “nut crushers,” a jacket. She had been forced to leave them behind when she surrendered herself to the auction. Slaves didn’t wear leather. They
became
leather.

Underneath, her golden chain of charms was pooled on top of a pistol. Devadas moved to pick them up.

“Don’t,” Elise said sharply.

Confusion crumpled his features. “Why did you want me here if I’m not supposed to help? To torture me with the darkness, the heights?”

“You’ll see.”

She dressed in her own clothes, placed the charms around her neck, and picked up the pistol. Elise checked the magazine. Nothing had changed since she left it there—it still had the same rounds in it that had been there the last time she checked, shortly before hiding it. Two silver rounds on top, six lead rounds underneath. The former owner had been preparing to shoot a werewolf if necessary. Both types of bullets would be completely useless to Elise in Hell.

Elise tucked it in the back of her belt.

“Pick up the other end,” she said, crouching to wriggle her fingers underneath the edge of the blanket-covered mass.

Devadas did. Together, they managed to lift it. If Elise had been human, she wouldn’t have been able to budge it with any amount of help, but her strength was dependent on how well fed she was now, not muscle. And the last time she had fed, she had fed very well indeed.

But the naga struggled. “What is this?” he asked, leaning over as if he were going to try to look underneath the blanket.

“Watch the stairs,” Elise said.

Backing down the stairwell with a man who had a serpent’s tail while supporting the shrouded mass between them was no easy matter, but somehow they reached the ground floor without falling. It seemed to have gotten even heavier since the time that Elise had first transported it to Hell, and she didn’t think it was because she was weaker. It was the nature of the material under the blanket. It was reacting to being in Hell somehow, growing denser and more massive.

Jerica greeted them on the empty street, looking almost as nervous as Devadas. She was tugging on her lip piercings with her pinkie fingers, stretching the skin out unsettlingly far. “Was everything still there?”

“Yes,” Elise said. “You were right. Good hiding spot.”

Jerica grabbed Devadas’s side of the burden. Together, they guided it onto the flatbed. The suspension sank under the weight of it.

Elise set it down carefully and breathed out a sigh once she was free.

“What in the name of the seven…?” Devadas asked, staring at the end he had been holding. In moving it, the blanket had flipped up, baring a foot frozen in black stone. Everything looked like it had been carved in obsidian, even the hem of the jeans, a piece of gum stuck to the sole of the boots, and the faint indentation of what had been a blood splatter.

Elise jerked the blanket over the foot again, concealing it. Her glare challenged the naga to question her. He didn’t.

“Back to the house,” Elise said, and she couldn’t seem to muster the same emotionlessness that she had earlier.

Neuma met them
at the gates of the House of Abraxas looking breathless and excited. Her cheeks were spotted with pink, betraying her excitement.

“You gotta see this,” she said, jogging alongside the Mack truck as Jerica steered it through the main gates. Elise could feel it passing onto the property as though it were driving over her spine. Completely impossible to ignore. Evidently, the wards meant to alert Elise to the presence of intruders were working.

“Did you find water?” Elise asked.

“Yeah, but—”

“Devadas will help distribute it,” she said, indicating the naga on the flatbed by nodding toward him. “He worked for Abraxas; he’ll know what to do. But keep a knife ready. I don’t trust him.” It was kind of like saying that the sky was red. Of course Elise didn’t trust him. She didn’t trust anyone in Hell that she hadn’t brought with her, and even that was tenuous where Jerica was concerned.

“That’s not the exciting thing,” Neuma said. “It’s in the storage room.”

Elise’s nerves were frayed. She somehow doubted that
anything
in the storage room would be of interest to her. “Help me close the gates,” she said, taking the chains on the right side and pulling.

Neuma hurried to the other side and helped her drop the gate. Elise could breathe easier once it was shut.

She turned to face the property to find things were exactly the way she had left them. The kennels still buzzed with the energy of the humans within—they hadn’t left their cages, water or not. Only a handful of humans were elsewhere. Three or four, maybe. Anyone that Gerard had talked out of hiding. The fiends were even easier to identify, since all of them had been packed away in the barracks once Elise realized that they were frozen by her presence. The entire House was a ghost town.

