by S. M. Reine
She was waiting in the wreckage of Poppy’s Diner when she felt it coming. Rylie used to like having lunch there, before the Breaking, before Elise entered her life. It was dark and filled with ash now, but it still relaxed her to curl up in one of the red leather booths with her diary. But when she smelled the shifting atmosphere, she picked up her journal, tucked it under her arm, and headed outside.
Abel had sensed the change, too. He was already waiting by the statue of Bain Marshall. She clasped his hand in hers tightly, trying to control her trembling.
They didn’t have to wait for very long. The air rippled, and a fresh plume of smoke billowed out of the fissure.
There was a shape moving inside.
Rylie sniffed the air. She could tell even before the ash settled that it was Elise—her scent was unmistakable, especially since she had brought Ace with her. But there was no preparing for how haggard Elise looked. She didn’t walk with any of her usual confidence. She was caked in amber blood and limping. Rylie’s breath caught in her throat. That could only mean bad news.
Then Elise stepped aside, and a man emerged from the smoke behind her.
Abram.
Rylie burst into tears and flung her arms around him, hugging her son tightly. “Oh, thank God.”
He hugged her back just as hard. It was a lot like being engulfed in a bear’s embrace. Even though he was bigger than Seth had ever been, it reminded Rylie very much of hugging him, too. There was just something about Abram that felt warm in that same way. It melted her heart and made her soul fill with joy.
But the joy was short-lived. Abram’s scent told an overwhelming story—a tale of worlds Rylie had never seen, and places far more dangerous than Dis. He smelled like sulfur and leather. He also smelled like buttered popcorn, apples, and freshly-mowed grass. He was drenched in the odors of Heaven and Hell. Rylie could almost picture New Eden just from inhaling his scent.
“Thank you, Elise,” Rylie said, trying to wipe her cheeks dry.
Elise looked stiff. Uncomfortable. Ace was leaning hard against her calf, sensing her mood. “Don’t thank me.”
Rylie looked around her son’s arm. Elise and Abram had been unaccompanied on their journey up the bridge.
“Shit,” Abel said. He’d already reached the same conclusion that Rylie had.
“But…the Scions,” she said. “The pack.”
Abram’s expression said it all.
The pack wasn’t coming home.
It was the night of a full moon, and Rylie was lonely. She wandered the streets of the sanctuary feeling like her chest had been packed with shards of glass. She hadn’t expected to ever return to this place after Levi ousted her, and now that she had, she almost wished that Levi was still there.
There were only three werewolves in a sanctuary built for fifty, and it felt hollow.
Elise lingered underneath the trees with Ace, separate from Rylie, Abel, and Summer as they prepared to become wolves. None of them needed to shift, but Abel had never been as good at skipping moons as Rylie, and it would be a deeply unpleasant night for him if he clung to his human skin.
“You ready to go?” Abel asked, shedding his shirt.
“I can’t,” Rylie said, hugging herself tightly. “I just…I can’t.”
Summer glanced at Elise. “I understand. We’ll see you in the morning?”
Rylie nodded.
Abel surrendered to his animal form, shifting into the wolf with popping bones and a low growl.
Ace’s ears flattened to his skull. He whined.
Summer didn’t immediately follow Abel’s example. She chewed on her thumbnail, watching him shift. Then she asked, “Did you see Nash?” She was speaking to Elise. “When you were in New Eden—was he there? I haven’t heard from him since he left, and I just thought…”
Elise only stared at her, expression unreadable.
“Please,” Summer said softly.
“Ask your brother,” Elise said.
“I don’t know where he is right now. He went off on his own. I think he’s still trying to figure out how to cope.”
Her response was curt. “Ask him when he comes back.”
Finally, Summer nodded. She seemed to step into her wolf form rather than going through the painful, violent shift that other werewolves did—a side effect of being born to werewolves, rather than bitten.
As soon as she had changed, Abel nipped at her neck, showing her the affection as a beast that he couldn’t bring himself to show as a human. She nipped back.
Abel and Summer chased each other into the forest, vanishing among the mist with a flash of their tails.
“What would you do if you were in my place?” Elise asked as soon as they were gone.
Startled, Rylie turned. She hadn’t expected Elise to ask her opinion. She had hoped she wouldn’t, in fact—she didn’t want to have to choose between her daughter’s request and what she thought Elise needed to do. “What do you mean?” she asked carefully.
“If you had an entire army of demons that you couldn’t trust, without enough supplies to feed them all while on the move…would you go to war?” She wasn’t even looking at Rylie. She was gazing up at the sky. “I don’t know if I could save the survivors in New Eden even if I wanted to.”
How could she say that? The pack wasn’t dead. Abram had said they were just trapped in some kind of stasis, probably serving as angel food. If there was any chance they could be saved, they had to try.
Maybe Elise had been struck by conscience for once. There were a lot of costs to war—costs that Rylie couldn’t even begin to imagine.
But however bad it was, it couldn’t be worse than letting every one of her friends die.
