Then she had him. Eve tore her claws along both sides of Abaddon’s face, slicing his eyes, which burst and dribbled black-red fluid. Abaddon screamed and doubled over, hands going to his face. Eve drove her knee into his head, and something in his skull cracked. She wrapped the fingers of one hand in the tangle of his horns and drove her fist into his chest over and over, breaking bones.
Abaddon tried to strike out at her with a hoof. Eve twisted his head to get him off-balance, exposing his legs, and shattered one with a hard kick. Again, the demon screamed.
He thrust upward with such strength that one branch of his horns snapped off in her hand. Blinded, the pits of his eyes gouting foul ichor, Abaddon reached for her. Eve thrust out her right hand, slipped her fingers into the sockets where his eyes had been, and dragged him to the ground once more.
Her body still sang with the blood of the angel, but even if she had been withering with hunger she would not have drunk from Abaddon.
Eve crouched above him, his life hers to destroy, the demon at her mercy at long last. It took all of the strength she could muster to keep herself from killing him.
“Bitch,” Abaddon rasped in the language of angels.
She lifted him effortlessly from the ground, twisted, and hurled him into the Tree of Knowledge, impaling the demon upon its branches. For the third time, Abaddon screamed.
Limply, he hung there.
Then he uttered a low, gurgling laugh.
“You think this will kill me?” Abaddon asked.
Eve moved nearer to him, crushing a fallen piece of fruit under her foot. Hatred and revulsion welled up within her so fiercely that she shook with it. Abaddon was correct. Though he might not be able to extricate himself from the tree’s branches, he would not die. He might hang there for eternity.
With a trembling breath, she released all of the venom that had built up in her heart. Eve reached up and touched the side of Abaddon’s ruined face.
“I . . .” she began, and faltered.
She hung her head.
“I forgive you.”
The demon howled his rage and refusal, but he could not deny that which she had given him. A burden lifted from her.
It had been the most difficult task of her immortal life, but it had been done.
Perhaps she had not earned the Creator’s redemption yet.
Or maybe she had, and He had simply not deigned to share the news with her. Regardless, she had found her own redemption within her own heart. Eve had put the past behind her. She had forgiven herself.
That would have to be good enough.
A smile touched her lips. Once again, she had visited this place and become newly aware of her nakedness. Some clothes would be nice. She would set off back toward the encampment that the demon’s confederates had set up and, hopefully, along the way she would find a vampire whose clothes would fit her. The idea troubled her. The damned leeches never had a lot of fashion sense. It was too much to hope that she’d be able to kill one who was wearing something stylish.
Eve turned on one heel and strode from the glade where the Tree of Knowledge grew, newly adorned. Abaddon shrieked after her, but she found it was simple enough to shut out his cries and listen instead to the wind and the cries of the birds of Paradise.
17
DUERGAR roared and raised his axe. In response, the ground in front of him rose in a wave, huge stones surging up, rushing toward her like a battering ram.
Ceridwen raised her elemental staff. Pure, golden light swept down from the head of the staff and splashed across that wave of churning earth, and it stopped. Green grass and vividly colored flowers grew from the mound left behind.
With her free hand, she reached up into the air. The winds rushed away from her, swept across the encampment to the tallest tree at the edge, and the tree bent like a reed, its branches reaching for her even as her fingers beckoned.
Duergar spun, eyes wide, and raised his axe, but too late.
The tree hammered him against the ground.
The half-blood warrior heaved his body upward, trying to free himself from the weight of the tree that, like a mortar and pestle, ground him into the dirt. Ceridwen took the moment to cast a quick glance around her. The vampires had been either driven off or exterminated; only a few of them lingered there in the demons’ camp. Whatever dark magic Abaddon had used to keep the dead Drows shambling around had been extinguished. They lay in heaps of rotting flesh.
Beneath them, new grass and flowers bloomed.
Ceridwen took a deep breath and inhaled the pure air of Paradise. The wind gently tousled her hair and ruffled the silken gown she wore. Never had she felt so entirely a part of nature. The elements seemed to flow through her, to touch her heart and soul, and her spirit spread out across all of Eden.
