Descent07 - Paradise Damned (25 page)

“Whoa, whoa, whoa!” the man protested.

Anthony pulled back his fist without punching, and realized that he had just pinned Malcolm. The scars and missing eye were harder to see when it was so dark.

“Did you come to save us?” Lucas asked. “
You
?”

“Save the incredulity for later.” Malcolm dusted himself off. “Nice boxers, by the way,” he added, winking at Anthony. At least, Anthony thought it was supposed to be a wink.

Lucas peered through the door at the street beyond. “How did you get in?”

“Shift change,” Malcolm said. “And there might be at least one dead guard involved. Don’t worry your pretty heads about it. Let’s get out of here.”

Anthony could
almost
see what Elise must have seen in him once.

Almost.

The men scaled the fence without being seen. It was easy with a former Union commander guiding them. Malcolm knew all of the patterns that the guards walked around the perimeter, so they just had to sneak between them when their backs were turned.

“And now we run,” Malcolm said as soon as they reached the other side of the fence.

Anthony felt stupid sprinting through the fields wearing his boxers. Stupid, but grateful.

They didn’t stop until they reached the edge of the forest and the lights of the Union outpost were reduced to pinpoints. Even then, they only paused long enough to catch their breaths.

The outpost stirred. Shouts drifted through the night.

Their absence had been noticed.

“Let’s keep going,” Lucas urged, so they did.

They sheltered in
the foothills until dawn hit, and then kept climbing. It was a warm spring day; by the time they climbed to a vantage point that allowed them to look down on Oymyakon, Anthony was soaked with sweat and breathing hard.

“The Union’s preparing to grab Elise,” Malcolm said when they finally stopped climbing. He stretched out on the ground with his arms behind his head. “I saw the cage in the village. Thought you blokes might find that interesting, in the terrifying kind of way.”

“It doesn’t really matter, does it? They can’t contain her,” Anthony said.

“Actually, they can. All it takes is some electricity and a lot of light. Run a few volts through a demon, and it’s like dropping them in acid.” He plucked a long piece of grass free and picked his teeth with it. “Then you take away her shadows so she can’t go all incorporeal-like…”

Lucas grimaced. “If they’re prepared to contain her, we have to expect that they’re prepared to capture her, too.”

“They’ll have to surprise her,” Malcolm said. “They’ll snag her the instant she’s back in the dimension, throw her in the middle of some lights, and haul her back to HQ for God knows whatever they have planned.”

Anthony nodded. “Which means we have to get to her first so she can’t be surprised. How the hell are we going to do that?”

The other men didn’t answer.

Anthony squinted, watching a glimmering line of vehicles drive out of Oymyakon toward the forest where Malcolm had said that the meadow was located. Whatever they had planned, they were already preparing for it. “When’s this thing going to happen?” he asked.

Malcolm shrugged. “Dunno. You’re the one getting phone calls from a prophet.”

Anthony continued pacing, tapping his fingers against his chin as he considered. “We’ll have to wait until nightfall. Once it’s dark, we can get down to the meadow and see what the Union’s got set up for Elise. We can’t plan until we know more.”

“Great, have fun,” Malcolm said.

“Actually, you’re the one who knows Union equipment. You should probably be the one checking out the meadow,” Anthony said.

“Uh, no? I’m also the one they’re most likely to shoot on sight.”

“Anthony has a point,” Lucas said. “While you’re doing that, we’ll sneak back into Oymyakon and steal weapons. Sound good?”

Malcolm stared between the two kopides, annoyance twisting his mouth. “You know we’re all likely to die doing this shit.”

“Any day now,” Anthony said.

He sighed. “Right. Okay.”

With that decided, there was nothing left to do but wait for the end.

XII

Something was tickling
James’s cheek. He opened his eyes to see green spikes in front of his face, and pushed himself onto all fours with a gasp. The sound was strangely crisp, unmuffled by Limbo, and his ears ached at the clarity of the sound.

He was on his hands and knees on something green. James flexed his fingers.

Grass.

