Once, he had been limited to the creatures that had existed in the human world, but Legion’s touch had changed that, perhaps awakened a memory of other worlds the Creator had breathed into life, or unshackled possibilities in his mind that Clay had not allowed himself to pursue.
It only meant there were infinite ways for them to hate, and to hurt, one another.
Then Legion leaped away, putting space between them, and his flesh flowed into earth once more. He stood before Clay in the Egyptian garb he favored, a hairless, earthen creature much larger than any man. Clay took a breath, waiting for Legion to attack again, but when that did not happen, he reverted to what he had always considered his true form. He became a mirror image of Legion, this time right down to the color and texture of the Egyptian clothing.
His brother leaped at him. Clay raised his arms to defend himself but that was what Legion had hoped for. Their hands joined, clasped together in an impossibly equal test of will and strength. Teeth gritted, they struggled like that, each trying to force the other back or break the grip.
When the dry, cracked clay of Legion’s palms merged with his own, he felt it happen. A tremor went through him, and he nearly collapsed. But it wasn’t like the feeling he’d had when Legion had plunged a hand into his head. That contact had stunned Clay into catatonia and unlocked memories of the infinite inside of him. Once done, it could not be done again. This time, the contact did not harm him, but it had a more insidious effect.
Images battered his mind and soul. The burning of Alexandria. The rape of street urchins in Babylon. Screams and flayed skin and scarlet splashes. The thrill of the torture devices of the Spanish Inquisition, breaking and tearing and crushing accused witches. Eating the flesh from the bones of Christians in the lion pits beneath the Coliseum. The smell of burning, diseased corpses in the death fields of plaguestricken Europe. Striding through the gas chambers at Birkenau, grinning down on the withered and dying, laughing at them as they died.
And more. And more. And more.
“No,” Clay whispered.
“Oh, yes,” Legion replied, their hands still locked together, sealed flesh to flesh, clay to clay. “He cast us out, brother. Tore us apart from each other and tossed us away like garbage.”
Clay shoved against him, drove him back a few steps. He squeezed his eyes closed as he recalled the memories that had visited him while he’d been catatonic. Legion’s words were not quite truth, but they were not lies. The Creator had ripped them in two—one the loving, questioning spirit and one the fury and frustration—and that had been how they lived their lives down across all the ages of mankind.
In all that time, not once had the Creator returned to them.
Not to bless Clay or to damn Legion.
His brother shoved back, and Clay stumbled, went down on one knee.
“That’s right, brother,” Legion rasped, pushing down from above him. “Surrender. Die. End the Almighty’s repulsive experiment. Isn’t it worth sacrificing yourself just to find out if it’ll make the son of a bitch sit up and pay attention?”
Clay looked up into those hate-filled eyes, and pistoned himself upward. He slammed his forehead into Legion’s face, and the two of them broke apart, a scattering of dirt falling from their hands as they separated.
“I have questions,” Clay admitted. “But I won’t have them answered at the expense of my friends’ lives or the fate of infinite worlds.”
Legion laughed, acid in his tone. “Daddy’s good boy.”
He launched himself at Clay, and the carnage began again.
THE ghost of Dr. Graves helped where he could. Phantom bullets had little effect on the Drows, but those dull-witted monstrosities could do nothing to harm him. Vampires and demons were another story. His ectoplasmic bullets tore their flesh, spun them around, knocked them down, and just generally pissed them off. The bloodsuckers could be killed if he eradicated their hearts. Some of the lesser demons died just as strong men would have. But there were other demons that might have ripped his soul apart and tossed it into the air like confetti, denying him eternity. He avoided them and tried to tell himself he wasn’t a coward.
Spectral and devastating, he visited all of his allies, coming to the aid of Conan Doyle and Danny, then Ceridwen. He obliterated a bulbous-eyed, disgusting demon carried by a dozen lesser abominations that looked almost like babies, destroying them all before the demon could cover Squire in the boiling, putrid mucus it vomited as some kind of weapon. Dr. Graves helped Jelena, the she-wolf, and the beasts of Eden wherever he could. The animals were brutal and swift, and soon the vampires were few and far between, and nearly all of the Coinn Iotair had been dragged down and slaughtered.
