Chapter 20 Lucifer #3
pressed against his as he pulled her into a hug.
Galilee stroked his hair. “Are you okay?” She smelled like Leviathan, a cracked cacao pod lying in a dewy jungle.
“I’m fine,” he managed to say. “My brother’s a piece of shit, that’s all.”
Leviathan coughed out a short laugh, and Lucifer turned to him.
“Thank you for guarding her,” he said.
His prince’s eyes slid away. “I live to serve,” he replied dryly. “Will Michael be a problem?”
The real question he was asking was if Michael planned to kill Galilee. Lucifer disliked not knowing the answer, disliked
being distracted by Deziel’s resurrection in his life, the dominoes tipping over in favor of his annihilation.
“The hellgate is the priority,” he answered instead. “Belial should be there by now. I’ll take Galilee, and we’ll meet you
there.”
Leviathan’s eyes flicked to the deadly girl in Lucifer’s arms. “You’re taking her?”
Lucifer frowned in disapproval. “This isn’t the time for your bloodlust, Levi. Focus.”
Levi merely smiled, and there were new shadows in it, ones Lucifer didn’t have the bandwidth to wonder about.
He wrapped his arms around Galilee and took off, gravel scattering again, his wings beating steadily.
The air got colder as they rose, and Lucifer was glad for Levi’s jacket wrapped around Galilee’s shoulders.
“What’s the hellgate?” Galilee yelled above the wind as they headed for the Onyearugbulem house.
“It’s the artifact we were protecting,” he answered, and her laugh tore away into the sky.
“Of course it is.” She tipped her head up to smile at him. “Remember our deal?”
As if he could forget the bargain that had turned him inside out. Lucifer grinned back, feeling some of the darkness slough
away. This was why he needed her, needed the way she made him feel, everything better than the fate his family had condemned
him to.
“You get to see it, I get a dance.”
Galilee winked. “Can’t wait to dance with you.”
His heart spasmed. She made it sound so simple, all that innocent anticipation, as if he wasn’t who he was, as if he hadn’t
done what he’d done. Deziel wanted to hurt him, and Galilee wanted to dance with him—wasn’t this the truth about the world
he had left and the one he had been condemned to? It was a truth he kept rediscovering over and over, in millennia of realizations
and looped epiphanies, the blasphemy that maybe Heaven simply didn’t know how to love as well as the humans did, as well as
a score of Hell’s princes could. That maybe damnation was a better place to be than the propaganda of salvation. It was no
longer a question of where he belonged, because he belonged nowhere, but of making a world of his own. The loyal princes and
their blood-splashed love. The silent Hell. The Morningstar had been thrown away, but he’d taken all that discard, used it
as scaffold and mortar, and now this girl-creature of light was smiling in his face as if the best part of their future would
be spinning in each other’s arms as music swirled around them.
Lucifer was inclined to believe her. The hellgate would be thwarted.
He would coax her soul out of her, and it wouldn’t be a betrayal, not when he intended to be so careful with it, not when it would protect her from both his princes and a dangerous archangel.
Besides, Galilee had changed in the garden—she didn’t belong with the humans who aimed weapons at her.
She was one of them now, the outcasts, the unwanted
ones, and the princes would see it, would get past their fear of her power once Lucifer had her soul, once they understood
her heart, the soft valved thing that wanted to dance with the Devil. He would take her back to Hell with him, and Michael
would never lay eyes or hand or sword upon her.
They touched down on a balcony of the mansion holding the hellgate, and Galilee glanced around as Lucifer folded his wings.
“The cameras don’t catch you in this form?”
He shrugged. “Glamours are useful for all sorts of things.”
“Ugh, I’m jealous,” she replied, stepping in through the door he held open for her.
Lucifer followed behind her, and Galilee turned around slowly as she recognized the hallway where he’d faced off with Oriak?.
“Right back where we started,” she said, her voice low with awe. “I can’t believe it was just last night.” A note of uncertainty crept in on her last words, and Lucifer slipped an arm around her.
“Too fast?” he asked. Time never meant anything to him, whether it stretched long or short or sideways, but Galilee had been
raised as a human.
She turned inky eyes up to him, worry tangled in her expression. “How is this possible?” she asked in return, pressing her
palm to her chest, then to his. “How is this real, Lucifer? A day ago, I didn’t even believe you existed. Now . . .” She broke off and dragged in a deep breath. “God, everything has changed.”
