Nathaniel wanted it to stop burning, so his G.o.dly will had made a tsunami.
"f.u.c.k me," Elise swore.
That was all she managed to say before it all crashed over her.
A fist of water punched into her. She thought that it might have slammed her into a wall, or maybe the street; she couldn"t tell where she was or which direction was up anymore.
Elise phased, turning herself to smoke. It didn"t help.
She struggled to the surface, moving her semi-corporeal form through the tide as it smashed over buildings, crushed streets, vaporized the fire.
As soon as she touched air, it became easier to spread herself out as the darkness. And there was quite a lot of darkness in the village. The fires had been drowned under hundreds of feet of water, and Russia was now an ocean as far as she could see.
The hotel was under it, too. The hotel and everyone inside.
Her mother. Abram, with the blood of Adam.
James.
Elise plunged into the water again, seeking out the wreckage of the hotel among the rest of the flotsam. It was shockingly dark within Nathaniel"s wave, filled with shattered fragments of wood and stone, but she couldn"t traverse it as easily as she traversed air. She"d never tried to phase through so much water before. She couldn"t seem to do it.
Elise glimpsed the door of the hotel before the waves swept her away from it. Away from the fading mental signals of the people inside.
No!
And then she was standing in the middle of the street, right in front of the hotel, and there was no water anywhere.
Just like that, the ocean had vanished.
Nothing looked even remotely damp. Nothing except Elise. Water drizzled from her hair and clothes, leaving a puddle at her feet. It smelled like brine and apples.
The village was burning again. In fact, the fire had advanced. But the buildings that had been crushed by Nathaniel"s wave were standing again and the hotel was intact beside Elise. She could feel everyone alive inside. James"s mind was almost indistinguishable from the others-just a mortal mind overwhelmed by the power of the werewolves that accompanied him.
"Nathaniel?" she called.
Belphegor appeared beside her. "h.e.l.lo, G.o.dslayer."
Her obsidian falchion leaped to her hand. Its textured hilt was sure in her slick palm. "Belphegor."
"You won"t be able to kill me here," he said calmly, undisturbed by her suggested death threat. And why should he worry? He"d been more powerful than Elise before penetrating Eden. Now he was something else completely.
"I am the G.o.dslayer," Elise said. "I can get creative."
She sensed faint amus.e.m.e.nt from him, even if she couldn"t see it in his face. Belphegor was in a good mood and it radiated. "I"ll give you one free shot. Try to kill me. I a.s.sure you that I won"t fight back."
Elise studied him out of the corner of her eye. He was still wearing the slim-fitting black uniform of a steward, the one with the silver pin marking his allegiance to the Palace"s last administration. His slender, skeletal hands were folded in front of him.
He flickered. The suit briefly became spiked armor with a velvet cape and the head of a human slave dangling from the belt at his waist.
Then he was in the suit again.
"You"re not really here," Elise said.
"I"m still within Eden. You"ll have to enter the garden to kill me."
"Fine. Not the first time I"ve done it."
"While I appreciate your bloodthirstiness, I"d like to make an alternate proposal." He swept a hand up the burning street. "Will you walk with me?" So civil. As if he hadn"t once chained her to his office wall and threatened her with a studded phallus.
"Nathaniel," she said. "I have to find him."
To her surprise, Belphegor said, "I agree. Please, let"s discuss this. Consider ourselves at a detente."
"The entire f.u.c.king world is burning. Some detente."
The fires vanished. The sky cleared of smoke. Even the broken wall of James"s room at the hotel had been sealed again, as though Nathaniel had never been there. The village had been restored to its condition of hours earlier.
"Now the walls between universes," Elise said.
Belphegor"s radiating amus.e.m.e.nt grew. "Some things are beyond even the power of G.o.ds. However, we can also discuss that."
She sheathed her falchion. "Okay."
"Let"s walk."
The village melted away and became replaced by desert. If the sun-baked soil hadn"t been golden rather than crimson, she might have believed that it was h.e.l.l. A river of magma raced through the scorched sagebrush. At least, Elise thought that it should have been racing down the slope-it wasn"t moving.
The sparks that the magma threw into the air were still, too. They hovered in midair like starlight. She walked through the embers and brushed them off of her arms when they threatened to burn through her shirt.
Belphegor had frozen time.
"An improvement, don"t you think?" Belphegor asked, indicating the magma river.
Elise would have been lying if she said that she didn"t like how it felt. Earth had always been too damp and cold for her; this was dry, hot, and miserable, so she felt right at home.
Belphegor strolled along the sh.o.r.e of the magma river. The glow of the magma didn"t touch his slender black suit. He was a cutout moving across the desert, isolated from the environment.
"You wanted to talk, so let"s talk," Elise said. There was a jackrabbit"s corpse at her feet that seemed to have suffocated from the gases. Flies were suspended inches above its rotting flesh.
"You didn"t use my army as I intended," Belphegor said. "I gave them to you so that you could lay siege to Heaven."
"You gave them to me so that I"d provoke the angels into ripping the world apart. I did that fine without their help."
"That you did. Regardless, you no longer need them."
That sounded like a threat. "You don"t, either," Elise said. "You"ve got the hybrids and the Fates. You"ve got the Origin, too. You played a long game to get to Eden, and now you"ve made it."
"Are you impressed?" Belphegor asked.
Slightly. "No," Elise said.
"Would you like to join me?"
She stopped walking. "What?"
