Descent07 - Paradise Damned (21 page)

“No,” he repeated, more firmly this time. “We’ve got maybe two days until everything falls apart. There’s not enough time to call in backup. And if there are more of
those
around, we can’t let them leave here alive.”

“I’m not worried about hybrids,” Malcolm said. “I’m worried about the Union.”

Lucas snorted. “Can you really leave when something is about to go down?”

The ridiculous, heroic kopis instincts inside of Malcolm said
no
. But out loud, he said, “Hell yes I can.”

Anthony rolled his eyes and walked away.

“Why are you even here, Malcolm?” Lucas asked, lowering his voice. “If you’re so eager to get away, why come in the first place?”

“Because I’m an idiot,” Malcolm said. “I owe James Faulkner a favor. He asked me to get Elise. I thought, how bad can it be? Turns out, very bad. And here we are.” He dropped his hand on top of the hybrid’s head, ruffling its blood-caked hair.

It started screaming.

He jerked his hand back and jumped away.

“Jesus fucking Christ!”

Malcolm’s exclamation was still quieter than the shrieks of the hybrid. Somehow, without lungs, it was as loud as an air raid siren.

Lucas clapped his hands over his ears. “Shut that thing up!”

Malcolm ripped the bandana off of his eye and stuffed it into the hybrid’s mouth. It kept screaming anyway, long and loud and wordless.

Anthony came sprinting back, shotgun in his arms and panic in his eyes. “How many days did you say we had until shit got bad?” he yelled, trying to be heard over the hybrid. “Two? Maybe three?”

Dark figures rose from the forest far beyond him. There was no mistaking them for birds.

Malcolm knew, with nauseating certainty, that those creatures were rising from the meadow.

“Shit,” he said, picking Alsu’s shotgun up again. “We’ve got to get the villagers to safety.”

Anthony nodded sharply. “On it.”

He ran off again, and Lucas drew a pair of pistols from his hip holsters, which were set for a cross-draw. “I need to load,” he said. “Cover me.”

The hybrids hurtled toward the air, making a beeline for Oymyakon. A hysterical laugh bubbled out of Malcolm’s throat. Cover him? Against three—no, wait,
four
hybrids?

“Sure, I’ll do that,” he said, tracking the flight of the hybrids across the bright sky with the shotgun’s sight.

They were moving fast. Just seconds away.

“So I get that you only came here because James asked you to,” Lucas said, slipping a few rounds into a magazine. He sounded pretty chill, considering that the head was still screaming. “Cool. Great. But that still leaves us with a pretty big question.”

“What’s that?”

Lucas slammed the magazine into his pistol. “Where the hell is James now?”

IX

Limbo was a
nothing-place.

The ground and air were indistinguishable from one another—vast gray plains with a single dividing line that implied a horizon. The landscape had no remarkable features. It was flatter than the plains of the Midwest, without any bumps worth tripping over.

The only hint of life within was a lone man, stumbling toward gray nothingness, emerging from gray nothingness. James Faulkner had been walking through it for a long time. If there were anything to find in Limbo, after an eternity of searching, he would have found it.

Yet he had seen everything that there was to be found, which was to say, nothing at all. There were no sounds to reach his ears, no flavors on his tongue, not even scents in his nose. He should have been able to pick up the odor of rot, if nothing else, since he was still smeared with Malebolge’s effluence. He had no water with which to wash himself.

Without any senses, James felt like he had become as much of a nothing as the timeless world around him.

But there must have been
some
kind of time passing, even if it didn’t touch his clothing. The magical burns had healed neatly, leaving behind smooth skin. Out of boredom, he had ignited a few more of the spells, and those had healed, too. The magic itself did nothing in Limbo beyond stinging his skin for a fleeting second. He was powerless.

He had no clue how long he had stumbled through the vast wasteland of Limbo.

But eventually, he couldn’t handle it anymore. The running. The boredom. The constant, gnawing hunger.

All he wanted to do was die. But that wasn’t an option—no more than finding water to slake his terrible thirst. James couldn’t even remember what water tasted like.

He collapsed. It wasn’t the first time. Dear God, it wouldn’t be the last time.

