Defying Fate (26 page)

“It’s a Haven,” he said. “I think the angels were building it. It’s brand new.”

James stared around at the way the rocks slid together. They were moving toward a central point, compelled by some kind of gravity—trying to form into a new world. It was equal parts incredible and terrifying.

He leaped onto another boulder, and then another, and finally managed to get a handhold on Nathaniel’s island. The rock slipped away from beneath his feet. He dug his fingers tightly into a crevice and hung in empty space for a few breathless moments.

Using the strength of his arms, he hauled himself up a few feet at a time. His marked shoulder ached. His bare palm burned. He left bloody handprints everywhere he touched, and flexing his fingers made the new skin feel like it was going to tear free. James kept climbing.

James looked up and continued to climb.

Nathaniel grabbed his arm when he reached the top, helping him roll onto the level ground. There was grass beneath him. Actual grass.

“This is so awesome,” Nathaniel said. He was grinning for the first time in days—maybe weeks. James couldn’t actually remember seeing him smile at all, even before his mother’s death.

“Where did you get the water you dropped in Zebul?” James asked. “It was…impressive.”

Nathaniel’s chest puffed up at the compliment. “I tagged the brook when we were hiking to Thistle’s house. I thought it would be useful.”

His son had pulled an entire creek from Earth to Heaven. Incredible. Maybe it wouldn’t take thirty years for Nathaniel to catch up with him after all.

“Well done,” James said. He switched his remaining glove to the other hand to protect the bleeding mark. It felt strange having it turned backwards, but it was better than leaving handprints on everything.

He got up to look around. The gateway stood on the far end of the grassy island between a pair of trees. The gateway was still vibrating with energy, so the Union would probably be right behind them. Time flowed much more quickly in a Haven, though—they had at least a few minutes’ head start.

“Where are we going?” James asked.

Nathaniel pointed. “We need to get to the middle. I can feel Shamain that way.”

“Shamain? The ethereal metropolis?” James couldn’t see “the middle” from where they stood—there were too many floating islands in the way, drifting through the air like a puzzle designed by Escher.

Nathaniel cracked his knuckles. “We have to climb.”

The vibration of the gate increased in intensity.

A smaller island drifted past them, moving toward the center of the developing Haven. Nathaniel took a running leap onto it without warning James. He landed easily.

Muttering under his breath, James jumped after him.

The second island was moving faster than it appeared. He slipped and almost missed, barely catching himself on the edge. By the time he got on top of it, Nathaniel was already jumping onto another rock, and another.

The distant sounds of yelling caught James’s attention. He looked back to see three men clustered on the island with the gate, and two more falling through the air who had been unlucky enough to have popped in on the wrong side, like James had, but without any boulders to catch them.

It was going to be a long fall into the eternal sky.

James refocused on following Nathaniel, who was climbing the underbelly of another island. James was much faster with the glove protecting his marked hand. He reached it just moments after his son.

The wind beat at them harder as they grew closer to the center of the Haven, roaring through James’s ears and whipping his shirt around his body. “Where’s this other door?” he shouted, turning to search the nearby islands. “I don’t see one!”

“We aren’t looking for another door!” Nathaniel yelled back.

“Then what—”

James looked up and answered his own question.

The rocks parted, baring a brilliant gold light hovering at the center of the field of islands. It was almost as bright as the sun, but no star had ever sung out like this did. It called to him in a soft chorus of voices and rippled with energy. Everything around it vibrated.

A fissure.

The juncture between universes was a glorious thing to behold, but it drove a spike of fear into James’s heart.

The Havens were meant to prevent angels and demons from interfering with the mortal inhabitants. If Nathaniel’s guess had been correct—if James were indeed ethereal Gray—would the fissure treat him like an angel? Would he be capable of passing through to Shamain?

There was only one way to find out.

A witch wearing Union black scrambled onto the rock behind them.

“Keep going,” James told Nathaniel, and then he turned to face the attack.

