How long had it been since she had sung?
It started as a hum as the words came to her.
A song of Paradise, a song of the place she saw so vividly inside her head.
She stumbled then, her slippered foot catching on half-buried roots, and sprawled on all fours in front of the corpse. She reached out to steady herself, brushing against the dried, almost mummified flesh of the body’s foot.
And the images that filled Eliza’s head were explosive.
They came at her all at once, a sensory rush of pictures and emotions, and in the course of a moment she lived a lifetime, born into the Garden from the rib of a man. . . .
This man before her.
She saw and felt it alclass="underline" the temptation, the sin, the loss of innocence.
She could taste it in her mouth . . . the taste of the fruit.
The taste of their fall from grace.
The sin had become part of them, following them from the Garden, growing in the hearts and souls of their bloodline. Never to be forgotten.
Never to be forgiven.
Until . . . now.
Eliza recoiled, pulling her numbed hand away from the body. She had no idea what had just happened, but she understood what was on the horizon.
Eden was returning for him . . . this corpse. . . .
This man.
Eliza understood whose body it was that lay before her.
“Adam,” she said, staring at the withered remains wrapped in the red blanket.
The corpse tilted its head ever so slightly toward the sound of her voice; its eyes slowly opened to look upon her.
And she began to scream.
He had worn the guise of his master for so long that Taranushi had actually started to believe that he was the elder angel Malachi.
But as he took his true form, he was reminded of the truth, and his purpose.
Taranushi was the first of the Shaitan: the beings of darkness and fire that would soon replace the angels of Heaven.
He looked down upon his foe, tightening his grip upon him. The Cherubim was tired, the fight nearly drained from him.
The Shaitan momentarily took his dark eyes from the angel, and gazed off in the direction of the scream he had heard moments before. It was the one out there whom he wanted: she was the reason he was upon this Earth . . . waiting.
Waiting for the Garden to arrive.
Taranushi turned his black-orb eyes back to the Cherubim. Still the angel pathetically struggled.
“Why can’t you just die?” the Shaitan asked, aggravated now.
Heavenly fire leapt weakly from Zophiel’s hands but it had no effect on the shape-shifter.
Again Taranushi looked off into the woods. If he did not act, she might elude him again. He knew that he should go.
In a display of savagery, Taranushi shaped his malleable form into something distinctly terrible, with claws and teeth so fierce that not even God’s armor would protect. The Shaitan ravaged his foe, biting and clawing, ripping and tearing away pieces of the Cherubim’s armor and the divine flesh beneath.
The blood of the angel was like the strongest of acids, but Taranushi used the pain as his fuel, maiming the heavenly sentry to the point where it struggled no more.
The Shaitan looked down into the faces of its foe, seeing in the many eyes expressions of failure. The Cherubim knew that his end was here, that he had been brought to the edge of death by his better.
His eyes begged for release, but the Shaitan did not know the meaning of mercy. Instead. he left the angel to die slowly as his life force poured from his torn flesh.
Once again the Shaitan assumed the dignified form of Malachi.
An appearance far less frightening to the human whom he sought.
The human who would grant him access to the Garden and bring about the birth of his people.
And the fall of Heaven.
Zophiel knew that he was dying, but it did not stop him from attempting to rise. The pain was great, but it did not compare to the agony he felt at the core of his being at the failure that had come to define him.
As he struggled to stand, his mind wandered back to the time when he’d discovered the threat to them all.
The threat to Heaven and to his Lord God.
If there was but one thing for which he could thank the monster that had mauled him, it was this moment . . . this clarity of thought. Impending death had cleared the fog from his damaged mind, and he saw what had brought him to the brink of madness.
He had been in the Garden of Eden after the fall of the humans, guarding the sacred place as the war with the Morningstar raged in Heaven. There had been rumors that Lucifer would try to take the Garden as his own, and Zophiel remembered his bravado. As long as he was sentry, nothing would dare threaten that holy place.
He had sensed a disturbance not far from the Tree of Knowledge, and upon investigating, had discovered several strange, fetal creatures writhing in the dirt at the base of the Tree. Zophiel was familiar with all the beasts in the Garden, but he had never seen the likes of these. They were pale, hairless, their bodies adorned with black sigils of power . . . sigils that caused the fire of his sword blade to ignite ominously as his six eyes passed over their odd shapes.
What are these . . . things? the Cherubim wondered, instincts attuned to danger already beginning to thrum.
And then an angel stepped into the clearing from the dense forest, holding one of the mewling life-forms lovingly in his arms. He was the elder Malachi, the one to whom God had given the gift of creation.
“What is this?” Zophiel remembered asking.
And the elder angel had explained that they were his attempts to create a better servant for the Almighty—a better angel—that he had been secretly working on his Shaitan, as he called them, for quite some time.
Zophiel recalled his own reaction to the word secretly, and when prodded, Malachi explained that the Lord knew nothing of his experiment . . . that it would not be wise for Him to know about the creatures that would one day replace His Heavenly hosts.
The Cherubim was about to demand that Malachi explain himself, or be brought before the Thrones, when the elder did the unthinkable.
Malachi suddenly dropped the infant life-form to the ground and lunged at the sentry, dagger of light in hand.
Zophiel had no chance to react.
He remembered the pain as the blade slid through the middle of his faces, and how everything, in a matter of seconds, had turned to madness. The thoughts would not come; there were only pain and confusion. The need to retaliate, to strike back at the one who harmed him, who had threatened the Creator and all that He had built, was all a-jumble.
The dagger had brought about the insanity, and Zophiel was nothing more than a wild beast trying to remember the purpose of its rage.
But now he remembered.
Now, in time to die, he remembered.
Zophiel painfully spread his wings, blood leaking from his ravaged body to pool upon the frozen ground. He had to get away; he had to do something to stop Malachi.
The Cherubim leapt skyward, flying above the clouds.
Not sure how much longer he, or the Kingdom of Heaven, had left.
The screams had drifted off, but Mulvehill still surged ahead.
He listened as he wove between the trees, listening for the sound of pursuit, but so far there was nothing.
Maybe they killed each other, he thought, just as he found the old woman, kneeling in front of a birch tree. Wouldn’t that be something.
“Fernita,” he called, then caught sight of something wrapped in a red blanket leaning against the tree.