Naked and amorphous, it shone with a brilliant white radiance that made the vampires scream in pain and sorrow. Its head seemed too large for its body, and its face was etched with madness and anguish. Its radiance seared Eve’s flesh, and it nearly crippled her just to look at the Guardian of the Gate, but she also could not look away. This was divinity.
Yet it was also tainted.
The Guardian’s eyes were missing; in their place were black hollows, as dark as the angel’s radiance was bright.
Somehow, in the eternity that had passed since mankind had been banished from the Garden of Eden, the Guardian had been blinded. Eve wondered if its eyes had been torn out in some prior battle to protect the Garden Gate, or if the Guardian had removed its own eyes.
It howled in rage and despair and lunacy. The Guardian raised its sword of fire and listened. Duergar began to rise.
The Guardian twitched, hearing the noise, and the blade swept downward. With a roar, Duergar shot to his feet and began to raise his axe, but Eve could see that he would be too late.
One of the Drows, huge and ugly with its misshapen face and yellow tusks, stepped between the blind, burning angel and its master. The sword of fire sheared the lumbering boneeater in two, searing the flesh as it cut through the Drow.
Duergar raised his left arm, and the fiery blade scored the crimson-black armor with a clang and a hiss of melting metal, but the sword did not cut through. Cleaving through the bone and gristle of the Drow’s body had slowed the blow enough.
Duergar turned the blind angel’s attack away even as the two halves of the dead Drow spilled wetly to the sand around them. He swung the axe and hacked off the Guardian’s arm, which fell to the ground still clutching the flaming sword. A low roar of triumph issued from the mouths of the Drows, and they closed in around the burning angel, battering it with maces and hacking with axes. Duergar choked it with his bare hands, and Eve could smell his flesh burning. But from where she lay on the ground, she could see the burning sword and brilliant white light of its amputated arm turn to blazing liquid and flow back to the angel. In that same moment, when it touched him—flowed into him—the Guardian manifested a new arm and sword, and the burning blade began to swing.
Drows shouted death cries as the angel struck them down, and Eve’s cold black heart soared. A part of her wanted desperately to see Eden again, and always had—but not like this.
Jophiel, Abaddon, and all of their allies ought to be scourged from the face of the world, and she only prayed she would be chosen as God’s instrument for the task. If not, she’d do it just for fun.
The ground shook. Duergar bent to touch the earth, and the sand swept up and began to drag at the angel’s legs, slowing it down for a moment. But whatever Fey magic the half-blood commanded, it would not stop an angel of the Lord. The blind Guardian tore free. Maces bludgeoned its face. Another axe blade severed its sword hand at the wrist, and Eve began to think the battle would last for eons. But attrition had begun to eat away at the Drows. They might injure the angel time after time, but its essence came back together almost instantly. They couldn’t destroy it. Yet each time it attacked, the Guardian killed at least one of the Drows. Soon, Duergar would have no more Drows to serve him, and the vampires weren’t going to be any help. Palu and the others—even the most ancient and powerful among them—couldn’t even approach a being radiating with the touch of God.
The weight of the blood chains seemed to have grown. It felt as though the flesh on her left shoulder had torn, but she ignored the pain, studying the angel Jophiel and Abaddon.
The Hell-Lord maintained his smooth, exotic façade, but Jophiel seemed to grow. His angelic aspect expanded, wings spreading wide, a radiant whiteness coming from within, laced with a tint of red. Side by side, angel and demon began to move toward the slaughter taking place in front of the little mosque-style building, out there under the nighttime desert sky.
What are you two thinking?
Even as the question entered her mind, Abaddon stepped sidewise and vanished within the white radiance of Jophiel’s angelic presence. Eve could see a man-shaped stain deep inside Jophiel’s brightness. Silently and swiftly, Jophiel circled around to the Guardian’s right. The towering, hollow-eyed angel slashed viciously at one of the Drows nearby, then blocked at attack from Duergar, even as Jophiel darted toward him without a sound. The Guardian noticed nothing, and Eve understood.
Somehow, Jophiel had masked Abaddon’s presence. The Guardian didn’t sense the demon approaching.
