Chapter Fifty Lucifer
Chapter Fifty
Lucifer
My shadows catch Charlotte as she falls, and I’m at her side just as quickly, combing over her, searching for any sign of blood beyond what I can already see smeared all over her arms and face. But internal bleeding doesn’t always show through puncture wounds, and it’s the moment the light leaves her eyes that truly terrifies me.
My nostrils flare as I clutch hold of her. Crumple to the ground.
She was wrong, in any case. About my abilities.
I can control both.
The light doesn’t exist without shadow, but I ... never got the chance to tell her that before ...
Death’s shadow engulfs her face. Steals her from me.
Pressure builds inside my chest, a pulsating burst of power, and I feel myself begin to shake. My human form is barely able to contain me. Fire blazes inside me, igniting the very ground where I stand as I battle the irresistible urge not to abandon her here.
I have every intention of eviscerating the entire world beneath my feet.
Every last one of them.
“You’re fucking hard to keep up with, you know that?” Gabriel’s voice has me jerking my head up with a snarl. “Gallivanting all over the place.”
The furious sound that tears from me is pure animal.
He sighs, shaking his head at me, as he glances down at Charlotte’s corpse that I’m still clinging to. His expression falls. “Oh, that’s unfortunate, Lucy.”
As if she’s little more than a toy. I suppose I might have treated her as such. Initially. All this time I planned to have her. Planned to keep her.
I didn’t once stop to fully consider the meaning of her mortality.
That I might lose her. Or worse ...
That she’d be taken from me.
Because she’s good. Pure, through and through. She won’t end up in Hell with me.
My own foolish pride got in the way of that, it seems.
Yet another one of Father’s cruel lessons.
“It’d be just like Him,” I whisper, barely able to breathe, “to give her to me only to cruelly rip her away.”
“I thought we’d already established it was Mom who sent her?”
“Dad. Mom. It doesn’t matter. Don’t you see? It all comes down to Him.” I point toward the heavens, snarling. “To His fucked plans. Whatever they may be.” Gently, I lay Charlotte down on the dirty concrete floor, standing as I face my brother. “Well, not this time.”
I have Gabriel up against the wall within seconds, coaxing my Father’s forgiveness from him, as if sucking the light out from his body. He lurches, his mouth falling open as the light spills from inside him, and I reach into his mouth to tug against it, struggling to grasp the whole of it in my hand. I tear it from his body like a long rope that’s attached to his entrails, until the last of it spills from his lips and into my now-glowing palm.
Done with Gabriel, I release him, and he drops shakily back to the floor, swearing at me. “Fuck, Lucifer,” he growls. “You could have just fucking asked for it. It’s already yours.”
I shake my head. “But you wouldn’t have given it to me if you knew what I was going to do with it, would you?”
A beat of silence follows.
Gabriel glances to where I now stand over Charlotte, my Father’s redemption clutched in my now-closed fist. A choke of realization tears from him, then a hiss. “Lucifer, no.” His eyes go wide, exactly as they did when they all learned what I did with Eve. “You can’t.”
I smirk. “You’d think He’d have learned His lesson after clipping my wings, wouldn’t you?” Before Gabriel can stop me, I plunge my Father’s redemption into Charlotte’s chest, reaching inside her to where her heart no longer beats.
Unsurprised that mine still continues.
Even after she stole it from me.