In the sky, a gigantic, golden-feathered bird tore into the flesh of an amorphous demon that hung in the air like a jellyfish, poison tendrils dangling to the ground. The bird could only be Clay. Ceridwen reached a hand up and summoned the winds of Eden. Powerful gusts rushed against the translucent demon and pushed it farther skyward. She drove the bottom of her elemental staff into the new grass beneath her feet.
The fire that churned within the ice sphere atop the staff burned brighter, then seared out in an arc of raging flame that engulfed those deadly tendrils. The fire raced up toward the hanging belly of the thing as though each was a fuse.
A piercing shriek tore across the clearing, and Ceridwen spun to see that it came from a trio of hideous, gigantic hags who were attacking Dr. Graves. The ghost dived clear of their reach and fired his spectral guns in a staccato thunder that blew holes through the monstrous creatures, scattering their raw, pink flesh in gobbets across the clearing.
Squire, Danny, and Shuck were arrayed in the midst of a savage battle with the onslaught of insectoid demons that had begun to swarm toward the Menagerie. Animals summoned by Jelena, the she-wolf, ran rampant through the encampment, tearing at demons and the remaining vampires and trampling underfoot the stinking hounds from Faerie, the Coinn Iotair.
“Ceri!”
The sorceress whipped around to see Arthur running toward her. His hands and arms were coated in green-black demon blood, and crimson stained his clothes. Beyond him lay the scorched and twisted remains of several demons, and farther in the distance others had begun to emerge from the gigantic cocoon that had been spun in the center of the encampment.
But Conan Doyle wasn’t crying out to her for help.
He extended one long finger, pointing past her.
Ceridwen’s eyelids fluttered, and she drew a deep breath.
She could feel the ground beneath her tremble, translating a message, even as the wind gusted against her back. Much as she appreciated Arthur’s concern and his warning, they were unnecessary.
“Die, Fey witch!” Duergar roared as he careened toward her.
With a whisper to the elements, Ceridwen summoned the wind. It lifted her, swept her from his path, and pushed Duergar, increasing his momentum so that he stumbled and crashed to the ground, tusks and chin digging up the new grass.
Conan Doyle arrived at her side.
“He would have attacked from behind, the blackguard!”
Sometimes she loved how old-fashioned Arthur could be.
Ceridwen arched an eyebrow and looked at her lover.
“He’s through,” she said, her tone strangely light, almost foreign to her ears, as though she were speaking with the voice of Eden herself.
Duergar snarled, snuffling in the dirt like a wild boar, and forced himself up on arms that rippled with muscle. The effort made him groan. His face was torn and bloody. His leather armor had been cracked by the tree she’d hammered him with, and Ceridwen could only assume that his bones had taken similar damage.
His huge fist still clutched the axe with which he had slain so many of her kinsmen during the Twilight Wars. Its blade had been stained with the blood of her aunt and many cousins, some close and some distant.
He’d been a traitor and a conniver, a rapist and murderer. Always, he called himself a warrior, but Duergar had never had the honor to bear that title.
“Damned fairy whore!” the half-blood creature said, with the dull-witted cruelty of his Drow kin in his eyes.
“Bastard,” Conan Doyle sneered, orbs of dark blue magic pulsing around his fists.
Duergar rose. “Oh, of course, let the magician come to your rescue. It won’t help, Ceridwen. The two of you tried to kill me time and again in the Wars, and never could manage it. Not even after I split your aunt in two with prick and axe.”
“Times have changed,” Ceridwen said softly. “I have changed.”
Conan Doyle cursed loudly as he attacked, crackling indigo leaping from his hands and striking Duergar, driving the half-blood staggering backward. That dark light enveloped him in an eyeblink and, as Ceridwen watched, stripped the thick, tough hide from Duergar’s face, hands, and arms. All of his exposed skin scraped away, and the warrior roared in an agony like nothing the sorceress had ever heard. Even the lids of his eyes had been peeled from his face.
