B7 Ascension Read online

  Contents

  Sins of Eden

  Copyright

  About

  One

  Two

  Three

  Four

  Five

  Six

  Seven

  Eight

  Nine

  Ten

  Eleven

  Twelve

  Thirteen

  Fourteen

  Fifteen

  Sixteen

  Seventeen

  Eighteen

  Nineteen

  Twenty

  Twenty-One

  Twenty-Two

  Twenty-Three

  Dear Readers

  Sins of Eden

  The Ascension Series - Book Seven

  SM Reine

  Copyright © 2014 Red Iris Books

  The characters and events portrayed in this book are fictitious. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is coincidental and not intended by the author.

  This book is sold DRM-free so that it can be enjoyed in any way the reader sees fit. Please keep all links and attributions intact when sharing. All rights reserved.

  Text and cover art copyright © SM Reine 2014

  Model photo © The Reed Files

  Published by Red Iris Books

  1180 Selmi Drive, Suite 102

  Reno, NV 89512

  SERIES BY SM REINE

  The Descent Series

  The Ascension Series

  Seasons of the Moon

  The Cain Chronicles

  Preternatural Affairs

  Tarot Witches

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  About Sins of Eden

  There have always been three gods. Always.

  Until Elise Kavanagh murdered them.

  A demon named Belphegor has entered the Origin and become a new god, triggering genesis: the death and rebirth of the entire universe. He wants Elise to join him in Eden for the end of all things, but only once she’s watched everyone she cares about die painfully under his heel.

  With nothing but a dwindling army of werewolves, Elise must enter Eden, slaughter Belphegor, and stop the genesis. But Belphegor’s smarter than Adam ever was, and far crueler. He’s spent lifetimes preparing for this.

  He will have his world of Hellfire. He will have victory. And he will have Elise’s life…

  One

  It had been an eternity since Nathaniel Faulkner hadn’t been alone.

  Sometimes the trees in the garden spoke to him. They had seen many things in the eons that they had shaded fertile soil from sky and they were happy to tell him about it all. The whispering of the branches told colorful stories wilder than anything he ever could have imagined on his own.

  They said that there was a time when the garden had been filled with laughter and light. It had begun with just three people, and they had been happy with one another’s company.

  The first to arrive had been Lilith. She had been a serpent slithering through the rotting leaves with little interest in the trees, they told Nathaniel with no small amount of disapproval, but her presence had been beneficial. She’d been hungry, always hungry. She ate the rats, pests, and parasites that risked the garden’s health. She ate the fruit that had gone foul. She devoured all things dead and left the living untouched. Her hunger had been good for them, but the garden had found her frightening.

  The second had been Eve—their favorite. She had flown among their branches like the birds, filling the air with song. She nurtured the trees from saplings. Her fingertips had urged their roots to dig deeper in the earth, clutching at the world to hold it in a single piece, and that had been good.

  And then there had been Adam.

  The trees didn’t like to talk about Adam.

  “Why?” Nathaniel asked once.

  The answers had been varied and reluctant. One said that He had burned them centuries earlier, and they had never forgotten the pain of it. Another tree had said what happened to Eve was His fault, though it wouldn’t elaborate on what had happened to her. A third just said that Nathaniel would be happier not knowing anything about Adam at all.

  But the trees liked having Nathaniel’s company. He shared more in common with Eve than Adam, they said. He had brought a sapling with him, and the garden was thrilled to welcome the new life.

  These conversations did little for Nathaniel’s state of mind. The garden couldn’t embrace him with human arms, nor could it listen to his stories; it only told him its own.

  It hadn’t always been like that.

  Nathaniel remembered that he used to live in a place where the sun had shined for many hours a day. He remembered beaches, sand, the smell of seaweed in the ocean.

  He remembered a woman with blond hair and a thin smile, a woman who had probably been beautiful when she was young but became exhausted and fearful with age. He knew that they had some kind of relationship. He couldn’t remember now. It had been too long.

  Yet Nathaniel was certain that he hadn’t always been alone. He knew he hadn’t always lived in twilight underneath trees a thousand times taller than him, with moss-draped branches and bone-white roots.

  But he wasn’t all that certain where or who he used to be.

  To be frank, it had been so long that Nathaniel wasn’t even certain that he hadn’t been hallucinating his conversations with the trees all along.

  “Am I really here?” he asked the garden once. “Who am I?”

  He’d gotten no response to that.

  Sometimes, Nathaniel walked and walked, and when his legs grew tired, he unfurled his wings and flew. He searched for an edge to the garden and found none within the two or three days that he could travel. It was endless, monotonous forest carpeted with ferns and fed by crystalline streams of water bubbling over rocks.

  He usually didn’t try to walk. He waited with his sapling as it grew, until one day it became a Tree. A very special Tree.

  The only apple tree left in the garden, in fact.

  One day, he returned from a walk to find that the Tree had changed. Its roots no longer encompassed a glassy stream; it cupped a still pond of glowing light. The pond was so bright that he couldn’t see the bottom, though he thought that the water had to be fairly shallow.

  Nathaniel didn’t think that the Tree had grown around that pond. He thought the pond might have come to his Tree.

  Its light blanched the roots and lapped at the shore with the whisper of a thousand voices. Strange as its appearance had been, Nathaniel was happy to see its light, if only because it was a break from all the gloom within the garden.

  The trees told him not to go into the water. They said it would ruin him.

  Yet Nathaniel still went swimming in the pond. Later, he couldn’t remember why he’d decided to do that. It had seemed important at the time.

