Paradise Damned

by S. M. Reine

  This was still a dream. Betty wasn’t real.

  She couldn’t be.

  “Why aren’t you talking to me?” Betty asked. “This is awfully quiet, even for you. Did something go wrong when we were fighting the Night Hag? You can tell me if something went wrong, you know. I won’t take it badly.”

  “This is a sick fucking joke,” Elise said.

  Betty’s eyes widened. “Okay. What happened?”

  Elise tore open the curtains. The grassy lawn faded into the gray haze of fog. Metaraon stood at the edge, watching her.

  “Did we kill the Night Hag?” Betty asked.

  “Yeah,” Elise said without turning around. “We killed the Night Hag.”

  Betty gave a shaky laugh. “I must have been unconscious for a while. Did I get knocked out or something?”

  You got shot in the face.

  Elise couldn’t bring herself to say the words out loud. She started pacing the kitchen again.

  This illusion sat just like Betty, with her legs curled underneath her and her chin propped on the back of the couch. She was adorable. Curvaceous. She looked puzzled, but not hostile.

  For fuck’s sake, she hadn’t aged a day.

  “So how did I get back here?” Betty asked, twirling a finger at James’s apartment. “Tell me that James heroically carried me here after I passed out. Please? But, you know, go ahead and say that he carried me around heroically even if it’s not true. Let me swoon.”

  This, this was insanity—far beyond anything else Elise had been subjected to in the garden.

  “You want to know how you got here?” Elise asked. “Fine. Look at where you are.”

  She threw the front open and marched down the stairs. Betty followed her without needing to be asked. That used to be her trademark—the kind of blind loyalty that meant she would go anywhere Elise went.

  That was what had gotten her killed, after all.

  Elise’s feet drummed down the stairs, and she stepped into the cobblestone street, pointing at the city at the end of the path. The distance had distorted itself again; it was only at the bottom of the hill.

  Betty stopped beside Elise. Her jaw dropped at the sight of the gleaming city. “Holy flesh of Christ as a cracker,” she said. “What the fuck?”

  Elise seized her by the shoulders. “I didn’t bring you here, Betty. This isn’t even the ‘here’ you think it is. What happened?”

  Her mouth opened and closed repeatedly before she found the words to respond. Betty’s stare was fixed over Elise’s shoulder. “I don’t know. The last thing I remember, we were on our way down to get the Night Hag. There was a ramp down into that big cave with the stone arch, and spiders, and then…” She shook her head slowly. “Well, I don’t know. Then I woke up here, with you.”

  Maybe Metaraon had brought Betty back to life.

  But why?

  “So, uh,” Betty said, “where are we, if this isn’t Reno?”

  “Heaven.”

  “Does that mean we’re dead?”

  That was a loaded question if Elise had ever heard one. “Not necessarily.”

  Betty drifted down the road, spellbound by the sight of the gleaming white temples. She appeared to be legitimately stunned. It was a consistent reaction in a world of inconsistencies.

  Elise pressed the heel of one hand to her temple.

  She couldn’t start thinking like that. She had to keep reminding herself that Betty was a new form of torture.

  But as Betty wandered through the streets, touching the leaves and stroking her hands on the smooth white stone, all Elise could think was that James had come back from the dead once before, too.

  “This place is amazing,” Betty said, gazing at the waterfall foaming down the cliff behind one temple. “When you say that we’re in Heaven, do you mean, like…” She pointed toward the sky. “Heaven, Heaven? And that tree is…”

  “The Tree of Life.”

  “You’re telling me that we’re in the Garden of Eden.”

  “No. Eden was on Earth. This is an ethereal dimension called Araboth—it’s where they transplanted the Tree after the original garden burned.”

  Elise shuddered. She could imagine Eden burning as clearly as though she had been there.

  Those weren’t her memories. The garden was leaking into her mind.

  “Is God here?” Betty asked.

  Elise dug her fingers into Betty’s arm. “Don’t say His name,” she said. “And yes, He is.”

  “I take it that’s a…bad thing?”

  “You have no idea,” Elise said.

