Sins of Eden

by SM Reine

  She didn’t need weapons to kill Belphegor. She was the weapon.

  They spiraled toward death together, souls locked as one.

  Elise poured all of her hurt into him, all her pain and loathing and frustration—and while she was at it, she threw all the love at him, too. Love for friends. Love for family. Love for the people who deserved to be reborn into a beautiful world that didn’t burn with eternal hellfire.

  She might have been broken, but he was weak.

  Belphegor died first.

  This time, Elise watched him die, making sure that he vanished into nothingness as completely as Adam had. She didn’t let him go until there was nothing left to grip.

  No body, no soul, no consciousness.

  One more dead god.

  Then she was alone, and she collapsed on Ba’al’s knucklebones, utterly drained.

  She rested at the center of the vortex. All that remained was a few square feet around her, which she had no strength to resist. Weak as he’d been, Belphegor had still been strong enough to kill her.

  Elise was unwinding into eternity, her soul fragmenting.

  Some small part of her wanted to get up and save the world, but there was nothing left to save. Nothing but the last god in a dying pantheon and a few inches of bone.

  Elise opened her arms wide, embracing the void as it consumed the last of the Earth. She used the last of her will to push the genesis to its climax.

  The vortex closed around her as she died.

  That was how the world ended—in absolute silence and darkness, without a single person to see it happen.

  Twenty-Two

  Abel woke up in the forest with a shock. He flung his hands in front of him, grabbing for the obsidian body of his mate—but she wasn’t there.

  Trees loomed above him. A sparrow swooped from one branch to the next, then caught a breeze and fluttered away.

  On that breeze, Abel could smell deer. They stunk of fleas. Always a problem, fleas. Werewolf healing couldn’t do much about bugs that burrowed into fur, and it always sucked to have to end a full moon hunt with a flea bath.

  As frustrated as he’d been by all the bathing, the fact that he could be frustrated at all meant one thing.

  He’d died and gone to Heaven. Or whatever came in the afterlife.

  It was the only reason that he could have been sucked into some creepy dark tornado and ended up in a forest that looked a hell of a lot like home.

  Someone shifted softly beside him.

  Abel tensed all over and didn’t immediately look to see who was next to him.

  His whole body was telling him who had woken up alongside him in the forest, and he was afraid his senses were wrong. That the womanly scent drifting through the air didn’t belong to his mate. That he was going to roll over and find out that he was still horribly alone.

  He couldn’t block out her tremulous voice.

  “Abel?”

  He looked. He had to look.

  Rylie was propped over him on one arm, her blond hair falling in a sheet that spilled over a bed of dried pine needles. The wide eyes that gazed at him were the luminous gold of a full moon in autumn.

  She reached for him with slender fingers, and he caught her wrist.

  There were bones under the smooth skin. She was solid and real. Not a ghost or his imagination.

  He didn’t trust his sense of touch, so he jerked her hand toward him, running his nose along the inside of her arm as he inhaled her scent.

  Rylie giggled and twitched when he brushed against her elbow joint. She’d always been ticklish there.

  It was really her.

  Words left him, but he didn’t need words.

  He rolled them, pinning her to the ground underneath him so that he could feel the full length of her body against his, all softness and curves and those damn bony knees that dug into his hip.

  Abel fisted her hair in both hands and kissed her with all of the pent up grief and regrets that had chased him through the long hours without her, and she tasted just as alive as she smelled. She responded exactly how he expected her to respond. That little shocked intake of air, like she was still surprised and thrilled by every kiss. The way her fingers immediately moved to the scars on his cheek, touching him where he hurt the most.

  “Don’t tell me if I’ve gone crazy,” Abel mumbled against her lips. “I don’t wanna know.” He kissed her again, longer and slower, and Rylie clung to him just as desperately.

  He didn’t know how long they held each other. Long enough that it started to get brighter. Long enough that the birds started moving back into the nearby trees, even though smart wildlife had a tendency to avoid Alpha werewolves.

