by SM Reine
She must have been able to see what he was thinking. She jerked her hand away. “There.” She sounded breathy, like she was struggling to concentrate as much as he was. “At least you’ll be able to travel now.”
“Travel? Where? Where could we possibly go?”
“Somewhere safe,” Elise said.
He looked at her—really looked at her. Her face was almost the one that he used to see every day on the other side of the breakfast table.
James wanted to argue that there was nowhere safe in this world or any other world. He might have only been awake for a couple of hours, but he’d been able to determine enough just by looking out the window and talking to Ariane. She couldn’t send him away. There was nowhere to go.
Yet as soon as he looked at her, he couldn’t think.
Elise’s lips were pressed into a disapproving line, which didn’t make him want to kiss her any less. “You’ll have to invent one more spell for me, James. Put together a rune that I can use to dampen my demon powers, or that will make you impervious to them. We can’t talk like this.”
“I’m controlling myself,” he said.
“Your control isn’t the problem. You look like lunch to me.”
That sounded far too much like an invitation. “But I healed you. You said you’re stronger than ever.”
“I am,” Elise said. “My self-control problems aren’t because I’m hungry.” She sidled toward him again, tracing a fingertip along his belt. “Just seeing how you’re reacting to me…” She shook her head. “Goddamn, James.”
He somehow managed to say, “Sorry.”
“No. Don’t be sorry.” Her thumb traced a line of electricity along the curve of his bottom lip. “I never thought you would have chosen anything over your magic.”
“Not anything,” James said, catching her wrist. “Just you.”
A boy spoke from elsewhere in the room. “What about me?”
Elise shoved James behind her as she turned, shielding him with her body. As small as her physical form was, once her power flared, she seemed to fill every ounce of space within the room.
Every ounce except the place Nathaniel stood by the window.
His arms were wrapped around his stomach, spine arched with pain. He glared at them with accusing eyes.
“Eternity,” he said. “Alone. You have no idea what that’s like!”
Elise sucked in a breath. “Nathaniel.” She stepped toward him, reaching out. “How did you escape Eden?” And then, an instant later, she said, “Belphegor pulled down the walls so he could get in. Now you’ve—”
Nathaniel cut her off with a scream, gripping his head as if trying to keep it from exploding.
The walls of the hotel room shivered. The paper on the desk caught fire, consuming every one of James’s miserable attempts to draw a magical rune.
And still Nathaniel screamed.
James’s eardrums throbbed. Clapping his hands over his ears did nothing to protect them.
His mind flooded with images that could only come from Nathaniel. He saw a garden filled with towering trees. A sapling taking root in the soil. A glowing pit of ether, and Nathaniel slipping into it for a swim. Red apples, rotten apples, a doorway standing alone.
Belphegor. The trio of demons called the Fates. Hybrids.
And the years. So many monotonous years jammed into a mind that hadn’t had a chance to finish growing before he entered the Origin.
Elise seized Nathaniel. James realized with a sickening jolt that his little boy was taller than her now. Almost as tall as James himself.
His presence was far vaster than hers. She filled the room; he filled the entire world.
“Nathaniel!” she shouted, her voice nowhere near as loud as his scream. “You have to stop!”
He shoved her across the room. “No!”
Nathaniel jumped through the window.
The glass shattered. So did the surrounding wall, ripping away from the hotel, showering bricks over the street beyond.
Elise didn’t even hesitate. She jumped after him.
Elise landed on the street, slamming into the bloody pavement. The buildings opposite the hotel room were on fire. They blazed as though they had been burning for hours, even though they’d been fine when Elise had arrived minutes earlier. Now she could barely see through the smoke.
The air didn’t have the scent of Hell to it, that touch of brimstone that made her homesick.
This was Nathaniel’s work, not Belphegor’s.
He stood in one of the burning buildings as it collapsed around him. Elise phased to the edge of the fire. Flames licked her boots, melting the rubber soles. She took a quick step back. “Nathaniel,” she said from the wrong side of the wall of fire. “Stop this bullshit and talk to me.”
He shook his head. A ceiling beam cracked and fell, crashing to the charcoal that had once been carpet. “You abandoned me.”
“You asked me to leave you in Araboth with the Tree. You wanted to move it to safety and be left alone. I did. I was showing respect for your—”
She was interrupted by another wall of the house collapsing. It slid right through Nathaniel without touching him. Bricks sprayed from the point of contact.
He lifted his head to glare at her. “You respected the decisions of a child. You should have known better.”
“I wasn’t much older than you were when I was left to my own devices. I survived. I assumed you would, too.”
“Not alone,” Nathaniel said. “You took James from us. My mom and I were alone. Always alone.”
“You’re not alone now,” Elise said.
He flashed through the fire and appeared at her side. The world spun sickeningly around them. He hadn’t phased like Elise did; he had distorted the village, moving it around him rather than moving himself.
Nathaniel’s pale eyes were wild. “Then tell me what to do. Tell me how to fix this.” He thrust a finger at the burning village. “Tell me how to fix myself. How do I keep from hearing everything? Feeling everything?”