Duergar never dropped the axe. As he screamed, his eyes seethed with hatred, and he took a step forward, raising the blade. Conan Doyle swore and began to cast a new spell, one comprised of some guttural language, a piece of dark magic she would never wish him to stain his soul with.
“No, Arthur. I told you, he is through.”
The half-blood laughed even as he choked with agony. He staggered forward.
Ceridwen felt the presence of Eden in her very soul. She whispered to the soil, to the heart of Paradise, and with a gesture, roots thrust up from the ground beneath Duergar. With his armor already cracked and torn and his thick hide scoured away, he had nothing to protect him. The roots impaled him through the legs and chest and throat. They twined themselves around him and dragged him down. Bones shattered and organs burst wetly as the roots pulled Duergar down under the soil, tearing him apart.
Moments later, he had disappeared, leaving only splashes of blood on the grass and on several trees that had begun to grow to replace parts of the Garden that had once stood on that spot.
The axe lay on the grass, the only proof that Duergar had ever existed at all.
“Ceri,” Conan Doyle began, hesitant, perhaps surprised by the savagery of the half-blood’s destruction.
“I wasn’t alone, Arthur. I summoned the elements, but Eden destroyed him, in the end. Though I, for one, would call it self-defense.”
Conan Doyle nodded and reached out to take her hand.
His simple presence at her side gave her comfort and reminded her of the warmth and weight of flesh, of life beyond the touch of elemental spirits.
She touched his face and parted her lips to speak his name again, but new cries of rage and pain filled the clearing.
Demons shrieked in voices unlike anything ever heard by human or Fey. Side by side, they turned to see that the demon hordes had not been thinned nearly enough to claim victory.
Things crawled along the ground and floated in the sky, and where they passed, the purity of the Garden became freshly despoiled.
“It isn’t over,” Ceridwen said.
“It’s only begun,” Conan Doyle replied.
Voices called to them. Ceridwen turned to see Danny and Squire running toward them, still armed with Gemini swords and daggers, and the hobgoblin carrying that great, heavy blunderbuss. Shuck bounded along behind, snapping at demons that tried to give chase.
The Menagerie began to gather, there in the clearing where the dregs of a hundred Hells had invaded Eden and still fought to conquer it. Dr. Graves’s phantom guns barked again and again, and the ghost drifted in from their left. From the right came Clay, wielding Gemini Blades and wearing the cracked-earth form he considered his natural face.
Falcons, ravens, eagles, and dozens of other birds soared through the sky, tearing at the demons that could fly. Jaguars and apes, cobras and rams attacked on the ground. Seeing the Menagerie clustering in one place in the clearing, the huge she-wolf broke off from the battle and loped toward them, rising on her rear legs and pulling open her skin like a cloak to reveal Jelena’s face and body beneath.
“The odds are against us,” the she-wolf growled as she ran toward them.
“Yeah, ya think?” Squire snapped.
The Menagerie formed a circle, backs to one another. The demons began to surround them. A monstrosity covered with eyes, each of its six arms wielding a fiery weapon forged in the pits of some stygian sewer, let out a cry and raised its hands. The fire snuffed out instantly, all of its weapons going dark, and it collapsed to the ground.
Eve stood behind it. She’d torn open the back of the demon and cored out whatever piece of filth acted as its heart.
The vampiress trampled the demon’s gelid remains. She wore loose, ill-fitting leather and black silk, clothes borrowed from some defeated enemy.
“The gang’s all here,” she said, a grin suffusing her face with bliss and an ethereal beauty even she had never managed before. “Now the party can start.”
A chorus of demonic wails and roars went up, and they started toward her. Eve joined the Menagerie at the center of the onslaught.
“Abaddon?” Conan Doyle asked.
“Taken care of.”
“You killed the son of a bitch?” Danny said.
Eve smiled. “No. But he’s off the board, and he’s suffering.”
“Good enough,” Dr. Graves said.
