Descent07 - Paradise Damned (18 page)

Her swords were gone, devoured by the Tree.

But that had been her only plan for saving Betty.

“How will I kill him without my falchions?” Elise murmured. She didn’t mean Adam.

Metaraon slipped past her, the tips of his wings whispering on the stones as he walked. He bent to whisper into her ear. “Get creative.”

Elise turned to watch him glide up the path toward the surface.

Get creative
.

A spark of inspiration bloomed in her mind.

If she didn’t have the weapons she needed to kill Metaraon, then she would just have to get help.

“Thanks,” Elise said.

Metaraon had already left.

But she wasn’t the only person staring into the amber lake.

A female figure stood on the far shore. She seemed to glow faintly in the mist.

There should have been no other women in the garden—it was in quarantine, Adam’s prison, and all previous brides were dead.

The woman turned, gliding up the path between the eggs.

Elise bolted around the shore of the lake, cutting through the razor-edged ferns. She was fast—very fast, even without darkness to carry her—but the lake was much larger than it appeared.

By the time she reached the other side, the woman was already walking out into the garden again.

Elise chased.

She stepped out of the cavern to find the woman sitting just a few feet away, skirts pooled over a stone bench. Elise slowed to a stop.

She had been prepared to find Lilith lurking in the garden—maybe even prepared to fight her, if she had to. But she hadn’t been prepared at all for the woman she found waiting.

It was her mother, Ariane.

“It’s you,” Elise said.

After running into her mother in the City of Dis, Elise could no longer be surprised at the places that Ariane would show up. Neither she nor Isaac had ever been too concerned about rules, quarantines, or silly things like mortal peril.

Ariane telegraphed her emotions with every line of her body, from the hesitant tilt of her chin to the curve of her bottom lip, and the way she drew her shoulders toward her ears. Elise could tell that Ariane was worried, maybe even fearful, but not surprised. She had already known that Elise was in the garden.

“What are you doing here?” Elise asked.

“I am only a dream,” Ariane said, speaking her native French, just as she usually did with Elise.

“Bullshit.”

“How can you be sure? Sometimes we are in a garden, sometimes in a city, and sometimes on Earth. It’s possible you are imagining me now, too.”

“I’m sure,” Elise said. “If I was going to dream about anyone, it would never be you.”

Ariane flinched, hands clutched to her heart. “I see.”

“Don’t tell me this is a rescue attempt.”

“It’s not. I’m sorry. Metaraon brought me here so that he can keep an eye on us.”

She frowned, trying to understand the connection between her mother and the archangel. “Why would he need to keep an eye on
you
? What were you trying to do?”

“Escape him.” Ariane’s shoulders were tense, extruding muscular lines on either side of her neck. “Permanently.”

There was a lifetime of history in those three words—the implication that Ariane would
need
to run from Metaraon, as if he could have some kind of interest in her, but Elise couldn’t imagine why. Metaraon didn’t think much of mortals. He had made that more than clear.

“So the fact that you’re here has nothing to do with me.”

“No…I wouldn’t say that.” Ariane squared her shoulders, as if steeling herself to deliver unpleasant news. “While I was serving in the City of Dis with your father, we received many transmissions from the Union. One update warned us of a prophesied convergence—a point on which destiny hinged. Or, rather, a location.”

Elise lifted her eyebrows. “And that location was the garden?”

“No, a village called Oymyakon. The prophecy said that you would be there soon. Very soon. You’re only one part of the convergence, however; we are all drawn toward it. Even me—and I had done my best to escape. That is why I am here. You and I, Elise, we are being drawn toward destiny.”

“But if I’m supposed to be in Oymyakon, then that means…”

“You’re going to escape,” Ariane said simply.

Elise glanced around the garden, afraid that He was watching. The Tree swayed above them. Adam didn’t appear.

“How?” she whispered.

“The solution is simple, if not easy,” Ariane said, reaching out to take her daughter’s hand. “Walk through the door.”

Elise shook off her mother’s grip. “Did Metaraon tell you to say that?”

“No. But you must do it. Walk through the door, let Him start over, and when He is luxuriating in His new life…” Ariane sighed. “I never wanted this for you.”

“How do you know about the door? You can’t know, unless you’re colluding with them.”

