A Hundred Words for Hate

CHAPTER TWENTY

For Jon, it was like stepping into a fairy tale.

Like climbing the beanstalk and finding the old woman who lived in a shoe, and all her kids were being babysat by Cinderella.

It was that weird.

He’d been raised to believe in this place, that someday he and all his cousins would be allowed to return to Paradise.

To Eden.

Now, standing just beyond the gate, he tried to take it all in. It was an odd place, a foreign place. Jon had been to many a jungle in his lifetime as the Sons moved from place to place, but he’d never seen a jungle like this.

“Something’s wrong here,” Izzy said.

Jon noticed the trees, their branches twisted and malformed, the vegetation covered in dark, malignant spots. A smell hung heavy in the humid air; it was the smell of sickness, of rot.

Izzy bent down to the ground, and Jon watched as she extended her long fingers and stuck them into the moist earth.

The woman gasped.

“Oh . . .,” she said, eyes growing wide, her body rigid.

Thin, snaking vines began to emerge from the ground, entwining around her fingers and moving up her hands, wrapping around her wrists.

Her breath was coming in quick gasps, her eyes blinking rapidly as they glazed over.

“Oh, my God. Oh, my dear God . . .”

Jon reached for her, but Remy grabbed his wrist, stopping him.

“Wait,” he ordered.

“The Garden,” Izzy said between troubled breaths. “The Garden . . . the Garden is in my head. . . . Oh, God . . . she’s sick. . . . Something . . . something is growing inside of her. . . . Something is going to kill her if . . . if she can’t fight it.”

A strange moaning sound filled the air. Jon looked around for the source, but realized it was coming from all around them. The tree branches were moving, creaking in protest as they bent in their direction. Even the grass beneath their feet had begun to squirm.

“This isn’t good,” Izzy screamed, trying to pull her hands from the ground, but the vines held her fast. “She’s crazy from the pain . . . from the sickness.”

Tree limbs lashed out with whiplike speed.

Remy grabbed Jon, driving them both to the ground as a branch swiped at them, passing dangerously close to their heads.

“She . . . she’s trying to fight back,” Izzy said, now sitting upon the ground, still connected to the Garden. “She doesn’t know that we’re here to help.”

Thorny vines dropped from some of the higher trees, wrapping themselves around Remy like tentacles, and pulling him up into the air.

Jon watched in horror as the squirming tendrils yanked Remy higher into the thick foliage, the angel practically disappearing into the growth.

“She’s trying to save herself,” Izzy yelled.

Jon scrambled to his feet, standing beneath the struggling form of Remy Chandler, who was now completely enshrouded in sharp, spiny vines. He looked toward Izzy; she had the power to help but was held in the grip of the Garden. She had started to struggle, her body becoming covered in thin, slithering roots.

Jon moved to help her, but the ground beneath him turned to watery mud. He sank instantly to his waist, clawing at the ground for purchase, but wherever he touched, the ground turned to insubstantial muck.

Pulling him deeper, until he felt the cold touch of wet earth beneath his chin.

Ready to swallow him whole.

Taranushi dispatched the tigerlike beast with cold, deadly efficiency, wrapping his pliable body around the great cat and snapping its bones one at a time, slowly crippling it, before he began to consume its still-warm flesh.

The great cat had sprung at them from the thick underbrush as they fought their way through the living jungle, another example of how much the Garden had changed.

These changes disturbed Malachi, a seed of worry germinating in his mind. Something was amiss.

Thick, serpentine roots erupted around them, attempting to snatch Adam and Eliza from where they lay upon the ground. Malachi brandished his scalpel, lunging at the vegetation, cutting the tentacle-like growths in half before they could do any harm.

“It is obvious that the Garden does not want us here,” the angel said, brushing the signs of conflict from the fabric of his robes. “It too must sense the end of the old, and the inevitable approach of a new beginning.”

Malachi paused, waiting for Eden to respond, as Taranushi finished his snack and rejoined the group.

“Though a wonderful thing, birth can always be so . . . traumatic,” Malachi continued.

The jungle again began to tremble, shifting and moving as it readied to resume its attack on them.

“Tear it down,” Malachi said with a wave of his hand. “We do not have time for this.”

