Sins of Eden

by SM Reine

  James was surprised by how hard that news hit him. He’d never liked the half-succubus, but she’d been around ever since he and Elise had retired in Reno.

  Neuma was one of Elise’s oldest friends. More remarkably, Neuma was the only half-demon Gray to have ever held a territory as overlord. He wouldn’t have been surprised to learn she was immortal.

  If she had become a fixture to James, he could only begin to imagine what Elise was feeling.

  He didn’t really need to imagine. Her grief was making the air around her into acid almost as surely as the sinkholes were.

  Elise wrenched away from him, spinning to punch the wall of a bank. Her fist went all the way through. She ripped it free and took half of the drywall with it.

  He scratched the back of his neck. “Were you two…ah…”

  “We used to have sex, if that’s what you’re asking,” Elise said a little too harshly, as if she expected him to be disgusted by the news.

  James hadn’t been asking that specifically, but he had seen them kiss and wondered. He waited for a pang of jealousy that he never felt. “Ah. I understand.”

  “No. You don’t understand. You can’t fucking understand. I was starving, and she fed me. I felt guilty, and she made it okay. She was…” Elise smothered her face in both hands as emotion rippled over her, and James smothered with her, carried on the current of her emotion.

  He had to take several deep breaths before he was capable of speaking again.

  “You loved her,” James managed to choke out.

  Elise sat down on the curb and didn’t look up. Ace pushed his head into her lap, whining softly. “Who cares? She’s dead.”

  James didn’t have a response for that.

  He sat beside her on the curb, just far enough away that they didn’t touch. He took a half-drawn rune and pen from his pocket, and he finished drawing it in silence. “Here,” James said. “I’m not sure how well it will work, considering I haven’t been able to test it, but I think…everything should be in order.”

  She stared blankly at the paper he offered her, as though she didn’t quite see it.

  “It’s the spell you requested,” he added. “The dampening spell to make it easier for us to be around each other.”

  Finally, Elise looked it over. “This will only work on a mortal.”

  He was surprised that she’d noticed. It hadn’t been easy to come up with a marking for that. “You need to apply the rune to me. It’ll make me numb to most of your, ah, passive influences. I thought that we couldn’t risk reducing your powers; only my reaction to them.”

  Elise folded the paper into quarters and tucked it into her pocket. What little of her pocket remained. “Thanks.”

  A howl echoed through the eternal night, drifting between the buildings so faintly that it almost could have been the wind. That one wolf voice was soon joined by a second, a third, a whole pack’s worth of voices.

  When the sounds died off, James said, “I think I know where Nathaniel is.”

  “Where?” she asked.

  “We don’t have a way to stop him,” James said. “It’s better to focus on Belphegor and—”

  “Where?” Elise repeated, her voice low and dangerous.

  “I think…” James swallowed hard. “I think he’s gone to Hannah’s grave.”

  Alarm flared from Elise. “His mother? His dead mother?”

  “What harm can an angry, confused god-child do at the grave of a dead woman?” James asked.

  They both knew the answer to that wasn’t good.

  Abel came loping around the corner, tailed by the wolves. He wasn’t returning of his own will. The street beyond him was glowing red. More magma floes had appeared around the corner, and the air smelled sour. Their momentary peace was being shattered under Belphegor’s fist, just like the rest of the world.

  “Then let’s find Nathaniel,” Elise said.

  Nine

  Elise seemed to take longer to phase than usual. Instead of simply flashing across the world in a breathless, crushing moment, James felt as though he were suspended in darkness for hours.

  There was so much more in that darkness than ever before. Elise’s emotions were a storm, dragging James through the same strange mixture of grief, anger, and hate that she experienced.

  When James could finally breathe again, he was on all fours on a muddy trail. His fingers and knees sank into a puddle. He was wet, gasping for air, and immeasurably sad—as if waking up from a deep and confusing nightmare. Elise’s emotions clung to him like the sticky sap of a tree.

