Sins of Eden (31 page)

Eve pushed Elise gently toward Eden, but Elise didn’t want to go. It was comfortable inside the Origin. Elise could see and feel everything simultaneously, from the smallest growth of moss to the whisper of water between two stones. She could see what remained of the Earth, burning within Belphegor’s hellfire, and the decaying scraps of Heaven.

It all hurtled toward the end.

Everything was dying, and it was good in the same way that losing her body had been good. The universe was shedding everything that was weak and leaving the energy at its core. Everything would be reborn fresh and strong.

Not yet
, Yatam said.
You’re not done. There’s more work to do
.

He was right. With Nathaniel unconscious, Belphegor would shape the rebirth of the universe, using their power to construct an all-encompassing Hell. A universe broken to meet his whims, not a healthy new world.

Belphegor needed to be removed from the equation.

So Elise followed Eve’s urgings and emerged from the Origin. That was easy, too. She willed her body back into existence—the illusion of a body—and found herself rising as a human.

Elise dragged herself out of the waters and stood on the roots of the Tree. Yatam and Eve stood in the same position. They moved as a single unit. Three people occupying a single position in space.

The garden was frozen around her: Nathaniel asleep, Belphegor beside James, the whirlwind of blossoms and weeping amber frozen in midair.

She knew what she needed to do.

Like becoming God, killing Nathaniel was much easier than she expected, too.

James’s death was equally simple.

In the moment that Belphegor killed James, Elise could see everything that he had ever done. She saw him christened by the White Ash Coven and lifted to princely status among witches. He’d been told from the moment he could open his eyes that he would be the greatest of them, a savior, a man of importance. He grew knowing that he was better than everyone else.

He weaved magic unlike any the world had ever seen, unconsciously tapping into the ethereal plane and proving his coven’s suspicions correct.

And then she saw him abandoned by the coven. Left to hunt down Elise and deliver her to God. A king without kingdom.

The years of fighting, the tumult, the confusion, the pain. She had experienced so much of that with him the first time around. It was easier to watch it all like this, separated from emotion: their binding as kopis and aspis, his years of self-loathing, and eventual estrangement.

James had always been a deeply disturbed man. He’d never stood a chance at being anything else. And when he had tried to be the hero he was told he’d be, he’d become the villain instead.

Now he was dead, his head severed from his body, his intestines spilled across the soil of Eden.

There would be no more opportunities for him to redeem himself.

Elise lingered over the moment in time where they had decided to retire from the demon-hunting business and decided to open a dance studio. They had agreed to fund it largely through prize money rather than draining money they had stolen from one of their richer enemies, and James had started teaching her ballroom in earnest that night.

She watched the memory of James guiding her across an empty gas station parking lot, both smiling and laughing, and she couldn’t maintain her sense of godly detachment.

It hurt.

“He had to die,” Yatam said. It sounded like he stood behind Elise, just out of her eyesight, alongside Eve. “He was Belphegor’s leverage—he and Nathaniel both. Without them, your power is flawless.”

“I know,” Elise said as reality faded back in around her. A cold reality where there was a dead boy in front of her and Belphegor with James’s blood on his hands.

Elise understood that James needed to die, and yet she felt like she had already lost against Belphegor. Like there wasn’t anything left worth fighting over.

Belphegor didn’t look triumphant. He looked angry.

Angry, and afraid.

“Killing Nathaniel won’t stop the genesis,” Belphegor said. “Furthermore, you can’t assemble a new pantheon unless you kill yourself as well—and whatever else you have dredged from the Origin. The only way out of this is suicide. What’s victory worth to you?”

At this point, when almost everyone Elise loved was dead, beyond her reach?

“Everything,” she said. “Anything.”

Elise lifted her swords, and with Yatam and Eve at her back, she attacked.

Without any physical limitations remaining, Elise was no longer merely fast. She saw every possibility played out in front of her in every instant: Belphegor’s possible dodge to the left or right, how she would chase, which of them would succumb first.

The next heartbeat brought another cascade of possibilities, and so did the next. A million different ways either of them could die.

