Sins of Eden (27 page)

Someone help me
, Elise thought in a rare moment of desperation, knowing that there shouldn’t have been anyone to hear her.

She was shocked when another voice responded.

Very well
.

That voice belonged to neither Elise nor Atropos.

The megaira showed no sign of hearing it. Her pallid flesh was oozing into the water around her as she sank, but her grip on Elise’s throat didn’t falter. Atropos was using Elise’s body as a shield against the light from the fissure.

Who are you?
Elise asked the voice.

The reply sounded amused.
We are pieces of you. Relax, sword-woman—you won’t be alone in Eden.

Her lungs ached as Atropos pushed her toward the light, the air on the other side, and the final confrontation with Belphegor. The megaira’s cheeks peeled away as the light from the fissure consumed them, baring a skeletal grin.

Elise’s back brushed the juncture to Eden.

Hell turned inside out.

Elise passed through
the fissure, stretched like taffy, and appeared on the other side with more company than she had expected.

Water gushed around Elise as she struck the grass. Atropos’s hands still pressed against her throat, her skull. The megaira’s knees drove into her back.

“I never would have allowed her to get the better of me like that,” remarked a dry voice.

Bare toes were nestled in the grass inches from Elise’s nose. She couldn’t turn to look all the way up to his face, but she could see legs wearing snug leather, narrow hips, the hem of a black silk shirt.

It was Yatam, the original father of all demons.

He had been dead for years.

The kindly response to his complaint was just as impossible. “You never fought enemies as powerful as Elise has.”

That sounded like Eve: first angel, Adam’s former consort, and also very much dead.

Elise groaned out an incoherent question as Atropos’s hands squeezed. But the other demon was weakening, too. Her breath was growing choppy, her fingers losing consistency as the light from Eden sank into her flesh. It was gloomy underneath the trees, sheltered from the worst of the light, but still far too bright for one of the Fates.

“I outlasted you by a considerable number of years, Eve,” Yatam said.

Eve giggled. “We never fought, darling nephew.”

“Nephew? Don’t insult me.”

Two ancient dead beings were arguing over Elise’s head.

It seemed possible that she hadn’t survived passing through the fissure with her sanity intact.

Atropos coughed a lungful of fluid onto the grass next to Elise then rasped, “We made it. Belphegor’s going to end you and everything you care about.”

Not only was it a pathetic attempt at evoking anger in Elise, but it told her something important: Atropos couldn’t see Yatam and Eve.

With a hard twist, Elise flipped underneath the megaira. Her heart guttered at the sight of Atropos’s rotten face. Passing through the fissure had hurt Elise, but Atropos had been completely ripped apart.

Elise kneed the other demon in the gut. It was easy to push her off. She wrenched free, drawing her steel-bladed sword as she stumbled to her feet.

Atropos was slower.

“You’ll never be able to kill her with that pathetic blade, Godslayer,” Yatam said. His thumbs were hooked in the low-slung waistband of his pants, dragging them dangerously low to expose the vee of hard muscle under his navel.

He underestimated Elise.

She hurled the sword—not toward Atropos, but straight into the air, using all of the strength that remained in her body.

The blade ripped through tree branches, opening a hole to the bright sky beyond.

A beam of light spilled over the grass with Atropos at its center.

Elise leaped out of the way just in time, sheltering underneath a large root. She watched from safety as Atropos struggled to follow her, trying to run on legs that turned to steaming sludge with every step.

Atropos’s feet melted into the grass. She ran on anklebones. And then the stumps of her fibula and tibia began wearing away, leaving her to try to escape on her knees, hands digging into the grass for purchase.

“No,” she gasped.

Atropos’s final cry was deeply satisfying.

The splash of her ichor washed over Elise’s feet.

“Impressive,” Yatam said. He stood in the sunlight. He had always been able to stand in the sun, despite the fact that Elise had inherited her vulnerability to light from him; after five thousand years, he had found some kind of trick that made him impervious.

He was as beautiful as she remembered. His hair was matte black, his smooth skin creamy with olive undertones. Eden’s light glinted on the ridges of muscle down his abdomen and emphasized the hard cut of his cheekbones. Given breasts and a softer jaw, he would have been indistinguishable from his dead sister, Yatai.

