Ruled by Steel (The Ascension Series #3)

by S. M. Reine

  Neuma pressed her lips to Elise’s.

  She tasted just the way she smelled—like liquor and blood and chocolate, although Elise couldn’t imagine where she would have gotten such a thing in Hell. It was pleasant enough. It didn’t arouse Elise. There was nothing sexy about a half-succubus coming on to her in a guard tower with nightmares beating against the walls.

  But Neuma was right. They didn’t have much time. Elise was about to fight, and she needed to feed.

  She lifted her hands to Neuma’s shoulders and settled her fingers on them lightly, uncertainly. Neuma giggled against her mouth.

  “What is that?” Neuma asked, melting against Elise, chest to chest and thighs to thighs. She tangled her fingers in Elise’s hair. “You gonna make me orgasm by touching my shoulders? Don’t think so.”

  “I don’t know what to do,” Elise said. It was an embarrassing admission. She considered herself brave, in the sense that she never backed down from a challenge just because she didn’t know how to handle it. But the idea that she needed to satisfy Neuma—a succubus, a woman who had been with probably thousands of other women—was more daunting than trying to figure out how to kill a demon the size of a skyscraper. She didn’t even know where to begin.

  “What do you like done to you?” Neuma asked, guiding Elise’s hand between her legs.

  All she could think about was James—the long, quiet night they had spent together in the studio they used to own together. The one time that they had been content together before everything else went wrong. She liked the way he had dug his fingers into her as if he couldn’t hold enough of her all at once. She liked the way their bodies had pressed desperately together, and how they had fit better than well-trained dance partners in a breathless tango.

  He had known how to cause pain, and when. And he had known how to turn that into pleasure. The first time they’d had sex was like the thousandth time. James and Elise had known one another’s bodies from years of fighting together, from years of watching the other involved with other people, years of waiting and longing.

  Everyone else had just been something to pass the time. It had been about scratching an itch, not feeling good.

  A bright spark of pain snapped Elise out of memory. Neuma had pulled Elise’s shirt aside and sunk her teeth into her shoulder.

  “Focus,” Neuma said, and she licked a hot line up the side of Elise’s neck. “You’re depressing yourself again.”

  Elise jerked her wrist out of Neuma’s grip. “You don’t have any idea what I’m thinking.” The anger was safer than the other feelings—the longing, and the self-hatred, and the regret.

  “I can read you. Trust me.” Neuma sucked Elise’s earlobe between her lips. Her teeth lightly raked against the skin. “Just keep it simple. Don’t make it complicated.”

  “But it is complicated,” Elise said.

  “Not with me it’s not. I’ve taught dozens of baby succubi to feed.” She unbuckled Elise’s bustier and spread it to bare her chest. She smiled at the sight of her tender skin bared. “Perfect,” Neuma said, sliding her hands up Elise’s ribcage, cupping the underside of her breasts, mounding them in her fingers. She kneaded gently. “Totally perfect, doll.” Her thumbs flicked over Elise’s nipples. “I always wished you woulda been one of my girls, you know. Way back at Eloquent Blood. I wasn’t blowing smoke up your ass by trying to get you up on my bar.”

  Elise set her jacket down gently. She was carrying the vials of blood in the pocket and didn’t want them to shatter. “I assumed that was because—” she began, but then Neuma’s mouth closed over one of Elise’s nipples and sucked on it lightly, and she forgot what she was saying. A low groan escaped her. “I thought you tried to recruit everyone that entered the club.”

  “Sometimes. But mostly just you.” Neuma nibbled on the skin hard enough to leave imprints. “We could have had fun, though. Lots of fun.” She bit again, even harder than before. She drew blood on the side of Elise’s breast. The blood cooled as it trickled down her ribs.

  That was what she liked. Heat shot through her, arching her spine back. She grabbed for the windowsill and missed.

  “You never told me that you were taking care of people,” Elise gasped. “You should have told me why you needed the money.”

