Descent07 - Paradise Damned (5 page)

The trail narrowed and the surrounding jungle thickened. The sweet scent of ripe apples filled the air, touched with a hint of cinnamon bark. A river bubbled somewhere nearby, gurgling and whispering beyond the trees. Even though she couldn’t see where it lay, the water left the edges of the trail muddy.

Motion and Dance emerged from the trees. She experienced a moment of confusion when she realized that the two-story brick building was being consumed by creepers. Weeds jutted through the foundation.

It should have been near Idlewild Park, the apartments, the Truckee River. Not surrounded by ancient trees and overgrown vines, as if transplanted to the jungle.

Elise blinked and rubbed her eyes.

No, that was definitely Motion and Dance. It was totally right for it to be in the trees like this. She had just been confused.

A man was waiting for her, sitting on the bottom of the stairs that led to the second floor apartment. He stood when she approached, and her heart jumped at the sight of Him. Her stride grew, devouring the remaining length of the trail in seconds.

“Hey,” she said, unhooking the white picket fence and stepping inside. The rosebushes seemed to lean toward her, scratching at her ankles. “You’re up earlier than usual.” She couldn’t bring herself to look Adam in the eye, but she could feel the anger in His silence.

Pale hands closed around hers. The grip was painfully tight, and she already knew that she would carry fingerprint bruises like tattoos around her wrists. “Where did you go this time?” Adam asked. “I’ve been worried about you.”

She opened her mouth to reply, but no response came to her lips.

Where
had
Elise gone? She tried to remember, and couldn’t.

Part of her felt like she had only just slipped out of His bed an hour ago, maybe two, so that she could enjoy the early morning air with a jog. She always jogged in the mornings, didn’t she? But another part of her—one that was dwindling quickly—felt like she had been away much longer than that.

She faintly recalled the domed roofs of Russian cathedrals, open tundra, cold lakes, high deserts with thin atmosphere, neon lights, sagebrush. Things that she never could have encountered while jogging through the garden.

Elise shook her head, trying to clear her thoughts. “I was running.” She knew that much was true. She had been running for a very long time.

“Why?”

“I like to run,” she said.

“You scared me. I thought you had left again, just when you got back.”

“Again?” Elise echoed with a frown. Disjointed memories drifted together, clashing and crashing. They had just been eating breakfast together. Hadn’t they? Adam had brought her favorite meal to her: a piece of toast with strawberry jam, a piece of bacon, black coffee.

Then how had it become morning again?
Why
had she been running? Why would she want to leave His side in the first place, even if it were only to exercise?

A sense of unease crept over her.

Something is wrong
.

His anger melted to sympathy.

“You’re so confused,” Adam murmured, stroking a hand down her cheek, as though she were a dog to be petted. “Look at you. You haven’t gotten over the shock of coming back to me at all, have you? Well, it will all begin to fall into place soon. It will all make sense. We will be happy.” The last sentence was said firmly, as if to convince Himself as much as her.

But Elise was already happy. She was home, at Motion and Dance, with the man that had saved her from…
What?

She pressed her fingers to her temples. The thoughts slipped from her skull as soon as she had them.

“Everything will come together if you give it time,” He said soothingly.

Elise shook her head again. “I don’t need time. I’m fine,” she said. “I’m
fine
.”

“Yes, you are. Come. Let’s walk.”

He led her outside the gate. Elise thought about protesting—she had just been running; she didn’t need to go outside again—but when they stepped through the white picket fence, it wasn’t the same jungle that she had been jogging through. Where the dirt path had been moments before, there was a street paved with white cobblestone.

But the trail soon slipped from her memory, too, until she was certain that the cobblestone had always been there.

“Where are we going?” Elise asked, entwining her fingers with His.

“You will see,” He said.

They walked down the road together, hand in hand. The ground was warm beneath her bare feet.

The trees soon opened, revealing a city that she had somehow missed while jogging.

