FALL FROM PARADISE

by Blair, M. Dylan

  “Wow,” I blurted out and felt stupid even saying it. For what it was worth, this all fascinated me.

  Adrenaline started to course through my veins the moment the icy smoke began to envelop my ankles. I watched as a design appeared within the circumference of the circle, odd shapes racing in all directions as they overlapped simpler designs like squares and triangles.

  “And this design?” I said as it finished, the bright light filling the minute crevices where no light had been.

  Suddenly the floor disappeared out from underneath us, leaving only a bright vortex in its wake. The sound of wind rushing loudly past our feet drowned out any chance of me hearing anything else.

  Even Goat had to yell for me to hear him. “Are you ready?”

  Apparently I wasn’t. “Ready for what?”

  He shook his head disappointedly as if I had missed something important.

  “For Hell.”

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  I closed my eyes and prayed we’d arrive in one piece. I was trusting my entire existence to a man I’d only known a couple of hours. Hell, I could say that about everyone I had met recently, Duncan included.

  I wondered what sort of madness I was about to step off into. Like Alice and her ever-elusive rabbit hole, the thought that I had found mine did not escape me.

  I wasn’t prepared for this. How could I be? Goat was taking me into Hell and doing what, leaving me there? He had no reason to stay. This wasn’t his battle, wasn’t his fight.

  Adam. My thoughts kept darting back to him.

  What they had done to him, how inhuman. What lack of soul did it take to do something like that to another human being, and then I realized none of them, of us, were human.

  It didn’t matter if the box closed neatly when there was no box to begin with. The reality of the situation had finally dawned on me. No matter how hard I tried, nothing would ever be even remotely similar to my old life.

  Perhaps it had been that way since the moment Adam had stepped foot in my hospital room. Perhaps even longer than that. Perhaps it went back to the life I had no recollection of.

  “Amelia?”

  I glanced up to find Goat staring at me, his black eyes steadied on my distracted gaze. “We’re here.”

  Fear suddenly poured down my spine, the hairs prickling on the back of my neck. What was I expecting Hell to be like? Would it be all fire and brimstone, or would it be more bleak, like an endless field and blackened sky? Everyone had read about it, made movies about it. Hell, even the Bible was about it.

  A Nephilim. That’s what Camael had called us.

  He knew everything about us, but I didn’t even know his name before any of this. Who had ever heard of an angel named Camael? Was I supposed to? I didn’t know whether to be embarrassed or not; I didn’t even remember my own past.

  Everyone was so certain that I was Eve, the mythological character out of Genesis. At least I could recall that much from Sunday School. The reason we aged. The reason we died.

  All because of some apple.

  All because of me.

  But was any of it the slightest bit true? It was obvious that we had done something to anger the angels; that much I believed. I also believed that Goat might be, in fact, capable of taking me into the one place humanity feared more than anything else.

  I had never thought of myself as a bad person, and I certainly didn’t feel I had done anything to incur the wrath of Heaven, but apparently I was wrong. I silently prayed that I would get through this in one piece. It took me a second to muster up the courage to look beyond Goat, my eyes locking on the unfamiliarity behind him.

  And all I could do was blink.

  “What is this?” I balked, finding myself standing in the middle of a stark white room no larger than ten feet in any direction. I couldn’t help but look up and notice the ceiling panels. Why were there ceiling panels? Why was there a ceiling at all? “Um, Goat?”

  He reached into his back jean pocket and pulled out another cigar, lighting it with the Zippo he carried. “Yeah?”

  “Where are we?”

  “I already said,” he muttered out of the corner of his mouth.

  “Um,” I stuttered, glancing around uneasily. “Are you sure?”

  The uncertainty in my voice made him look up. The fact that we were standing in a stark white room and not in the bowels of the Underworld didn’t even faze him in the least. “Yeah, watch,” he snorted and arched backward to hit a small button on the wall I hadn’t noticed previously.