  She stood beside him, but Abel did not. “I dropped him off with his kids,” she said. “Your books, too. Hope you don’t mind.”

  “Good idea.” It would be hard enough to confront his son with Elise watching. He would have hated to have any more spectators than that.

  James got to his feet. Elise had taken them to a shady patch of Colorado forest that hadn’t been touched by Belphegor yet. Once he oriented himself to the trail, the barbed-wire fence marking off Union land, and the threatening signs, he felt sick.

  They were close to Hannah’s grave. Very close.

  “How did you know where to find this?” he asked.

  “My mother was there when Hannah died,” Elise said. “She told me enough to figure it out.”

  She’d “figured it out” with eerie accuracy. They stood at the end of a trail, where it met with highway—the exact location where Hannah had died. Right upon that juncture between soil and cracked asphalt. “She died here,” James said, staring at the empty patch of road.

  Elise stood a few feet away from him, sheltered underneath the trees. “Tell me about it.”

  He glanced at her. Did she really care? Was she asking to be polite? Elise, making polite conversation. The world really was ending.

  “I think that Hannah was trying to save Ariane from Metaraon,” James said. “Ariane was almost due at that time, and I don’t believe Hannah would have interceded for anything less. She wasn’t a fighter.”

  “Huh.” Elise’s mouth tipped down at the corners. “Then I’m grateful.”

  “Grateful that Hannah died?”

  “Grateful that she saved Marion,” Elise said.

  Marion. Not Ariane, but Marion.

  James ripped himself away from the place that Hannah died, walking up the trail. “Did you find Marion when you were in New Eden?”

  Elise shook her head. “Benjamin lied to get me to infiltrate the city. He lied, and I don’t fully understand why.”

  “Damn,” James said. “So she’s still at large.” He hesitated. “If Benjamin knows, then Nathaniel might, too. We can ask him.”

  She gave him an appraising look. Apparently, she hadn’t yet known about the connection between the two young men—but she didn’t look surprised, either. “Yeah, we can ask,” Elise said. There was a hint of violent promise in her voice.

  James swallowed hard. “When you find Nathaniel…what are you going to do?”

  “Talk to him. Find a way to hold him down.”

  “You aren’t going to try to punish him for what he’s done?” James asked.

  “No,” Elise said, but she didn’t elaborate beyond that.

  When Elise had dropped off Abel, she had also picked up a small notebook. She redrew James’s rune as she slunk alongside him. The dampening spell formed under the point of her pen within moments, whispering the words she needed without James’s prompting.

  The rune lifted off of the page and crawled onto her fingers.

  He felt the instant that Elise triggered it—the first time he’d felt any magic since severing himself from the source. The spell settled over him with prickling needles, and, for a moment, his skin felt too tight.

  Then it was gone.

  A lot of other things were gone, too. All those emotions Elise had been dumping on him. The overwhelming anxiety mingled with uncomfortable arousal and anger and fear and so many other unappealing emotions.

  Elise look
ed different, too. Her skin was dimmer. Her eyes weren’t pits, but simply flat black, and he didn’t struggle to meet her gaze.

  James let out a breath that he felt like he’d been holding for hours.

  “Well done,” he said.

  She shrugged. “It was your work.”

  Now that it wasn’t so difficult to look at her, James drank in the sight of his former kopis. Without the power of her thrall, she looked much more like the woman he remembered. She was Elise—just Elise, with all the imperfections smoothed out, recolored to look like a demon.

  She was still incredibly beautiful.

  He thought about all the things he wanted to say to her—do with her—and he realized that this might be their last opportunity to be alone. With the world in tumult, there were no guarantees that they would have time to speak later.

  James and Elise shared a long look. Neither spoke.

  Maybe there was nothing left to be said.

  They walked on.

  The night was silent except for the creaks and cracks of the forest, the dripping of water through the branches. Of all the places that had gone wild, melting down under apocalypse, this obscure patch of forest was the one place that it was silent. Almost mournful.