The witch swung at him. James dodged it, then grabbed her arm and drove his elbow into the joint. It was a move that he had seen Elise execute, but he had never been fast enough to perform it himself.

The bone snapped. She cried out and dropped to her knees.

Zettel jumped onto the island, followed shortly by the rest of his unit. They spread out into a circle around James. There were only four of them now, including the one with the broken arm—fewer than had entered Zebul, but more than enough to take James down, if need be.

He looked up to see Nathaniel continuing to climb, a dark spot against the bright fissure. He was almost to safety. But if he went through the fissure alone, then James might never escape.

“This is the end of the line for you, Faulkner,” Zettel said, ripping a handgun out of one of the other kopis’s shoulder rigs.

James edged away from them. “This is ridiculous. You don’t need to arrest me now. I won’t be returning to Earth to cause trouble for a very long time.”

A vein bulged dangerously on Zettel’s forehead. “This isn’t about arrest.”

James saw his finger tense an instant before he fired.

He dropped to his belly, and the bullet passed harmlessly over his head. The
boom
of the gunshot shattered his eardrums.

One of the kopides jumped for James, reaching out with both hands, and he rolled just out of reach.

Zettel lowered the gun to fire again.

James felt a surge of magic, and the fissure flared. Fingers of white flame licked over the floating islands, hotter than the hottest day in the desert. The grass curled around him.

A shockwave followed instants later. It slammed into the rock. James had already been too close to the edge, and the shudders threw him off the edge of the island.

He was airborne for a half-second before hitting another boulder. It was moving in the wrong direction—away from the fissure.

Shouts echoed from the island he’d left behind. Zettel’s voice was loudest of them, and the angriest. The voice of a man who wanted blood.

He didn’t give them a chance to catch up.

James ignited a tattoo on his hip and pointed at the island.

A blast of air unleashed from his palm—a mighty vortex that could have flattened a building on Earth. In the floating world, it was far more devastating. The island flipped, crashing into another with a sound like a mountain cracking in half.

James didn’t watch the kopides fall.

He had to backtrack to find an island heading toward Nathaniel, and then jumped on a boulder that was rushing toward the heart of the fissure. Every leap made his heart miss a beat. Every time, he thought he was going to fall.

But he finally landed at his son’s side.

They were only a few hundred feet from the beaming golden fissure. The fragments of earth seemed to move in slow motion around it.

Nathaniel shoved his Book of Shadows into his back pocket. “Took you long enough.”

“My apologies,” James said. “Next time, I’ll let the Union kill us both.”

He rolled his eyes. “Anyway, while you were gone, I fixed the fissure.”

“Fixed it?”

“Redirected it,” he amended. “I moved this universe next to Hell so we can walk right into Malebolge.”

James wasn’t sure which was more shocking: that they were about to enter an infernal dimension, or that Nathaniel had shifted an entire universe to accomplish it. A small universe, granted, but still an entire
universe
.

Nathaniel rolled his eyes again at James’s expression like he had just admonished him. “Whatever. Are you ready?”

No.
There was no way for him to be ready for another visit to Hell. Especially not a level so much deeper, so much darker, than any human was intended to visit.

The City of Dis was populated by thousands of humans, and some of them weren’t even slaves; the Council had put a lot of work into making sure that the Palace was seen as a safe zone. It was as secure for mortals as anywhere in Hell possibly could be. They welcomed tourists there.

But living humans didn’t enter Malebolge. Not willingly. And the ones that did never came back out.

“I should have warned you,” James said. “These deeper levels of Hell—they’re going to be much worse than anything you’ve seen before.”

“I’ve been to Dis,” Nathaniel said. “I’m not afraid.”

“This is worse than that. So much worse.”

Nathaniel’s determined expression didn’t change. “I’m going. If you’re too scared, fine. Stay here.”

He jumped into the fissure.

For an instant, he was frozen in midair—suspended in space by the energy. The light grew until it blinded James.

Then he blinked, and Nathaniel was gone.

James ripped off his scarf, took a final deep breath of the Haven’s clean air, and retied the cloth tightly around his face.

