Remy paused, feeling the rage as he once had. “There are no answers; it’s just how it is. Everything had lost its meaning until I started to watch them.”
“To become like them,” the Seraphim said with a sneer.
“Yeah,” Remy agreed. “And was that so bad?”
“It is not what you are.”
“No, but it’s what I’ve become.”
The Seraphim stared with an intensity that was nearly palpable. But Remy stared back, refusing to back down.
And suddenly the angel spread his wings, a sword of fire—Zophiel’s flaming sword—appearing in his hand. The armor that adorned it was suddenly dirty, stained maroon with the blood of his memory.
“Look upon me,” the angel commanded, his voice booming like thunder. “Look at what I’ve become.”
The Seraphim was a fearsome sight indeed.
“Right now, this is what I need you to be,” Remy said, walking across the top of the spire toward the Seraphim, and offering his hand.
“You,” the Seraphim snarled, staring at Remy’s hand as if it were covered in filth. “What Eden . . . the Earth . . . and the Creator need you to be . . . What I need to be.”
And with those words the Seraphim turned swiftly, unfurled its wings, and leapt from the spire, gliding down to disappear amid the elaborate structures of the holy City of Light twinkling below.
“Are we ready?”
Remy blinked repeatedly, first seeing the multiple boats and those who manned them in the water below where he stood, before turning his gaze to Jon and Izzy, who stared wide-eyed at him.
“Are you all right?” Jon asked. “You got kind of quiet.”
“I’m fine,” Remy said, remembering—experiencing—the rage of the Seraphim. “We should get going.”
They were standing close together on the porch outside of Izzy’s house, having decided that they were going to Eden.
“We was waitin’ for you,” Izzy said. “You was goin’ to tell me how to get to the Garden when you went all strong-silent-type on us.”
“Sorry,” Remy apologized. “I was just thinking.”
“Well, how about you think me an explanation as to how we’re going to find that place.”
“We need some blood,” Jon said before Remy could reply.
Izzy looked at him as if he had three heads. “I’ll give you blood,” she said, making a fist that crackled with repressed supernatural energy.
“He needs it to track the location,” Jon explained, throwing up his hands in surrender. “If you can sense where Eden is, then he can track it through the magick in your blood.”
She looked at Remy.
“I’m afraid he’s telling the truth.”
“How much blood?” Izzy asked.
“Enough that I can catch a strong scent,” Remy explained.
Izzy shook her head in disgust, reached into the pocket of her jacket—she’d put it on because she could sense that Eden was resting someplace cold—and removed a penknife.
She unsnapped the small blade and let it hover over the index finger of her left hand. “This all right?”
“Should be fine,” Remy answered with nod.
She dug the blade into the center of the finger’s pad, the blood welling up on either side of the blade. “Shit,” she hissed. “Now what?”
“I need to smell it.”
She raised her finger toward Remy’s nose. He closed his eyes and inhaled, taking the scent of her magickally tainted blood into his nose.
Images exploded in his mind, pictures so vivid it was as if he were already there.
“Got it?” Izzy asked.
He opened his eyes and nodded, then spread his wings wide.
“Come closer,” he told them. They shuffled toward him, and his wings began to close around them as if in a hug.
“This isn’t gonna hurt, is it?” Izzy asked.
“When was the last time that you ate?” Jon asked, as their reality began to shift.
And they were gone.
Gregson Paul had been raised a good Catholic boy.
Church every Sunday for most of his life, followed by an hour of Sunday school, where he’d learned the wonders of the Holy Bible.
He’d always thought of the stories inside the Good Book as that—just stories, parables that sought to teach the reader something about how to live life as a good Christian.
He never thought of any of it as true: Noah’s ark, Lot, Sodom and Gomorrah, Moses and his commandments.
But here—at the North Pole—right before his eyes, one of those stories had come to life.
“It’s Eden,” he said to Marjorie Halt as he gazed through the metal of the gate at the thick greenery beyond.
“You’re fucking crazy,” she said, hands on an impressive hip as she studied the gated jungle that had appeared amid the ice and snow.
“Then explain it,” he said. “Look at us.”
They were in their T-shirts and underwear, the heat from the mysterious jungle overwhelmingly tropical.
“There has to be an answer,” she said, pacing back and forth in front of the gate.
Daniel Hiratsu knelt silently in the grass, his scientific instruments scattered uselessly about him. All he could do was stare. Terrance Long stayed back on the ice and snow, clothed in his heavy gear. He was attempting to communicate with anyone who would listen, but was met with a wall of interference. It appeared that Eden would not let him.
Gregson knew that it was Eden before them, as crazy as that sounded. There wasn’t a doubt in his mind. It was as if the jungle were broadcasting something directly into his mind, telling him that this was true.
“I want to go in,” Marjorie said as she wiped trickles of sweat from her brow. She was standing before the gate, a look of determination on her pretty face.
An uncomfortable feeling suddenly twisted in Gregson’s gut.
“I don’t think that’s a good idea,” he said.
“Why?” she asked. “Why isn’t it?”
“Because we’re not allowed,” he said, having no idea where his answer had come from but knowing it to be true.
“Yeah, right,” Marjorie said. She turned, rushing the gate and grabbing hold of its metal bars.
She didn’t even have a chance to scream.
The lightning arced from the sky, striking the top of her pretty head, disintegrating her in a flash of brilliance that caused small, colorful blobs to dance before Gregson’s rapidly blinking eyes.
All he could do was stare at where the girl whose remarkable ass had brought him to the North Pole had been standing, now nothing more than a smoldering mark upon the ground before the gate.
After a moment, the sound of sobbing distracted him and he turned to see Hiratsu rocking back and forth, his face stained with tears. Long was standing nearby, having ventured onto the grass, the hissing walkie-talkie he’d been using resting by his boot, where he had dropped it.
“I told her,” Gregson said, his voice cracking. He could feel his sanity slip just a little bit more. “I told her not to do it.”
“We should go,” Long said, his voice cold and emotionless. “We should get out of here before . . .”
Before we’re all struck down by lightning . . . by the wrath of God? Gregson wondered.
He slowly turned from the Garden on wobbly legs and caught sight of figures in the distance near their tent. He hadn’t noticed their approach; they just suddenly seemed to be there.
“Who . . . ?” Gregson began.
The others turned to follow his gaze; then almost as one they began to move toward the strangers.
But the closer they got, the more wrong they appeared.
The lead figure was dressed in long, tattered robes, like some sort of twisted monk. The other appeared naked, his flesh as white as the snow they trod across, but covered in strange, angular black markings. An even odder observation was that he appeared to be carrying two people beneath his arms, an older black woman, and . . .
A mummified body.
Alarms went off in Gregson’s brain and he felt the grip of madness embrace him that much closer; first the Garden of Eden, and now this.