Authors: SM Reine
Elise could only occasionally glimpse them through the window. Even for something like her, werewolves were too stealthy to track unless they wanted to be tracked.
She didn’t care enough to attempt it. She could feel the pack outside and that was enough. They wouldn’t be leaving any time soon—not when she had the body of their dead Alpha in her possession. Rylie Gresham’s corpse, turned to stone by the obsidian falchion, was hidden underneath blankets on the far side of the pickup bed.
Elise was much more concerned with her living cargo.
James Faulkner still hadn’t woken up. Not when Elise carried him into the pickup, not when Anthony and Brianna began shouting about the changes in the sky over Oymyakon, not when they began their rough journey toward Harbin.
He was alive. His brain registered activity that Elise could easily see, if not understand. She thought he might have been dreaming. She wasn’t sure.
It had been a very long time since Elise had looked at James and had no idea what was going on in his head.
“It’s looking worse.” The voice came from the front of the pickup. Brianna was in the passenger’s seat, leaning forward so that she could look at the sky through the windshield.
“Don’t worry about it,” Anthony said tightly.
“How am I not supposed to worry about it? The whole sky is falling apart!”
“Just don’t look. Okay?”
Brianna might not have been able to follow Anthony’s advice, but Elise could all too easily.
She already knew that the angels had succeeded in ripping the universe asunder. She didn’t need to look outside to know that there was no longer any sky remaining.
Where the velvety blackness of night should have been, roiling void waited, flashing the occasional glimpse of distant buildings and trees. Sometimes those buildings were colorless gray, like something out of Heaven. Sometimes they were spires of obsidian. They peeked through the shifting clouds in breathless instants before fading again.
The walls between universes had been shattered, and Elise didn’t need to stare to be able to tell death was approaching.
James’s face, however, was far more interesting. He had changed in subtle but important ways.
His hair was completely white, unhidden by a glamor. The skin underneath his closed eyes was purpled from fatigue. Horizontal lines marked his forehead.
Every single one of his long years was imprinted on his flesh, and when she looked deeper within, his heart reflected a similar wearing. He looked like he was dying by the minute. Not now, possibly not even in the next thirty years, but James was mortal and he was going to die.
Elise had always expected to die before him.
“Whoa!”
Anthony’s shout from the driver’s seat was the only warning before the truck flipped.
Elise reacted the instant that she felt the floor buck underneath her. She released her skin and wrapped herself around James.
In a blink, they were outside.
She set him on the ground beside the road and watched as the truck rolled into a ditch.
It hadn’t been traveling quickly enough to roll onto its roof; it only tipped onto its side, sliding laterally until it stopped at the bottom of the hill. A hard
thump
after it stopped told her that Rylie’s body had shifted within the truck bed.
The fear radiating from the driver’s compartment indicated that Anthony and Brianna were fine, but it didn’t tell her why Anthony had wrecked the pickup.
Then she saw the young man standing in the middle of the road.
He was little more than a silhouette in the darkness, even with Elise’s keen night vision. There were no stars, no moon, no light from nearby cities—not this far into the wilderness. There was nothing to see.
Lightning flashed inside the billowing clouds, briefly highlighting the man on the road.
He was tall and leanly muscled, not yet grown into his adult frame. His dense brown curls had been cut an inch from his scalp. He wore a metal bracelet on one arm—an intake bracelet for a drug called lethe, Elise knew—and wore jeans, a black button-down shirt, sneakers much too flimsy for the Russian winter.
Benjamin Flynn. She had found him.
Or, to be more precise, he had found her.
She expanded her senses until she brushed against Benjamin’s mind. He crackled like a live electric wire. There was so much going on inside of his skull that it was completely unreadable to her. She couldn’t even tell if his intentions were friendly or hostile.
Considering that he had just made Anthony crash, Elise suspected Benjamin wasn’t entirely friendly.
She reached back to loosen the falchion in her sheath.