James was never going to escape.

But this time, as he lay suspended in the gray nothing of Limbo, he could find no desire to get up again.

A pair of boots crossed in front of him. James’s eyes tracked up a pair of legs to a very familiar face.

Elise stood over him, arms folded, hip jutted, judgment in her eyes. Her hair hung over one shoulder in a thick braid. A smattering of freckles covered her cheekbones. A white tank top hugged her torso, with a gap between its hem and the studded belt of her jeans that bared the vee of muscle slanting over her hips. Her combat boots were as muddy as if she, too, had been slogging through Hell.

It wasn’t Elise as a demon, or even the woman that he had eventually come to love. It was Elise as a sixteen-year-old girl, full of hard edges and attitude. She was untouched by the washed-out light of Limbo. Young and vibrant, but not alive.

She was a ghost.

“What are you doing down there?” she asked, her voice flat.

“Elise,” he croaked. His lips cracked with the motion. It didn’t hurt, but he tasted salt and iron on his tongue. “It’s you.”

She lifted her eyebrows. They were naturally slanted so that she looked perpetually angry, although he understood this particular shade of anger to be one tinged with exasperation. “Are you just going to lie there forever?”

“Maybe, now that you’re dead,” he said.

“Nice to see you’ve written me off. Stop being so pathetic and get the fuck up.”

He didn’t make the decision to move, yet he found himself standing anyway.

Hallucination or not, James took the time to drink in the sight of Elise. He didn’t understand why he would have summoned her from such a distant memory—maybe she was frozen, timeless, in his mind from the moment that he had realized he loved her.

“You’re supposed to be rescuing me,” Elise said.

He was the reason that she was gone in the first place.

“I’m so sorry,” he whispered.

She touched his shoulder. He saw her fingers rest against his shirt, watched the cloth move at the contact, and felt nothing on his skin. But long-forgotten feelings blossomed in his chest. It was a warmth that nothing in Limbo could provide.

He leaned into her touch, eyes dropping closed, and tried to savor the ghostly sensation of their contact.

Then she hauled off and punched him across the face.

He sprawled to the ground. It was as featureless and unremarkable as everything else in Limbo. Maybe dirt, maybe sand, maybe neither. But it felt harder than it ever had before. He felt like he really hit something for the first time.

Elise straddled his chest. She had no weight.

“Let’s count the bodies,” she said, ticking off her fingers one by one. “My dad? Dead. My mom? Probably dead. Hannah? Definitely dead. And the longer you pretend that Metaraon hasn’t run off with Nathaniel, the likelier it becomes that he’s dead, too. Are you just going to give up on us?”

“I haven’t given up,” he protested weakly. “There just isn’t anything I can do from Limbo. I’m trapped.”

Elise rolled her eyes. “All I’m hearing are excuses.”

James would have gotten angry if he could have mustered the strength for it. “If being trapped in a world with no exit is an excuse, then why don’t you rescue me?”

The corner of her mouth lifted in a half-smile. “What do you think I’m doing?”

“But it’s not
you
. I’ve gone insane.” Although he felt no less sane than he had stumbling through eternal nothingness.

She rested a gloved hand over his heart. “I’m in here. You have half of me, and I have half of you. We need to get the parts back together.”

He held her hand. He couldn’t feel her skin, the cloth of the glove, but he remembered what it felt like.

“I don’t think I can do it,” he said.

Elise stood and shrugged. “Fine. Lie here until the world ends. Maybe I’m dead, maybe I’m not—you’ll never know now.” Elise’s body faded. He could see the faint line of the horizon through her waist.

“Wait,” he said. He didn’t think his body had any moisture left in it, but a single tear rolled down his cheek, as cold as the ice in the Coccytus. “Elise!”

She bent, lowering her face to his. Her eyes seemed to glow with an inner light, even as she drifted away.

“Do something about this,” she said. “I need you.”

And then she was gone.

But the glow wasn’t.

Beyond the place that Elise had vanished—far beyond—a flickering, colorless light hung in the gray plane that he thought of as the sky. It was impossible to tell distances in Limbo, but he thought that it must have been far away.

