Sins of Eden (33 page)

As he spoke, Belphegor woke up. His hands stripped away the mold that had grown around him. He sat up, and though it was far less dramatic than Ba’al’s rise from Malebolge, it was somehow far more terrifying.

He looked just as dead as the skeleton, just as impossible to move. But he radiated with power that neither of the avatars had. He blazed as bright as Adam had. Brighter, even.

“Godslayer.” His rotten lips slid together, slicked by ichor. “I see you.”

Yeah, she saw him too, and she wished that she didn’t have to.

“Let me in,” Elise said. “You still have to give me that free shot.”

Belphegor glanced toward the crack in Ba’al’s skull. They were close enough to the genesis void now that Elise could hear its raging winds through the thick wall of bone. “All I have to do now is wait,” he said as Ba’al pitched toward the vortex.

Elise steeled herself and lifted the falchions to attack again, but a gentle hand stopped her. “You must leave,” Eve said. “If you get within his reach, he will kill you.”

“Not before I kill him,” Elise said.

“But without any surviving gods, the genesis will never finish. Everything will die without rebirth. Everything will be lost. You must survive this, Elise.” Her name sounded so sweet on Eve’s lips, as though the woman were speaking the name of her favorite child.

Elise understood Eve’s reasoning, but she was only a few feet from Belphegor’s shriveled form.

She had almost gotten revenge against the thing that had killed everyone she loved.

“He can’t enter the genesis alive,” Elise said, frustration twisting within her.

“Yes, I know. We’ll address that issue, as we should have many centuries past,” Yatam said. “He will be dead before this avatar plummets into the vortex.”

“And you two?” Elise asked.

A smile touched Eve’s lips. “We are only ghosts. It’s inconsequential.” She brushed a kiss over Elise’s forehead. “It’s been an honor sharing your life with you.”

The angel pushed hard.

Elise felt something tearing as she stumbled backward, as if someone were ripping her soul down its axis, shredding her apart.

She dropped to her knees, gasping.

That had
hurt
.

Now she was incomplete, her raw heart aching. She felt strangely empty and alone. The two other aspects of herself stepped away, standing independently of her body.

For the first time in years, Elise was alone within herself—no longer a demon like Yatam, no longer conflicted with Eve’s tenderness.

She was only Elise, a kopis become deity.

Eve extended a hand to Yatam with a gentle smile. “Together?”

“Don’t insult me,” he said with a sneer.

That only made Eve smile more broadly, as though he had done something cute. She obviously loved Yatam the same way that she loved everyone else. Eve’s magnanimity really was boundless.

Yatam took the obsidian falchion. Eve took the newly forged godsword. Together, they were day and night, and they turned to face Belphegor as though animosity had never divided them.

“Go,” Eve said over her shoulder.

Elise left Ba’al’s skull.

Since she was God, she couldn’t truly leave. Her omnipresence touched the entire universe—what little of it remained. She could see the few patches of Earth, Heaven, and Hell shrinking away, sucked into the genesis vortex. She saw the last of the trees wrenched from the soil, roots and all, shedding their leaves and then becoming compressed into pinpoints of plant matter.

Animals fell without oxygen; the last of the humans were wrenched away into nothingness.

Elise looked for the place she had left her friends on Mount Anathema, and found that the mountain no longer existed. The same applied to the Himalayas and the gate that looked like Lilith.

They simply didn’t exist anymore.

Only a few anchor points remained: Rylie and Seth’s obsidian bodies, and a few miles of Earth surrounding the genesis vortex.

There was nowhere for her to go.

So she waited, and she watched Yatam and Eve.

They shed the illusion of bodies as they approached Belphegor’s shriveled cadaver, leaving nothing behind but the light and darkness. The falchions swung. Blades severed the veins binding Belphegor to his avatar.

He wrenched free of his dais and moved with impossible speed toward Yatam and Eve.

The battle was short. They were two, and he was one.

Both plunged their blades into him as he lunged. Their points joined deep within his belly, pushing through his back.

At the same moment, Belphegor’s hands gripped their wrists.

