39. Max
Max
The island was covered end to end when we came back. Eggs three ways, bacon crisped dark, sausages, grilled tomatoes, mushrooms, beans, toast in a rack, a tower of pancakes with butter melting off the sides, coffee, juice. Enough for a garrison, laid on an ordinary countertop.
Not a banquet hall. Not a high table with a throne at the end. A kitchen island, where you eat with your elbows on the counter.
He knew. Somehow, he knew exactly what would get through my guard, and it wasn’t gold.
“Just comfort food,” Lucifer said, waving us onto the stools. “A proper breakfast.”
I ate like the mine was still behind me.
Fast, both hands, head down, three bites ahead of my own manners, and it was so good that my eyes watered.
When I finally came up for air, my father was watching me with his chin on his fist, and his eyes were bright along the lower rims. He blinked it away, cleared his throat, and pushed the bacon closer.
“After the meal,” I said, when I could talk without food in my mouth, “I need you to void a marriage contract. It was signed by another party without my permission.” I set my fork down and made myself hold his gaze.
He was my birth father and I’d known him for less than an hour, but I refused to let that fact run me.
“And then we have to go back. The war is at the door of my kingdom.”
“Time runs differently here.” He salted his eggs. “You’ll get back in time, and you’ll go back with my aid. But I need a couple of days with my daughter first.” He looked up. “Will you not give me that? Aren’t you curious why you weren’t raised by me?”
“I tried not to stare into the abyss,” I said. “Now that I’m here, why don’t you tell me?”
For twenty years I’d lived in fear of being possessed. Killing curiosity had been the only way I knew to stay safe.
“A couple of centuries ago.” My father ran a thumb around the rim of his glass.
“I spent most of my time up on the surface. When you live forever, the fastest way to die inside is to live in the past, and I learned that lesson the hard way. So I roll with the times. New century, new name, new face. I drank. I gambled. I threw the kind of parties that people described as infamous. Anything loud enough to keep me in the present and out of my own head.”
“And that was when you met the White Witch?” Drakken’s face had gone stony, hatred burning in his cold gray eyes. “That’s always how the story starts, isn’t it?”
Lucifer gave him a measured look. “Nobody called her the White Witch before the Rupture.” He drank, water with ice and lime.
“She was still young then. A witch with ambition, and extraordinary, and I do not use that word about mortals. More powerful than archdemons. An old god’s blood flows in her veins, and she knew exactly what it was worth.
” He almost smiled. “Hecate. I called her Cate.”
Cate. My mother. The woman who had killed billions with her bomb and had never stopped since. The monster who had orphaned three heirs.
“I was taken with her. I almost thought we had the rare thing they call love, until I worked out she’d been using me all along.” He shrugged. “I called it off. She declined. Cate has never once in her life taken no from anyone, and she does not forgive being scorned. So she trapped me.”
An ancient feeling surfaced in Lucifer’s eyes for a second, and the light in the kitchen dimmed. Cold seeped in.
“I thought no one and nothing could ever cage me, not even Heaven. But Cate managed. She mastered blood magic and found spells that keyed my blood in.” He was lost in the past for a moment.
“Not that I can lay it all at her feet. I put my guard down. I’d stopped believing anyone could get close enough to matter, and I paid for it. A century went by.”
I held my breath. I knew where this was going, yet I had to ask. “What did she want?”
“A child. Mine. Hers,” he said. “I had sworn off siring any offspring. My two before you were sons. The others before them, all sons, all perished. Every one of them a disappointment and a bitter regret. Power-hungry, entitled, spoiled, kin-slayers. I had no intention of adding to the tally.” He turned the glass.
“But after a century in that cage, with no one able to find me and no one coming, I caved. I gave her what she wanted, and she promised me my freedom.”
The trade.
“I’m the payment,” I said.
“You were the terms.” Lucifer’s white stars held steady on me.
“You stopped being the terms the moment you were conceived.” A dry gleam came into his eyes.
“I broke every blood bond and spell she’d put on me.
Snapped them like thread. And then I put them carefully back on and wore them like a good prisoner for months, because a man who is still in chains is a man nobody watches. ”
Drakken nodded his appreciation.
“I wouldn’t let her or anyone use my child.
That was the whole reason she wanted one from me.
The more powerful she became, the more power she craved.
” Lucifer’s eyes shone with something I couldn’t name.
