Ascension: Sins of Eden Part 15

She looked almost the way that James remembered her, with a few subtle changes. This wasn't really her body, but a woman constructed from the memory of her son. Hannah looked fractionally older than she had been at death, yet also fractionally more beautiful, as if Nathaniel simply hadn't remembered his mother's imperfections.

There was nothing in her eyes-nothing but confusion.

The woman that looked like Hannah Pritchard was just as blond and delicately boned and graceful as the real thing, but it wasn't her. No matter how convincing the image was, Hannah had been dead for far too long to be brought back.

"Mom," Nathaniel said.

She looked down at herself and screamed.

"Mom, no," Nathaniel said. He waved his hand at her, much like the same way that he had dismissed Elise's thoughts with a gesture.

Hannah stopped screaming. She collapsed to the ground bonelessly.

James tasted bile on the back of his tongue. "You have to put her back, Nathaniel. You cannot resurrect her."

"No." Nathaniel kneeled beside her, searching her body with his eyes, looking for something that wasn't there. "I can bring her back. I can do anything now. I'm everything."

But when he put his hand on her heart again, making it beat, forcing her lungs to breathe, her eyes remained empty. She stared at the sky and didn't even blink at the first drops of rain.

"Even if you did animate that body, it wouldn't be her," James whispered.

Hurt and betrayal flashed over Nathaniel's face. "But I can make this."

Another gesture, and there was a second Hannah standing between them. This one was smiling softly. She looked tired. Her skirt suit was crisp, as though she were ready to go into work at the legal office where she'd once been employed.

"Nathaniel," she said, and her voice was very real, very gentle. "Here I am."

At the same time, Nathaniel's lips moved. Nathaniel. Here I am.

He was a puppeteer. She was only a memory.

"I just have to put them together," Nathaniel said with new determination. "That thing in this thing." He pointed to the animated memory of Hannah and the lifeless body in front of him. He was starting to sweat. "I can do anything."

The hillside bowed around them. Dizziness swept over James as the ground twisted underneath his feet, the trees shriveling, the sky receding to a distant patch of clouds on the other end of a pinhole.

James looked down at his hands and saw them stretching away from him, too. He was distorting. Losing breath. The oxygen was being pulled away into the sky as his feet descended into darkness with the Earth as it dwindled into a point.

Nathaniel was trying to remake his mother, and he was warping the whole universe to do it.

The body on the ground began screaming again. The memory of Hannah did, too.

They sounded so distant.

And then Elise moved.

Whether Nathaniel had been too distracted to hold her, or if Elise had simply broken free, James couldn't tell. But she was walking now, and she dragged Nathaniel away from Hannah's screaming body.

As soon as she yanked him to her chest, Hannah collapsed. The corpse shriveled. Her skin wrinkled, sucked in on itself, skull hollowing.

The world snapped back into place. Ground below, sky above, James's body in a single piece.

"No!" Nathaniel cried.

Elise forced him to face her. "You can't do that," she said, biting out every word.

He began trembling. "But I just want my mom back."

"You can't have her. You can only resurrect someone within hours of their death."

Tears shimmered in Nathaniel's eyes. "Why?"

"Because the souls get reused immediately. When people die, they return to this big pool of souls waiting to be reborn. It's like tearing a city down to its bricks and making a hundred new buildings from it. None of the original structures survive. Just pieces. I performed necromancy once-I saw it myself. "

"No," Nathaniel said. "I mean, why?"

"Because that's how it's meant to be. We only get one life, kid. It's better that way." A single tear streaked down her cheek. "I swear, it really is supposed to be better that way."

"But I can do anything."

Her eyes burned with grim anger. "You can make something that looks like her, sounds like her, acts like her, but her soul is gone and you'll never be able to bring her back."

Nathaniel sank to his knees in the mud, and Elise dropped with him, wrapping her arms around his shoulders. He bowed his head to her shoulder. Though he looked like he was almost an adult now, though he had become a G.o.d, he seemed so small beside her. As though he had shrunk down to fit inside the protective circle of her embrace.

James hesitated, and then kneeled beside them.

"She can't come back," Nathaniel echoed, like the truth was finally, painfully sinking in. His face was screwed up as though he might begin sobbing, but he only kept shaking.

Elise looked troubled. James didn't need to be bonded with her to know she wasn't thinking of Hannah, but of Rylie and Neuma. "No. She can't. There are limits to everything, and you've found one of yours."

"What am I going to do?" Nathaniel asked.

James settled his hand on his son's shoulder. "We don't know, but we can help you figure it out."

The boy didn't respond, and for a few blissful seconds, James sat with them feeling like there might be a chance to change everything after all. James had cured the incurable with gaean magic; he had made himself human and burned the anathema powder from Elise's veins. Given enough time, they might find a way to help Nathaniel, too.

But when Elise spoke, his hopes shattered.

"Belphegor."

There was power in her voice.

Nathaniel reared back. "What? No!"

A man appeared at his back. James found himself staring up at the pallid figure of Belphegor, clad in a slim black suit with the pin of a steward of Dis on his collar.

James cried out as Belphegor seized Nathaniel by the neck, jerking him away from Elise.

