by S. M. Reine
But light and dirt weren’t the only things tumbling through the hole.
James saw the body falling as a pinpoint of darkness against the gray sky first. It grew and grew until he could make out arms, legs, streaming hair.
Elise plummeted toward the lake face-first, a sword in each hand. He couldn’t tell if she was conscious or not. She wasn’t fighting against the fall.
Her momentum accelerated as she entered the cavern. She looked like an eagle in flight, diving for its prey.
She struck the center of the lake. It consumed her with a gulp.
James crawled through the ferns, struggling to reach the shore, even as chunks of soil continued raining down upon the surrounding earth. Nathaniel moved faster. He folded his wings back and dived after her.
A pale fist erupted from the surface of the sap, still clutching an obsidian sword.
Nathaniel caught her wrist. He flapped hard, pulling her from the depths of the amber.
Elise was soaked, black hair plastered to her back, naked body drenched with strings of gooey sap. But when she looked up to see who had seized her arm, she grinned. It was a victorious smile. Not the smile of Eve, or a woman gone mad, or someone stepping away from the battlefield as a victor. It was just Elise, and she was happy to see Nathaniel alive. He smiled back.
Nathaniel dropped Elise on the shore.
James moved to touch her. Elise’s warning look made him stop in mid-step. That glare was as good as a punch to his gut.
Elise tried to speak and only managed a wet cough. Sap splattered over her feet.
“You need to run,” Nathaniel said, wiping a strand of sap off of her shoulder and flicking it to the ground. “I’m holding onto the gate for you, but it’s not going to last much longer. Nothing will.”
Elise wiped her mouth on the back of her arm. “What are you going?”
“I’m taking Araboth away,” he said.
“No,” James protested.
“You know you’ll be trapped,” Elise said to Nathaniel, as if James didn’t even exist. She sidestepped a piece of debris that smashed into the ground beside her without having to look at it.
The boy nodded. “Yeah. I know.”
She shared a long, understanding look with Nathaniel, as if they were the ones that could communicate telepathically. They didn’t have much time, but Elise and Nathaniel looked like they had eternity to say goodbye.
“Good luck,” she said.
Nathaniel threw his arms around Elise’s neck. Nobody gave Elise surprise hugs and survived, but she didn’t look surprised, or even angry. She embraced him tightly. The warmth in her eyes—that was new. That didn’t belong. Yet somehow, it suited her face.
“He can’t stay,” James said when they released each other and stepped back.
But Nathaniel was already rising again with a sweep of his wings.
“He knows what he’s doing,” Elise said.
“He’s a child!”
“He’s the first mage since God was trapped in the garden. I trust him.”
James would have kept arguing, but Elise didn’t wait for him. She took off running, a sword in each hand, and was halfway up the path to the surface in a flash.
His son was heading up the center of the Tree, glowing with the gray light that beamed down. James could feel his magic building. It all but crackled around him as he gathered strength for a final, powerful spell—one that could move an entire dimension.
Nathaniel was already far beyond James’s reach. Maybe he always had been.
His eyes burned as he turned to follow Elise up the path.
When James reached the surface of the garden, he immediately turned to look at the Tree above him. The damage was even worse from this perspective—the severed halves had fallen to either side, and they were long enough to reach the walls on either side, creating long, jagged bridges. Sap spurted out of the Tree’s exposed innards like arterial wounds.
Everything that remained was on fire. The bushes had ignited. The grass had already burned away, leaving nothing but dirt. Mnemosyne had dried out, baring the charred rocks that formed the riverbed. The only things he could see that weren’t destroyed were the feathers drifting around him like downy snow.
Elise had climbed onto one of the severed halves of the Tree. She ran toward the wall without looking back at James.
He grabbed a branch and hauled himself onto the Tree behind her. It was uneven under his feet. Looking closely, James could see that the Tree had probably been rotting for a long time—the same black infection that had seized the rest of the garden had been growing there, too. Its carcass formed a bridge out of the garden, but it was a path of thorns and blood.
