Descent07 - Paradise Damned (11 page)

He didn’t hesitate to shoot—and his aim was much better.

The kopis’s chest exploded in a bloody mist.

There was movement inside the vehicle. A third person from the Union was still in the backseat. Malcolm realized it only an instant before they fired on him, too.

Bullets punched through the rear hatch of the SUV, just inches from Malcolm’s head.

He shouted and threw himself between its huge tires, underneath the bumper. He had to drop the gun to get under cover.

“Fuck me,” he muttered, elbow-crawling farther underneath the vehicle.

A door on the side of the SUV opened and feet dropped out. Malcolm squirmed out on the opposite side of the vehicle and sprinted for the other kopis’s gun.

The third Union soldier fired before he reached it.

It felt like a tiny animal with razor fangs bit into his calf, ripping the muscle free. He stumbled and fell.

Can’t stop
.

He crawled forward as quickly as he could, grabbed the remaining AK-47, and fired as he turned.

Bullets chewed through his attacker before Malcolm realized that it was a woman—another witch, petite and cute.

She was short. He shot higher than he intended and took her face off.

Malcolm stared at the place where she had been standing, chest heaving with panicked breaths. His eyes were wide. He saw everything without really registering it.

His determined calm faded, and the panic returned.

Gin
. He desperately needed gin.

Malcolm limped over to the body of the third person he had killed and stood over her, wiping sweat off of his forehead. “Ah, shit,” he said. Malcolm didn’t like killing anyone, especially not women.

There would be time for regrets later—plenty of time, unfortunately.

Hopefully, Oymyakon was well stocked with alcohol.

Malcolm hadn’t exactly
been dawdling on his way to Oymyakon—wandering through Russia wasn’t on top of his list of “fun ways to waste a few days”—but he floored it now, tearing down dirt roads that were little more than parallel ruts split by long grass.

He didn’t stop to enjoy the rolling hills, snow-peaked mountains, or summer breezes. In fact, he didn’t stop at all until he reached the dot on the map indicating Oymyakon, and he kept his eyes on the rearview mirror the entire time.

Nobody followed him.

The Yugo stopped working a few kilometers away from his destination. The gas gauge had been getting dangerously close to the empty line, so Malcolm assumed he had just run out prematurely; he jumped out to refill the tank with the canisters in the back, and found that they had all been punctured in the firefight. He had been trailing gasoline for an hour.

He swore and kicked the tire. His calf, which had been grazed by a bullet and was now caked with blood, cramped in protest.

Malcolm limped the rest of the way to Oymyakon, chased by the ghosts of the Union team members that he had killed. At any moment, he expected an SUV to come bearing down upon him.

But he managed to arrive in the village at midday without any other incidents. Small mercy.

It was a tiny town with only one real street, and a lot of aging buildings that looked like they hadn’t been updated since the Soviet era. He might have driven right past it if he had still been in the Yugo, slow as it was.

“
This
is Oymyakon?” he muttered under his breath.

A farmer stood at the end of the road, watching him uneasily; a pair of black-haired women whispered to each other near the house. They were all dark-skinned, kind of Turkic-looking.

“Hello!” Malcolm called to them in Russian. It had been years since he’d hung out with his friend, Piotr, who had taught him the language over the course of many months of heavy drinking, but it still came to his lips as easily as though only days had passed. “I’m looking for somewhere to stay, and I was told there’s an old grandmother who might be expecting me.”

The farmer backed away, disappearing into a house, and the women only continued to whisper.

“Small town hospitality at its finest,” Malcolm said.

God, he could use some gin.

Considering that there were no hotels for hundreds of miles, he was not looking forward to having to sleep in his car until Elise materialized. But the women were still whispering, the town was otherwise empty, and he somehow doubted the farmer would be keen on letting him visit for a sleepover. At least it was warm out. He wouldn’t freeze overnight.

He opened the door to the Yugo again.

Before he could climb in, one of the women stepped forward. “What are you looking for?” she asked. Her accent was different than what Malcolm was used to. He wasn’t sure he understood her properly.