  Still pressed to her chest, Neuma’s chuckle shook through Elise’s entire body. “Talking family is not sexy.” She slithered up to stand tall and pushed a thigh between Elise’s legs. They rocked together gently. The friction was good, almost as good as biting.

  Neuma slid her fingers between them, down Elise’s leggings, seeking out the warm heat between her legs. She laughed again when she felt how damp Elise was, her body reacting to the bite, to the pressure of flesh against flesh. It wasn’t derisive. It was joyful.

  “Tell you what,” she murmured into Elise’s mouth. With two fingers, she spread her folds and sought out her hot center. Her fingers began working in long, slow strokes. “I’ll show you what to do and feed off of you, and then you get to do it to me. We’ll both get what we need.”

  Elise wanted to argue, but she wasn’t sure why. It felt good. It was easier than killing a few fiends. But this was Neuma—one of her oldest allies and someone she considered to be a friend, whether she was comfortable with the idea or not. Elise hadn’t been with anyone since Lincoln, and he was possessed by a demon. And her last feeding from Seth had led to his rigid body in the House of Abraxas and the mourning of an entire werewolf pack.

  “What if I do kill you?” Elise asked. With their hair draped over their bodies, there was no telling where one sheet of black ended and the other began.

  “Like I said, I’ve trained tons of young succubi. You can’t hurt me. It’s not even worth worrying about.” Neuma smiled impishly. Her lips were flushed from pressing against Elise’s body, and there was a smear of blood on her chin. “And I told you to stop thinking so much.”

  Maybe she was right. Maybe she wasn’t. Either way, her fingers were sliding in and out of Elise, and it felt too good to stop her. It wasn’t just her demon that liked it. She did, too.

  So Elise stopped thinking, and she started enjoying.

  Jerica was waiting for them when they emerged from the guard tower rumpled and breathless. She must have known what Elise and Neuma had been doing, but she didn’t remark on it.

  “There’s something moving inside the mines,” Jerica said, hands folded behind her back, a cleaver sheathed on one hip and a Taser at the other. “I think something’s trying to get through.”

  Elise muttered a few swear words and pulled her shirt down, checking to make sure that everything was covered properly. Her fingernails were a normal color again. Her skin didn’t hurt as much. She felt almost as good as she had after having sex with Lincoln—good enough to fight.

  “Have they gotten far?” she asked, winding her hair into a knot at the nape of her neck.

  “It’s hard to tell. The fact that I can hear digging makes me think that they must be getting close.” Jerica’s features were pinched. She swallowed hard. “I wouldn’t think we have more than a few minutes. Everyone’s armed and ready—we need to go now.”

  Neuma shot Elise another little smile. “We’re as ready as we’ll ever be.”

  “I bet you are,” Jerica said.

  Neuma gave her a quick and sloppy kiss. “You’re still my favorite,” she said, bumping their foreheads together. “Always will be.” It sounded a lot like a goodbye. Jerica gave her a small smile, far from her usual toothy grin.

  They climbed down the wall to join their army.

  Elise surveyed the weapons that the slaves had put together with their wish list of supplies. She had brought them batteries big and small—some that powered the Tasers directly, and larger car batteries that they carried in backpacks. They had wrapped cord around blades and spears to electrify them. The assortment of weapons looked ridiculous. But when they flipped the switches on the hilts and bags, the air buzzed with danger.

  “Yo
u and I will have to stay at the back,” Jerica said, noticing Elise’s glare. “Neuma’s going to have to take the lead—she’s the only one of us three that won’t be hurt by crossfire more than an average human. We’ll push the humans through after her. They’ll open a tunnel and we’ll follow behind. Got it?”

  “Yeah, got it,” Elise said.

  Jerica stepped up between the army and the portcullis to debrief them, leaving Neuma and Elise in back. “I’ve picked out the path to the Palace,” Neuma said softly underneath Jerica’s shouts. “It’s a straight line, including a couple of alleyway shortcuts that’ll be a tight fit. Should only take an hour if we walk real fast. Two at most.”

  “And this will go to the main entrance?” Elise asked.