The demons began to shuffle closer. A splintering sound crashed across the sky. They all turned to see the strange cocoon structure cracking and pieces of it falling away to shatter on the ground. Trees grew up from within it, reaching for the sky, branches spreading. The earthen mound the demons had built began to tremble, and a moment later, branches began to shoot up from beneath that as well.
Squire whistled. “Holy fuck.”
Clay stared at Ceridwen. “When did you become this powerful?”
“It isn’t me,” she said. “It’s Eden.”
The demons seemed unsure for a moment what to do, then, slowly, their ranks began to break.
“Hey, boss,” Squire said. “We’ve got company.”
Ceridwen looked at the hobgoblin and saw that he stared off toward the edge of the clearing. In the thick trees and wild undergrowth of the Garden, figures had begun to emerge. At first there seemed only a few, but as several of them started out of the trees and across the clearing, dozens of other silhouettes appeared in the dark shadows of Eden. At least two of the figures that strode toward them were familiar. One was Nigel Gull, the mage who had once been Conan Doyle’s friend and ally and whose face had been twisted by dark magic so that his head was like that of a horse.
The other was Lorenzo Sanguedolce.
“Sweetblood,” Conan Doyle rasped.
“Oh, shit,” Squire muttered.
A muttering of his name went through the clearing. His legend hung with dread over the denizens of a thousand realms. It seemed to Ceridwen that even the demons held their breath. If Sanguedolce was here, with Gull alongside and who knew how many followers, there was no telling what he might be up to. Had he come to ally himself with Abaddon and Jophiel, but arrived too late?
When Sanguedolce approached the outer ring of demons that surrounded the Menagerie, one of the creatures sniffed and turned to glare defiantly at him.
The archmage glanced at the tall, thin, batlike demon. Fire erupted from Sanguedolce’s eye—from the Eye of Eoghain, which he’d once plucked from Conan Doyle’s skull—and incinerated the demon where it stood. The fire was rimmed with orange but had a black core, as though the center of that inferno was an oil slick, or an eye itself into an abyss even demons wished not to view.
More of Sanguedolce’s followers—his army—stepped from the wilds of the Garden and started toward the demons.
They scattered from the path of the mage who had once been mentor and teacher to both Conan Doyle and Nigel Gull.
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In moments, Sanguedolce and Gull stood with the Menagerie, facing the demons. Not a word was spoken.
The demons fled. Their ranks broke, and they flew and lumbered, slithered and darted back toward the Garden Gate in an exodus from Eden like nothing the angels who’d driven Adam and Eve from the place could ever have imagined.
Everyone turned to stare at Sanguedolce and Gull, even as Sweetblood’s many followers filled the clearing. There were creatures from many realms, many breeds, some hideous and some beautiful. The members of the Menagerie seemed ready for a new battle.
Then Ceridwen noticed Conan Doyle’s face. She narrowed her eyes and studied his expression in astonishment.
He did not seem at all surprised.
Conan Doyle smoothed his blood-stiffened jacket and ran his fingers through his hair. He took a deep breath and patted his pockets idly, as though he expected to find his pipe.
“I wondered when you might arrive to show your hand,” he said, almost to the air, although all those gathered fully understood that he spoke only to his former mentor.
Sanguedolce smiled. “You’ve been expecting me? How could you have known I would come?”
“All the pieces fit, Lorenzo. Elementary, sir. Elementary.”
EDEN continued to reclaim the area that Abaddon’s invasion had caused to rot and wither. A single tree grew up in seconds from beneath the cairn-hut the Drows had built for Duergar, shattering it and scattering stones into the tall grass and flowering plants that had begun to thrive there. Demon and Drow corpses were swallowed up by the earth or hidden by the tangle of the Garden’s swift growth. Soon, there would be almost no trace at all of the taint that the demons had brought to Paradise.
Conan Doyle surveyed the small army that had arrived with Sanguedolce and Gull. Many of them he recognized—sorcerers, necromancers, mediums, and an array of monsters that humanity considered nothing but legend. Several of those who followed Sweetblood the Mage had been at the council Conan Doyle had convened in Dubrovnik.
Crashing Paradise Page 29
