Ruled by Steel (The Ascension Series #3)

by S. M. Reine

  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 pa
in 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.”

  Four

  It was daytime on Earth. Standing underneath the fissure in the slave market, where the auctions were held, Elise could feel its rays beating down upon her. It wasn’t as powerful a sensation as it would have been if she were trying to stand in the sun at home, but it must have been a pretty clear day topside; her heart sped and sweat leaped to her forehead.

  Elise mopped up the sweat with the back of her arm, keeping her attention on the auction. Last time she had been there, she had joined the lines of humans dragged from a cart delivering them to the market with her head hanging low, naked and indistinguishable from the mortals. She had been marched onto the stage at the center of the square alongside four other women. The ropes around her wrists—affixed by Neuma before Elise joined the others—had been lifted above her head and attached to a hook, jerked high to stretch out her body for display.

  She had been expecting to be purchased by Belphegor and hadn’t been disappointed. Being elevated above so many other demons, seeing their faces tipped back to stare at her, knowing that any one of them might recognize that she wasn’t mortal at any moment—it had been tense. Fortunately, it also hadn’t lasted long. Two of the other four women had sobbed through the process, which took all of five minutes. A quick bid, and they had been put into a line with the rest of the humans bought by Belphegor.

  Now Elise was seeing it from the other side, standing far enough toward the back of the crowd that she could hear the sizzle of meat cooking at a nearby vendor’s cart. Devadas was coiled at her side, a few inches taller than she was, with his arms folded. Were it not for the tremble in his shoulders, he might have cut an imposing figure.

  It felt like she had been there before, standing at the back of the crowd, watching humans mount the steps to the stage. It was impossible. Elise had never watched an auction from the perspective of the buyers before.

  Thinking was too difficult with the occasional flashes of sunlight. She wiped her forehead dry again. The motion drew her companion’s attention.

  “Bid on this batch?” Devadas asked.

  “No.” Elise wasn’t going to buy a single slave. She didn’t need any more mortals to feed.

  She was only there to watch the buyers. There weren’t nearly as many as the square could accommodate—mere dozens, rather than hundreds. It was easy to tell the major House holders, dukes, and duchesses from the vendors and casual observers; most of them were strong enough to have taken human form, and all of them were dressed in the latest fashions. This week, it was high-waisted trousers and cropped jackets with shoulder pads, a sort of retro eighties look that wouldn’t pass muster at a downtown shopping mall, but signified the wealth of the demons. Only the most powerful in Hell could afford to look that trashy.

  To Elise’s left stood a woman that appeared mostly human. She was old, with a heavily lined face and tight white curls. She wore a tan pantsuit. Her long fingers were curled around a sign with a number on it, and she watched the proceedings with hunger in her eyes. Not greed, but actual hunger. Elise could sense the sparks of it within her.

  To her right squatted another demon that could have passed for a woman, were she to stand upright rather than dragging her callused knuckles along the ground. The greenish tinge to her skin was also a dead giveaway. She wasn’t native to Dis—she was more likely something that had been born of an Earth spirit and immigrated.

  “Name them for me,” Elise said, affixing her gaze to the stage. “The others.”

  Devadas glanced around at the demons surrounding them. “The House holders?”

  “Yes,” she said.

  He swallowed audibly. It was quiet in the auction square, despite the number of people there; a frightened hush had fallen over them all under the watchful eye of the fissure, and nobody dared speak more than it took to complete their transactions.

  “Gretchen,” he said, indicating the old-looking woman. “Her House is to the east, on the edge of the wastelands.”

  “Does she have any influence in the Palace?” Elise asked.

  “No, she withdrew from the Council some decades back and never reasserted control.”

  “And?”

  Devadas lowered his voice and leaned in close. “What else is there to know? She’s a recluse. She doesn’t keep an army in her House—only as many brute guards as it takes to keep her slaves and walls held. She relies primarily on witches for protection.”

  “When she was on
the Council, was she important? Would she have been involved in the Palace defenses?” Elise asked.

  “No.”

  No knowledge, no army—not interested.

  Elise nodded to the squat, troll-like woman. “That one?”

  “Nivue. Lives in Phlegethon, actually. I’m surprised to see her here.”

  Which meant that she also wouldn’t know the Palace’s weaknesses.

  Elise’s eyes swept over the crowd as the bidding on the current batch of slaves was completed. They had been sold to a tall, slender man that looked very much like the iron trees decorating the streets: brittle, angular, skin blacker than pitch. He wore no robes to hide his unnaturally gaunt form. He didn’t seem to be concerned with fashion, Earth or Hell. He had just purchased four women.

  “That one?” Elise asked.

  “The Dark Man isn’t a House holder,” Devadas said. He slipped behind Elise, almost as if he were trying to hide behind her. “He’s a wanderer.”

  “Then where does he keep the slaves?”

  “He doesn’t keep them.”

  Elise watched the women march off the edge of the stage. One of them was sobbing, shoulders shaking, but the others were silent and resigned. The Dark Man didn’t look like a butcher or a tanner. They were going to be used for some other purpose. Something that didn’t require keeping slave quarters.

  Her stomach churned. “Not my problem,” she muttered, returning her attention to the stage as another group was brought up. Three men, one woman. “Not my problem…”

  Devadas’s tongue flicked against her ear. “What do you say, Father?”

  She elbowed him, and not gently. “I wasn’t speaking to you. And don’t call me that in public.”

  “My deepest apologies.”

  Elise tried to pick out the sight of other significant figures in the crowd, but there were so few, and her eyes kept slanting to the left, where the slaves were being held for The Dark Man. Two of them were crying now. He circled them, performing a silent inspection. The way he moved was almost insect-like, though he only walked on two of his brittle legs.