A wolf emerged from the trees, shapeshifting into human form. Most werewolves needed to wait for the Alpha to make the change, but not Summer Gresham. She was one of the few who had been born with the wolf spirit inside of her, and she switched between the two forms as easily as most people got dressed in the morning.
The young woman was naked when she finished changing. Her skin steamed from contact with the freezing air. “You okay?” Summer asked, helping Anthony and Brianna climb from the pickup. She hadn’t noticed the man in the road.
Benjamin bolted at the sound of her voice, veering to the left and vanishing into the trees.
Elise tore herself from the crashed pickup and flashed through the night.
For the past several weeks, she had been sick, incapable of feeding well enough to regain control of all of her powers. Now, she loosed herself into the night without hesitation. There wasn’t even a microgram of anathema powder remaining inside of her.
More than that, she felt like she had fed on an entire army of victims, with blood and sex and flesh and fear, and she was strong enough to take on a second army if she wanted to.
Elise saw everything as she expanded to fill the unnaturally dark night. She saw the werewolves closing in on the pickup, ripping the doors off to help Anthony and Brianna climb out. She saw the careful transfer of Rylie’s body to flat ground and Ariane Kavanagh emerging from a second vehicle behind them.
She saw the angel named Nashriel skimming the border between air and void in the sky above, wheeling in circles as he watched for enemies that might threaten the wolf pack.
Elise saw every inch of shadows under the canopy of the trees, between the grains of topsoil, deep within the layers of ice.
And she saw Benjamin Flynn running.
With a thought, she materialized in front of him, arms flung wide so that she formed a wall with her mortal body.
Benjamin skidded to a stop before striking her. Now that they were closer, she realized he wasn’t impervious to the cold after all. His whole body was trembling, his lips pale, his runny nose frozen. He didn’t cut the most imposing figure.
“What do you want with us?” Elise asked.
He looked confused. “What do
I
want? What does that even mean?”
She opened her mouth to reply, but wasn’t sure what to say. Something in his tone told her that he wouldn’t have understood.
Benjamin shoved her.
Elise let out a small cry of shock as she lost her grip on the trees and fell backwards.
She never hit the ground. She flashed into shadow inches before she contacted ice.
When she reappeared, she found herself standing in New Eden.
Elise’s jaw dropped. Her boots crunched on frozen ground as she turned. That ground belonged in Russia. The trees framing her view of the city were likewise the trees of the tundra, with their desperate branches grasping for any brush of sunlight they could get in the long winters.
Everything else surrounding her was ethereal. The frozen ground turned to white cobblestone a few feet to her left, and one of the angels’ newer buildings thrust toward the clouds, its upper floors of shimmering crystal hidden by storm clouds.
Smoke spiraled into the black sky. Some of the trees were burning.
Lightning flashed through the clouds over New Eden. For an instant, Elise glimpsed a familiar landscape high above her head: an icy road framed by forest and a pickup truck so far away that it looked to be half the size of her pinky nail.
Benjamin had pushed her into another dimension.
He was nowhere in sight now. When Elise searched for him with her other senses, ethereal power crashed over her, smothering her ability to sense anything else.
This wasn’t just a vision. She was really in New Eden.
Some part of her was perversely amused that she had stumbled back there after all it had taken to reach New Eden the first time. A much larger part of her was horrified by the implications.
What other worlds would be spilling onto Earth next?
She stormed deeper into New Eden, searching for Benjamin’s movement among the swaying branches. The wind was picking up. The city groaned and crumbled around her.
Another consciousness pushed against hers, powerful and brief.
Leliel.
The angels knew Elise had come back.
She raced down the twisting cobblestone road faster.
Benjamin was scurrying over a bridge when she found him, rubbing the circulation back into his arms. On the other side of the road, Elise could see Earth again—not the tundra that they had left behind, but somewhere with waving grass the color of sunshine.
The sky was blue over there. Benjamin was fleeing to a place where the sky hadn’t yet shattered, where it would be too bright for Elise to give chase.
She had to catch him while he was still in New Eden.
Rage erupted inside of her. She didn’t fight it. She embraced it, fed into it, and unleashed nightmarish fear in a wave.
