Ascension: Sins of Eden Part 21

She darted easily over the cable without touching it, undeterred by the flas.h.i.+ng electricity.

He drew a pair of knives from his boots. Both steel from tip to tip. Almost like cleavers, as nightmares often carried. Seemed like the appropriate way to end this.

McIntyre lunged for Clotho and buried one of the knives in her body. It didn't hurt her at all, of course. She just laughed.

Then pain struck him in the heart. His real, physical heart, not the heart that felt like it was breaking at the sight of his dead family. He thought that he could feel the fingers squirming past his ribs.

He was pretty sure when he felt it ripped out through his gut.

McIntyre was kind of grateful for that.

But he wasn't grateful for long.

As he dropped, vision darkening, he kept one of the stainless steel knives buried in her gut. He even dragged it down a few inches and she didn't seem to care. Didn't seem to realize what he was doing.

He jammed the second knife in the braided steel wire.

Electricity leaped from one knife to the other, electrocuting McIntyre instantly-and Clotho with him.

Twenty-five thousand volts.

Elise felt the instant that McIntyre's life ended. His heart stopped beating just as suddenly as Neuma's had, ending the sweet flow of blood, silencing the healthy patterns of his brain. One minute, he was a normal mortal-alive and hale and full of thoughts-and then he was suddenly a blank spot in her senses.

Lucas McIntyre was dead, and she was vomiting bullets on the street less than a block away.

They surged from her stomach, slippery and black, as though her body was rejecting a diseased liver. Elise felt hot. Her muscles shook as they spilled out of her.

She'd only been able to toss McIntyre her sword before the sickness overtook her. And it felt like he'd emptied the entire magazine of one of guns into her back, so it was emptying from her system too slowly. She was helpless to react until the last of the bullets emerged, splattering in a sac of liquid on the broken street.

Worst f.u.c.king timing.

Now the military was drawing closer, their headlights spilling over the street, inching toward her as they approached. They'd heard the fight. They were coming to investigate far too late.

Elise wiped her mouth as she got up, and as soon as she was certain that she was done throwing up, she phased away from the headlights and back into the relative safety of the train shelter. So close, and yet distant enough that she hadn't been able to help them when she heard the screams.

She reappeared on the edge of the platform and s.h.i.+elded her eyes from the sparking of electricity. McIntyre had cut the wire as she'd suggested-good for slowing Clotho down, but dangerous for Elise to approach.

There was no reason for her to risk getting near the cable now.

It was already too late for the McIntyres.

Two of the bodies were under the bench where Elise had left Leticia behind to fight Clotho, but it was difficult to tell that the woman was, in fact, Leticia McIntyre. There was too much blood. Elise didn't bother looking closely enough to verify. There were only so many pink-haired women who had been carrying their toddlers through France.

She couldn't look at Deb at all.

Elise had hated the way those children shrieked, hated how they pulled at her hair while trying to braid it, hated the constant cacophony. She hated kids. She hated that child in particular. Elise was shaking and her eyes were burning and she couldn't seem to get control of herself.

She had told Nathaniel herself that everyone got one life and that it was better that way. Maybe it was true with Neuma. She'd been in her eighties, maybe her nineties; she'd had a good, long life. Even Leticia was in her thirties. But Deb...

It was too much.

So she turned to the train trench instead. Lucas McIntyre wasn't recognizable, either. He was a charred mess of flesh that smelled like burned hair and fat. His victory rested inches away from him: a puddle of ichor that had been Clotho. Elise hadn't seen one of the Fates killed before, but she felt no doubt that the sludgy mess was a dead demon, and that she wouldn't be coming back.

Elise hoped that Belphegor had felt that death. She really hoped that he f.u.c.king despaired at it.

Masculine shouts, the rub of metal on cloth. The military was coming closer. Far too late to help with the fight.

A fluttering heartbeat drew her attention beyond the train tracks. There was still something alive nearby-something small. Faint enough that it might not even be human.

She phased past the cable, leaving McIntyre's body behind.

The military would bury him, she hoped.

Elise reformed on the opposite side of the street, right in front of a brick house.

She was greeted by a gunshot.

Elise looked down to see a hole in her s.h.i.+rt. She felt the bullet settle in her gut almost immediately. She would have to expel it soon, but for the moment, it didn't hurt.

Her eyes tracked back to the source of the gunshot. It had come from a small shape huddled in the doorway, knees tucked by her ears, gun held between her legs. Pretty good aim for such an awkward position.

It was Dana McIntyre. The girl looked up at Elise with tearful eyes, and there wasn't a hint of hope in them. She knew what Elise had found in the train shelter. She had probably seen the murders herself.

Elise kneeled and held her hand out. Dana gave her the gun. It was still hot as she pushed it down into the waistband of her leather pants.

She thought that she should probably tell the girl that it was going to be okay. That she would be safe now, and she was fine, and there was nothing to worry about. All those comforting lies that you were supposed to tell children in times of sadness.

She couldn't make the words come out.

"I have you," Elise said instead, and she opened her arms.

Dana wasn't crying as she crawled into Elise's hold. She wrapped her arms around the child, and, together, they phased into the night.

Thirteen.

After the angels' attack and a few hours on top of the Himalayas, Elise's camp of allies was looking pretty pathetic. They had all the coats from Russia, sure, but this wasn't Russia anymore. This was freaking Everest. Or somewhere near it, anyway-Anthony had no idea where they'd been dumped this time.

It was a good thing Belphegor was clogging the air with smoke and ash and all that c.r.a.p. The haze worked as insulation, keeping the temperature hovering above zero degrees. Cold, but not as cold as usual.

