by S. M. Reine
She lifted her eyebrows. They were naturally slanted so that she looked perpetually angry, although he understood this particular shade of anger to be one tinged with exasperation. “Are you just going to lie there forever?”
“Maybe, now that you’re dead,” he said.
“Nice to see you’ve written me off. Stop being so pathetic and get the fuck up.”
He didn’t make the decision to move, yet he found himself standing anyway.
Hallucination or not, James took the time to drink in the sight of Elise. He didn’t understand why he would have summoned her from such a distant memory—maybe she was frozen, timeless, in his mind from the moment that he had realized he loved her.
“You’re supposed to be rescuing me,” Elise said.
He was the reason that she was gone in the first place.
“I’m so sorry,” he whispered.
She touched his shoulder. He saw her fingers rest against his shirt, watched the cloth move at the contact, and felt nothing on his skin. But long-forgotten feelings blossomed in his chest. It was a warmth that nothing in Limbo could provide.
He leaned into her touch, eyes dropping closed, and tried to savor the ghostly sensation of their contact.
Then she hauled off and punched him across the face.
He sprawled to the ground. It was as featureless and unremarkable as everything else in Limbo. Maybe dirt, maybe sand, maybe neither. But it felt harder than it ever had before. He felt like he really hit something for the first time.
Elise straddled his chest. She had no weight.
“Let’s count the bodies,” she said, ticking off her fingers one by one. “My dad? Dead. My mom? Probably dead. Hannah? Definitely dead. And the longer you pretend that Metaraon hasn’t run off with Nathaniel, the likelier it becomes that he’s dead, too. Are you just going to give up on us?”
“I haven’t given up,” he protested weakly. “There just isn’t anything I can do from Limbo. I’m trapped.”
Elise rolled her eyes. “All I’m hearing are excuses.”
James would have gotten angry if he could have mustered the strength for it. “If being trapped in a world with no exit is an excuse, then why don’t you rescue me?”
The corner of her mouth lifted in a half-smile. “What do you think I’m doing?”
“But it’s not you. I’ve gone insane.” Although he felt no less sane than he had stumbling through eternal nothingness.
She rested a gloved hand over his heart. “I’m in here. You have half of me, and I have half of you. We need to get the parts back together.”
He held her hand. He couldn’t feel her skin, the cloth of the glove, but he remembered what it felt like.
“I don’t think I can do it,” he said.
Elise stood and shrugged. “Fine. Lie here until the world ends. Maybe I’m dead, maybe I’m not—you’ll never know now.” Elise’s body faded. He could see the faint line of the horizon through her waist.
“Wait,” he said. He didn’t think his body had any moisture left in it, but a single tear rolled down his cheek, as cold as the ice in the Coccytus. “Elise!”
She bent, lowering her face to his. Her eyes seemed to glow with an inner light, even as she drifted away.
“Do something about this,” she said. “I need you.”
And then she was gone.
But the glow wasn’t.
Beyond the place that Elise had vanished—far beyond—a flickering, colorless light hung in the gray plane that he thought of as the sky. It was impossible to tell distances in Limbo, but he thought that it must have been far away.
It had been so long since he saw anything but emptiness that he was slow to realize what the presence of light must have meant.
That light looked just like the fissure that James had used to enter Limbo.
Excitement thrilled through him, making his heart pound and his blood race. He hadn’t been excited in so long that being able to feel his own pulse almost shocked him as much as the fissure did.
He picked himself off, wiping imaginary dust off of his jeans—an old, reflexive gesture that had suddenly returned to him.
And then he began to run.
Adam’s return was heralded by a too-familiar surge of energy. The Tree blurred around Elise. When her vision cleared once more, she was in bed at Motion and Dance with the sheets pulled to her waist. Gray sunlight streamed through the curtains. Betty was also in bed, curled on her side in the fetal position—the shift in setting hadn’t made her vanish, nor had it awakened her.