He looked over their shoulders at Elise, seeing her through time and space. She could feel it like silver nails raking down her spine.

“Godslayer,” he whispered, blood dripping down his bottom lip.

The three died together.

Elise was no longer connected to Yatam and Eve, so she didn’t feel their deaths. She only watched them. Yet her heart wrenched with sudden, unexpected loneliness—the knowledge that the two people who had made her whole for so many years were gone.

Dead.

Even if it meant taking Belphegor with them, it was two more deaths than she wanted to face.

Ba’al stumbled and began to fall.

He collapsed over Los Angeles, sinking to his knees, crushing buildings and hills and roads underneath him. He was big enough that he smothered whole neighborhoods underneath his rot. The ragged hole he had torn between Earth and Malebolge blighted the valley as well—though that, too, was being sucked into the vortex.

Everything was gone except for the land around Ba’al, and he didn’t have much longer, either.

When his body finally settled, Elise stood on the ground beside him.

The final survivor. The only soul left remaining within all the dimensions that had once existed.

Belphegor and Nathaniel were dead, and she had survived. Genesis was almost complete.

Elise would be the only one to see it through.

“What am I going to do?” she asked Ba’al’s rotting corpse.

Lilith had been a sculptor—an artist with a vision. She had probably known exactly what she was doing when she made a new universe. Even Belphegor had planned on taking that responsibility all along. He’d had plans.

Elise had no plans. She had only thought to survive, and now she had. But she had thought that she would survive in a world that was still partially intact. She had never planned on changing anything—she’d just wanted it back the way it was before.

She had no idea what to do from there.

Staring deep into the depths of the genesis vortex, she realized that it wasn’t really complete darkness. There was faint light within it. Everything that had ever existed was now twisting inside—everything on Earth and Heaven and Hell, all of history and time, and every single soul that had ever lived.

Elise wasn’t really alone. She could remake everything exactly as she wanted it, despite the fact she didn’t want anything at all.

The idea was daunting. She was no Lilith, no master architect.

“Might as well get started,” Elise said to nobody in particular.

She stepped toward the vortex, away from the receding edge of crumbled road underneath Ba’al.

Then she realized Ba’al was still moving.

At least, something very small was moving on Ba’al’s body. A tiny figure was clambering from the ear canal, sliding down the collarbone, and leaping to the arm bones that were stretched toward the genesis.

Belphegor had survived Yatam and Eve’s attempt to kill him. He was running for the vortex.

If he got there first…

“Fuck,” she hissed.

Elise chased, and Belphegor ran, shockingly fast for such a shriveled little raisin of a body.

She met him on the wrist, knocking him over with the full weight of her will. He fell easily. Her physical form was still that of a kopis, and as strong as she had ever been; he was an atrophied cadaver with sword wounds in his belly. It was almost pathetic how quickly he dropped.

The genesis vortex was just a few feet away now, devouring Ba’al’s finger bones. There was no more roaring wind. Only silence. If she didn’t kill him before the vortex closed, then it wouldn’t matter who had the stronger physical body. Belphegor would win.

Elise lifted her fists, feeling empty without her swords. “Don’t move,” she said. “Don’t go anywhere near that void.”

His rasping voice entered her mind directly. “I don’t need to. It’s coming to us. You can’t kill me, and you can’t touch me without dying, too. We’re going into this genesis together. It’s over, Godslayer.”

It couldn’t be over. This couldn’t be the end.

Damn it, he was supposed to be
dead
.

The other side of the genesis vortex was chewing its way through Ba’al’s spine now, as though they stood at the center of a contracting globe. Elise couldn’t see anything beyond its hips or the road underneath them. The entire universe had been reduced to the upper body of a demon.

Belphegor smiled, and his lips cracked, gushing fresh ichor over his chin. He dragged himself forward a few inches toward the knucklebones.

Elise didn’t have a choice.

She grabbed him by the shoulders and hauled him back.