It would only take the right moment, the right possibility, to slaughter Belphegor.

They danced together at a speed beyond comprehension, moving through time as well as space. When Belphegor dodged, he didn’t just move to the left; he slid into an ancient desert crossed by spice merchants on camels before sliding back into Eden, outside of time and space. Elise pursued him through it.

Her thrusts drove him back to a time where the Earth was unpopulated, chasing him over a log that bridged an icy river through the mist.

Belphegor didn’t have any weapons, but he didn’t need them. His forearms were stone deflecting her attacks.

He shoved her hard enough to send her flying. Elise felt time vortex around them, punching her out of ancient history into modernity.

Almost
modernity. She smashed into parquet flooring hard enough to shake the entire building, and looked up to see that Belphegor had tossed her into Motion and Dance, the studio that she had once run with James. It was nighttime outside. Blue exercise mats were spread across the floor.

She was stunned to stillness, hands tight on the falchions.

There was a photo on the wall—a poster-sized shot of Elise and James at a competition.

Pain punched through her at the sight of it.

Elise had let Belphegor kill James just so she wouldn’t be weak.

“Move,” Yatam said from behind her, almost casually.

She rolled. A fist smashed into the parquet where she had been resting, cratering the wooden floor. The hole it left was much larger than the gauntlet that Belphegor wore in his armored form. She glimpsed a vast body that could crush the streets of Dis under his skeletal foot, and then he attacked her again as the steward.

Elise leaped away from him—and away from Motion and Dance.

She threw herself into a place where she was strong, a place without the painful reminder of what had happened to James.

The crystal bridge from the Palace of Dis to the fissure gleamed among the smoke over the city. Elise had leaped into a time when everything was intact, when she had still ruled.

Belphegor strode up the bridge, smoke billowing away from him as he approached her. Fire burned within his eyes.

“You learn quickly,” he said. “It took me centuries to learn how to travel temporally.”

“You haven’t had centuries.” She leaped back when he lunged at her, leaving several yards between the specters of their physical forms. Dis pitched around them. The crystal bridge was suddenly shattered again and the city was burning.

“I’ve always been God,” Belphegor said. “I’ve had eternity.”

She thought she understood what he meant now. Her soul was stretching in every direction, expanding to fill the universe with herself.

It did feel like she’d lived forever. Like she’d always been on this side of the Origin, just waiting to wake up to it.

Belphegor thrust his will against her, manifested as a fist to the gut. She staggered as reality swam dizzily around her.

They were in a doctor’s office. James and a girl who looked like Elise were sitting across from a doctor, who was calmly explaining that she had been born an aberration. She had complete androgen insensitivity. She was genetically male in an otherwise female body.

She had always assumed, until that day, that being a female kopis was just the luck of the draw. That she was one among thousands only by coincidence. She hadn’t known that all kopides
were
male, and that there was something significantly wrong with her.

Metaraon had made her that way. A female to be Adam’s bride, yet also male enough to be kopis, and strong enough to murder gods.

James had been there for that appointment. He had held her hand through it. He had reassured her that there was nothing “wrong” with her at all. He had made her feel as close to normal as a teenage girl who slaughtered demons could ever feel.

He had loved her, even then. He had taken care of her when nobody else would. When Elise wouldn’t even admit she might need the help.

The reminder was emotional warfare from Belphegor.

“Stop it,” she said, shoving both of them out of the office.

“Does it hurt?” Belphegor asked.

He knew it hurt. He was guiding her to the most painful places in her memory deliberately.

A god might not have been able to kill another god easily, but he could make her wither.

“Fire with fire,” Eve said. “Let’s take Belphegor where he hurts the most.”

It was Yatam who supplied the responding setting. They appeared in an ancient version of Dis with a river running through its center, flooded by the fissure to Eden.

At the time, Dis had been a desert oasis. The wind smelled like sage, the trees hung heavy with dates, and what few buildings stood in the shadow of Mount Anathema resembled the Hanging Gardens of Babylon.

Lilith, the serpentine demon goddess, stood among the trees and fountains. A man groveled at her feet.