  Betty turned to take in the sight of Araboth around them, but some of the wonder had faded from her eyes. Her cheeks were pale. “This is what you told me about, isn’t it? The thing you were running from all that time? The reason you went into hiding?”

  Anger burned in Elise’s cheeks.

  Betty was so fucking convincing.

  All she could manage was another stiff nod. It took all of her self-control to keep her face blank.

  But Betty knew Elise too well to believe that the expressionlessness meant that she was okay. “It’s going to be okay,” she said. “Anthony and James will get over their man hate and work together to save us. Right?”

  “I dumped Anthony,” Elise said. “And James is probably dead.”

  Betty’s jaw dropped. “What?”

  “You heard me. Nobody is coming to save us.”

  “Then…what are we supposed to do?” Betty asked. Her chin trembled. Her eyes welled up with tears. “If James is dead…”

  The urge to comfort Betty was overpowering, even if she was fake. “I’ll get you out of here,” Elise said before she could stop herself. “Just like I always do.”

  “But James.”

  “Yeah,” she said. Her heart felt like it was made of lead. “James.” A laugh bubbled out of her chest, almost like a half-sob. “Have I got a story about James for you. And…and so much more.”

  “How long have I been gone?” Betty asked. Her forced smile was slipping.

  “A long time, Betty,” Elise said. “A long time.”

  Her best friend’s gaze focused over her shoulder, as if something had caught her attention.

  Elise turned to glimpse the figure of a dark-haired woman disappearing among the trees.

  Shock numbed her to her fingertips.

  All of Elise’s moments in Araboth had been hauntingly lonely. Adam had told her that the city was empty because Lilith had taken everyone away. Yet Elise had definitely seen someone, and Betty had, too—it wasn’t her imagination.

  Could it have somehow been Lilith?

  “Wait here,” Elise said, touching Betty’s shoulder. “If someone tries to take you elsewhere, don’t go with them. I’ll be right back.”

  Betty nodded mutely as tears streamed down her cheeks. She sat down on a stone bench.

  Elise pushed into the jungle, parting the bushes with her hands. The roaring of the waterfall grew as she delved deeper into the foliage. The river was so close—she could see a misty spray over the tops of the trees.

  A woman ducked between the trees in front of her.

  “Hey!” Elise yelled.

  The trees slid around her…then disappeared.

  She stumbled into an open, grassy clearing next to the cliff, where the waterfall fed into the aqueducts.

  There was no sign of the woman that Elise had seen. But Metaraon stood on the bank, wings unfurled, as if preparing to fly.

  All thoughts of Lilith fled from Elise’s mind.

  “Don’t you even fucking think of leaving,” Elise said, striding toward him.

  He dropped his wings. “Eve,” Metaraon said silkily, like it was an insult. He pressed a fist to his chest in a salute.

  “What did you do?” she asked, jabbing her finger back toward Araboth, where she had left Betty. “She is dead.”

  “Was,” Metaraon corrected.

  The clearing seemed to spin around her. Elise took a steadying breath
. “You’re telling me,” she said, carefully selecting her words, “that you brought my friend back from the dead?”

  “Do you know what happens to human souls when they die?” the angel asked.

  “Eventually they get absorbed into the energy of the universe, or…something like that,” Elise said. Her mom had told her a couple of times, but it had all sounded like witch bullshit. Elise was much more concerned with people who were still alive than those who had already died. “It doesn’t take long for a soul to vanish. Betty’s been gone for over a year.”

  “I have lived almost as long as the universe, girl. Such things are hardly beyond my ken.”

  “But why?”

  Metaraon’s eyebrows lifted. “You said that you have nothing left to lose—now, that has changed.”

  Grief and anger and confusion were a fist in her throat, squeezing her breath tight. “Is that what this is? Leverage? You’re so annoyed that I haven’t gotten around to killing Adam yet that you decided to ramp up the torture a little fucking more?”

  “Is it working?” He gave her a hard look. “Are you angry?”