“I’m looking for a ‘who,’” he said, carefully enunciating the words to make sure that he was communicating properly. “Grandmother. That’s the only name I have.”

“That’s not what I asked.”

“I told you, I’m not looking for a ‘what,’ but now that you ask…” Malcolm grinned. “I’ll start with a room warm enough that my testicles don’t try to climb into my stomach at night, and then we can go from there, if you’re feeling a little friendlier.”

Unsurprisingly, that seemed to be the wrong answer.

The women turned to leave.

“Wait,” he said. “I’m just waiting to pick up a friend. I need somewhere to stay. Is there someone called ‘Grandmother’ here?”

Her pinched expression told him that she was thinking of saying no, but when her mouth opened again, she said, “I’ll take you to her.”

V

Elise wasn’t sure
when she came back to herself after the training with Adam. She thought that she might have gone unconscious at some point, only to have Him follow her into her dreams; the nightmares He exacted on her sleeping mind were just as awful and impossible to distinguish.

But she eventually woke up to find Adam gone and her body a ruin. He had skinned her. Now she was alone, bleeding onto the dry soil of the garden.

She didn’t bother trying to move. She remained immobile on the banks of Mnemosyne, listening to the water slosh, staring at the jagged black branches high above her in the fog.

Everything hurt.

A black tear burned a path down her battered cheek.

“There’s an easy way out of this,” Metaraon said, strolling to her side. “Surrender to Him. Walk through the door and allow yourself to become Eve. Then finish Him.”

Elise rolled onto her back. The dirt pricked at her exposed muscle.

She wanted to say,
Just kill me. Please.
But she wouldn’t beg—not even for that. So she said, “Go fuck yourself.”

He shrugged and stepped away. “In that case, He has asked me to tell you to consider yourself at home. He doesn’t want you to feel like a prisoner, and so you have free reign of the garden until His next visit.” With a sardonic smirk, he added, “Enjoy.”

Metaraon left her alone with the pain.

Mnemosyne splashed her legs. The bushes rustled around her.

Elise drifted.

She imagined herself in the apartment above Motion and Dance. It was easy to put together the memory of it after spending so much time in Adam’s perverse domestic fantasy; she clearly recalled the Ansel Adams prints, the tidy furniture, the rug underneath James’s coffee table.

The harder that she imagined it, the more clearly that she could see everything, as if she were really in the studio again. She searched around for happy memories in which she could shelter—something, anything, that had nothing to do with pain.

Elise remembered a rainy day when she had walked through the front door, hung up her jacket, and put her wrist sheaths in the pockets. The memory was vivid. She could actually smell the golden potatoes simmering on the stove.

Dinner was cooking.

“James?” she had called, and her lips formed the consonants in reality, huddled in a bloody mess in the garden.

The memory continued to become clearer: the radio quietly playing the news, a roast in the oven, a bottle of wine already picked out. Elise had worried at the time that James wasn’t in the kitchen; there was no way that he would leave dinner unattended. If he was gone, then he must have been attacked or kidnapped.

Or, as she had realized moments later, in hiding.

When Elise stepped past the laundry room, the doors had flung open and James had jumped her.

It was a game that they played hundreds of times. Even during their retirement, he had wanted to keep her senses sharp, ensuring that she would be on edge in the event of another attack. And, she thought now, maybe he had wanted an excuse to touch her.

In the memory she fought with James, exchanging blows. And the more she focused on the way the rain of fists had felt against her arms and shoulders, the less she felt the pain of being skinned, toothless, broken.

Elise had pinned him to the wall, hand in his throat, and she did the same in the memory.

It wasn’t James under her hand—not really. But the illusion was convincing. Elise could remember how it felt to have his pulse beating under her fingers. She remembered the thrill of adrenaline, the sweat on the back of her neck, the ache of being beaten. James never held back, and neither did she.

Within moments, the immense power of the garden had fully realized her memory, pulling the ghost of James into her false reality. Elise stared up at him, and he stared back at her with pale blue eyes, like those of a Husky. His hair hadn’t been quite as gray at the time, and he had his first sunburn of the spring tinting the bridge of his nose a shade of rosy pink.

