Emil’s boots were a rugged leather that I could tell had seen little action; they were new enough that even breaking into Hell didn’t soil them. He was just standing there, waiting. Why wouldn’t he attack? Was he always this cautious?
Clink, clink.
The sound echoed off the demon David was fighting against, the last of David’s arrows bouncing off the armor the creature wore. We were truly out of time.
Below echoed in my head once more. The blood loss was making it difficult to concentrate.
The blood!
It trailed down my back, down my chest and hips till it reached the ground, pooling in the small crags and crevices in the broken surface of the platform. Like before when Goat had teleported us into the first level of Hell.
The Enochian symbols!
And then suddenly the blood turned to liquid fire, a smoldering blue that lapped at the stone as it raced around the divots. The ice blue flames grew higher, dancing around the platform’s circumference, effectively trapping us in the center with Camael on the outside.
His eye widened even farther, almost bulging out of his head as it were, and then the laughter began. Terrible, whooping laughter that made my head ache even more. “You foolish girl!” he crooned, nearly doubling over as he gasped for air, a motion so human it made me wonder if angels even needed to breathe. “All you’ve done is seal your fate. You’ve created a Barrier of Hamuldin.”
“Is that a bad thing?” I blurted out accidentally, forcing Camael’s laughter to inch closer toward delirium.
Danielle lowered Adam to the ground beside my feet just long enough to undo the final chain holding me upright. As the last metal chain fell to the ground, I noticed the sheer, iridescent gloves she wore and made a quick, mental note to ask about them later.
The fact that her emerald gaze met mine meant only two things: one, mental notes did me no good and two, either I was getting better at limiting my projections, or nobody else cared to hear my thoughts. “Is Camael telling the truth?”
“I don’t think so.” She reached into the folds of her robes and pulled out a small athame from her waistband. “Take this.”
When I eyed the weapon suspiciously, she thrust the sleeve of her right glove down and touched the blade to her bare skin. “It won’t hurt you. It’s made from adimantium-fused diamond.”
“This will do the trick?” I eyed Adam, my arms latching onto his shrunken, damaged form instinctively.
“It will,” she yelled, having to speak up over the roaring of the cerulean blaze burning around us like wildfire. “David, come on!”
The curly-haired man inched steadily back up the opposite edge of the platform toward us, his longbow still extended defensively.
“Emil!” Danielle cried as she latched onto David’s hand, effectively connecting us all within the circle. “Let’s go!”
Emil had bought just enough time for the circle to activate. I glanced down at the blue flames lapping around us and wondered if this had been the plan all along.
Emil bolted toward the fire, his gaze deadlocked on the prize, a center spot in the spider-veined platform between David and me. “Amelia, now!”
“What?”
All three angels gawked at me.
“Get us out of here! Do your thing!” Emil hissed.
My grip around Adam slipped. “What are you talking about?”
“Blessed Thrones, you’ve got to be shitting me,” Emil said. “Raphael sent us into Gehenna after a neophyte? This is ludicrous.”
Danielle yanked him closer toward her so that we were almost nose to nose. “Relax, Emil. He probably didn’t know.” And then she turned those piercing green eyes back to me. “He told us you managed to make it into Vilon and then to Rai’ek. Obviously you know something.”
“I don’t know how I got there,” I argued. “I just woke up there.” What I didn’t tell them was that I had been losing time for weeks, ever since I had met Adam.
Camael hovered at the edge of the circle, just outside of its perimeter.
I looked at Danielle. “He can’t make it past?”
All three glanced up.
“I guess not,” Emil grumbled, “but that doesn’t mean we can waste time like this. Locking him out probably bought us a minute or two.”
He was right. I watched as Camael and Goat tried from either side of the flames to break through the barrier around us.
Emil frowned at me. “Now would be a good time to pull a rabbit out of your hat.”
Panic surged within my veins instead of adrenaline, the thought of once more becoming a captive was all that I could handle. “Here,” I said, handing Adam over to David for support.
