Chapter Twenty-Three
LILY
We marched and marched, and then, for a change of pace, we marched some more.
At least this time, there were no tremors or face-eating, ground-burrowing, cavern-mouthed creatures.
So…win? Admittedly, it was a tad boring.
Never thought I’d admit that. But traipsing over the same monotonous terrain for hours on end was hardly exciting. And a little unsettling.
I didn’t trust it.
The phrase “the calm before the storm” kept circling my mind.
If Lucifer wasn’t actively screwing with us, then what was he doing?
Was he preparing for our attack? Or was he doing something even more nefarious?
With my father, there was no way to know.
The quiet was too neat, too manufactured, and I kept waiting for the next shoe to drop.
Or, in my father’s case, the next abomination to claw its way out of the ground.
I kept my eyes moving, scanning every inch of terrain for signs of shifting rock or bubbling lava. Anything to indicate what might come next. But there was nothing. Just the steady beat of my army’s footsteps.
It wasn’t until we were about half a day’s march from the palace that I started to feel a strange…
itch. And no, not the down there kind. This was different.
It started as a low prickling at the base of my spine, then climbed upward until the hairs on the back of my neck rose.
It was subtle at first, almost like when a sunny day turns to rain on Earth—a slight pressure change before the storm rolls in.
But I couldn’t figure out why. Was it my nerves?
Or was I so out of sorts that I was imagining things?
Because I didn’t see anything suspicious at all.
I rolled out my shoulders, but the itch didn’t dissipate. If anything, it worsened the farther we went.
Eventually, it reached a point where I was rubbing my arms and looking over my shoulder every few steps. Rathiel kept glancing my way, concern furrowing his brow. When our gazes met, he arched a brow, as though to ask me what was wrong.
Sighing, I slowed my pace. Every single hellspawn following did the same. Until, eventually, we all came to a complete stop in the middle of a barren field.
“What’s wrong?” Rathiel finally asked.
I didn’t answer. Instead, I sent my senses outward. The wasteland looked no different than it had for the last few hours. Endless charred rock, rivers of fire, smoke polluting the air, the searing heat… For all intents and purposes, everything appeared normal.
But beneath it all, there was a current. Something that didn’t feel right. And it made my skin crawl.
“Lilith?” Levi asked.
I turned and scoped the land once more, pinpointing exactly where the wrongness came from. Eventually, I spotted it. A flicker. A ripple in the distance. Perhaps it wasn’t visible to the naked eye, but I saw it, nonetheless.
“There you are,” I murmured more to myself than anyone else. Then I pointed across the field. “Does anyone see that?”
Rathiel squinted. Levi narrowed his eyes, too. Eliza just shrugged.
“Looks like heatwaves,” Calyx offered. “No different than any other day.”
“Yeah, except the heat doesn’t feel like a parasite wiggling inside my brain,” I said.
That caught everyone’s attention.
I took a couple steps away from the army and really stared at whatever I was seeing off in the distance. Calyx was right, it did look like heatwaves, but there was something else there too.
“A gate,” I mumbled. “That’s a gate.”
It rippled just like the one on Earth had. Magic encircled it, the aura pulsing and flickering.
“It’s a freaking gate,” I announced. “And it’s open.”
“Are you sure?” Rathiel immediately asked.
“Oh, I’m sure.” It was a fucking gate. And since there weren’t many in Hell who could open one—and the majority were standing behind me—I knew exactly who had unlocked this one.
Lucifer.
So, this was his next move? Instead of harassing us with tremors and creatures from the black lagoon, he’d turned his attention to a nearby gate?
But why? Logically, it made no sense. For anyone other than me, opening a gate drained their powers to near death.
It required a great deal of sacrifice. And if there was one thing my father wouldn’t do, it was sacrifice his power.
Perhaps he’d ordered Gavrel to open it instead?
But that didn’t line up right in my head either.
Gavrel was Lucifer’s final fallen angel.
His last link to creating more hellspawn.
Furthermore, Gavrel was Lucifer’s strongest weapon against my army.
The fallen’s ability to spark chaos had destroyed my ranks last time.
I didn’t see my father throwing away his last remaining weapon at a chance to open a gate.
Unless…
Shit. Had my father left Hell? Was that his next grand scheme?
I had to know. I couldn’t just keep marching without knowing what he was doing. If he’d left for Earth, things were more dire than I would have liked.
