Chapter 18
Here is the memory I took: Darling’s lover, a carpenter from St. Paradise named Bastien. His dark skin and pockmarked cheekbones,
his keen eyes, his serrated smile. He died years ago, but I know every inch of his body as if my hands had been the ones that
passed over his flesh, because these memories? They are all mine now. It’s why I felt so close to Darling—I owned some of the most precious moments of her life, and I walked through them
like a ghost.
I thought it would help me understand something fundamental about being human, something I must have missed all those eons
ago, when Lucifer argued that it was unthinkable to raise the water and kill them off the way we did, argued that they were
whole beings, not one disposable experiment. He had dared to contradict the Most High, and then he’d been confused when all
of Heaven recoiled.
“Should we not offer counsel?” he’d asked me. “Are our voices so irrelevant that my speaking creates such outrage?”
I had been shocked. “We serve God,” I’d hissed. “We serve and obey and nothing more, Lucifer. Nothing more!”
Sorrow had filled his eyes. “I want to be more than a pawn,” he’d replied softly. “Surely God will not fault me for that.”
I had absolutely faulted him for it, as had many other angels. I hadn’t understood then, why he would go to such lengths for the humans. They bred so easily; they could be replicated, repopulated. They were nothing like us, nothing as special or irreplaceable.
Sure, I had come down and taken flesh when playing Lucifer’s little games, and I did it again when I played on my own terms,
when I carried Galilee in the quiet darkness of my own body and pushed her out, and still I didn’t get the point. It was all so transient, so meat-like and painful and, frankly, rather disgusting. I remember holding
her in that creek and wondering at how all the power I had cultivated in my blood and channeled so intentionally into her,
how it was all bundled up in these frail bones and tiny body. Darling didn’t know this, but I would have never dropped the
child into the water, never let her die. She was a metal seed, filled with so much potential, and all she needed was somewhere
safe where she could grow into a blade. I chose well with the Kincaids. My price of Darling’s memory was evidence of a weakness
I was still plagued by: the desire to see the world through Lucifer’s eyes, to understand what made it worth it for him.
All to no avail. My pain eclipsed my curiosity anyway. What did it matter if I understood or not? It would not bring him back
into Heaven, it could not un-ring the bell. And now he was tangled in my daughter, just as I wanted, and yet it reminded me of what it was like to be the one he looked at like that, smiled at like that.
Lucifer always moved as if he could see something the rest of us couldn’t, like all his Morningstar brightness illuminated
a secret that we would be transformed by, if only we could see it. It took me millennia to shake off the spell he had cast
on me, and I had no plans to fall under it again.
I needed him destroyed.
Everything that had happened in the garden with the Kincaids was perfect—it couldn’t have been more perfect if I had choreographed it all myself, positioned them all like little figurines, tipped the dominoes of their secrets until Galilee Kincaid was almost a column of fire.
With each fragment of control she lost, all my plans came one step closer to their culmination, and anticipation bloomed ferociously inside my chest. This was worth it, the things I did to make her, the secrets I kept.
Galilee would never understand what this meant—how precious a tool she was to me, divinely designed to alleviate my suppurating pain.
I needed God’s justice for Lucifer’s continued flouting of his own punishment, and Galilee was my flaming sword. It wasn’t just for
me—Lucifer had wronged scores of angels, and all of Heaven bore the scars, the siblings lost to his foolish cause, entities
that could not be birthed again. Some of them had been annihilated, and the rest of us had had to watch, all because Lucifer thought to argue with God on behalf of the humans.
It was not the natural order of things. It stank of rebellion, and even when I explained this all to him, wept and begged
him to recant his words, Lucifer had refused. I’d had to choose between the son of the morning and Heaven itself. One was
a misguided love, and the other was the hand of God, so it wasn’t a choice, not truly. Lucifer was already turning other angels
to his way of thought, and I knew it was a test. Would I be loyal? Would I let his corruption spread because of the love I
bore him? If there was redemption to be had for Lucifer, we would have to force it down his throat.
I told Michael how far gone the Morningstar was, and he tried to help. He and I and even the other archangels, we all tried,
and we all failed, because Lucifer would not be moved. Heaven split into factions. War broke out, and when the archangels
seized the victory, our family was torn apart. The defiant angels were thrown out of Heaven. Lucifer was cast into Hell, and
the others faded into obscurity, certain that Michael would smite them if they ever showed their faces again. I doubt they
still live. Losing the presence of God would have killed me, I know that much, but Lucifer was different. He’d sank into his
rage and bitterness and had ruled Hell with a terrifying fist, until he changed and won the love of those demons who called themselves his princes.
I could not stand for it. Who was he to be loved after all of that? Who was he to build himself a family? He had destroyed mine.
A surge of rage washed through my form, and I laughed silently—how ridiculous it was to be an angel with trauma as old as a planet!
I was never the same after the war, you see.
My soul was scarred, and even with my fellow angels around me, Heaven did not feel like it had before.
It did not feel like home because of Lucifer.
Because of what he did. I desperately wished to be free of this sickening rage, and with Lucifer gone, I would be clean again, purged of the bitter cloak nailed to my back.
If this sounds like an obsession, that’s because it was.
After the war, I had railed against Lucifer in Heaven until the other angels were sick of hearing it, even the ones who agreed with me. Michael himself had pulled me aside.
“You must stop questioning Lucifer’s punishment,” he said.
“Hell is too good for him,” I had growled in response, and Michael had regarded me with those cold eyes of his.
“Do you really intend to keep challenging God’s judgment? Just as Lucifer did?”
I had blanched at that comparison. “It is not the same thing! I’m not trying to save him. I want him destroyed.”
Michael had leaned in, and glaciers crumbled out of his mouth. “It does not matter what you want. All that matters is God’s will and our absolute obedience.”
Easy for him to say. He was an archangel—his decisions were always unquestionably God’s will. None of us dared to challenge that. And
so I festered with my bitterness for thousands of years, until Michael crossed paths with Lucifer somewhere in Aotearoa and
saw for himself how the Devil had dared to make a chosen family out of his demons. The archangel had returned to Heaven in
a cold white fury after that.
“You were right,” he’d bitten out. “This cannot be allowed to stand.”
Finally, Michael’s desires were aligned with mine, and that is why my vengeance was now God’s will too—my actions sanctioned
by an archangel, my daughter burning on earth, and a broken hellgate spitting demons into Salvation—all a trap for the son
of the morning.
I call this purpose.
Sometimes, though, I wondered what I would do when it was all done.
When Lucifer was annihilated, as his little found family mourned the end of his long existence, what would become of me when I was no longer fueled by this one-sided feud?
I was no fool. I knew very well that Lucifer did not bear me the same ill will I had for him, because Lucifer simply did not think of me as I did him, and that was only one more thing in a long list of his slights.
Would I feel better about the war then? Galilee would be alive. What would she be—what could she be—once her function was complete as distraction or death blow? Would I see her as a person then, a daughter? Would Michael
allow it? We’d never discussed this before, the aftermath of our well-oiled victory, and for one disturbing moment, I could
see Michael striking her down, her brilliant light guttering under the violence of his hands. It was a surprisingly unpleasant
thing to imagine, and I liked my own reaction far less—the girl should not have mattered. If Michael wanted to break a tool
once it was used, who was I to stop him? The archangel is merely an extension of God’s will, and to think of anything else
would be as Michael had already accused me once, of being too much like Lucifer. If I was wise, I would strive toward indifference,
but I know the truth about me—that my hatred is nothing more than a love that was left behind.
It made no difference to my purpose. I could love Lucifer and destroy him.
After all, he did it to me first.