Authors: SM Reine
“Okay!” Elise snapped. “Stop it. I’m here. I’m going. You’ll have your infernal majority.”
Belphegor didn’t relent until Elise took the first step onto the root.
It felt like the entire garden held its breath as she ascended. She climbed up onto the roots, gazing down into the brightness of the Origin. It rimmed her in brilliant white light. It should have been
too
bright for her—it was much brighter than the sun, after all. But she only seemed to glow.
Elise turned back. The foot lifted from James’s skull an inch. His head still hurt, and he wasn’t certain that Belphegor hadn’t fractured something.
Even through the pain, Elise was beautiful to behold, and the sight of her standing above the Origin terrified him.
She didn’t want to enter the Origin. She had
never
wanted that kind of power—only what it took to save lives, vanquish evil, and keep the cogs of time turning. It should have been James up there, if anyone at all. He should have tried harder to get there before she could. He should have triggered genesis himself before she could be the one responsible for that.
“Don’t,” James said. He wanted to say so much more, but it was all that he could bring himself to verbalize.
Elise gave him a flash of a faint smile. For an instant, as the light of the Origin rippled over her, he didn’t see her with black hair, white skin, black eyes. He saw her the way she had been as a human. Auburn-haired, muscular, freckled. Beautiful and strong, forged in battle.
There was no reluctance in her smile. Everything was going exactly to her plan.
She stepped off the edge of the roots and plunged into the Origin.
Belphegor didn’t try to stop James when he dragged himself across the grass, pushing his upper body up on his arms to peer over the root. He felt something shift inside of himself that wasn’t supposed to move. His vision darkened at the edges.
James couldn’t see Elise below. The surface of the Origin wasn’t disturbed by so much as a ripple.
He had expected something much more dramatic—something more along the lines of a big bang heralding the birth of a new universe.
Yet the Origin was calm, and so was Eden. Belphegor glanced at his wrist. James was almost amused to realize that the demon had made a watch appear at the end of his sleeve.
James tried to stand up using the root and slipped. He collapsed again, taking slow, painful breaths.
Eden began shifting. It sounded like the trees were rustling against each other even though he couldn’t actually see the branches moving. Every time he blinked, they seemed to be a few inches taller, budding with new growth, filling the canopy with lush green leaves.
A slender vine tickled James’s knuckle, creeping over the back of his hand, curling around his wrist. The growing grass seemed to stretch toward his wound as if drawn by the scent of his blood.
“Genesis,” Belphegor murmured with a smile.
Abram had never
felt more useless in his life than he did trying to protect Elise’s family from infernal onslaught. He stood between the women and the door, violence burning in his blood. It felt right to face these demons, all red-eyed and leather-skinned and snarling. This was what he was meant to do—not hunting werewolves, as he briefly had with Seth, but hunting demons.
Yet his bullets seemed to vanish midair. For every fiend he dropped, another would climb over its body. They were infinite, pushing into the cavern one after the next.
If not for Levi and Abel, he would have already been killed by the onslaught. He’d served his purpose. Eden was open. There would be no more interventions from people like James and Elise to save him.
He wasn’t sure how much longer the werewolves would last, either.
But he couldn’t give up. Couldn’t stop shooting until he ran out of bullets, and even then he threw the guns at the fiends to knock another down before resorting to bare fists.
Abram snapped a hard right hook at a fiend and caught it in the mouth with his knuckles. The skin cracked. Blood trickled down his wrist.
Another fiend slipped past him. Ariane cried out.
He wrenched the fiend off of her, only to have another jump onto his back, staggering him. They dragged him down. Dull teeth worried against his shoulders. Abram struggled, driving his elbows into every soft spot he could find, stomping on their limbs.
Bones cracked. Saliva dripped onto his neck.
“Get—off—”
Weight lifted suddenly from him. He expected his savior to be Levi and was surprised to see Elise’s young friend dragging the fiend away. Abram didn’t even know the guy’s name.
Marion’s sharp cry drew Abram’s attention. The fiend that had gotten past him had smashed Ariane’s head into the wall. She bled from a wound in her temple, and the little girl had seen. She was in hysterics. But not injured herself, not yet.
