by SM Reine
He held Hannah’s dead body in the Union outpost.
He held Elise against him, naked and panting, her fingers locked in his hair and shared saliva glistening on her lips.
The heat grew around him, and time moved slower, slower, slower.
He gazed upon Nathaniel’s face for the first time again. He marveled at their resemblance with a strange mixture of pride and fear.
James was in the prison in the Palace of Dis for an eternity, and grieving Elise’s death even longer. He wished again that he had died with her. But that faded, too, as all things must, and he stood on a parking garage roof drenched in starlight, reading prophecies about his life, and wondering if he might have had a son.
The most peaceful moments seemed to disappear too quickly, while the misery dragged endlessly. Finding Betty’s corpse with a gunshot wound in her forehead lasted so much longer than dancing in the darkness with Elise, his arms around her waist and a smile on her lips. The memory of fighting Death’s Hand in Guatemala could have been a lifetime.
Time flitted past.
Helping Elise slaughter a fallen angel again.
Their first kiss on the frozen beach of Copenhagen.
Burning Mr. Black’s mansion, and finding Elise in Oymyakon.
Everything before that seemed so dull in comparison. The fear, the adrenaline, the constant sense of death—those were things that filled his memories with color. Hannah, as beautiful as she had ever been, was nothing more than a woman that he fought with and fucked and loved with some tiny corner of his heart.
Yet when he reached his early, idle years with the coven, his life paraded on before his eyes. The short years of childhood dragged into eons.
His first crush. His first spells. The first time he told his mother he was too big to sit in her lap.
James glimpsed himself born from his mother’s womb. He didn’t scream when he entered the cold world. He also wasn’t set in his father’s arms upon delivery. Instead, he was offered to a man wearing a plain white t-shirt, tailored jeans, and a frown.
“He will do,” Metaraon had said. As with everything he said, he sounded as though this were more of an insult than approval.
With those three words, the course of James’s life was set. Destiny determined.
And somewhere else, so many years later, Elise’s lips brushed against his.
“How long?” she had asked.
“Always,” James replied.
He had plenty of time to wish that he could take it all back. He wanted to fix the mistakes and lies. He wanted to take away those words from Metaraon that meant he would never know a life free of fate’s heavy hand. He wanted a life where he could have loved Elise for who she was, instead of what she was.
At the nadir of the flames, deep in the throat of Ba’al’s maw, all time was one. James’s life, condensed to a pinpoint, was suspended in front of him.
Then it vanished.
Everything was gray.
James didn’t realize he had opened his eyes at first. He thought that he had to be seeing faint light through his closed eyelids. But when he lifted a hand to feel his face, he could see his fingers, as flat and colorless as the indistinct landscape beyond them.
He was in Limbo.
The fissure was above him, well beyond reach. Its light was only a fraction paler than what must have been the sky—a gray plane above him that was almost indistinguishable from the gray plane below.
He looked down at himself. All of the color had leeched from his jeans, his shoes. Even Nathaniel’s blood looked like ink on his hands. It was the magic that was lacking—James couldn’t see or feel even the faintest hint of magic, within himself or in the surrounding world. Limbo was barely more than a void. Just a detour outside of time, light, and space.
James would never find the fissure to Araboth without Nathaniel. He was trapped in that miserable gray place. And Elise would be lost forever.
He threw back his head and tried to scream his failure into the emptiness. But he didn’t have the satisfaction of the sound. The ragged sobs never reached his ears, consumed by Limbo as surely as all color and magic had been.
Maybe he fell, after that, but collapsing to his side felt no different than standing without gravity to orient him.
James wasn’t sure how long he wallowed in all of his failures. It didn’t seem to matter. Not anymore. Not when he had failed every single person that had relied on him.
He stared at the pale, flickering light of the fissure. It lit a final spark of hope within him.
Whether or not he had Nathaniel, there would be one other juncture just like this one somewhere in the wasteland of Limbo. If he found it, he could reach Elise. And once he had her, the other problems would be insignificant.
They could still rescue Nathaniel together, kill God, kill Metaraon, and escape the garden forever. The fissure had to be somewhere. Separation from Nathaniel only meant that James would have to find it alone.
“I’m coming, Elise,” he tried to say, but the sounds never reached his ears.
Then he picked a direction and started to walk.
He walked for a very, very long time.
A NOTE FROM THE AUTHOR
This story isn’t over yet! But we’re getting close. Paradise Damned, book seven of The Descent Series, is the final chapter in James and Elise’s fight against Him. It’s slated for a June 2013 release. If you would like to know when it‘s available, sign up for my mailing list: smarturl.it/armyofevil.
In the meantime, you can help me write faster by hanging out on my Facebook. ;) facebook.com/authorsmreine
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Sara (SM Reine)
http://authorsmreine.com/
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