Ruled by Steel (The Ascension Series #3) (8 page)

“Will you die?” Elise asked.

He blinked in confusion. “No, but…”

Then he was fine. She turned from him to focus on her newest acquisitions—a pair of matching Tasers, which fit neatly into her palms. They looked like TV remote controls that only had an on-off button. One of them hummed when she pressed it. The other didn’t react.

One down, one functioning. It would have to be good enough.

Elise turned the Taser that still worked over in her hands. She didn’t know much about such devices, but she thought it looked too expensive to be a consumer-grade device. It was sturdy. Very well built. Maybe something the military or police used.

Where a group of demons could have gotten military Tasers wasn’t nearly as much of a concern as the fact that they had them at all.

Only two things could hurt Elise: light and electricity. There were no great sources of light in Hell; most demons preferred to live a life in constant twilight. But they had somehow obtained electricity, which meant that they had known that they would need it. Furthermore, the nightmares hadn’t been impressed by the sight of the Father. They had been warned.

The assault was deliberate. Someone knew Elise was in Hell.

Reaching Vassago’s house
from the slave market required a long walk around the walls of the Palace of Dis. Elise had been avoiding it since she returned to Hell, but there was no way to stay away now.

The Palace loomed out of the ashen darkness of the city, towering high overhead in black spires of iron and obsidian. The tallest of the towers had fallen during Elise’s last visit. The curve of buildings against the sky looked empty without it.

If the House of Abraxas was a self-sustaining village, then the Palace was its own city. Over the crenellated walls, Elise could make out the shape of the building where her father, the former Inquisitor, had tortured the demons that he arrested. She could see the apartments where visiting touchstones used to live, as well as the Council members’ quarters, all linked together by delicate iron bridges that looked like they should have snapped under the hard desert winds. They were heavily trafficked by demons that flitted from one door to another, black shapes against a red sky.

They had been rebuilding the grand tower for some years. For now, it was mostly a honeycomb of exposed steel climbed by black brick, but there were already the beginnings of a crystalline bridge being constructed at its apex. Unlike the others, this bridge didn’t lead to another. It would soon climb all the way to the fissure—if Elise didn’t do anything about it.

From the ground, the Palace’s roofs were an impressive sight. Like the bottom half of a fanged jaw jutting from the ground. Even with a thirty-foot-tall wall between them, heavily warded with magic both mortal and infernal, Elise couldn’t shake the uncomfortable feeling that it might bite down on her.

In contrast, Vassago’s house seemed almost mundane. It emulated old Victorian homes Elise had seen on the East Coast with bay windows and red brick. The gate was tall, but not so tall she couldn’t have jumped over it; the barbed wire was a better disincentive than the height, and the runes stamped on his gate better still. They were used to incorporeal attacks in Hell. Elise wouldn’t be able to phase into Vassago’s house any more than she had been able to phase into the House of Abraxas.

She peered through the wrought iron gate to the garden. Human hands jutted from the flowerbeds in front of his windows. They hadn’t been tended in a long time; some of them had wilted, limp at the wrists, and others had overgrown nails ribboning from their fingertips. The fear that had been keeping the citizenry of Dis out of the streets had been keeping Vassago from gardening, too.

“He may not be home,” Devadas said in a high, almost whining voice. “We shouldn’t allow ourselves to remain exposed for long.”

“Is there a doorbell?” she asked, searching the brick gates for a button or pull cord.

“There are likely guards watching from within. If they wanted us to visit, they would open the door.”

She frowned. “What about spontaneous visitors?”

“Only Stewards can cross the wards,” he said. “We’re bound to restrictive contracts that prevent us from causing trouble. You can’t visit without his permission.”

“But Stewards can,” Elise said.

He shook his head. “Oh, no. No. I don’t think so.” In his fear, he had reared up on his tail, growing a full foot and flaring out his hood. The right side of his face was a swollen bruise. “There are rules. Regulations.
Customs
.”

Funny. Elise considered it customary to kill demons that annoyed her. They were breaking all kinds of “customs” that day.

