FALL FROM PARADISE Read online

  Excerpt

  I asked if you knew Dante because it’s important,” he said. “Now give me your hand.”

  He snatched it from my side. Before I had the chance to protest, he’d already drawn a small blade across the fleshy pulp of my hand. Blood pooled to the surface as I watched for any reaction from him.

  There was none. It was all business.

  At least that was reassuring.

  Suddenly the floor disappeared out from underneath us, leaving only a bright vortex in its wake. The sound of wind rushing loudly past our feet drowned out any chance of me hearing anything else.

  Even Goat had to yell for me to hear him. “Are you ready?”

  Apparently I wasn’t. “Ready for what?”

  He shook his head disappointedly as if I had missed something important.

  “For Hell.”

  FALL FROM PARADISE

  By

  M. Dylan Blair

  Copyright © 2014 by M. Dylan Blair.

  All rights reserved.

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise), without the prior written permission of the author.

  The scanning, uploading, and distribution of this book via the Internet or via any other means without the permission of the author is illegal and punishable by law. Please purchase only authorized electronic editions, and do not participate in or encourage electronic piracy of copyrighted materials. Your support of the author’s rights is appreciated.

  PUBLISHING HISTORY

  Paperback edition / August 2014

  Ebook edition /August 2014

  eISBN: 978-0-440-42334-8

  Cover design: M. Dylan Blair

  Back Cover Illustration: Fredrik Strømme

  http://www.mdylanblair.com/

  v2.0

  Table of Contents

  EXCERPT

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  Dedication

  Books By M. Dylan Blair

  Author's Note

  Map

  Quote

  PART ONE

  CHAPTER ONE

  CHAPTER TWO

  CHAPTER THREE

  CHAPTER FOUR

  CHAPTER FIVE

  CHAPTER SIX

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  CHAPTER NINE

  CHAPTER TEN

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  PART TWO

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

  CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

  CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

  CHAPTER THIRTY

  CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE

  CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO

  PART THREE

  CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE

  CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR

  CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE

  CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX

  CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN

  CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT

  CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE

  CHAPTER FORTY

  CHAPTER FORTY-ONE

  CHAPTER FORTY-TWO

  CHAPTER FORTY-THREE

  CHAPTER FORTY-FOUR

  CHAPTER FORTY-FIVE

  Acknowledgments

  THE CELESTIAL COMPENDIUM

  The Seven Heavens

  The Celestial Hierarchy

  The Council of the Seraphim

  The Demonic Hierarchy (ArchDemons)

  Locales & Terminology

  The Celestial Alphabet

  The Enochian Alphabet

  Novel Playlist

  PREVIEW FOR EYES LIKE MINE

  About The Author

  Dedication

  To Kyle, you were the one who inspired me to keep writing even if you didn't know it. Always and forever.

  Books by M. Dylan Blair

  The Nine Worlds Saga

  Burning Eden * forthcoming 2016

  Redemption of the Damned * forthcoming 2017

  The Genesis Trilogy

  Fall From Paradise

  East of Eden * forthcoming 2015

  Other Novels By M. Dylan Blair

  Eyes Like Mine * forthcoming 2016

  Author's Note

  While this book is considered a work of fiction, it incorporates and alludes to the beliefs, dogmas, mythology, folklore and histories of several religions and studies including but not limited to: Christianity, Judaism, the Kabbalah, the Books of Enoch I – III, Dante's La Divina Commedia (The Divine Comedy), De Coelesti Hierarchia (The Celestial Hierarchy), Demonology, The Greater and Lesser Key of Solomon, Greek Mythology and Angelology.

  This information is used to entertain, educate and enlighten.

  I tried to only include what was pertinent for a basic understanding of this book. Additional information can be found after the acknowledgments in the back.

  MAP OF THE REALMS

  “It matters not how straight the gate,

  how charged with punishments the scroll.

  I am the master of my fate:

  I am the captain of my soul.”

  ~ Invictus, William Ernest Henley

  PART ONE - ADAM

  CHAPTER ONE

  I had no idea how long he had been standing there in the dark at the end of my hospital bed, almost like a whisper. Had I not seen the streetlight glimmer off his wings, I would have scarcely thought him real.

  The room was silent, save for the harmonic beeping of the monitor tethering me to this world, letting the overnight staff know that I was still alive and kicking even if it was only for a few more hours.

  Had a more devout person been in my place, they would have faced the shock of a lifetime. This man did not stand before me dressed in white and beautiful enough to make one weep.

  He looked human, haunted even.