  Immediately the blinding white wall in front of us parted, and it suddenly dawned on me that we were in some sort of supernatural elevator, a notion seconded by the drastic change of scene on the other side of the wall.

  The moment I started toward the exit, my knees wobbled anxiously, reminding me of the fact that my resolve was not infallible.

  This was Hell. I wasn’t even through the doorway, and I was already scared shitless.

  “You don’t have to do this, you know,” he said simply. “Just because someone tells you that you owe them, doesn’t mean you actually do.”

  I leaned over, supporting myself on my hands as I steadied my nerves. Goat was right. I had no business being here. Ever since I had met Adam, my life had been turned upside down. Had I never spoken to him that night, my fate might have very well been different.

  I would not have found out that I was a Nephilim.

  I would not have been murdered by angels who considered me a threat.

  I would not be entering Hell with a demon I had met hours before.

  Instead, I would be dying of cancer, bound to a bed while another vial of poison coursed through my veins, or perhaps I would be past the point of dying. Maybe I’d be dying in a hospice like Mary’s, or better yet, back in my own bed constantly doted over by the mother who never realized there were more important things to do than muster over me.

  Foolishly I had thought that my previous life had been a waste. I should have been thankful to be alive. Millennia old, and I was still stupid and ignorant.

  Perhaps the angels were right to hate us so.

  “Oh, stop bawling, Jesus Christ!” Goat interrupted. “If you don’t get that self-wallowing under control, and I mean right fucking now, you are going to get yourself fucking killed.”

  I sighed. “Goat—”

  “I don’t care, kid. Your business is yours alone. You want to go? Then go. If you want to stay, then stay. I’m here because of Duncan. I don’t care either way; just figure it out.”

  I shot him a glare as I remained hunched over. “Listen, buddy. I know the thought of dying doesn’t really mean a shit to someone like you, but it means something to me.”

  He laughed again, the ash from his cigar falling to the white tile beneath our feet. “That’s not what I meant. You are just as immortal as I am. More so actually. You shouldn’t be so scared of dying.”

  A slight distortion of heat fluctuated around me out of nowhere, making the sudden nauseous feeling even worse. It tugged and nagged at me until the only thing I could do to keep from vomiting was fling myself out of the claustrophobic room.

  My knees sank into the gravel, the rocks tearing the fragile skin of my palms as I gasped for air. “What is going on?” I rasped, my voice hoarser the moment I stepped over the threshold. “Continuum displacement,” he said as he took one final drag off the cigar before putting out the butt with his boot, using his heel to draw a line over the ground we had been standing on.

  “And that . . . means what?” I inhaled in sharp, ragged gasps, as if I'd been caught in a fire where all the oxygen had been stripped away.

  “Just give it a minute,” Goat said simply. “It takes some getting used to. Happens to everyone the first time.”

  I stared widely at him, each breath taking all of my concentration just to expand my lungs. Goat stepped through the threshold to try and pull me to my feet only to stagger himself.

  “Happens to everyone the first time,” I said so
urly.

  He snorted as we leaned on each other for a moment, waiting for our bodies to adjust to our new surroundings. A thick sulfuric smell clung to the air like a second skin, caking my body in a putrid film.

  “It wasn’t this the last time I was here,” he rasped.

  “Okay,” I said as I staggered to my knees and then to my feet. “When was that?”

  “1918.”

  “What?” I nearly died. “Please tell me you’re joking.”

  “No,” he barked. “Why do you humans always think someone is joking all the time? It’s ridiculous.”

  I wiped the spit from the corner of my lips. “Because humor is a defense mechanism in case you haven’t noticed.”

  Goat shook his head. “There’s a reason you humans haven’t evolved much in two thousand years.” He let go of me abruptly, allowing me to realize the cause of his actions.

  Three shadows, thin as wisps, stood before us. Had he not reacted, it would have taken me far too long to realize the threat in our midst. Possibly long enough that I would have already been dead.

