by S. M. Reine
Even without an open bond between them, James would know she was pissed.
He was pissed, too.
“We’re done with him,” James said. Rage radiated from him. It glowed within his irises. “If we survive this, Malcolm’s not coming with us to our next destination. And that is final . No debate! Don’t even try!”
Elise wasn’t debating. She stood inches from James, glaring, breathing hard through her nostrils.
God, but she shouldn’t have been happy to see him alive and barely injured.
He hated her.
Hated her so much that he was using magic to kick her boyfriend’s ass.
“The artifact,” the Traveler said.
James ripped the satchel off over his head and tossed it to the Traveler without looking. Elise had the entirety of her aspis’s focus.
“He disrespects me,” James said. “He disrespects you . And whenever he’s awake, he’s drunk! I don’t care how useful he is as an ally. I won’t tolerate him anymore!”
“Bitch, bitch, bitch,” Malcolm groaned from the back of the cavern.
The Traveler glided toward the fissure, holding the leather satchel and its moonstone prize.
The earth shook harder as it approached.
Phlegethon knew its death was coming.
Fresh blood sprayed from the fissure, sloshing over Elise’s feet, staining James’s khakis.
“I’ll leave with Malcolm,” Elise finally said. “We won’t bother you again.”
Disbelief made James’s face sag. “I’m your aspis.”
“Yeah, and you hate me,” she said. “I’ll get out of your life. You can go back to Colorado. You’re welcome.”
Saying that hurt more than any single blow the fiends had landed, more than every cracked bone in her ribcage attempting to rapidly knit itself back together.
The Traveler was only a dozen feet from the fissure now.
James grabbed Elise’s wrist to maintain his balance, fingers sliding on her blood-slicked skin. An earthquake jolted the entire cavern.
His touch hurt her in a way that the demons’ claws hadn’t.
“Shit’s about to go down,” McIntyre said helpfully. He had helped Malcolm to his feet, but the other kopis still looked woozy, like he wasn’t quite sure if all the shaking was in his head or in the earth.
The Traveler began to glow.
It was preparing to travel.
“Let me go, James,” Elise said, eyes narrowed. She could have broken free without effort, but she didn’t. She didn’t really want James to let go. Not if this would be the last fight she had with him—the last battle fought against him, and beside him.
No matter how cruel the loathing that churned in her belly, she liked the feeling of steadying him against the shaking earth, and the curl of his fingers around her arm.
“I don’t hate you,” he said. “I would never hate you.”
The fissure widened.
Blood slopped across the room, hot enough that James felt it through his shoes. He could also see into the dimension on the other side: the hideous, darkest depths of inhospitable Hell, filled with flame, evil, and the creatures that flourished on such things.
Demons scrambled out of Phlegethon, illuminated by the Traveler’s glow.
The witch lifted the moonstone artifact in one hand. It gestured with the other hand, as though parting invisible curtains.
Time distorted.
“Don’t lie to me,” Elise said.
Even caught in this moment with James, she was hyper-aware of the tide of demons flowing around them, parting around their bodies. Most of those fiends recognized the greatest kopis. They didn’t attack her. They went for the easier targets—the mouth of the cave, and the helpless mortals beyond.
But one demon plunged toward her. She thrust a falchion under her arm, skewering a demon that rushed from behind her without looking back.
The earth bucked harder.
The Traveler reached the moonstone artifact toward the fissure.
“I’m not lying,” James said.
McIntyre started shooting again. There was screaming.
Elise turned to see what was wrong, prepared to help. But James didn’t release her wrist.
He yanked her back against his chest.
And he kissed her.
Of all the inadvisable things James had ever done—and there were many—deciding to kiss Elise when they should have been protecting the Traveler at the mouth of Phlegethon was probably one of the most inadvisable.
But dammit, he didn’t want to see her thinking like that.
And he wanted to do it once. Just once.
Even if they were going to forget about it as soon as the Traveler reached the fissure.
James used his grip on her wrist to snap her back against his chest. His other hand clutched the back of her head. And he kissed her with the utter desperation of a man who knew that the kiss would never be remembered, not by either of them, when he wanted to communicate a thousand fraught emotions despite the fact there was no time for words.
For an instant, Elise was stiff against him.
They kissed.
She shoved him away.
For once, James’s desperation was enough to make him almost as strong as she was. He held her to him with his fingers digging into her biceps.
Elise stared at him in wide-eyed confusion.
He could see her mind attempting to reboot.
They didn’t have a piggyback going anymore, but they had shared consciousness often enough in the last six months that James knew what she was thinking.
He rejected me in Copenhagen.
But he’s kissing me now.
Is it because he thinks we’re going to die?
Is he taking pity on me?
Is he mocking me?
“No,” James said. He had been holding onto his thoughts for so long that the one kiss had broken him, and now all of those emotions were spilling out at once. “Because everything you think that I think about you is wrong. You have no idea, Elise, you can’t even begin to imagine —”
The cavern shook hard enough to throw them against the wall. Rocks smashed to the ground around their feet.