Adam promptly entered the room through a white, four-paneled door. He carried breakfast on a tray: one piece of toast with strawberry freezer jam, an egg, a piece of bacon, a coffee mug. Elise couldn’t smell any of it. The only scent she detected was that of apples.
“Hello, darling,” He said, sitting beside her. “You slept in terribly late.”
Elise glanced at the clock on the wall. There were no hands. “I thought we were done with these lies,” she said. “This apartment, this building, this…illusion.”
“What do you mean?” He sounded genuinely confused. “I’ve only come to see if you’re ready to go through the door.”
Elise stared at the door over His shoulder. If she walked through it, she wouldn’t be tortured again. She wouldn’t have to ever watch her skin stripped from her body, feel the teeth shatter in her skull, have Adam parade all of her failures in front of her.
But she would lose herself.
Everyone wanted her to go through that door—not just Adam and Metaraon, but her mother, and even Lilith herself, who Elise had assumed must have been long dead. It was like the entire universe was pushing for her to enter.
Despair choked her. She caught herself shaking her head in a silent denial of what was coming, and forced herself to stop.
“Just train me,” Elise said. The tremor in her voice was almost imperceptible.
He didn’t even bother arguing with her about it. Not anymore.
“Very well,” He said.
He reached into her mind and pulled it open.
Every nerve in Elise’s body sang with pain, like a violin played with a bow made of razors. She might have screamed—she usually did—but she couldn’t hear anything other than the pounding in her head.
Her father’s disapproving gaze loomed.
It’s your fault.
Memories swirled through her: Ariane’s pregnant belly, the neat circle of a bullet entry wound in Betty’s forehead, seeing Pamela Faulkner’s feet behind her desk and knowing that it meant she was dead on the other side. The gaping slash on James’s throat was a huge, a bloody chasm, and she thought that she was going to fall inside.
Adam devoured Elise. His glow burned away the memories of James as Mnemosyne roiled in her veins.
Her abs clenched. Serpents twisted in her gut.
Just walk through the door.
Elise’s back arched and she slid off the bed, hitting the ground. Her body was no more than a bag of fluid. She gushed everywhere, pouring blood and ichor and tears.
Through the pain, she saw the Tree as a sapling at the beginning of the world.
Adam strode toward her. He was in the cavern tangled in the roots of an adolescent Tree, walking among the growing eggs, and His angels were destroying all of her children. Their silent cries pierced her soul.
You will love nobody but me, He had said.
I do love you, she had replied, but I want children, Adam.
You already have hundreds of children. They are enough.
She had agreed to let Him destroy them. The knowledge of that was more horrifying than any number of bullet wounds, slashed throats, or skinned bodies. She had let Him kill her unborn children, for the safety of the ones that she already had.
Elise’s teeth strained inside her skull, on the verge of fracturing.
The door was beside Adam. It was always there now, waiting for her to cross through.
But there had been a time before doors, before God
, when Adam had been only a man. He had been her only companion in the world before there was a world.
The image of Him before He was immortal crested over the tender ruins of her mind.
He had been aging. Humans were mortal, and Eve was not. Angels never died, so she knew that a time would come when she would have to watch the rise and set of the sun without Adam at her side, and it broke her heart.
Eve couldn’t imagine a world without Adam.
“I’m sorry,” she said.
The pain suddenly vanished.
She didn’t move at first, expecting that the pain would return momentarily. But it didn’t. She lay on the parquet floor beside the bed in Adam’s bedroom, looking up at a blank ceiling bordered by bookshelves.
Adam kneeled beside her, and she grasped His hands for comfort. “Adam,” she said. “What happened? Did I get hurt?”
Wonder filled His eyes, like He was seeing something that He had never expected to find again. “Eve?” He asked, touching her cheek. It didn’t hurt. Nothing hurt. “Is it you?”
Eve laughed. “Of course it’s me. Are you all right?”
