Paradise Damned Read online

  Once she was on the other side of that wall, He would never let her out again.

  James. Elise had to get back to James.

  She craned her head around and bit. Teeth sank into angel flesh. Blood filled her mouth. It tasted like sweet pain, and part of her wanted to drink it deep, draw it into her belly, drown in the bitter flavor.

  Elise was rewarded by a scream. The wounded hand flinched away.

  She blindly elbowed the other cherub in the gut. She must have hit something good, because his hand dropped, too.

  Freedom.

  Reaching back, she felt around her shoulders for the spine sheath. It was gone, and so were the twin falchions.

  She was unarmed.

  Elise made a break for gate, sprinting across the field even as the gray light of Heaven seared her, peeling her flesh away with white fingers and burning her bones.

  The gate approached slowly. Too slowly. Heaven rendered her sluggish.

  A wind stirred her hair, and wings drummed behind her. The angels had taken flight.

  Just a few more steps…

  Elise stretched her fingers toward the light within the gate.

  Almost there…

  Pain flared at the back of her head.

  Darkness.

  A few minutes or a few hours later, Elise shocked back to consciousness. The eyeless faces of the cherubim were above her. One of them had long, braided hair that swung over his shoulders. When he adjusted his grip on Elise’s wrists, she noticed that his hand trickled blood from the circular imprint of tooth marks. The other had pale features, pale hair, and a determined grimace. He held her ankles now.

  She being hauled over grass again, but now the gate was nowhere in sight and the garden wall loomed. She could barely make out the skeletal fingers of branches stabbing the sky, blackened by time and bare of leaves or fruit.

  They were almost inside.

  Elise screamed.

  The noise must have surprised the cherubim, because the grip on her legs slipped—the barest of motions, but it was enough. She ripped one leg free and snapped a kick into the cherub’s face. His nose crunched satisfyingly under her heel. He dropped her.

  The angel with the braids was not so easily thwarted a second time. He kept hold of her wrists.

  All the better.

  She used the momentum of falling to flip him over her shoulder, and his weight broke the grip.

  As soon as he was flat on his back, she straddled his chest. Elise dug her fingers into his throat and squeezed.

  She had ripped a cherub’s throat out before. She would be more than happy to do it again.

  But her fingernails had barely begun to sink into his flesh when the second angel recovered. One warm hand grabbed her jaw. The other took the back of her head.

  He whipped her chin to the side. Something popped inside her skull.

  Elise had a disconcerting moment to realize her neck had snapped before darkness swallowed her again.

  It didn’t last long.

  Elise’s eyes snapped open. Her senses flooded back to life.

  Gray light. Curling brown leaves. Burning flesh. And the sound of the cherubim’s footsteps on grass.

  She was still alive.

  Goddammit, I’m still alive!

  The cherubim dragged her through the bushes on the inside of the garden wall. Brambles tore at her flesh, sharp and cruel, leaving red imprints on her pale skin. Her left hip scraped along dry soil. Pressure pinned her arms above her head. One of the cherubim had wrapped a vine around her wrists to keep her restrained.

  Elise couldn’t go anywhere, so she had plenty of time to look at the garden surrounding her. It wasn’t like the garden that she had left so long ago, however vague the recollections were.

  Hadn’t the flora inside the wall once been lush, blossoming, moist? Hadn’t there been flowers? Now it was a colorless place filled with fog like San Francisco summer, dense enough that she could barely see the cruel thorns scratching her, much less the shape of the Tree’s distant trunk. It was a faint specter among the gray.

  Water splashed her legs as they carried Elise past the river Mnemosyne, which roared with an eon’s worth of fury. The spray over its banks was acid to her skin, but she resisted the urge to cry out.

  Instead, she went completely limp.

  Elise swayed between the cherubim’s hands, biting the inside of her cheek until she tasted blood. Pretending to be asleep when her entire body burned wasn’t easy. She focused on the memory of tearing out a cherub’s throat in Hell to distract herself.

