Descent07 - Paradise Damned (15 page)

“Guard her and guide her,” Metaraon told the cherubim. “She is more important than any of you know.”

Destiny was set into motion. Adam’s death was sealed—or so Metaraon hoped.

It was the least he could do for Eve.

P
ART
F
OUR

Bishops

VI

Betty looked like
she belonged in the garden. She still had the apple-cheeked beauty of a fairytale princess, even a year after she had been shot and killed. “If you keep staring at me like that, I’m going to start thinking you want my hot body,” Betty said, venturing a smile at Elise.

They were alone in the apartment above Motion and Dance. Elise could have believed it was a normal, quiet afternoon in James’s living room with her friend if the last time she had seen Betty hadn’t been when she was a rigid corpse.

Now Betty wore practical tan slacks and a blouse with a loose neckline that framed the mounds of her breasts, of which she had always been extremely proud. There was even a black clip over one ear to hold back her bangs. Elise had given her that clip for Christmas. Betty looked like she was ready to go to her job at the university.

Elise ripped one of the bottles of wine off the rack, uncorked it, and sniffed the mouth. It didn’t have any smell. One more detail missed by Adam when He was constructing the illusion.

She turned the bottle so that she could look at the shape of her reflection in the side without a label. Elise’s hair was curly, just below her shoulders, probably red. She was in her human form.

This was still a dream. Betty wasn’t real.

She
couldn’t
be.

“Why aren’t you talking to me?” Betty asked. “This is awfully quiet, even for you. Did something go wrong when we were fighting the Night Hag? You can tell me if something went wrong, you know. I won’t take it badly.”

“This is a sick fucking joke,” Elise said.

Betty’s eyes widened. “Okay. What happened?”

Elise tore open the curtains. The grassy lawn faded into the gray haze of fog. Metaraon stood at the edge, watching her.

“
Did
we kill the Night Hag?” Betty asked.

“Yeah,” Elise said without turning around. “We killed the Night Hag.”

Betty gave a shaky laugh. “I must have been unconscious for a while. Did I get knocked out or something?”

You got shot in the face
.

Elise couldn’t bring herself to say the words out loud. She started pacing the kitchen again.

This illusion sat just like Betty, with her legs curled underneath her and her chin propped on the back of the couch. She was adorable. Curvaceous. She looked puzzled, but not hostile.

For fuck’s sake, she hadn’t aged a day.

“So how did I get back here?” Betty asked, twirling a finger at James’s apartment. “Tell me that James heroically carried me here after I passed out. Please? But, you know, go ahead and say that he carried me around heroically even if it’s not true. Let me swoon.”

This,
this
was insanity—far beyond anything else Elise had been subjected to in the garden.

“You want to know how you got here?” Elise asked. “Fine. Look at where you are.”

She threw the front open and marched down the stairs. Betty followed her without needing to be asked. That used to be her trademark—the kind of blind loyalty that meant she would go anywhere Elise went.

That was what had gotten her killed, after all.

Elise’s feet drummed down the stairs, and she stepped into the cobblestone street, pointing at the city at the end of the path. The distance had distorted itself again; it was only at the bottom of the hill.

Betty stopped beside Elise. Her jaw dropped at the sight of the gleaming city. “Holy flesh of Christ as a cracker,” she said. “What the
fuck
?”

Elise seized her by the shoulders. “I didn’t bring you here, Betty. This isn’t even the ‘here’
you think it is. What happened?”

Her mouth opened and closed repeatedly before she found the words to respond. Betty’s stare was fixed over Elise’s shoulder. “I don’t know. The last thing I remember, we were on our way down to get the Night Hag. There was a ramp down into that big cave with the stone arch, and spiders, and then…” She shook her head slowly. “Well, I don’t know. Then I woke up here, with you.”

Maybe Metaraon had brought Betty back to life.

But
why
?

“So, uh,” Betty said, “where are we, if this isn’t Reno?”

“Heaven.”

“Does that mean we’re dead?”

That was a loaded question if Elise had ever heard one. “Not necessarily.”

Betty drifted down the road, spellbound by the sight of the gleaming white temples. She appeared to be legitimately stunned. It was a consistent reaction in a world of inconsistencies.