“Colluding is a harsh word, my daughter,” Ariane said. “But Metaraon tells me many things now. We are…very familiar.”

She stood, and her dress fell around a huge stomach.

Elise’s eyes widened.

She had said that Metaraon wanted to keep an eye on “us”—not Ariane and Elise, but Ariane and her new offspring.

It wasn’t hard to put the pieces together.

Elise was surprised at how angry the sight of her mother’s pregnancy made her. Her parents had abandoned her when she was fourteen years old, like she was too much of a burden for them to bear, yet went on to conceive another? And with an
angel
?

“This is fucking bullshit,” Elise said.

“I can explain.”

“What? That you fucked up with your first kid and thought you could try again?”

“This isn’t meant to be a replacement,” Ariane said.

“Then what is it? A mistake?” Elise asked. The words lashed at Ariane, making her flinch.

“You were planned, Elise,” Ariane said softly. “But not by Isaac and me. Metaraon asked us to make you, so we did.”

“You knew that I would be the Godslayer.”

“Yes, but I didn’t know how much I would love you.” Ariane reached out for Elise, but she jerked away from her mother’s touch, angry heat pooling in her stomach.

“You didn’t think you would love me? Your own daughter?”

“I was sixteen, Elise,” Ariane said. “Sixteen is a stupid age. My concept of marriage and parenthood was little more sophisticated than a child toying with her dolls. I made oaths I had no ability to understand. And when it came time to surrender you…I did what I had to.”

Elise had been about to walk back under the Tree again, but that phrase stopped her.

I did what I had to
.

That was the same thing that she had told Betty.

Ariane wasn’t done speaking. She fidgeted with the skirt of her dress, seeming to choose her words carefully. “Consider this, my daughter,” she said. “Your life has been orchestrated by greater powers. All of it. There was never any doubt in Metaraon’s mind that you would come to this point, in this garden, at this destined convergence point. He has invested everything in you.”

“But I escaped. I was gone for a long time.”

Ariane shook her head. “No, Elise. You weren’t.”

“For ten years—”

“
No
, Elise,” she said, more forcefully than before. “Metaraon knew where you were the entire time.”

Elise frowned, trying to understand what her mother was telling her. “James and I…” She let the beginning of the sentence hang in the air between them, but didn’t finish it. As soon as she said James’s name, a spark had lit in Ariane’s eyes. “What are you saying?”

“I wouldn’t dare suggest anything,” Ariane said. “But you and I have much in common.” She suddenly looked old, so old, and so very tired. She sat on the bench again. “We have been used, Elise.”

“James didn’t use me,” Elise said.

Ariane cupped her cheek. She didn’t say anything else, but the warmth in her eyes spoke volumes.

Having her mom touch her like that sent her back to the time when she had still found comfort in her mother’s company. After so long in the garden, after so much of Adam’s torture, she desperately needed that comfort again.

Elise rested her hand on her mother’s stomach. The baby stirred at her touch. It felt strange for the skin to bump and jitter underneath her fingers and know that there was something alive in there, like the eggs underneath the Tree.

“I did make a mistake with you, Elise,” Ariane said softly. “I made a thousand mistakes. But what’s done is done, and I cannot fix the past. You’re an adult now. Your destiny is in your control.” She rested her hand on top of Elise’s. “This one—this one, I want to keep.”

Elise didn’t feel angry anymore. She was too numb.

“It’s not fair,” she said.

“I agree.”

“I’ll get both of you out of here. You and…” Elise trailed off, rubbing her mom’s stomach. Ariane, Betty, a baby—she had entered the garden thinking she had nothing left to lose, but it only got worse by the moment. “Nobody’s going to use you anymore, Mother. I promise.”

“Walk through the door,” Ariane said gently. “It’s the only way.”

“How do you know?”

“Because,” she said, “Lilith told me.”

VIII

RUSSIA – MAY 2010

Babushka’s house stunk
of thick, cloying pipe smoke. It made the air in the tiny living room suffocating, which was stuffed with a broken couch, bookshelves, and a TV, despite its size.

A pair of teenage boys struggled over a GameCube controller. Malcolm’s new friend—who had introduced herself, extremely reluctantly, as Alsu—shoved past the boys, blocking their view of the TV. They flung their arms in the air and shouted protests.