  Abel came up for air eventually, just so he could stare at her. Rylie looked embarrassed by the scrutiny.

  “I’m fine,” she said. “I’m better than fine. I feel great.”

  “I know about Abram and Seth.” It came out of him before he could think better of saying it. Rylie’s eyes widened, but he didn’t let her talk. “I don’t care. If you think that means that you can leave me or something, just because the kid’s not mine, then I’m gonna tell you right now that I don’t care, he’s mine even if he isn’t mine, and I’m not going to fucking let you go anywhere again, no matter what you—”

  “Abel. Stop it.” She caught his face in both of her hands. “I love you.” She kissed him firmly.

  “Yeah, you better,” Abel said.

  “I’m not going anywhere.”

  “You’re sure as hell not.”

  “Good. Since we’ve got that settled.” Another giggle escaped her. “I think there are ants crawling on me.”

  He let her sit up. She was wearing one of those white sundresses that drove him crazy, and there were, in fact, ants crawling down the back of it. He plucked them off.

  Then he swept her off her feet into another hug, burying his face in her hair.

  So much had happened since she died. He felt like he should tell her all about the demon armies, and the wolf spirits, and the end of the world. All of that felt like a distant nightmare now that he had Rylie in his arms while the forest swayed around them, though. He didn’t really want to remember any of it.

  “Abram’s gay, by the way,” he said instead.

  Rylie pushed herself against his chest and looked at him. “What?”

  “Yeah. He’s with Levi.”

  “Levi?”

  “He’s still mine,” Abel said stubbornly. “I’m gonna be his daddy the right way now, whatever it takes. We’ve got a second chance. We’re going to do this right. If I can deal with Nash as my son-in-law, I’ll figure out a way to deal with fucking Levi.”

  “Honey, the world just ended,” Rylie said. “I think we’ve got bigger problems than who Abram is dating.” A pause. “Ugh, but Levi? Really?”

  At least they agreed on that.

  “Speaking of the world ending,” Abel said, eyeballing the forest around them. It didn’t look like the end of the world. In fact, it looked like the first beautiful morning he’d seen in months.

  “It was Elise.” She giggled wetly, wiping her wrist over her eyes. “She’s God now, Abel. She saved us. She saved all of us.”

  How could Rylie know that? She had been dead.

  That sounded like bullshit to him anyway. Some demon couldn’t become God.

  But hey, if that’s what Rylie wanted to believe, he was fine with it. He would have agreed with her if she told him that the trees were made with toothpicks and cotton balls.

  “Wait,” he said. “What do you mean, she saved all of us?”

  Rylie stepped up to the edge of the rocks, gazing down at the valley below with a huge grin.

  “All of us,” she said.

  He stood over her shoulder to see what had her smiling.

  The werewolf sanctuary was spread below them, just as it had been before the Breaking. It looked like spring. The waterfall was roaring with snowmelt, the lake strained at its banks, the fields were fil
led with flowers in full bloom. The cottages were all cute and perfect and intact, even some of the ones that had been seriously damaged in the winter that had followed all the ash fall.

  And the streets were filled with pack.

  They were going to be as happy to see Rylie alive as Abel was. Okay, not as happy—she was his mate, she was everything to him—but he still wanted to show off.

  “Come on,” he said, starting to drag her down the hill.

  “Wait,” Rylie said. “There’s something I was waiting to tell you. I wish I hadn’t waited, but I didn’t know that I was going to get—well, you know. I thought I had more time. And now I realize, we just don’t know, and… Anyway, I guess you should just feel this.”

  She grabbed his hand and pressed it to her navel.

  There was motion underneath his palm. Something inside her belly was kicking.

  Shocked, Abel jerked back.

  His first thought was that Rylie had been infected by a demon or something. Like she was about to tell him that she had come back to life just to die again. Then he realized that there was a much more obvious, much less stupid reason for her stomach to move.