Not a man—a skeleton.

Belphegor.

He didn’t look like any of the forms that Elise was familiar with. Not the steward, nor the general, nor the towering monster. He was a shriveled, pathetic thing, like a runt that had been abandoned by its mother and wasted away to nothing. He had two arms, two legs, something like a face, and the resemblance ended there.

But it was definitely Belphegor. Elise could feel him.

“You sicken me,” Lilith said. “Your obsessions are perverse.” It was somehow worse to hear that coming from a demon than it would have been from an angel.

And indeed, Eve was there, too—Eve, and younger forms of Yatam and his sister, Yatai. They all glared at Belphegor with total disgust in their eyes. It looked like the one issue that they had all ever agreed upon was the fact that this creature, this skeleton, was an abomination.

“Kill him,” Yatam urged.

“We can’t,” Eve said.

Yatai’s lip curled. “Sentimentality.”

“She’s right. We cannot,” Lilith said. “It’s impossible. This thing is beyond our ability to kill.” She seemed to look at Elise when she said it, even though Elise wasn’t really there. “Belphegor has been settled too deeply within the fabric of time. He must exist now, as he must exist centuries in the future.”

Belphegor the god stood apart from the conversation, staring at it in disgust.

“They turned on me, the only surviving ancient, when they should have worshipped me,” he hissed, rounding on Elise. “
You
turned on me.” She understood that he was speaking to Yatam and Eve, her other aspects.

Elise drove the glowing white point of her godsword into his chest.

He was too stunned by the sight of the ancient city to react in time. He didn’t even attempt to dodge the blow.

Instead, Belphegor looked down at the sword. His thin lips stretched into an expression that didn’t seem quite like a grimace or a smile. He seized Elise’s wrist and pulled her in closer. Blade scraped against bone, the hilt vibrating in time with his heart fluttering against metal.

The desert oasis of Dis melted away.

Darkness consumed them. Vast nothingness.

There was no time, no world—only the space between Belphegor and Elise as his body’s systems rapidly shut down. “What do you know of avatars?” The whisper of his breath over her lips tasted like old graveyards.

Elise didn’t know much beyond what James had told her of avatars—that gods needed them to walk on Earth, like Nathaniel did through Benjamin. Her thoughts unfolded between them. She didn’t need to speak for him to know it.

Belphegor responded with equal candor, both mentally and verbally. “I am an avatar. Nothing more. And I’m not the only one.”

He died before Elise could ask how that was possible.

At least, his avatar died.

Elise jerked the sword free and allowed Belphegor to fall. He landed on the ground beside the Tree, though she wasn’t certain when they had ended up in the garden again.

His body flickered between those of the steward, the armored general, and the monster. When it settled, he was only a skeleton, quickly devoured by Eden’s mossy ground. Green tendrils crept over him, sank into his bones, sucked him away into nothingness.

The garden didn’t react to his death. She didn’t feel him leaving the way that she had felt Nathaniel leave.

The Belphegor that Elise had known for years wasn’t the real thing at all. She had always been dealing with an avatar—and that was all she had killed. An avatar. Not the real thing.

“How the hell has he had an avatar longer than he’s been a god?” Elise asked.

Yatam scoffed. “Don’t think so linearly.”

She stretched herself across existence, searching through Heaven and Hell and Earth for any sign of Belphegor’s true form. He should have been easy to find. He shared in the same godhood she did; he should have burned like a flare.

“Where did he go?” she asked, sensing nothing.

“Try Malebolge,” Eve whispered.

Elise appeared in the moldy yellow wasteland. She was surprised to see that Malebolge hadn’t changed much during Belphegor’s rampage. He’d made Heaven and Earth burn, but left Malebolge largely untouched. There were obvious sinkholes dotting the landscape in Hell, but the sky was intact, giving no glimpse of any other dimension.

Lights still burned in the market, situated deep within the pelvis of the giant skeleton that formed the city. The population remained there. In fact, judging by how full the staircases along the walls of the city were, it looked like Malebolge was taking refugees from elsewhere in Hell.