Eve lingered behind him, drifting through the grass. She was just as beautiful but much less showy. Yatam deliberately posed to encourage Elise to appreciate his form; Eve never had felt the urge to display herself. Now was no exception. Still, with her cascading brunette hair and perfect heart-shaped face, Eve was as gorgeous as she had ever been.

“Ah,” she said. “Here.” She pointed into the bushes. “I found it. That’s where your falchion landed.”

Elise gave them a wide berth as she collected it, rubbing fresh sap off of the blade with her shirt.

She surveyed both from a safe distance. They
looked
real enough. Eve was tall, winged, and graceful; Yatam was a splash of unnatural darkness in paradise.

They definitely didn’t look dead.

“How?” Elise asked.

Yatam rolled his eyes to the sky. “It isn’t difficult to figure out with a few moments’ thought.”

“We are pieces of you,” Eve said. “You asked for help. We emerged.”

“You’re not actually Eve and Yatam, though,” Elise said.

“Tell me what you think, sword-woman. Your blood rendered me mortal, and my twin sister severed my mortal body into two pieces as you watched. Am I
actually
Yatam?” he asked.

He was certainly almost as infuriating as the real thing. But Elise thought she understood: she had been given the powers of Yatam when she had been reborn. Then the garden had given her the blood of the Tree and pieces of Eve’s soul. She had been carrying the memory of both inside of her for years.

Apparently, it was slightly more than memory.

It couldn’t be accident that they had been invoked now.

“How are you going to help me kill Belphegor?” Elise asked.

“You are the sword-woman originally forged to murder Adam,” Yatam said. “You have been reforged to kill new gods. Together, the three of us form the blade, the hilt, the pommel. We will balance out your strengthened steel.” When he smiled, it didn’t touch his lips—only the corners of his eyes. “Temper yourself.”

If he was a piece of herself, then Elise was irked by the obscurity of that sliver of her subconscious. She’d asked for help in a moment of desperation and been rewarded with an enigma.

Elise squeezed the last of the water from her hair and began trudging through Eden—not in any particular direction, but where instinct told her to go. It was silent among the trees. Yatam and Eve made no noise as they followed her.

Blade, hilt, pommel. Tempered steel. Elise was too exhausted and shocked from the transition between universes to make sense of it all.

But maybe it was far less complicated than she expected.

Maybe it wasn’t about
who
they were, but
what
they were: an angel and a demon. Two pieces of a whole.

And Elise was the third.

James bled on
the grass, but he didn’t die. He almost wished that he would. It would make Elise’s job easier—one less hostage for her to worry about, one less “motivating” factor in succumbing to Belphegor’s demands.

He shut his eyes and waited to feel death creeping over him, but Belphegor had been careful inflicting the wound, and abdominal injuries killed slowly. It didn’t take a god to gut a man and give him hours of pain before dying. Only millennia of practice on human slaves in Hell.

James focused on breathing. Breath wasn’t painful. The expansion and contraction of lungs, the heat in his throat.

The edges of his wounds rubbed together when his chest rose and fell.
That
hurt. Strange how it felt like his intestines burned with exposure to the air.

James was so absorbed in the mere act of respiration that he almost didn’t hear the footsteps.

“I didn’t give you permission to join us,” Belphegor said. The fact that he sounded irritated at all spoke volumes about exactly how angry he was.

The responding silence was just as telling in so many subtle ways.

Elise had arrived.

James’s eyes felt dry, difficult to open. All his body’s fluids were trickling out his gut. But he managed to roll over and open his eyelids, and there she was, standing beyond Nathaniel’s unconscious body.

“Am I despairing enough now?” she asked.

“That’s for you to decide. How did you feel, seeing your friends die?” Belphegor asked.

Her expression didn’t shift. “It felt great.”

“Sarcasm. Amusing.”

“I’m an amusing person,” she said flatly.

Neither of her swords was drawn. She didn’t look like she was ready to fight at all. She was soaking wet, half-dressed, her face slack with exhaustion. Elise had none of her usual fire, as though all the anger had been sucked away.