  “Holy shit,” Abel said.

  Rylie’s smile was nervous. “Surprised?”

  He wasn’t surprised. He was fucking floored.

  “This one’s mine?” he asked. Seemed like a stupid question, considering he and Rylie had been together for ages, but he’d been pretty sure about Abram too.

  “Yours,” she said firmly.

  He’d meant to take her down to the sanctuary immediately, to share the good news with everyone, but this news was too good to have to share.

  A laugh erupted from him, and he picked her up in a hug, swinging her around and around. Rylie laughed, too. The sound filled the trees and made those birds fly away again and Abel didn’t care about anything, because everything was perfect.

  His baby. His mate.

  They really were saved.

  The last thing that Seth Wilder remembered was dying. He remembered every millimeter of his body becoming consumed by ichor, especially the instant that his lungs had begun to turn to stone and lost the ability to expand.

  He also remembered Rylie’s expression as she watched his every organ fail.

  That was the last thing he remembered.

  So he was kind of confused when he woke up in bed, at home in the werewolf sanctuary, with no sense of time passing and no sensation of pain.

  Seth opened his eyes.

  He was resting on his side in bed. His arm was curled underneath the pillow under his head. The fitted sheet on his mattress was crisp and white, making it easy for them to bleach their linens when they got dirty, as they so often did in a sanctuary of werewolves.

  The blue light of early morning streamed through the window. It was cracked so that he could smell fresh pine and hear the waterfall rushing outside.

  Sunrise was creeping up on him even though it had been dark when he died.

  “Rylie,” Seth said, pushing himself upright. He was alone in the bedroom. And it wasn’t actually his bedroom, for that matter. He was in one of the vacant guest cottages.

  He lifted the sheets to look down at himself. He was wearing the outfit he had died in, but it was whole, undamaged. Just like the body underneath it. There was no cut in his shirt where Elise’s sword had sliced through him and cut into his guts.

  A cry outside the window had him on his feet in an instant. He flung the shutters open and looked outside.

  The pack was streaming out of the other cottages onto the street. Pyper, Trevin, and Crystal were nearest—familiar faces that he felt exhilarated to see. He’d left the sanctuary never intending to see any of those faces again, but any thoughts he’d had about leaving suddenly seemed stupid.

  Everyone looked to be celebrating outside. Pointing up at the pristine blue sky, the trees, the cottages. Hugging each other and crying. Lifting their hands as if in prayer. Spinning around in the streets.

  Seth emerged from the front door of the cottage, blinking in the growing light. The sun peeked through a pair of trees on the ridge to shine on the step where he stood.

  Almost instantly, the street went silent.

  He felt a momentary thrill of fear until he realized that everyone had gone quiet because they were looking at him.

  The near-identical stunned expressions would have been kind of funny had they not been aimed at him.

  Trevin managed to speak first. “Seth?”

  And then the pack was surging forward to drag him into the street, and everyone was trying to touch him, hug him, patting him on the back.

  Seth was overwhelmed. He tried to laugh, but he couldn’t seem to get it out. “I think I missed something,” he said, shaking hands with a werewolf named Michael, who had never shown any interest in him before.

  “You were dead, man,” Trevin said. “We had a funeral. We practically had a parade!”

  “The amount of crying was embarrassing.” Crystal was sobbing as she said it, though she quickly scrubbed the tears off of her cheeks.

  Seth definitely hadn’t concocted those memories of dying, unless the entire pack had been taken by mass hysteria.

  Elise really had killed him.

  “Oh my God,” Trevin said, looking over Seth’s shoulder.

  He turned. Rylie and Abel were coming down the trail from the mountain. Even though Seth’s last memory was of Rylie, he still felt like he hadn’t seen her in so long—not just weeks or months, but years. An entire lifetime.

  She spotted him among the pack, and her jaw dropped.