“What are you doing?” His eyes studied the fallen Nephilim in his arms.
I stepped out of the circle, the liquid fire scorching and popping as it cried its disagreement with my choice. “A magic trick.”
Camael smiled widely, his aggressive grin baring his whitened teeth yet again. “Finally reconsidered my offer, Amelia?”
“No,” I said simply. “But you’re going to reconsider ours.”
“I doubt that,” he laughed, “But you know how much I love to hear you talk.”
“I’m going to kill you for what you’ve done,” I hissed. “I will find a way.” I dug my nails into my palms, steadying myself as he laughed at my resolve.
The thought that I was going to die rushed over me. The surrealism of having angels surrounding me, helpless and looking to me for guidance, was not lost on me.
I needed something. Anything.
And then it came.
“Mal’ahk ben wa . . . hutucuun . . . hafala yriken ydris . . . bors du va lorr . . .” The words flowed into my mind like water over a broken dam. Images rushed over me, things I had scarce dreamed of.
Places I had never been. People I didn’t know until now.
Wars. Blood. Heaven. Hell. God. Satan.
I remembered everything, and I was right all along.
My name had never been Eve.
It was Lilith, Queen of the Damned, and I was completely screwed.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
The shrill cacophony of laughter threatened my eardrums, Camael’s mania resounding at every stretch of my consciousness. It was whooping, horrendous, and aimed directly at me.
“You trite, wanton fool!” he bellowed jovially, almost at the point of delirium.
I could see it in his eyes, in every line etched into his immortal face, in the way he had stared at me and the way his hatred seemed so personal. His will to track and hunt us down was so strong. He was the reason I had fled Eden in the first place, why I had come to Earth. I fully intended to oust him for the malefactor that he was.
I had chosen Adam, not him. Like a maniacal Arthur, we were Guinevere and Lancelot, only I had been promised to Lancelot long before my Arthur ever came around.
And across nearly six millennia and multiple dimensions, he had followed me.
I had tried to escape him, escape the wanton cruelty of an angel who considered it his job to retrieve his property when I had never been his. I had always been Adam’s.
“Eve . . .” He had heard me.
I couldn’t do this to Adam. I couldn’t let him die because of me. He had done enough, suffered enough. He had lost everything because of me. I wouldn’t let him go through this a second time. Or a thousandth time for all I knew.
“Adam,” my voice seized in my throat, my tears welling to the edge of my eyes.
Unlike Adam, Raphael’s trio did not know what I knew, or what I was about to do, so they were barely able to stop Adam from charging out from the safety of the circle.
“Mia, don’t do this,” he begged, his voice as tender as his ravaged throat would allow. He, too, had tears brimming at the forefront of those fierce eyes like the ocean.
Emil stepped toward the edge of the blazing fire, ever our protector. “What’s going on?”
“She’s going to sacrifice herself,” Adam breath
ed, his muscles tensing beneath Emil’s capable grasp holding him in place.
“What?” Emil and the others stared directly at me while Camael waited patiently now that his laughter had finally subsided.
“I told you that you were choosing sides when you didn’t even know the stakes.” Camael straightened his spine and took a step closer, extending out a hand to me. “I will ask you one last time. Will you reconsider my offer?”
I glanced once last time at Adam struggling to break free of Emil’s control, our eyes locking with everything I could not say.
But I could say this as I faced Camael and took his hand. “I’m sorry, Adam.”
PART TWO - CAMAEL
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
“This is ludicrous,” Adam grunted, face down on the cold, metal stretcher as Raphael oversaw Danielle’s attempt to treat the burns all over his body. “We have to go after her. We can’t just let him have her.”
“And we will,” Raphael said calmly, pulling a pair of bifocals from his lab coat pocket.
In the moments that followed Amelia’s departure, the remaining angels did everything to keep Adam from losing what was left of his humanity. A shrill wail bellowed from his chest as David and Emil latched onto him and held him at bay.