When he came upon Clay and Legion, the ghost knew he had to help. Just watching them tearing each other’s flesh and breaking bones, plucking out eyes and organs, he felt as though he might be sick. Long dead, Graves knew his revulsion and nausea could amount to nothing, but it hurt his spirit to bear witness to their carnage.
He stood there on ground that had been ravaged and scarred only moments before but which now sprouted with new green grass and flowers—Ceridwen’s doing, he felt sure.
The ghost of Dr. Graves leveled his phantom guns at the dueling shapeshifters and could not discern a single clue that might have told him which of them was his friend and which his enemy.
“Clay!” he shouted. “Give me a sign!”
Both of them tried to speak, but neither allowed the other a word. More blood flew.
An eerie keening filled the air and Graves glanced past them. A quartet of demons raced at the shapeshifters. They were awful things, with tentacles where their faces should have been, gnashing jaws in their chests, and mosquito wings.
Their arms ended in three-fingered claws with what appeared to be strange proboscises that would suck the fluids from their victims.
“Damn it!” Graves muttered.
He started firing. Bullets tore into the demons. Chest shots seemed to have the desired effect, slowing them down. Soft, pustulant flesh split, and sickly yellow, viscous fluid drooled from the wounds.
One of the shapeshifters turned to try to fight them off.
The other only laughed and used the opportunity to rip open his brother’s abdomen.
Graves swore and gritted his teeth. He had his answer.
Abandoning any pretense of solidity, the specter darted toward Legion, swept up like a wraith behind him, and raised both guns. Dr. Graves pulled both triggers again and again, splattering bits of Clay’s brother onto the attacking demons.
As Legion fell, Graves shot him a dozen more times in every part of his body.
He turned to the demons, helping Clay to finish them off, waiting for an attack from behind at any time. Legion wouldn’t be dead. The ghost could practically feel the hatred of the shapeshifter on his back.
But when the four demons were dead, tentacles and proboscises twitching on the ground, Graves and Clay turned to find that Legion had vanished.
“Where—” the ghost began.
“No idea,” Clay said, glancing around desperately, searching for a continuation of a vicious struggle neither brother could ever win.
“We’ll catch up with him,” Graves replied, though he felt little confidence that they would. Not if Legion did not want them to catch up.
Together, ghost and shapeshifter waded into the battle once more, going to the aid of their friends. Dr. Graves looked at the horizon and saw that the demons Abaddon had invited to infiltrate Eden had begun to spill from the strange constructions of their encampment in greater numbers.
The Menagerie had taken the upper hand, but only for the moment.
Now they faced the renegades of a hundred Hells.
EVE stood in the shadow of the Tree of Knowledge and licked her lips with the memory of tasting its fruit, of the nectar that ran down her chin and blossomed the light of sweet epiphany in her mind. It had woken her spirit. She ought to have felt hatred for the serpent in
the Garden, whose forked tongue had seduced her into disobeying the Creator’s will, but she had never been able to blame the devil. Once she had bitten into the fruit, though the sin stained her with every drop of juice that dripped from her lips, she could not bring herself to regret.
She had never been sorry. Not when she brought Adam to the Tree and tempted him to taste its fruit so that he would feel himself full of wonder just as she had; not even when the damned angels had driven her and Adam from paradise. It had taken her eons to confess that to herself, but she felt free, now. Somehow, she felt free.
“Come, Abaddon,” Eve sighed, running a hand over her curves and glancing up at the Tree, its succulent fruit so close, though the briars made it unobtainable. “You know you want it.”
Never had the demon looked so hideous, even in the midst of the depravity he had perpetrated against her. All traces of the elegant façade he sometimes wore had been scoured away by his hatred and determination. Eve felt sure, though, that this was not even his true face. What she saw was only scratching the surface of the real evil Abaddon represented.
Beneath his exterior there lay an endless cesspool of filth and disease, an abyss filled with malice.
