Descent07 - Paradise Damned (6 page)

She was alone.

If she hadn’t reappeared in Oymyakon, then where was she? And why couldn’t she unleash the darkness?

She spanned her fingers over the trunk of the nearest tree. It was a young, slender tree, barely twice her height.

Puckered buds dotted the branches. Elise plucked one free, shredding the leaves to find the petals underneath. They were white, with delicate red stamen: an apple blossom. It was indistinguishable from any kind of apple tree she might have found on the North American continent, so it didn’t tell her much about where the gate had dropped her off. She flicked the blossom to the ground.

Now that she was back on Earth, Elise should have been able to feel James, just like she
should
have showed up in Oymyakon. Neither of these had happened. What the hell had gone wrong?

The sound of rustling reached her ears.

Elise dropped to a crouch and slunk through the trees.

A light appeared, limning the leaves in front of her with a hazy green glow. It was warm on her skin, but not painful, so it wasn’t sunlight. It also wasn’t the gray void outside the garden.

As she got closer to the light, time seemed to slow. It took forever for her hand to reach forward, press down on the branch, and move it out of her way.

Piece by piece, a wide expanse of grass appeared. In the center of the clearing stood a tiny sapling. It was barely more than a waist-high sprout, with creepers climbing its pale white trunk. The sapling was the source of the light she had seen. It had its own internal glow, as if filled with swirling fireflies.

She was shocked to realize that it was growing as she watched, fresh leaves spreading in the night air and roots slithering deeper into dirt.

Even as Elise moved more slowly, the tree moved in accelerated time, as if fast-forwarded.

And there was a man standing beside it.

It made Elise’s eyes ache and her skin crawl to look upon him. He had wide shoulders, and the muscular lines of his back curved down to narrow hips, a round posterior, strong thighs.

The brush of hair covering his legs was tawny brown. His feet were as bare as the rest of him, and dirty, as though he had been walking through this lightless forest for weeks without clothing or shelter. His skin was a warm shade of brown, darker than hers, and made darker still by exposure to a sun that seemed to have gone missing. Dark brown hair fell over his shoulders, shielding the curve of his face from her.

But Elise didn’t need to see the man’s face. She had seen that back before, and she recognized the muscular slope of His shoulders. And she knew the hands best of all. They had reached out to her in a thousand dreams, stretching forward to take her hand, drawing her back into the nightmare that she had barely survived as a teenager.

Eve
, a voice whispered. It was deep, masculine, seductive.

The man began to turn. His shoulders tilted, and the sliver of His profile appeared on the other side of His hair.

He moved as slowly as she did. She had plenty of time to feel the horror grow inside of her, as suffocating as a fist punched through her lungs.

I have missed you for so long…

Her skin was suddenly cold. Elise looked down and was shocked to find that the slave leather corset missing, without so much as an imprint of the boning on her ribs. The leggings, her bra, her boots—they had vanished, too, leaving her naked, as all humans must be within the garden.

Elise hadn’t escaped at all.

He turned to face her fully, one hand resting on a branch of the young Tree. It grew into His grip, leaves curling through His fingers.

Eve…

“No!”

She clapped her hands over her ears, backpedaling into the trees, but they had closed around her—she was locked into the meadow, with nothing between her and Him but a growing Tree.

There was a door behind Him. Not a fancy ethereal gateway of bone, but an ordinary, four-paneled door with a golden knob, and no walls on either side. The white rectangle of wood framed Him as He strode toward her with a long-legged gait.

The whispering voices grew, tangling around her, building into a torrent of voices that penetrated her skull.
It’s time to go through the door, Eve…

Eve…Eve…

And then He reached out to embrace her, and everything was gray.

Terror forced Elise
to wrench free of the dream, and she landed on a wooden platform face-first. The shock of the landing stunned her. For a moment, she didn’t move.