Elise thought that she had never seen anything quite so beautiful before. The city was a place of marble arches and white gazebos. The buildings looked ancient, yet new.

The jungle canopy was a shimmering ocean of green, heavy with ripe fruit; the perfume of citrus reached her on the breeze. Roofs peeked through the branches like river stones peeking from moss. There was a cliff to her right, and a waterfall misted over the side before being channeled through aqueducts around the Tree on the far end of the valley.

The Tree itself was big enough to house another city, but even though Elise could almost summon faint memories of windows set into the trunk, she couldn’t make out any detail at that distance.

The roads between Elise and the Tree were empty. There were no lights inside the gleaming temples, no sound of voices beyond the river’s whisper.

Nothing lived in this city.

Her jaw hung open as she stood on top of the hill to look down upon it. Her hands were locked tight on Adam’s arm.

“You look surprised,” He said. “Have you already forgotten what it’s like here? You weren’t gone
that
long.”

She glanced over her shoulder at the road that they had been traveling. Even though they had only seemed to walk for a few seconds, Motion and Dance was so far away. It looked so plain in comparison to the stone structures. It was just a brick box with rickety, wooden stairs on the side and a sign in front.

“I feel…strange,” Elise said.

Adam wasn’t listening. He walked down the road, and she felt empty the moment that his arm pulled away. He was the warmth and the sun.

She hurried to follow. He gave her an indulgent smile that she felt rather than saw. “Where is everyone?” she asked.

“Who?” Adam asked.

Elise frowned as she tried to think. “Everyone. The people that live here.”

“It’s just us,” He said. “Lilith has taken the others, so it’s finally peaceful. The way that we always wanted it to be.”

Once He reminded her of that, she knew it to be truth. Lilith had taken the other inhabitants. Elise and Adam were alone. It was good, it was right—not lonely. How could she have been so confused? Why did she keep getting the details wrong?

“That’s right. It’s perfect,” she agreed.

The trees grew close to the path as they headed down. Elise captured a leaf between her forefinger and thumb. The texture surprised her. Although it looked plump and green, it broke off in her hand as though it were dead.

Out of the corners of her eyes, she glimpsed the skeletons of bare trees and scorched earth.

But when she turned her head to look at it, she saw a much more exotic world: vines the diameter of her arm, dangling from mossy branches. Bushes heavy with blackberries, raspberries, and fruit. She saw cobblestone under her toes, not dried soil. She couldn’t get a clear view of the destroyed garden, no matter how hard she tried.

The dissonance of her senses washed over her with the hot sting of shock.

Elise pressed a hand to her temple. Her thoughts struggled to organize themselves.

She
had
been at Motion and Dance earlier, but not with Adam. She had dressed in front of the floor-to-ceiling mirrors of the dance hall and gathered her swords to join someone upstairs.

Who had been there? She couldn’t remember his face or name now, but she knew that he had been planning to cook breakfast. They were together,
finally
together, and then…she had stepped outside the wards.

Adam lifted her hand to kiss it. His lips tickled the knuckles of her hand. Her
bare
hand. After wearing gloves for so long, it felt like a violation. “Come, we’re meeting a visiting friend. Try to smile for him—he’ll be happy to see that we’re happy, and I want your passage through the door to be a happy occasion.”

He drew Elise onward, entering an open building. The roof was suspended above them by a ring of white pillars. The floor was a sprawling mosaic. There were benches around the edges, and a raised dais at the center—almost like a priest’s pulpit, or a stage.

There was a door on the opposite side of the temple. It was a rather ordinary door, like the kind leading into the bedroom at Motion and Dance. It was white, divided into four rectangular panels, and had a gold doorknob. But there was no wall to the right or left—just open air, through which she could see the rest of the gleaming white city.

Elise’s temples throbbed harder.

Why have a door when she could simply step around it? Where was this temple in relation to Motion and Dance? When had Reno become so beautiful?

The questions faded from memory before she could ask Adam.