Elise wondered what he would have done if she’d tried to kiss him.

“James,” she said, and he didn’t respond, because he wasn’t any more real than a photograph.

She drank in the sight of him, healthy and alive.

“What’s the point now?” Elise asked him. “Why should I even try to kill Him? Metaraon won’t let me escape if I succeed. And I can’t die. This is never going to end.”

He remained silent, smiling.

Elise imagined bowing her head to his chest. She felt his heart pounding under his shirt, as if he wasn’t on a stone slab underneath the Tree, cold and dead. When she wished that he would wrap his arms around her, he did, and they hugged for a long, peaceful moment.

“What are you doing?”

Adam’s presence bristled behind her.

Elise turned to see Him looming in the kitchen, desperately out of place in her memories of James. She realized with a cold wash of shock that forcing herself to remember the studio must have taken her there, and truly formed an image of James. Her memories had come alive, just as Adam’s did, at His will. The garden was malleable.

And He had just caught her fantasizing about James.

Elise tried to shield James with her body, even though she knew that there was no point. Adam had already seen. And there was no point in protecting a ghost that couldn’t even speak with her.

“You can’t take this from me,” she said.

Adam didn’t seem to agree.

He grew in His anger, swelling to fill the apartment with crackling fury and gray light. It burned away Elise’s illusion of her intact body, baring her skinned flesh again.

“I don’t know why you want to hurt me like this,” He said. “You don’t need anyone else.” His voice was calm, even as He continued to build in size.

He consumed her vision. The apartment faded around Him. James’s warm, ghostly presence vanished, and she slipped to her knees. Ichor dribbled out of her mouth, splattered on the floor.

Adam slammed His fist into her face.

She didn’t move out of the way in time—she was slow without her skin, distracted by pain. Elise spilled to the floor. She tried to crawl away.

He chased her, wrapping His fist in the hair at the back of her head, jerking her upright. His cheek burned beside hers. “I hate it when you make me treat you like this,” He said, soft as ever.

Adam shoved. Elise crashed to the table by the couch.

She grabbed wildly, wrapping her fingers around the first thing that her hands touched—the lamp from the table. Elise lifted it and swung. It glanced harmlessly off of Adam.

He struck her again. What few teeth had remained in her head splintered onto her tongue.

His weight bore down on her, pinning her to the floor. He burned against her raw flesh, agonizingly hot, and it was all she could do to keep breathing as He kneeled on her back with one hand forcing her head to the floor.

“Is the priest why you won’t go through the door?” He asked, lowering His lips to her ear.

Elise closed her eyes.

“Just kill me,” she said.

“What happened here?” asked Metaraon from somewhere behind her.

The heat of Adam’s attention faded a fraction as He turned it on the angel.

“Did she fall in love with someone else while she was on Earth?” Adam asked, accusation dripping from every word. He wasn’t as soft-spoken with Metaraon as He was with Elise. She wished that it had been the other way around. She preferred the honesty.

Metaraon’s response was prompt. “I believe so. Your bishop, in fact. The one meant to guide her back.”

Your bishop?
The words swam through Elise’s mind, but she couldn’t make sense of them.

“Betrayal all around,” Adam said. “Is he dead?”

Metaraon took so long to reply that Elise decided to fill the silence. “Yes,” she said. “It doesn’t change anything.”

Adam shoved harder, mashing her cheekbone into the floor. The apartment was fraying as His thoughts wandered. She could see cobblestone out of the corner of her eye—a hint of the ethereal city.

“When you look at me, do you see him?” Adam whispered.

“Stop messing with me,” she said.

He shook her hair. “What do you see when you look at me?”

He doesn’t know,
Elise realized with a dull jolt of shock. He had no idea that He appeared like James to her. That wasn’t part of the way He was trying to break her. It was a torture dredged up by her own mind.

Despair swelled in Elise, choking back a response.

“Look at how sad she is,” Adam said. His hand in her hair relaxed. He stroked her neck, her back, like she was a dog. “Why is she so sad?”