A single look from Alsu silenced their complaints.

“Who’s this?” asked the first boy, who had just lost his game.

“Pizza delivery,” Malcolm said brightly.

Alsu looked pained. “Stop being lazy and go outside, children.”

She pulled Malcolm into the kitchen.

From the outside, the entire building had looked hardly bigger than a garden shed, so Malcolm was amazed to see a half a dozen centenarian women jammed in the kitchen to prepare dinner. Their voices rolled over each other as they chatted, building to cacophonous white noise. There wasn’t even a pause when Alsu shoved Malcolm into the one empty chair at the table.

“Now this is more like it,” Malcolm said as one of the women set a plate in front of him.

“I’ll be right back,” Alsu said before stepping into the back hall.

Dozens of eyes watched Malcolm as he dug in, inhaling the pasta as fast as he could manage. It made his stomach cramp to eat so quickly, but it was too delicious to pace himself.

“Did you want some?” he asked his watchers, cheeks bulging with food.

The women whispered among themselves.

He finished the pasta alone and started on the next plate of food that they gave him. Malcolm didn’t get far before Alsu returned to the kitchen. “She’ll see you now,” she said.

Malcolm shoved a potato into his mouth. “Right now?”

“Right now.”

He followed Alsu out of the room.

It had to be some kind of temporal rift that allowed four bedrooms to be situated behind the kitchen. At least one of them seemed to have been converted from a broom closet, and it was probably the most attractive of all the rooms; it was the only one without stained, forty-year-old wallpaper.

Alsu took him to the rearmost bedroom door. “She’s very old,” she said. “Speak up and show respect.”

He swallowed his last mouthful of food and winked. “I know how to handle the ladies, trust me.” Potato flecked from his lips as he spoke.

She sighed and pushed the door open.

Until the moment that Malcolm stepped inside Babushka’s room, if someone had asked him to describe the smell of death, he would have said that it had no smell at all. The piss and shit a body purged while dying certainly had a smell, and so did perforated intestines, and blood spilled in large quantities. But death itself had no particular odor.

Yet the instant he walked through that door, he could smell that Babushka was about to die. It was a stale, grim odor, like the air inside a mausoleum that hadn’t been opened in centuries.

Babushka herself was probably old enough to have found the invention of horse-drawn carriages frightening. The trenches on her face were stained black with smoke. The slivers of her lips were pursed into a permanent, wrinkled pucker, probably thanks to the pipe that she was currently filling with fresh tobacco.

“I don’t like any of this,” Babushka said as soon as he entered.

“I’m sorry, Aunt,” Alsu said, grabbing Malcolm’s arm. “I didn’t realize—”

“That’s not what I mean. Leave us alone,” Babushka said.

Malcolm almost backed out of the room before he realized that she wanted her niece to leave, not him. Alsu shut the door on her way out, leaving him trapped.

There was nowhere to sit between the footboard and dresser, so Malcolm stood awkwardly by the door, eyeballing the contents of Babushka’s dresser. It was cluttered with brushes, combs, crystals, throwing knives, and a statuette with a woman’s face and a snake’s body.

He wrenched his gaze away from the serpent-woman.

“James Faulkner sent me,” Malcolm said.

She hocked and spat black saliva on the floor. It splattered at his feet. “Fuck him.”

Malcolm exploded with laughter, more from surprise than mirth. The sound didn’t suit the mournful air of the room. He quickly stopped and coughed into his hand. “Not that I disagree, but what did he do to make
you
mad?”

“He’s killing her,” Babushka said simply.

The last hints of Malcolm’s laughter cut off.

“Uh,” he said.

Babushka scraped her thumb on a matchstick. It flamed red, lighting the shiny peaks of her ancient face. “If you’re here to help James Faulkner, I’ll have my nieces slit your throat,” she said matter-of-factly.

“Whoa, hang on there,” Malcolm said, momentarily forgetting his Russian. “Don’t be hasty.”

She didn’t seem to have any problems understanding the English. Her eyes narrowed to slits. “It was a mistake letting him take her the first time. If she gets back again, she’s free. She’s earned it.”