by S. M. Reine
“Come to me,” she said, extending her other hand to Memeon and Chismael, and they did. They didn’t even look at the sword she was holding. It was as though the idea of Eve carrying a weapon was so foreign to them that they simply couldn’t see it.
Chismael kissed her palm. She stroked his jaw, gazing at the graceful curve of his cheekbones and feminine tip of his nose. His eyelashes were as thick as hers.
“This is a miracle,” he said.
Make it painless, Elise.
She released Saritiel and tangled her fingers in the fine hairs at the nape of his neck. “I love you,” she said in Eve’s voice.
Elise severed the head from Chismael’s neck.
The stump was already turning black when he struck the earth in front of her. The soil soaked up his blood, turning it from shiny to matte in seconds.
Memeon tensed, eyes widening with surprise. Elise simply looked at him.
“My son,” she said.
Any indication that Memeon knew what she had just done was wiped from his face. “We’ve missed you. All of these years without you have been…indescribable.”
“I understand.” And she did. Without her guidance, they had turned to others. They had become perverse.
It only took two more swift gestures to kill both Memeon and Saritiel.
Neither fought back.
She let their bodies fall around her. She was crying again and there was no way to tell who it was feeling those emotions. There was no distance between Elise and Eve anymore. Every breath drew them closer together, burning away the membrane that separated them within Elise’s body.
Wings flashed in the air above her. Feathers fluttered through the trees. Energy surged as more angels approached, drawn by the deaths of their brethren.
She wasn’t afraid. As soon as they saw her, they would forget to attack.
Best of all, Elise wouldn’t have to hunt them through the city. They were coming to her.
And she would give them the deaths they deserved.
“She’s here,” Nash said suddenly.
Abram didn’t even open his eyes. He’d lost track of how long they had been entombed in the cave underneath New Eden, but it was long enough that he felt like shit. “Who’s here? Leliel?” Trying to speak hurt his throat. His mouth was so dry.
“No,” Nash said. His voice sounded so strange that Abram finally looked at him. Nash’s expression was chillingly blank, as though he were listening to someone calling to him from a great distance. “It’s—it’s not possible.”
Summer had been sleeping with her head resting in his lap. She stirred at his voice. “What? Did something happen?” She still clutched Abram’s knife in one hand, but she hadn’t added anything new to the diagram etched into the floor for hours. The angels’ machinery was beyond even her.
Nash helped her sit up. “She’s here. She’s come back. But—this is beyond impossible. If it’s what I think, then it’s catastrophic.” He let out a shuddering breath. “It’s Eve.”
“The dead first angel,” Summer said.
Abram shot a look at his sister, asking her silently—in the way that only twins could—if there was a chance Nash had gone insane. Summer responded by rolling her eyes. He could almost hear her saying, “Be nice, Abram,” in that barely-patient tone of voice she got whenever anyone said something less-than-glowing about her feathered fiancé.
The collapsed wall trembled. Rocks slid from the top of the pile and skittered across the floor.
Someone was breaking through—or the entire cavern was starting to shake.
“That’s bad,” Summer said. “That has to be bad, doesn’t it?”
Nash moved to the wall, glaring up at the levers. “We have to get out of here. Now.”
Definitely bad.
“Don’t touch those,” Abram said. “You don’t know what you’re doing.”
The chamber shuddered again.
“Our options have run out,” Nash said, looking haunted and pale. “She’s here. She needs me. We have to escape now, and that means this is our only chance to free the pack.”
“But you could kill everyone if you do it wrong.”
“I have an idea,” Summer said. “Call it a stroke of inspiration I got while drawing those stupid switches.” She stood in front of one of the empty chambers and balled her hand into a fist.
“Summer,” Abram said warningly.
“Look, this is our only option. If you’d let me do this hours ago, we’d already be out of here.”
“Or everyone would be dead.”
“We’ll die anyway,” she said.
Then she punched the chamber with every ounce of her shapeshifter strength.
Her knuckles cratered the crystal. Summer grunted as the skin split, but she still pulled her fist back for another blow. The second punched all the way through. Abram didn’t breathe as the chamber depressurized, gushing moisture out the fist-sized hole. Mist poured into the room.
She yanked her fist free and whirled to face another chamber. Nothing had happened to it.
“Looks like that doesn’t activate a kill switch,” Summer said, shaking her hand out. “Nash? You’re almost as strong as me. You can get a few of them open, too.”
He looked at her blankly, unseeing. “She needs me. She’s here.”
Damn it.
“Don’t worry about the other captives,” Abram told his sister. “Just get the pack out. We don’t have time.”
Summer was already moving down the narrow room, wiping away fog so that she could see who was inside.
As soon as she came upon a werewolf—Crystal, still in her animal form—Summer started hitting again, and again, until she opened a hole. Abram reached around her to help pull the crystal apart. It was much more fragile once the seal broke. But he didn’t heal like his sister did—the crystal sliced into his palms, sending blood flowing down his wrists.
He yanked his shirt off, shredded it into two, and wrapped his hands before continuing.
Summer moved down the line one at a time. Abram was slower. He was just pulling Crystal’s heavy, furred body out of the hole they’d made when Summer reached Levi.