  “Yeah, Jerica says it’s the only gap in the wards. Soon as we all get there, we can head up for the bridge. Should be easy, right?”

  “It might be, except that I want the army to hold the main tower until I find Belphegor and come back. I want them to keep my path to the soul links clear.”

  Neuma blinked. “Wait—find Belphegor?”

  “I still need to get a sample of his blood,” Elise said. She took the samples from Lincoln, Aquiel, and Abraxas’s lab out of her jacket pocket and handed them to Neuma. “You can take those down to the soul links while I get him. Keep them safe.”

  “Elise, do you even know if Belphegor’s in the Palace?” Neuma asked in a low, urgent voice.

  “He’s not. I think he’s with the infernal army marching in from the wastelands. I’m going to have to go there before I can join you at the Palace.”

  “This would have been good to know earlier, doll. I thought you were going to be there with us when we took the Palace.”

  “I trust you to take care of it. You’re strong, Neuma. Much stronger than I ever gave you credit for.”

  Neuma’s lips blossomed into a smile. “Took you long enough to notice.” She lifted the vial labeled X. It was the only one that had been marked. “What’s this?”

  “My blood. That goes to the fissure above once we’re on—”

  A loud crack echoed through the air. Jerica and the milling army fell silent, and three hundred faces turned toward Elise to look up the mountain.

  The crack turned to a rumble, and then hot air gusted down the hill as clouds of dust lifted behind the House of Abraxas. There were dark shapes in the clouds. They rushed toward the army, and Elise heard the shouts before she could make out the faces.

  Brutes. Dozens of brutes—a kind of demon twice as massive as a human with their faces set into their chests and enough strength to snap spines with a single finger.

  Not the kind of demons that would be hurt by electricity.

  They had broken through the mine.

  Chaos erupted among the human army. They were unprepared. They picked up weapons, donned shields, tried to move to face the rushing nightmares.

  But if they turned on the lights and started activating their electrified weapons there, they were going to hit Elise. Worse, they were going to get themselves slaughtered.

  Jerica was shouting. “Open the gates! Open them now!”

  Elise exploded into darkness. The humans might have been unequipped for brutes, but she wasn’t. This was exactly the kind of creature she could take down on her own.

  She flew up the mountain, twisting between the rushing demons, filling the spaces between them. It was a quick way to count. Ten, fifteen, twenty—were there really fifty brutes? Aquiel must have sent them through to surprise her.

  The nightmares outside the gates hadn’t been a genuine attack. They had been a distraction.

  The larger she became, the more of the property she could see: the house, the church, the empty kennels, the cleaning stations, the barracks. She watched the humans flood through the gates to the street, and she could taste the electric zing of their weapons discharging at the shadows beyond. They cut a path straight through the swarm. They might be fine if Elise could keep the brutes off their backs.

  She stayed within the walls as she expanded, growing large enough to cover the brutes in darkness. They stumbled within her fog. She struggled to surround them all.

  As soon as she had stretched to her limit, engulfing almost half of the brutes, she began to squeeze. To swallow.

  And then something cold thrust through her—something that looked very much like a pale, bony arm.

  Elise lost control. She frayed at the edges.

  Let them go, said a powerful voice that reverberated through her. The command was impossible to ignore.

  She snapped back into her body, hitting the ground hard enough to make the world spin around her. The brutes ran past her. She jerked her knees to her chest, threw her arms over her head, trying to protect herself from their boots.

  When they were gone—through the gates, following her little army—Elise was left facing a single demon.

  She didn’t need to go looking for Belphegor.

  He had found her.

  Eighteen

  Leading an infernal army looked like it suited Belphegor just as well as the Stewardship had. He was wearing armor that put the fiends’ plate mail to shame: well-fitted, flame-scorched iron plates that bristled with spikes from every edge. Even the shoulders and wrists of his gauntlets looked like they could kill with a casual gesture.

  A crimson cloak hung to his ankles, tattered at the hem from his journey through Abraxas’s mines. Only his frowning mouth was visible under the ridged helm, but Elise didn’t need to see his empty eyes to recognize the skeletal shape of his jaw. She all but smelled the death on him.

