Descent07 - Paradise Damned (8 page)

“Ready for what?” Elise asked.

He swept a hand toward the door.

“Step through,” Adam said. “Give yourself to me.”

“No,” she said.

“I’ll have to retrain you if you keep refusing,” He said, shaking out His arms, rolling His shoulders, cracking His knuckles. “Don’t make me do it. I hate training.”

The way He said the word “training” made prickles crawl over her skin.

He didn’t mean fighting or dancing.

Elise backed away slowly, contemplating avenues of escape. There was nowhere to hide in the empty room. The windows were blocked. And when she brushed aside the red drapes that should have hidden the garage door, she only found brick wall.

The sole escape was through that white door.

“Come on,” He said, almost teasingly. “Just walk through the door.”

Adam almost managed to sound like James, too.

Her heart broke a little.

“Stop pretending,” Elise said. “I’m not going through the fucking door. I know what comes after that. So whatever you’re going to do, get to it.”

He spread his fingers, flexed His hands. He was so immensely tall. Unnaturally so. He seemed to become taller every time she looked at Him. “What comes after?” He asked.

“Rape,” Elise said bluntly. “Mind and body.”

“Surely you don’t think I would ever hurt you, Eve,” He said, voice painfully soft. “Not when it took you so long to come back to me. I will never hurt you with the intent of causing pain—I am no sadist. I am not your captor, or your enemy. I am your husband, and require you to be with me.” He pointed to the door again. “If you won’t do that, then it’s my duty—my pleasure—to remind you of our union by any means necessary.”

Elise pushed the drapes aside again. Still no garage door. Adam approached her, and she sidestepped quickly, sliding along the wall of mirrors. The barre bumped into her hip.

“Stop trying to look like him,” Elise said. Her reflection in the mirror was auburn-haired, hazel-eyed, but the tear that slid down her cheek was black.

“Like who?” Adam asked. He sounded so puzzled that she almost believed He didn’t know the answer. But there was no way that He didn’t realize what He was doing to her.

It was all a game. She was supposed to be some kind of fucking
toy
.

He took a quick step closer, and Elise jumped back. He was faster. He pinned her in the corner with a hand on the mirrors on either side of her head.

She reacted on instinct, bringing her knee between them. Elise drove the bony spike into His stomach. He didn’t react.

Elise grabbed His neck and tried to slam His face into the mirrors. Adam slipped from her grip, reappearing on the other side of the room.

With a war cry, she threw herself at Him.

The dance hall elongated. The distance between them grew immense. She could still see Him as if He were only a few feet away, but running didn’t close that gap.

“I can’t believe you want to hurt me,” He said. “Maybe it’s the setting that distresses you. Let’s try this somewhere else.”

When she blinked, the studio was gone again. Elise was still trying to run, so her toe caught on the grass. She lost her balance and sprawled onto the ground.

Elise pounded a fist onto the earth, frustrated.

She didn’t have to look around to know where Adam had moved her this time, but she did anyway. The wilderness was dark. Elise was on the grass next to a sapling that glowed with inner light. This was the jungle setting that she had first reached through the gateway in the ethereal city. The one that she had thought was Earth.

Wasn’t it Earth?

How had she gotten there this time? She didn’t remember leaving Motion and Dance, or finding her way back to the dark clearing.

“Because it’s not real,” she said aloud. The sound of her voice grounded her in a way that nothing else did.

It was all just another part of the illusion—the game that Adam was playing with her.

Elise wouldn’t forget again.

But she could feel the truth slipping away from her as she stared into the shimmering, glowing depths of the young Tree. Its bark was no more than a glowing membrane with entire universes held captive inside.

This
was
Earth, as He must have known it in the beginning: a wild, untouched jungle. It was a memory of her home, almost as good as the real thing.

She could stay there if only she would step through that door.

The thought popped into her mind unbidden.

No.
She would never cross through.

Adam approached her from the other side of the Tree. The jungle seemed to part around Him, as if to carve a soft path for His feet to walk upon—or as if they were afraid of touching Him. He emerged into the clearing as radiant and naked as they day that He was made.

