It was Ariane. She had pushed Marion behind her into the corner, and both of them crouched behind Abram. She lobbed the bottle of light-emitting potion over the heads of fiends.
Elise caught the potion, and, without hesitation, smashed the gla.s.s on Atropos"s face.
Light gushed over them. The megaira shrieked in pain, clawing at her boiling skin.
Her wild struggles made Elise lose her balance. Both of them tipped backwards over the edge of the cold spring.
With the megaira still locked in her arms, Elise"s back smashed into the water. They sank rapidly.
Elise kicked Atropos away and surged through the water, arms thrusting in front of her, shoulders flexing, legs kicking. The spring was flowing away from the fissure to Eden, so it should have been easy to propel herself back to the surface.
Yet the tide refused to yield. No matter how hard she tried to swim, she fell toward the light.
Atropos fell, too. Her boot lashed out and connected with the side of Elise"s skull. She caught Atropos"s ankle before she could kick again.
With the contact of skin against skin, their thoughts freely intertwined.
Aren"t you so angry? Atropos purred, even as she struggled to free herself of Elise"s grip. After everything you"ve suffered at Belphegor"s hands, aren"t you furious?
McIntyre. Neuma. Gerard. James.
Elise tried to push away the anger, tried to find a quiet core within herself.
The surrender she had found moments before was suddenly gone.
They were tumbling toward Eden, locked together in combat, and there was no retreat from the anger. Strength drained from her muscles as her fury about her dead friends grew. She sank toward Eden faster, weakened by Atropos"s feeding.
Water flowed up her nose and down her throat and choked her. She wasn"t ready to go to Eden. She had no idea how to kill Belphegor. She wasn"t ready, it wasn"t fair, and this was all Atropos"s fault.
At least, that was what Atropos wanted her to think, because it made her angrier.
Elise glared at the receding circle of darkness that indicated the cavern above. Her mother and sister-finally, her sister-were up there, dying as Eden pulled her into its arms.
Atropos gripped Elise"s throat in both hands and squeezed.
You"ll never be able to kill Belphegor anyway, Atropos said. You"re too weak. You"re a failure. Doesn"t that make you angry? Don"t you hate yourself?
They were so close to the fissure now.
Fear crept in at the edges of Elise"s anger-true fear. The fear that James was already gone and that Belphegor would greet her with his bones. Or worse, that he wasn"t dead, and she wouldn"t be able to save him anyway. The fear that she wasn"t going to be able to save anyone, just as she hadn"t saved the liberated slaves, her friends, or so many others.
The fear burned as badly as the light from the fissure.
Elise clutched at it, trying to let it grow to overwhelm her and take away Atropos"s fuel.
Someone help me, Elise thought in a rare moment of desperation, knowing that there shouldn"t have been anyone to hear her.
She was shocked when another voice responded.
Very well.
That voice belonged to neither Elise nor Atropos.
The megaira showed no sign of hearing it. Her pallid flesh was oozing into the water around her as she sank, but her grip on Elise"s throat didn"t falter. Atropos was using Elise"s body as a shield against the light from the fissure.
Who are you? Elise asked the voice.
The reply sounded amused. We are pieces of you. Relax, sword-woman-you won"t be alone in Eden.
Her lungs ached as Atropos pushed her toward the light, the air on the other side, and the final confrontation with Belphegor. The megaira"s cheeks peeled away as the light from the fissure consumed them, baring a skeletal grin.
Elise"s back brushed the juncture to Eden.
h.e.l.l turned inside out.
Eighteen.
Elise pa.s.sed through the fissure, stretched like taffy, and appeared on the other side with more company than she had expected.
Water gushed around Elise as she struck the gra.s.s. Atropos"s hands still pressed against her throat, her skull. The megaira"s knees drove into her back.
"I never would have allowed her to get the better of me like that," remarked a dry voice.
Bare toes were nestled in the gra.s.s inches from Elise"s nose. She couldn"t turn to look all the way up to his face, but she could see legs wearing snug leather, narrow hips, the hem of a black silk shirt.
It was Yatam, the original father of all demons.
He had been dead for years.
The kindly response to his complaint was just as impossible. "You never fought enemies as powerful as Elise has."
That sounded like Eve: first angel, Adam"s former consort, and also very much dead.
Elise groaned out an incoherent question as Atropos"s hands squeezed. But the other demon was weakening, too. Her breath was growing choppy, her fingers losing consistency as the light from Eden sank into her flesh. It was gloomy underneath the trees, sheltered from the worst of the light, but still far too bright for one of the Fates.
"I outlasted you by a considerable number of years, Eve," Yatam said.
Eve giggled. "We never fought, darling nephew."
"Nephew? Don"t insult me."
Two ancient dead beings were arguing over Elise"s head.
It seemed possible that she hadn"t survived pa.s.sing through the fissure with her sanity intact.
Atropos coughed a lungful of fluid onto the gra.s.s next to Elise then rasped, "We made it. Belphegor"s going to end you and everything you care about."
Not only was it a pathetic attempt at evoking anger in Elise, but it told her something important: Atropos couldn"t see Yatam and Eve.
With a hard twist, Elise flipped underneath the megaira. Her heart guttered at the sight of Atropos"s rotten face. Pa.s.sing through the fissure had hurt Elise, but Atropos had been completely ripped apart.