If the fissure treated James like an angel and denied his passage, he was in for a
very
long fall. And if he didn’t fall, then he was going to plunge into the darkest depths of Hell. James wasn’t sure which was worse.

Elise. This is the only way to save Elise.

He took a few steps back, and then launched himself into the air.

XIX

James opened his eyes on
total darkness. He tried to stand, and a cool hand touched his arm. “Don’t fall over,” Nathaniel said.

It sounded like his son was speaking from beside him, but he couldn’t see anything. James pulled the scarf off of his face. It hadn’t been covering his eyes, so his vision remained unchanged.

“Why is it so dark?” James asked, reaching out for anything solid to orient himself. His bare fingers brushed something hard and hot—like volcanic rock. He jerked back.

“It’s not all that dark. You just need a second to get used to the lighting after the fissure.”

The fissure
. James had been consumed by its light and heat for so long that he thought he would never know darkness again. He only could have been falling for a few seconds, but time felt endless near the juncture between universes.

He blinked rapidly, trying to clear his eyes. The air was hot, dry, and smelled like rusted pennies. “Did we make it to Malebolge?”

“Um,” Nathaniel said. “Yeah. Looks like it.”

James waited until his vision returned. It took several minutes for him to make out Nathaniel’s shape, followed by the black stone wall behind him. There was no fissure on this side.

“Why isn’t there a light here, too?” James asked.

“The landing point’s usually nowhere near the actual fissure,” Nathaniel said. He had his back pressed to the rock, even though it must have been uncomfortably warm. “It’s safer that way.”

James stood again. They were in a shallow cave of igneous rock. Beyond the exit, Malebolge was dark and eerily quiet. He couldn’t see any hints of civilization. “Are you sure we’re in the right place?” he asked.

Nathaniel jerked his chin toward the mouth of the cave. “See for yourself.”

James leaned out to search for sky and found none.

Malebolge stretched below them, at the bottom of a vast cavern. The roof stretched high above him. The stones glowed with dim, internal fire.

The city itself was unlike any city on Earth. Dis had been, in some ways, a perverse homage to mortal cities—parts of it resembled human landmarks, like Dubai, Chicago, São Paolo. This looked more like a hive built of bone and iron, meant to accommodate creatures that walked on six legs instead of two.

And as James’s eyes continued to adjust to the darkness, he realized that he
was
seeing bone. Giant black ribs jutted from the yellow wasteland. The streets were built around a spine broader than the freeways in Los Angeles, its base half-buried in the desert. The pelvis was disproportionately huge, almost three times larger than it should have been to match the ribs, and the center of the city was nestled inside its cavity.

Puffs of smoke danced between each of the ribs. They were young nightmares, fresh from the fires.

James’s first impression had been wrong. This wasn’t a hive. This was the rotting body of a giant, filled with festering holes, dark places, and screams. This was where nightmares were born.

The acrid air stung his lungs. “How do we get to Coccytus?” James asked, tying the scarf around his face again.

Nathaniel pointed at the other side of the chasm. The structure that looked like a spine was twisted in a curve, and the skull was embedded deep in the earth. “It’s down there, with the head,” he said.

James forced himself to stop staring at all of the crawling, writhing, squirming shapes among the city, and searched for the path down. A narrow winding staircase had been built into the cliff below him, although it was extremely generous to call the steps “stairs.” They were shallow ledges barely a foot wide, with no railing. They looked like they had been chiseled by hand.

“Can you get us down?” he asked.

“I could get myself down.” Nathaniel licked his lips, trying to wet them. But the saliva seemed to evaporate instantly from his skin. “I can’t take you.”

What would be more dangerous: forcing Nathaniel to climb down the stairs with him, or allowing him to wait at the bottom, alone and unprotected? James’s eyes tracked over the writhing corpse of a city.

“We’ll climb, then,” James said.

“Okay. See you at the bottom.”

Nathaniel pulled a page out of his Book of Shadows and vanished.