“Elise!” he yelled. She didn’t look back.
James staggered after her. The fatigue was catching up with him now. He stepped around clusters of sticky thorns that jutted from the Tree’s innards, edged along the side of what must have once been large chambers inside, like rooms, and struggled to catch up with Elise.
She was so far away—a pale figure darting across the dark expanse of the Tree. Even weighed down by a pair of swords, Elise didn’t seem to slow.
Whoosh.
James looked up to see a fireball plunging toward him.
He leaped away. It smashed into the Tree where he had been standing, leaving smoldering pulp and a crater the size of his chest.
Another fireball rushed through the air, and James stumbled forward. The hot debris pelted his shoulders like a dozen tiny bee stings. He focused on keeping one foot in front of the other, finding something solid to stand on.
He was concentrating so hard that he was surprised when he almost ran into someone.
Elise.
His moment of optimism vanished as soon as she saw that she hadn’t stopped for him. Elise stood over a crater in the Tree, knuckles white on the hilts of her falchions as she looked inside.
James peered over her shoulder.
Half of a human skeleton had been exposed by the Tree’s destruction. Its jaw was open in an eternal grin. The eye socket was empty. The charred, gray bones of one hand stretched across the pulp, almost as if it were reaching for Elise’s toes.
It was Adam’s mortal body. The first one.
The whizzing of another projectile made James look back. The destruction was only getting worse—the fireballs were coming faster.
“We have to go,” James said.
He was shocked when Elise grabbed his arm. She didn’t speak as she dragged him down the Tree, across the wall, and jumped into the desolate wasteland beyond.
XVI
OYMYAKON, RUSSIA
The Union worked through the night and the following day. Malcolm watched their trail of destruction grow as they built a road leading straight from Oymyakon to the meadow, tearing trees out by their roots and leaving them piled on either side of the new path.
They finished by erecting temporary guard stations on that road. Malcolm counted two people watching each one—probably a bonded kopis and aspis. With their powers combined, they would be able to defend the road against at least one hybrid at a time.
The Union was obviously ready for a fight, but the hybrids hadn’t shown their faces since the first attack on Oymyakon. He didn’t think that they were afraid of confronting the Union, exactly. The tanks were too slow without the element of surprise on their side, and hybrids could move freakishly fast.
If they weren’t afraid, though, then it meant that there was some other reason that the hybrids were hanging back. And that unknown reason worried Malcolm even more.
As he watched from the foothills, he imagined the hybrids somewhere else in the mountains doing the same thing: studying the Union’s movements, evaluating the situation, and preparing themselves for this Event—the moment that Elise Kavanagh, demon-god-hunter-thing, would return to Earth to fuck shit up.
Or get fucked up.
“They keep the guns near the center of the compound,” Malcolm said as Anthony and Lucas
prepared to head into Oymyakon again. They hadn’t been able to scavenge clothing yet and looked fantastically stupid in their boxers. Malcolm had given his shirt to Anthony, the poor baby, but Lucas seemed proud to be naked in all of his hairy glory. “You won’t be able to get in that far without being caught. Pick off a couple of guards for their weapons. And trousers, hopefully.”
“Right,” Anthony said. “Thanks.”
“Be careful,” Lucas added.
Malcolm waved a vague salute at them.
They had to travel a greater distance, so they set off when evening began to dim the sky. Malcolm remained on the hill.
He hadn’t been to a church for innocent reasons in a long time, and he couldn’t remember the last time that he had prayed. It seemed silly to try to pray when he knew that Elise was off in Heaven. For all he knew, she was probably fucking shit up there, too.
Regardless, Malcolm crossed himself, then briefly clasped his hands.
“Don’t let me lose my other eye,” he told the orange sky. “I like this one.” After a moment of hesitation, he added, “Look out for Anthony and Lucas, too. They’re all right.”