  Seth shoved his way free of the werewolves and met her halfway. Rylie tackled him. He engulfed her in his arms, holding her as tightly as he possibly could.

  He remembered everything now. Not just dying, but being in a place beyond death, and having Rylie with him. He wasn’t sure how to describe it. He just knew that she had died, too, and that they had both been given second chances. That it was a miracle for either of them to be there, right in that moment.

  He also knew that it had something to do with Elise.

  If he strained hard enough, he could almost remember sitting down for a lengthy conversation with Elise and that witch boyfriend of hers, James. Rylie might have been there, too. Seth couldn’t remember where they had that conversation. He couldn’t even remember when they would have had the conversation.

  The harder he tried to remember that conversation, the faster it slipped away.

  It didn’t seem to matter.

  “Fuck, man,” Abel said, and Seth grabbed his brother by the arm, dragging him toward them. They embraced tightly. His brother smelled awful, like he always did, but Seth was thrilled to deal with it.

  All those old grudges between them were meaningless now. The fights that had divided them, and the resentment that had driven Seth away.

  None of that mattered anymore. He was alive. He was safe.

  He was home.

  James Faulkner was walking on a beach. He wasn’t sure how long he’d been walking, but his legs felt as tired as though he’d been trudging along the sand all day, and the hems of his slacks were damp.

  It was approaching nighttime now. High tide slopped over the sand. The crystalline waters reflected the darkening violet of the sky.

  When he realized that he didn’t know where he was or where he was going, he stopped.

  The white condominiums to his right were familiar in their sparse lines, as was the well-kept road leading to a park that he could see at the end of the block. People were out bicycling and jogging, even though the air rapidly cooled with nightfall. Nobody even glanced in his direction. None of them seemed to realize anything might be awry.

  There was also a familiar pier nearby. Its steps had been mostly worn away by seawater, wind, and time, but it looked very much the same way that it had last time James had been there.

  He was in Klampenborg, a town north of Copenhagen. He’d once rented one of those white condos ov
erlooking the fjord because he needed the private space to perform the lengthy ritual that had bound him to Elise as her aspis.

  That part, he remembered well.

  Recent memories were somewhat hazier.

  He touched a hand to his throat, feeling where it had been severed. There was no sign of injury there.

  “Elise,” he said softly. The breeze carried her name away from him.

  The fact that James had appeared on this familiar beach in Klampenborg and that it looked so normal meant that Belphegor hadn’t seized control of the genesis.

  Elise had done it. She had ended the world…and then saved it.

  James closed his eyes and took a long inhale of the clean air. Not a hint of smoke or brimstone. Everything was normal.

  When he opened his eyes again, someone was standing on the end of the pier. James was certain that she hadn’t been there a moment before. She looked out of place alongside the leggy Danish joggers in their athletic gear; nobody else wore hip-hugging leather and a cropped black tank that revealed two inches of skin between her belt and the hem of her shirt.

  She was gazing out at the fjord, hands on her hips, as though surveying a recently finished painting for flaws. Wind lifted auburn curls around her freckled shoulders, tossing it aside so that James could see the hard line of her jaw.

  He stopped at the bottom of the steps, toes sinking into the sand. It felt like his heart wouldn’t beat. His legs certainly wouldn’t carry him another step.

  James tried to call out to her, but he couldn’t speak, either.

  He didn’t need to. She turned around as though she could feel him behind her. Sunset painted her peach skin in tones of crimson, and actual sunlight touched her cheekbones with no sign that it hurt her. The fact that she didn’t glow like liquid moonlight anymore made James ache.

  Elise’s scarred left eyebrow lifted as she smirked, silently asking, What do you think?

  James pulled himself free of the sand. He scaled the steps of the pier. The rough, uneven boards creaked underneath him as he approached her.

  “It’s perfect,” he said, answering her unspoken question. He tucked a curl behind her ear. Her skin was warm and smooth.