He responded by crushing His lips to hers in a kiss. He tasted the way that the first breezes of spring smelled. She pressed herself to His chest and enjoyed the sensation of being consumed by the tides of His energy.
It felt like she had been without Him for so long, but she couldn’t remember why.
When she pulled away, she realized that Metaraon stood behind Him. The angel’s blue eyes, identical to Eve’s, were cold with shock—and hatred.
Hatred?
“Metaraon,” Eve said, extending an inviting hand toward him.
His lips twisted with revulsion. He didn’t move to touch her.
“There was another intruder, Father,” Metaraon said, voice tight with emotion. “It waits for you in the throne room. You said that you wanted to know.”
Adam kissed Eve again, catching her face in His hands. “Yes,” He said when He pulled away. “I’ll take care of it.” She could feel His eyes burning over her face as He drank in the sight of her. “Don’t stray, Eve. I’ll return.”
“Where would I stray?” she asked.
His delight rippled over her skin. “Soon,” Adam said. “Soon.”
He left the room, and Eve stood. Breakfast was still on the tray in front of her pillow. There was a piece of bread, a fried egg. They looked unappetizing.
“What intruder is Adam addressing?” she asked.
“There is no intruder. I lied so that He would leave.”
Eve blinked in confusion. “Why?”
Metaraon slapped her across the face.
The sensation wasn’t nearly as painful as the fact that he had struck her at all. Eve’s hand flew to her burning cheek. “Elise,” he said, “snap out of it.”
Hearing that name filled her with confusion. She looked down at herself again. Two arms, two legs, auburn hair—everything was intact. Everything except her wings.
Her eyes filled with tears. “Why did you hit me?”
Metaraon grabbed her arms. “Don’t talk like that,” he said harshly. “Don’t talk like you’re her. Remember who you are, Elise—you’re a killer, and you’re here for a reason. Elise. Not Eve.”
She stared up at him with mingling fear and shock. Metaraon would never have hit her. He adored her—in fact, he may have even been in love with her, if their kiss among the rose bushes was any indicator.
“You’re scaring me,” Eve said.
He seized her shoulders, turning her to face the bed. “Look at her. Remember who she is, and who you are.”
Another person was lying in the bed. Metaraon shoved her forward, and Eve the face of the blond-haired woman. The name came to her in a rush of crystal-clear realization.
Betty.
“Shit,” she said, pressing the hell of her palm to her temples. He was right—she wasn’t Eve, she was Elise. They were separate entities with a single mind. Her skull bulged with memories that didn’t belong.
Elise struggled to untangle her thoughts.
Elise.
Memories of kissing Metaraon gave way to memories of kissing James, which were not nearly so horrifying. Elise wished that she had steel wool to scrub Eve’s memories from er brain. She didn’t need to see her mother’s newest lover like that.
“I almost lost myself,” Elise said. “I remembered everything. I think…I think I almost became her.”
Revulsion curled Metaraon’s lip. “You are no Eve,” he hissed. “She was a woman of grace, compassion, and magnanimity, the likes of which have been unseen since her death. You could never be her.” It was obvious from the way that he said it that he intended it to be the harshest of insults.
“You’re the one that shoved me into this hellhole and brought back my dead friend,” Elise said. “If I completely snap, it’s your fault.”
Metaraon waved to dismiss the vision of James’s bedroom, returning Elise and Betty to the juncture of branches in the Tree.
“I will attend to Adam,” he said.
Then he spread his wings and flew away, vanishing into the fog.
Elise’s head wouldn’t stop aching.
She paced over one of the platforms set into the Tree, massaging her forehead, although she knew that nothing could relieve the pressure. It wasn’t a physical pain.
Eve’s memories were still swirling through her mind, giving her brief glimpses of the much brighter garden that had been on Earth in days past. She saw Adam, too, young and human and filled with laughter.
Eve had loved Him so much. Enough to forgive Him for anything, even hundreds of years after He had stopped loving her back.