  I blinked rapidly, my eyes unsure of whether I was imagining them or not. “Who are they?”

  Just as my weight shifted forward, Goat barred my path with his arm. “Not who, but what,” he said slowly, enunciating each word as he did. “They’re carrier demons. Low level. Like foot soldiers.”

  “So what are they ‘carrying?’”

  “Us.”

  Ω

  Myriad colors burst into my vision, erupting from every corner of my sight. It took a second to realize the contrasts for what they were. Flowers of a wide variety bundled together by hands I recognized.

  Adam lowered the cluster of wildflowers, allowing me a step back to focus myself. “I thought you’d like these.”

  “Adam?”

  I spun around in search of any semblance of recognition only to be disappointed that we stood waist deep in a flowering field, the tall grass blowing in every direction. A cloudless sky danced in the firmament, its golden hues speckled with the soft rose and orange that bloomed miles above our head. Like the strokes of a painter’s brush encompassing a blank canvas, it completely contradicted the dull, lifeless world I had grown accustomed to seeing.

  “You’re really here?” I nearly tackled him in relief only to find a questioning look in my direction.

  “Of course I’m here,” he said simply, still holding the bouquet in my direction as he took a step backward. “Where else would I be?”

  By the look in those pale green eyes, he obviously didn’t understand the cause for my concern.

  “I can’t believe you’re really here, though I don’t know where here is,” I exhaled.

  The moment I tried to wrap my arms around him, he realized something was amiss, barring my affections with an arm. “Eve, what is going on? Why are you acting like this?”

  “What?” Confusion racked me. “Where are we?”

  Adam’s brow furrowed as he studied my face. “We’re in the fields of Eden, on the outskirts of Vilon.”

  “Eden?” I hissed below my breath. “We’re in Eden?” I suddenly looked around for any sign of life other than ourselves, finding only the stark quiet our companion.

  Adam’s eyes widened at me, my confusion unnerving him. “Eve—”

  My hands latched onto him, clutching him by the arms. “Adam, where are the Seraphim? How did I get here? Tell me!”

  “I— I don’t know what you’re talking about.” He yanked his arm away so roughly that I nearly tumbled to my knees, my hands jutting out to break my fall. “We’ve been here for over a century now.”

  “Where’s Goat? Where’s Camael?”

  “Camael?” The only other person as far as the eye could see had no idea what I was talking about. “The leader of the Throne guard?”

  I looked down at my hands in hopes of seeing dirt, grass stains, something to know I wasn’t imagining this too. But there were none. Each time I had been transported somewhere, there was something to tether me back to the real world. Now I couldn’t tell.

  “You know who I am?” I hugged myself tightly, my anxiety building to an almost gargantuan proportion.

  “Of course I do,” he said quietly, looking around as if he didn’t want to be overheard. But by whom? “You’re Eve D’Angeline; Guardian of Vilon.”

  It was clear he had no idea who I was now. Anyone could have been standing there in front of him and it would have made no difference.

  And then came the realization that we were not in my era. Not in my lifetime. Amelia did not yet exist.

  How I had gotten to Eden mattered far less than the fact that I was no longer in my time. I had returned to Eden, to Vilon as Adam had called it, and for all anyone could tell, I had never left.

  That gaze like the ocean seemed haunted even then. Whatever darkness he was hiding, I could see right through it. An illusion, albeit a good one, was just real enough to remind me that the real Adam was out there somewhere, possibly dying if that was even something that could happen.

  This Adam was gorgeous in an unnatural way; his skin glistened in the sunlight much like everything else caught in its incandescent web. It took me another moment to realize that much of the shimmering was a reflection of the downy feathers escaping from his shoulder blades. And they were unlike anything I had ever seen before. They were magnificent, a true glimpse at what my past had been.

  “So this is Eden?” I spun around, trying to embrace the entirety of where I was—the immortal paradise that housed the Tree of Life and the Tree of Knowledge. “The Trees? They’re real?” I blurted out suddenly, doing my best not to become a self-fulfilling prophecy.

