by S. M. Reine
This was an illusion, just like everything else had been an illusion, but it was a convincing one. The air on her skin felt real. The sheets under her felt real, too. Almost as real as the sadness that rolled through her, thick as the blood of the Tree.
Dead.
Elise had lost James once before, when he had been possessed by the Hand of Death. Her only choice had been to kill him. She had raged against life and death, fought to bring him back, and won. When he had returned to life, they had shared one heartbeat, one soul, one mind. They were two halves of a whole.
Since then, Elise had suspected that James’s death would mean hers, too. A soul couldn’t survive being severed into pieces.
But he was gone, and she hadn’t died—maybe beTimecause she couldn’t die anymore. And instead, she was trapped in Heaven.
How dare he have left without her?
She heard the door open. Dishes clinked together as a man entered carrying a tray of breakfast. “Good morning,” Adam said. The words didn’t seem to come from His mouth. He spoke from everywhere and nowhere at once.
Elise couldn’t bring herself to reply. Her hands were limp in her lap.
He set the tray beside her and sat on the edge of the bed. “You look sad,” He said, pulling a lock of her hair between His fingers, rubbing the silken curls with His thumb. When she didn’t respond, Adam eventually dropped His hand. “I made you breakfast. It’s your favorite.”
Her favorite, dragged from her memories of the way that James used to cook breakfast for her—which he would never do again.
She tried to eat.
Adam watched her as if fascinated by the process. His eyes never left hers as she lifted the toast to her mouth, sank her teeth into the bread, and felt the all-too-real flavor of butter spreading over her tongue.
Elise stared at the near-perfect circle of tooth marks she left behind on the toast. When He had first brought breakfast in, she thought that it looked like there had been strawberry freezer jam on the toast, but she hadn’t tasted it when she’d taken a bite. It was gone now, as if it had never been there at all.
Subtle inconsistencies. The lie betraying itself.
“What’s bothering you, Elise?” He asked. “Isn’t it perfect?”
“Perfect,” she echoed, taking another bite.
It was toasted exactly the way that she liked it, missing freezer jam aside. She had no appetite for it.
Elise set the food aside and pushed the blankets off of her body. She was wearing a nightgown again. Naked, slave leather, a nightgown. Were any of them real? Did it matter?
Adam’s hand trailed down her shoulder, fingers slipping underneath the strap to brush bare skin, and chills pricked Elise’s skin. “Do you like it?” He asked. “I chose it for you.”
It looked nothing like the kind of clothing Elise would choose to wear. It had lace around the high neckline, a skirt of modest length. It felt like she had stepped into another woman’s wardrobe.
Did she “like” it? What a stupid fucking question to ask.
He leaned in, and she knew that He was going to kiss her. She didn’t stop Him. Didn’t move.
His lips trailing down her shoulder felt like razor blades slicing through her skin, as if she should look down and see exposed muscle, bone, gushing flesh. Elise sucked in a gasp despite herself.
Over His shoulder, she saw Metaraon watching from the corner, arms folded, and an expectant look on his face. He was shadowed by the bookshelves, toying with one of the statuettes on the altar. Just seeing the angel in James’s bedroom made her stomach lurch with hate in a way that could only be matched by her hatred for Him.
The door, he mouthed silently, nodding behind Elise.
She turned. James’s door was white, with four panels and a gold doorknob.
Elise closed her eyes and wished that she could be somewhere, anywhere, but that bedroom. She never wanted to think of that ordinary life again. She didn’t want to remember how good life had once been, and how little time she had gotten to appreciate it.
If Elise were to be trapped in Heaven, then she didn’t want the illusion of peace. She wanted to suffer in truth.
Adam leaned back. “What is truth?” He whispered, as if He could hear her thoughts. “What is real?”
Bitter fury surged in Elise.
