Descent07 - Paradise Damned (30 page)

James staggered between
the roots of the Tree as the garden dissolved around him. The bushes that had been tainted with ichor were turning to ash. Mnemosyne’s roar rocked through his skull, bouncing off of his eardrums, making his teeth ache.

Elise was embedded in the garden. Her blood flowed through the Tree, which meant that the most dire blood of a Godslayer turned demon was flooding the entire garden.

He had no idea what was going to happen, but he was certain it couldn’t be good.

Even as he stumbled through the cavern underneath the Tree, he couldn’t shake the image of the last look that Elise had given him before stepping through that door. Her glare had been so cold. There was so much hate in the way she looked at him.

It must have been Eve.

The ferns along the shore of the lake shook and swayed as if blasted by a wind that James couldn’t feel. He pushed through them to stand on the brink of the amber lake. Its dark depths bubbled below, churning in a vortex.

Plunging inside would lead James directly to the heart of the Tree.

It would be a kind of death, but what other option did he have? Elise had stepped through the door, quite possibly insane from her time in the garden, and he had no other way of saving her.

“You don’t have to do that.”

Nathaniel stood behind him, untouched by the chaos that wracked the garden. Naked except for the sap marking his body, he was a leggy, gawky child whose pale eyes spiked straight through James’s mind.

His eyes should have been brown.

“Dear Lord,” James said. “Are you all right?”

It was a foolish question. Nathaniel wasn’t all right. The presence of this new body, soft-skinned and blue-eyed, could only mean that he had died. Metaraon had saved Nathaniel by sacrificing him, just as James had. Now Nathaniel was bound to the garden, his fate entwined permanently with that damn Tree.

“It wouldn’t make a difference if you jumped in anyway,” Nathaniel said. “She knows.” He touched two fingers to the healing wound on his left pectoral, near the shoulder. “She saw my sacrifice, and she found your old body. It’s not hard to connect the dots. So even if you jumped in to save her, all you’d end up doing is killing yourself—Elise isn’t going to forgive you for what you did to her.”

The shock of it was so powerful that James didn’t feel anything at first. His fingertips were numb. His head swam with half-formed thoughts that quickly dissolved before he could actually process them. The guilt, the self-hatred, the fear—that would all come later.

“I searched so long for her,” he whispered.

There wasn’t even a hint of sympathy in Nathaniel’s face. “You should leave. This Tree is too dangerous. I have to hide it.”

The Tree shuddered dangerously above them. Dirt showered from the roots at the top of the cavern, and James lifted an arm to shield his head.

If Elise was gone, then what was the point? Everything he had done since he became an adult had been in service to his coven, their God, and later, to hide Elise from them. Without Elise, without Hannah, he didn’t have a future.

But he did have his son.

“Fine. Let’s get going,” he said.

“I’m not going back to Earth,” Nathaniel said. “To hide the Tree I’ll have to move the whole dimension, just like I did with the Haven. I have to be inside to do it.”

“You can’t stay here,” James said. “Everything is going to fall apart.”

“Maybe. Maybe not.”

“Do you see that?” He pointed at the lake. “That’s Elise’s blood. She’s turning this place mortal. The orchards, the river, the Tree—and there’s no way of knowing what the repercussions will be. We need to escape.”

“I’m not going to run,” Nathaniel said.

Frustration built within James until he couldn’t hold it back anymore. “I can’t leave you here. I have to do
something
.”

Nathaniel gave a half-smile. “You can save yourself. That’s what you can do.” He turned away from James. There were two gaping wounds on his back, like vertical slits that bared bone underneath, and James’s shoulder blades ached in memory of similar wounds. “Everything’s changing. The world’s going to need you to get back to the beginning.”

Wings unfurled from Nathaniel’s back. They were brilliant white, glowing with their own internal light, so much brighter than anything else in the cavern. James could only watch, stunned, as his flapped once and lifted himself into the air.

He carried himself above the lake of amber and spread his arms wide.

It was with a sigh, more than an explosion, that the Tree split own the center.

The cavern above the amber lake broke in half. Rock showered over James, crushing the ferns and splashing into the pool of sap. James dived, covering his head with his arms as debris pelted him.