  His wings suddenly flapped, like a wild bird aggressively raising the alarm. I could feel the distance rising between us, as if he no longer trusted who I was. “Shh,” he whispered and pulled me under a small ash tree, obscuring us from view. “What is wrong with you, Mia? Why are you acting so strangely, like you’ve never been here before?”

  So his little endearment had originated long before my current lifetime. “Does that mean I’m a reincarnation?”

  Apparently my craziness only increased in his eyes. “Reincarnated? Where did you get this stuff? You’re the same person I’ve been serving with since our assignment began. Do I need to send for Raphael? Are you sure you’re not coming down with something?”

  I was getting nowhere with this person. “What is Vilon?”

  “This is.” He held his hands out on either side of him though his gaze questioned mine. “It’s the entrance to Heaven.”

  I stated the obvious. “We’re standing in a field of flowers, a handful of which you just tried to give to me. So am I imagining this or not?”

  “Vilon only gives you what you need.” He reached for my hand, his wings retracting back out of the way.

  “This is so strange.” I spun around, half-expecting to see ghosts or wild safari animals or something. Instead it was so very silent. Beyond the ash tree, the field continued onto the horizon, those same crimsons and muted golds shifting down the rainbow toward navy and purple. I could tell that if this place did see nightfall, it was fast approaching.

  “Adam, I need you to listen, and this might not make sense, but I need you to trust me,” I said calmly, doing my best not to arouse his further suspicion. “I don’t know when this is, or where we are, but I need you to tell me how to get back.”

  “Back?” he repeated. I could tell he still didn’t understand. “Back where?”

  “Earth. Purgatory,” I barked at him. “Hell even. I don’t care. Just not here.”

  And then it finally dawned on him, or at least I thought it did. “I’m going to get Raphael, Eve. You’re sick, and I don’t know how, but there’s something not right with you.” He reached into the chest pocket of his linen robe and pulled out something that looked like a small horn, immediately sounding an alarm as he blew into it.

  Before I could even realize what was happening, an entir
e battalion of armored angels descended around me, their weapons drawn and poised in my direction. Each of them bore foreign coats of arms I had never seen before, but I recognized the Celestial script engraved into the plate armor. Those on my left and right all wore the same symbols from what I could tell, and I assumed they were insignia of their positions.

  The only differences between the entire lot of them were the masks covering their faces. Some angels had their features exaggerated, their noses lengthened like Cyrano de Bergerac. Their eyes black like night or gold like the sun. Their identities hidden, their bodies tanned and hardened. All of which seemed meaningless and trivial against the overwhelming assembly of glistening feathers all raised in alarm.

  One of the masked angels walked down the aisle created in the gap between the two groups, the strange creature staring at me through its hidden veil. Adam, dwarfed in comparison, stood beside the taller being. The angel spoke to Adam, its voice indistinguishable as they talked.

  Paranoia flooded every fiber of me. Once again, I felt like Alice in Wonderland, only this time the proverbial rabbit had led me right into the Queen’s domain. The urge to flee nearly consumed me.

  The creature’s gaze noted my existence before Goat’s warning slapped me in the face. I threw up whatever imaginary walls I could around myself in hopes that these creatures would not realize the truth, but I had the feeling that it was already too late.

  Two of the guards latched onto my arms, their vise-like grips already bruising my tired limbs. There was no hope of escape as I struggled in vain, wondering what can of worms I had opened now.

  I desperately wanted to see Adam, my Adam.

  Paradise’s version was already disappearing back along an ethereal stairwell I had not noticed previously. More so than ever before, I didn’t know what to do. The only other person I could trust had been taken from me, trapped in the bowels of Gehenna while I couldn’t get any farther away if I tried.

  All I could do was weep.

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  The Queen of Hearts, it turned out, was an angel who apparently had no qualms over showing his true identity to the rest of the Celestial world.