She shoved the tray off of the bed with a scream, upending the plates. The mug shattered against the bedside table. Coffee splashed over the carpet. Elise ripped the lamp off of the side table and hurled it at Adam. He didn’t move to dodge. He simply wasn’t sitting on the edge of the bed anymore, having reappeared across the room.
Jumping out of bed, Elise lunged at Metaraon, hands extended.
But Adam was there first. He stepped between them and backhanded Elise, hard enough to make her vision fuzz.
She hit the ground. The carpet smelled like damp soil and grass.
Elise pushed onto her hands and knees, but before she could get up, Adam pressed His foot between her shoulder blades and flattened her to the ground again.
“Is it so hard to walk through a door?” Adam asked. He wasn’t speaking to her now. He talked over her head to Metaraon, as if she had vanished. “Do I ask too much?”
“She’s stubborn. She just needs a little coercion.”
“I don’t want to have to hurt her,” He said. “I want her to love me as much as I love her.”
Elise tried to push onto her hands and knees again, but His foot was too heavy.
“She loves you, but she’ll have to be shown that,” Metaraon said.
“Fine,” Adam said. His voice had turned deep and booming. His foot seared Elise’s flesh, increasing in intensity until it felt like a hot poker held to her spine. The moisture in her eye sizzled, evaporated. The illusion of quiet domesticity had vanished so quickly. “If I must.”
Time slipped. The carpet disappeared from underneath Elise’s feet.
She blinked and found herself standing on the first floor of Motion and Dance, in the remodeled garage. Heavy red drapes concealed the door leading outside. Mirrors covered the other three walls, interrupted only by a single door: an ordinary white rectangle split by four panels.
The narrow windows didn’t show Reno on the other side. Branches pressed against the glass, as if hoping to punch through to her with brittle fingers. Gray light still somehow suffused the room, though the light fixtures were dim.
Elise looked down at herself. She wore black leggings, a sport’s bra, and fingerless gloves with padded knuckles. Training gear.
“Are you ready?” asked a masculine voice from behind her.
For an instant, Elise closed her eyes and imagined that it was James speaking. They had trained together a thousand times in that room. Sometimes, it was in the art of dance; sometimes, in the art of fighting. He would attack her, they would wrestle, someone would win the skirmish—usually Elise—and they would both laugh as they prepared to fight again.
They would be happy, Elise and James.
But the moment of lying to herself didn’t last long, and when she opened her eyes, it was Adam who circled around her. He was wearing a t-shirt, sweat pants, and the kind of low-soled shoes that dancers liked to use. Mimicking James.
“Ready for what?” Elise asked.
He swept a hand toward the door.
“Step through,” Adam said. “Give yourself to me.”
“No,” she said.
“I’ll have to retrain you if you keep refusing,” He said, shaking out His arms, rolling His shoulders, cracking His knuckles. “Don’t make me do it. I hate training.”
The way He said the word “training” made prickles crawl over her skin.
He didn’t mean fighting or dancing.
Elise backed away slowly, contemplating avenues of escape. There was nowhere to hide in the empty room. The windows were blocked. And when she brushed aside the red drapes that should have hidden the garage door, she only found brick wall.
The sole escape was through
that white door.
“Come on,” He said, almost teasingly. “Just walk through the door.”
Adam almost managed to sound like James, too.
Her heart broke a little.
“Stop pretending,” Elise said. “I’m not going through the fucking door. I know what comes after that. So whatever you’re going to do, get to it.”
He spread his fingers, flexed His hands. He was so immensely tall. Unnaturally so. He seemed to become taller every time she looked at Him. “What comes after?” He asked.
“Rape,” Elise said bluntly. “Mind and body.”
“Surely you don’t think I would ever hurt you, Eve,” He said, voice painfully soft. “Not when it took you so long to come back to me. I will never hurt you with the intent of causing pain—I am no sadist. I am not your captor, or your enemy. I am your husband, and require you to be with me.” He pointed to the door again. “If you won’t do that, then it’s my duty—my pleasure—to remind you of our union by any means necessary.”
