Ascension: Sins of Eden Part 2

A laugh s.h.i.+vered through his body. A tear dripped down his cheek. "It's too late. It's much too late."

"It's not too late until we're all dead."

"How do you know that we aren't?" Benjamin asked. "You're going to destroy the world, Elise. How could you?"

Crack. The bridge behind them snapped in half. The pieces fell into the ca.n.a.l, was.h.i.+ng downstream.

Elise pushed Benjamin away before they could fall in.

The ground grew hot under her feet, just a few feet from the wavering image of Earth. She could feel it through the thick soles of her boots.

The long gra.s.s caught fire.

"Watch out!" Benjamin dragged Elise under the shelter of another tree that wasn't yet burning. Its low branches s.h.i.+elded them from the wind.

Elise watched in horror as the street collapsed in on itself, exposing a burning core of magma underneath. Red-hot fire flowed like an underground river.

That shouldn't have been underneath Heaven.

"What's going on?" Elise asked, clutching Benjamin's s.h.i.+rt in a fist. "What have you done?"

"It's Belphegor." His eyes were suddenly clear, as if struck for the first time by sanity. "Yeah, Belphegor. That's why I came looking for you. I almost forgot because of all the threads-because the messages are so unclear now, and I can't... No." He shook his head as if to clear it. "I have to warn you what he did before I forget again."

"What? Belphegor?" It had been weeks since she'd heard anything from him. She was half-convinced that he had just wanted to sit back and enjoy watching Elise wage war for no good reason.

Benjamin's voice dropped to an urgent whisper. "As soon as the walls fell, he joined me. I let him in. If he could find me, that means he'll find her. He'll find Marion. And-and now he's gone into the Origin."

Elise's heart plummeted.

The Origin was the central point from which everything in the universe had sp.a.w.ned. It had also bestowed the powers of G.o.d upon Adam, who had once been an ordinary man.

Which meant that Belphegor now had those powers too.

A fresh plume of magma erupted from the ground behind Benjamin, so close that it seared Elise's eyebrows. It smelled of sulfur. It smelled of home.

Because Belphegor was causing it. He had become G.o.d and was trying to make Heaven into h.e.l.l.

The molten fire flowed into the ca.n.a.l, drying the last of the water with a sizzle and streaking deeper into the city. When it brushed the roots of the trees dangling into the ca.n.a.l, they caught fire.

Before long, New Eden wasn't going to exist at all.

The open hole between Heaven and Earth wavered harder. Elise couldn't tell if it was closing or if the heat from the magma was just making it s.h.i.+mmer.

"Get to Earth, Benjamin," Elise said, pulling free of his grip. "Get through there, find somewhere as safe as possible, and wait for me to find you. I will find you."

"What are you going to do?" Benjamin asked.

"There are still humans in New Eden," she said. "I'm not going to let them burn."

Most of the bodies that Elise pa.s.sed in New Eden had been killed by her hand just hours earlier, though she couldn't recall slaughtering them.

Her memory was good enough that she could remember what she had eaten for lunch with Anthony at the Hard Rock Casino's buffet last April-but she couldn't remember this. Surrendering herself to Eve had done her a small favor. For once, her memory was blissfully fuzzy.

Elise could still tell which ones she had killed because their wounds oozed with ichor from the obsidian falchion.

She was surprised to see how many more had died in the time since. Several burned corpses were half-submerged in magma, and those definitely weren't her work. A few hung from the lower branches of scorched trees, and some smoldered among the orchards. Elise lost count of the additional dead around two dozen.

The survivors still hadn't abandoned New Eden. Angels whirled through the smoky sky, their wings lonely points of white light against the darkness of the void beyond, carrying water from the remaining ca.n.a.ls to extinguish fires.

Elise spotted one accidentally crossing into another dimension. He swooped toward a tree, skimmed a wavering patch of air, and vanished.

She phased from one side of the city to the cemetery at its center. They would need a much bigger hill to fit memorials for all the angels killed in New Eden that day. Although considering the rate at which Belphegor's fire approached the hill, the angels would soon be lucky to have any cemetery at all.

Elise strode toward the stairs at the center of the hill, sword drawn, eyes open for any sign that the angels were coming for her. It seemed that they were far too absorbed in their suicidal struggle to fight her.

There was another sinkhole between dimensions near the top of the spiral stairs. Elise hesitated above it, looking down into an endless puddle of blue-black fluid. It dribbled waterfalls onto the steps. That sinkhole might have led to one of Earth's oceans. It also could have been opening into Phlegethon, or even Zebul-neither of which Elise wanted to visit.

The air hummed as she skirted around it and descended.

All of the mist that had clung to the cavern underneath the cemetery had dispersed, but the smoke from the fires above was climbing, not dropping. The air was still breathable. The mortals unconscious on the stone slabs were unaffected by the catastrophe above.

Hope stirred in Elise's chest.

Maybe, just maybe, she was going to get to save these people.

But save them for what? An Earth that was falling apart?

She stepped off of the stairs into an inch of water and examined a man resting on the nearest slab. He was naked. Stone spikes were embedded directly into the veins at his wrists. His eyes danced under his eyelids.

The man's dreams were so vivid that she could glimpse them through his brain signals: he imagined that he was running barefoot on a desert trail, chest heaving with pleasant exertion, a dog by his side.

Opening his eyes to Heaven on fire was going to be a h.e.l.l of a wake-up call.

Elise moved to jerk his arms free of the stone spikes.

"Don't do that."