“This comes from my memory instead of yours,” He said. “Is it better?”

Elise clenched her fist in the grass, tearing a handful of blades out of the dirt. She could hear each one severed like the strings of a harp being plucked. The garden sighed softly, lamenting the pain.

Better? How could it be
better
?

She quivered with rage as she stared up at Him, her eyes fixed to His broad chest and unable to meet His gaze. Her muscles vibrated with tension. The urge to attack was strong, but she knew there was no point. He would never let her near Him—not until she succumbed to the garden.

“You seem calmer. Have you changed your mind about the door?” He asked.

“No,” Elise said.

She could feel how hurt He was by her refusal. It made her teeth ache. “It’s an honor to rule at my side,” He said, almost sounding kind. “You’ll realize this soon, and we can start over again.”

Elise remembered hearing this speech once before, when she had first arrived in the garden as a fourteen-year-old girl. But it hadn’t come from Adam. It had come from the bride that preceded Elise—a frail old woman who had introduced herself as Eve with so much confidence that there was no doubt in Elise’s mind that “Eve” believed the identity to be true.

It’s an honor to rule by His side. Once you come to terms with it, He’ll be able to start over again,
Eve had said with a rapturous expression on her withered face, as if she couldn’t imagine anything more glorious than Adam’s new beginning.

Elise had asked,
What do you mean, start over?
but had never gotten an answer.

Through that door
, Eve had said, and she had pointed at it. At the time, it hadn’t looked like James’s bedroom door. It had looked like the entrance to Pamela Faulkner’s house, with a brass pentagram set into the window.

Its appearance may have changed, but the door was the same, and the outcome would be, too.

There was nothing that could make Elise walk through that goddamn door.

“Are you ready?” He asked.

Elise lifted her eyes to His burning face as best she could. The door was beyond Him. Somehow, she knew that it would
always
be just beyond Him. Waiting.

“Try me,” she said.

Before the last syllable even passed her lips, the garden disappeared.

Elise unfolded.

White hands clawed at her face, clammy with the chill of death. Elise rolled on a bed of corpses that pawed at her body, begging forgiveness, begging for mercy—but only for an instant.

They were soon replaced by her father’s cold eyes.
You let your guard down.

Serpents roiled in her belly, then poured over her tongue and out of her nostrils. They dripped from her orifices in scaly black strings, making her eyes water. Elise gagged on them so hard that she felt her stomach surging into her esophagus.

She could almost see Him through the tears—the hazy outline of His face, unimaginably handsome and as classic as ancient paintings—but she wasn’t sure if it was real or panicked imaginings.

Even if she wasn’t sure if she saw Him or not, she certainly felt His hands raking down her arms, stripping away the skin, baring the muscle underneath.

The gray air burned.

Blood splattered.

Elise allowed herself to scream, channeling the pain and fear and rage through her throat. But when she inhaled, everything tasted of blood and sap again, choking her.

You deserve this
, said her father’s voice.

Cold fingers pawed at Elise’s face.

Her fingernails dislodged. She could only watch as blood spurted from her hands, pouring over the bodies, splashing her father’s eyes, filling the darkness with a wash of crimson.

Time inverted, flipped, restored Elise’s skin.

When her eyes cleared, she realized that she was lying on the grass beside the sapling again. She wasn’t sure when she had lost control of her body and fallen. The arm flopped in front of her face wasn’t skinned, though—it was whole, uninjured, intact. She had imagined that part.

Adam stood in front of her, with the door beyond him. The sight of its four panels and gold handle made her feel far sicker than any visions of her father. The trees swayed around it, stirred by a gentle breeze that Elise couldn’t feel.

“Well?” He prompted.

Elise tried to respond, but when she tried to draw in a breath, an obstruction in her throat stopped her. She gagged. Pushing herself onto her elbows, she vomited.

A black, shiny mass surged from her throat and splattered on the ground. When it erupted, effluence and ichor spilled over the grass.

A serpent wriggled out of the bile and slithered into the long grass.

She coughed, sitting back on her heels.