  There was a head at his belt. A human head. It was suspended by its hair, mouth hanging open in an eternally slack-jawed stare. Elise had seen that flat nose and brunette hair on one of the slaves—one of the witches that had been planning to enchant the army’s weapons. What had Gerard said her name was? Tina?

  He had said she had gone missing. Now they knew why.

  Belphegor grabbed Elise by the arm and lifted her to her feet. The gauntlets were clawed. The iron points dug into her bicep. “You’ve liberated the slaves only to sacrifice them to Aquiel’s nightmares,” he said in a mild voice. “You should be embarrassed.”

  There was almost something robotic about the calmness with which he spoke. He must have been boiling with a need for revenge, but he sounded utterly emotionless. If he had feelings, none of them were betrayed through the eye slits on his helm.

  Elise yanked her glove off. He caught her fist and crushed it with sickening pops of bone.

  “Don’t,” Belphegor said.

  With her free hand, she jerked the ethereal dagger out of her boot and plunged it down through the bottom of his helm and into his throat.

  Energy crackled between them as the tip buried into his flesh. Blood gushed over her hand, colder than the Arctic Ocean.

  Elise staggered away from him with a groan, clutching her arm. The chill of the blood hurt a thousand times worse than having him crush her hand. Bones healed instantly—this was something else. His blood froze the cloth of her sleeve and began crawling toward her shoulder, so she shook off her jacket before it could climb all the way to her face.

  Belphegor wrenched the knife from his throat and tossed it aside.

  “Ineffectual,” Belphegor said.

  Elise grabbed the knife, heart pounding. It was covered in his blood. She had the last of the three samples she needed to break the soul links in the Palace.

  But the other two were with Neuma—and there were fifty brutes, thousands of nightmares, and one very bad demon between them.

  He clamped his hand on her shoulder. She flashed into her incorporeal form, releasing herself from his grip. But he seized her shadow and immediately jerked her back into her body again. It was even worse the second time. Her organs felt like they were being compressed.

  “There are many incorporeal demons in Hell, Godslayer. Nothing you do will surprise me. Your every action is anticipated,” Belphegor sai
d. “Soon, the nightmares will break your slaves and the brutes will bring them back, and the House will be restored under my name.” He pulled her against the hard metal of his breastplate. “We will finish what I started.”

  “Not a fucking chance,” Elise said.

  She flashed a few inches away from him, just out of reach, and didn’t bother trying to stay incorporeal. She couldn’t cast magic while she was incorporeal anyway.

  Elise lifted her twitching fist and unleashed James’s destructive spell.

  Her eardrums popped and her sinuses filled with the sharp scent of copper. Magic thrust through her, shoved across dimensions from James’s core of power, and lanced from her fingers. It brightened the hellish twilight with flashes of red and blue.

  The spell struck Belphegor in the chest—and diffused.

  Elise froze, arm extended, only able to gape as the magic skittered over his armor.

  It didn’t even hurt him.

  Belphegor advanced on her, armor clanking, cape whipped behind him by the wind. “As I said, your actions are anticipated. I have fought warlocks before. I remember the counter-spells.” He jiggled the slave’s head at his hip. “And I know how to coerce a witch to enchant my armor for me.”

  Hope spiraled away from her, sucked into the darkness of the city beyond the walls.

  Elise couldn’t swallow Belphegor, stab him, or use James’s magic against him.

  She would have to run.

  He reached for her, but she didn’t let him grab her again.

  Elise flashed into shadow and followed the army through the gates, surrendering the House of Abraxas to Belphegor.

  The nightmares seethed around Elise, thicker and darker than ocean tides at night. They formed a wall of infernal energy that even she couldn’t penetrate. There was no darkness for her to slip through when they filled Hell’s brutal air with their bodies.

  But the slave army had cut a channel through them. The army had done better than Elise expected with the spears and shields. It was as though they had ripped a bleeding wound into the mass of demons.