Her fingers pressed against the wood. Her
pale
fingers, as white as moonlight. It was demon skin. Elise was sitting on one of the landings locked into the trunk of the Tree. She could hear the rushing of water below, and leaves drifted around her like black snow.

Elise scrambled to her feet. Her muscles were liquid, her bones brittle, and she fell to her knees again immediately.

Far below the platform on which she sat, she could see dead bushes decorated by dead blossoms. The river Mnemosyne, roiling with crimson waters, twisted a path between the roots of the Tree, which were like tangled limbs on a graying corpse.

This was the garden as she had seen it while being carried by the cherubim: a withered, dying prison. But now she wasn’t sure if that had been real, either. Had He only been letting her imagine that she was fighting back so that she would be satisfied by the artificial escapes? What was reality, and what was a dream?

Elise had thought that she had escaped Adam twice already.
Twice
. Yet she kept finding herself back where she had started, each time equally convinced that she had broken free.

How could she escape when she couldn’t even trust her senses?

This garden certainly
felt
real. The gray light burned her delicate skin, just as it had before, and when she lifted her hands in front of her face she could see the bones through it, as though she were no more than paper.

But one thing had changed: her arms were slippery with the Tree’s amber blood. She twisted around to see where she had fallen from. There was a gaping wound in the trunk that bared tender black pulp and dribbled sap. It was about five and a half feet tall, and as broad as her shoulders: a hole in the outline of Elise’s body, like a vertical casket.

The Tree had been devouring her.

A shout drew her gaze to the burning gray sky, and squinted through the pain to see what was making that sound. There were dark shapes in the air, spiraling like vultures waiting for her carcass to split open under the sun and expose all her delicious, raw innards. The cherubim buzzed with raw power as they sought her out.

Whether or not she was dreaming, they were still a very real danger.

Yet Elise couldn’t make a break for the gate—not when her last attempts to jump through it had only led her back into captivity again. She needed to hide. Recuperate. Make a new plan for escape.

She sat on the edge of the platform. The branches of the Tree stretched over her. Beyond the branches of the Tree, the cherubim whirled, descending.

Elise jumped. She fell.

The first thing she hit was a root, which seemed to rise up to meet her body. She rolled down the bark, covering her face with her hands, and landed on the dry grass in the shadow of the Tree.

An angel swooped toward the platform that she had been sitting on moments earlier. She dug her fingers into the soil and dragged her body underneath the root to hide.

Wedged between earth and Tree, face pressed to the aromatic bark, she thought that she could feel the full weight of the monstrosity leaning on her chest. But it was almost shadowy underneath that root—the omnipresent gray light didn’t quite reach her, and her skin hurt fractionally less.

Wings churned the humming air. Feathers drifted to the grass nearby.

Another flurry of wind, and the angel that had been spiraling over her passed.

Elise and dragged herself out from under the root again.

The many hollows underneath the Tree formed caves and gulleys and valleys. Elise remembered walking over the paths between them the last time she had been there and being awed—and terrified—of the luminescent blossoms that blossomed on the shrubs at the base of the Tree.

Nothing glowed now. The garden did not sing and grow.

She limped deeper into the darkness underneath the cavernous roof of the Tree’s base.

The base of the trunk arched high above the ground in a yawning mouth, so tall that she couldn’t have reached the top if she stood on her own shoulders. A dark mouth gaped beyond. The path continued underneath the Tree, so steep that she couldn’t see where it led.

Elise climbed into the cavern under the Tree and stepped onto damp, cold rocks. As soon as she was sheltered by the trunk, the flapping of wings became distant, as though miles away.

She had made some small escape, but she felt no relief yet. They were still searching, and that they would realize where she had dropped soon enough. There were only so many places that she could run.

How long could she hide under the Tree? She straightened to assess her surroundings.

Elise stood on the edge of a massive cavern underneath the Tree. It was almost a perfect sphere, as far as she could see—which wasn’t far at all. It was filled with a clinging haze, moist and heavy, and she could barely see beyond a few hundred yards in any direction.

