They thought they were cutting off premonitions, but they were trying to sever me from godhood. No matter what they do, I’ll become him again. Men are too weak to control me now.”
He was rambling. Insane.
“James can—” Elise cut herself off. No, James couldn’t do anything. He was never going to use magic to heal someone ever again. “I can do magic now, Benjamin.”
“I know. I know .”
“If anyone’s strong enough to repair you, it’s me,” Elise said. “Let’s figure this out. There’s still time to save you, and save the world.”
A laugh shivered through his body. A tear dripped down his cheek. “It’s too late. It’s much too late.”
“It’s not too late until we’re all dead.”
“How do you know that we aren’t?” Benjamin asked. “You’re going to destroy the world, Elise. How could you?”
Crack . The bridge behind them snapped in half. The pieces fell into the canal, washing downstream.
Elise pushed Benjamin away before they could fall in.
The ground grew hot under her feet, just a few feet from the wavering image of Earth. She could feel it through the thick soles of her boots.
The long grass caught fire.
“Watch out!” Benjamin dragged Elise under the shelter of another tree that wasn’t yet burning. Its low branches shielded them from the wind.
Elise watched in horror as the street collapsed in on itself, exposing a burning core of magma underneath. Red-hot fire flowed like an underground river.
That shouldn’t have been underneath Heaven.
“What’s going on?” Elise asked, clutching Benjamin’s shirt in a fist. “ What have you done ?”
“It’s Belphegor.” His eyes were suddenly clear, as if struck for the first time by sanity. “Yeah, Belphegor. That’s why I came looking for you. I almost forgot because of all the threads—because the messages are so unclear now, and I can’t… No .” He shook his head as if to clear it. “I have to warn you what he did before I forget again.”
“What? Belphegor?” It had been weeks since she’d heard anything from him. She was half-convinced that he had just wanted to sit back and enjoy watching Elise wage war for no good reason.
Benjamin’s voice dropped to an urgent whisper. “As soon as the walls fell, he joined me. I let him in. If he could find me, that means he’ll find her . He’ll find Marion. And—and now he’s gone into the Origin.”
Elise’s heart plummeted.
The Origin was the central point from which everything in the universe had spawned. It had also bestowed the powers of God upon Adam, who had once been an ordinary man.
Which meant that Belphegor now had those powers too.
A fresh plume of magma erupted from the ground behind Benjamin, so close that it seared Elise’s eyebrows. It smelled of sulfur. It smelled of home .
Because Belphegor was causing it. He had become God and was trying to make Heaven into Hell.
The molten fire flowed into the canal, drying the last of the water with a sizzle and streaking deeper into the city. When it brushed the roots of the trees dangling into the canal, they caught fire.
Before long, New Eden wasn’t going to exist at all.
The open hole between Heaven and Earth wavered harder. Elise couldn’t tell if it was closing or if the heat from the magma was just making it shimmer.
“Get to Earth, Benjamin,” Elise said, pulling free of his grip. “Get through there, find somewhere as safe as possible, and wait for me to find you. I will find you.”
“What are you going to do?” Benjamin asked.
“There are still humans in New Eden,” she said. “I’m not going to let them burn.”
Most of the bodies that Elise passed in New Eden had been killed by her hand just hours earlier, though she couldn’t recall slaughtering them.
Her memory was good enough that she could remember what she had eaten for lunch with Anthony at the Hard Rock Casino’s buffet last April—but she couldn’t remember this. Surrendering herself to Eve had