She seized him by the hood, jerking his head down to her level. With the other hand, she drew the pistol from the small of her back and pressed it into his stomach. He twitched at the touch of cold metal. “Go in and tell them that I’m here to speak to Vassago,” Elise said. She didn’t bother putting any threat into her tone. The pistol did all the threatening for her.

When she released him, he dry-washed his hands and tipped his head down as if muttering a prayer.

An unseen clock tower chimed Tuesday. Time was passing quickly. It had already been a month on Earth since the fissure opened, and every moment that they waited, more people would be dying.

Elise slipped her finger over the trigger. A disabled naga could communicate as easily as a whole one. She tried to decide where she would shoot him—the tail, or the chest?

She didn’t get time to decide. Devadas opened the gates, and she took her finger off the trigger again.

The gates fell shut behind him as he slithered inside, tail flicking behind him. The hands planted in the garden stretched toward him as he passed, straining at their roots to touch his scales, though he kept out of reach.

The door opened silently, and Devadas entered.

Elise waited. The
clock chimed Wednesday, which meant that another day had passed on Earth and that more ruin would have crept over the world she had left behind. “What’s taking so damn long?” she muttered, peering through the gates.

She didn’t know what kind of formalities they might be observing in there. Blood of Yatam or not, the culture of demons was foreign to her, and especially the culture of the wealthy creatures that controlled the city. There was always a chance that Vassago had killed Devadas for the intrusion—not the most heartbreaking thought, although she had just been growing attached to the idea of letting him run the House of Abraxas for her.

While she waited, she watched the fissure and the passing of day into night and back again. It had been harder for her to tell that time was passing when she first arrived, but now it was easier to tell what the shifting light meant. The touch of sunlight made the sky slightly more orange, whereas the usual crimson of Hell seemed more violet when it was night.

No kibbeths crossed the distance between Dis and Earth now. The large, flying demons had been used heavily on the first day to transport the remnants of Abraxas’s army to the surface like living ferries, but they had finished crossing over. The emptiness that followed wasn’t peaceful. It was anticipant.

If Elise closed her eyes, she could imagine what was happening to everyone that remained on Earth. The fissures had gashed open North America like a giant X, severing it into bleeding quarters. It had been the worst in Las Vegas, initially. It had been the first to fall to Abraxas’s army. She knew that some people had been evacuated, but she also knew that many more had been devoured; all that remained now was wasteland.

Abraxas had been only one piece in a vast machine, and killing him hadn’t stopped the army. She had seen the progression on the news when she visited Earth long enough to pick up Neuma and Jerica: the march of demons on Washington DC, the mandatory evacuations, the chaos as people tried to flee to countryside that was no safer than the urban centers. It was the Union’s wet dream. They hadn’t declared martial law by the time she visited last, but now, over a month after the first strike, she was sure that they would have. The country was finally theirs.

The images that filled her mind didn’t belong to her. Elise could clearly imagine chain-link fences, black-suited Union soldiers clutching assault weapons, buses filled with civilians. Everything bristled with barbed wire. The sky was a smoky slate-gray, and the sun was a red disc in the sky no bigger than a penny. She smelled the campfire smell of uncontrolled wildfires, the stink of human sweat.

In her mind’s eye, she was striding alongside a gurney, one hand on the metal railing of the bed. That hand was wearing a leather glove. Elise so often wore gloves that it didn’t strike her at first that the image was too vivid, yet unfamiliar, to have come from her imagination.

Shouts drifted in and out of her ears as she tried to focus on the woman in the hospital bed. Elise recognized that pixie-like face, framed by brunette hair that only made her pallor seem starker. It was Brianna, the woman that James had called his new high priestess. She was connected to tubes and being carried toward a line of ambulances that were evacuating a hospital.

Which meant that the gloved hand Elise saw belonged to James.

He was bleeding into her mind.

Crash
.

Elise’s eyes flew open.
That
sound hadn’t been in her mind.

It was a shock to look around and realize that she was still standing between the gates of the Palace of Dis and the gates of Vassago’s home. She whirled to look through the wrought iron bars.