“I half-wish I had never told her.” Adam shifted onto his side and then sat up, leaning onto his hands for support. “Never showed her anything. Kept her oblivious even now.”
Raphael’s scornful look said everything he needed to say. Danielle, however, was young enough and nosy enough that her opinion mattered. “You can’t be serious. You’re only saying that because you’re angry,” she said as she gathered the equipment necessary to start the first round of debridement.
They barely had made it back in time to keep the rest of Adam’s body from sloughing off any further. If left untreated, his limbs would carbonize, and then before long he would be little more than walking ash. Camael had seen to a thousand lifetimes of torture, his self-decided penance for Adam.
The ultimate jealously, one of the hallowed Ten Commandments, and even one of the fabled Seven could not uphold the rules. When Camael saw them standing there that day, arm in arm in the meadows of Vilon, Adam had unknowingly become the ultimate adversary to the leader of the Thrones.
And he had paid dearly for his choices.
In Camael’s obsession, he had chased Amelia to the ends of the earth, to the ends of each dimension, and now into the bowels of Hell itself.
Camael had left Adam only one choice.
He would lose Eve, but by erasing her identity and hiding his own, he could protect them both. The Elohim had listened when he had stormed into Araboth, the white hall where the Council dwelt, and demanded clemency through exile. They knew at what cost this decision came. More so than Adam losing his twin soul, he and Eve would lose their immortality.
They would lose their identities; Eve, her memories. They would be recreated and remolded, and she would never know him for who he was or who he had been to her. “Adam?”
He glanced at Raphael, the sternness of the Archangel easing for a moment. “This will end. One way or another,” he said gently. “Amelia made a conscious decision, one that hasn’t been easy for either of you, but either she’ll come back or you’ll find her. You always have, and you always will.”
Adam grimaced as the antiseptic ran down his back in droves. “Be that as it may,” he inhaled sharply, his muscles jumping from the stinging liquid. “Everything’s been for naught if Camael succeeds. I should have never brought her back into this. She was better off.”
An aggravated huff released from Danielle’s lips as she carefully continued her ministrations. “Adam, seriously, get ahold of yourself. It’s not like you to mope like this.”
Raphael sighed. “Dani, be easy on him.”
The lesser angel turned on him, tugging loose a charred piece of flesh a little too roughly for anyone’s liking. “Easy on him?” she balked. “Easy would entail not being sent into Gehenna with no warning of what we were getting into. Easy would have been someone telling his little peach that going with the enemy is generally not considered the best idea after nearly being killed by them.” By the time she was done, she foamed at the mouth.
“I know, Dani.”
“That little stunt could have ended very badly, Raphael,” she growled at him. “I don’t know about these wahoos, but I care about my afterlife. I don’t want it to end just because your amnesiac girlfriend can’t figure out which arm-candy she wants to hang onto.”
Before the others could even blink, Adam spun around on the operating table and lunged in Dani’s face. “Immortal or not, you couldn’t possibly understand—”
“Oh, please.” She swatted his hands away. “I can’t understand? You’re such a fool, Adam. An arrogant, ignorant fool. Poor Adam, no one understands what you’ve been through—what you’ve lost. No one can ever sympathize.”
David, who had been silent until now on a rotating stool in the corner, finally spoke up. “Dani—”
“Please.” She waved him off too, pointing the scalpel in the direction of the Nephilim. “Things happen that we cannot stop and cannot change. You sit here whining after everything that’s happened and expect everyone to bend over backwards for you. You need to remember that when we’re diving into the pits of Hell for a friend, our lives are at stake too.”
“I know, Danielle.” Adam’s face contorted in pain as he leaned back onto the cot. “I realize what a risk it was coming after us. I didn’t know her plans, let alone that you guys were coming to rescue us.”