  His five-o-clock shadow furthered his disheveled appearance; his chestnut hair was tousled slightly. Short and unkempt, it hid his face from view.

  Minutes passed before either of us finally said something. My haggard voice broke the near silence. “I—I don’t know who you are, but if you don’t leave, I’ll call the nurses’ desk.”

  “Somehow I highly doubt that.” He didn’t even glance in my direction but merely reached to the plastic cup on the rollaway cart and poured a glass of water, holding it out for me in the process.

  I reached cautiously for the water, and the man took notice of the IVs taped to my hands and arms. “Why are you in my room?”

  My gaze never left his darkened face. His tangled web of hair hid his eyes from sight. A rush of sound, like flapping in the darkness, diverted my attention just long enough for something to glisten in my peripheral.

  With any luck, his wings were nothing more than a morphine-induced hallucination.

  “I didn’t poison it, if that’s what you’re thinking.”

  “What?” I blinked.

  “The water.”

  My palms began to itch, and I looke
d down, remembering the cup was still in my hands. I took a quick sip before setting it next to the phone on the nightstand. “Thanks, I guess. So are you going to tell me what you’re doing in a stranger’s room at two in the morning?”

  He snorted or maybe laughed; I couldn’t tell without seeing his face.

  Voices lied. Words lied. Only eyes told the truth.

  “We’re not strangers,” the man said as he sat down on the corner of my bed.

  I felt something brush my cheek in the darkness, and I almost jumped out of my skin. “You had me fooled.”

  “That’s where you’d be wrong.” He smiled briefly.

  “Listen, buddy. I’ve never seen you a day in—”

  That same rush of sound echoed in the room, and the man who had been avoiding my gaze was now inches from me. Suddenly his breath burned my face, belying my thoughts and emotions.

  It was raw, pure, and hovered in my direction.

  His eyes struck me like peridots lost in an ocean of blue, with an intensity blazing in them that I knew better than to question. For a moment, I was scared he would hurt me, and he must have noticed the look on my face because he backed up instantly.

  I couldn’t bear to look at those eyes again. “So this is a normal thing?” I asked as I fingered the holes in the crocheted blanket keeping my legs warm. “You coming to the hospital to visit people?”

  “No,” he said quietly. “Just you.”

  I mustered a smile even though a voice in the back of my head screamed in warning. He could have been a serial killer, a pervert, or a deranged psychotic that snuck into hospital rooms at night to scare the damned and dying.

  The same disturbed look I had on my face now crossed his.

  Could he have heard me? I had no idea, but I was sure I didn’t want to find out.

  Luck, it would seem, did not fancy my cares. “Amelia, please,” he whispered in the dark. “Stop this foolishness. You know better than to think that of me. I would never hurt you. Never.”

  The pain in his beautiful eyes nearly choked me. I had no recollection of the stranger before me, but obviously that meant little to him.

  “What do you want?” I took another sip from the cup.

  “You.”

  “What?” This time I choked for an entirely different reason.

  “You asked me what I wanted,” he said simply, as if the words required no forethought. “I want you.”

  I fidgeted even more as I struggled to regain some control over the madness unfolding around me. My hands dug into the blanket and pillow as I forced myself upright to stare this man in the eye. I said nothing, knowing anything I would say was futile.

  Instead, I did the most unnatural thing to me. I listened.

  “You’re dying, Amelia, and there’s nothing I can do to stop what happens after that, but for now I can give you a choice. Right here, right now. I can’t stop your death, but I can slow it down. Maybe not long enough for grandchildren but time to do what you want, go where you want. Time to be happy. Time to live.”

  I finally mustered the courage to speak. “And in what capacity am I supposed—”

  “When the time comes, Mia, you will follow me unquestioningly. You will be mine and I, yours. Together, forever, at last.”

  “Why are you doing this?”

  “Because you asked me to.”

  I could only blink. The man stared at me with such longing that I felt ashamed beneath his gaze, as if he’d just caught me with my hand in the cookie jar. He reached for me one final time, extending a gentle hand to my thigh. I couldn’t deny the rush I felt, nearly choking me with desire. A burning fire whipped down his body and into mine, leaving my breath caught in the back of my throat.

  Our eyes locked, and it was evident we both knew the effect his touch had on me. My body knew him even when my mind didn’t.

  “Say you’ll come with me, Amelia, please,” he begged. “I can’t bear this much longer without you.”

  “Bear what?” My voice struggled to get out.

  The room was suddenly stifling. Suffocating even. I began to fidget even more.