One of Vassago’s windows had been broken. Shards of glass were scattered over the stairs, showering the garden of hands so that the fingers cringed away. Elise’s eyes fell on a candlestick on the lawn. Someone had flung it from the window inside. Probably not a sign that Vassago wanted to invite her in.

She took a step toward his gate before remembering that Devadas had said she couldn’t enter. But there had to be a way inside—some part of his defenses that could be penetrated.

Elise wasn’t given time to find one. The gates swung open in unison with the front door.

In the wake of the shattering window, it was eerily silent. She drew the gun, turned off the safety, and aimed it at the ground as she moved inside. The garden of hands didn’t reach for her the way that they had reached for Devadas. They curled away, bending as far as they could without ripping free of the hard earth. 

She peered through the front door.

From outside, Vassago’s home could have passed for Victorian. Inside was a different story. Between the sconces and heavy wood furniture, it would have fit in a medieval castle just as well. Vassago seemed to be a fan of fine art. Paintings hung from every wall in a mixture of different styles: lush Renaissance curves, the hard lines of post-modern art, impressionistic smudges. Each was framed with heavy drapes. There were a lot of shadows in the room between the flickering candlelight and the curtains.

She eased inside, eyes flicking from the empty doorways to the shattered windows. She didn’t see Devadas, and she sensed no minds.

Her soles crunched on broken glass as she advanced, grinding it into the tile floors. Elise peeked through the left-hand door into the study. The shelves looked as if a mighty fist had smashed down the center to snap them all in half, and parchment was scattered across the floor like oversized flakes of ash. There were no intact books or scrolls remaining.

A scrap of something with the consistency of tissue paper fluttered on the edge of a wingback chair. Elise lifted it with the nose of her gun. Golden scales dusted from the skin.

“Devadas?” Elise asked, raising her voice. It echoed off of the silent walls. “Vassago?”

Her eyes traveled from that scrap of skin to the edge of the desk, where a few more fingernail-sized scales had been shed. The trail led through the study, beyond the foyer, and into the hall. Framed paintings had been knocked askew. A long scrape gouged the wallpaper as though someone had run a claw along the length of the hallway.

The back door hung open on one hinge. A lawn dotted with iron trees stood beyond it. The quarters where Vassago had probably kept his brutes were dark, the doors open and windows shattered.

The quiet as she stepped into his backyard was unsettling. There should have been city noises. Even though the main streets were empty, the rear of his house butted up against the kinds of alleys that demons had been using to get around the City of Dis. Yet she heard no voices or movement. Either he had spells keeping his property quiet, or there were no demons in the alleys anymore, either.

The door to the barracks was unlocked. Elise pushed it open.

Vassago had been keeping his brutes in something that looked very much like stables. There was chalk spread over the floor to soak up bodily fluids. There was a wall covered in hooks that were most likely meant to hold weapons. Blood smeared the floor, turning the chalk red.

All of the brutes were gone. Devadas also wasn’t there.

Elise stepped out into the silent lawn again, glaring up at the Palace over the roof of Vassago’s house. The carapaces of workers crawling over the bridge in progress glimmered in the light from the fissure. It looked like a nest of ants had been unleashed on the scaffolding.

Sweat leaped to her skin and her pulse accelerated. The sun was shining through the fissure again.

Elise jumped back into Vassago’s home.

No Steward meant no management for her new House. No Vassago meant no information. Empty barracks meant that she couldn’t take the guards. She was exactly where she had started when she had broken free of Belphegor, except that hours had passed and more people on Earth would be dead for the delay.

Elise was halfway back to the study when she heard a soft noise like tearing paper.

She froze in the hallway to listen, fingers tensed on the gun.

There it was again—another tearing, a clicking, a rustle. The soft noises didn’t come from the study. They came from deeper within the building.

Elise moved between the framed paintings into the dimness of a hallway beyond. Her senses were alert for any hint of movement, but she was alone in the hall; the noises were coming from the other side of a door. She hovered her ear beside it.