Chapter 4 Lucifer
Lucifer
It shouldn’t have been that hard to walk away from her.
Lucifer had been topside for the past month and he was fucking sick of it. He missed Hell. He missed the weight of it, the
pressing silence and bottom-of-the-ocean darkness—he’d done away with the stereotypical sulfur and brimstone a while back.
Silence was comforting to him and a very effective mode of torture for human souls when you wielded it the right way, and
Lucifer had found many ways to wield it. Earth was glaring and loud, but being confined to flesh for this long was even worse—or, at least, it had
been, right up until he’d thrown Galilee Kincaid’s leg over his shoulder and used his mouth on her. He could still taste her
on his lips, but the mansion had quaked around them—something the humans couldn’t feel, but a red flag that he needed to return
to the artifact immediately.
His princes hated working for Onyearugbulem—they thought humans were beneath them—but it meant nothing to Lucifer.
Power remained power, no matter what vessel you shoved it into, and this was just temporary, unless it all went wrong.
They were there to do a job. It was understandable that the team was irritated and overextended—they’d spent the last few weeks maintaining the wards around the artifact because none of them could figure out how to fix the damn thing.
Someone had used a lot of power to create something that the King of Hell couldn’t reverse engineer, and when Lucifer found out who it was, he was
going to skin them strip by strip and make sure they stayed awake and screaming for all of it. The last thing he needed was
a variable like Galilee walking right up to his warded doors with her dark eyes and freckled skin. He would never forget his
first sight of her: the way light refracted through the beads of her dress, the way her mouth parted just a fraction. Her
presence had pulsed through the air, and when she’d walked up to him and placed her hand on his chest, the nonhuman forms he kept buried inside
him had snarled up in hungry response, threatening to burst through his skin.
She definitely wasn’t human—she smelled entirely too wrong for that—and she hadn’t flinched at his eyes going black or at
the darkness he’d called up to cloak them. The clearest sign had been the first time she’d touched his skin, because heat
had seared through him instantly, painful heat, all the way down to his bones. The shock was so great, Lucifer hadn’t been able to control his eyes reacting to it,
flooding black. No one should have been able to burn him like that. He was the King of Hell, for fuck’s sake. He was supposed to be both invincible and immortal, and if Galilee was capable of actually hurting him,
protocol dictated that Lucifer should’ve dragged her into some alcove and slit her throat before she could escalate the threat
that she was. Instead, Lucifer had been fascinated.
She had hurt him. She had burned him.
There was no human measure of time that could communicate how long it had been since anything had punched through the numbness that clung to him like armor.
Lucifer had been who he was for unfathomable eons.
Ever since his Fall, he’d done his job and he’d done it well, and there had been little else.
He came to earth in different skins, made his bargains, walked the clay roads with a whistling tune, tipped his hat and smiled with edged white teeth.
Those games entertained him, as did the souls, but nothing, nothing, had felt like the searing cut of Galilee Kincaid’s touch.
His second-in-command, Leviathan, would disapprove, but Lucifer
had made his choice in that hallway. He’d chased the flame and let Galilee incinerate him with her hands in his hair, with
her mouth in that kiss, with her pretty cunt fucking his face.
It made no sense that she was pretending to be a human. Her power crackled in the air around her, humming like a swarm. She
tasted like a sea he’d drowned in lifetimes ago, all sweet and salt and soft, soft sin. Lucifer almost regretted leaving her
in the hallway with a faint bruise of hurt in her eyes and her glass dress murmuring against her flushed body, but it was
necessary. She had unsettled him, and the wards had faltered, so he’d pulled back from the flame, finally coming to his senses.
Whatever Galilee was, she was obviously new in the flesh—she would be easy to handle. Lucifer had existed before this planet
was even formed, when rivers of hungry night poured out from underneath his lashes, eating worlds in their wake, but now his
work was tied to these humans. He had responsibilities, and there was too much at stake to be distracted by Galilee’s soft
flesh, that freckled deep honey skin, those hips, that ass. The sounds that had spilled from her mouth made Lucifer want to
keep the darkness cloaked around them for hours more, eons more, until he’d worked his way thoroughly under her skin, beyond
her secrets. Instead, he’d wiped her scent off his face and made himself return to his team. He’d have to consult with them
on how to handle her, but every step was a struggle to not turn around, hunt that little doe-eyed pretender down and fuck
the truth out of her.