He didn’t try to free the werewolves in between them. He set Crystal gently on the ground and went straight to Levi instead.
Abram ripped the crystal away in fistfuls. It only took a minute to make a hole big enough to reach through. “Come on, asshole,” Abram muttered.
He shook the werewolf, and not particularly gently. If Levi was dead, he was going to kill the guy.
Levi started coughing inside the chamber, doubled over and trembling, and it was one of the best things that Abram had ever seen. That sound was echoed by others. Crystal was struggling to her feet, and so was Paetrick, who had clawed his way out of the second chamber without help.
One by one, the pack was stirring.
“Hey, wake up,” Abram said, grabbing Levi’s shoulders and helping him straighten.
Levi’s eyes opened.
He was alive. He was conscious.
And if he had woken up, then that meant they had an entire werewolf pack to fight the angels.
Eve strolled through New Eden. Elise killed.
Silent dawn shined on the bodies in their wake.
She didn’t look behind her at the decapitated angels that she had left behind, their heads discarded in the canals and their bodies dropped in the street. She only looked to the next angels waiting to greet her.
They held their hands toward her. They wept. They whispered her name.
Eve. Mother.
She recalled their histories as she passed through. Kushiel had been born among Eve’s first children—a skilled tracker who had taught her how to follow animals’ trails through the forest. She'd been so delighted that she could have made a creature that knew things that she did not. It had been one of her first thrills of creation.
It took her two attempts to sever his neck. She was too upset to do it smoothly.
Elise
left him in front of a temple with a statue of Eve in the courtyard.
She stepped over the canal and dropped Moroni’s head inside, allowing the current to wash it away from the body. He had been one of her later births. A survivor of Adam’s destruction of her nursery.
And as she brought death to her children, none of them fought back. They still stared at her with love.
Even as the obsidian falchion cleaved through angel flesh.
It was so quiet in New Eden.
She moved toward the cemetery at the center where she had found Benjamin Flynn. She hadn’t planned to go to the cemetery—it was simply the most prominent landmark, and all roads seemed to spiral toward it.
That was where she found Leliel.
Eve’s first daughter waited at the base of the hill, her peach dress fluttering around her ankles, shock blanking her expression.
“Mother,” Leliel said. “It cannot be.”
A mother never had favorites, but she had always had a special place in her heart for Leliel. She had taken after Eve so closely. And Elise was going to have to kill her, too.
She opened her arms to Leliel. Blood dripped down the sharpened edge of the obsidian falchion.
“Daughter,” she said.
When Leliel stepped into her embrace, she didn’t immediately kill her. Elise imagined driving the sword into her back. It was short, only a two-foot blade. It would be easy to sever her wings or implant it in her heart and Leliel would never feel it.
But Eve balked. She doubted. Not Leliel.
Elise dug her heels in. I bet she’s in charge. She has to go.
The first angel slipped away from Elise, fading from her mind. No. Not my daughter.
Leliel tensed in her arms as if detecting the shift in personality. If Eve bailed, Elise’s glamor wouldn’t be enough to protect her. Nothing would be.
Okay. Not Leliel. Not yet, thought Elise, and Eve seemed to relax.
Leliel stepped back. “I don’t know how it’s possible, but I’m so relieved to see you,” she said through her tears, clutching Elise’s hand. “I thought you were gone. We all thought you were gone.”
“I have always been within you,” Elise said in Eve’s voice. “I have never left.”
Her eyes brimmed with tears. “I’ve done things in your honor. All for you. Do you want to see it?”
No. I want to kill you.
But Elise said, “Yes. Show me.”
Hands joined, followed by a hundred more angels, they walked into the cemetery together.
Eve read the names as Elise passed the tombstones. Every single one felt like being punched in the stomach. Elise had been there for some of those deaths, and knew of others, but the knowledge hadn’t transferred to Eve. It was all a shock to her.
“So many have died,” Elise said.
Leliel held her hand tighter. “Many died in the war following your death. Many have died in recent years as well. It has been tumult without you.”
And yet she didn’t question how Eve could have returned.
It was equal parts sickening and satisfying to look over her shoulder and see all those angels blindly following, oblivious to the dead beyond.
Leliel stopped at the empty gravestone where Benjamin Flynn had been suspended.
“This city has been built to feed us without any struggle, Mother, and this is the crux of it.” Leliel gestured to the cross. She sounded so proud, showing off her creation to Eve. “We have thousands of mortals suspended below so that we may feed off them eternally. Their energy flows through this central point. It is magnified when the right mortal stands at the crux of this vast machine. It is, if I may be so proud, one of our most incredible designs.”
Eve was impressed. Elise hated her a little bit for it.
The stairs leading down into the pool weren’t far—just a few steps away. But Leliel stood between her and those stairs.
Elise sat on a bench beside a topiary, laying the bloody falchion over her thighs. It must have stained her clothes, but it didn’t touch the glamor. Eve’s dress remained pristine.
“What do you think?” Leliel asked.
“I don’t understand why you needed to make a city like this,” Elise said in Eve’s words. “Humans are so easily fed upon without disturbing them. There’s no need to hold them captive.”