  Angry fire smoldered in her gut.

  Soon.

  Endless minutes passed as she hung between the angels. Eventually, their grip loosened as they became convinced that she was unconscious.

  Branches rustled. She dared to open her eyes to slits, watching the path they trod through her swinging hair. Paving stones began to dot the soil.

  They were getting closer to the Tree.

  Her heart raced as her adrenaline mounted. Elise struggled not to tremble.

  They soon reached the stairs. Platforms spiraled around the trunk of the Tree to allow the garden’s inhabitants to walk into the upper branches. Because the circumference of the Tree was as great as a city, it would take long minutes to reach the place where He surely waited. But once Elise was there, the nightmare would really begin. Trapped for eternity. Sacrificed to madness.

  Elise would never see James again.

  The cherubim adjusted their grip in preparation for mounting the first of the stairs, and though the vines on her wrists did not loosen, she felt fingers shifting on her ankles. A moment where the hands holding her captive were weaker.

  She flashed into motion.

  Elise wrenched her legs free and kicked again. The cherubim with the braided hair tumbled off the side of the platform with a wordless shout. The ground was at least twenty feet below, but she didn’t wait to see where he landed.

  She swung her restrained arms and slammed both fists into the skull of the other angel. He fell, stunned.

  Hurtling across the platform, Elise took a single glance at the garden below—at least fifty feet down—and launched herself into open space. The power of her legs sent her flying.

  Mnemosyne swelled beneath her. She had enough time to suck in a lungful of air before she crashed into it.

  The pain was brilliant and red, and for a moment, Elise thought that she would go unconscious again. Waves battered her over the rocks, bruising her ribs, almost tearing her limbs from their sockets. The vines were ripped off of her wrists and whipped into darkness.

  Not enough oxygen. Her vision sparked at the edges.

  Elise’s arms pumped against the waves. Her feet kicked.

  Air. I need air.

  Something cold splashed over her face. Was she on the surface?

  Her lungs were at their limit, and she couldn’t wait to orient herself.

  Elise’s mouth opened in a wide yawn, gasping for breath—and foaming waters sucked into her chest.

  Screams rattled in Elise’s skull as Mnemosyne consumed her. She was drowning in water, drowning in time. That was Mnemosyne’s nature: thoughts and dreams turned fluid.

  The brightest stars in Elise’s memories winked.

  How long? she had asked James.

  Always, he had replied.

  And sometime before that, so many years ago, she recalled staring him down in Oymyakon with a knife in her hand. His eyes were blue, much like those of the angels that had taken her, and she remembered his anger at the bacchanalia. Elise had feared James instantly. She had been terrified that he would take her back.

  Elise could almost remember his face, the way his eyelids crinkled at the corners when he smiled, the streaks of gray at his temples.

  The back of her head smashed into a rock, and she saw nothing else.

  Elise regained consciousness once more on the shore of Mnemosyne. Its waters were quieter downstream, without any hint of the crimson spray she had
glimpsed earlier. She had washed up on a pillow of grass.

  She groaned and pushed herself onto all fours. The leather gear she had picked up in Dis was heavy with moisture, dribbling onto the shore. The black sheet of her hair was drenched. Her neck still ached from being snapped, and it felt like she had to fight against the weight of a car to lift her head.

  Dim shapes soared around the Tree in search of her. But the cherubim were looking in the wrong place. Elise was near the wall—so close to escape.

  Elise scrambled to her feet and tried to run.

  She moved too slowly in the garden. She desperately longed for darkness, a hint of shadow, anything that would allow her to escape her skin and phase into nothingness.

  The branches grabbed at her like the reaching hands of the dead. Elise beat them away. Kept running.

  Cries in the fog.

  The cherubim had spotted her, but too late—she was at the garden wall.

  Throwing herself at the gray stones, Elise began to climb. She wedged her hand into a crack and formed a fist, then punched her other hand into a higher gap to repeat the process. She hauled herself up inches at a time.