  Elise slammed her fist into his jaw. Metaraon’s head snapped to the side, but his body remained immobile, as though she had punched one of the stone pillars of the temple.

  “What do you think, asshole?” she asked.

  He rubbed his jaw, and she could see the murder in his eyes. “Good,” he said, sweeping his wings wide. “Now do your job. Don’t disappoint me.”

  Elise watched him soar away. Anger dulled to a muted roar inside of her, indistinguishable from the rushing of the waterfall.

  It didn’t matter if Metaraon used Betty as leverage. Elise was becoming increasingly convinced that there was no way to kill Adam. Even if she did, Metaraon would surely deliver death to Elise next—which meant that Betty would be vulnerable, too.

  Betty changed everything, and yet, she also somehow changed nothing.

  Elise would have to kill Him to save Betty—but first, she needed to kill Metaraon.

  Which meant that she needed her swords.

  Elise returned to find that Betty was still sitting on the bench. Betty gawked at the outline of the Tree in the fog, and didn’t notice Elise until she grabbed her arm.

  “Come on,” Elise said, dragging her away from the temple. A wind was rising in Araboth, carrying the scent of apples over the air. The city was restless.

  He was coming.

  “Where are we going?” Betty asked, hurrying to keep up with Elise. She had kicked off her shoes and now walked barefoot.

  “We need to find my swords,” she said. “But first, we need to get out of this city.”

  She had managed to summon the apartment above Motion and Dance by force of will. If Elise could change her surroundings, then she must be able to break out, too.

  Elise gripped Betty’s hands tightly.

  What if Elise’s first impression had been right and Betty wasn’t real? If Elise woke up, would Betty vanish?

  Elise gazed at her friend’s pink cheeks, the blond hair falling over her forehead, the way she gnawed at her bottom lip. Wind plastered the tan slacks to Betty’s hips and ruffled the collar of her shirt.

  She still looked—and felt—so real.

  Elise didn’t want to know if she wasn’t.

  “Don’t let go of me,” Elise said. “Okay?”

  Betty only nodded.

  Shutting her eyes, Elise tried to form an image of the garden in her mind—the garden as it had been when she was first dragged through the gate, not the city in which she now stood. She imagined Mnemosyne frothing with blood. The Tree with its dying branches. The blackened foliage, oozing with ichor, as the garden was poisoned from the inside out by His insanity.

  And then Elise stepped into it.

  “Holy shit!”

  Betty’s exclamation made her eyes fly open.

  They stood in a grassy clearing encircled by dead bushes. The fog was thicker than ever before. But Elise could hear Mnemosyne’s rushing and see the dim outline of the garden wall covered in green creepers.

  She was in the garden, and Betty was still with her.

  Alive.

  A laugh escaped Elise. “You’re real!”

  But Betty looked horrified. “What the heck is wrong with your hair?”

  Elise picked up a fistful of silken hair that fell over her shoulder. It was a long, shiny black sheet—not the auburn curls that she used to have. Betty had died before Elise was given a new form by Yatam and Nügua, so she had never seen it before.

  “We’ve got to get to the Tree,” Elise said.

  “But…”

  “It’s me,” Elise said firmly, grabbing her hand again. Betty’s palms were slick with sweat. “Okay? This is just…it’s some garden thing. We have bigger problems.”

  “Like your boobs,” Betty said.

  Elise looked down. All of the brides were kept naked, and the shift in location meant a shift in costume, too.

  She tried to remember what her body had looked like before her rebirth as a demon, and could barely summon the memory. There had been more muscles. That much she knew.

  “Are they bigger?” Elise asked.

  “Uh, yeah,” Betty said. She clapped a hand over her mouth and giggled. “Just a little bit.”

  Elise rolled her eyes. “Of course that’s the first thing that you notice.”

  “No, it’s good. Really impressive. You don’t look like a preteen boy anymore.”

  “Get moving, Betty.”

  All of the plants in the garden seemed to whisper at Elise’s passage, as if quietly heralding a visiting queen. It made her ears hurt. She tried to ignore them.