There were lights in the gloom at the bottom of the cavern. They lit her path on the way down, inviting her to explore.

Elise drew a breath, and it didn’t burn as much as it had outside. The atmosphere was moister here. After a few deep inhales, she almost felt strong enough to walk again, though not strong enough to face the angels.

Glancing at the gray sky over her shoulder, barely peeking through a hole in the roots above, she started down the path.

It only got darker as she descended, but she quickly began to realize that it wasn’t lanterns glowing but spherical rocks, each the size of a couch. They were scattered across soft, fertile soil, and all of them glowed with their own internal light.

Her senses itched powerfully among the rocks. There was something wrong about them. Something almost…organic.

If this was an illusion like the jungle, the town, and Motion and Dance, it was a weird fucking illusion.

She picked up a glowing rock the size of a softball that was planted near her path. She had to snap it free of the ground, as though it had roots of its own. The light died as soon as it was disconnected. She hefted the rock in her hand. It was heavier than it looked. Elise thought of bringing it down on Adam’s head, and wondered if he would bleed crimson or silver.

Elise had to walk for a few more minutes before finding another rock small enough to wield, and when she plucked it from the ground, it also stopped glowing. She tucked both under her arm.

She wove through the rocks in search of more ammunition as she continued down the path. There were occasional stone slabs interspersed among the rocks, low and flat. Most were empty.

She spotted one that was occupied, and she froze.

There was a body on it, hands folded over her chest and eyes closed. Wings were draped over either side of the slab. The angel didn’t move, so it must not have heard Elise—or even been alive.

As she drew closer, she could see condensation beading the angel’s eyelashes, hair, and feathers. Her skin was fresh and pink rather than the ash-gray of death. Were it not for her exposed breasts and the smooth skin between her legs, she would have looked as genderless as any other angel; she had almost boyish features and no waist.

Through the papery skin, Elise could see a heart beating in the angel’s chest, slow and sluggish. Every pulse sent blood flooding through the limbs with a red flush.

She backed away slowly, unwilling to find out if those eyes would open.

But that wasn’t the last body she passed. Others were obviously dead, with mortal wounds on their chests and bellies and faces, while others seemed uninjured. All of them were unresponsive.

“What the fuck is this place?” Elise whispered as she moved around another body, which had no head or wings.
A nursery, or a graveyard?

She spotted another small rock, but she had run out of hands to carry it, and she was naked. Elise searched for a nearby body wearing clothes and found an old, wingless woman in a white dress, almost like a wedding gown. Elise ripped a strip off of the hem with her teeth. Tying the ends together made a serviceable sling.

A sling and stones—she could take an entire fucking army with a start like that.

Distant shouts echoed over the graveyard.

They were searching for her.

“Come and get me,” she hissed into the cavern.

The air continued to grow denser as she walked deeper, and every time she saw another small stone, she added it to her sling. By the time the rocks started to thin out in favor of ferns, each with fanning leaves the size of her head, she had a half dozen stones to throw.

She pushed through the ferns. The edges were sharp enough to slice.

On the other side, Elise found the shore.

She stood on the edge of a vast, glassy basin at the center of the cavern. It wasn’t filled with water. It was filled with amber sludge—sap from the Tree. The fluid rippled gently, channeled into the ground beneath the glowing rocks, almost like veins.

Elise stepped up to the edge, her heart pounding in her chest. She took one of the stones from her sling and shook it hard. Something rattled inside, muffled and small, like a dull bell.

They aren’t rocks,
she realized, feeling sick.

“Search the nursery.”

The voice echoed through the cavern, bouncing off the stones and distorted by the fog. It could have come from one of the doorways into the tree, or from just feet away. There was no way to tell.

Elise clutched the sling to her chest and slipped into the ferns, ears perked for motion. She didn’t have enough room to whirl the sling, but the rocks—
they aren’t rocks
—would work well as a bludgeon, too, if something came too close.