by S. M. Reine
“I know.” She was done being afraid of Adam. Unlike James, she wasn’t going to let ghosts haunt her life.
Composed, she brushed her fingers over the forehead of the man on the slab. His skin was clammy. He didn’t react to her touch.
“One of the missing thousands, I take it,” James said.
Elise moved down the sloping path toward the center of the room. The man wasn’t alone. She started out counting the slumbering bodies, but there were too many. She lost count.
None of their faces were familiar to her. There was no apparent theme to the collection, either. All seemed to be adults. None were visibly pregnant. Aside from that, they spanned all races, all ages, all genders.
She wasn’t sure if she was relieved that she couldn’t see Anthony.
Elise had witnessed both James and Nathaniel like this in Araboth: stretched out on stone slabs with roots driven into their veins, unconscious and near death. But they had been arranged like that so that they could be resurrected as angels.
“What are they doing to these people?” Elise asked. “They can’t all be ethereal Gray, can they?” As far as she knew, only those who already had angel blood within them could be reborn as angels, like James and Nathaniel had been.
James looked disturbed. “All I can think is that it tastes amazing here.”
It took a moment for that to sink in.
The humans were having bright, shiny dreams, caught in sleep with their bodies’ fluids feeding into the hatchery. Demons didn’t care for beautiful dreams. A human in a happy, restive state did nothing for the average demon.
For angels, however, it was like a buffet. And as an ethereal Gray, James was feeding off of the kind of energy that angels loved the most.
“This is a farm,” Elise said.
“I think so.”
“The demons have been selling humans to angels.” She felt numb. Unable to be angry, unable to feel another modicum of horror. “The angels are corralling humans for food.”
“I see stairs,” James said gently, stirring her from her shock.
He was right. There was a staircase at the center of the dark cavern. Elise stopped trying to identify bodies and focused on it. The stairs spanned the distance from the floor to the high ceiling.
“It feels like there’s a nexus above,” he said. “Some kind of concentration of this…energy. We should investigate it.”
Before she could move for the stairs, a shuffling noise echoed through the cavern. A shadowy figure emerged from the mist on the opposite side of the staircase.
Elise drew the Beretta and stepped in front of James. “Stop right there,” she said. “Take another step and I’ll shoot to kill.”
“Who is that?” the responding voice was hoarse, quiet. Familiar.
Elise’s gun didn’t waver. “Identify yourself.”
“I’m Abram Gresham,” he said. “Where am I? What’s going on?”
She sighed and lowered the Beretta. Relief swept over her—not merely the relief at having found one of the missing people, but relief at the idea that she wasn’t going to have to tell Rylie that her son was dead. “I’m Elise Kavanagh. This man is James Faulkner. We’ve come to save you.”
Abram staggered forward. He had been stripped down to his underwear. Blood flowed freely from his wrists, and his skin was ashen gray and slicked with sweat. He’d been on one of those slabs with the stone spikes buried in his arms, trapped in sleep.
James must have noticed the same things that Elise had. “How did you escape?”
“Escape what?” Abram looked around the room as if he didn’t quite see it. Shivers slid over his body. He wrapped his arms around himself, hugging himself tight. The vulnerable posture was strangely reminiscent of Rylie, though it was strange seeing it on such a big man instead of a petite blond girl.
Elise holstered Seth’s Beretta. “I’m going to take a look at you. I won’t hurt you. Understand?”
He nodded.
She took his chin in her hand, thumbing back his eyelids. The whites of his eyes were bloodshot. At the contact, she could easily distinguish his heartbeat from those bodies sleeping around them, and she could tell that he was still healthy and strong. Shaken up, disoriented, but not harmed. He hadn’t lost significant amounts of blood.
“What’s the last thing you remember before being brought here?” she asked.
He didn’t move, remaining pliant in her hands. “Rylie and Abel walking into the fissure.”
So he had been there? He had seen the pack rejecting their Alphas, and hadn’t done anything to stop it? “That’s the last thing?” Elise asked.
The amount of effort he put into thinking looked physically painful. “Levi brought two members of the pack into Northgate to swear allegiance to him. But Abel had changed them into werewolves, and Levi couldn’t change them back. And then…” He scrubbed a hand over his closely shorn scalp. “Damn. They took us all.”
Elise grimaced. “Okay. James, get Abram back to the door. See if you can find a way to reach it. I’m going to head up the stairs, see if I can figure out what’s going on.”
She expected James to protest, but she was surprised when Abram said, “I can’t go until we find Levi.”
“Levi? The guy who took over Rylie’s pack?”
“Yes,” Abram said.
Elise suddenly recalled the two different types of deodorant in Levi’s trailer, and thinking that he must have had a male roommate. Or a boyfriend. “Oh,” she said. Abel was going to love that.
“What?” James asked.
“Nothing important. Abram, I promised your mother that I’d get you home safely. That’s going to take precedence over finding the pack. James, get him out of here.”
She didn’t wait to see if they would obey her. She mounted the spiral stairs at the center of the cavern, climbing higher and higher.
They didn’t follow her.