Taranushi did as he was ordered, his liquid form flowing toward the thickening wall of vegetation, bolts of magickal power erupting from his hands, reducing the jungle before them to drifting particles in the air, and cutting a swath of destruction into the very heart of Eden.

The old woman moaned, her face pale and flushed, damp with sweat and tears.

Malachi studied the humans; he hoped they would stay alive long enough to help him fulfill his plans.

“Bring them,” he commanded the Shaitan as he turned and strode down the blackened path.

The jungle surrounding him grew steadily darker, the growths more perverse and mutated. He was getting closer—closer to the seeds he’d planted so very long ago, the seeds that would now bear the fruit of his supremacy.

Malachi stopped before a wall of vines adorned with ebony flowers. The flowers hissed menacingly, blowing puffs of some noxious, organic poison into his face. Annoyed, he slashed at the growths with his glowing scalpel, burning and cutting the thick vegetation, the stink of poison in his angelic lungs reinvigorating his determination to see Heaven reduced to smoldering ruins.

And from the ashes, a new beginning would emerge.

He had no idea how long he went on, his anger blinding him to time’s passage, stopping only when he was summoned by his servant.

“Master,” Taranushi called tentatively.

The elder whirled, blade clutched tightly in his hand and murder in his eyes.

“We are here,” the Shaitan said, pointing behind him.

And Malachi turned to see what he had endured so much, for so very long, to reach.

“The Tree,” he exclaimed, clambering over the remains of Eden’s last defense.

With a cloud of buzzing insects swarming around his head, Malachi finally stood before the Tree.

And was horrified by what he saw.

The Tree was withered, its branches sagging with the shriveled remains of fruit once filled with the knowledge of God.

Something’s wrong, Malachi thought, and then his eyes fell to the ground surrounding the base of the great Tree.

The grass was brown—dead—and the ground roiled as something stirred beneath it.

Something that he had placed there.

Something ready to be born.

For a moment, Izabelle Swan ceased to exist, and there was only the Garden.

Izzy and Eden were one. Izzy felt the Garden’s yearning, her desire to be complete again, to have her children returned to her.

But she also felt her sickness.

Something had been planted within her, something that fed upon her. It was beyond hungry . . . voracious, and it wanted the knowledge.

God’s knowledge.

And it would not be sated until it had consumed it all.

And as it grew, it fed upon the tree, suckling upon its roots, using the enlightenment of God as its source of nourishment.

The evil grew within the soft, dark womb of her earth. She tried to kill them, to abort this dangerous life inside her, but it was too strong, and the longer it was inside her, the weaker she became.

She did not how much longer she had, but Eden would fight until there was nothing left of her but dust.

Izzy threw back her head and sucked in a mouthful of air and annoying insects, gasping for breath as the thoughts of the Garden receded in her mind.

“We want to help you,” she cried out, her hands still buried deep within the soil. “Please let us help you.”

The Garden shivered, a noticeable tremor passing through the lush vegetation as the woman’s words reached the sentient jungle surroundings.

She heard the sound of coughing, and turned to see the muddy form of Jon, climbing out of a deep pool of muck, roots snaking across the ground allowing him to pull himself free.

“Thank you,” she said, feeling suddenly joyous, but that joy was short-lived as there came an explosion from somewhere above them, and something dropped to the Garden floor, still burning.

“Sweet Jesus,” Izzy said as she watched the angel slowly stand, his body burning as if doused with gasoline.

“Remy,” Jon called out as he stood, dripping thick mud.

But Izzy wasn’t quite sure it was Remy he was calling to.

The angel stood there, flaming sword in hand, a sneer of contempt upon his burning face.

“Jon, you might not want to get too close,” she warned.

The Son of Adam stopped short as the angel’s gaze fell upon him.

“Remy?” the man asked again.

The angel’s fire seemed to burn brighter, and for a moment Izzy feared for the man’s life, but the angel’s expression suddenly softened, and the fire around his body extinguished.

“Yeah,” Remy said.

“She didn’t want to hurt us,” Izzy explained, as she pulled her hands free of the twining roots and joined her friends. “Eden’s sick. . . . Something very bad is growing inside her, something evil. . . .”

Remy looked at her, and for a moment she sensed that he might have been replaced again by something far colder, and more angelic.

“Then I suggest we help her,” he said, holding out his burning sword. “And cut this cancer from her womb.”