They were locked away from the army, sure, but they were also trapped.
"Mere," Marion said, crouching by the wall in her dirty skirts. Even soiled, her ruffled pink dress was strangely bright against the wall of volcanic rock.
The adults moved over to look at what she was doing. She"d found water bubbling out of a crack in the ground that trickled along the edge of the small cavern and vanished against the other wall.
"What is that?" Abel asked. "A hot spring?"
Ariane dipped her hand into the water. She looked pleasantly surprised. "No, it"s only a stream of ordinary water. Quite cool, in fact." She addressed her daughter in French, listened to her response, and then added, "She says this water flows from Eden."
Abel was startled. "But we"re in Dis."
"This is Dis? How can you tell?" Abram asked.
"I spent days chasing down angels in this d.a.m.n city. Trust me, I know the stench of it." In fact, Abel was willing to bet they were deep underneath one of those big black mountains that had watched him from the horizon the whole time he was in the city.
Marion cupped her hand in the water and took a sip.
"Non, ma fille," Ariane said, grabbing her wrist.
It was too late. The little girl had already drunk, and the remaining droplets shivered on her chin. She grinned at her mother again. A big, unabashed smile.
She didn"t explode into smoke or anything, so apparently the water running from Eden wasn"t dangerous. The kid had been in the garden for a while. She"d probably done a lot more than just drink the water.
"Do you hear that?" Levi asked suddenly.
Abel didn"t hear anything, but he smelled a demon-and it was in the room with them.
He whirled with a snarl.
Elise Kavanagh stepped out of a door in the wall, accompanied by a skinny black kid that Abel didn"t recognize. She looked exhausted and b.l.o.o.d.y, hilts of her sheathed swords jutting over each shoulder like she was the centerpiece of a strange skull and crossbones.
Her face brightened when she saw Marion. Abel hadn"t even known she could smile like that.
Elise dropped to one knee and opened her arms. The little girl immediately scrambled up onto her hip. "At least you weren"t lying about one thing," Elise told her male companion as Marion snuggled against her side.
"I never lie," he said. "I just get confused sometimes." He rubbed his forehead, shoulders twitching. "I get confused a lot."
Marion waved at him. "Salut."
"Bonjour," he replied with a terrible accent, giving her a weak smile. That expression looked familiar for some reason. Abel felt like he"d seen this guy once before, but not in many years.
The newcomer kicked the door shut behind them, and it immediately melted into the wall, vanishing completely. Dread lurched through Abel"s stomach. He"d a.s.sumed that this was a rescue, but the door was gone in a flash.
Ariane gathered her skirts and stood to confront the young man. "You"re the one who took her. Aren"t you?"
"Get angry later," Elise interrupted. "What are we doing here? What is "here"?"
"Apparently, we"re in Dis," Abram said.
She swiped a finger under Marion"s chin, gathering a few of the lingering drops. "Water in Dis," Elise said softly. She turned to the young man she"d brought with her. "How?"
"Every dimension connects with other dimensions with at least one point," he said.
"The fissures."
"Right. Even Eden needs to be connected with another dimension somewhere." He pointed to the water. "Here. This is where it all began. Eden was the seed of the last genesis, but this was the first offshoot."
"The fissure into Eden has been under the House of Abraxas the entire time," Elise said, staring at the water with the look of someone who was about to throw up. "That"s what Onoskelis was trying to tell me."
Abel stared between them like he was watching the most surreal tennis match he"d ever seen.
The conversation was going right over his head.
"Don"t beat yourself up about it. Eden wouldn"t have been accessible until the gates were opened," the unnamed man went on. "Quarantine, you know. Similar quarantine to the one that used to be around Araboth. Even a fissure can"t supersede that. But now they"re open, and Belphegor probably doesn"t have this entrance locked down."
Probably. That inspired confidence.
Abel tried to work through the conversation-fissures, quarantines, Eden and all. It still didn"t make any sense, but he latched on to one thing the other guy had said. "If this was the first offshoot from Eden, then you"re telling us that the whole universe basically started off with h.e.l.l."
"This part of h.e.l.l, yeah." He smiled weakly. "It was gra.s.sier then, I think."
Why did that man look so familiar? Abel just couldn"t put his finger on it.
That smile...
"So there"s a fissure here," Elise said. She pa.s.sed the girl off to Ariane.
"Somewhere," the young man agreed.
Elise kneeled by the spring where it bubbled from the floor, studied the crack for a moment, and then slammed her fist into it with a hollow thud.
The crack widened.
With another punch, light began shimmering in the water, sparkling like distant starlight. Elise seized the edge of the rock and pulled hard on it.
"Abel?" she asked.
He dropped down beside her, widening the hole in the ground by pummeling the stone and tearing at it in turns. As it enlarged, the light got brighter and brighter, until Ariane"s potion was nothing more than the faint flickering of candlelight in comparison to the blazing sun underneath the chamber.
They exposed a bright, flooded tunnel underneath the ground that was about as wide as a car and too deep to see the bottom. All Abel could tell was that it was glowing down there.
Water gushed freely from the spring, sluicing over Abel"s feet. It was cooler than he expected. Almost icy. The rock crumbled away more easily as the water poured out faster.
"Eden," Elise said.