The sun touched the horizon.
Malcolm set off and slipped into the forest, which was already filled with a night-like gloom. He didn’t have a great sense of direction—north or south, he wasn’t sure which way he was going. But he didn’t think it mattered. That meadow had found him last time, and he trusted that it would find him this time, too.
He forged his own path through the trees, trying to walk as silently as possible in case the Union had already found the time to place cameras in the canopy. He didn’t see any red LEDs, but that didn’t mean they weren’t there.
The first signs of the Union appeared in the form of cabling, rather than actual equipment. Exposed wire carpeted the grass in the shape of a web. Malcolm stepped carefully over it. He wasn’t sure if they had it charged at the moment, but it was clearly meant to be electrified at some point, and he didn’t want to test their security with his feet.
Not far beyond the wire, the trees started to thin. He spotted a splash of bright yellow that meant he had found the harvester that he had used to kill the hybrid.
The meadow itself looked to be empty of personnel at the moment, but the Union had already positioned a few assault vehicles around the perimeter, all focusing inward to a central point that was marked with yellow tape. Those must have been the coordinates for Elise’s arrival that had been in Benjamin Flynn’s prophecies.
There were probably motion sensors. As soon as she blinked into existence, they would fire.
“How the hell am I going to warn you?” Malcolm muttered.
“Don’t move,” someone said behind him.
Something hard prodded his lower back, and he slowly turned to see a Union kopis holding an AK-47.
“Well, that’s just not fair,” Malcolm said.
He was rewarded with a hard kick to the back of his knees. He hit the ground.
More kopides emerged from the trees, seeming to melt out of the night. There were almost a dozen of them. Every single one had a gun pointed at him.
A blond woman stepped forward.
“Malcolm Gallagher,” she said in Russian. “We never would have dreamed that you would be stupid enough to come here, especially after you were spotted at the airport in Colorado. And then killed one of my units. And a guard.”
“Ah, Haldis. I haven’t missed you at all, either,” Malcolm said. They had hooked up once during officers’ training. Fine piece of woman. Terrifying, but sexy.
She gestured, and Malcolm’s heart sank to see Anthony and Lucas being dragged toward him. The men had found trousers, but no guns. They must have been caught attacking guards back at Oymyakon. “Are these Americans with you?” Haldis asked.
“No?” Malcolm ventured.
Lucas and Anthony were tossed to their knees beside him.
“Kill all of them,” Haldis said. “We’re too close to the Event to risk it.”
Malcolm attempted his most charming grin. It was a real challenge, considering how many guns were pointing at his cranium right at that moment. “Babe, can’t we talk about this?”
A shriek tore through the air.
It was loud enough to make the entire forest shiver. Everyone looked up at once, except Malcolm—it was terribly difficult to tear his gaze away from the guns that were still aimed at him. All it would take was a single twitching finger to make him have a really terrible night.
The cry was like a signal to the Union. They all moved at once.
“Get ready!” Haldis shouted as her team scattered, leaping into their vehicles arrayed around the meadow. They were armed with enough weapons and ammunition to kill an entire army of humans.
But they weren’t prepared for the two-dozen hybrids that soared into the clearing.
ARABOTH
When James had first entered the garden, the distance between the wall and the gateway to Earth hadn’t seemed that distant. But the falling of the Tree seemed to have rearranged things. A wasteland stood between them and the exit now—a stretch of dead earth at least a mile wide.
The idea of having to walk that far made James despair. But then another fireball thumped into the ground behind them, and he somehow found the strength to match Elise’s brisk stride.
Plumes of smoke rose from the garden, circled by cherubim. Flakes of ash drifted through the air.
He watched her profile, framed by the gray mist beyond her.
Nathaniel had said that she knew everything. “Elise,” James began.
“Don’t talk to me.”
“I can explain,” he said.
Elise’s mouth worked, as if she was chewing on a response, but she didn’t say it out loud. She picked up her pace toward the gate.