The sigh grew into a groan. The air thickened, throbbed, pulsed like a heart struggling to beat.

The Tree severed.

A path tunneled straight through it, splitting the branches into two separate pieces that tumbled away. The fog poured down into the hole that was left behind, and gray beams of light pierced through, highlighting Nathaniel’s hair and the tips of his wings.

But light and dirt weren’t the only things tumbling through the hole.

James saw the body falling as a pinpoint of darkness against the gray sky first. It grew and grew until he could make out arms, legs, streaming hair.

Elise plummeted toward the lake face-first, a sword in each hand. He couldn’t tell if she was conscious or not. She wasn’t fighting against the fall.

Her momentum accelerated as she entered the cavern. She looked like an eagle in flight, diving for its prey.

She struck the center of the lake. It consumed her with a gulp.

James crawled through the ferns, struggling to reach the shore, even as chunks of soil continued raining down upon the surrounding earth. Nathaniel moved faster. He folded his wings back and dived after her.

A pale fist erupted from the surface of the sap, still clutching an obsidian sword.

Nathaniel caught her wrist. He flapped hard, pulling her from the depths of the amber.

Elise was soaked, black hair plastered to her back, naked body drenched with strings of gooey sap. But when she looked up to see who had seized her arm, she grinned. It was a victorious smile. Not the smile of Eve, or a woman gone mad, or someone stepping away from the battlefield as a victor. It was just Elise, and she was happy to see Nathaniel alive. He smiled back.

Nathaniel dropped Elise on the shore.

James moved to touch her. Elise’s warning look made him stop in mid-step. That glare was as good as a punch to his gut.

Elise tried to speak and only managed a wet cough. Sap splattered over her feet.

“You need to run,” Nathaniel said, wiping a strand of sap off of her shoulder and flicking it to the ground. “I’m holding onto the gate for you, but it’s not going to last much longer. Nothing will.”

Elise wiped her mouth on the back of her arm. “What are you going?”

“I’m taking Araboth away,” he said.

“No,” James protested.

“You know you’ll be trapped,” Elise said to Nathaniel, as if James didn’t even exist. She sidestepped a piece of debris that smashed into the ground beside her without having to look at it.

The boy nodded. “Yeah. I know.”

She shared a long, understanding look with Nathaniel, as if they were the ones that could communicate telepathically. They didn’t have much time, but Elise and Nathaniel looked like they had eternity to say goodbye.

“Good luck,” she said.

Nathaniel threw his arms around Elise’s neck. Nobody gave Elise surprise hugs and survived, but she didn’t look surprised, or even angry. She embraced him tightly. The warmth in her eyes—that was new. That didn’t belong. Yet somehow, it suited her face.

“He can’t stay,” James said when they released each other and stepped back.

But Nathaniel was already rising again with a sweep of his wings.

“He knows what he’s doing,” Elise said.

“He’s a child!”

“He’s the first mage since God was trapped in the garden. I trust him.”

James would have kept arguing, but Elise didn’t wait for him. She took off running, a sword in each hand, and was halfway up the path to the surface in a flash.

His son was heading up the center of the Tree, glowing with the gray light that beamed down. James could feel his magic building. It all but crackled around him as he gathered strength for a final, powerful spell—one that could move an entire dimension.

Nathaniel was already far beyond James’s reach. Maybe he always had been.

His eyes burned as he turned to follow Elise up the path.

When James reached
the surface of the garden, he immediately turned to look at the Tree above him. The damage was even worse from this perspective—the severed halves had fallen to either side, and they were long enough to reach the walls on either side, creating long, jagged bridges. Sap spurted out of the Tree’s exposed innards like arterial wounds.

Everything that remained was on fire. The bushes had ignited. The grass had already burned away, leaving nothing but dirt. Mnemosyne had dried out, baring the charred rocks that formed the riverbed. The only things he could see that weren’t destroyed were the feathers drifting around him like downy snow.

Elise had climbed onto one of the severed halves of the Tree. She ran toward the wall without looking back at James.