Lucifer cupped her face in his hands, and fire cut through him in a welcome burn. “It is fast,” he agreed. “Everything between us, between you and your family; everything within you. But you can handle it, beloved. You’re not human. As much of a shock as that is, it can also be a strength.”
Her pupils were wide and dark. She was so fucking beautiful.
“Find it, Galilee. Hold on to your light, your power, and it will get you through this.”
Lucifer spoke with a fervent heat, knowing even as he poured assurance into her that he was being selfish. He needed her to
hold it together because she was holding him together. Without her, this new thing searing life through him, he would be consumed by the bitterness, the
rage of old grudges, that would erase the wonder of the new life he had made, and Heaven would win. They would win by taking
over his mind again, by dragging his attention from his job and his people back to them and their bullshit, just like Deziel
wanted to do with the hellgate, but with Galilee, he could build on what he’d started with his princes, something marvelous
and new. With her soul, he’d never have to give up the scorching thrill of being able to feel again.
Lucifer bent his head and claimed Galilee Kincaid’s mouth, relishing the electric ripple of her taste dancing down his nerves.
“I have you,” he whispered against her lips.
Galilee kissed him back fiercely. “I have you too.” She gazed into his eyes, and he saw flashes of white light burst in hers.
“Let’s go handle your hellgate.”
One of Lucifer’s princes was guarding the carved wooden door of the vault.
He watched Galilee with large amounts of suspicion as she approached, despite Lucifer’s presence, and the Devil bit back a sigh.
He couldn’t blame his princes for their hostility, not if the hellgate was degrading as fast as Michael had warned.
This was no time for variables, and Galilee Kincaid was a sure thing only to the Devil.
He would have to work on her soul as soon as the hellgate gave him a fucking minute to breathe.
“Paimon,” he greeted. “Who’s inside?”
The prince continued tracking Galilee with cold eyes. “All the others,” he answered. “Asmodeus, Beelzebub, Leviathan, Belial.
Mephis is out with Astaroth hunting, but we wondered if it would be better to call them back. The gate is . . . breaching.”
“I heard.”
Lucifer laid his hand on the door, and the protection ward that shielded it from outsiders exhaled to let him in. Paimon shifted
on his feet, his hands brushing his weapons unconsciously as he watched Galilee step up to the door with Lucifer. They walked
into the vault, and Lucifer closed the door firmly behind them.
Galilee huffed out a short breath. “I’m amazed I’ve lived this long around your princes,” she started to say, but then her
words cut out as she saw the inside of the vault. “Holy shit.”
Lucifer felt his back teeth snap together as he looked around. Galilee was stepping in a slow circle, her neck craned back
to take in the sight of a space larger than any room in the mansion had a right to be—endless, in fact. It was a towering cave made of stone, the ceiling swallowed up by darkness, the walls sheared straight down to
meet a slick and glistening floor.
“Where are we?”
Lucifer forced words past his tensed jaw. “It shouldn’t look like this.”
Galilee scoffed. “Yeah, I think my friends would’ve had something to say if this is what they saw last night.”
“The hellgate’s bending reality around it.” Lucifer knew these kinds of caverns all too well, and it meant that Michael had
been right. He hated when Michael was right. “It’s projecting one side onto the other.”
Galilee shot him a look. “This is what Hell looks like?”
Lucifer shrugged, already heading to the center of the vault, where his princes were gathered around a dark plinth, their heads bent and their arms extended out.
Galilee followed behind him, and in a quiet part of his heart, Lucifer wondered if she’d ever walk into the real Hell with him, for him.
He could pull her there once he had her soul, but he’d never force her to do anything. He wasn’t that person anymore.
The princes murmured endless chants in a tongue unsuited for human mouths, and Galilee winced at the sound. “God, that makes
my skin hurt.”
“It’s not the chants doing that.” Lucifer forked his tongue and flicked out the tip, tasting the air. He hissed sharply when
the unmistakable clamor of Hell greeted his senses. It was still hard to believe that Deziel was behind all this, that she
hated him enough to even touch a hellgate. Perhaps Michael was lying, but the princes had sensed an angel. Perhaps Deziel
was a misdirection. Lucifer would have preferred to think that she was doing whatever she did in Heaven these days, not wandering
earth with a vendetta as old as the hills. He glanced over at Galilee and his own voice slithered in his head, cold and unkind.