It had been so long since he had seen such a thing that he almost didn’t recognize the green slivers between his fingers. He let his fingertips sink into the soil. It pushed underneath the white tips of his fingernails, turning them black.

The earth was wet. How long had it been since James felt anything moist, or dry, or anywhere in between other than that gray nothingness?

He pressed his face to the grass, and the blades tickled his cheeks. It felt so marvelously novel that he never wanted to lift his head again. But he had to. He couldn’t lie there for eternity. If he had found grass, then that could only mean one thing.

James had finally reached the garden.

His knees were soaked with dew, his fingers were clammy, and when he stood, all of his muscles trembled. A vine hung in his face. He plucked a leaf free and pressed it to his nose, inhaling deeply. It smelled of wild places that humans had never known before. It smelled damp and dirty and incredible.

James was standing beside a stone wall rotten with age. It was at least four times his height, much too high to climb, and it extended as far as he could see in either direction.

James couldn’t see any hint of the fissure or any gates, but he knew he had to be on the outermost edge of the garden. The grass that he stood on only extended a few hundred feet before terminating in gray void.

A change in pressure made his eardrums
pop
, and the hybrid appeared.

It stood on the grass just a few yards away, briefly disoriented by the transition between universes.

James swore and ducked into a hole in the stones of the wall, letting the vines fall over him like a veil. Hard edges scraped at his shoulders, jabbed into his spine. He pulled his long legs to his chest and hugged them.

He could see the hybrid lifting its nose to the air through the fall of vines. Its eyes fell closed as it sniffed.

Then it looked straight at James’s hiding place.

His pulse sped. James grabbed a rock the size of his hand, and then dropped it—that wouldn’t do anything against a hybrid. What spells did he have left? Which of them might work in an ethereal dimension? He hadn’t forgotten what happened when he tried to cast a spell in Zebul, the holy temples of Heaven—it had felt like his entire thigh muscle was ripping off.

The hybrid strode toward him. But before James could decide what to do, another winged figure appeared.

A cherub dropped from the sky. Its eye sockets were empty, with silver blood staining its cheeks. Its sword flamed. It must have sensed something passing through the fissure—it didn’t look surprised to see an intruder outside the walls of the garden.

The hybrid whirled on the cherub, lips peeled back in a hiss.

It attacked, and the two of them grappled. They fought at super-speed, too quickly for James to see anything but the occasional flash of blade, the splatter of blood, the flare of wings. But he could tell that the cherub was only guarding against the attacks. It wasn’t fighting back—it was delaying.

A second cherub landed behind the hybrid.

James swallowed down a gasp as the pair of cherubim ripped into the hybrid, dismembering it with ruthless, brutal efficiency. The hybrid didn’t even get a chance to scream again.

The cherubim hacked at the hybrid until the body was in pieces and the grass was bathed in blood.

James didn’t dare breathe in his hiding place, lest they turn on him next.

But the cherubim didn’t even search for him. They grabbed the dismembered limbs and took off again, leaving James alone with a few fragments of torso.

Something about the sight of a pair of angels killing a hybrid had scoured the fatigue from his muscles. He climbed out of his hiding space and stepped back to study the impossibly high wall. It could be scaled—Elise had to have done it once before.

He leaped to grab a sturdy vine and began hauling his weight up the wall.

After the eternity that he spent in Limbo, the hours it took to reach the top of the garden’s wall was nothing. James let himself rest on top of it, taking in the sight of the garden spread before him.

The grass on the opposite side was dead. The nearest bushes oozed with ichor, poisoned from the inside, leaving thorns where there had once been blossoms. The river sliced through the dead parts of the garden, winding toward the massive Tree at the center, which was even bigger than James remembered.

He didn’t stop to study it for long. He was too vulnerable atop the wall.

James slid to the dry grass and walked through the garden.

Considering that he
was only twelve years old, Nathaniel took dying fairly well.

“The eyes are cool,” he said, bending over to stare at his reflection in the amber lake. From behind, Elise could see that there were two long slices along his back, like new orifices between his shoulder blades. They didn’t seem to be bleeding. “I think I look good with blue.”