Elise stared helplessly at him. She’d never done well with teenagers, even when she’d been a teenager herself. Puberty was a terrible thing. And this particular teenager was experiencing puberty with omnipotence.
She needed to say something to make it better. She had already fucked up with Nathaniel once. She had to fix it this time. “We can figure it out,” Elise said, as gently as she could manage through gritted teeth. “Together.”
His eyes screwed shut, palm pressed to his forehead. “It hurts, and everything is falling apart, and I hate Belphegor, and I just want it all to stop.”
On that last word, the ground rumbled. A new shadow crested over the village—a towering wall of water a hundred stories high.
Nathaniel wanted it to stop burning, so his godly will had made a tsunami.
“Fuck me,” Elise swore.
That was all she managed to say before it all crashed over her.
A fist of water punched into her. She thought that it might have slammed her into a wall, or maybe the street; she couldn’t tell where she was or which direction was up anymore.
Elise phased, turning herself to smoke. It didn’t help.
She struggled to the surface, moving her semi-corporeal form through the tide as it smashed over buildings, crushed streets, vaporized the fire.
As soon as she touched air, it became easier to spread herself out as the darkness. And there was quite a lot of darkness in the village. The fires had been drowned under hundreds of feet of water, and Russia was now an ocean as far as she could see.
The hotel was under it, too. The hotel and everyone inside.
Her mother. Abram, with the blood of Adam.
James.
Elise plunged into the water again, seeking out the wreckage of the hotel among the rest of the flotsam. It was shockingly dark within Nathaniel’s wave, filled with shattered fragments of wood and stone, but she couldn’t traverse it as easily as she traversed air. She’d never trie
d to phase through so much water before. She couldn’t seem to do it.
Elise glimpsed the door of the hotel before the waves swept her away from it. Away from the fading mental signals of the people inside.
No!
And then she was standing in the middle of the street, right in front of the hotel, and there was no water anywhere.
Just like that, the ocean had vanished.
Nothing looked even remotely damp. Nothing except Elise. Water drizzled from her hair and clothes, leaving a puddle at her feet. It smelled like brine and apples.
The village was burning again. In fact, the fire had advanced. But the buildings that had been crushed by Nathaniel’s wave were standing again and the hotel was intact beside Elise. She could feel everyone alive inside. James’s mind was almost indistinguishable from the others—just a mortal mind overwhelmed by the power of the werewolves that accompanied him.
“Nathaniel?” she called.
Belphegor appeared beside her. “Hello, Godslayer.”
Her obsidian falchion leaped to her hand. Its textured hilt was sure in her slick palm. “Belphegor.”
“You won’t be able to kill me here,” he said calmly, undisturbed by her suggested death threat. And why should he worry? He’d been more powerful than Elise before penetrating Eden. Now he was something else completely.
“I am the Godslayer,” Elise said. “I can get creative.”
She sensed faint amusement from him, even if she couldn’t see it in his face. Belphegor was in a good mood and it radiated. “I’ll give you one free shot. Try to kill me. I assure you that I won’t fight back.”
Elise studied him out of the corner of her eye. He was still wearing the slim-fitting black uniform of a steward, the one with the silver pin marking his allegiance to the Palace’s last administration. His slender, skeletal hands were folded in front of him.
He flickered. The suit briefly became spiked armor with a velvet cape and the head of a human slave dangling from the belt at his waist.
Then he was in the suit again.
“You’re not really here,” Elise said.
“I’m still within Eden. You’ll have to enter the garden to kill me.”
“Fine. Not the first time I’ve done it.”
“While I appreciate your bloodthirstiness, I’d like to make an alternate proposal.” He swept a hand up the burning street. “Will you walk with me?” So civil. As if he hadn’t once chained her to his office wall and threatened her with a studded phallus.
“Nathaniel,” she said. “I have to find him.”
To her surprise, Belphegor said, “I agree. Please, let’s discuss this. Consider ourselves at a detente.”
“The entire fucking world is burning. Some detente.”
The fires vanished. The sky cleared of smoke. Even the broken wall of James’s room at the hotel had been sealed again, as though Nathaniel had never been there. The village had been restored to its condition of hours earlier.
“Now the walls between universes,” Elise said.
Belphegor’s radiating amusement grew. “Some things are beyond even the power of gods. However, we can also discuss that.”
She sheathed her falchion. “Okay.”
“Let’s walk.”
The village melted away and became replaced by desert. If the sun-baked soil hadn’t been golden rather than crimson, she might have believed that it was Hell. A river of magma raced through the scorched sagebrush. At least, Elise thought that it should have been racing down the slope—it wasn’t moving.
The sparks that the magma threw into the air were still, too. They hovered in midair like starlight. She walked through the embers and brushed them off of her arms when they threatened to burn through her shirt.
Belphegor had frozen time.
“An improvement, don’t you think?” Belphegor asked, indicating the magma river.
Elise would have been lying if she said that she didn’t like how it felt. Earth had always been too damp and cold for her; this was dry, hot, and miserable, so she felt right at home.
Belphegor strolled along the shore of the magma river. The glow of the magma didn’t touch his slender black suit. He was a cutout moving across the desert, isolated from the environment.