  Elise didn’t release Betty’s wrist as they stepped through the desiccated ruins of an orchard. A full half of the trees were black, as if they hadn’t had water in months; the plants that survived oozed ichor onto the soil.

  “Some garden,” Betty whispered.

  Elise had to drop her hand to squeeze around a cluster of mossy rocks. “It didn’t used to be like this. It used to be beautiful.”

  “What happened?”

  “I left Him,” Elise said softly, leaping over a fallen tree. She waited on the other side to give Betty a hand. “He’s always been crazy, as far as I know, but having women sacrificed to Him kept Him from realizing that He’s imprisoned here. They didn’t have anyone to replace me when I left, so He’s gotten more…destructive.”

  “When you say ‘Him’…”

  Elise glanced around the garden. The vines hung with shriveled brown fruit the size of her fist; they had rotten on the outside to expose glistening pits, which almost looked like eyes. She didn’t dare say “God.” Not in this place.

  “Adam,” Elise said. “The first man.”

  Betty opened her mouth, most likely to ask more questions, but Elise shook her head. It wasn’t the right time for that. Talking to Betty was like enduring the Inquisition, but a misspoken word could have deadly consequences when He was watching.

  They continued to move.

  “I need to find somewhere to hide you,” Elise said, glancing over her shoulder to make sure that her friend was sticking close. Betty was right at her back, near enough that one misstep would probably make both of them trip.

  “Hide me? Where?”

  Elise didn’t really have any ideas. Where could she hide someone in hostile territory? The garden itself was a mess of twisting, maze-like paths among the roots of the Tree, but He was everywhere within it.

  “Underneath the Tree,” Elise decided. It didn’t seem to be part of the cherubim’s normal search pattern. At least Betty would be hidden from casual glances.

  Betty swallowed hard as she looked up at the towering branches of the Tree. Its tangled boughs looked like ribs of iron.

  “That sounds bad,” she said.

  James’s dead body flashed to Elise’s mind. “It’s fine,” she lied. “It’s as safe as it gets.”

  But Betty had stopped f
ollowing her.

  “What are those?” she asked, pointing up at the sky.

  Elise followed Betty’s finger with her gaze. A pair of figures wheeled through the mist above the Tree.

  She pulled Betty under a bush, which scraped at her face and hair until she slapped away the branches. They made a sulky retreat.

  With her belly flattened to the earth, Elise parted the brittle leaves enough to see the cherubim.

  “They’re looking for me,” she whispered.

  Betty paled. “Why?”

  Elise wasn’t certain. Had Adam noticed her absence and sent them to retrieve her for another round of “training”? Or were they acting on Metaraon’s orders?

  Either way, she didn’t want to be found until Betty was safe and she had her swords again.

  “When we move, it will have to be quickly,” Elise whispered.

  The leaves rustled, and the bushes parted.

  A man stood on the other side, handsome and tall and as naked as Elise. Betty gave a strangled cry.

  Where He walked, the garden seemed to come to life. There was vibrant green grass beneath the balls of His feet. Irises tickled His calves. The vines drooped to His shoulders, wrapping around His arms, greeting Him with kisses of their fruit. But the life didn’t extend far beyond Him—it was another illusion. He had no idea that He stood in a dead garden.

  His gaze bored into Elise.

  “What are you hiding from?” He asked. Even though He sounded amused, there was a dangerous edge to it.

  Elise stood, putting herself between Him and Betty, even though she knew it was too late. Her stomach knotted. “Is it time again already?” she asked harshly. “Aren’t you bored of hurting me yet?”

  He used her hand to pull her against His body. When their skin met, her sight changed. She saw the entire garden the way He did: thriving, lush, and colorful.

  A sense of warmth filled her—a feeling of rightness. She was meant to be in that lush, beautiful garden, with His hand wrapped around hers.

  Elise pulled her hand out of His. The dead orchard returned.

  “Don’t look so afraid,” Adam said to Betty. He managed to sound simultaneously dangerous and charming as He helped Betty step out of the bushes.

  Elise wanted to stop Him, but she felt rooted to the ground as surely as the Tree.