  Chills prickled over James’s scalp. He had to say something. Even if it wasn’t something—if not to tell Elise how he felt about her, then just to fill the quiet.

  “I was never good for Hannah,” he said. “I was too obsessed with the coven, too unwilling to sever ties, insensitive to her needs. If I’d known that she was pregnant with Nathaniel…”

  “You’d have stayed.”

  “I don’t think I could have,” he said. “My fate had already been chosen for me. But I would have tried harder to get back to her sooner. I would have come back to Colorado—dragged you with me, if need be. When Hannah didn’t allow me to contact her after I left, I should have pushed more. I should have just shown up.”

  “You would have been putting both of us in danger,” Elise said. “The White Ash Coven would have handed me over to Metaraon the instant you showed up. I wouldn’t have developed enough to kill Adam. Everything happened the only way that it could have.”

  “That’s probably true.” It hurt to say it.

  James had spent so many years dwelling on what he wished had happened—reaching Eden, becoming God, and changing everything he regretted—that the admission tasted sour on his tongue.

  It was like confessing that everything that he had done in pursuit of the Origin had been just as useless as it had been selfish. As close to a confession as he ever planned on making.

  That unspoken confession didn’t escape Elise. She lifted an eyebrow at him. “Yeah?”

  James felt like he swallowed down needles. “Just because we regret something doesn’t mean that it wasn’t meant to be.”

  She smiled faintly. “Everything happens for a reason. Doesn’t it? It’s almost like—”

  Elise cut off and pushed James behind her.

  A light had appeared among the trees.

  Elise advanced slowly, and James remained behind her, watchful for movement at their rear. The forest remained as silent as it had been the entire time.

  “What is it?” he whispered when she stopped walking. “Is it him?”

  Finally, she let out a breath. “No, it’s fine. Nothing to worry about.”

  She allowed him to step around her.

  The light was coming from a narrow bar of sunlight spilling from between two trees. It was the Haven, the dimension that James had tried to send Rylie to when she’d been pregnant with Summer and Abram.

  Unlike most of the sinkholes between universes, this one didn’t distort the world surrounding it. It was simply an open valley, caught in daylight, that had appeared between two trees. It looked like it was sunny spring on the other side. The grass was green, the flowers were in bloom, and the air that breezed from it smelled like moist soil.

  James didn’t look at it for long. His eyes swept through the trees, searching for movement.

  Nothing.

  Nathaniel should have been there.

  “We buried her on top of the hill,” James said.

  They climbed onto a ridge overlooking the sinkhole into the Haven. After all these years of weathering, there was no longer a bump in the ground signifying Hannah’s grave. But the cairn was still in place. Nothing had managed to disrupt that pile of stones that marked Hannah’s final resting place.

  “Where is he?” Elise asked.

  James raked a hand through his hair. “Perhaps I misinterpreted Benjamin—perhaps he meant that Nathaniel was looking for a different grave. If that’s the case, then we’ll never find him. I don’t know who else he cares about.” He turned back to Elise. Her gaze was fixed to the ground. “Any ideas would be welcome.”

  She didn’t react—not to move or speak.

  James frowned. “Elise?”

  Her hair wasn’t stirring in the faint breeze. A water droplet was suspended on the point of her chin.

  She was frozen.

  Nathaniel had arrived.

  The boy emerged from the Haven below, and his footsteps didn’t disturb a single puddle as he climbed the hill.

  He was beside James within moments. Nathaniel wasn’t looking at the grave. He was focused on Elise, and anger twisted his face into something ugly. Something inhuman.

  “So you took him up on his offer,” he told her frozen body. “You’re going to take me back there and make me suffer again, just so that the two of you can remake the world the way you want it.”

  “What are you talking about?” James asked.

  “Look at what she was thinking about when I stopped her,” Nathaniel said, pressing his hand to Elise’s forehead.