It was only then that Elise realized that another man was waiting for them, facing the plain door with his hands folded behind his back. Elise could just make out the hazy outline of wings over his shoulders, but it must have been her imagination; as soon as she blinked, they were gone.

Happiness radiated from Adam at the sight of the person waiting for them. “My son! You made it!”

“Of course,” the other man replied without turning. He was studying the door as if it were the most interesting thing in the world. “I couldn’t miss this occasion. I’m eager to see your bride pass through.”

“As am I, my friend.” Adam urged Elise forward with a hand pressed to her lower back. “That door is waiting for you. Go through. It’s long past time.”

Dread churned in her stomach.

She stalled. Dug her heels in.

“Why can’t I just walk around it?” she asked.

Adam turned an imploring look to His other companion. “Help me explain it to her. She’s so confused.”

The angel finally turned. “Go through the door, Elise.”

As soon as Elise saw the “friend’s” face, the illusion came crashing down around her.

It was Metaraon.

Elise’s mind was flooded with a torrent of memories. The temple, the trees, the door, the smell of citrus—it all wavered around her, as if she was looking at a reflection in water, and a stone had been dropped into the image.

She was still in the garden, still trapped. She had somehow been sucked into His delusions, when she had thought that she escaped.

Elise reacted on instinct, shoving Adam away from her. Touching Him with her bare hands made them burn.

“No!”

A sense of shock radiated from Adam, as if He had never been touched in violence before. “What’s wrong, my beloved?”

Elise’s skin suddenly burned again. The hair falling around her shoulders was glossy and black, not the auburn curls that she used to have. Her skin was demon-pale. She wore slave leather, not shorts. And she
definitely
wasn’t home.

“I think I’ve upset your wife,” Metaraon said. The light humor in his voice filled Elise with rage. It was so condescending, so goddamn
patronizing
, as if she had just done something cute.

“Forget about him,” Adam said gently. “Just go through the door.”

The ordinary door that led to nowhere?

“Not a chance in Hell,” she said.

Elise spun, trying to see through the illusion to reality. It made her forehead ache.

The temple peeled away around her. The street wavered. The entire world stuttered between different visions: the ethereal city, a dense jungle, a dying garden, the master bedroom of Motion and Dance. The jumbled, swirling images made her nauseous.

Through it all, Elise glimpsed the gate that she had tried to escape through before. It loomed just outside the temple, crackling with white light.

She broke free of Adam and Metaraon, lunging toward the gate.

The instant that she took the first step, she could see the garden as it truly was. She could feel the cherubim wheeling through the air, still circling, still watching for her. And she could feel His fury building as she tried to run.

“Elise!” He shouted, and it pierced straight to her heart. He sounded so
disappointed
.

“I’ll get her,” Metaraon said. His voice boomed through Elise’s mind.

She crossed the road in three steps and flung herself into the gate again.

Elise emerged from
the other side of the gate and hit the ground running.

Her boots connected with grass, and she threw herself into motion without waiting to see if the interdimensional shift would make her sick. She didn’t even stop to see where she had arrived—Metaraon and the cherubim wouldn’t be far behind her, which meant that
He
wouldn’t be far behind, either.

There was no time to do anything but run.

Arms pumping at her sides, she flew through the dark jungle. Branches scraped at her arms and face. Elise swatted them aside without stopping.

There was grass beneath her feet. It crunched lightly with each step, as if with the fullness of spring. It wasn’t the tundra outside Oymyakon, where Elise had expected to emerge. It was much too warm here, at least seventy degrees. She sweated inside the slave leather corset.

There were no stars, no sun, and no moon to reflect the sun’s light. She tried to let her flesh unravel and vanish into the sanctity of the darkness. It should have been easy. Indeed, it had been harder for her to hold her shape since being reborn in Yatam’s likeness. But even though the night was all but solid against her body, she couldn’t seem to let herself go.

She slowed, staring into the night with confusion. There was no sense of angels behind her anymore.

Elise stretched out her senses for any sign of her pursuers, and felt nothing.