Chapter Seventy-Five Charlotte
Chapter Seventy-Five
Charlotte
Sloth leads me toward the pearly gates, my eyes transfixed on them the entire way.
We walk for what feels like only a handful of minutes, though the distance we crossed makes it look like it would take a lot longer, but when we finally reach them, I realize I don’t exactly have a plan for what I’m doing.
I delivered Sloth here, blew the gates open.
Now what?
They look as if I should be able to walk straight through them, but I know it can’t possibly be that easy.
“What am I supposed to do?” I glance to Bel, hoping he might have the answers.
He shrugs. “I don’t know.” He’s busy admiring his new wings like he still can’t believe they’re there. “I’ve never needed to open one. Before Dad cast us out, they always just opened on their own.”
Of course they did.
God and Lilith clearly never made him work for anything.
“Do you think they would now?” I ask.
He shrugs again. “Only one way to find out.” At least he’s willing to help me now.
Or maybe it’s something about this place. Maybe it heals a part of what was broken previously.
You taste like Heaven.
Lucifer’s words. He’s whispered that to me so many times. Into the hollow of my throat, against my stomach, my lips, between my legs.
Now I realize what he was always trying to tell me.
Heaven wasn’t just his home.
It’s the feeling of something being healed in him.
My eyes fill with tears, but I don’t allow them to fall. I wish he were here beside me.
I have to do this.
If not for us, then our daughter.
So she knows there’s more to humanity than it seems.
Just like her father learned when he fell in love with me.
Sloth steps forward, and the moment he reaches out his hand, dipping it past the open air of the gate, thunder sounds and lightning strikes, the crack so loud it’s practically right on top of us. When Sloth pulls back his hand, his skin’s steaming.
“Holy fuck!” he howls.
Okay, so apparently there are some parts of Heaven that feel like the God of the Old Testament, and I’m not particularly thrilled at the idea that my Father-in-Law might smite me.
I place a hand on Bel’s shoulder, gently urging him back. “Let me try instead.” I step forward, my heart racing at the idea of getting anywhere near that open space.
But there’s no other option.
Like in the In-Between, the only way out is through.
I think about what Azrael said when he left, about how time moves faster here, and how I’m supposed to be racing against Lilith, finding God before she can destroy everything. I don’t have time to hesitate. I’m the key.
The cosmic paradox that was never meant to exist, if not for Lucifer.
Inhaling a deep breath, I plunge my hand through the empty space.
At first, nothing happens.
Tentatively, I take another step through.
On the other side of the gate something speaks:
I am not born, yet I do grow,
I bind the high, I break the low.
I cannot die, though I am lost—
And only truth can pay my cost. What am I?
I glance at Sloth. “Did you hear that?”
He runs a hand through his beach-blond hair. “Vaguely. I wasn’t really paying attention.”
I roll my eyes. “It’s a riddle.”
Bel shrugs like there’s nothing at all odd about that. “Have you seen Earth? It’s all contradictions. Dad loves riddles.”
I shrug. Fair point.
I turn back toward the voice. It’s neither male nor female, angelic nor human, at least as far as I can tell.
It feels older, like it came from the root of the wind.
The vibration of it echoes in the space between us, the sound humming over my skin like it’s searching for something inside me.
I repeat the words back to myself.
For a moment, I’m frozen.
Because the gates don’t shimmer with golden light.
They don’t swing open at the touch of divine blood.
They ask. They wait.
For something real.
From me.
I stare through them and think of Lucifer—of his laugh, his lips, that devilish smirk, his shadows curling around me like a caress, despite that he was never taught softness.
Then I think of Azrael, his voice in the dark, the feel of his skeletal hand in mine, of how he kept his word, even when he’d never known love before Lucifer, didn’t know what it would bring for an eternity.
Then I think of mine and Lucifer’s daughter growing inside me.
A miracle born of a being Heaven rejected.
But still I don’t know the answer.
“Well, it’s obvious, isn’t it?” Bel scrunches his face.
I lift a brow, prompting him.
“Faith.”
The moment he says it, I know he’s right.
It’s what brought me here.
What keeps bringing me here, despite how impossible this all should be.
“Faith,” I whisper, my voice breaking against the soft light as I glance down at my belly.
Not the kind in a church. Not the kind my father used to preach about.
Not the hymns or the commandments or the holy fear.
But a faith that led me to kiss the devil, to love Death.
The kind you give when the whole world tells you you shouldn’t.
“I don’t know who or what made you,” I say into the quiet, my words catching on the wind as I speak, “but I think . . . I think you’ve been waiting for someone like me.”
The silence stretches.
And then the gate breathes.
It shimmers with an impossible color, light cascading outward in threads of gold, like silk stitched through the sky, unraveling every lie I’ve been told about who belongs here.
Heaven is open to anyone who has faith, regardless of its doctrine or creed.
The last gate parts.
Not violently. Just gently.
Like it’s been waiting for me the whole time.
Like I belong here.
I reach back, extending my hand to Sloth, confident he can come through now, but he shakes his head reluctantly. “I wanted to come home, but now that I’m here, I’m . . . not certain I’m meant to be.”
My heart breaks for him.
Because I know what it’s like to feel that way.
To be cast out.
I vow right then and there that if I do find God and beat Lilith, I’m going to give Him a stern talking to. About practicing what He preaches.
And not just with Lucifer.
Sloth turns away, his wings spreading wide like he’s prepared to take flight.
“Wait!” I call after him.
He glances over his shoulder at me.
“How am I supposed to find Him?”
“How does anyone find Him, Char?” Sloth laughs. “You just start looking.”