Anthony could still feel the icy fingers of wind creeping through his fur coat. He wasn't sure if his s.h.i.+vering was because of the temperature or because of how few people remained with the camp.

Some of the werewolves were still hanging around, but the Alpha himself was not. There also were none of those spirit wolves Elise had made. Ariane had left on a secret mission, too. Now the only people hanging around were Abram, Levi, Summer, and Nash-not great company. They kept to themselves.

Guess they didn't want to hang out with Anthony and Brianna at the gate to Eden.

The gate's condition was impressive, considering it was subject to constant winter at the top of the mountain. This one was in the shape of a statue memorializing some snake woman. She was three stories tall with a thin-lipped smile, bare b.r.e.a.s.t.s, and a coiled tail where legs should have been.

Brianna had made a few half-hearted jokes about snake b.o.o.bs and Anthony hadn't laughed. There wasn't anything funny about the end of the world.

"What are you doing?"

Anthony looked up at the sound of James's voice, but Brianna didn't. She ignored him and continued to draw an elaborate circle on the ground in front of the statue.

James stormed toward them. He looked p.i.s.sed.

"What's it look like we're doing?" Anthony asked.

James's eyes searched the site of the ritual. Brianna was trying to replicate magic that was well beyond her ability, but she was doing pretty well at it. She'd gotten everything together on her own. She'd duplicated the circle. She had a.s.sembled the altar. She was almost done.

All she needed was to finish drawing the details on the circle and a little bit of Adam's blood.

Anthony thought that it was pretty G.o.dd.a.m.n impressive. James didn't seem to agree.

"It looks like you're trying to do something incredibly foolish," he said, jerking the gla.s.ses off of his face. "And I'm wondering why."

"You know why," Anthony said.

James's jaw clenched. "Elise." He rounded on Brianna, stepping over the lines of her delicately drawn circle. "You'll kill yourself doing magic like this."

Brianna grinned at him. "It's not like you can do it anymore."

"And you've never been capable. You're too weak," James said.

Anthony stepped between them. "You don't talk to her like that."

Confronting James would have been a dangerous proposition earlier. Now, Anthony liked seeing the wariness in James's eyes, trying to decide which of them would win in a physical confrontation.

Easy question. Anthony was a young, fit kopis, and he would definitely win. He'd be more than happy to work out a decade's worth of annoyances against James, too. Who cared if he was some ordinary old guy now? It would feel good to bash his face in. Really good.

But darkness descended on them, dimming the outside of the circle, and Elise appeared with the fluttering of invisible wings.

Killjoy.

"Problems?" Elise asked.

James whirled on her. "You have them opening the gate to Eden."

There was no denying it now, not when the evidence was clear as day on the ground in front of the gate. Elise hooked her thumbs in the belt loops of her leather pants. "Yeah. That's the plan."

"How? Why?"

"Belphegor's body is in Eden. I can't kill him if he comes out. I have to go in after him. I'm going in now, whatever it takes, and he is going to die in agony." She sounded unusually angry, even for her. Something was wrong.

Anthony frowned. "What happened, Elise?"

She gripped Anthony's shoulder and turned him.

Summer Gresham was kneeling at the bottom of the creva.s.se, holding a girl's hands as she cried. The kid was about seven years old, maybe. Pretty big for a girl her age. Big enough that Anthony had already taken her to the shooting range a couple of times.

Dana McIntyre.

If Dana was there-if only Dana was there-then that could only mean one thing.

Emotion struck him in a wave, twisting his stomach and making his hands go numb.

It mostly felt like anger, at first. The grief came second.

"f.u.c.k," Anthony said.

Elise's fingernails dug into his s.h.i.+rt. Her lips tightened as she fisted the material. She was shaking.

James still looked confused. He hadn't visited the McIntyres since the time before Dana had been born. He didn't recognize her wispy blond hair, her stocky stature, her flat nose.

Anthony grabbed Elise's hand, and he held it as tightly as she held him, watching the evidence that their friend was dead. Their friend, his wife, and their other little girl. McIntyre's death had been inevitable. All of their deaths were. They were kopides-that was just what happened to them sooner or later. Usually sooner.

But the others...

"f.u.c.k," Anthony said again, with more heat this time. He was squeezing Elise's hand so hard that anyone else would have suffered broken bones.

Brianna got up. "What?" she asked, looking down the ridge. "Who is that? What's got you all freaked out?" Her eyes narrowed. "She's human. Just plain old human."

For some reason, that made Anthony angrier. "Finish the ritual, Brianna," he said. He didn't look at her. "We've got to open this f.u.c.king gate."

James had spent a lot of time preparing to argue with Elise when she came back. He'd taken shelter, worked on the spell Elise requested, and fumed, rehearsing the conversation in his mind a thousand times.

He had plenty to say about Nathaniel, Benjamin, and the end of the world, but he'd narrowed it down to a few key points.

Elise did not seem interested in an argument.

Whatever had happened in the hours that she had been gone, her mood had been profoundly changed for the worse. "You and I need to talk," Elise said curtly, yanking him across the camp.

"There's a building," James said. "It's up the mountain. We've been using it to-"

She didn't let him finish. She gripped his collar and hauled him up the narrow, winding trail.

They didn't have to climb very far to spot the building's sloped roof, the wooden walls, the large windows. There were no doors to this building. But when they rounded the corner, they found a wall of shattered windows that the pack was using to get in and out of the building.

Elise missed a step when she saw the broken wall. She had destroyed those windows to escape the building months earlier.

It was the former retreat that James had used to cage Elise.

She didn't go through the wall. She stopped just outside of it, most likely realizing at that moment that James had caged her near one of the gates. That he had planned on keeping her close so that he could return to her quickly after he got into Eden.