Belphegor faced her. Another flicker, and he wore his armor. The crimson cape flapped around his ankles in a breeze that Elise couldn"t feel. His fleshless jaw was exposed by his helm in a skeletal grin. "There are always three in any given genesis," Belphegor said. "The angel, the demon, the gaean. Nathaniel"s the angel. I am the demon."
"I"m a demon, too."
"You were once a kopis, a gaean breed. You are all three in a single package. Your blood is primal ethereal, your origin mortal, your power infernal." He reached a gauntlet toward her. Its spiked fingertips brushed her jaw, and she didn"t step back. "You are a wildcard, G.o.dslayer, and you can fulfill any of the three positions. Imagine a pantheon occupied by two demons. Imagine what we would do to the universe."
She could imagine it much too easily because it would all look like the desert where they stood: endless h.e.l.lfire.
It was a tempting thought. Elise would be able to go anywhere and do anything in an environment like that. Electricity? She could will it out of existence. Sunlight? Irrelevant. They would only need the fires smoldering in the pits.
She"d be unstoppable.
Elise would have also made the world uninhabitable for everyone that she cared about.
"I chose you from the kennels for reasons I didn"t understand at the time," Belphegor said. "You were alluring. Instinctively, I understood what you would represent to the universe, and to me. Lilith made you for me, perhaps out of some belated sense of contrition."
Revulsion curled through her stomach. "Yatam made me out of his blood."
"At Lilith"s desire."
"I was made to kill G.o.ds," Elise said. "Not become one."
"And? You"ve already fulfilled the destiny forced upon you by angels and man. Is that the end of your legacy?" Fire sparked within the dark depths of Belphegor"s helm, momentarily making his eyes glow crimson. "You can be more than that."
"I"ve seen what happens to people who enter the Origin."
"Adam became insane because he was greedy and entered the Origin twice. Hardly an inevitability." His lipless mouth seemed to smile. "Also, we will have each other. Previous pantheons have done best when they formed strong bonds with each other."
The only kind of bond Elise could imagine forming with Belphegor was the bond between her sword"s blade in his chest and her hand on the hilt.
"How do you know about previous pantheons?" Elise asked.
"This wasn"t my first genesis. I"m the last of the ancients. I have done all of this before. I have seen G.o.ds rise and fall, and I know what it will take to make the next one last."
"Genesis. You keep saying that."
"With every new group of G.o.ds comes an entirely new universe," Belphegor said. He waved a hand at the desert. "I flex my G.o.dly muscles with this destruction merely as entertainment. Once I have you as the third, we"ll be able to make everything from the beginning. Again."
Belphegor continued walking. Elise picked up her pace to walk alongside him.
The desert melted away. They walked through a mountain range filled with crystalline temples and waterfalls.
She"d seen engravings of Zebul, the Heavenly dimension where angels used to craft all of their finest work. It was no longer the idyllic utopia that she had read about. The waterfalls ran with fire. The trees burned. The sky was filled with glimpses of Earth.
The plumes of smoke didn"t move, just as the river of magma hadn"t moved. Time continued to hold still.
Belphegor walked on the long bridge between two temples. It was just wide enough that she could fit at his side. Elise wasn"t exactly short, but her chin was only level with his elbow.
"So you want me to enter the Origin," Elise said slowly. "In the garden."
"Ideally."
In order to do that, he would have to let her inside the garden where his real body waited. She could kill him and prevent anyone else from entering the Origin. She could prevent this genesis thing.
"Okay," she said. "I"ll do it."
The instant she said it, his amus.e.m.e.nt grew. He wasn"t stupid enough to think she"d just changed her mind. "You"ll have to take care of something first."
"Name it."
"Find Nathaniel. He"s become a problem. He"ll need to be contained."
"You want me to kill him," Elise said.
"No, having a useless angel in Eden suits me. His weakness will render those ethereal fools impotent. I said that we"ll contain him, and we will. However, I will only contain him if you cooperate. Surrender him to me and I will let you into Eden."
So Belphegor would only let Elise into Eden if she gave him a hostage first.
She missed when her enemies were stupid.
They crossed the bridge to the next temple in Zebul. The instant their feet crossed the threshold, the ethereal dimension melted into New York.
The American northeast had been largely untouched by the Breaking, but now the city was suffering like the rest of the world. People fled buildings frozen in mid-collapse. Fire scaled the walls of skysc.r.a.pers.
Elise glanced down a set of stairs leading to the subway and found the tunnel flooded with Belphegor"s magma.
His fist was clenching around the entire Earth.
And the sky was worst of all. The Palace of Dis hung inverted above the clouds, taunting her with the sight of where she had left behind Neuma, Jerica, and her loyal dog, Ace.
"What if I agreed to cooperate with you without hostages?" Elise asked. "What if I gave up now?"
"No. No, I don"t think that will do." Belphegor slipped between two people trying to climb over a car that had been crushed by rubble. The woman"s mouth was open in a silent scream. Tears tracked her cheeks. "It"s not about hostages. It"s about your spirit, G.o.dslayer. You"re too spirited to obey me. For now."
"What"s that supposed to mean?"
"Bring Nathaniel to me. Let that be your primary concern."
"How?" she asked. "He"s a G.o.d now. I can"t control him."
Belphegor"s chuckle was low and unpleasant. "You"re the G.o.dslayer. Get creative."
Elise took another step, and she was back in Russia.