Chapter 27
Twenty-Seven
I turned in bed, groaning softly as Lust’s sunlight blared through the window. Eros was lying on his stomach next to me, completely naked. I pressed my lips to the center of his back, where his parents had torn off his wings, and dragged my nails down the side of his back.
“Luci,” he mumbled, eyes still closed.
“Good morning,” I said.
Let’s just say, after our little fight last night, we had made up.
Slowly, he fluttered his eyes open and gazed around the room. “Shit,” he said. “Dani is going to be—”
“Fine with this.”
“No,” he said. “I mean, she needs to feed in the morning, or she’ll be cranky all day.” He rolled out of bed and grabbed his pants from one of the Lust Room dressers. As he pulled them on, he gazed over at me. “What?”
I sat there, smiling at him. “Thinking about last night,” I said.
I honestly hadn’t expected Eros to be okay with anything further than a simple kiss, but we had ended up in the Lust Room for hours.
When he buckled his belt and pulled his shirt over his head, he grimaced. “I have to go,” he said hesitantly by the door.
He glanced at my lips for a quick moment, then walked over and placed his lips so lightly on mine that all I wanted to do was pull him down and not let him go.
He pulled away, glanced at me with emotion in his eyes that I couldn’t decipher, and walked out.
I chuckled and pulled on my clothes. “He loves me.”
* * *
After Biast had given me the dead fallen angel from his kingdom, I had dropped him off at my best examiner.
He had worked for thousands of years with demonic magic, was an expert in every kingdom’s use of magic, and examined every angel that fell—with wings or not—before sending them through the portals to the Styx River to the true entrance of Hell.
So, when I asked him, “How did he fall?” I expected an answer.
He was my greatest.
He shook his head and opened a file, flipping through all the pages. “My team and I have searched through everything that we could think of, but no theory holds up.”
“No theory?” I arched a brow and walked around the dead angel, drawing my finger over his skin and watching the soft white skin freeze. “His magical power wasn’t drained?”
He shook his head. “There is no sign of struggle inside of him. As you know, angelic magic is bound with your soul, and when it’s taken away, there are signs of struggle within the vessel of the angel, a struggle between the soul and the magic thrashing around violently inside of them.”
“And what about the marks of a demon on him? Maybe he got caught in trouble in the humansphere.”
He walked over to his head and dug a knife right into the top of it, where there was a scar. He peeled back the skin, then cut through the skull to show me his brain.
An angel’s brain was different from any demon’s brain that I had ever seen bashed on the walkways to Satan’s kingdom. Inside, they were completely white and glowed like balls of magic.
“When possessed by a demon, the brain of a human tints black in some areas. And although I believe that angels may be able to resist the powers of a demon to some extent, I do think their brains will turn a grayish color. Even if it’s not a lot, there will be some kind of change.”
I nodded and paused, unsure if I should move forward with what I wanted to ask or not. “What about Dani’s mother?” I asked. “She was possessed by Asmodeus—Dani’s father. She was an angel.”
He looked to be in complete shock for a moment. “Are you suggesting we examine Dani’s mother without her permission?”
“Dani won’t mind.”
“She will kill me,” he said. “She hasn’t even seen her mother yet. If she knew her body was here in Hell …”
“She’ll be very upset that nobody told her, but do you think she would want to see her mother how she is now—with a single claw stuck right through her skull?”
He paused for another moment, then closed the skull and skin and brushed his hand over the open wound.
It closed back up almost instantly. He walked to the other side of the room, wiping his hands.
“Even if I considered this, we don’t know where her body lies.
It could be anywhere in Tartarus’s Pits; it could’ve even been burned by now. It’s been almost twenty years.”
“If I find it for you, will you examine it?”
He sighed deeply through his nose. “Why do I do your dirty work, Lucifer?” he said more to himself than to me. He shuffled through more of his work and looked down.
“Because I pay you well.” I leaned against one of the counters in the examiner’s room. “What about banishment?”
“Banishment usually results in the loss of wings,” he said.
I breathed deeply through my nose. “It also results in taking the magical power that allows angels to travel between the magical barrier around Heaven. The barrier that allows no demon or human to get in without going through the Golden Gates and repenting.”
He raised his brows and looked down at the angel. “He would still have to have had some sense of struggle within him to have that physically stripped from him.”
“What if it wasn’t stripped? What if that ghoul just isn’t strong enough to keep all those angels within the barrier anymore and he fell right through?”
He took a deep breath. “I will have to do some tests, but that would be the best theory—if it holds true.”
I walked to the door and nodded. “So, she’s weakening. That ghoul is weakening,” I said to myself.
As much as I didn’t want to believe that prophecy bullshit, that was exactly how it went—the angels fall, the Two-Faced Prophet comes, and then holy Heaven crumbles.
Our time to rise up against all of that ghoul’s strict power and rules were approaching. Everyone in Hell had to be ready, and we would be.