Elise kneed the other demon in the gut. It was easy to push her off. She wrenched free, drawing her steel-bladed sword as she stumbled to her feet.
Atropos was slower.
"You"ll never be able to kill her with that pathetic blade, G.o.dslayer," Yatam said. His thumbs were hooked in the low-slung waistband of his pants, dragging them dangerously low to expose the vee of hard muscle under his navel.
He underestimated Elise.
She hurled the sword-not toward Atropos, but straight into the air, using all of the strength that remained in her body.
The blade ripped through tree branches, opening a hole to the bright sky beyond.
A beam of light spilled over the gra.s.s with Atropos at its center.
Elise leaped out of the way just in time, sheltering underneath a large root. She watched from safety as Atropos struggled to follow her, trying to run on legs that turned to steaming sludge with every step.
Atropos"s feet melted into the gra.s.s. She ran on anklebones. And then the stumps of her fibula and tibia began wearing away, leaving her to try to escape on her knees, hands digging into the gra.s.s for purchase.
"No," she gasped.
Atropos"s final cry was deeply satisfying.
The splash of her ichor washed over Elise"s feet.
"Impressive," Yatam said. He stood in the sunlight. He had always been able to stand in the sun, despite the fact that Elise had inherited her vulnerability to light from him; after five thousand years, he had found some kind of trick that made him impervious.
He was as beautiful as she remembered. His hair was matte black, his smooth skin creamy with olive undertones. Eden"s light glinted on the ridges of muscle down his abdomen and emphasized the hard cut of his cheekbones. Given b.r.e.a.s.t.s and a softer jaw, he would have been indistinguishable from his dead sister, Yatai.
Eve lingered behind him, drifting through the gra.s.s. She was just as beautiful but much less showy. Yatam deliberately posed to encourage Elise to appreciate his form; Eve never had felt the urge to display herself. Now was no exception. Still, with her cascading brunette hair and perfect heart-shaped face, Eve was as gorgeous as she had ever been.
"Ah," she said. "Here." She pointed into the bushes. "I found it. That"s where your falchion landed."
Elise gave them a wide berth as she collected it, rubbing fresh sap off of the blade with her shirt.
She surveyed both from a safe distance. They looked real enough. Eve was tall, winged, and graceful; Yatam was a splash of unnatural darkness in paradise.
They definitely didn"t look dead.
"How?" Elise asked.
Yatam rolled his eyes to the sky. "It isn"t difficult to figure out with a few moments" thought."
"We are pieces of you," Eve said. "You asked for help. We emerged."
"You"re not actually Eve and Yatam, though," Elise said.
"Tell me what you think, sword-woman. Your blood rendered me mortal, and my twin sister severed my mortal body into two pieces as you watched. Am I actually Yatam?" he asked.
He was certainly almost as infuriating as the real thing. But Elise thought she understood: she had been given the powers of Yatam when she had been reborn. Then the garden had given her the blood of the Tree and pieces of Eve"s soul. She had been carrying the memory of both inside of her for years.
Apparently, it was slightly more than memory.
It couldn"t be accident that they had been invoked now.
"How are you going to help me kill Belphegor?" Elise asked.
"You are the sword-woman originally forged to murder Adam," Yatam said. "You have been reforged to kill new G.o.ds. Together, the three of us form the blade, the hilt, the pommel. We will balance out your strengthened steel." When he smiled, it didn"t touch his lips-only the corners of his eyes. "Temper yourself."
If he was a piece of herself, then Elise was irked by the obscurity of that sliver of her subconscious. She"d asked for help in a moment of desperation and been rewarded with an enigma.
Elise squeezed the last of the water from her hair and began trudging through Eden-not in any particular direction, but where instinct told her to go. It was silent among the trees. Yatam and Eve made no noise as they followed her.
Blade, hilt, pommel. Tempered steel. Elise was too exhausted and shocked from the transition between universes to make sense of it all.
But maybe it was far less complicated than she expected.
Maybe it wasn"t about who they were, but what they were: an angel and a demon. Two pieces of a whole.
And Elise was the third.
James bled on the gra.s.s, but he didn"t die. He almost wished that he would. It would make Elise"s job easier-one less hostage for her to worry about, one less "motivating" factor in succ.u.mbing to Belphegor"s demands.
He shut his eyes and waited to feel death creeping over him, but Belphegor had been careful inflicting the wound, and abdominal injuries killed slowly. It didn"t take a G.o.d to gut a man and give him hours of pain before dying. Only millennia of practice on human slaves in h.e.l.l.
James focused on breathing. Breath wasn"t painful. The expansion and contraction of lungs, the heat in his throat.
The edges of his wounds rubbed together when his chest rose and fell. That hurt. Strange how it felt like his intestines burned with exposure to the air.
James was so absorbed in the mere act of respiration that he almost didn"t hear the footsteps.
"I didn"t give you permission to join us," Belphegor said. The fact that he sounded irritated at all spoke volumes about exactly how angry he was.
The responding silence was just as telling in so many subtle ways.
Elise had arrived.
James"s eyes felt dry, difficult to open. All his body"s fluids were trickling out his gut. But he managed to roll over and open his eyelids, and there she was, standing beyond Nathaniel"s unconscious body.
"Am I despairing enough now?" she asked.
"That"s for you to decide. How did you feel, seeing your friends die?" Belphegor asked.