  The creepers were stronger near the top, thicker, more like vines. As soon as she could reach one, she grabbed it and began climbing faster.

  The faster she climbed, the taller the garden wall looked. It stretched endlessly into a gray sky.

  Somehow, at some point, she reached the top. She didn’t look at the approaching cherubim, though their wings beat a heavy rhythm that she couldn’t ignore.

  Elise crouched at the top of the wall to consider the drop to the other side. It didn’t seem nearly as tall as the climb had been—even less distance than her jump into Mnemosyne.

  Hands reached for her.

  She leaped to the grass and hit shoulder-first. She rolled to her feet.

  It seemed like the sparkling light of the gateway was millions of miles away.

  Desperation dragged her down.

  He can’t have me. Not again.

  Elise’s boots pounded against the grass, and the cherub with the braided hair dropped in front of her. A black, endless universe swirled within the voids of his eye sockets. She grabbed the cherub by the back of the neck and slammed his face into her knee.

  His nose cracked. Silver blood gushed over his upper lip.

  She lunged for the gateway.

  It had been so many years since her first escape from the garden, but the gate looked exactly the way she remembered it. The symbols etched into the stone swirled, as though the entire structure was breathing; the closer she grew, the harder it vibrated.

  Elise flew. Each breath escaped her throat in a ragged gasp.

  The angels were drawing closer. They were faster, but she had desperation on her side.

  Almost there.

  Her palms burned.

  I can do this.

  A hand swiped at her shoulder again, but she threw herself into a roll, and the cherub missed. She didn’t stop to fight. She immediately got back to her feet and continued running.

  The door loomed, growing in her vision until there was nothing else. She crossed the bridge of ragged stone, chased by angry shouts. Elise’s back grew hot—a cherub’s flaming sword burned like a miniature sun—and she smelled singed hair.

  Gray void built around her, thickening the air and slowing her legs. It was too bright. Her eyes were going to combust.

  But the threshold was there.

  Flinging her arms over her face, Elise launched into space and prayed to James that she would make it. Heat flashed as she crossed the threshold.

  She had escaped. She was free.

  Elise opened her eyes and gray sunlight seared her retinas.

  She sat up with a gasp, hands flying to the back of her neck. She expected to find tender bone where her spine had snapped, but it was undamaged now, and she felt fine. Maybe even good—although she was hesitant to use such an optimistic word to describe her situation when she wasn’t even sure what had happened to her.

  She lifted the blanket in her lap to examine her body. She wore a nightgown. Her muscular legs were bare under the covers.

  Birds sang outside her window. Golden curtains fluttered in the breeze.

  Elise knew this room. She recognized the floor-to-ceiling bookshelves, the shoes neatly lined up along the side of the bed, the altar decorated by figures of the Horned God and Mother Goddess. If she stepped into the hallway, the bedroom that used to be hers would be on the left, and the bathroom on the right; at the end, she would find a living room and kitchen and a window-mounted air conditioning unit that had limped its way through at least twenty years of hot August nights.

  She was in the apartment above Motion and Dance. It was quiet enough that she thought she could hear the stomping of the creative ballet class in the studio downstairs. Distant piano drifted on the summer breeze.

  If anywhere was home, this was it.

  Elise had escaped.

  A man stepped into the room carrying a tray. He bumped the door shut. “Good morning, darling.”

  Elise rubbed her hands over her face. Morning? How long had she been away?

  “What time is it?” she asked.

  “Seven o’clock, and it will be a beautiful day.”

  He set the tray on the bed beside her. He had made one egg over easy, a piece of bacon, and half a slice of whole grain toast with strawberry freezer jam. She didn’t have to taste the coffee to know that it would be strong and black—her favorite.

  She picked up the toast and held it without eating.

  Hadn’t she just been in the garden?

  “How did I get here?” Elise asked, setting the toast down again.