Abaddon’s chest rose and fell. Crimson-black flesh rippled with movement of corded muscles underneath, and perhaps other things that slithered inside his skin. His horns had sprouted offshoots, seventy-seven prongs, so that they were now more like heavy antlers. Tiny things, demonic parasites, capered in those antlers or hung from the prongs like leeches.
When the demon grinned, jaws unhinging, hanging wide, his rows of fangs pushed outward, jutting to extreme lengths.
“There’s nothing here I want, temptress, except for your suffering,” Abaddon said, his voice a leer. “I will see you plead for death; and then I will strip away all hope and spirit and belief that there’s a scrap of goodness left in this existence, and I will see you suffer more until the light finally goes from your eyes, and the madness and bloodlust sets in. Then I will wait as long as it takes for you to free yourself, to awaken to what new carnage you might have caused. I’ll see the self-loathing and despair in your eyes, and it will begin again. Only when I’m certain there is nothing left of you but the evil, the hunger, will I snuff your flame.”
Eve heard the words, but did not listen. She saw the way the demon’s eyes flickered from her body to the Tree, to the forbidden fruit.
Abaddon took a step toward her, but there was caution in that step.
“Look at you, quivering like a schoolgirl,” Eve said, laughing softly. “You talk big, but I see the temptation in you. You’re transparent. I’m not the tender-fleshed creature I was when we first met. Are you sure you can kill me. If you don’t, you’ll never get to the fruit.”
“I didn’t come here for that, or for you!” the demon protested in a snarl, shaking his head like a bull about to charge.
“No. You didn’t. I know why you came. Because you’re a fucking coward, and you wanted someplace to hide from the Demogorgon and you figured if there was anyplace that might truly be inviolate, this would be it. But the Tree’s right here in front of you, Abaddon, and so am I. Come on. Take what you want. Taste it. I’ll give it willingly.”
That startled him. The demon narrowed his eyes and took half a step back. “You think I’m a fool?”
“Well, yeah!” she said, grinning. “But that’s not what this is about.”
Abaddon roared and started toward her. His hooves splashed in the stream, and he stopped there, raised both taloned hands, and gestured at her. Black fire ballooned into a sphere around his hands, then exploded outward, searing the air toward her.
Eve slipped aside as though the wind moved her. And perhaps it had.
That discharge of demonic power—of hellfire—burned past her and struck the tangle of briars surrounding the base of the Tree. They crackled and charred black in an instant, then fell away to nothing but cinders.
“See,” Eve said, arching an eyebrow, moving in a sort of willowy glide that accentuated her body. Her voice dropped an octave, suggesting everything a Lord of Hell could imagine.
“You didn’t want to destroy me. Not with that attack. Had you meant to, I’d be dead, wouldn’t I? You’re the demon Abaddon. You kill what you intend to kill. Which tells me what you really wanted was to destroy those briars, open yourself up a path to the Tree.”
“You’re mocking me!” the demon roared, stomping his hooves and stepping from the stream, talons opening and closing. Black pus drooled from the corners of his mouth as he stared his hatred at her. “Have you truly forgotten, Eve? Did you forget what it was like the last time I had you at my mercy? The last time I—”
“Enough,” she said, voice soft and low.
As she said it, she stepped through the section of charred bramble and reached up to the Tree. Her fingers caressed a piece of fruit, and she heard Abaddon give up a gasp that sounded like Hell’s version of a prayer.
Eve plucked the fruit from the Tree and turned to Abaddon.
There beneath the boughs of the Tree of Knowledge, she held the fruit out toward him, just as she had done once before, at the beginning of the world.
“Think of it,” she said. “You defiled the mother of humanity and despoiled Paradise. You pretend otherwise, but isn’t it all about spitting in the Creator’s eye? Ruining what is most precious to Him? Now you have a chance to taste that which has always been forbidden, to your kind most of all.”
Abaddon hesitated, almost mesmerized by the ripe fruit.
“You call me temptress, but you know there’s more to it than that. I was the first to be tempted, yes. But He put the Tree here to tempt us all. Take it, Abaddon. Taste what He wishes to deny you, like you always have. He must have a plan, even for Hell, even for your kind. Eat of the Tree and your eyes will open. You’ll see God’s plan for the universe and understand your place in it. How can you resist?”