Abel wiped his hands dry on his jeans and edged away from the tunnel. "I"m not going down there." He"d kind of figured out how to swim in the lake they had at the werewolf sanctuary, but he still wasn"t very good at it. He definitely couldn"t hold his breath long enough to reach that light at the bottom.
"You"re not coming," she said. "None of you are."
"You need backup," Abram protested.
She shook her head. "You"ll all get killed. No, no more deaths if I can help it." Elise looked over all of them, gaze lingering on her mother and sister. "You guys need to find somewhere safe and wait. There"s nothing else you can do."
Abram looked almost offended that Elise didn"t want them all diving in after G.o.d to get themselves killed. "Nothing at all?"
"Nothing." Elise tied her hair into a loose knot, stripped off her over shirt, kicked her shoes into the corner.
More pounding on the other side of the door. The smell of demons was stronger, and Abel knew that the entrance had been cracked. A few more hits of the battering ram and Atropos would be inside.
Elise hesitated, teetering on the edge of the spring.
"What are you waiting for?" Abel asked.
"Nothing." She said it with conviction, but she still didn"t jump.
"You do have a plan to kill this Belphegor thing, right?" Levi asked.
"Yes," Elise said. Abel smelled the lie on her.
No wonder she was hesitating.
The G.o.dslayer had no idea how she was going to kill a G.o.d.
"Oh, f.u.c.k," he said.
Which was when the door to the cavern burst open and the army poured in.
Elise had her swords drawn an instant before the first demon hit her.
It was a fiend, probably from the former fifty-ninth centuria if its uniform was any indication. Cannon fodder for the first wave.
The stupid thing wasn"t ready for Elise. She sliced upward, catching it in the groin and cutting neatly through the nether region, the stomach, and chest until her blade caught on the breastbone.
Smoothly, she pivoted, thrusted, and buried both falchions in the throat of a second demon. Elise ripped them wide. Plunged the points into two more oncoming fiends, skewering their hearts.
Blood and ichor sprayed. She was bathed in their fear, their fluids, and their organs.
She only glimpsed her other allies through the flailing limbs of the attack. Abram with his sidearm drawn, mouth opened in a shout that was drowned out by gunfire. Levi shapeshifting behind him. Abel with one fist clutching the face of a fiend, his fingers collapsing the skull.
Ariane retreated to the corner with Marion in her arms. Elise hamstrung a demon before it could leap toward them.
Benjamin. Where was Benjamin?
"Get out!" Elise shouted to Ariane, unsure if her mother would hear.
Darkness swarmed with the buzzing of flies. Atropos suddenly stood between Elise and her next quarry. The Fate was bleeding everywhere, but she didn"t look weak. She looked p.i.s.sed.
Atropos lunged.
Megaira and Elise met, crashing together with a hot thunder of energy, aura against aura.
As Elise thrust against her with willpower and blade, she glimpsed images of Atropos devouring the army-swallowing fiends the way that Elise could, sucking anger from the marrow of their minds as they died feeling bitterly betrayed.
She was reading Atropos"s memories. The Fate had eaten half of her army to help herself heal from the spirit wolf attacks.
Anger spiked in Elise"s heart.
"Out!" she yelled again, hoping that her allies would listen. Benjamin had gotten Elise into the cavern-he would be able to get them out, too.
At least, he"d better be able to get them out. Elise had seen the broken body of McIntyre"s youngest daughter too clearly, and it was easy now to imagine Marion-not much younger than Deb-with her heart ripped out, the fold of her wrist stained in blood, her curls matted to her back.
The anger climbed to nauseating levels, and when Elise swung her falchion to block a punch from Atropos, her arm felt weak.
Rage weakened Elise because megairas like Atropos fed on rage. As Elise became more infuriated, Atropos became stronger and healed her wounds more rapidly.
If Elise wanted to survive a fight against Atropos, she needed to let the anger go.
The falchion whistled toward Atropos. The demon caught that blade in her hand, and it didn"t even slice through her skin.
Her smile was triumphant.
"Yes," she hissed, digging her fingernails into Elise"s wrist.
Let the anger go.
Elise breathed it out, pushed it away.
All that remained behind that hard wall of anger was something much more vulnerable. Something that looked very much like fear.
Atropos wasn"t a nightmare, so she couldn"t feed on fear.
But Elise could.
The megaira was forcing her memories on Elise, so she responded with memories of her own. She recalled Lachesis"s death, the way that she had melted away under the fiery light from the gate to Eden. Elise thought of Clotho"s sludgy remnants after McIntyre electrocuted her. She thought of Abel"s spirit wolves, even now fighting to hold the remainder of the army that was trying to force its way into the chamber.
Elise forced it all on Atropos, remembering it without anger, but with grief. Another emotion that was useless to the demon.
"You"ll die the way your sisters did," Elise whispered without heat, hoping that Atropos would be afraid.
She was.
Slowly, the energy between them shifted.
Atropos"s cheeks paled, and new energy flowed into Elise"s arms.
Elise locked her arm around Atropos"s throat and dragged her toward the light flowing from Eden. The demon began to phase away almost immediately, trying to escape both the brilliance of the fissure and Elise"s memories of the other Fates dying.
"Elise!"