It had been so long since he saw anything but emptiness that he was slow to realize what the presence of light must have meant.

That light looked just like the fissure that James had used to enter Limbo.

Excitement thrilled through him, making his heart pound and his blood race. He hadn’t been excited in so long that being able to feel his own pulse almost shocked him as much as the fissure did.

He picked himself off, wiping imaginary dust off of his jeans—an old, reflexive gesture that had suddenly returned to him.

And then he began to run.

Adam’s return was
heralded by a too-familiar surge of energy. The Tree blurred around Elise. When her vision cleared once more, she was in bed at Motion and Dance with the sheets pulled to her waist. Gray sunlight streamed through the curtains. Betty was also in bed, curled on her side in the fetal position—the shift in setting hadn’t made her vanish, nor had it awakened her.

Adam promptly entered the room through a white, four-paneled door. He carried breakfast on a tray: one piece of toast with strawberry freezer jam, an egg, a piece of bacon, a coffee mug. Elise couldn’t smell any of it. The only scent she detected was that of apples.

“Hello, darling,” He said, sitting beside her. “You slept in terribly late.”

Elise glanced at the clock on the wall. There were no hands. “I thought we were done with these lies,” she said. “This apartment, this building, this…illusion.”

“What do you mean?” He sounded genuinely confused. “I’ve only come to see if you’re ready to go through the door.”

Elise stared at the door over His shoulder. If she walked through it, she wouldn’t be tortured again. She wouldn’t have to ever watch her skin stripped from her body, feel the teeth shatter in her skull, have Adam parade all of her failures in front of her.

But she would lose herself.

Everyone wanted her to go through that door—not just Adam and Metaraon, but her mother, and even Lilith herself, who Elise had assumed must have been long dead. It was like the entire universe was pushing for her to enter.

Despair choked her. She caught herself shaking her head in a silent denial of what was coming, and forced herself to stop.

“Just train me,” Elise said. The tremor in her voice was almost imperceptible.

He didn’t even bother arguing with her about it. Not anymore.

“Very well,” He said.

He reached into her mind and pulled it open.

Every nerve in Elise’s body sang with pain, like a violin played with a bow made of razors. She might have screamed—she usually did—but she couldn’t hear anything other than the pounding in her head.

Her father’s disapproving gaze loomed.

It’s your fault.

Memories swirled through her: Ariane’s pregnant belly, the neat circle of a bullet entry wound in Betty’s forehead, seeing Pamela Faulkner’s feet behind her desk and knowing that it meant she was dead on the other side. The gaping slash on James’s throat was a huge, a bloody chasm, and she thought that she was going to fall inside.

Adam devoured Elise. His glow burned away the memories of James as Mnemosyne roiled in her veins.

Her abs clenched. Serpents twisted in her gut.

Just walk through the door.

Elise’s back arched and she slid off the bed, hitting the ground. Her body was no more than a bag of fluid. She gushed everywhere, pouring blood and ichor and tears.

Through the pain, she saw the Tree as a sapling at the beginning of the world.

Adam strode toward her. He was in the cavern tangled in the roots of an adolescent Tree, walking among the growing eggs, and His angels were destroying all of her children. Their silent cries pierced her soul.

You will love nobody but me
, He had said.

I do love you,
she had replied,
but I want children, Adam.

You already have hundreds of children. They are enough.

She had agreed to let Him destroy them. The knowledge of that was more horrifying than any number of bullet wounds, slashed throats, or skinned bodies. She had
let
Him kill her unborn children, for the safety of the ones that she already had.

Elise’s teeth strained inside her skull, on the verge of fracturing.

The door was beside Adam. It was always there now, waiting for her to cross through.

But there had been a time before doors, before God, when Adam had been only a man. He had been her only companion in the world before there was a world.

The image of Him before He was immortal crested over the tender ruins of her mind.

He had been aging. Humans were mortal, and Eve was not. Angels never died, so she knew that a time would come when she would have to watch the rise and set of the sun without Adam at her side, and it broke her heart.

Eve couldn’t imagine a world without Adam.