“No,” Eve rasped. Then she bucked against the blood chains. Despite the weight of their magic, she rose an inch off the ground. Where the skin had been torn on her left shoulder, the chains cut deeply and pulled, ripping through her jacket and blouse and pulling the skin away. The wound seeped tears of dark, viscous blood and the chain slid into her flesh. If she moved, it would saw deeper.
“Guardian!” she shouted, trying to keep as still as possible.
“Abaddon is here! The demon attacks to your right!”
The vampires swarmed her, kicking and punching and twining their fingers in her hair. Palu stripped a light cotton jacket off a female leech, wadded it up, and forced it into Eve’s mouth.
The towering angel had responded to the sound of her voice, whipping his blazing sword to the right, face upturned as he tried to sense the presence of the demon. But now as Eve managed to peer between the vampires who bludgeoned her, she caught a glimpse of Duergar taking advantage of the Guardian’s distraction. The half-blood swung his battle axe and buried it in the back of the gigantic angel. The Guardian threw back its head and let out a scream of pain. Fire erupted from the wound in its back, and the axe melted and fell to the sand, burning black.
The angel Jophiel stepped around behind the Guardian, even as his blind brother screamed out to God in a language that predated the world itself. Abaddon emerged from within Jophiel like some phantasm.
Vampires clawed at Eve wherever the chains did not protect her flesh. The blows tugged on her bonds, and the demon-forged chain slithered deeper into the wound on her shoulder and began to cut across the tops of her breasts and her calves. She just lay there, taking the violence, not feeling, not caring, watching as the demon Abaddon cast off his human face and stood once more in the grotesque grandeur of his infernal nature. The demon’s flesh looked purple-black in the darkness, but it glistened bloodred in the radiance of the mad Guardian’s presence.
The giant, blinded angel had a grip on Duergar’s throat, sword raised high, his touch searing the half-blood creature’s flesh. But the moment that Abaddon took on his true form, the Guardian raised his head as though catching his scent. He sensed the demon. Hurling Duergar away from him, the Guardian spun to face Abaddon.
A tiny voice in the back of Eve’s mind urged the demon on—the whisper of a serpent, so familiar—and she hated herself for the knowledge that it was her own voice. She yearned for the Garden Gate to be opened, and if the pitiful, eyeless creature that guarded it had to die, that small part of her cared not at all. Her heart and mind attacked such thoughts at once, eradicating them, but she could never deny them.
Abaddon moved too swiftly. Even as the Guardian brought that blade of fire around in an arc that would have removed the demon’s head, Abaddon stepped in close. He reached up with both hands, leaving himself vulnerable to attack, and plunged long talons into the black, empty sockets where the angel’s eyes should have been. With an obscene grin, Abaddon tore the rest of the Guardian’s face away, leaving a gaping hole that seemed a window into some dark void, an endless abyss.
Eve whimpered. She had wanted to be welcomed back to Eden someday, not to return like this.
The demon reached his arms deep into the angel’s ruined face and continued to tear, widening the rip in the fabric of the world. Abaddon bent the Guardian backward, opened his jaws, and vomited black blood and hellfire into the void where the angel’s face had been.
Jophiel screamed in triumph, and
in that moment, when Eve glanced at the beautiful angel, she saw that there was in him even more iniquity than in Abaddon, though the demon had violated her, tainted her soul for eternity, and driven her to madness. Jophiel still wore the façade of an angel, but within, he had more of Hell in his heart than the most perverse of demons.
A terrible ripping noise filled the air, rolled out across the desert, then the pure white radiance of the Guardian flashed so bright that the vampires screamed and dropped to their knees. Even Abaddon roared in agony. Eve squeezed her eyes closed against that pure light, wishing it would burn the monster out of her—take the obscene hunger away. With her eyes shut, she could hear the moaning of the surviving Drows and even of Duergar.
A cool breeze passed over Eve, easing the pain of her wounds, and she caught the scent of lilacs on the air. Slowly, hope fluttering in her chest, she opened her eyes. As she did, she realized that she no longer lay upon sand. Beneath her was sweet grass. Nearby she heard the burble of a stream.