  Her thoughts spilled around them in a tangle of images. James glimpsed a lot of familiar people, locations, events—even himself. Elise’s mind was cluttered with Neuma’s bloody corpse, the day that she took James as her aspis, a distant day when she held an infant with shockingly blue eyes.

  Nathaniel waved most of the images away, leaving nothing but the brightest, freshest thoughts behind.

  When she had been frozen, she’d been imagining Eden’s towering trees and the glowing light of the Origin. Either her imagination was stellar or she had seen these things before, in her dreams or in Eve’s memories.

  She was thinking about standing on the edge of the Origin’s radiant nimbus with Belphegor and Nathaniel.

  “What does that look like to you?” the boy asked, thrusting a finger at the light.

  “I never understood what she was thinking half the time, even when we were bound,” James said.

  “Did she tell you that Belphegor tried to talk her into dragging me back to Eden?” Nathaniel’s jaw clenched, fists trembling. “Does this look like a woman who’s thinking of ways to save me?”

  In that context, it did look like Elise was considering Belphegor’s request. “You can’t take anything from that. Thoughts don’t matter—only actions.”

  “You’re so full of crap,” Nathaniel said. “Thoughts are the only things that matter. You were trapped in Limbo. You know that.” He swiped away Elise’s thoughts, leaving the hilltop in darkness. She continued staring at the ground blankly.

  James’s mouth was dry, watching his son tear through Elise’s mind so easily. He had watched Adam do the same thing in Araboth once.

  Nathaniel wasn’t done, either. He crouched beside Hannah’s grave. “Elise did wrong by me, but at least she tried. You never even tried. Only one person ever really cared about me.”

  His words hurt so much worse than anything else he could have done.

  Mostly because he was right.

  James had never tried to help Nathaniel because he’d never had the opportunity to try. They had barely even seen each other before—scant moments in Hell together, a few panicked days chasing Elise into Heaven, and then…this.

  Yet those had been James’s only opportunities, because H
annah had kept everything else from him. Nathaniel’s first words, first steps, first days at school.

  It probably wasn’t a good idea to remind an angry child-god that his beloved mother was responsible for their estrangement.

  “Give me a chance, Nathaniel,” James said. “Please.”

  “I don’t need you,” he said.

  The soil stirred.

  James realized what he was doing, and his heart almost stopped. “No, Nathaniel. Don’t.”

  The ground melted away, and James couldn’t watch. He couldn’t see what Nathaniel was bringing out of the grave. But he couldn’t turn away, either—he felt like he’d been frozen, just like Elise.

  The world sighed, distorting around Nathaniel, and Hannah Pritchard rose from her grave.

  She looked almost the way that James remembered her, with a few subtle changes. This wasn’t really her body, but a woman constructed from the memory of her son. Hannah looked fractionally older than she had been at death, yet also fractionally more beautiful, as if Nathaniel simply hadn’t remembered his mother’s imperfections.

  There was nothing in her eyes—nothing but confusion.

  The woman that looked like Hannah Pritchard was just as blond and delicately boned and graceful as the real thing, but it wasn’t her. No matter how convincing the image was, Hannah had been dead for far too long to be brought back.

  “Mom,” Nathaniel said.

  She looked down at herself and screamed.

  “Mom, no,” Nathaniel said. He waved his hand at her, much like the same way that he had dismissed Elise’s thoughts with a gesture.

  Hannah stopped screaming. She collapsed to the ground bonelessly.

  James tasted bile on the back of his tongue. “You have to put her back, Nathaniel. You cannot resurrect her.”

  “No.” Nathaniel kneeled beside her, searching her body with his eyes, looking for something that wasn’t there. “I can bring her back. I can do anything now. I’m everything.”

  But when he put his hand on her heart again, making it beat, forcing her lungs to breathe, her eyes remained empty. She stared at the sky and didn’t even blink at the first drops of rain.

  “Even if you did animate that body, it wouldn’t be her,” James whispered.