It had taken a while for Nathaniel to wake up after emerging from the egg, but after an initial panic, he had been calm. Even seeing his own corpse only seemed to inspire puzzlement, rather than fear. Hell, he was taking the garden a lot better than Elise had.

She shouldn’t have been glad to see Nathaniel in Araboth, but she was. He was a very special kind of witch that could open portals and manipulate dimensions—a skill that was so rare it might have been unique. If he had retained his magic through the rebirth, he might be the ticket to saving Betty and Ariane.

“How are you feeling now?” Elise asked. Nathaniel had struggled to breathe for a few minutes in the beginning, too, but he didn’t seem to be laboring anymore.

“I feel weird,” Nathaniel said. He rubbed the wound on his chest. “But okay, I guess. It doesn’t hurt as much as getting shot did.”

Elise forced herself to stop staring at the injury that so perfectly matched James’s.

“Who did it?”

“Some Union guy,” he said, lifting one shoulder in a shrug. “He wasn’t aiming for me. It was an accident. How I ended up here after that, I don’t know.”

“Metaraon brought you. He’s also the one that brought you back like this.”

The instant Nathaniel heard that name, his eyes shadowed. “Is he still alive?”

Elise hadn’t seen Metaraon since stabbing him in the chest, but she somehow doubted that it had taken him down. It could never be that easy. “If he isn’t dead yet, I’ll change that soon.”

“Good,” he said forcefully.

Elise considered asking him when he had gotten such a taste for murder, but it didn’t seem important in comparison to the more urgent tasks at hand. Namely, accomplishing the murders themselves.

“I need you to help me.” She flashed her palms at him. “I only have one mark, so I can’t escape through the gates. Is your magic intact? Can you open a path out of the dimension?”

“I think so,” Nathaniel said. “I’ll have to see what I can do. But Metaraon—”

“He dies first.”

He stood up straight and tall, at eye-level with Elise. He had done a lot of growing since they had traveled through Hell together. “I’ll see what I can do. What about James?”

Elise frowned. “What about him?”

The cavern shuddered.

Her vision blurred, darkening at the edges.

Nathaniel’s eyes widened. He reached for her hand, but his fingers only slid through her skin, as though she weren’t actually there.

“Elise?” he asked, and his voice sounded distorted, muffled.

He vanished, along with the cavern.

At first, she thought that Adam was dragging her away, forcing her into a new vision. She expected to reappear beside his throne, or in the dance studio, or by a much younger Tree, at any moment.

She didn’t expect to open her eyes and see James.

James reached the
platforms ringing the Tree without being seen. There had been apples the first time that he had unwittingly entered the garden, but the branches were dead now. There was no indication that the Tree was alive at all anymore, aside from the occasional groan from deep within its trunk.

He found Elise captured against the trunk of the Tree, tightly secured to its base with wooden fingers. A branch had locked over her eyes. Others pinned her ankles.

He stepped up and touched her lips. Warm breath gusted over his fingers.

“I’ll get you out of here, Elise,” he said.

James was exhausted from his time in Limbo—too tired to stand for long, much less try to run again—but he found new strength when he locked both hands around the branch growing over Elise’s eyes. He snapped the wood with a dry
crack
, showering splinters over his feet.

He tore at the branch until her entire face was exposed. Elise’s eyes were dancing beneath her eyelids, as if dreaming. Her head drooped without the support.

“Almost there,” he whispered, glancing over his shoulder before continuing to tear at the tree creeping over her arms, hips, and knees.

Once her upper body was free, she sagged against him. The contact brought the bond to vivid clarity again for the first time in what felt like thousands of years. James caught glimpses of a strange cavern, a glassy lake, and Nathaniel—
Nathaniel
, of all people.

But something had changed. James couldn’t quite tell what. It was as though the tenor of her thoughts had changed, warmed at the edges with a magnanimous kind of love that was entirely uncharacteristic of Elise. The garden had changed her mind. He could only hope that it wasn’t permanent.

He finished extricating her legs, and she fell from the Tree. The branches shuddered at her departure. The Tree oozed out of the crevice that Elise left behind.