Shotgun shells plugged holes into the wall about three yards away. McIntyre splattered a handful of demons before they could reach Elise and James.
“You deserve better!” James shouted over the echoing death. “I’m not going to watch you with Malcolm anymore!”
She finally managed to speak. “Why not tell me sooner?”
“Because of all the things you don’t know, Elise. Because you have two marks, and I am a living mark, and if we were to do anything—if we were to be together—then Eden would open, and He would find you, and it would all end, and I can’t let you—”
Her knuckles connected with his jaw.
Being punched by Malcolm was nothing like being punched by Elise when she was furious and heartbroken.
James hit the wall of the cave. He ragdolled to the ground. Standing seemed to be impossible.
He wasn’t sure that she hadn’t broken his neck.
“Because you think that it would mean I’d be dead?” She was shaking with rage. Her voice was ragged. “That should be my choice . Fuck you, Faulkner!”
A gong resounded through the cavern.
The Traveler had reached the fissure.
Its journey began.
This was the Traveler’s one magical power: The ability to shift time, to step back into the past after time’s natural flow had already compelled it forward.
There was no way to sneak up on Phlegethon, after all. It had sensed Elise coming days earlier. And a fissure, once opened, is nearly impossible to shut down, moonstone artifact or not.
But as the Traveler stepped forward in the cave, it also stepped backward in time.
It leaped back to a point before Phlegethon realized Elise or the moonstone artifact were anywhere nearby.
And once it traveled to lock the fiss
ure, everything that happened in the timeline since it jumped back a few days would be forgotten.
Time would be rewritten. Elise and Malcolm fucking in the RV, the fall down the canyon, and even James kissing Elise—all gone, evaporated, erased as though it had never happened, because it wouldn’t have happened. The Traveler was folding time in on itself and cutting away the parts that endangered their mission.
Elise quickly realized that she was about to forget James’s kiss.
She bolted toward the Traveler to stop it.
“Wait!” James shouted, scrambling to his feet. It was hard. Every bone in his body cried out with pain.
She couldn’t even understand the enormity of what James was trying to tell her.
It wasn’t merely that James did care about her—that he cared about her far too much for someone who had been taking care of her since she was a teenager, someone who she should have been able to trust without thinking that he wanted love, or sex, or anything like that.
There was no way she could grasp the enormity of his betrayal.
If she did, James would never see her again.
“You crazy bastards!” Malcolm roared from the rear of the cave. His voice was distorted by slowing time.
James hurtled after Elise.
She struggled to reach the Traveler first.
Time and air were thicker around the glowing witch. It had already stepped out of the current timeline, and now it was little more than a ghost with the moonstone artifact held aloft in that enchanted leather satchel.
It smirked when it saw Elise struggling to reach it.
“I told you that you wouldn’t remember anyway,” the Traveler said.
She reached out. “Don’t close the fissure!”
“No, I don’t think so,” it said.
James smashed into Elise from behind. They hit the ground together.
“I’m sorry,” he said, hugging his arms tightly around her ribs. He buried his face against the nape of her neck. He inhaled the scent of her sweat. “I’m so sorry.”
And she said, “No!”
The Traveler lobbed the moonstone artifact, satchel and all, into the fissure.
Time stopped.
September 8th, 2000 — The Grand Canyon, Arizona
In a stone vault under the earth north of the Colorado River, a portal opened.
The rocks shifted, groaned, cracked.
A fissure the width of an arm spread in the darkness.
“No, I don’t think so,” said the Traveler.
It lobbed the moonstone artifact into the newly opened hole between Hell and Earth.
In a blink, the crack was gone.
In the canyon, approximately five hundred yards away, Elise Kavanagh was very confused.
She was currently being bear-hugged by James, both of them on the dusty ground in the hot sunlight. Malcolm and McIntyre were on a nearby ridge with their guns aimed at nothing. All four of them were sweaty and exhausted and bleeding, but there were no demons in sight.
For an instant, nobody moved.
James was spooned against Elise’s back. His breath was warm on her neck.
She was a little too comfortable.
James released Elise quickly.
“Sorry,” he said. He sat up, looking very confused. “Sorry, I don’t know what…” He coughed. “Sorry.”
Elise stood and looked around.
They were in the Grand Canyon near the rock formation known as the Tower of Set. Elise didn’t remember climbing down there. She had just been in some tacky tourist shop trying to find an appropriate vessel for James to hide the moonstone artifact in. Malcolm had been shopping for leather chaps. That was almost a mile away.
Yet here they were, indisputably at the bottom of the canyon, and it felt like they’d been in a fight.
“Well,” James said. “I suppose the Traveler did its job, then. We’ve clearly gone back a day.” He dusted himself off.
“Yeah,” Elise said.
She dusted herself off too.
It was unsettling to know they had suddenly lost a day like that, with no recollection of what events had gone missing. They had known that would happen, and it was still very strange.
