Chapter 3
I wanted to see it for myself, the moment Galilee Kincaid and the Devil first laid eyes on each other, but I was embodied,
and Lucifer would catch my scent if I went too close. I hovered in the hallways instead, waiting. I had spent that girl’s
life waiting—what was a little more time in the measure of things?
The body I wore was a supple skin, fine wrinkles around her eyes and gray in her hair. A pale blue gown clung to my flesh
like a startled dawn, faint trails of pink and orange swirling up my legs. Eyes had followed me as I left the ballroom where
the party was being held, and I felt the weight of their covetous gazes on me. If I was as carnal as the others, perhaps I
would’ve taken one of them to bed, but those appetites deserted me a wartime ago—or so I thought, until Lucifer Morningstar
strode down the hall with Galilee Kincaid by his side. It felt like a flaming sword had carved out my stomach, how much it
hurt to see him again, how much it always hurt to see him. I avoided it for thousands of years at a time until inevitably I would give in and find him topside, watch
him from afar while hot pain burrowed through me. I did nothing to deserve this. God knows I did nothing to deserve this! And yet, it’s as if I was the one being punished, while the creature I once loved put on a
man’s skin to flirt in crossroads.
I looked away when he threw Galilee’s leg over his shoulder, and I winced at the memories.
There was a time Lucifer used to convince me to wear bodies so I could feel what they felt, the sharp ecstasies that could be dragged out for hours on his tongue.
It’s one of the many sins I now hold against him, the corruption I should have seen earlier.
He presented it with such innocence back then, an awe at the humans and what God had made them capable of, every bit of it from the blood and the slaughters to the screaming delights and easy laughter.
He was never satisfied with what we were, God’s most beloved.
I should have seen it then, his inevitable betrayal, but he was the Morningstar, and he was so unbelievably bright, he dazzled me.
He dazzled all of us, right up until the war began.
Despite the cloaking Lucifer had thrown around them both, despite being turned away, I still knew the exact moment Galilee
surrendered to the Devil’s forked tongue, because I heard her scream. She had no idea what she had just done to herself, but
far be it for me to stop her. Still, I must confess—I hadn’t thought remembering would sting like this. There was a time when
Lucifer had touched me with such wanton tenderness, gazed into my eyes with such a smile, almost convinced me to follow him.
We were soldiers together, siblings in arms, and I loved him dearly. He was always obsessed with the humans, but the rest
of us thought it was harmless, adorable even. The humans were made from dust, and they were fleeting amusements at best. I
played Lucifer’s games with him because it was fun and he was right—the experience of embodiment was a new thing, and we’d
been alive for so long, we cherished all novelties. But I never thought the humans would be the catalyst to splinter Heaven
or that Lucifer would be the wedge breaking us apart after God set in motion a great flood, one that would churn over the
land and drown everything that lived. Most of us had shrugged—what difference would it make to their brief lifetimes, after
all? But not the Morningstar, not when his beloved humans were sentenced to a dark and heavy death.
I never thought Lucifer would start a war over it, but he did, and it broke everything in my world. I can never forgive him for that, for setting me on this path I’m on now because he left me with nowhere else to go.
When he became the Devil—a new name like a skin of burning sulfur smothered over his face, smoke screaming all the way back
up to Heaven—it was a punishment he was meant to suffer for all eternity. That would have been some small measure of justice in the wake of his disobedience, his hubris, his unforgivable rebellion. But
the Morningstar is a trickster, a conniver, a serpent wriggling away from what is righteous, because there is no suffering
in the sweetness of a girl against his mouth, is there? And what is justice then, but a shadow twisting out of reach in the
corners of a battle everyone else thinks has ended?
I looked back at the two of them, and Lucifer was smiling softly as he kissed Galilee’s cheek, giving her his name. He was
so slick with it, so sure of himself, as he walked away from her with a loose-hipped saunter. After a few shell-shocked moments,
Galilee stumbled back down the hallway and made her way to the rest of the party. I flitted about, keeping an eye on her,
and then I took a champagne flute off a server’s tray and walked over, unable to keep myself away.
“You should try one of these,” I said, holding the drink out to the girl.
Galilee’s eyes skimmed over me, glassy and hardly focused. She smelled like Lucifer, like a fire that simmered in embers and
a spice harsh on the tongue.
“Thanks,” she said automatically as she accepted it, taking a sip. Careless, really, to take a drink from a stranger, but
she trusted me because I wore a woman’s skin.
I hadn’t been this close to Galilee since she was very small, and I took the opportunity to catalog her face as if I could forget it.
Other than her coloring, she did rather look like a Kincaid, tucked in the slope of her eyes and the form of her mouth—quirks of expression that made me think of Darling Kincaid, the door whose handle I had wrenched open.
It had turned Darling into a different woman, but that was the point.