Cursing under my breath, I turned to Korrak, Rathgor, and Drek’thar. “Hold our position here. Stay sharp. Do not move until I return.” Then I glanced back at my usual crew and gestured toward the gate. “You four with me.”
Rathiel gave a curt nod, already adjusting his grip on his blade. Levi stepped up wordlessly, the firelight gilding his golden hair in a way that made him look annoyingly heroic. Eliza drew her daggers, and Calyx his sword.
Together, the five of us peeled away from the horde and approached the gate.
With every yard, the shimmer sharpened from a ripple into a seam.
It looked as though someone had ripped through the fabric of the realm.
But it wasn’t Earth I saw on the other side.
In fact, I had no idea what I saw on the other side.
It was too bright to make out anything definite.
“Do you smell that?” Eliza asked, her voice almost wistful.
I drew in a deep breath and immediately, every muscle in my body just relaxed. It smelled like warm chocolate and hugs, if hugs had a smell.
“It smells like sex and warm entrails right after a kill,” Calyx said.
Everyone stopped. Eliza blinked at him. “That’s…not normal, Calyx.”
“God, you’re disgusting,” I muttered, dragging my gaze away when he smirked at me.
Rathiel and I shared a glance, and I shook my head. Then we pushed on, the strange scent thickening with every step. Why it smelled different to me than Calyx, I had no idea.
With every step, the seam stretched taller, its edges shivering like it wanted to rip wider. Energy bled through, soft and steady in a way that felt purely right. The others must have felt it too, even though no one said a word.
I focused my attention on the other side, trying to figure out what it was. But before I could, something took shape within the brightness, something massive and…were those feathers?
Yup, those were feathers. Ones that clearly belonged to a set of wings.
They weren’t black like Rathiel’s, or tattered grey like Calyx’s. Nor were they made of shadow like mine. These were pure-white feathered wings that practically shone in the light buffeting them from behind.
I narrowed my eyes and saw a figure take shape in front of the wings. A shadow that darkened with every step they took toward us, until finally, they stepped through the gate.
“Holy shit,” Eliza whispered, her voice soft with awe.
Holy was right.
The being stood tall and unflinching, clad in radiant steel that reflected Hell’s light and nearly blinded me. My gaze climbed until it settled on an entirely unfamiliar face, but one that was more beautiful than anything I had ever seen before.
He was an angel.
A real angel. And he was here. In Hell.
Levi was a real angel too, but even he had nothing on this one. The armor alone screamed both righteousness and fury all at once. It almost hurt my eyes to gaze upon him. Of course, Levi had spent a millennium trying to blend in. Whereas this angel burned with beauty and love and violence.
No one spoke. No one so much as moved. I could honestly say this was the very last thing I’d expected when I’d spotted the gate.
Rathiel was the first to move, and it was little more than his fingers twitching around the hilt of his blade. Was he preparing for a battle? Did he believe this angel had come to hurt us?
My gaze leapt to Levi’s face. I couldn’t read his expression, though. It seemed almost dark. Did he know this angel? Did his presence here make Levi homesick? Did he regret staying behind in Hell to wait for me?
Calyx just groaned. “Great. There goes the neighbourhood. I’m going to go wait with the army. I don’t need front-row seats for this reunion.”
I didn’t argue with him. Calyx was the rudest and crudest of my crew, and whatever purpose this angel served, the last thing I wanted was for Calyx to piss him off. I waved him off, my attention still locked on the angel standing in front of me.
“Lilith,” he said, his voice beautiful and indescribable. It resonated like a chord played on a divine instrument.
Had Rathiel and Calyx once sounded like that? Had Levi sacrificed such a voice during his stay here?
Beside me, Rathiel grumbled a displeased, “Cael.”
The angel—this Cael—inclined his head, though his expression betrayed nothing. If I hadn’t known any better, I might have mistaken him for carved marble, he was just that beautiful. He made the rest of us look like swamp monsters covered in sweat, grime, and blood.
“Lilith,” Cael repeated. My stomach did an odd flip, and not in the fun butterflies-before-a-first-date kind of a way. No, this was more like being dropped out of a plane without a parachute—or wings—and realizing the ground was rushing up real damn fast.
He fixed me with a gaze so piercing, I expected he could see straight through to my soul and knew all my sins. There were many, after all.
Instead, he said, “You must win this fight. Just as we prophesied.”