Elise touched her lips. She looked at James. She frowned.
“Huh,” she said.
She felt like she was angry at him, but she couldn’t think of why.
James frowned back at her. “Hmm.” He rubbed a hand over his jaw. “Well.”
“Incoming!” Malcolm shouted from the nearby ridge.
Elise turned to see a few hundred demons flooding up the canyon, coming from the opposite direction as the cave.
That was one unfortunate side effect of using the Traveler to go on a short journey through time. The Traveler had sent Elise, James, Malcolm, and McIntyre back a day, before the fissure to Phlegethon would have had a chance to open. The tension that had been building for centuries had gotten a chance to erupt, and the Traveler had erased it.
Unfortunately, the Traveler had also sent back any demons who had already crossed over to Earth after that eruption, too.
Its only power was traveling, after all.
Elise’s eyes swept over the incoming horde, their black-fleshed bodies glimmering in the harsh Arizona sunlight. She estimated at least two hundred demons coming their way. And there were more scrambling up the ridge to attack the RV park.
“At least you aren’t deprived of a good fight,” James said dryly, plucking the Book of Shadows out of his back pocket. “Can’t ever have that.”
She rolled out her shoulders to loosen them, adjusted her grip on the falchions, and nodded.
“Yup,” she said.
“Dibs on the ugly ones!” Malcolm called, leaping into the canyon.
And they fought.
September 13th, 2000 — The Grand Canyon, Arizona
Elise and James ate breakfast at sunrise. He had made coffee and scrambled eggs over a campfire. He could cook far better food than that, but the simplicity was fine. It seemed right to keep things simple after yet another near-apocalypse.
The RV park was in shambles around them. Demon bodies had been turned to jerky after a few days in the sunlight. Everything stunk of rot and was brown with dried blood. But the eggs and coffee were still just eggs and coffee, and that was fine.
At least it was quiet.
“I’m done with Malcolm,” Elise said suddenly. Her head was bowed over her plate. She had drained her cup of coffee but barely touched the scrambled eggs.
James frowned. It seemed significant that she was deciding to be done with Malcolm, though he wasn’t sure why. He was glad, certainly. If he never had to suffer being called “Jimmy boy” again in his entire life, it would be too soon.
Even so, there was more weight to that declaration than there should have been.
He squinted at the rising sun. Even when it was only halfway over the canyon, it was bright enough to make his eyes water.
“Yeah?” James asked.
Elise picked up a chunk of egg. She glared at it. Her hair looked far redder than usual, as though she were Icarus flying too close to the sun, and she had caught fire. “Yeah.”
It was odd that Elise would be done with Malcolm so abruptly. Six months together—shouldn’t she have decided to get rid of him sooner if she cared for him so little? It wasn’t as though the stress of battle could have done it. They’d fought a lot of battles in the last few months.
Well, James wasn’t going to question it. He didn’t like Malcolm anyway.
Distant engines echoed over the RV park. McIntyre’s cleanup crew was on the way to sweep up all the demon bodies. Malcolm was waiting to meet them at the far end of the trail, and probably nursing a hangover because he had drunk quite a lot of whiskey to celebrate their victory against the demons of Phlegethon.
“All right,” James said. “Probably for the best. Our money will last longer with just the two of us anyway.”
Elise set her fork down. “McInt
yre says there’s a nest of demons in Tampa.”
“Tampa.” He swirled his coffee in the mug. It was sludgy and black and strong enough to make hair grow on a frog’s forehead. Just the way Elise liked it. “Long drive to Tampa.”
“Mmm,” she said.
They ate together, and drank their coffee, and that was it.
One more apocalypse averted.
Paradise Damned
The Final Book
I
In the Beginning
1
SEPTEMBER 1, 5509 BCE
In the beginning, there was the earth, formless and empty. Darkness hung over the surface of the deep.
And then there was light.
It spilled over the waters, vast and powerful, and its creation severed the unity that had come before. This light was a separate entity from the darkness. Something novel and cruelly different.
The spirits called it “day.” Its opposite was called “night.” Between them was evening and morning—the First Day.
This division marked the end of peace in the universe.
Everything has been pretty much fucked up since then.
December 1981
Ariane Kavanagh went into labor while her husband, Isaac, was still skinning the brands off of a dead succubus.
“Now? You’re giving birth now ?” Isaac asked. The succubus’s legs were spread in front of him so that he could remove the brands lining her inner thighs. He was covered in blood from fingertip to wrist.
Ariane couldn’t respond. She gripped the chain link fence as she breathed through the contraction, trying to concentrate on everything that the witch midwives had told her to do. She was supposed to imagine herself as a vessel. She was supposed to find her serene inner core. She wasn’t supposed to feel like she was being ripped in half.
When the pain finally subsided, she gasped, “Elise is coming quickly.”
Isaac sighed with annoyance. “I’m almost done.”
He sawed a strip of skin off of the succubus’s thigh and slipped it into a bag for later identification.