  The man set the tray on the bed next to her. “I found you outside the wall.” He spoke gently, and there was a mixture of sympathy and condescension in the words, as if to say, Silly girl, can’t even remember being rescued. “You were asleep in the grass. You must have passed out during the escape.”

  “I must have,” Elise said faintly, staring hard at the bedroom window. The midday sunlight made it impossible to see anything beyond the glass, even though she knew that there should have been an evergreen tree and a neighboring building on the opposite corner. “I just thought…” She shook her head. “I don’t know what I thought.”

  “It doesn’t matter. You’re safe now. You’re home.”

  “Home,” she echoed.

  There was no hint of piano now. It was too early in the morning for a class anyway. The earliest lessons began at eight o’clock, so Candace wouldn’t be there for a half an hour.

  Elise shaded her eyes with a hand as she tried to see through the sun shining in the window. Fingers twined with hers, tugged her hand down, and she looked up to see the man’s face so close to hers. He was breathtakingly beautiful, although she couldn’t seem to focus on that face. She could see the edge of a chiseled jaw, but not the nose, the eyes, the lips.

  “I missed you.” He drew his hand through her hair. Auburn curls spilled over her shoulder like wine splashed on tan skin.

  She hadn’t even realized that she was waiting for a sign of affection until she received one. Warmth spread through her chest, and she tightened her hand on His. “I missed you, too, Adam.”

  He kissed her, and she hung onto His shoulders for support. His muscles were firm beneath her hand, but the kiss itself felt like nothing—no more than pressing her lips against air.

  Elise let her hands draw a line down His ribs to his waist. She slipped fingers underneath the hem of his shirt, tracing the edge of His hip, but He grabbed her wrist.

  “That hurts,” she said.

  Adam didn’t relax His grip. “You left me.”

  She frowned. Was that what had happened? She suddenly couldn’t recall. “I think I might have been taken. You just said that you found me outside, didn’t you?”

  Elise knew that His eyes were searching her face, looking for signs that she was lying, because she could feel it
like fingers on her skin. Yet she still couldn’t bring herself to meet His gaze—it was too searing, too accusatory, and guilt roiled deep in her gut. It was impossible to look directly at Him, just as it was impossible to look at the sun.

  Adam kissed her again, harder this time, until she could almost feel His lips. His long, pale fingers dug into her skin, holding her in place even once she pulled back. She had forgotten how aggressive He could be.

  “What’s wrong?” she asked.

  “How can you ask that?” His eyes sparked with anger. “If you leave me again, Eve…”

  A chill rolled through Elise.

  Eve?

  The feeling of something gone amiss touched at the back of her mind, and then disappeared just as quickly. “I’m not going anywhere,” she said firmly, pressing her forehead against His. “I just got here.”

  The fingers on her wrist loosened. “Do you promise?”

  “Yes,” Elise said. “Of course. I promise.”

  The branches of the Tree accepted Elise Kavanagh’s body, wrapping around her limbs in tendrils as firm as steel. The Tree supported her as the cherubim stripped the leather gear away. First the boots, then the corset, and finally the leggings. There was no need for clothing in the garden. Elise remained limp in the grip of the bark, arms spread wide, ankles pinned together.

  When they stepped back, the Tree drew Elise’s body tight against its trunk. It had been months since the cherubim had eyes to see, but they could feel the approval in the Tree—it was as though the entire garden breathed a sigh of relief. The bushes relaxed. A wind fluttered through dead branches. Even Mnemosyne settled its churning waters, and everything was silent.

  Neither of the cherubim moved their mouths, but they understood one another’s thoughts perfectly.

  “She’s not mortal anymore. I can’t believe Metaraon brought a demon here,” the first one told the other, putting his wounded hand into his mouth. The blood was still dribbling down his wrist to drip onto the grass at his feet. “It would have been better to kill her. Put her down like a rabid animal.”

  The second tucked the slave leather clothing under his arm. They had no use for the accoutrements of Hell in the garden, so it would go into the lake for later regeneration. “We have our orders.”