Actual snow began falling by the time they left the walls of the garden behind. It collected rapidly, forming drifts around their ankles, and then their knees.
The slog through the snow was long and exhausting, but they soon neared the edge of the bridge leading to the gate.
James couldn’t go through that gateway without one last plea. “It’s not too late to get Nathaniel back.”
Elise stopped walking abruptly. She rounded on him.
“He’s not just some child,” she said.
“But he’s only twelve. He can’t make these kinds of choices.”
“Yes, he can,” she said. Her black eyes smoldered like coals. “I made life and death decisions when I was his age.”
“Isaac is hardly a shining example of fatherhood,” James said.
“He raised me, and he understood me. You didn’t raise Nathaniel. You don’t even know him.”
“And you do?”
Elise lifted her chin. “I don’t have to know him to trust him.” Her fists trembled. The points of the falchions wavered. “Trust, James. It’s what you do with people you respect. And especially the people you love.”
He blew out a sigh. “Look, Elise, I know you must be—”
“You don’t know anything,” she said, cutting him off. “Frankly, I don’t think I know you, either. You told me that you were an enemy of God. That we had to run and hide together. You never told me that you’d been in the garden before, or that you were some kind of…” Elise glared at the injury on his chest.
“I don’t really know what I am,” he said.
“I know what you are,” Elise’s voice dropped to a dangerous whisper. “I think I know you better than ever before. And I don’t think I like you very much.”
James felt like his heart was shattering in his chest. “I came to save you.”
Elise started walking again. “I didn’t need you to save me. You, or anyone else.” Her lips twisted. There was such anger in her eyes—almost loathing. “You should have stayed on Earth.”
“Elise—”
She spun on him, fists balled at her sides, black eyes flaming. “You lied to me, James. You lied for a long goddamn time.
And when the time came, when I really needed you, you helped Him find me, and you walked away without even bothering to warn me. Why? Because you were afraid of what I would think of you?” Elise’s voice was cold, so much colder than the snow. “I could have come to terms with your past if you had been honest with me. But I can’t come to terms with the fact that you are such a coward.”
It was everything that he had feared she would say. He let the anger wash over him, trying to keep his features composed, but he couldn’t do it.
“I ruined everything,” he said. “Didn’t I?”
“That’s the understatement of the fucking millennium.”
She looked like she had more to say, but the words died on her lips when something behind James caught her eye.
Elise lifted the swords. James turned.
The cherubim that he had seen spiraling around the garden had followed them out into the wastelands. They landed one by one, ringing Elise and James.
James backed up until his shoulder bumped Elise’s. Back-to-back, they waited for the cherubim to attack.
A female cherub stepped forward. She was missing her eyes, just like every other cherub, but James felt her hollow stare deep within his chest. “My name is Aliel,” she said. “I am the commander of the cherubim.”
“I just killed God,” Elise said. “If you’ve come to stop me, I think you should reconsider.”
Aliel tilted her head to the side, as if studying Elise without eyes. “There are abominations through that gateway. On Earth waits the army Metaraon and Lilith forged together. The abominations were meant to seize the garden upon His death, but Metaraon is no longer there to lead them.”
“Hybrids,” James whispered. He had seen them in Hell.
“I’ll get rid of them,” Elise said, addressing all of the cherubim. “I won’t let a single one walk away, if you let me through.”
“There will be more elsewhere,” another said. “Metaraon scattered them across the world. He was preparing for war.”
“Then I’ll kill them, too.” Elise stepped forward, shoulders squared, and she spoke with such confidence that it would be impossible not to believe her. “How many did he make? Dozens? Hundreds? I’ll find them all, and I will tear through them. I will kill until there is nothing left to be killed, and then I will heal the wounds that allowed them to be made.” Every time she said “I,” James flinched. Even though she was facing away from him, it felt like she flicked each at him like throwing knives straight to the chest.