"There you are," Belphegor said coolly. He sounded less like an angry demon G.o.d and more like a mildly irritated parent. "I told you not to leave Eden in this condition."

Nathaniel turned betrayed eyes on Elise as he struggled helplessly against Belphegor's grip. "How could you?"

Elise straightened, stony-faced aside from the fresh tear that tracked down her cheek. "I'm just doing what I have to do, Nathaniel. Belphegor said he'd let me into Eden if I surrendered you."

So Nathaniel had been right.

James's heart felt like it was going to wrench from his chest. He had to do something-anything-but he didn't have a single weapon on his body, and certainly nothing that could influence any party in this calm, horrible conversation.

If only he'd still had magic. If he'd had the time and ability to cast another gaean spell...

Belphegor's chuckle was ice. "You'd only enter the garden to kill me."

"That's the deal," Elise said. "I give you Nathaniel, you let me into the garden."

"The deal has changed," Belphegor said. The sky distorted, clouds twisting into a thick spiral above them. Lightning flashed. The peace of the forest had been shattered. h.e.l.l loomed above them, red and smoky.

"No honor among demons," Elise said.

"None," Belphegor agreed. "I will let you into Eden, G.o.dslayer. You'll be with us." He shook Nathaniel at that, and not gently. The boy tried to attack him, kicking at his shins, elbowing wildly, but Belphegor didn't even blink. "Unfortunately, there's still too much spirit in you."

"What do I have to do to be ready?"

Belphegor leaned down until his nose was mere centimeters from hers. "You have to despair." When he whispered those words, their lips brushed.

Nathaniel cried out. His knees buckled under Belphegor's touch, as if the demon were crushing his shoulder.

"I'm despairing," Elise said grimly.

"Not enough," Belphegor said. "You still have other friends, people who keep your heart whole. I'm already moving in to kill them all. You will watch them suffer, and you will break." He brushed his thumb along her jawline. "Furthermore, Nathaniel isn't the only angel-child that I have in Eden. Thoughtful of Nathaniel's avatar to bring her into Eden for safekeeping, where it would be easiest for me to reach her."

Elise stiffened. "Marion?"

Belphegor grinned the way a skeleton grins.

"I look forward to meeting you at the end," he said. "And I look forward to watching you despair."

He vanished, taking Nathaniel with him.

Ten.

Elise had never seen James so angry before.

He seemed unaware that she had jerked him all the way from Colorado to the pack's camp on the other side of the world. As soon as he caught his breath from being phased, he was on his feet, storming toward her with all those angry hormones dumping into the air.

"How could you do that?"

She folded her arms and tapped her foot, waiting for his sense of reason to return. "Think about it."

"Think about it? That was my son!"

"Yes," Elise said. "And he was about to kill both of us."

James gaped at her. Through some kind of elaborate process of nave denial, he just couldn't imagine Nathaniel killing them.

But Elise could imagine it too easily. She had felt the way that time and s.p.a.ce had been fluctuating around him. She had felt his anger, his hatred.

Nathaniel hadn't forgiven them for anything, and they had been a few breaths from oblivion. Maybe he would have regretted it later, but in the meantime, Elise and James still would have been dead.

"So you surrendered him to Belphegor?" James's hands clenched into fists. "That was the only alternative that you could think of?"

"Against a f.u.c.king G.o.d? Yes. Until we find a way to make him human, Belphegor's the only one who can contain Nathaniel."

"He will never trust you again," James said. The way he said those words, it almost sounded like "I will never trust you again."

Anthony had heard the shouting and emerged from a nearby pickup. All of the mismatched vehicles had stopped in a tiny village-nothing more than a collection of modest farms and shacks-to allow everyone to rest, and Anthony in particular looked like he needed the break. He was scruffy and unshaven, his eyes bruised with exhaustion.

"What's going on?" Anthony asked. Ace jumped out of the pickup to sniff at Elise's calves, tail whipping from side to side in puppyish greeting.

James opened his mouth to keep yelling at Elise, but she lifted a hand to belay his rampage. "Have you seen anyone from my army?" she asked Anthony.

"No sign of them."

"Or an opposing army?"

Anthony looked stricken. "An opposing army. f.u.c.k. Really?"

She took that to mean that he hadn't seen any of them, either. "The break is over. We're out of time, Anthony. We need to get to the gate now."

His mind churned as he considered their options. "That's a problem. We're still days away, and you can only transport a few people at a time."

"Then get all these cars back on the road," Elise said. "The sooner we move, the better."

"What if we get to the gate and this 'opposing army' meets us there?"

She had considered that possibility, but it was too ugly to give serious thought. Without her legions, there wasn't much that any of them could do against even one or two centuriae of demons-even if they did have a werewolf pack. "Let me worry about the other army. Get back on the road."

Anthony jogged back to the cars. Brianna was sitting on the tailgate of a pickup, sipping from a water bottle as she spoke with Summer Gresham. Anthony addressed them briefly, and then the women were on their feet too, heading to the other trucks to spread the word. Ace trotted after them.

There would be no sleep that night. Not if anyone wanted to survive.

Discussion of opposing armies hadn't made James forget his anger. He pushed Elise behind one of the trees, cutting off her view of the trucks.

"He's just a child," he hissed.