Her eyes beheld rolling hills and distant woods. For a moment, she let herself believe that somehow all of her enemies had been destroyed.
Then she heard the dark laughter of the demon and the giddy cry of the angel Jophiel’s delight. She shifted her head and saw the vampires and Drows rising. Duergar limped as he moved to join Abaddon and Jophiel. The three of them stood before the true Garden Gate, a gleaming wall of polished wood with marble posts. There were no slits in the gate, no way to see into Eden, and Eve knew by instinct that neither the angel nor the demon would be able to fly over the Gate—or if they did, they would find only more hills and woods on the other side—and the Drows would not be able to tunnel under it.
They existed now, all of them, in some strange limbo realm outside the Garden of Eden. Through some divine power, the Garden had been removed from the earthly plane and existed in this place, this perfection that Eve sensed all around her. It had remained here, untainted by the sin of the human world. The Guardian had defended the door, but some past intruder had blinded the angel, tainting him at the same time. Perhaps Abaddon had done the deed himself in a prior attempt to gain entry. Regardless, it must have given the Guardian a vulnerability it had never possessed before, a strange kind of rot.
And perhaps the Guardian itself had been the door into this limbo . . . so that they could now stand before the Gate of Eden.
The vampires roused themselves, simply staring at the Gate, both terrified and elated. Jophiel’s face was etched with a passion akin to lust. Abaddon stared at the Gate a moment longer, then turned and strode toward Eve. He reached down, wrapped his fingers in the chains, and carried her back toward the marble-and-oak Gate. The blood chains bit farther into her flesh, and she clamped her teeth together, refusing to cry out in pain.
The demon held her aloft as though she were some small child. He reached out, and tore away the chains, which snapped like twine and fell with Eve to the grass. She grunted as she struck the ground, hissing in pain and hatred. The chains became angel’s blood once more and soaked the grass around her.
“Open it,” Abaddon said.
Eve climbed to her feet. Where the chains had cut into her flesh, already she had begun to heal. The skin and muscle would knit quickly. She flexed her fingers and stared up at the seething, pustulant face of the demon.
“I don’t think so.”
Jophiel’s wings enclosed him a moment, and when they unfurled, the glory had gone from his aspect, and once again she saw him as the effete, elegant, arrogant creature who had dogged her for so many centuries.
“Eve, you want to see beyond the Gate as much as we do,” the angel said.
“Not like this.”
Abaddon laughed. “You still hope for your pathetic redemption? Forgiveness. You had smeared your own soul with the stink of shit before I ever touched you. You’re filthy with sin, cunt. I ruined your body, and took great pleasure in it, though I’d no idea the plague I would begin. But the spirit—that was your doing.”
“He gives forgiveness to those who are worthy of it, who truly desire it,” she whispered, fingers hooked into claws, canines elongating.
“Oh, yes, it’s easy to see how much you desire forgiveness for what you’ve become,” Abaddon replied with a laugh.
Duergar laughed softly, stepping up behind the angel and the demon. Palu and the vampire horde laughed as well, a susurrus of insidious mockery. The Drows were too dullwitted to laugh.
Jophiel gestured toward the door. “Open it, Eve. You believe yourself indestructible, but you cannot possibly hope to defeat us all. Open it, or we’ll rip your heart out, end your life, and you will never have the redemption you seek.”
Hatred burned in her, but she heard the truth in the angel’s words. She approached the Gate, staring up at them. Her dead heart could not beat, but she imagined the racing of her pulse. Fear took her over. She did not want to know if the Gate of Eden would open for her, if she had earned that much.
But if she did not try, she would never know, and she would never be able to try again.
The Gate of Eden was not locked. Anyone could push it open if they were pure. Eve put her hands on the door and pushed.
Nothing happened. She had been banished at the beginning of time, and nothing had changed since. Horror filled her unlike anything she had felt in millennia. All of her sins, as a woman and a demon, fell upon her with more crushing weight than the chains that had bound her. Once more she dropped to her knees, staring up at the Gate of Eden.