Elise pressed the heel of one hand to her temple.

She couldn’t start thinking like that. She had to keep reminding herself that Betty was a new form of torture.

But as Betty wandered through the streets, touching the leaves and stroking her hands on the smooth white stone, all Elise could think was that James had come back from the dead once before, too.

“This place is amazing,” Betty said, gazing at the waterfall foaming down the cliff behind one temple. “When you say that we’re in Heaven, do you mean, like…” She pointed toward the sky. “
Heaven
, Heaven? And that tree is…”

“The Tree of Life.”

“You’re telling me that we’re in the Garden of Eden.”

“No. Eden was on Earth. This is an ethereal dimension called Araboth—it’s where they transplanted the Tree after the original garden burned.”

Elise shuddered. She could imagine Eden burning as clearly as though she had been there.

Those weren’t her memories. The garden was leaking into her mind.

“Is God here?” Betty asked.

Elise dug her fingers into Betty’s arm. “Don’t say His name,” she said. “And yes, He is.”

“I take it that’s a…bad thing?”

“You have no idea,” Elise said.

Betty turned to take in the sight of Araboth around them, but some of the wonder had faded from her eyes. Her cheeks were pale. “This is what you told me about, isn’t it? The thing you were running from all that time? The reason you went into hiding?”

Anger burned in Elise’s cheeks.

Betty was so fucking
convincing
.

All she could manage was another stiff nod. It took all of her self-control to keep her face blank.

But Betty knew Elise too well to believe that the expressionlessness meant that she was okay. “It’s going to be okay,” she said. “Anthony and James will get over their man hate and work together to save us. Right?”

“I dumped Anthony,” Elise said. “And James is probably dead.”

Betty’s jaw dropped. “
What
?”

“You heard me. Nobody is coming to save us.”

“Then…what are we supposed to do?” Betty asked. Her chin trembled. Her eyes welled up with tears. “If James is dead…”

The urge to comfort Betty was overpowering, even if she was fake. “I’ll get you out of here,” Elise said before she could stop herself. “Just like I always do.”

“But
James
.”

“Yeah,” she said. Her heart felt like it was made of lead. “James.” A laugh bubbled out of her chest, almost like a half-sob. “Have I got a story about James for you. And…and so much more.”

“How long have I been gone?” Betty asked. Her forced smile was slipping.

“A long time, Betty,” Elise said. “A long time.”

Her best friend’s gaze focused over her shoulder, as if something had caught her attention.

Elise turned to glimpse the figure of a dark-haired woman disappearing among the trees.

Shock numbed her to her fingertips.

All of Elise’s moments in Araboth had been hauntingly lonely. Adam had told her that the city was empty because Lilith had taken everyone away. Yet Elise had definitely seen someone, and Betty had, too—it wasn’t her imagination.

Could it have somehow been Lilith?

“Wait here,” Elise said, touching Betty’s shoulder. “If someone tries to take you elsewhere, don’t go with them. I’ll be right back.”

Betty nodded mutely as tears streamed down her cheeks. She sat down on a stone bench.

Elise pushed into the jungle, parting the bushes with her hands. The roaring of the waterfall grew as she delved deeper into the foliage. The river was so close—she could see a misty spray over the tops of the trees.

A woman ducked between the trees in front of her.

“Hey!” Elise yelled.

The trees slid around her…then disappeared.

She stumbled into an open, grassy clearing next to the cliff, where the waterfall fed into the aqueducts.

There was no sign of the woman that Elise had seen. But Metaraon stood on the bank, wings unfurled, as if preparing to fly.

All thoughts of Lilith fled from Elise’s mind.

“Don’t you even fucking think of leaving,” Elise said, striding toward him.

He dropped his wings. “Eve,” Metaraon said silkily, like it was an insult. He pressed a fist to his chest in a salute.

“What did you do?” she asked, jabbing her finger back toward Araboth, where she had left Betty. “She is dead.”

“Was,” Metaraon corrected.

The clearing seemed to spin around her. Elise took a steadying breath. “You’re telling me,” she said, carefully selecting her words, “that you brought my friend back from the dead?”