They wouldn’t be able to survive much longer if they remained trapped in that cavern.
Abram threw the remaining fiend. It bowled into Levi, and the werewolf took care of it in moments, shredding it in his teeth. “We need a way out,” Abram said, catching the arm of Elise’s friend. “Make an exit!”
The young man looked ashen. “I can’t open any more doors.”
“You
can’t
?”
“It was never me opening them, exactly. I’m not a witch, I’m not magical. I just saw the places that fate intersected, and…” He made a knocking gesture in midair that did nothing, then shrugged.
Frustration clutched at Abram’s heart. “Then how are we going to escape?” He turned. “Marion?”
The little girl was crying. Ariane made soft soothing noises, holding her against her shoulder. It wasn’t helping.
Marion wasn’t going to be able to open a door for them, either.
“Levi!” Abram shouted.
The wolf didn’t stop fighting, but he glanced over. His eyes burned brightly in the darkness.
Abel turned at the call, too. He saw Abram’s unarmed hands and Ariane’s bleeding forehead. His mouth opened in a swear. It wasn’t hard to read lips and guess what he was saying.
Fuck this
.
Wolf spirits erupted from him, fountaining from his flesh like the water. When a fiend rounded on Abram to attack, there was already the translucent figure of a wolf between them, forming a furred wall. The others ripped into the demons.
These wolves were slower than they’d been earlier, and even fainter. They were weakening. But it gave Abram and his companions the precious seconds they needed to escape.
Levi lunged into the doorway, shredding through a cluster of brutes. Then he bowled over the demons that had been about to follow them in.
The entrance to the hallway, for the moment, stood empty.
Abram skirted around the gushing spring and ran into the magma tube. The path was broader beyond the door. With the demons more spread out, they didn’t look quite so numerous. He could actually see an end to them. If they could just get past this wave…
“We need a path,” he said.
Levi didn’t need to be told. He’d already begun shoving through the demons. Abram dragged Ariane along behind him, daughter and all.
Adrenaline electrified Abram’s muscles with new strength as they progressed up the hallway inch by inch, following Levi’s furred back. The wolf spirits flowed through the tunnel and vanished into the darkness. The only way to tell that they were still fighting were the screams of the demons when the wolves reached them.
“There!” Ariane cried.
There was another tunnel leading off of the main path. Abram hadn’t noticed it on the way down. There was no way to tell where it would end up, or even if it was safer than the hallway they were in now.
Given the choice between probable death and possible death, Abram would always take the latter.
He darted around a spirit wolf tearing into a gibborim and launched into the unknown.
The sounds of battle receded behind them as they rushed through the narrow tunnel. There wasn’t enough room for more than two of them to run abreast. Abram pushed Ariane and Marion in front of him so that he could watch their rear.
That left him in the back of the group with Elise’s friend. The stranger.
“Who are you?” Abram asked.
After a moment’s hesitation, he said, “My name’s Flynn.”
It didn’t sound like a lie, but it didn’t quite sound like the truth, either.
“Should I know you?” Abram asked.
Flynn laughed. “No, you don’t know me yet.”
“Yet?”
“I know you,” Flynn said. “I know all of you. I know things about you that you can’t imagine. Like, I can tell you that you’ll like Abel someday, a lot, but you’ll never get to be very good at talking and that’s okay.” And then he gestured to Ariane. “I know that she’s finally going to stop running. And I know that Marion is going to be really—well, really awesome.”
He almost touched one of Marion’s curls then drew his hand back suddenly, like he wasn’t sure he was allowed.
Abram didn’t understand. “If you’re not a witch, what are you?”
“A precognitive,” he said. “Just a precognitive. Basically, when I’m in this world, way back in this genesis, I see time. Mostly the future.”
“And that’s where you’ve seen me. The future,” Abram said.
“Yeah,” Flynn said. “I’ve seen you in the future. A lot.”
“That means we survive this, right?”
A roar echoed up the narrow tunnel.
“Probably,” Flynn said, glancing nervously over his shoulder. “Things have been known to change.”