IN her mind, she slips back to that moment when she had awakened, not far from the Garden. The demon had fallen upon her and violated her in every way, pouring his blood and his hellish seed into her, breaking her bones, tearing out her hair, beating her, tasting her flesh and her blood. For hour upon hour, day upon day, night after night, he had pierced her, feeding her only bits of his own flesh, sips of his own blood, subjecting her to every obscenity he could imagine while using his infernal will to keep her alive. She had been cast out of the arms of Heaven, but Hell received her in a warm embrace.
Now she wakes and finds that her soul is stained with the blood and lust of Abaddon, but her body is not broken. She can still feel his filthy touch, still feel the way he’d torn her up inside, the tearing of her scalp, the massive, sharp phallus with which he’d fucked her every orifice, and created new ones.
Madness rises up inside her. She feels it happening, feels her mind breaking again, just as it had during the eternity she’d spent in his grasp. But with the madness, there is something else—the hunger. The taste of his blood is still in her mouth, and she must have more. If not Abaddon’s blood, then the blood of man.
Adam’s blood.
Her mind screams at the thought. The tiny shard within her that is still Eve reels from the horror of it, and she staggers to her feet. Adam is not far away, she knows. He will be searching for her. His scent is carried to her on the night wind. All she has to do is go to him and her hunger can be sated.
Eve cannot. She flees, screaming at the moon, racing as fast as she can away from Adam, knowing that there will be others. The hunger is clawing at her soul and gnawing at her gut. She can taste the blood on her lips and in the back of her throat.
She is lost. The floodwaters of madness rise around her, and she begins to drown in them. Eve is a beast, then. A monster.
It is an eternity before the madness will recede, and she will be alone for all of that time. God has turned a blind eye to her.
EVE blinked and looked around, barely aware that she’d slipped away, wondering how long her mind had wandered—how far. Only seconds, she thought, from the expressions upon the faces of her most hated enemies. The memory had been so strong it had overwhelmed her, just as sorrow took her now.
God had turned a blind eye to her at the dawn of mankind, and still she was beneath His notice.
“As I told you,” Jophiel said to Abaddon, “the Gate will not open for her.”
Duergar snarled at them, the axe
still in his hand, rising slowly. “What is this, godlings? Vows were made.”
“And will be kept,” Abaddon snapped. And then he smiled. “We are prepared.”
The demon raised a claw and beckoned toward the vampires.
One of them pulled away from the others, a pale creature unfamiliar to her, with eyes an icy blue. As the vampire walked toward her, his flesh rippled fluidly, and he began to change.
Eve had seen such a transformation hundreds of times before, but she had only ever seen one creature perform it. The vampire grew larger, flesh altering, turning to a rich earthen clay, dry and spiderwebbed with cracks. Despite his clay flesh, he was human in every other aspect, eight or nine feet tall and massively broad of shoulder. He wore a short garment in the Egyptian style.
She knew him. Eve knew him so very well.
Fresh horror flooded her mind, but then he moved closer to her, a smile on his face. Eve stared into his eyes, studying them, and she knew. Not a speck of tenderness existed in those eyes.
“You’re not him,” she said. “You’re not Clay.”
9
THE ghost of Dr. Graves lingered on a marble balcony overlooking the Adriatic Sea and the walled Old City of Dubrovnik. The whitewashed walls and buildings had an almost spectral glow, and the orange roof tiles turned red in the moonlight. When the gathering had been planned, Conan Doyle had acquired this house high on a hill above Dubrovnik’s old port, but its purpose had changed. It had been meant as a place for him to rest. Now it was their war room. An unlikely and beautiful place for such endeavors.
Often, particularly of late, he wondered about Arthur’s methods.
But he never doubted the man’s resourcefulness.
The Mediterranean breeze whispered across the tropical landscape, and Graves wished that he could feel it. He held up one spectral hand and studied the city below through his gauzily transparent flesh. When he lowered his arm, the rich beauty of Dubrovnik filled him with a terrible longing. That obscured view seemed more appropriate for one such as he—out of focus, intangible. It seemed wrong, somehow, that Graves could see all the vibrant life and color of the place and not be able to take part in it.
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