Chapter Six - Lucifer #2
We went through in a burst of glittering black and gold, crashed down onto the lower balcony one floor beneath, and hit hard enough to rattle bones.
The air punched out of me. Metal screamed somewhere under the impact.
One of the chairs skidded sideways and toppled over the ledge into the dark below.
For a moment, neither of us moved. I rolled onto my back with a choking cough and spat more blood over the side of the balcony. Beside me, Az groaned, low and vicious, like pain had only sharpened his temper.
I turned my head toward him, half ready to lunge again if he so much as twitched wrong.
He was sprawled across the broken stone, one arm flung over his eyes, chest heaving.
Dark red blood slicked the corner of his mouth.
When he dragged his arm down at last, he looked at me with murder still very much alive in his expression.
“What the fuck are we doing?” he asked.
I coughed, swallowed blood, and said, “Excellent question.”
Az pushed himself up onto one elbow with a wince, glaring at me like he hadn’t ruled out finishing the job. “I should knock your teeth out.”
“You already made a decent start.”
His mouth twitched, but it wasn’t amusement, just rage changing shape. Then he looked up, not at the shattered window above us, but beyond it, higher, as if even now some part of him could feel the weight of Heaven pressing down.
“No,” he said, more to himself than to me. “No, I’m not doing this here.”
I frowned. “Doing what?”
He turned his head slowly and fixed me with a look that still had heat in it, but not for me anymore. “Wasting this on you.”
The words landed hard.
“He’s the one,” Az said. “He’s the one who did all this. He’s the one who twisted everything and called it love. He’s the one who made monsters and then stood back like He had clean hands.”
The silence stretched between as my ribs throbbed. My mouth tasted like metal and glass. I stared up at the sky and felt the pain lessen as I slowly healed.
“We can’t kill Him,” I said. I dragged in a breath that still hurt and turned my head toward him.
A muscle twitched in his jaw.
I pushed myself up onto an elbow, slowly. “That’s what the Oracle said, but I don’t know yet.” I wiped blood from my mouth with the back of my hand.
Az looked away first, breathing hard through his nose. His hands opened and closed once against the broken stone, like he was imagining all the ways this conversation could still end badly.
Then he spat blood over the side of the balcony and muttered, “I still want to hit you again.”
I let out a rough breath that almost passed for a laugh. “Stand in line.”
His glare cut back to me. “Don’t get clever.”
“I’m not.” I looked at him then. “You’re allowed to be angry.”
His expression hardened. “Generous.”
“No,” I said. “I was wrong.”
Az’s mouth twisted. “Wrong.”
The word sounded too small between us, and I looked away.
“What I did to you was unforgivable.”
He didn’t respond.
I said quietly. “So if you need to hate me, hate me where I can see it.”
His mouth flattened into something lethal. Then, after a long beat, he looked away again and scrubbed a hand down his face. My head fell back against the stone, and I stared up at the fractured mouth of the broken window above us. My penthouse glowed up there like a wound, both elegant and ruined.
When I looked back over, he was staring at nothing, his eyes narrowing like he was looking inward instead of out.
Az said quietly, “It wasn’t just before.”
I turned my head.
“He came to the hole,” Az said. “After my mind… after.” He swallowed. “He’d come and talk. Show me things. Explain things. Or try to.” His face tightened. “He wanted me to understand Him.”
The disgust in those last words was quiet and complete.
I was surprised. The First Light? Coming back to Hell?
“I remembered something. He said He was one of…” Az frowned. “Not gods. Something older. A group, a—a council.” He looked irritated suddenly, angry at his own memory. “There were others. Equal to Him, I think. He hated that. Hated that it was shared.”
The city glowed below us. I stayed still.
“He said they ruled over…” Az made a helpless motion with one hand. “More than realms. This was bigger than that.”
“He thought they were weak,” Az said. “When they kept stopping Him. Telling Him no. Telling Him something will break that you can’t put back together.” His eyes narrowed. “He said He knew better than them.”
He drew in a slow breath.