Rylie bit her bottom lip. “Whatever you decide to do…” She struggled against the words inside of herself. She didn’t want to say it. She didn’t want to make this kind of promise. But the offer was straining inside of her, with all of the Alpha wolf’s fury and despair, and she couldn’t swallow it down. “We’ll be supporting you. Whatever you need us to do, we’ll do it.”
Elise looked startled. Startled, and pleased. But she said, “I won’t ask you to do that.”
“You’re not asking. I’m offering.”
“A lot of people will die if we fight.”
“And my whole pack will definitely die if we don’t,” Rylie said. Her words caught in her throat. She clapped a hand to her mouth, but there was no stopping the hot tears that tracked down her cheeks.
Wolves howled in the trees. They sounded mournful. Like they were crying along with Rylie.
She startled when she felt skin brush against hers. She looked down to see that Elise had rested a hand on her shoulder. Silently reassuring, but making no promises.
“Thank you,” Rylie said, resting her hand on Elise’s.
But the hand was gone.
Elise and Ace had returned to Hell.
Elise sat on the throne of thorns deep underneath the Palace, alone with Ace and the fluttering banners bearing her mark. The crossed swords normally gave her an equal sense of pride and annoyance. It was a symbol that demons worshipping the Father had designed, but it had become more than that. That mark indicated her territory. Her victories. It was painted on the walls of alleys in Dis and etched on the breasts of her guards’ armor.
Now she had to decide whether to paint it on the walls of New Eden in the silvery blood of angels.
What they had done was unforgivable. Horrifying. Yet the damage was done. So many of those humans had already been lost. And Elise was still trying to free all the humans in Hell. How could it be worse for the survivors in New Eden to be trapped in happy dreams than the mortals enslaved in the Houses of Dis?
But they were angels. Her children.
They were killing Lilith and Adam’s offspring to feed themselves. The greatest of all sins.
Ace’s nails clicked and his chain slithered against the tile. He rested his heavy head on her thigh, gazing up at her with wide puppy eyes. He
was usually less skittish after being thoroughly exercised, and she had given him a brisk walk around the battlements after returning from Earth, but her dog was still restless. He needed more room to run around. And she needed a solution that a few minutes of exercise couldn’t give her.
He whined.
“What would you do?” she asked, scratching behind his floppy ears with her fingernails. His whiplike tail thumped against the floor. “You would eat them all, wouldn’t you?”
His tongue lolled out the side of his mouth, leaving drool on her leather pants.
A faint smile crept over her lips and his tail wagged harder.
“Belphegor wants me to do it. If he wants it, then the result can only favor him. I bet there’s something in New Eden he wants. Or else he wants me to focus my attention on the angels so that I don’t notice what he’s doing.” Not that she had any clue where he had gone after Shamain fell anyway.
Thinking aloud wasn’t making the choice any more obvious.
War was an awful thing to conduct. Just as terrible, in many ways, as what had been done to the angels’ victims. She would have to beat down the city’s walls and force her army down New Eden’s gullet.
But her army wasn’t very strong. It was oversized, undersupplied, and disobedient. And Heaven wasn’t exactly across a mountain range or some other inconvenient geographic feature. It was in another dimension. She’d have to move the entire army to Malebolge before she could even reach New Eden.
Then demons would die. Angels would die. And the mortals would be caught in the crossfire.
But if she did nothing, then the survivors would never escape. Rylie would look at her with those big, heartbroken eyes. Thousands of lives would be lost—maybe more—because Elise hadn’t forced the angels to come to heel.
It would all be on her shoulders.
Ace whined again. Her fingers had stopped moving.
She resumed scratching, and his tail resumed thumping.
The door to the throne room opened. She could hear the voices of Gerard and the centurions outside, waiting for her to tell them what they were going to do. Whether they were about to go to war or concede to the angels and remain in Dis.
James entered and shut the door behind him. His veils were loose around his neck, letting her see the tension around his eyes, the lines bracketing his mouth.
“Benjamin?” she asked.
“Asleep. He’s as restful as I can make him. But he roused briefly, and I spoke with him.”
Her interest was piqued. “What did he say?”
“He had a message for you, actually,” James said. “He wanted me to tell you that Marion’s in New Eden.”
Elise froze.
Marion is in New Eden.
Her hands began to shake.
“She can’t be there,” Elise said. “I would have heard.”
But why would he lie?
Benjamin seemed to want her to invade New Eden more than anyone else. If it was because of Marion…
“Who is Marion?” James asked as Elise stood, careful not to prick herself on the iron thorns of her chair.
She took Ace’s chain, wrapped it around her fist, and led him through the banners toward the door. He trotted at her side, tail swishing, head lifted.
James hurried to keep up with her, too. “Elise, who is Marion?”
She paused in front of the doors, closing her eyes, collecting herself. This would be the beginning of her most important performance of all. She needed to be strong, without a hint of weakness—not just for the sake of the victims in New Eden, but for Marion. Elise couldn’t falter. She couldn’t fail.
“Elise?” James’s voice sounded like it was a thousand miles away.
She threw the doors open.
There were more than a dozen faces waiting on the other side, and they all fell silent one by one as they realized that Elise had arrived.