The stress of responsibility over hundreds—
useless
hundreds—pinched at her temples. Elise reached for her sword out of habit and didn’t find it. It was going to take more than a couple of days to get used to its absence.

“We’ll put the cargo in my room,” Elise called to Jerica. “Abraxas’s room.”

Neuma frowned. “The bed’s mine.” She sounded like she was trying to joke and failing. She really wanted that bed.

“Put it in the study in his quarters,” Elise added, loudly enough for Jerica to hear, before addressing Neuma more quietly. “You can keep the bedroom.”

“Got it,” Jerica said, and she accelerated, driving Devadas and the cargo toward the House.

Elise moved to follow, but Neuma stayed her with a hand on her arm.

“Trust me. You
really
want to see this,” she said.

Exhaling slowly, Elise nodded. “Okay. Show me.”

The storage room
was more modern than the rest of the manor, if the finest in Industrial Era technology could be considered modern. Huge brass tanks stood along the front wall with mercury thermometers affixed to the sides. Empty buckets had been stacked beside a manual pump at the end. It was going to be a pain in the ass to supply to the mortals. They passed these to enter a maze of wooden crates, which had been stacked to the ceiling.

“I thought I’d look around and see if Abraxas left behind something cool,” Neuma explained, walking backward so that she could see Elise as she spoke. She crossed through a beam of paler light filtering through the high crystal windows, stirring glitter-like dust so that it swirled around her shoulders. “Like, something that could make the fiends work instead of sitting around like sacks of shit. Right? But you’ll like this better. Check it out.”

She stepped around a corner to reveal a crate that had been broken at the base. Elise peeled away a few fragments of brittle wood. Inside the crate, she found a glossy white stone cylinder that looked like it was meant to hook into another fragment like a puzzle piece.

“Impossible,” Elise said. It wasn’t until her fingers brushed the smooth surface of the column that she knew it was exactly what it looked like: a piece of ethereal ruin.

“Must be a pretty recent acquisition,” Neuma said, rocking back on her heels. She radiated pleasure. “I wonder if he might’ve grabbed it out of Reno.”

The gates from Reno.
Elise jerked her hand out of the crate. Her fingertips buzzed at the momentary contact, like she had tried to grab an electrified fence.

Abraxas had pieces of an ethereal gateway. In theory, if Elise had all of the pieces, she could assemble it to find out which Heavenly dimension it led to. But she had no idea if such a gateway would work in Hell. It shouldn’t have even been able to cross the barriers into the dimension. Until its dissolution, the Treaty of Dis had forbidden ethereal creatures and artifacts from entering Hell.

Elise punched a fist through the crate beside it and found more pieces of the pillar. She would have to open a lot of boxes to see if he had the complete gate.

“I’ll need an inventory of the storage facilities,” she said.

“Yeah, I’ll make that guy do it,” Neuma said, fluttering a hand, as if searching for his name in the air. “Dave or whatever. Snake man. He can take care of this.”

“No, I don’t want him to have access to storage. I want you to do it.”

“Really? You want me to go through
all
of this shit and write it down?”

“Yes,” Elise said.

Neuma’s pouting lips twisted into a frown. “I’ll need Jerica’s help.”

“Fine.”

The half-succubus lifted the lid off of another crate not far from the first. “I found this, too.” She extracted a wad of paper—no, not paper. Money. Euros, to be precise.

Elise looked inside the crate. Abraxas had euros, American dollars, Canadian dollars, some rubles—all of it in large denominations. Probably enough money for him to have gone anywhere on Earth and live comfortably for a few years. It was utterly useless in Hell.

“I’m going back to make sure my cargo made it into the room,” Elise said, turning on her heel. “I’ll have Jerica come down to help you. Hydration first so that the mortals don’t die, inventory second.”

“I want this, too,” Neuma said, drumming her lacquered fingernails on the edge of the crate hard enough that they sounded like four tiny hammers. “All the American dollars.”

Even though Elise hadn’t wanted it, Neuma’s demands still grated on her. First Abraxas’s bed, now this. The half-succubus was too interested in these inconsequential things and not nearly enough in the task at hand.

“No,” Elise said.

“But—”

“No,” she said again. “Hydration. Inventory. Go.”