This was something else entirely.

"You can do it," Eve said. It felt like she touched the back of Elise's neck, spreading warmth and rea.s.surance through her. "We'll all do it together. You're not alone."

It did make her feel slightly better to hear that. It did not make Elise feel more optimistic about her odds. "This whole 'Belphegor is a city' thing would have been great to know in advance," she said, gathering her resolve, squaring her shoulders.

Yatam's smirk smoldered through her mind. "I'll keep that in mind for all the future city-sized demons you're required to fight."

Elise had never really liked that guy.

Ba'al stood. Ice crusted his skull, flames leaping from the three mouths. His hands stroked his chins, his chest, his bared hips, as though searching for missing bones.

Then he turned his attention on Elise.

She felt the moment that he noticed her. They were G.o.ds of the same pantheon, so there was nowhere to hide; he would have been able to find her anywhere, given the time.

The weight of his eyeless gaze made her feel puny.

"It's only an avatar," Eve reminded her.

Only. Right.

Ba'al's hand swung through the s.p.a.ce between them, reaching for Elise.

Instinctively, she wanted to phase to him-the way she would have crossed that distance as a demon. But now she was so much more than that. Omnipresence meant that she existed everywhere simultaneously, including the center of Malebolge.

She moved her consciousness to the pelvis where the market had been. Now most of the ramshackle buildings had fallen away. A few demons clung to the bones, crying their woes.

Elise hovered off of the street, seeking the light of Belphegor's true form among the chaos. She only saw demons filled with fear-demons that had believed Malebolge was their final refuge, and now didn't know where to go when that was taken from them. They clung to their tables and stalls until those also collapsed, and then fell with the debris.

Bones larger than redwoods swept toward the market. Ba'al was moving to scratch Elise like an itch.

She scaled the ribs, darting through his bones in search of Belphegor's true form as the city collapsed around her. Ba'al was moving too, striding across the wasteland toward the side of the cavern that formed Malebolge. He shed the remaining pieces of the city inside the cadaver as he shifted.

A steady pulsing filled the air. A rotten heart rested at the bottom of what had been the Amniosium, beginning to beat now that Belphegor had reanimated his avatar. Every contraction of the muscles squeezed fresh sludge out over the breastbone, cascading over down his chest in a sludgy waterfall.

Belphegor wasn't there, either. Only nightmares. Elise recognized a few of them in pa.s.sing, people who had worked for her, and people she had killed.

When she reached the collarbone, that ma.s.sive hand caught up with her, swatting her away from his neck.

She hung in the air in front of him.

The face tipped down to look at her. Hovering near his frontmost chin, she couldn't even see his eyes above her. Flames smoldered beyond his fangs, inside his skeletal maw. The fissure to Limbo was gone now. All that remained was blazing fire, as incredibly hot as the icicles dangling from his jawbones were cold.

Those flames were so bright that she almost missed the glint of Belphegor's presence inside Ba'al's skull.

"There he is," Yatam said.

Finger bones pinched down on Elise, crashing together with the sound of a collapsing skysc.r.a.per.

He'd caught her.

Ba'al pushed her toward one of the mouths. He was trying to push her into the flames, seeing if the brilliance could kill her as it would have killed her before she entered the Origin.

Maybe it would have worked if Elise had still been a demon like Yatam, but she wasn't exactly a demon anymore, and Belphegor was going to have to try harder than that.

She slipped from his grip effortlessly and reappeared inside Ba'al's skull, near the ear ca.n.a.l.

The skull bones weren't as barren as the rest of the giant cadaver. Tissue remained inside, swimming with crimson-tinted fluid, pulsing in time with the beating of the heart. The inner half of the ca.n.a.l was a jungle of rotten organic matter that dangled in long, veined ropes.

Belphegor glowed brighter here. He was definitely within.

The falchions were in her hands. She cut through the rot, tearing a route for herself deep inside Ba'al.

It was a safari through rot and memory. She pa.s.sed through the ca.n.a.l to enter cranial tissue, and when the G.o.dsword sliced through the gray clumps, she was shocked with flashes of Ba'al's thoughts.

The avatar had walked the Earth in a time when there had still been other demons his size. Creatures like Volac, who had once held a House in Dis, but existed in another dimension without gravity where her tumescent body could flourish. Ba'al hadn't even been the largest of them.

It was a lightless world, and entirely inhospitable to humans. Its atmosphere had been liquid acid and its oceans flame. He had thrived there. He had been happy.

Then he had become hungry.

Elise hacked through another piece of tissue, and she saw Ba'al breaking through the walls between worlds to attack Earth. He had walked through ancient villages-no more than seasonal gatherings of nomadic mortals-and attempted to devour them all.

He had been trying to exterminate humanity, and from what Elise saw in brief flashes, he had done fairly well.

Until Lilith intervened. Until she and her compatriots slaughtered Ba'al and bound Belphegor.

Elise's falchion tore through a wall of tissue, and she stumbled forward with nothing on the other side to stop her.

She found herself within a large chamber where blood dripped from the fleshy walls to echo hollowly around her, like a soft echo of Ba'al's beating heart. His skull was hollow, a cavern.

Yatam was already waiting for her in there.

"He was always angry that we didn't let him have the humans," Yatam said. "He was among the movement-before the Treaty of Dis was instated-that believed mortals only existed as cattle, food for the infernal and ethereal."

"So he tried to conquer using one of his avatars," Elise said. She was skeptical. "He's only been a G.o.d for days. He couldn't have had an avatar back then."

"Days, eternity. Nathaniel didn't go insane over a span of mere years. He has walked the universe as long as Belphegor."

"By that rationale, I should have existed for eternity, too."

"You have," Yatam said. "You have always been G.o.d. Your reach extends further into the past than you realize. Someday, you might recognize your influence on history."