Elise pushed the drapes aside again. Still no garage door. Adam approached her, and she sidestepped quickly, sliding along the wall of mirrors. The barre bumped into her hip.
“Stop trying to look like him,” Elise said. Her reflection in the mirror was auburn-haired, hazel-eyed, but the tear that slid down her cheek was black.
“Like who?” Adam asked. He sounded so puzzled that she almost believed He didn’t know the answer. But there was no way that He didn’t realize what He was doing to her.
It was all a game. She was supposed to be some kind of fucking toy.
He took a quick step closer, and Elise jumped back. He was faster. He pinned her in the corner with a hand on the mirrors on either side of her head.
She reacted on instinct, bringing her knee between them. Elise drove the bony spike into His stomach. He didn’t react.
Elise grabbed His neck and tried to slam His face into the mirrors. Adam slipped from her grip, reappearing on the other side of the room.
With a war cry, she threw herself at Him.
The dance hall elongated. The distance between them grew immense. She could still see Him as if He were only a few feet away, but running didn’t close that gap.
“I can’t believe you want to hurt me,” He said. “Maybe it’s the setting that distresses you. Let’s try this somewhere else.”
When she blinked, the studio was gone again. Elise was still trying to run, so her toe caught on the grass. She lost her balance and sprawled onto the ground.
Elise pounded a fist onto the earth, frustrated.
She didn’t have to look around to know where Adam had moved her this time, but she did anyway. The wilderness was dark. Elise was on the grass next to a sapling that glowed with inner light. This was the jungle setting that she had first reached through the gateway in the ethereal city. The one that she had thought was Earth.
Wasn’t it Earth?
How had she gotten there this time? She didn’t remember leaving Motion and Dance, or finding her way back to the dark clearing.
“Because it’s not real,” she said aloud. The sound of her voice grounded her in a way that nothing else did.
It was all just another part of the illusion—the game that Adam was playing with her.
Elise wouldn’t forget again.
But she could feel the truth slipping away from her as she stared into the shimmering, glowing depths of the young Tree. Its bark was no more than a glowing membrane with entire universes held captive inside.
This was Earth, as He must have known it in the beginning: a wild, untouched jungle. It was a memory of her home, almost as good as the real thing.
She could stay there if only she would step through that door.
The thought popped into her mind unbidden.
No. She would never cross through.
Adam approached her from the other side of the Tree. The jungle seemed to part around Him, as if to carve a soft path for His feet to walk upon—or as if they were afraid of touching Him. He emerged into the clearing as radiant and naked as they day that He was made.
“This comes from my memory instead of yours,” He said. “Is it better?”
Elise clenched her fist in the grass, tearing a handful of blades out of the dirt. She could hear each one severed like the strings of a harp being plucked. The garden sighed softly, lamenting the pain.
Better? How could it be better?
She quivered with rage as she stared up at Him, her eyes fixed to His broad chest and unable to meet His gaze. Her muscles vibrated with tension. The urge to attack was strong, but she knew there was no point. He would never let her near Him—not until she succumbed to the garden.
“You seem calmer. Have you changed your mind about the door?” He asked.
“No,” Elise said.
She could feel how hurt He was by her refusal. It made her teeth ache. “It’s an honor to rule at my side,” He said, almost sounding kind. “You’ll realize this soon, and we can start over again.”
Elise remembered hearing this speech once before, when she had first arrived in the garden as a fourteen-year-old girl. But it hadn’t come from Adam. It had come from the bride that preceded Elise—a frail old woman who had introduced herself as Eve with so much confidence that there was no doubt in Elise’s mind that “Eve” believed the identity to be true.
It’s an honor to rule by His side. Once you come to terms with it, He’ll be able to start over again, Eve had said with a rapturous expression on her withered face, as if she couldn’t imagine anything more glorious than Adam’s new beginning.
Elise had asked, What do you mean, start over? but had never gotten an answer.