She looked between her guards, from Gerard to Aniruddha, to Isaiah and Azis. Even Neuma, Jerica, and Terah were waiting for her verdict. Her most trusted friends and allies. People that she wouldn’t want to subject to war for anything.
Almost anything.
Elise clenched her fist on the chain hard enough to keep her hands from trembling.
“Prepare the army. We’re invading New Eden.”
Abram rode the motorcycle with the radio turned off, enjoying the grumble of the engine and the wind whipping over his helmet.
It felt good to be back on Earth. He had never thought that he would be happy to see this miserable place, so much more gray and broken than the Haven where he had grown up, but at least it wasn’t New Eden. It didn’t smell like apples. There weren’t so many angels that he felt like he was having an ice pick stabbed through his skull. He didn’t have creepy stone vines drinking his blood.
There were lots of pluses to being on Earth, even if it still wasn’t home.
The long drive didn’t last long enough. Mountains soon turned to fields, and he reached the farm where Shamain’s temple district had crashed that winter. Ethereal buildings jutted out of the corn like bones in a disturbed grave.
His tires jittered against the broken cobblestone as he climbed into the ruins. The Union wasn’t around anymore, so nobody tried to stop him. They had been stationed there for a couple of weeks after the temple fell, but now there weren’t even cameras monitoring the site. Apparently the Union was stretched too thin after the Breaking to worry about anything that wasn’t an active threat.
If ethereal ruins weren’t an active threat, Abram didn’t want to know what warranted their attention.
His headlight crept up a pair of bare legs standing in the middle of the road and then shined on a woman’s face. He stopped the motorcycle a couple of feet away.
It was Summer.
“What are you doing here?” she asked, hands planted on her hips. The look she gave him was chillingly reminiscent of the looks Gran used to give them when they got into trouble as kids.
It was the full moon. She should have been running with Rylie and Abel. He had counted on that to allow him to disappear without anyone noticing, but apparently there was no eluding his twin sister’s attention.
He dismounted from the motorcycle, setting the helmet on the seat. “I have to know.”
“Know what?”
He brushed past her. She turned and followed him, matching him stride for stride.
Abram wasn’t trying to push his sister out. He’d never been a man of many words, and he just didn’t know how to begin to tell her what had led him to Shamain’s crashed temple.
While he had been in New Eden, connected to the city, he’d had dreams. But not the kind of dreams that Elise had described the other victims experiencing. They weren’t blissful visions of winning a high school basketball game or eating dinner with family or going on bike rides through the Appalachians.
Abram had been dreaming of a garden.
It had been bigger than a city, with a giant tree at the center. Its trunk was wide enough that Northgate could have fit comfortably inside. The branches had formed a canopy over most of the garden, and there were juicy red apples on most of the branches.
That had been the entirety of his dream. A big tree. A garden. Red apples.
There hadn’t been mythology in the Haven, but Levi had given him a crash course in Adam, Eve, and the place called Eden. He’d talked about them the same way that he had talked about history, like Mesopotamia and Julius Caesar, like they weren’t part of some primitive religion but actual fact.
And Abram was definitely dreaming of Eden.
The grass outside Eve’s temple was yellow and hard, unlike the garden in his dream. Earth winter had been brutal on Shamain’s ruins. Even the stone buildings had cracked and lost their luster. A mural rimming the base of the temple had turned to little more than a colorless blob.
“Guess there isn’t much weather in Heaven,” Summer said, rubbing her hand over the mural. The paint crumbled under her fingers. She wiped
it off on the hip of her button-down dress. “Seriously, Abram, what are you doing here? Talk to me.”
“I have to know,” he repeated.
His footsteps echoed as he stepped into the temple. Summer had told him all about the “super extremely awesome” clock that had been inside the building, but there was no sign of the giant cogs now. It was empty all the way up through the mezzanine.
He mounted the stairs. Summer spoke behind him. “Did you see Nash while you were in New Eden?”
“Yes,” Abram said. He was surprised that Elise hadn’t told her.
“And?”
“You won’t want to know.”
“I just need to know if he’s okay,” Summer said. “He hasn’t checked in with me. He always checks in with me.”
Abram had never liked Nash, but now he kind of hated him. Regardless, his sister loved the angel. That had to count for something. “He’ll probably survive. The other angels found him.”
She sucked in a breath. “What happened?”
“Elise happened.”
Summer pressed her lips together. Anger flashed through her eyes. “He attacked her first, didn’t he? I told him not to try to take her head-on. Dammit, Nash…”
“Like I said,” Abram said. “He’ll probably be fine.” If it was “fine” to be trapped in New Eden with angels that must have considered Nash an enemy by now.
“So we failed,” Summer said. “We didn’t stop the war.”
Maybe if they hadn’t tried to take the war into their own hands, it wouldn’t have happened in the first place. Maybe Levi wouldn’t be locked behind glass underneath New Eden.
He didn’t respond, letting his anger burn silently inside of him. But Summer knew. She always knew.
“Are you okay, Abram?”
Was he okay? His wrists were still bleeding intermittently. Those dreams were driving him crazy. And he was the only escapee of an abduction that had ended up claiming the pack he considered family, albeit family that he didn’t like all that much.
“I’m fine,” he said gruffly.