The ripe fruit lay upon her palm, ripe and dappled with moisture. Its aroma filled the clearing, richer and sweeter than the mead of Asgard, pure as Eden itself. The fruit exuded the scent of paradise, of divinity and perfection . . . of Heaven.
Abaddon’s desire writ itself upon his features. He leaned toward her, somehow diminished by his lust for the fruit—for the knowledge she had tempted him with.
“You’ve some trick planned,” he said, his voice a rasp and his gaze riveted upon the fruit in her hand.
“Really?” Eve asked.
She lifted the fruit to her lips and sank her fangs into it, breaking the tender skin and tearing the ripe flesh. Its juice ran down over her chin and dripped treacle upon her breasts.
Eve shuddered with pleasure and anguish. She had tasted of this fruit before, and it had cost the world Paradise. The cost had been even higher than that. Yet still the taste rippled through her with bliss and an unparalleled arousal that transcended the sexual.
“Mmmm,” she murmured, letting Abaddon see her shiver, and the way it made her body arch.
Mesmerized, Abaddon came toward her. Eve took a step back and reached up for the lowest branches of the tree. She pulled herself up and perched there in the crook of the tree, holding the fruit out toward him. The demon plucked it from her hand, raised the fruit to his lips, and bit into it.
He tasted the knowledge that God had forbidden.
The demon stiffened and threw his head back, sucking air into his lungs as though it were his last breath. His red eyes went wide, and the fruit tumbled from his hand to fall to the ground, soiled by dirt and the ashes of the brambles that had surrounded the tree.
Abaddon’s mouth fell open, and he began to whimper.
The demon fell to his knees, jerking spasmodically.
The words he choked out were in the language of angels before the Fall, a language he’d not been allowed to speak since the Creator had cast him out along with Lucifer and all of his traitorous brethren. It had been the language of Paradise as well, once upon a time.
&nbs
p; “How can this be?” Abaddon asked.
The question was not for her. Eve understood that it had been directed at the one who had sown the seeds of Paradise . . . sown the seeds of everything. Twice, now, she had eaten of the Tree and she knew that the knowledge its fruit provided was a rose with thorns. That knowledge was understanding . . . awareness of the self.
As she watched, Abaddon buckled and fell to the ground, still twisting in anguish. Tears of liquid fire and blood raced down from the corners of his eyes—perhaps the first time a demon had ever wept.
“You understand now, don’t you? Bastard,” Eve whispered as she slipped down from the branches of the Tree.
“You’ve a glimmer of what it means to have a soul and to suffer the things you did to me.”
“I . . . I remember,” Abaddon said.
Weakly, hideous mouth twisted in agony, he forced himself to his knees. The demon glared up at her from beneath knitted brows and the heavy, vicious horns upon his head. All of the evil Abaddon had ever perpetrated now returned to him, but he’d been awakened to the horror of his deeds.
Eve smiled, licking the juice from her fingers. “What you feel now, demon, is remorse.”
Abaddon snarled at her. One corner of his mouth lifted to reveal black fangs, and he managed to rise on one knee. “You overestimate your God, bitch. He made me. He had a plan for me, and for all of us. And that plan included rebellion. It included our Fall. He knew what we would become. Demons were a part of the plan from the start. Whatever I am, Eve, He made me.
“Remorse? Perhaps. But hatred, and fury? Oh, yes. Most certainly. If evil is what I am, then He is to blame. If redemption is possible, I don’t want it. I spit in the face of the Creator. Piss on Him. Fuck forgiveness.”
Slowly, off-balance, Abaddon began to rise.
Sorrow enveloped Eve as she stared at the demon. She did not understand. Forgiveness was all that she had ever wanted.
“Have it your way,” she said.
Eve lunged at him. Abaddon raised his arms to try to defend himself, but the taste of the fruit had overwhelmed and drained him. One talon raked her chest, dragging furrows in the tender flesh of her breasts. But it began to heal almost instantly, even as blood mingled with the juice that had dripped on her.
Crashing Paradise Page 28