His hands immediately clamped down on her wrists, and an overwhelming sense of death swept over her. Belphegor’s face filled her vision, all scales and beady eyes and blood. “Wrong choice,” he whispered.

The words echoed through her skull.

He drained the life from her, drawing on the immense power of her godhood, dragging her down toward oblivion the way that he had ended Yatam and Eve.

But Elise wasn’t just a god. She was the Godslayer. A weapon forged to kill Adam and Belphegor and any other sorry asshole who’d made the mistake of entering the Origin. And she was the last person who could protect the whole fucking universe from being subjected to Belphegor’s sick vision of eternity.

She wasn’t going to die alone.

Elise gathered the full force of her will and clamped it down on Belphegor, dragging him toward the darkness with her.

Surprise registered in his eyes.

He tried to let go of her, but she just gripped him tighter, digging her fingers into his shoulders and sinking her will into his. “You killed everyone I care about,” Elise whispered. “You’re coming with me.”

“I killed them all. I shattered your willpower completely. You were
broken
.” He sounded like he was trying to convince her of it—not like he believed it himself.

He didn’t realize that broken metal was always stronger where it was mended. The shattered link on a chain was the one least likely to snap under stress after its repair.

Even if losing her friends had broken her, Elise had been forged into something much stronger than herself.

She didn’t need weapons to kill Belphegor. She
was
the weapon.

They spiraled toward death together, souls locked as one.

Elise poured all of her hurt into him, all her pain and loathing and frustration—and while she was at it, she threw all the love at him, too. Love for friends. Love for family. Love for the people who deserved to be reborn into a beautiful world that didn’t burn with eternal hellfire.

She might have been broken, but he was weak.

Belphegor died first.

This time, Elise watched him die, making sure that he vanished into nothingness as completely as Adam had. She didn’t let him go until there was nothing left to grip.

No body, no soul, no consciousness.

One more dead god.

Then she was alone, and she collapsed on Ba’al’s knucklebones, utterly drained.

She rested at the center of the vortex. All that remained was a few square feet around her, which she had no strength to resist. Weak as he’d been, Belphegor had still been strong enough to kill her.

Elise was unwinding into eternity, her soul fragmenting.

Some small part of her wanted to get up and save the world, but there was nothing left to save. Nothing but the last god in a dying pantheon and a few inches of bone.

Elise opened her arms wide, embracing the void as it consumed the last of the Earth. She used the last of her will to push the genesis to its climax.

The vortex closed around her as she died.

That was how the world ended—in absolute silence and darkness, without a single person to see it happen.

Abel woke up
in the forest with a shock. He flung his hands in front of him, grabbing for the obsidian body of his mate—but she wasn’t there.

Trees loomed above him. A sparrow swooped from one branch to the next, then caught a breeze and fluttered away.

On that breeze, Abel could smell deer. They stunk of fleas. Always a problem, fleas. Werewolf healing couldn’t do much about bugs that burrowed into fur, and it always sucked to have to end a full moon hunt with a flea bath.

As frustrated as he’d been by all the bathing, the fact that he could be frustrated at all meant one thing.

He’d died and gone to Heaven. Or whatever came in the afterlife.

It was the only reason that he could have been sucked into some creepy dark tornado and ended up in a forest that looked a hell of a lot like home.

Someone shifted softly beside him.

Abel tensed all over and didn’t immediately look to see who was next to him.

His whole body was telling him who had woken up alongside him in the forest, and he was afraid his senses were wrong. That the womanly scent drifting through the air didn’t belong to his mate. That he was going to roll over and find out that he was still horribly alone.

He couldn’t block out her tremulous voice.

“Abel?”

He looked. He
had
to look.

Rylie was propped over him on one arm, her blond hair falling in a sheet that spilled over a bed of dried pine needles. The wide eyes that gazed at him were the luminous gold of a full moon in autumn.

She reached for him with slender fingers, and he caught her wrist.

There were bones under the smooth skin. She was solid and real. Not a ghost or his imagination.

He didn’t trust his sense of touch, so he jerked her hand toward him, running his nose along the inside of her arm as he inhaled her scent.