Dani set down the scalpel on the metal tray beside them. “Yeah, well, it wasn’t by choice. It was an order from the Principalities.”
Raphael nodded. “Apparently, you’ve got some friends in very high places still. A lot higher than me anyways.”
“How long will I need to heal?” Adam asked as he felt the side of his body that was little more than charcoal.
Dani glanced at Raphael before saying anything. Another nod from the Archangel, and she was already digging through a bin of vials so old that their labeling had long since faded, making them hard to decipher. Luckily for Adam, it didn’t take her long to find the exact substance she was after.
“Well, the fact that you can move and talk coherently says a great deal about your will, but whether those wings of yours will ever work again is another question.”
The former guardian of Vilon shook his head. They still had so much to learn. “It’s been over three thousand years since I’ve used the things. I highly doubt it’s going to make a difference now.”
“Millennia or not, your body’s muscle memory remembers every last detail of flight,” Emil said as he sat down in one of the visitors’ chairs. “Even if it didn’t, you were half-burned down to the bone. You should be grateful you’re even breathing right now.”
Raphael nodded. “Emil’s right. Immortality only goes so far.”
“If you survive this ordeal and regain what you’ve lost, you might be able to go after her.” Emil dug the dirt from under his nails with a small knife he kept on his hip.
David looked up and asked the question the others dared not to. “What if she doesn’t want to be saved?”
Ω
Hell, surprisingly, had been grossly over-exaggerated by all accounts, or at least the parts I was privy to seeing. And that wasn’t much.
For the first month I was chained by my ankle to a post in the center of what I would consider my chambers. Rash, some people might think, but what’s a month when centuries pass like days? Camael didn’t trust me not to escape, and I couldn’t blame him. I didn’t trust myself.
In all his mania, he had instructed his guards that I must want for nothing, and that was, at least, something I could attest to. Beneath the half-dozen layers of billowing folds of iridescent fabric the seamstresses had fashioned into my gown, I could hardly make out the rusted shackles.
“Tell me, D’Angeline,” Camael’s v
oice sounded from behind me as I stared out across the rocky terrain below my chamber. “Do you fancy these surroundings?”
He went ahead and opened the stained glass doors leading to the balcony, a strange sight in such a place.
Perhaps he had missed home, missed that part of Heaven that had meant something to him.
Hell was dark, cold. A place that time forgot about eons ago.
I had been here once, long ago, and the memories filled me with a terror unlike anything I had ever known. I was trapped in a place of nightmares.
Most people think they know what really happened because Genesis tells us so definitively, but there was far more involved with my fall. With everyone’s focus on Lucifer and his war-mongering tendencies, it paved the way for dissent to build within the ranks of Celestials. Friends became enemies, and enemies became a reason worth dying over.
Even if we were all immortal.
Camael slipped past me and leaned against the lithic railing as he watched me with his head cocked.
I refused to meet his gaze. “Why are you doing this?” Though my voice was barely above a whisper, I would shed no more tears in front of him. I would not let him win.
With eyes void of feeling, cold like the stone around us, he stared at me. “Doing what? I told you that you would come with me willingly.”
“You gave me no choice,” I said coolly. I would not let him get a rise out of me. I would tell myself whatever I had to, to save what remained of my sanity.
He latched onto my bare shoulder and turned me to face him, his eyes brimming with anger. “I told you what you needed to know. Nothing more.” Camael’s eyes were gray and unmoving, so unlike Adam’s molten foam. Rigid. Empty. Like steel. They made me yearn for Adam so badly. How strange it seemed now: forgetting, meeting, and then remembering someone so pivotal to my entire existence, only to give it all up to save his life. I had no idea if he even survived.
But I couldn’t think about him any longer.
My ability to shield my thoughts had increased in the days since I had last seen him. Perhaps due to the stress, or perhaps my own prowess was gaining strength. I would need everything I had if I was to get out of this alive. I did not intend to become the next Queen of Hell, regardless of who was offering.
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