Belphegor closed the distance between them. “The failure in previous gods has been in their petty attachments. Loneliness will drive anyone insane after an eternity, but with nobody to miss, there can be no desolation in solitude.” He stroked his knuckles down her cheek. “I have done you a favor by burning away everything that would make you struggle in godhood. Everything except for the final death, which I think you’ll want to address promptly.”

He meant James.

“Fine,” she said, and she drew her sword.

It wasn’t surprise that struck James. Not exactly. He didn’t have the energy for that. But he wouldn’t have expected her to jump to agreement so quickly.

Belphegor did look surprised, though. “I didn’t mean for you to kill him. I have mortally wounded him, and he won’t be capable of healing unless you enter the Origin and breathe life into him.” He drummed two fingers on his chin. “Perhaps your mind was more fragile than I expected.”

Was that what had happened? Had losing her friends pushed Elise beyond rationality?

No, James didn’t believe she was willing to kill him. There had to be another plan if she would so readily agree to Belphegor’s terms.

Elise’s expression betrayed nothing.

He supposed that the good news was that Belphegor intended Elise to heal him at all, though it wasn’t
that
good. Sparing him now would still mean eventual death of old age, and the remainder of his life would be spent as leverage to control Elise. It also meant that he would see the next genesis. James wasn’t sure if dying now would really be worse than that.

Elise didn’t seem engaged in the conversation. She swayed nearby, eyes shut, knuckles white on the sword. It looked like she was listening to the faint wind whispering through the wet, heavy forest of Eden.

“No,” she said.

Belphegor stroked his fingers through her hair. She didn’t react. “What are you refusing?”

She didn’t seem to hear him. “Bad idea. That’s a bad idea. There has to be another way.”

“Snapped indeed,” the demon murmured.

It did look a little bit like she had snapped, but James knew Elise better. She wouldn’t break. She was far too strong.

Something else was happening. The sight of it—whatever “it” was—made him feel the smallest thrill of excitement, which was interrupted by the spike of pain accompanying too large an inhalation.

Finally, her eyes opened. They had bled to black.

Elise dived at Belphegor with the obsidian falchion. Even bleeding, James could tell that she would be too slow. She was clumsy, awkward, with none of her usual grace.

Belphegor didn’t even need to sidestep her. He simply wasn’t standing where she attacked.

He seized her by the back of the neck.

“I expected more from Metaraon’s weapon,” he said.

She thrust the sword backward, between her body and her arm. The point of the falchion almost plunged into his stomach, but his spine arched, extending his body into serpentine lines that curved away from the blade.

She moved more swiftly now, striking at him again. He dodged every time. Not a single swing touched him.

“Afraid?” Elise asked.

With a sudden lunge, she nicked the sleeve of his jacket. Belphegor stepped back and touched the wound. It was slick with ichor.

He moved in a flash. With a swift gesture, Belphegor jerked the sword from her hands and tossed it aside. “Lilith’s poison can’t harm me. You have, however, expended my patience.” He swept a hand toward the roots of the Tree, glowing with the crystalline waters of the Origin. “Enter now.”

“No,” Elise said, but she didn’t seem to be saying it to him.

Belphegor pressed a foot onto James’s head. It weighed heavily on the side of his skull, making his vision blur more as immense pressure squeezed against his eyeballs.

James couldn’t help but groan, feeling his cheekbone bowing under the press of Belphegor’s heel. Elise had been about to attack again, fists lifted in an aggressive stance, but she froze at his sound of pain.

“Enter
now
,” Belphegor said in a low, dangerous voice.

Still, she didn’t move. “The third to enter is the weakest. You went in second. You’ll have power over me.”

“Yes, that’s the point.” Belphegor’s foot smashed down harder. Probably only another ounce, but James felt like his brain was going to extrude through his eye sockets. He grabbed weakly at the demon’s ankle. “It’s the only way you’ll be able to save Nathaniel or his father, so you don’t have much of a choice, do you?”

When she didn’t immediately reply, Belphegor leaned.

White-hot pain lanced through James’s skull. He cried out.