Chapter 27
Wrathhog said she was going home to soak in the tub, but she’d be back in the morning.
We had a few hours to kill before bed, so it was time.
I hadn’t really explored this house. There was a room that was obviously Lucifer’s and I didn’t sleep in that room.
I wasn’t going to go snooping in there either unless I needed to.
Who was Lucifer? I knew the stories. He was a bad guy to a lot of people, but didn’t he just ask for equal rights?
If I was a few years older, Mom would have had trouble getting the loans she did without my father in the picture just because she had a vagina.
Mom was just a kid when schools were desegregated, but she told me how awful some people were about it.
Yeah, I didn’t blame him for that. I didn’t blame him for the rebellion, either. I still wasn’t all that convinced he saw two lines on a pee stick, flipped out, and decided to fuck out of literally all of his responsibilities, but I was curious to find out now.
Nero, Kujo, and Celix had never met the man. They just heard the stories. They’d heard more stories than I had, so I was letting them tell me as we explored this massive house.
“He’s supposed to be the nicest,” Nero said.
“This happened thousands of years ago, but everyone says Hell would be different if his son wasn’t murdered.
He had been committed to changes and then it happened.
He threw himself into catching who did it and then just withdrew from everyone when none of the leads panned out. ”
I just grunted because he eventually had another child and I could have been murdered, too, but demons found me before the angels did.
“Princess, wipe that look off your face,” Kujo said.
“I hate everyone in this place except Nero and Celix. Wrathhog is pretty cool, but I don’t know her enough yet to not hate her.
Lucifer might be a big cuddly bear for all I know, but he never did me any favors, so I hate him, too.
I’m not particularly fond of you, so I’m not exactly sure why I care that you look upset, but Lucifer took his eyes off his son long enough for a trip to the mortal realm and lost him.
It devastated him. If he knew your mom was pregnant, the only reason he wouldn’t be there was if he couldn’t. ”
“Well, that was a shitty pep talk and I don’t like you, either, but you’re dealing with decades of abandonment issues and me being a card-carrying atheist, so it’s probably going to take a few days to sink in that my father was Lucifer and he didn’t abandon us, he was probably kidnapped by angels.
That’s fucked up. You can see how that would be fucked up for me, right?
You’re probably going to have to tell me he’s not a deadbeat a few more times. ”
“You don’t have to be mean,” Nero said.
“Yes, I do. The sooner she accepts all this, the less likely we all are to get killed trying to protect her.”
Dick. He wasn’t wrong, but give me five minutes. I’ll bet whoever fetched him from the mortal realm when his magic showed up gave him a little more grace than he was giving me. I marched straight to an ornate door at the end of the hall so I didn’t kick him in the nuts again.
I threw the door open and found myself in a study.
There was a massive desk in front of a fireplace and books everywhere.
He disappeared around the time I was born, so unless Hell had vastly superior technology, I wasn’t going to find a cell phone or laptop some genius might be able to get into that would have all the answers.
There was a portrait above the mantle on the fireplace and fuck me if it didn’t look like me with a dick.
“Is that—?”
“Kir, your half brother. Lucifer paints. You can only own one of his paintings if you’re filthy rich, but sometimes, he auctions them for a good cause,” Celix said.
It made so much sense. Mom was also an artist. She’d been working as an illustrator when she got pregnant with me, but she couldn’t buy insurance because they decided pregnancy was a pre-existing condition.
She had to take a job she hated just for the insurance because kids needed it.
She’d take my favorite stories and illustrate them.
I could totally see Mom falling for a bad-boy artist.
I looked up at the painting. It wasn’t just that the man in the painting looked exactly like me. Mom made sure I had a decent arts education. I was terrible at drawing, but I could appreciate it. We went to arts museums all the time.
The person who painted this really cared about the subject.
Kir was posed with a sword that was covered in green flames, but he had this gentle look in his eyes like he’d only use it if he was forced.
I’d never be that. If Lucifer ever chose to paint me with a sword, he’d better capture the ‘cut a bitch’ vibes or it wouldn’t be accurate.
Of course, we needed to find him first.
I was looking at the painting, but Celix and Nero were looking at the bookcase pretty hard.
Lucifer seemed to read just as much as I did, though I highly doubted he was reading about some mortal woman getting railed by the dragon king.
Kujo was over there, too, and call me curious.
I wanted to know what kind of books the devil read.
Celix and Nero were looking on in horror as Kujo started messing with the shelves. They looked like they were scared Lucifer was going to appear in a cloud of brimstone and smite their asses for fondling his books. But Kujo seemed like he was looking for something, so I asked.
“Furies are upper demons. Most of them are uber wealthy, but they are also paranoid. My mother didn’t want me, but she had to let me live with her until I could take care of myself.
She wanted me as out of sight as possible, but I figured out her secrets while I kept out of her way.
There might be a hidden room in here. My mother had one.
If the princes all distrust each other, but don’t want to kill each other, they’ve probably all got one somewhere. ”
Shit, this was actually interesting. While he was looking, I was peeping on Lucifer’s books. He seemed to be a history buff and a lot of these were about the mortal world. He seemed really interested in pagan gods, which I was dying to ask him about if we ever found him.
“Here!” Kujo said.
He pressed some button that honestly just looked like a pattern in the wood and the bookcase swung open. They all hung back because I guess they wanted me to go first.
I stepped in and found the light switch.
It was honestly a lot. The hidden room was big, but this was clearly where Lucifer had been doing his investigation into Kir’s murder.
There was a big board set up with photos or drawings of his suspects.
There were drawings of people I didn’t know that had to be angels, but he also had the demon princes on his board.
There were massive shelves of identical books with ornate, leather-bound covers that had no titles on the spines or covers. I picked one off the shelf and flicked it open. Shit. Lucifer wrote extensive journals. There were shelves full of them.
I was a fast reader and had been known to one more chapter my way through an entire book in one night. Even if I stayed up and read one of these every night, it would still take me years to get through the collection.
And I didn’t exactly feel comfortable reading any of them.
These were his private thoughts he opted to hide in a secret room.
I didn’t want anyone reading my diaries, either.
But I was going to have to. I’d have to find the most recent ones to find out who might have overpowered him or if he was just thinking of abandoning all of this and his child.
But before I could even think about looking at his board harder or digging through the diaries, this loud, obnoxious alarm started blaring.
Except it wasn’t like an alarm in the house was going off. It was like Hell itself was screaming.