That was reassuring.
“I think I see something,” Ariane said, producing another potion bottle from the bodice of her dress. With a hard shake, it began glowing blue, lighting the tunnel a few feet ahead of them.
The tunnel dropped off sharply just ahead. They never would have seen it coming in the darkness.
Abram stopped at the edge, hanging onto the wall as he stared down at what he had hoped would be an escape with dwindling hopes.
Beyond that abrupt drop-off, fires smoldered. The magma tube had led to a second cavern, a much larger cavern with its floor hundreds of feet below. The rough walls made it look natural rather than hand-carved, but its center was occupied by a huge statue of three people standing back to back: an angel, a demon, and a human.
Real demons carpeted the floor in a seething mass. It was more of the army that had attacked them above, led by Atropos. Many of them were too large to fit into the narrower reaches of the magma tubes underneath Dis. They must have been waiting for Atropos to emerge and give them guidance.
“We’ll have to go back,” Abram said.
Ariane’s mouth dropped open. “Go back? But—”
“Into Eden,” Abram said. It was the only way that they could hope to get out now.
But it was too late to backtrack. Noises echoed up their tunnel.
They were being followed.
Abram stepped in front of Ariane to protect her. His hand automatically went for his holster, now empty.
Fiends rushed up the tunnel.
He braced himself for the attack, mind whirling. No weapons. Nowhere to run.
This is going to be ugly.
Then arrows whistled from the darkness, thudding into the backs of the fiends’ skulls, iron points protruding from their foreheads. Their bulbous eyes went blank. One by one, they skidded to Abram’s feet, arrow fletching stained with their blood as they twitched out their last moments of life.
His heart didn’t beat as a woman stepped out of the tunnel carrying a crossbow, armor clanking together. Blood was smeared over her hands and lower jaw. She looked all too pleased with herself.
“Who are you?” she asked them, casually lifting the crossbow to her shoulder.
Abram opened his mouth to respond, but Flynn spoke first. “We’re Elise’s friends.”
“She has any surviving friends?” The demon sounded far too casual about that question. Abram assumed it was hypothetical. “Well, my name’s Terah, and I’m here to save your useless mortal lives. I can take you to safety.”
A fiend darted toward her from the depths of the tunnel. She backhanded it without dropping her gaze from Abram’s, sending it flying into a wall.
His eyebrows lifted. “Okay.”
Terah strode back up the tunnel, and they followed her in silence to yet another branch of the magma tubes, where it was hotter still. This one was almost vertical. Impossible to climb. But an iron chain dangled down the wall, and when Terah tugged on it, someone at the top lowered it a few more feet.
“This leads to the surface,” she said. “They will pull you out.”
“They?” Flynn asked.
Terah’s teeth gleamed in a smile. “Don’t you trust me?”
Probable death versus possible death
, Abram reminded himself.
He grabbed the chain, wrapping it around his forearm. Whoever was on the other end lifted. Metal rattled against stone, and his feet lifted off the ground. He watched the faces below him until the tube curved and blocked his view of them entirely.
The darkness inside was softer than it had been in the other tunnels, and it only grew lighter as the chain continued to lift him.
Abram emerged on the slope of the mountain, hot air pushing down his throat, burning his lungs. He was greeted by the sight of more demons. These ones wore black leather body armor with red pinstripes at the hips, which was the same uniform that Abram had always seen on Elise’s army when they visited the sanctuary. They were allies, or something like it.
They didn’t attempt to kill him, which was definitely an improvement to the conditions below.
He stood back and let them drop the chain down the tunnel again.
Abram shielded his eyes from a windy blast of dust and ash, looking up at the peak of the mountain. He hadn’t been to Dis very often, but he remembered Mount Anathema having a tall, sharp peak, like a knife cutting into the sky.
Now it looked like the stone had been blasted away. The jagged peak belched black smoke. Rivers of lava flowed down the slopes, the nearest of them searingly hot on his arms. His arm hair was curling from the temperature.
He suddenly missed the sheltered darkness below.
Yet there was salvation nearby. The stone turned to carpet further down the slope.