She lifted her sword as she turned to address the speaker. It was an angel wearing a filmy peach gown, her hair tumbling over her shoulders, blood smeared on her hands.

Leliel. Eve's first and most beloved daughter.

Eve almost always had something to say about running into another angel, especially one as important as Leliel, but she was silent within Elise this time. Maybe James had healed Elise so d.a.m.n well that the first angel was gone completely. She could only hope.

"Give it up," Elise said. "Your city's lost. Let these people go."

"He'll die if you tear him away from the support system like that," Leliel said.

"Then how do I free them? Is there a master switch that will let everyone go?"

"They were never meant to be released. There's no easy way to wake them."

"But there is a way."

Leliel gazed across the room, anguish twisting her beautiful features into a hideous mask. Magma was starting to drip down the wall of the cavern, making the angel glow crimson.

"This wasn't supposed to happen," she said. "We were only attempting to isolate ourselves, not shatter the universe. We worked on our machines and hybridized magic for years with Metaraon's a.s.sistance-there's no reason that it shouldn't have worked."

"Someone could have sabotaged it," Elise said.

"But why? A shattered world benefits no one."

No one except the demon trying to get into Eden. "Who else helped you with the severance?" Elise asked.

Leliel looked uncomfortable. "Infernal architects. Abraxas."

"Belphegor."

"Yes, Belphegor worked closely with Abraxas and Aquiel."

But only Belphegor had wanted into Eden. The other demons had wanted to isolate the angels for selfish reasons-removing the only faction that might have been able to keep them from conquering Earth. Maybe they would have succeeded in their imperialism if Elise hadn't intervened.

Belphegor's sights had been set on something much larger the entire time.

"I'm going to fix this," Elise said. The dripping magma was cooking bodies of the sleeping mortals nearest the walls. "How do I free these people, Leliel?"

Something in Elise's expression must have convinced Leliel that there wasn't any point in arguing anymore. "You have to wake them up gently. Only angels can do it." She gave Elise an appraising look. "Is she still there? My mother?"

Elise turned her attention inward, searching for the spirit that had been riding her since she escaped imprisonment in the Tree.

There was a faint glimmer of the ethereal inside of her-very faint-but Eve was still silent.

"I don't know," Elise said.

Leliel actually looked heartbroken. "All right. Try this and see if it works."

She rested her hand on the forehead of the man on the slab. Elise felt a small surge of power, and the man's eyes opened. His expression remained blank as the stone spears began to withdraw from him. He woke slowly, the dream falling away from him.

Elise sheathed her swords and put her hand on the forehead of another victim. "Tell me what you did to wake him up."

"If you still have Eve within you, she'll know what to do."

She felt nothing while touching the human except stirring hunger. Her dominant demon side had a thousand ideas for constructive activities to do with an unconscious mortal. Neuma had described how to mount someone while they slept, inject s.e.xual nightmares into their mind, and feed off of the energy. Elise was pretty confident she could follow those instructions.

Eve had nothing for her.

Elise dropped her hand. "Guess I can't do it."

Magma oozed past the stairs, contacting the water dribbling from another dimension. Steam jetted toward the roof of the cavern with a hiss.

"I'll summon the survivors to help me," Leliel said. "We'll return as many to Earth as possible."

"Why should I believe you'll do that? You dragged everyone here in the first place."

"We can't feed off of them. We also can't stay in this city. We'll have to take refuge on Earth." And an Earth populated by as many humans as possible was the best way for angels to continue to feed.

Well, at least Leliel was being honest for once.

Elise stepped back before the stream of magma could contact the toe of her boots.

If this was New Eden, then what was happening on Earth?

"You don't have much time." She slipped back into the shadows under the stairs so that she could phase. "Make it fast."

"As fast as possible," Leliel said.

Elise paused before slipping into darkness. "Just because you regret the damage that's happened here doesn't mean you're not culpable for it. We're not done here, you and me."

The angel was pale. "Vengeance changes nothing."

"You'd be surprised."

Elise phased back to the Earth portal-and, she hoped, Benjamin.

Three.

Gora Hotel wasn't unoccupied when the werewolf pack arrived.

Five minutes later, it was completely empty.

"Everybody, get out!" Abel roared as he slammed through the front doors mid-shapes.h.i.+ft.

The family that had been sitting in the entryway scattered, screaming. The desk clerk lasted a few seconds longer-until she saw the rest of the werewolf pack entering behind Abel.

Most were in human form again. The others remained in their half-wolf juvenile forms, towering above everyone else with s.h.a.ggy fur on their shoulders and fangs like knives.

Abram allowed the clerk to escape before shuffling into the hotel with his hands wrapped around the legs of his mother's body. Summer held Rylie by the shoulders. His twin sister's cheeks were streaked with tears, her normally bouncy curls limp, her whole body trembling. They'd covered Rylie in a blanket so that they wouldn't have to keep looking at her, but seeing her once had been enough. Rylie's pained expression had been immortalized in stone, and Abram had memorized it instantly.

Gora Hotel was an old hunting lodge outside Belogorsk, all of its furniture comprised of huge slabs of wood decorated by antlers and boar skins-including the coffee table. More than enough room for an obsidian corpse.

Carefully, Abram and Summer lowered Rylie to its surface. The blanket had slipped off of one of her blackened feet. He pulled it back into place and tucked it underneath her so that she wouldn't be exposed again.

"Watch her," Abel snapped. His voice was no less growling now that he was fully human again. His eyes blazed a brighter shade of gold than usual. His pupils looked entirely animal. It was like some part of him had completely lost control of his humanity when Rylie died.