Chapter 20 Lucifer #4
How long will it take, it asked, before she hates you as much as Deziel does, as much as Leviathan tries to hide? You poison everything you love. Lucifer pushed it away. He had changed. He would continue to change, and the change would save him. There was simply no other
choice.
Galilee was frowning at the quiet in the cavern. “Everything looks fine.”
“You’d need eyes from Hell to see the truth.” Lucifer flicked his fingers into the air, dropping the illusion so she could
witness what he and his princes were truly dealing with. The vault glitched once, and Galilee choked back a cry, her hand
clutching at Lucifer’s arm.
“What the fuck?” Her voice was almost lost in the guttural screams echoing through the cavern.
Small portals were shredding open in the air before the princes chanted them shut, while visible pulses thudded out from the plinth that held the mask, stained red and veined with bitter black.
Splashes of boiling darkness slammed against the walls of the room, the agony of them redoubling as the room’s wards flung them right back.
Lucifer’s princes were being flayed repeatedly, flaps of skin being peeled back from their flesh, revealing unbleeding muscle underneath.
Their chants stitched the skin closed again, but it was clear they were fighting a losing battle.
Lucifer felt a weight of grief deep in his gut.
Whatever punishment Deziel sought for him would obliterate his princes, even as they fought to do Heaven’s bidding, forced into this work by virtue of existing as what they were.
Leviathan was right there, as beautiful as ever, even with his dappled skin being taken and returned.
They were all fighting for him, for the Morningstar, who had never done anything to deserve it.
Asmodeus looked up, and a passing scream took out his left eye in a slash of vitreous fluid. “Lucifer,” he bit out. “It’s
getting worse.”
Something had to give. Someone had to give. “Stay over here,” Lucifer said to Galilee. “It’s not safe for you to move any closer.”
He didn’t dare imagine how the hellgate would target her, how hungry it would be if it sensed the simmering roll of her power.
Galilee nodded and folded her arms under Levi’s jacket, looking more human than Lucifer liked. He brushed his knuckles over
her cheek, then turned away and strode over to his princes, pushing his shirtsleeves up past his elbows.
The artifact was shimmering in an illuminated glass cube on the stone plinth, its molecules unstable as it seized in and out
of reality. To human eyes, it was a bronze mask, intricate and so very, very old. It was no one’s face, a broad flattened
nose, a wide mouth with ivory teeth. There was ancient and dried blood on the inside ivory curve of the mask, seeping through
the eyeholes, tangled in gold veins, and Lucifer could feel the sheer volume of the dead that had been pressed into it, packed
and screaming.
Beyond the gate, Hell itself felt Lucifer’s approach and crooned hungrily for him. Lucifer could feel it tugging at him, calling
him back home to that cursed throne. The gate’s fracture groaned, and Beelzebub staggered down to one knee.
“Anytime now, Luci,” she panted.
“I’m here,” Lucifer murmured to the madness beyond the gate. “I’m here now.”
Hell screamed and howled in response, but Lucifer funneled his power into a weave, placing it over the fracture, laying it
over the scattering mask. The weave could barely hold from edge to edge. Reality had already started giving way, but Hell
and all its damned inhabitants were his, and if he couldn’t temper its rush for a few precious moments, then he might as well toss out his title.
“Fall back,” Lucifer ordered as he pushed more power into the ward, and then more, and more. His eyes bled black and his wings snapped out, darkening the room. Screams ricocheted off the feathers and splashed into
inky stains on the stone floor.
“Lucifer.” Leviathan’s voice was quiet and filled with warning, but Lucifer paid him no mind. Now that Michael had confirmed
an angel’s involvement—Deziel’s involvement—the wounds to the gate made more sense, the power that had stitched them together, the weaves that felt faintly
and horrifically familiar now that Lucifer knew his former lover had made them. He could almost taste Deziel in the damage—she’d
come close to breaking the gate herself, which she undoubtedly could have, but it seemed to matter to her that it broke under
his watch, not under her hands.
Belial and Asmodeus retreated to the walls of the vault to reinforce the peripheral wards while Leviathan remained by the
plinth, within touching distance of Lucifer.
“What did Michael tell you?” he asked quietly, even as his fingers caught screams out of the air and flung them back to the
gate.
“He confirmed an angel,” Lucifer replied. Even knowing the nature of the wound, even with his own angelic power, the ward
he had placed was barely holding. This was bad.
“Which one?”
Lucifer ground his teeth and pushed more power into the gate. “Deziel.”
Leviathan gave Lucifer a shocked look, and the Devil winced. When he’d first Fallen, Levi had heard him call out Deziel’s
name in his sleep, before he learned how to let everything he had lost go.
Across the vault, Belial did a double take, and a splash of blackness burned against her cheek as it shot past. “Deziel? From the fucking war? Deziel-who-lives-to-suck-the-cock-of-righteousness Deziel?” The prince shook her head and wiped at
her face. “No fucking way, Luci. She’s gargled Heaven’s balls since the beginning of time. They’d crush her for this.”
“Unless they sent her?” Leviathan suggested.
Belial gave him a look. “It’s Heaven,” she said. “They’re straightforward murderous. This is too underhanded for all their
bureaucratic bullshit. If they wanted to hurt Luci, they’d just smite him, no?”
Lucifer almost smiled. She had no idea what the angels were like.
“Their hands are tied by the treaty between Heaven and Hell,” he said. “Breaking it overtly would give us grounds to go to
war against them.”
Belial’s eyes lit up. “I’d love to hurt an angel.”
“It’s overrated,” Galilee called out from where she was standing, and Belial shot her an evil glare.
“Shut the fuck up,” the prince snarled. “None of us see what you do to Lucifer as a joke.”
Galilee grinned at her, emboldened by what the garden had made her into. “Wanna find out if I can do it to you too?”
“That’s enough,” Leviathan growled. “We’ve got bigger fucking problems here.”
Lucifer had been so focused on the gate, on the taste of lost angel woven into the bronze and the gold-threaded ivory, it took him a moment to register the cruel chill that crept up his spine, the slight shift in the air of the cavern, the way that taste was suddenly not in the mask but in the vault itself.
Warning flared through his body a split second before a soft ghost’s voice joined theirs, magnolia drifting around it.
“Why, yes,” it said. “Yes, you do.”
Lucifer whipped his head around, keeping his hands centered on the artifact, his heart dropping. All his princes had spun
in unison, weapons flying into their hands.
A tall woman was standing in one of the room’s corners, dressed in jeans and a flannel shirt. Her hair was iron gray and braided
down her back, and her face was a flawless heart balanced on a long, graceful neck with moss-green eyes, dark bronze skin,
and a red, red mouth.
“All these wards, and none against angels?” She smiled slowly. “You’re getting sloppy, little brother.”
Every single prince blurred their forms instantly, their eyes bleeding out of the white. Leviathan pulled his sword out in
a soundless slide, and Belial’s face was contorted into a mask of contempt. Lucifer kept his energy focused on the work he
was doing, but he met the woman’s eyes and gave a small nod that belied none of the rage he felt. He knew that vessel too,
had loved it topside more times than he could count, which meant he knew the angel puppeting it around, keeping it alive longer
than should have been possible.
“Deziel,” he said, calm as a sleeping monster, as if it didn’t hurt. “Welcome, I suppose.”