“Well?” He asked again, sweeping a hand toward the door.

Elise gave him a pinched smile. Her eyes were blurred from throwing up. “There is nothing left to take from me,” she said. “You can’t fucking hurt me. You can’t do anything.”

“We’ll see,” He said.

The Tree disappeared, and Elise unfolded again, and again, and again.

IV

NEVADA – MAY 2010

The sun dawned
red over the desert, painting the mountains bloody violet, like raw meat. Anthony Morales had been jogging since the Milky Way was splashed across the sky. Now it was five-thirty in the morning, and it was already sixty-five degrees Fahrenheit; his bare chest was slicked with sweat.

He looped around a copse of Joshua trees, circling back toward the trailer. Dust clouds trailed his shuffling feet.

The McIntyre family’s trailer stood on the horizon—a white box guarded by a pickup truck—and the first hints of sunlight made the roof glow orange. By the time he reached the edge of the property, delineated from federal land by a row of rocks that Dana McIntyre had placed earlier that spring, the sun was high enough that it reflected off of the windows like fire.

Dana was already playing outside again. She drew a circle around herself in the dirt, using a stick broken off of the sagebrush. Her flannel pajama shorts were dusty. Her fine blond hair was still in the braids that her mother always gave her right before bed.

“Whatcha doin’?” she asked, drawing radiating lines off of the circle.

Anthony slowed to a stop at her side. “Running. What are
you
doing?”

“Making a circle of power,” Dana said. “I’m going to cast a spell.”

He planted his hands on his hips and tried to slow his breathing. He was too hot now that he had stopped moving. “Have you decided that you’re a witch today? I thought you were a kopis yesterday.”

Dana looked offended with all of her seven-year-old gravity. “I can be both.”

“Sorry,” Anthony said. “I forgot.”

The screen door squealed open.

“Your phone’s ringing, Anthony,” shouted Leticia McIntyre, apparently unworried about waking the year-old baby sleeping on her shoulder.

He held out his hands. She tossed the phone over the side of the stairs, and he caught it.

“Thanks,” Anthony said.

She went back inside, and he tilted the screen so that it was shaded enough to read.

Unknown number.

He refused the call and pocketed it.

Lucas would be up for drills soon, so Anthony took the opportunity to duck inside for a drink of water. Leticia cooked breakfast, Debora still fast asleep on her shoulder as she banged around the kitchen in search of a clean skillet.

“Grab the milk, Tony,” she said. “How was your run this morning?”

He pulled the carton out of the refrigerator. “It was good.”

“You know, if I didn’t have to feed the kids, I wouldn’t willingly wake up at three in the morning to go frolicking around the desert.” Leticia filled a bottle with milk, balancing the baby on her hip so that she could use both hands. A spot of drool was spreading over her chest. “I’d be sleeping.”

“Guess I’m stupid,” Anthony said.

“I’m just saying, if you want to be up that early, maybe you could try watching Dana’s pre-dawn episode of
Caillou
with her sometimes so I can actually sleep.” She shrugged. “Just a thought.”

Anthony grimaced. “I’ll take it under advisement.”

He grabbed a donut out of the box on the counter and went outside again before she could suggest more babysitting. Anthony had been living with the McIntyres for three months now. He did his fair share of watching Dana, whether or not he wanted to, and even played with Debora sometimes. But when Lucas approached him to ask if Anthony wanted to be his new trainee, he hadn’t mentioned midnight wakings as part of the arrangement.

Still, he kept an eye on Dana while he ate his cruller, brushing crumbs off of his lap.

His phone rang again in his pocket. The same unknown number that had been calling him earlier was giving it a second try. He hung up again.

“What do you got?” Dana asked.

“It’s a donut.”

“Give me some,” she said.

Anthony grudgingly ripped off a piece and she took it with dirt-caked fingers, jamming the entire thing in her face at once.

Lucas stepped outside and sat next to Anthony, already wearing sweatpants and a t-shirt. “You’re not eating a donut for breakfast, are you, pumpkin?” he asked, setting a pair of sneakers on the step below him.