“He wanted one place that was His. Entirely His. Built right. Ruled right. No argument. No balance. No one else with a hand on the wheel.” His mouth pulled sideways. “He talked like that was a vision, like the others were too frightened of damage to make anything beautiful.”
He looked at me then. “He wanted me to see it the way He did,” he said.
Az turned his head slowly toward me. “But before all of that,” he said, more quietly now, “I need to tell you.”
The night seemed to narrow around us.
“I never went inside Eden. I only saw it from afar while it was still being shaped. Gardens half-born. Rivers learning where to go. The Heavenly Artisans moving through it like they were listening to something no one else could hear.”
My mouth went dry.
Regret moved through his expression like a shadow. “I saw you with her,” he said quietly.
I didn’t answer. I couldn’t.
“You kept going there,” he said.
“But that wasn’t what worried me.” His brow furrowed, searching for the shape of old instinct. “It was your face.”
A laugh almost came out of me. It would’ve been an ugly thing. “My face,” I said.
“Yes, your face,” Az snapped, sudden and raw. “You looked… relaxed. Like you weren’t trying to be the Morning Star every second someone looked at you. And it worried me.”
That landed, hard.
“I didn’t know what it was,” he said. “I thought maybe she was influencing you. Or that Eden itself was. I thought something in that place had shifted you, and He was already watching you so closely then, waiting for the smallest change.”
Of course He was.
“So I went to Him.”
There it was. No thunder or drama, just the truth laid between us like another broken thing. My head turned toward him slowly.
Az’s voice had gone flat with shame. “I told Him you were spending time in Eden. I told Him there was an Artisan, one of the Celestines, and that something about it felt wrong.” He laughed once, sharply and self-loathing. “Wrong. That was the word I used.”
For a moment, I couldn’t feel the pain in my ribs or the blood drying on my skin. The whole world seemed to draw inward around that sentence until all I could hear was the distant echo of a choice made too early, too sincerely, too stupidly.
Az looked at me fully then. “I didn’t know,” he said.
And the worst part was, I believed him.
“I thought I was warning Him,” he said, throat working hard. “I didn’t know I was handing Him a weapon.”
I closed my eyes, just briefly, and when I opened them, the city still glittered below like it had no idea how much ruin a single frightened choice could make.
“By the time I understood something was wrong,” Az said, “you were called to the Throne. And then…” His expression twisted. “Then I was in the hole.”
The symmetry of it nearly made me sick. Both of us thinking we were surviving. Both of us serving the wrong god.
For a long while, neither of us moved. The broken window above us banged softly in the wind. Somewhere far below, Vegas kept burning neon through the dark like the world wasn’t falling apart.
Then Az spoke again, quieter this time. “After that,” he said, “the only thing I could hold onto was this phrase that kept going through my mind. Over and over.”
I frowned. “What?”
His eyes shifted to mine. “Find the one who matters.”
The words hit me.
Az stared at me with his face stripped open by pain, memory, and something like helpless fury. “I didn’t know what I meant anymore,” he said. “Not fully. My mind couldn’t hold the shape of it.
Az dragged in a slow breath and winced. “But somehow I think I was trying to tell you to find her, even back then.”
A muscle jumped in my jaw. All those years, I’d thought madness had chewed everything clean out of him. But somehow he hadn’t lost the truth. He had lost everything except the part of it that mattered most, and I had thought he was raving.
I looked away from him and back up at the broken window. At one of the places I’d hidden in, rotting in luxury and calling it survival. Then I looked back at him.
“We’ll find them,” I said.
Az gave one small nod.
I wiped blood from my mouth with the back of my hand and pushed myself to my feet. Pain flared white-hot through my back, but I welcomed it. It kept me in my body. Kept me grounded.
Az watched me rise, then took my hand when I offered it and let me haul him up too.
For a second, we just stood there on the broken balcony, bloodied and breathing, with the city yawning beneath us and the wreck of my old life shattered above.
It wasn’t forgiveness, just the truth, and a truce built out of necessity and old ruin.