If Leliel noticed how disappointed Eve sounded, she didn’t show it. “It’s because of the Treaty.”
“The Treaty of Dis?”
Leliel sank to the bench beside her, folding her hands in her lap. “Yes. That came about because of you—because of what happened to you. It was all about you, of course. Protecting your legacy.” She paused, frowning. “Where did you hear of it?”
“Another of my children told me.” The lie came to her easily. For a woman who was meant to be a force of pure good, Eve was skilled at deception.
“We struggled after you died, Mother. We struggled to feed ourselves without you. Nobody realized how much we had relied on you for strength until you were gone. We had to turn to humans for sustenance.” She rested a hand over her heart, as though it ached. “The gaeans disapproved of our use of mortals as herd animals. They attacked.”
“Angels feeding from mortals should be painless.” Eve had made certain of it.
“Typically. But not painless for your children. Fascination was a problem—we kept falling in love with the shifters, helpless to fight back against them, controlled by our lustful urges.” Leliel looked so embarrassed. “We weren’t keeping the bloodlines pure.”
Elise thought she knew where this was going. Anger writhed in her heart.
As soon as she felt the burn of it, Leliel stopped talking. She blinked rapidly and looked at Elise strangely, as though seeing through the façade.
“I only ever wanted my children to be happy,” Elise said, and Leliel’s eyes glazed once more.
“Yes. That’s why we did it. We obviously had to sever this cancer from our ranks.” Leliel sighed, shaking her head. “We made a deal with Yatam and the infernal forces. We created the Treaty and, with our combined magic, destroyed the gaeans protecting humanity.”
“Yatam wanted the gaeans gone?”
“It was in our mutual best interests. We killed most gaeans and turned the survivors into a new class of creature called kopides. Weakened, human, no real magic in them. Others became witches. Again, weak creatures. Unable to use their most powerful magics.” She touched Elise’s hand. “By removing the threat to our bloodline, we protected your legacy. We kept it pure.”
“And now isolating New Eden will keep you purest of all,” Elise said. She felt numb.
“Your legacy,” Leliel whispered.
“I was fascinated with Adam. It was the first fascination that befell any angel. I loved him beyond all else, and that is my legacy. The ability to love without condition.” Her chest was aching, as though her heart had shriveled away. “Love, my daughter.”
“Love for art, love for science—”
“Love for humanity,” Elise said. “I made you out of love. I made you for love.”
Leliel didn’t seem to hear her. “My husband fell into fascination with a shapeshifter. A wolf. He won’t be obsessed with her once we are free of the rest of the worlds.”
Neither Elise nor Eve could listen to this anymore. She stood. Surprised, Leliel stood, too.
“I want to see what else you’ve made,” Elise said. “Show me the pool.”
The cavern under the cemetery hadn’t substantially changed since Elise’s last visit. It had only become more populated.
There were no empty slabs now. Every single space was occupied by a human. While Elise had been preparing to confront the angels in Portola, other angels had continued to collect—and now they had enough souls to feed New Eden for an eternity.
Elise felt tears sliding down her cheeks.
There was no doubt in Eve anymore. The city had to fall, and the angels with it.
Including Leliel.
Eli
se turned to look at the angels that had followed them down. Twenty or so were arrayed on the spiral stairs and among the slabs. There would be more in the cemetery by now, drawn to Eve’s call, but those would be the last survivors in the city. Elise and Eve had killed the rest.
“It’s peaceful here, isn’t it?” Leliel said, lacing her fingers with Elise’s. “I like to walk through and watch the mortals dream pleasant dreams.”
Elise pulled her hand free. “Where is Marion?”
“Marion?”
“Yes. Marion.” Her voice was tight. “A little girl. Four years old. Brown hair. Blue eyes. Metaraon’s fucking daughter.” Shit, that wasn’t how Eve would talk. She was slipping. She had to focus.
“Metaraon had a daughter?”
The surprise in Leliel’s voice sounded genuine. But it was impossible. Marion had been taken to New Eden. That was what Ariane had said, and she had certainly believed it.
Elise relaxed, allowing Eve to take her again, sinking into the comfort of the other woman’s control. Leliel’s eyes unfocused.
“Marion,” Elise said again, this time gentler.
Leliel trembled all over. “I don’t know who she is. We don’t take children. You told us not to hurt the children, and we haven’t.”
Fucking liar.
The strength of her anger kept pushing Eve away. If Elise didn’t remain calm, she was going to find herself surrounded by angels that knew she wasn’t really Eve, and she’d be beyond screwed.
She still couldn’t keep herself from calling Leliel out on her lies.
“What about Rylie Gresham?” Elise asked.
Leliel recognized that name. Her hand flew to her heart. “We had to, Mother. Those dogs have hunted us for too long. You remember what they used to do to your children—my siblings. You must remember the trail of bodies that the shapeshifters left in their wake.”
Strangely, Elise did. She remembered the bodies of angels brought to her home for burial with throats torn to shreds and wings gnawed off. Even then, she had known that it was only self defense. Werewolves protecting the gaean kind from predatory angels. Eve had pitied the shifters even as she mourned.