“You wanted to talk, so let’s talk,” Elise said. There was a jackrabbit’s corpse at her feet that seemed to have suffocated from the gases. Flies were suspended inches above its rotting flesh.
“You didn’t use my army as I intended,” Belphegor said. “I gave them to you so that you could lay siege to Heaven.”
“You gave them to me so that I’d provoke the angels into ripping the world apart. I did that fine without their help.”
“That you did. Regardless, you no longer need them.”
That sounded like a threat. “You don’t, either,” Elise said. “You’ve got the hybrids and the Fates. You’ve got the Origin, too. You played a long game to get to Eden, and now you’ve made it.”
“Are you impressed?” Belphegor asked.
Slightly. “No,” Elise said.
“Would you like to join me?”
She stopped walking. “What?”
Belphegor faced her. Another flicker, and he wore his armor. The crimson cape flapped around his ankles in a breeze that Elise couldn’t feel. His fleshless jaw was exposed by his helm in a skeletal grin. “There are always three in any given genesis,” Belphegor said. “The angel, the demon, the gaean. Nathaniel’s the angel. I am the demon.”
“I’m a demon, too.”
“You were once a kopis, a gaean breed. You are all three in a single package. Your blood is primal ethereal, your origin mortal, your power infernal.” He reached a gauntlet toward her. Its spiked fingertips brushed her jaw, and she didn’t step back. “You are a wildcard, Godslayer, and you can fulfill any of the three positions. Imagine a pantheon occupied by two demons. Imagine what we would do to the universe.”
She could imagine it much too easily because it would all look like the desert where they stood: endless hellfire.
It was a tempting thought. Elise would be able to go anywhere and do anything in an environment like that. Electricity? She could will it out of existence. Sunlight? Irrelevant. They would only need the fires smoldering in the pits.
She’d be unstoppable.
Elise would have also made the world uninhabitable for everyone that she cared about.
“I chose you from the kennels for reasons I didn’t understand at the time,” Belphegor said. “You were alluring. Instinctively, I understood what you would represent to the universe, and to me. Lilith made you for me, perhaps out of some belated sense of contrition.”
Revulsion curled through her stomach. “Yatam made me out of his blood.”
“At Lilith’s desire.”
“I was made to kill gods,” Elise said. “Not become one.”
“And? You’ve already fulfilled the destiny forced upon you by angels and man. Is that the end of your legacy?” Fire sparked within the dark depths of Belphegor’s helm, momentarily making his eyes glow crimson. “You can be more than that.”
“I’ve seen what happens to people who enter the Origin.”
“Adam became insane because he was greedy and entered the Origin twice. Hardly an inevitability.” His lipless mouth seemed to smile. “Also, we will have each other. Previous pantheons have done best when they formed strong bonds with each other.”
The only kind of bond Elise could imagine forming with Belphegor was the bond between her sword’s blade in his chest and her hand on the hilt.
“How do you know about previous pantheons?” Elise asked.
“This wasn’t my first genesis. I’m the last of the ancients. I have done all of this before. I have seen gods rise and fall, and I know what it will take to make the next one last.”
“Genesis. You keep saying that.”
“With every new group of gods comes an entirely new universe,” Belphegor said. He waved a hand at the desert. “
I flex my godly muscles with this destruction merely as entertainment. Once I have you as the third, we’ll be able to make everything from the beginning. Again.”
Belphegor continued walking. Elise picked up her pace to walk alongside him.
The desert melted away. They walked through a mountain range filled with crystalline temples and waterfalls.
She’d seen engravings of Zebul, the Heavenly dimension where angels used to craft all of their finest work. It was no longer the idyllic utopia that she had read about. The waterfalls ran with fire. The trees burned. The sky was filled with glimpses of Earth.
The plumes of smoke didn’t move, just as the river of magma hadn’t moved. Time continued to hold still.
Belphegor walked on the long bridge between two temples. It was just wide enough that she could fit at his side. Elise wasn’t exactly short, but her chin was only level with his elbow.
“So you want me to enter the Origin,” Elise said slowly. “In the garden.”
“Ideally.”
In order to do that, he would have to let her inside the garden where his real body waited. She could kill him and prevent anyone else from entering the Origin. She could prevent this genesis thing.
“Okay,” she said. “I’ll do it.”
The instant she said it, his amusement grew. He wasn’t stupid enough to think she’d just changed her mind. “You’ll have to take care of something first.”
“Name it.”
“Find Nathaniel. He’s become a problem. He’ll need to be contained.”
“You want me to kill him,” Elise said.
“No, having a useless angel in Eden suits me. His weakness will render those ethereal fools impotent. I said that we’ll contain him, and we will. However, I will only contain him if you cooperate. Surrender him to me and I will let you into Eden.”
So Belphegor would only let Elise into Eden if she gave him a hostage first.
She missed when her enemies were stupid.
They crossed the bridge to the next temple in Zebul. The instant their feet crossed the threshold, the ethereal dimension melted into New York.
The American northeast had been largely untouched by the Breaking, but now the city was suffering like the rest of the world. People fled buildings frozen in mid-collapse. Fire scaled the walls of skyscrapers.