That was the sacrifice. Of course, the girl didn’t know, because she hadn’t known Darling before, but her grandmother had given up something very precious on the day Galilee came into the family. I wondered what Galilee
would think if she learned that was the reason some of the Kincaids resented her and made sure she felt it, because they knew a cost had been paid for her life and that it was dear.
Surely it was worth it, though, for a girl like this. I knew too well what Galilee was, and unlike Darling Kincaid, I knew
what Galilee could become. I knew every freckle on her face, all forty-eight of them, as well as the growing chasm inside her, how it stretched and
howled now that she’d met Lucifer. I almost reached out a hand to touch her hair, but I caught myself in time—it would have
seemed too strange, an alarming gesture from a woman she didn’t know at a party that was overwhelming her.
“Enjoy the drink,” I said softly, before fading back into the crowd. Galilee blinked but said nothing, her mind still reeling
from the Morningstar. It was laughable how innocent she was, but I could only fault the ignorance I’d carefully preserved
her in for all these years. I left her standing there and slipped out of the ballroom again, this time to the office of our
host, Elijah Onyearugbulem—the man responsible for Lucifer being there, even if he didn’t know it.
Elijah was a wall of a person, a slab of muscle in a bespoke embroidered agbada. The voluminous sleeves draped off his arms
in starched glory, and he looked up from his desk with a thick frown that melted away when he saw who had entered the room.
“Ah, Ms. Delacourt! I’m so glad you could make it.” He rose from his seat with an easy grace and crossed the antique carpet
to me, taking my hand and dropping an airy kiss against my left cheek.
“Mr. Onyearugbulem—”
“I’ve already told you. Elijah, please.”
I let the flesh I was wearing blush slightly, and the blood warmed my face. She was a curator to some, a smuggler and fence to others, and Elijah knew her in both capacities.
“Elijah,” I acquiesced. “You’ve thrown such a beautiful party, and yet you’re here hiding out in your office?”
He gestured me to a love seat against a paneled wall and then joined me on it. “And yet, you knew to find me here, Inès.”
“It wasn’t a great leap to make,” I admitted with a smile. “How is the artifact doing?”
The only reason I approached Elijah Onyearugbulem in the first place was because his daughter, Oriak?, lived in Salvation
and was friends with Galilee Kincaid. From the moment Galilee was born in the muggy forests outside this town, I knew I would
eventually have to draw Lucifer back here. I did not mind the wait—a quarter century is nothing in my lifespan. Elijah was
perfect in many ways: he had unlimited funds and a vengeful thirst that was impressive to witness in a human, a fiery desire
to see the things stolen from his homeland returned, without a particular care for legal provenance.
It was a sign of God’s favor, I was sure of it, because there happened to be an object that was both very, very old and of
great importance to Lucifer: a bronze mask lined in ivory and gold, a relic that had been soaked in blood and screams in the
thick rainforests off the coast of West Africa. It was the ideal lure, bait blessed by the Almighty and circumstance. And
so, I became the curator who could lead Elijah to this piece, persuade him to display it to a select group of powerful people,
whisper that while he was in the States procuring it, he might as well see his daughter and show her the mask in person. With
all its weight of history, surely she should behold it and celebrate with her father that it would be returned to the land
on which it was first created.
Elijah didn’t take much convincing. The artifact was brought to Salvation, and then it took even less effort for me to draw Lucifer’s attention with the mask, enough for him to come topside himself.
I knew that once an antiquity of dubious acquisition entered Elijah’s possession, the man wouldn’t hesitate to deploy his considerable resources against any entity that tried to take it away from him.
It left the gate wide open for Lucifer and his false security team to slip into the picture, and so, under God’s righteous eye, all the pieces on the board moved obediently where they ought to.
“It’s safely stored away,” Elijah replied. “I cannot thank you enough, Inès. What a coup to be able to return that piece to
its people.”
I inclined my head slightly. “Only made possible by your generosity,” I countered. “Did your daughter enjoy viewing it?”
“I’m going to take her to see it later myself, after the guests are gone. I find it almost a spiritual experience, you know?
The popular opinion among my experts is that the mask was a ritual item of great importance.”
I kept my face still so my amusement wouldn’t leak through. He had no idea, this human only mere decades or breaths away from
his death, of how close a line he walked to catastrophe by keeping that object in his house. It had been baptized in horrific
acts, washed over and over in blood, enough sin to turn it into what it eventually became. Evil like that doesn’t evaporate
over time. It remains sticky—but none of this was my concern. Elijah had done exactly what I wanted. Lucifer was here. Galilee was here. They had met
and become entangled, and now all I needed to do was wait and watch while the justice of the Lord settled on us all like the
shadow of a mighty wing.
“I agree,” I said to him. “The spirit moves in its presence.”
Elijah grinned at me. “Amen, my sister,” he said. “Amen.”