As she reached the higher levels, she could see more of the slabs underneath, and the stone spheres that resembled Eve’s eggs. Some of them were glowing faintly, pulsing with inner light like heartbeats—pale beacons in the mist. She couldn’t see James and Abram below. She hoped that they had gone back to the door, rather than doing something stupid.
She paused halfway up and searched the indistinct faces for Anthony. She couldn’t make out any features, but she believed she would be able to identify her best friend if she glimpsed him. Yet nobody jumped out at her. She didn’t think that he was there.
Which meant he might have already been dead.
Elise felt heavy as she climbed the remaining stairs. Light appeared ahead of her. She steeled herself and approached it.
Hundreds of yards above the floor, the stairs widened into open air. Beyond, the faint light of dawn was filled with starlight, just as she had seen through the archway under the Dark Man’s compound.
Elise climbed onto the ground and found herself in a cemetery.
She was on a lush, grassy hill surrounded by tombstones that looked like they had all been freshly carved. Elise kneeled in front of the nearest grave marker. It said, in large text, “Samael.” She ran her gloved hand over the first letter.
Samael had been an angel. She had considered him a friend, even. He had been critical to her first escape from Eden, and he had been punished for it, becoming a hideous, twisted creature that had craved the flesh of children. Elise had killed him. James had incinerated his body. There was no way that he was interred on this hillside.
The other markers all had angel names, too. Creatures that had died in a thousand battles. Probably all memorials rather than actual graves.
Not all of the tombstones were low and square. Some were large crucifixes with elaborate designs carved into the stone. And there was a boy—no, a young man—standing against one of the largest crosses, his arms folded across his chest, eyes closed in sleep. He was held in place by gray vines. His skin was dark brown, his hair dense and curly, his features a little too narrow to be considered handsome.
/> The vines holding him pulsed softly with inner lights, just like the stone spheres in the cavern underneath her feet.
“Benjamin,” Elise whispered.
She knew this man. He was a precognitive named Benjamin Flynn who had been sold to the Union as a teenager. His parents’ motives had been benevolent; every vision had pushed him toward the brink of madness, and only a Union collar had prevented him from losing his mind before he even turned eighteen.
Elise had tried to free him and failed. Yet another one of her many failures that she had never expected to face again.
Yet here he was, calm in sleep, his mind sparking even more brilliantly than the slumbering bodies below. His soul was brighter than the stars in the sky. Elise could almost see his visions just by watching him, entranced by the dazzling display of neural activity across his brain.
He was dreaming of a huge waterfall that foamed into a river far below, twisting at the bottom of a canyon that grew thick with trees. He dreamed of orchards filled with ripe fruit, the perfume of flowers, and buzzing bees.
Benjamin Flynn was happy.
“Check your email,” Elise whispered, suddenly realizing who must have left her the first note that had led her to find those long lists of names.
This was B.
Anthony had told her that Benjamin was the one who had led him to find her body in Lake Tahoe when she was reborn as a demon. Manipulating people and events to fit his visions of the future was nothing new to him. He had given her the lists of people who needed to be saved.
He had given her the obsidian falchion. He had paid her using the victims’ money.
A precognitive boy was manipulating everything in order to somehow ask Elise to save him from this place.
Wherever it was.
Keeping him in the corner of her eye, she approached the fence encircling the hillside cemetery. The ethereal city stretched beyond. After so many months in Hell, the beauty of it stunned her to silence.
It wasn’t like Shamain or Araboth. It didn’t have that ancient look about it. All of the architecture had sweeping, modern lines, with a touch of classic styling—glass-walled skyscrapers supported by white columns, sweeping gardens built on bridges over aqueducts, high condominiums built with open sides so that the angels could fly to them like aviaries.
And the angels. Elise hadn’t seen a sky filled with so many of her children since they had first built Eden as a family.
Hundreds of them swooped from building to building on broad wings of brilliant white and gray and gold and red. Bird of prey colors. She couldn’t see much detail at this distance, but the starlight sparkled on their feathers like jewels. They roosted in the upper levels of buildings that looked like they had been grown in the shape of trees rather than constructed.
Shamain had been a dead city. As empty as a museum—or mausoleum.
This was a thriving metropolis, and every angel that remained alive seemed to be living within its limits. There were enough angels to shatter Earth and Hell if they all decided to fight.
The ground curved slightly upward in the distance, allowing Elise to see emerald-bright forests entangled with the suburban outer reaches of the city. The aqueducts glistened with silvery water that poured down terraced waterfalls. And the city sang—it actually sang, in a soft melody that made Elise want to sing along with it.
Yet she felt panic at the sight of it all.
It wasn’t her fear. It was Eve’s.
The angel that dwelled inside of her had already moved beyond Elise’s shock and made connections between the organic-looking metropolis and the dead human bodies in the cavern below.
It was wrong. It was all wrong. It was sick, horrible, an abomination.
Eve hated it all. Eve didn’t hate anything.
Elise felt dizzy. She pressed a hand to her forehead, trying to steady herself.
“What is happening here?” she whispered to herself.
Footsteps whispered on the grass behind her. She turned, opening her mouth to address James.
But it wasn’t her aspis.