Elise slipped down the curved floor of Ba'al's cranial cavity toward the center. The veins all flowed toward spurs of bone jutting from the floor, as though Ba'al's nasal bones had been shoved back through his skull. They would have pierced his brain if he'd had one.

"I've definitely only been like this for a few hours," Elise said.

Eve appeared beside the bone spurs. Her long white gown was untouched by the blood and ichor within Ba'al's skull. Aside from Elise's G.o.dsword, she was the only light in the darkness. "You're still focusing upon a mortal perception of time. When you let it go, you will find your omnipotence."

"You're stubborn," Yatam agreed, somewhat less flatteringly. "The fact that you still walk with a body and attempt to phase shows that."

Elise's hands clenched on the falchions.

Call her stubborn, call her determined-it didn't matter.

Whatever it took to kill Belphegor, she would do it.

"He's in there, by the way," Eve said, gesturing.

Elise stepped around the bone spurs, and there he was.

Belphegor's true body was sleeping inside Ba'al's skull. How long he had been there, Elise couldn't be certain. With the strange way that time flowed for G.o.ds, he could have been resting in there for millennia after taking over Eden.

Maybe she could have waltzed down to Coccytus and slain Belphegor within the cranium of Ba'al years ago.

Too late to worry about that now.

It looked like Belphegor had already been slain, though. The skull was certainly a tomb. Belphegor's shriveled corpse, resting on the stone dais, looked like it hadn't moved for a long time. Mold had grown to consume much of his body, caking his arms and legs and neck, leaving only part of his face exposed.

This form of Belphegor was far less human-like than either of the avatars. Tusks jutted through his lips. Tiny scales rimmed his eyes.

Ba'al's bone spurs formed a cage of bone around his body. Elise couldn't reach him.

She circled it, considering how she might be able to gain access. Belphegor had gotten in somehow. There must have been a way to do it.

A beam of light radiated across the cavernous skull, splashing over the floor.

There was a wide crack in Ba'al's skull, through which Elise could see that the city was still walking. He had moved past a source of light. Some kind of fire. It briefly illuminated the entire skull.

Elise climbed up the inside of his forehead to look out.

Ba'al was breaking out of Malebolge. His ma.s.sive hands ripped at the walls of the cavern, exposing a sinkhole that showed Earth on the other side. There were rolling hills, suburbs, a black sky.

The trees and buildings were being sucked into a distant black hole. At least, that was what it looked like to Elise, though she had never expected to see a black hole on Earth.

That was where Ba'al was going. He was trying to reach the black hole.

"What is that?" Elise asked.

Yatam appeared to stand beside her. "The genesis vortex. It will consume everything. That's where it all ends, and where the next phase begins."

Ba'al was moving faster now that he had spotted it. If the avatar got inside-and took Belphegor with him-then they would both be beyond Elise's ability to stop. Belphegor would control the genesis.

She couldn't let them get that far.

Elise rounded on the cage of bone. There was still no obvious way to get inside; the spurs were too close together for her to slip through.

If she had been able to do as Yatam said and let go of her stubborn adherence to linearity, maybe there would have been a way inside to kill him, but she couldn't seem to place herself inside by sheer willpower.

"d.a.m.n," she said.

She had come so far and sacrificed so much to get to this point. She had given up everything.

Even James.

A few bones weren't going to stop her from killing Belphegor.

Elise swung her obsidian falchion at the cage.

Eve flung a hand toward her. "Wait!"

The blade connected with the bone.

It didn't cut through. It struck the bone with a loud crack, sinking less than a millimeter into the hard surface, and sticking to it. Belphegor's hand exploded from its moldy encas.e.m.e.nt, shooting out to grip Elise by the wrist.

The world shattered around Elise. Pain coursed through every fiber of her existence, vast as it had become.

And she immediately felt that existence begin to recede.

Death loomed over her, dark and permanent.

Yatam wrenched her out of Belphegor's grip. She fell backward, collapsing in a wet puddle of rot. "Belphegor's not the only one who can be killed by attacking his true body," Yatam admonished. "You're not an avatar. You're still walking around with your vulnerable core exposed. You can't go near him unless you want to die as surely as Nathaniel has."

As he spoke, Belphegor woke up. His hands stripped away the mold that had grown around him. He sat up, and though it was far less dramatic than Ba'al's rise from Malebolge, it was somehow far more terrifying.

He looked just as dead as the skeleton, just as impossible to move. But he radiated with power that neither of the avatars had. He blazed as bright as Adam had. Brighter, even.

"G.o.dslayer." His rotten lips slid together, slicked by ichor. "I see you."

Yeah, she saw him too, and she wished that she didn't have to.

"Let me in," Elise said. "You still have to give me that free shot."

Belphegor glanced toward the crack in Ba'al's skull. They were close enough to the genesis void now that Elise could hear its raging winds through the thick wall of bone. "All I have to do now is wait," he said as Ba'al pitched toward the vortex.

Elise steeled herself and lifted the falchions to attack again, but a gentle hand stopped her. "You must leave," Eve said. "If you get within his reach, he will kill you."

"Not before I kill him," Elise said.

"But without any surviving G.o.ds, the genesis will never finish. Everything will die without rebirth. Everything will be lost. You must survive this, Elise." Her name sounded so sweet on Eve's lips, as though the woman were speaking the name of her favorite child.

Elise understood Eve's reasoning, but she was only a few feet from Belphegor's shriveled form.

She had almost gotten revenge against the thing that had killed everyone she loved.

"He can't enter the genesis alive," Elise said, frustration twisting within her.

"Yes, I know. We'll address that issue, as we should have many centuries past," Yatam said. "He will be dead before this avatar plummets into the vortex."