  When he had come out, he hadn’t quite been the same. That swim in the pond was, he suspected, when he had started forgetting everything. He knew it had changed him. He’d emerged, dripping, from the shimmering white waters of eternity, his skin and feathers glowing with a new light.

  He was stronger than ever before, yet his mind grew weak. The Tree towered above him as tall as the others in the garden.

  Nathaniel thought it used to be a sapling. He thought that was a sign that a lot of time had passed since he’d entered the garden.

  He just wasn’t sure. He didn’t know much of anything. Not anymore.

  Which was why it was such a shock when he heard a knocking at his door.

  “I don’t even have a door,” Nathaniel said to nobody in particular.

  Yet when he turned around, there was indeed a door waiting for him on the other side of the Tree. It loo
ked like an ordinary door. It had four panels carved into the wood, the handle was a silver lever with a simple lock, and the frame was painted blue.

  Someone knocked on the other side again.

  It was a slow beat, slower than his heart. One, two, three knocks, and then a long pause.

  “Someone wants in, don’t they?” he asked the garden.

  He stepped around the door. It looked identical on the other side. There was no wall to support it, but a few inches of plain brown apartment carpeting had grown from the moss at its base. Now Nathaniel thought that he recognized the door. It had been in his bedroom at his mother’s house when he was a small child.

  His mother. That was the blond woman he sometimes remembered. Hannah Pritchard, a woman who had danced ballet until single motherhood forced her to surrender it. She’d worked sixty hours a week as a legal assistant to make ends meet and pay for daycare.

  She’d been a witch, too, like Nathaniel had been at the time, but much weaker than him.

  Nathaniel remembered that now. He actually remembered.

  It was thanks to the knocking. He was sure of it.

  And he began to grow excited.

  Another series of knocks. One, two, three, just as slow and deliberate as before.

  “Who’s there?” He raised his voice as though trying to be heard through a wall, even though there shouldn’t have been anything but door separating him from his visitor.

  Be careful, the trees warned him. Look.

  “Okay,” Nathaniel said, “I’ll look first.”

  There was a peephole in the door now. That wasn’t a feature that his bedroom door had possessed, but its existence didn’t bother him.

  He pressed his eye to the hole.

  There was a woman on the other side.

  Her head hung low so that black hair veiled her face. Nathaniel could make out the slope of pale shoulders, an hourglass body hugged by leather pants laced from ankle to hips, and a pair of combat boots. Compared to everything clean and pure in the garden, she looked dark, dangerous, tainted.

  She also looked familiar. The sight of her made Nathaniel both excited and angry.

  Be careful, the trees warned again.

  The woman lifted her fist. She knocked another three times. Gloves covered her from knuckle to elbow, leaving her fingers exposed.

  “Oh,” he said. “Elise.” The name came to his lips easily as though he had said it a hundred times before.

  That was who knocked: Elise Kavanagh.

  Now that he recognized her, he remembered her. He remembered when he had been nothing but a human boy and she had taken him into Hell with her. He remembered when he had gone into Araboth to save her from Adam. He remembered her forced half-smiles, the way she had ruffled his hair, the way she had consumed all light and yet glowed with something special from the inside.

  He remembered that she had abandoned him to loneliness.

  “I’ve been waiting for you,” Nathaniel said to the door. He hoped she could hear him.

  Be careful. The warning came more urgently now.

  The woman on the other side of the peephole didn’t look up. She just knocked again three more times.

  Nathaniel unlocked the door. It gave a very solid, very satisfying click.

  His relief was tempered by anger, the desire to make her answer for what had happened to him. Elise owed him answers. She owed him for endless years of solitude.

  He pushed down on the handle. The door swung open.

  The entire garden screamed in dismay. No, no, no!

  The door blew open the rest of the way, and it was dark on the other side—so very dark.

  It wasn’t Elise Kavanagh who stepped through.

  The man who entered first was tall, with waxen flesh stretched tightly over his skeleton. He wore a black jacket buttoned all the way up his throat, covering his neck to the jaw. His fingers were slender and long. His eyes were blacker than anything else in the garden.

  His gaze fell on Nathaniel. “There you are,” he said. “I’ve arrived to become the second to your first. What’s your name, boy?”

  Nathaniel’s mouth worked soundlessly. When he managed to speak, it was to say, “You’re not Elise.”

  “She’ll be with us soon.”

  The woman that Nathaniel had seen through the peephole entered, and he realized too late that it was only a demon who looked like Elise. She was accompanied by two other similar women, all radiating infernal energy that made the trees try to curl away from them, disgusted by the force of it all.

  They were similar to Lilith, but their hunger benefited no one. They would devour everything and leave nothing behind.

  “Go find the Origin, Lachesis,” the man ordered one of the women.

  She drifted away. Nathaniel felt like he should stop her, even though he wasn’t sure what the Origin was or why it needed to be protected. The other two women continued to flank the man. They reminded Nathaniel of a king on a chessboard watched by twin bishops.

  “Who are you?” Nathaniel asked.

  The man stretched out a hand, as though offering a one-armed embrace. “My name is Belphegor,” he said, “and I will be your God.”

  Two

  In a cold country gripped by ice, a pickup roared toward civilization.

  Its thick treads chewed through the snow, propelling the truck at well over fifty miles per hour, but the pickup’s escorts—a group of wolves pacing it just beyond the tree line—had no trouble keeping up with the pace.

  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 wea
ring. 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.