Huh.
Leviathan was going to want to kill her.
It was a sound strategy, even if Levi’s usual solution to most problems was to kill someone, but in this case he would be
right. Galilee smelled like a harbinger, and sometimes the best thing to do was indeed to kill the messenger before the message
could do its harm.
Lucifer stepped into the corridor leading to the carved wooden doors that marked the threshold of his domain within the Onyearugbulem mansion and cursed softly to himself.
One of his princes was leaning against the door, spinning a throwing knife in one hand.
She was dressed in matte black tactical gear like the rest of his team.
Her body was lean and muscled like a whip, and she looked pissed.
Lucifer stopped in front of her and sighed. “Belial. I felt the wards tremble.”
“It’s fine,” she snapped. “I reinforced immediately. Used the new weave you taught us.”
He nodded, then looked around. “Where’s everyone else?”
“Oh, I don’t know, Luci.” Belial leaned forward, and the light gleamed off the snakes tattooed on her shaved head. “Maybe
they’re inside supervising the unauthorized humans you told them to let in while you went off with some little wrong-smelling bitch you couldn’t stop yourself from eye-fucking.”
Yeah, so all his princes were going to want to kill Galilee.
“Get Asmodeus out here to cover the door. You and I need to talk in private.”
He was going to need Belial on his side to leash Levi, or else Galilee might not survive long enough for Lucifer to fuck her,
and there were so many things he wanted to do with her soft, honeyed body before it came down to killing her.
Belial glared at him, her shoulders tight with anger, then she walked through the closed door. A few moments later, Asmodeus
stepped through the door, also glaring at Lucifer. He was built like a tank, with broad shoulders and huge thighs. He’d been
there when Galilee had arrived and had tried, in his own way, to get Lucifer to think about what he was about to do.
“Did you claim your dance?” he asked, folding his arms as Belial came back out through the door.
“Not yet.” Lucifer jerked his head at Belial. “Let’s go.”
She rolled her eyes and headed off into a patch of shadow that was darker than it should’ve been. Lucifer was about to follow her when Asmodeus grabbed his arm, his gray eyes serious.
“It’s not like you, Luci.”
Lucifer took a deep breath. “I know.”
“She smells wrong.”
“I know.”
“Levi’s going to want to get rid of her.”
Fucking hell. “As, I know. We’re going to figure it out.”
“You think she’s here for the artifact?”
It never felt right calling it that, like teeth grinding into glass, but they couldn’t very well call it what it was anywhere
that humans might overhear. “I don’t know, As. We’ll find out.”
Asmodeus nodded and let go of his arm. Lucifer stepped into the patch of shadow, and the darkness consumed him lovingly.
Belial was pacing in their parlor by the window, her boots clacking against the black walnut floor. As soon as Lucifer entered,
she whirled around and narrowed her eyes. “You smell like her,” she pointed out. “It’s faint, like you tried to hide it, but
it’s there.”
Lucifer sighed and collapsed into a leather armchair. “I wasn’t trying to hide it. I just wasn’t planning on announcing it
to everyone.”
His prince looked horrified. “What did you do?” Her face brightened hopefully and her nostrils flared. “Is it her blood?”
He dropped his head back and closed his eyes. “No, Belial, it’s not.”
“Lucifer.” He heard the matching armchair creak as she sat in it. “I need you to tell me what the fuck is going on. Do we
have a security issue?”
If this was a few thousand years ago, Belial would’ve never dared to speak to him like that. Lucifer had been different then—cruel
and unforgiving, still much of an angel despite everything.
Things had changed. He had changed. There were so many forms of power available to entities like them, a menu of possibilities like faces or skins or weapons, whatever you wanted to pick up and use.
Fear was always the most popular one, but frankly, it got boring after endless eons.
At some point, Lucifer had decided to try something else—to let his princes have more of a say, to be accountable to them, to share his power.
He didn’t have to. They knew he didn’t have to, and that was what made it so much more impactful when he said he would and then he did, and their world had restructured around his choice.
Now his princes followed him not for fear or force or fire, but for
a burning loyalty. None of them called it love out loud, but they didn’t need to.