“Do you know what happens to human souls when they die?” the angel asked.

“Eventually they get absorbed into the energy of the universe, or…something like that,” Elise said. Her mom had told her a couple of times, but it had all sounded like witch bullshit. Elise was much more concerned with people who were still alive than those who had already died. “It doesn’t take long for a soul to vanish. Betty’s been gone for over a year.”

“I have lived almost as long as the universe, girl. Such things are hardly beyond my ken.”

“But
why?
”

Metaraon’s eyebrows lifted. “You said that you have nothing left to lose—now, that has changed.”

Grief and anger and confusion were a fist in her throat, squeezing her breath tight. “Is that what this is? Leverage? You’re so annoyed that I haven’t gotten around to killing Adam yet that you decided to ramp up the torture a little fucking more?”

“Is it working?” He gave her a hard look. “Are you angry?”

Elise slammed her fist into his jaw. Metaraon’s head snapped to the side, but his body remained immobile, as though she had punched one of the stone pillars of the temple.

“What do you think, asshole?” she asked.

He rubbed his jaw, and she could see the murder in his eyes. “Good,” he said, sweeping his wings wide. “Now do your job. Don’t disappoint me.”

Elise watched him soar away. Anger dulled to a muted roar inside of her, indistinguishable from the rushing of the waterfall.

It didn’t matter if Metaraon used Betty as leverage. Elise was becoming increasingly convinced that there was no way to kill Adam. Even if she did, Metaraon would surely deliver death to Elise next—which meant that Betty would be vulnerable, too.

Betty changed everything, and yet, she also somehow changed nothing.

Elise would have to kill Him to save Betty—but first, she needed to kill Metaraon.

Which meant that she needed her swords.

Elise returned to
find that Betty was still sitting on the bench. Betty gawked at the outline of the Tree in the fog, and didn’t notice Elise until she grabbed her arm.

“Come on,” Elise said, dragging her away from the temple. A wind was rising in Araboth, carrying the scent of apples over the air. The city was restless.

He was coming.

“Where are we going?” Betty asked, hurrying to keep up with Elise. She had kicked off her shoes and now walked barefoot.

“We need to find my swords,” she said. “But first, we need to get out of this city.”

She had managed to summon the apartment above Motion and Dance by force of will. If Elise could change her surroundings, then she must be able to break out, too.

Elise gripped Betty’s hands tightly.

What if Elise’s first impression had been right and Betty wasn’t real? If Elise woke up, would Betty vanish?

Elise gazed at her friend’s pink cheeks, the blond hair falling over her forehead, the way she gnawed at her bottom lip. Wind plastered the tan slacks to Betty’s hips and ruffled the collar of her shirt.

She still looked—and felt—so real.

Elise didn’t want to know if she wasn’t.

“Don’t let go of me,” Elise said. “Okay?”

Betty only nodded.

Shutting her eyes, Elise tried to form an image of the garden in her mind—the garden as it had been when she was first dragged through the gate, not the city in which she now stood. She imagined Mnemosyne frothing with blood. The Tree with its dying branches. The blackened foliage, oozing with ichor, as the garden was poisoned from the inside out by His insanity.

And then Elise stepped into it.

“Holy shit!”

Betty’s exclamation made her eyes fly open.

They stood in a grassy clearing encircled by dead bushes. The fog was thicker than ever before. But Elise could hear Mnemosyne’s rushing and see the dim outline of the garden wall covered in green creepers.

She was in the garden, and Betty was still with her.

Alive.

A laugh escaped Elise. “You’re real!”

But Betty looked horrified. “What the heck is wrong with your hair?”

Elise picked up a fistful of silken hair that fell over her shoulder. It was a long, shiny black sheet—not the auburn curls that she used to have. Betty had died before Elise was given a new form by Yatam and Nügua, so she had never seen it before.

“We’ve got to get to the Tree,” Elise said.

“But…”

“It’s me,” Elise said firmly, grabbing her hand again. Betty’s palms were slick with sweat. “Okay? This is just…it’s some garden thing. We have bigger problems.”

“Like your boobs,” Betty said.