  And then came an answer I wasn’t expecting.

  “Eternity.”

  CHAPTER TWO

  Orderlies bustled about the hallways. The RN came in every few hours to jot down notes on a brown clipboard, a foreign language scrawled for the entertainment of the doctor. All seemingly innocuous activities that daily life at a hospital begot.

  Just as I was coming around for what felt like the thousandth time, the brunette nurse must have noticed my movements because she scurried out of the room like the hounds of Hell were chasing after her.

  I closed my eyes long enough for those seafoam-colored irises to haunt me once more until the sound of Dr. Willard’s voice broke my reverie.

  His salt and pepper gray hair did little to mask the alarm on his face. I expected the worst.

  “I have to tell you, Amelia,” his Case Western-educated voice began, vying for my attention. “When Stacy told me about these readings, I thought she was mad, but she insisted that I come see for myself. While you were unconscious, we ran three panels, two biopsies, and a CT scan.” He patted my hand with a triumphant smile. “There’s no cancer anywhere in your body.”

  I blinked. What?

  He must have noticed my reaction because he slipped past me to the view-box on the wall, placed the scan in his hand on it, and flipped the switch. “See for yourself.”

  I inched over onto my side, taking great care to brace myself for the pain that didn’t come.

  Maybe he was right.

  I didn’t know which terrified me more: the idea of my cancer actually being gone or the truth behind how it happened. What should have been a cathartic experience instead left me frightened as I glanced at the images again and again.

  He was right.

  Not a speck. Not a mar on the screen.

  I was healed. Yesterday I was dying. Weak and frail, my veins were flooded with poison in hopes of keeping me alive a little longer yet. Thrown into a whirlwind of beeping monitors and bright lights, time had lost its meaning in a way I had not expected.

  I had expected panic, terror even. I had expected something. Anything.

  But not this. Instead I felt numb, hollow.

  I felt the chemicals eating away at my energy, eating away at my soul.

  My mother didn’t even know I was here. Or that I was dying. She and my stepfather were away on business for three months in Washington D.C. I had left her two messages but hadn’t heard anything back. Her phone had been off both times.

  I was alone in this. Alone save for the strange man who visited me in my dreams. It was becoming quite apparent that my brain’s way of coping might have actually been something else entirely. Maybe I did have a guardian angel watching over me—watching in ways I didn’t even want to know about.

  “As long as nothing changes, we’re going to release you the morning after tomorrow.” Dr. Willard’s voice broke my train of thought yet again.

  “What?”

  “We’re releasing you back to your life,” he said amicably. “Now, we are going to want to set up a follow-up appointment with the oncology ward to be on the safe side, but as far as we can tell, it’s as if you were never sick to begin with. Call it a miracle if you want.”

  My disbelief reared its ugly head. “A miracle?”

  Dr. Willard unclicked his ballpoint pen and stuffed it back in the chest pocket of his lab coat. “Well, someone’s looking out for you then. Remember to send them a nice Christmas present.”

  For a moment I was a tongue-tied, my defenses caught with their pants down. Appreciation had never been one of my strong suits.

  “Take care out there.” He smiled at me, and for a moment, I didn’t feel the wolf at my door anymore. With a gentle, reassuring pat on my shoulder, he was gone, back out of my life. I was alone in the stark white room once more.

  I stared at the monitors beeping harmonically at my side for
several minutes before I finally pulled the tape off my skin and the IVs along with it. I ran my hands along my arms, checking for any foreign objects still tethering me to this place, finding nothing. My fingertips grazed the patch of hair missing from the side of my scalp where they had shaved away my humanity.

  Just a strip at first. They didn’t know whether more would be necessary if the surgery didn’t work. But my hair was gone; my scars real. With that reality, so too came my truth: I was healthy.

  I glanced through the double-paned windows at the encroaching storm. The skies had turned a muted gray as the winter weather fast approached the city. The streets were all but deserted save for the large dump trucks launching salt into the blackness. Like a moth cocooning itself for a long slumber, the darkness blanketing the firmament soon covered everything in sight.

  Before too long, it would be pitch black and freezing cold, with ice laying waste to the pavement and grass, trapping us like birds in a cage.

  I threw a shawl around my shoulders and pulled on my pair of slippers with the little piggies on top. Taking care not to draw the attention of the women at the nurses’ station, I disappeared down the emergency stairwell.

  By the time they realized I was gone, it wouldn’t even matter.

  I had no intention of ever coming back.

  CHAPTER THREE

  Spring had settled into Middleton, the town I had chosen to start my new life.