Nash Adamson had landed beside Benjamin Flynn in a whirl of downy feathers. He folded his majestic white wings behind him, tipping his head back to gaze up at the young mortal man trapped against the cross.
“Nashriel,” Elise said, before catching herself. “Nash. Good to see you. We have to do something about this.”
He looked sad. “Yes. I suppose we do.”
“Help me free Benjamin Flynn.”
“They’ll realize you’ve disconnected him within minutes,” Nash said. “He’s at the crux of the mechanism feeding this city.”
“I can’t leave him,” Elise said. “He brought me here to save him.”
Surprise registered in the angel’s eyes. “Did he? Fascinating. Fascinating, and…impossible.”
“No kidding.”
She climbed up on the base of the crucifix, putting herself nearly level with the young man. He was several inches taller than her, but he had slumped within the confines of the vines. It was overwhelming to stand so close to him—she wanted to lose herself in his dream of a peaceful garden.
Elise wished she could wake him up. Demand that he tell her why—and how—he had given her the obsidian falchion and coordinated payment from so many accounts.
For now, she was going to have to settle for saving him.
She drew her falchion.
“You talked to Rylie about the missing pack, didn’t you?” Elise asked Nash over her shoulder. “That’s why you’re here, right?”
His expression was smooth, unreadable. “I’ve been trying to find them. I don’t think that they’ve been processed into the system yet, so they must be held somewhere else.”
Processed into the system. It was such a cold, clinical way to describe what the angels were doing to innocent mortals.
She brought the blade down on one of the vines.
The demon sword sliced right through it, blackening the edges with ichor. It immediately began spreading through the rest of the vines.
She hacked again, and again.
The bindings holding Benjamin’s chest to the crucifix shriveled and withdrew. He sagged against her. She shifted to wrap her arm around his back, allowing his head to rest on her shoulder, and cut away the rest of the vines.
He was free.
“Help me, Nash,” she grunted. His dead weight was much heavier than she had expected. She was strong enough to handle it, but her footing on the base of the cross was slipping.
The angel stepped forward to take Benjamin into his arms, cradling him like a child.
“You should take him back to Malebolge immediately,” Nash said, sweeping down the stairs. His wings dragged behind him like a cloak. “I’ll find the pack and make sure they return to Northgate safely.”
Elise hesitated to follow him, staring out at the glimmering city filled with her children.
No, Eve’s children.
The children that Eve was currently beginning to regret.
Something was wrong, even more than she realized. It was nagging at her.
“No,” she said, following Nash down the stairs. “I can’t leave until I’ve saved all of these people.”
“There are tens of thousands. You can’t save them alone.”
“I have three centuries in Malebolge,” Elise said. “I won’t be alone.”
He stopped a few steps below and gazed up at her, pale eyes silently pleading. “Please, Elise. You have to leave now. Please.”
Dread settled over her. “Rylie didn’t send you here. Did she?”
Nash sighed and dropped his stare. They were only a few steps from the bottom. He jumped down, wings flaring to slow his descent, and set Benjamin Flynn gently on the ground. The young man was still unresponsive, but his dreams were fading.
“I’m sorry, Elise,” Nash said. “I really am. But I can’t let you bring an army into New Eden.”
Her fist clenched on the hilt of the falchion. Tension stre
tched between them.
Where was James? Why hadn’t he followed her up the stairs? Why hadn’t he met her when she returned?
What had Nash done?
“You knew about this,” Elise said softly.
“I saw it in Leliel’s mind. She worked on this with Metaraon for years. Built it from a fresh Haven. Seeded it with bones.”
The bones.
Eve’s voice broke through Elise’s consciousness, as clearly as though the angel was whispering from just behind her. She had never heard Eve speak like that before. She was a piece of Elise, a facet of her soul acquired in Araboth, not a separate entity living in the same body.
Yet she heard Eve’s voice. It was throaty yet sweet.
The bones…
All of the ancient angel cities had been built using the bodies of ethereal creatures—not angels, but the millions of ethereal animals that had once populated the forests of Heaven. Adam and the other angels had hunted them to extinction, one by one, and seeded their bones in the earth to grow buildings, artifacts, and artworks.
Eve had never had the stomach for the hunt. She had birthed the ethereal animals, just like she had made the angels, and it had killed her to watch them slaughtered.
But all of those beautiful, elegant species that she had designed were extinct. There were no ethereal beasts left to grow a new city.
“The bones,” Elise said, and the words came out in Eve’s voice. Her chest hurt so fiercely that she was certain her heart hadn’t beat for several minutes.
The souls of the dead called to her. She ached with the force of their cries, reaching out to her from death with faint, fading wails. The living dwelled in their happiest dreams, but the dead had no such fortune. They were trapped in the fibers of the city.
They suffered so that the angels could flourish.
Belphegor had said that she would want to invade Heaven once she knew what Leliel had done.
He had been right.
Damn it all, Belphegor was right.
“You knew,” Elise whispered.
Nash stepped away from Benjamin, opening his wings wide.
“I asked you to leave,” he said sadly.
“I can’t,” Elise said, lifting her falchion between them.
He nodded.