He grabbed a branch and hauled himself onto the Tree behind her. It was uneven under his feet. Looking closely, James could see that the Tree had probably been rotting for a long time—the same black infection that had seized the rest of the garden had been growing there, too. Its carcass formed a bridge out of the garden, but it was a path of thorns and blood.

“Elise!” he yelled. She didn’t look back.

James staggered after her. The fatigue was catching up with him now. He stepped around clusters of sticky thorns that jutted from the Tree’s innards, edged along the side of what must have once been large chambers inside, like rooms, and struggled to catch up with Elise.

She was so far away—a pale figure darting across the dark expanse of the Tree. Even weighed down by a pair of swords, Elise didn’t seem to slow.

Whoosh
.

James looked up to see a fireball plunging toward him.

He leaped away. It smashed into the Tree where he had been standing, leaving smoldering pulp and a crater the size of his chest.

Another fireball rushed through the air, and James stumbled forward. The hot debris pelted his shoulders like a dozen tiny bee stings. He focused on keeping one foot in front of the other, finding something solid to stand on.

He was concentrating so hard that he was surprised when he almost ran into someone.

Elise.

His moment of optimism vanished as soon as she saw that she hadn’t stopped for him. Elise stood over a crater in the Tree, knuckles white on the hilts of her falchions as she looked inside.

James peered over her shoulder.

Half of a human skeleton had been exposed by the Tree’s destruction. Its jaw was open in an eternal grin. The eye socket was empty. The charred, gray bones of one hand stretched across the pulp, almost as if it were reaching for Elise’s toes.

It was Adam’s mortal body. The first one.

The whizzing of another projectile made James look back. The destruction was only getting worse—the fireballs were coming faster.

“We have to go,” James said.

He was shocked when Elise grabbed his arm. She didn’t speak as she dragged him down the Tree, across the wall, and jumped into the desolate wasteland beyond.

XVI

OYMYAKON, RUSSIA

The Union worked
through the night and the following day. Malcolm watched their trail of destruction grow as they built a road leading straight from Oymyakon to the meadow, tearing trees out by their roots and leaving them piled on either side of the new path.

They finished by erecting temporary guard stations on that road. Malcolm counted two people watching each one—probably a bonded kopis and aspis. With their powers combined, they would be able to defend the road against at least one hybrid at a time.

The Union was obviously ready for a fight, but the hybrids hadn’t shown their faces since the first attack on Oymyakon. He didn’t think that they were afraid of confronting the Union, exactly. The tanks were too slow without the element of surprise on their side, and hybrids could move freakishly fast.

If they weren’t afraid, though, then it meant that there was some other reason that the hybrids were hanging back. And that unknown reason worried Malcolm even more.

As he watched from the foothills, he imagined the hybrids somewhere else in the mountains doing the same thing: studying the Union’s movements, evaluating the situation, and preparing themselves for this Event—the moment that Elise Kavanagh, demon-god-hunter-thing, would return to Earth to fuck shit up.

Or get fucked up.

“They keep the guns near the center of the compound,” Malcolm said as Anthony and Lucas prepared to head into Oymyakon again. They hadn’t been able to scavenge clothing yet and looked fantastically stupid in their boxers. Malcolm had given his shirt to Anthony, the poor baby, but Lucas seemed proud to be naked in all of his hairy glory. “You won’t be able to get in that far without being caught. Pick off a couple of guards for their weapons. And trousers, hopefully.”

“Right,” Anthony said. “Thanks.”

“Be careful,” Lucas added.

Malcolm waved a vague salute at them.

They had to travel a greater distance, so they set off when evening began to dim the sky. Malcolm remained on the hill.

He hadn’t been to a church for innocent reasons in a long time, and he couldn’t remember the last time that he had prayed. It seemed silly to try to pray when he knew that Elise was off in Heaven. For all he knew, she was probably fucking shit up there, too.

Regardless, Malcolm crossed himself, then briefly clasped his hands.

“Don’t let me lose my other eye,” he told the orange sky. “I like this one.” After a moment of hesitation, he added, “Look out for Anthony and Lucas, too. They’re all right.”