“Stop!” Elise shouted, and he did.
Benjamin cried out as he fell, clutching his chest.
She sank the hooks of her power into him. Once caught, it was trivial to make his fear grow, paralyzing him as he struggled to breathe.
But what strange fears for Benjamin to have. Through the ropes of energy tying them together, she could see his nightmares played out like a movie: a blond woman drenched in her own blood, a towering Tree that Elise hadn’t seen intact for years, a dark garden that she had never visited at all.
She stopped at his side, but Benjamin didn’t see her. He writhed, clawing at his back, as if trying to rip away wings that weren’t there.
“Let me
go
!” he cried.
Elise eased her power away from him.
Color slowly returned to Benjamin’s cheeks as he panted on the ground. His palms were dirty with Earth soil where he had fallen. The knees of his jeans were ripped.
Elise could think of a thousand questions for him, starting with “How did you escape Dis?” and ending with “This is all your fault, isn’t it?” But she had no idea how long she could hold on to Benjamin, and only one of those questions mattered. “You told me that Marion was in New Eden,” Elise said. “She’s not here. I don’t think she’s ever been here.”
“I lied,” Benjamin gasped.
“But
why
?”
“Because I wanted you to go back here. I wanted you to punish the angels for what they’ve done. I think. I’m not sure.”
And she had taken the bait without thinking twice.
Anger burned in the pit of her stomach. She didn’t appreciate being manipulated, especially not when those manipulations had led to the walls between all of the universes falling apart.
“Why do you care what the angels have done? Did they take someone you care about? Is that why we’ve come back?”
“I don’t know anyone here. It’s just that they killed Nathaniel’s mother,” Benjamin said. “I hate angels. I hate all of them.”
The sound of Nathaniel’s name from Benjamin’s lips stunned her. He spoke with such heat.
Metaraon had indeed killed Nathaniel’s mother, a woman who James had once been engaged to marry, but that angel was dead now. Adam had ripped his head off.
It made no sense at all that Benjamin cared who had murdered Hannah Pritchard.
“Then where is Marion?” Elise asked.
“I took her somewhere safe, where nobody would be able to find her. Not even me. It was for her own good. She’s a mage, you know. Leliel would have taken her. Or James would have.” Hatred twisted Benjamin’s features. “You know what happens whenever James gets involved.”
Not long ago, she would have agreed with that sentiment. She wasn’t sure that she still didn’t.
Benjamin shouldn’t have known James at all.
“Have you seen him in your visions of the future?” Elise asked. Benjamin Flynn was a precognitive; he knew her with uncomfortable intimacy because he had seen her in previous visions. “James and Nathaniel—have you been having premonitions of them?”
“No. God, no,” Benjamin said. He gripped his head in both hands. “Yes. All the time.” He lunged for her. Elise took a quick step back, but he still managed to catch her shoulders, clinging to her desperately. Thunder rolled over New Eden, followed by the conflicting scents of rain and smoke. “I still see you, Elise. I know you. I never wanted to hurt you, but I
hate
you. How could you do this to me?”
His touch made her flesh roil. “I think the visions have damaged your mind. We need to isolate you from them again.”
“Like the Union did?” He laughed bitterly. “Their equipment failed. They thought they were cutting off premonitions, but they were trying to sever me from godhood. No matter what they do, I’ll become him again. Men are too weak to control me now.”
He was rambling. Insane.
“James can—” Elise cut herself off. No, James couldn’t do anything. He was never going to use magic to heal someone ever again. “I can do magic now, Benjamin.”
“I know. I
know
.”
“If anyone’s strong enough to repair you, it’s me,” Elise said. “Let’s figure this out. There’s still time to save you, and save the world.”
A laugh shivered through his body. A tear dripped down his cheek. “It’s too late. It’s much too late.”
“It’s not too late until we’re all dead.”
“How do you know that we aren’t?” Benjamin asked. “You’re going to destroy the world, Elise. How could you?”
Crack
. The bridge behind them snapped in half. The pieces fell into the canal, washing downstream.