Through that door, Eve had said, and she had pointed at it. At the time, it hadn’t looked like James’s bedroom door. It had looked like the entrance to Pamela Faulkner’s house, with a brass pentagram set into the window.
Its appearance may have changed, but the door was the same, and the outcome would be, too.
There was nothing that could make Elise walk through that goddamn door.
“Are you ready?” He asked.
Elise lifted her eyes to His burning face as best she could. The door was beyond Him. Somehow, she knew that it would always be just beyond Him. Waiting.
“Try me,” she said.
Before the last syllable even passed her lips, the garden disappeared.
Elise unfolded.
White hands clawed at her face, clammy with the chill of death. Elise rolled on a bed of corpses that pawed at her body, begging forgiveness, begging for mercy—but only for an instant.
They were soon replaced by her father’s cold eyes. You let your guard down.
Serpents roiled in her belly, then poured over her tongue and out of her nostrils. They dripped from her orifices in scaly black strings, making her eyes water. Elise gagged on them so hard that she felt her stomach surging into her esophagus.
She could almost see Him through the tears—the hazy outline of His face, unimaginably handsome and as classic as ancient paintings—but she wasn’t sure if it was real or panicked imaginings.
Even if she wasn’t sure if she saw Him or not, she certainly felt His hands raking down her arms, stripping away the skin, baring the muscle underneath.
The gray air burned.
Blood splattered.
Elise allowed herself to scream, channeling the pain and fear and rage through her throat. But when she inhaled, everything tasted of blood and sap again, choking her.
You deserve this, said her father’s voice.
Cold fingers pawed at Elise’s face.
Her fingernails dislodged. She could only watch as blood spurted from her hands, pouring over the bodies, splashing her father’s eyes, filling the darkness with a wash of crimson.
Time inverted, flipped, restored Elise’s skin.
When her eyes cleared, she realized that she was lying on the grass beside the sapling again. She wasn’t sure when she had lost contro
l of her body and fallen. The arm flopped in front of her face wasn’t skinned, though—it was whole, uninjured, intact. She had imagined that part.
Adam stood in front of her, with the door beyond him. The sight of its four panels and gold handle made her feel far sicker than any visions of her father. The trees swayed around it, stirred by a gentle breeze that Elise couldn’t feel.
“Well?” He prompted.
Elise tried to respond, but when she tried to draw in a breath, an obstruction in her throat stopped her. She gagged. Pushing herself onto her elbows, she vomited.
A black, shiny mass surged from her throat and splattered on the ground. When it erupted, effluence and ichor spilled over the grass.
A serpent wriggled out of the bile and slithered into the long grass.
She coughed, sitting back on her heels.
“Well?” He asked again, sweeping a hand toward the door.
Elise gave him a pinched smile. Her eyes were blurred from throwing up. “There is nothing left to take from me,” she said. “You can’t fucking hurt me. You can’t do anything.”
“We’ll see,” He said.
The Tree disappeared, and Elise unfolded again, and again, and again.
IV
NEVADA – MAY 2010
The sun dawned red over the desert, painting the mountains bloody violet, like raw meat. Anthony Morales had been jogging since the Milky Way was splashed across the sky. Now it was five-thirty in the morning, and it was already sixty-five degrees Fahrenheit; his bare chest was slicked with sweat.
He looped around a copse of Joshua trees, circling back toward the trailer. Dust clouds trailed his shuffling feet.
The McIntyre family’s trailer stood on the horizon—a white box guarded by a pickup truck—and the first hints of sunlight made the roof glow orange. By the time he reached the edge of the property, delineated from federal land by a row of rocks that Dana McIntyre had placed earlier that spring, the sun was high enough that it reflected off of the windows like fire.
Dana was already playing outside again. She drew a circle around herself in the dirt, using a stick broken off of the sagebrush. Her flannel pajama shorts were dusty. Her fine blond hair was still in the braids that her mother always gave her right before bed.