Not rage. Something almost human. “The moment I sensed you in her womb, a daughter, I wanted to keep you. I looked at the charts of your future, and I saw what would happen if I brought you home. My other children would have come for you, and everything gathered around them would have come with them. Constantly, for as long as you lived, and one day one of them would have succeeded. Even in my own realm there are traitors who work with Hecate. You would have been in danger from your first breath, and you’d have been an infant, and I would have had to watch.
” He took a breath. “I thought it through. Every outcome. I ran them all.”
“And every one of them ended with me in a mineshaft?” I asked.
“I wanted to raise you more than I have wanted anything. But for the first time, I couldn’t afford to be selfish.
Your interests had to come before mine.” He set the glass of water down, ice cubes clinking.
“So I made arrangements. I hired two high mages inside Hecate’s tight circle.
I paid them to take you out from under her, and to hide you in the Coldiron mine.
Of all things, Coldiron shrouds what it holds.
I aided their escape with you in their arms, and I kept the illusion running until the three of you reached the mine. ”
By Coldiron’s shroud, no blood may sing.
My father hadn’t only known the prophecy. He’d used it. He’d read the line about me and turned it into a hiding place, and it had worked for twenty years, right up until I climbed out of it.
“I thought they were my parents,” I said. My throat felt dry. “And then they died.”
“They are not gone.”
I sat very still.
“Their contract with me expired, and they were extracted,” my father said. “I could have kept them with you until you were grown. But Hecate would have found them eventually, and through them, you.”
The floor moved under me before it settled. Under the counter, Drakken found my hand and squeezed, and I hung on to it.
My mother’s hands trimming my hair. My father teaching me to read a seam. They’d homeschooled me. They’d drilled the disguise into me until it was a reflex, and starved themselves thinner so I could eat, and my mother had held me through my first fever.
“I want to see them.”
“You can’t.”
“That’s not a no I’m going to take.” I was on my feet without deciding to stand.
“They’re on the other side of the DarkVeil.”
Drakken and I looked at each other, and we both inhaled sharply.
No one knew what still stood on the other side of the Veil. New York, Ohio, Florida, close to thirty states swallowed behind that wall of shadows, and no scout who ever went east to answer the question came back.
I made myself sit back down.
“We have a more urgent issue,” Lucifer said, and glanced toward the observatory’s glass wall, his ancient eyes tracking something. “Your blood contract.”
Beyond the window, a shape sailed past the palace spires, close enough that the light from the burning sea slid along its crested skull, a single yellow eye rolling to look in at us as it passed, banking away toward the mountains.
Drakken rose off his stool, his shoulders tensing, the dragon coming up in him hard.
“My sentinel,” Lucifer said.
Drakken sat back, staying alert.
“Before we get to your marriage contract, you should know the dark truth about Xander,” Lucifer continued.
“Over the eons, I sired a great many children. Most of them slaughtered each other. Most of the rest didn’t live past adulthood; it’s a competitive family.
” He said it without a flicker of sentiment.
“Three of mine are still breathing today. You are one.”
I didn’t want to ask. I asked. “And the other two?”
“Rhemus, my eldest. Five thousand years old, give or take, and he’s spent most of them angling to be my heir. I kept it empty.” He looked at me. “Until the day you were born.”
Something cold started under my ribs.
“And the second,” Lucifer said, “was born about two thousand years ago. His name is Xander. He gathered his followers and became King of the Haven.”
The kitchen went very far away for a second.
Xander. The Collector. The Saint of the Haven. The man who had hunted stolen girls across two decades to find me.
My brother.
My half-brother, who had bought me as a bride.
My skin tried to crawl off my body. Every memory of that ballroom dance rearranged itself into a far worse shape. His hand at my waist, his mouth at my ear, his will pressing on mine, and under all of it, blood. The same blood. Half of it, anyway.
Beside me, Drakken had gone deathly still. High heat rolled off him in waves, his gray eyes turning molten gold. His dragon fought to take over, but Hell was suppressing it.
The stool creaked, and the edge of the island broke in his grip.
I put a hand on his shoulder to anchor him. “Drakken, I’m still here.”
Lucifer watched Drakken calm down at my touch.
“I marked him for death before this,” Drakken said, low and ruined. “Now I’m going to make that fucking pervert suffer first.”
“Family is complicated.” Lucifer sighed.
“And gods, monsters, and demons don’t think like humans.
Anyway, I’d rather you learn that from me than from him.
Xander, my youngest son, has always wanted a dynasty of the purest bloodline he could assemble, and now that he’s found it in you, he won’t let go. ”
“He will let go when he’s dead.” Drakken smiled viciously.
Lucifer didn’t so much as blink.