In fact, all of Eve’s memories were tinged with the rosy glow of love. She had loved everything—life, her children, the world. Metaraon was right about one thing: Elise could never have Eve’s grace and compassion.
But how the hell could Elise possibly know that?
“Elise?”
Betty had woken up. She leaned over the branch to look down at Elise pacing on the platform.
Elise climbed to her friend’s side again. “How’s your hand?” she asked.
“It doesn’t hurt at all anymore.”
Tugging at the bandages, Elise quickly unwrapped Betty’s hand. All of the swelling was gone. There was no sign of broken fingers. “You were only asleep for a few hours,” Elise said, gently bending Betty’s thumb. Betty didn’t even flinch. “How is this possible?”
“Magic?” Betty suggested.
Elise had healed all of the damage that Adam inflicted on her quickly, too. Maybe it was some kind of magic intrinsic to the garden. They had bigger worries.
“I’m going crazy,” Elise said. She blurted it right out, unable to control herself.
“I’ve known that for years.”
“No, I mean I’m actually going crazy now. I thought I had become Eve while you were sleeping.” She decided not to mention that Adam had been around—Betty didn’t need to know how vulnerable she had been. “I thought that would only happen if I went through the door.”
Betty blinked. “What door?”
“That one.” Elise nodded toward the platform below. The door was on the edge, waiting for her in the way that it always did. Betty leaned over to search for it.
“I don’t see any doors.”
“It’s right there,” Elise said. “I’m looking at it right now.”
“Okay,” Betty said slowly, “so you are going crazy.”
Elise was missing something—some piece of the puzzle that she couldn’t see. Why wouldn’t Betty be able to see the door? Why was she getting Eve’s memories? None of it made any sense.
“You okay?” Betty asked. “Sorry. I know that’s a stupid question. Obviously, the answer is ‘no,’ but…I guess what I’m asking is, are you worse than usual?”
Normally, Betty’s verbal diarrhea would have made Elise laugh, but she could find no mirth anymore. Not with the horrifying mental image
of kissing Metaraon lingering in the back of her mind.
“Metaraon loved Eve,” Elise said. “That’s why he’s been trying to kill Adam this whole time.”
Betty’s eyes widened. “Wow. Really?”
Elise barely heard her. She was thinking aloud, and an idea had dawned on her. “Eve loved Metaraon, too. But that doesn’t make any sense. Adam never would keep someone in the garden that challenged His affections. He’s too jealous.”
The same idea seemed to have struck Betty, too. Her eyes brightened. “Adam must not have known,” she whispered. “He would kill Metaraon.”
It was a dangerous idea—dangerous, and brilliant.
Elise climbed down the Tree and set off in search of God.
X
It was easy for Elise to figure out where Adam was lurking; the entire garden seemed to bend in His direction, as if He were a black hole toward which all matter spiraled. She and Betty had to cross a bridge over Mnemosyne to reach Him.
The setting shifted around them as they walked, sliding between the empty ethereal city, the garden at its glorious peak, and the dried-out husk it had since become. Betty clung to Elise’s arm the entire time, staring wide-eyed at the changing world.
By the time they reached Mnemosyne, it was a wide, white, torrential river that slopped over the cobblestone bridge. They crossed together. The water stung Elise’s feet when it splashed her.
“I’m going to talk to Him alone,” Elise said, gently dislodging Betty’s hand on the other side. “Watch out for yourself. If you see anyone—or anything—coming, then you need to hide.”
“You should leave me with one of your swords, just in case,” Betty said. “Or, um, a bazooka.”
“No swords or bazookas. Sorry.”
“What are you going to do?” Betty asked.
“I’m going to tell Adam the truth,” Elise said.
She managed to give Betty an encouraging smile before following the path down into the roots.
The smile disappeared the instant she turned her back. She would have given anything to get her swords back. The thought of them being eaten away in the pool of amber underneath the Tree caused her physical pain.
But just because Elise didn’t have any weapons didn’t mean that she was unarmed.