Chapter Twelve - Lucifer
CHAPTER TWELVE
Lucifer
THE REVEL HAD a way of disguising its bones, hiding arteries behind velvet and gold, making a maze feel like luxury. Tonight, it failed. The place kept offering me exits I hadn’t asked for, opening doors I hadn’t reached, like it was nervous, like it could feel what I was hunting.
Az kept pace at my back, because he’d insisted on searching the hotel with me, insistent he could help. I could feel his irritation at this whole messed up situation like static against my spine.
Topher and Destiny had gone the other direction. If the second Arcana was hiding in my walls, I would find them.
“They’re here,” I said, more as a reassurance to myself.
It wasn’t certainty, just instinct. The same pull that had led me to Morathis, subtle but insistent.
Az didn’t argue. He never did before when my instincts flared.
We moved fast. Past high-limit tables and velvet ropes, past bartenders polishing glasses they didn’t need to just to look busy, past guests who laughed too loudly from too many drinks. The light shifted as we passed, refracting wrong, bending just enough to make my teeth ache.
“There,” I muttered.
Az followed my gaze. Near the Security front desk. Behind it was the nerve center of the Revel. Cameras. Access logs. Private elevators. Vault corridors that didn’t show up on any public map.
If someone in this building decided who could go where, who could see what, who existed on which floor, it was Evan Pike, my Head of Surveillance. A low-level demon, but clean-cut and forgettable. He looked the part of a man who vanished into his own systems.
We found him where I expected him, in the glass-walled control room tucked behind a badge-locked corridor most guests never noticed. Screens covered every wall, feeds multiplying and collapsing in a thousand unblinking eyes.
Evan looked up as we entered. He didn’t seem startled or afraid. Just… ready.
“Mr. Morningstar,” he said smoothly. “Didn’t expect to see you down here.”
The air bent around him. Just a little, the light catching, refracting like heat over asphalt.
My pulse kicked. There you are.
“You control access,” I said, cutting straight through the pleasantries. “Every door. Every lock. Every place this building pretends doesn’t exist.”
Evan smiled faintly. Professional. Calm. “That’s my job.”
I stepped closer. The pull sharpened. The pressure in my chest tightened, urging me forward, urging me to take.
Az shifted. “Luce.”
I ignored him.
“Show me the floors that don’t appear on your maps,” I said. “The elevators that don’t log destinations. The rooms that reset themselves when no one’s looking.”
Evan didn’t hesitate. He turned back to his console, fingers flying, screens rearranging themselves with practiced ease. Schematics bloomed. Security layers peeled back. Restricted areas stacked atop one another like secrets nested inside secrets.
Too easy.
“You don’t even ask why,” I said.
Evan shrugged. “You own the building.”
Those words felt borrowed.
Az leaned in. “He’s not revealing anything,” he murmured.
I felt it then, the truth slipping sideways. The light wasn’t coming from Evan. It was coming through him. He was just a conduit. But I reached anyway. My powers flexed, testing the space around Pike, brushing for resistance or recognition, looking for the answering pressure I’d felt with Morathis.
There was nothing. Nothing answered. No pushback. No awareness. No sense of being seen. Just a demon in a room full of screens.
The pull vanished. The pressure drained out of my chest, leaving behind something cold and ugly. Disgust.
“He’s just… a demon,” I said quietly.
Evan glanced over his shoulder, brow furrowing, his true nature flashing through the human suit for a fraction of a second, pupils thinning, something hungry and lesser looking out.
“Sir?”
I stepped back, fury flashing hot and sudden. My hands curled, then loosened again, the building creaking faintly in response.
Az exhaled through his teeth. “Wrong door.”
I turned away without another word.
We left Evan staring after us, disappearing back into his systems and forgetting the moment like it had been written in erasable ink.
The Revel swallowed us again, lights and music rushing back in as if nothing had happened.
I made it three steps into the staff corridor behind Surveillance before the quiet hit, that muffled, employee-only quiet where the casino’s laughter couldn’t reach.
A plain wall ran along my right, dressed up with a cheap decorative panel meant to look expensive from a distance.
My control snapped. I turned and drove my fist into it. The panel cracked with a sharp, brittle sound, splinters and dust bursting outward. Behind it, concrete resisted for half a breath, then gave, spiderwebbing around my knuckles as if the walls had finally recognized me and yielded.
Pain lit up my hand, bright and clean, and it was a mercy. For a second, it drowned out the dread.
Azazael didn’t move. He didn’t speak. He just watched, his jaw set like he’d seen this kind of break before and knew better than to try to stop it with words. But when I glanced back at him, the guilt twisted in my belly.
Maybe he hadn’t seen it in anyone else. Maybe he’d only learned it alone, in that hellhole I’d left him in, with nothing but silence and time and his own mind turning feral around the loneliness.
I yanked my hand free. Dust rained down. The hole stared back at me, ugly and accusing. And I turned around and stalked through the casino again, my pulse pounding and anger tightening my ribs.
“He was close,” I snapped. “I felt it.”
“You felt yourself,” Az shot back. “Your power was just reacting to proximity. Not his.”
I hated that he was probably right.
We passed a service elevator as its doors slid open. A man in maintenance coveralls stepped out with a tool cart and a face I didn’t quite register. He nodded at us politely and kept going, unlocking a side corridor with a key.
My nostrils flared, and I didn’t slow down or look back. Because I was already searching for something bigger and louder. More obvious.
“They’re hiding better than the Mirror did,” I growled.
“We’re going to find them,” Az said. His voice was steady and controlled.
Quieter, he added, “You’re going to get her back, Luce.”
I stopped short and turned on him so fast the air cracked between us.
“Am I?” The words came out menacing. “Because I’m not so sure. That glowing motherfucker, whatever He is, has her, and I don’t even know what He’s doing to her. I don’t know where she is. And I don’t know if I get her back in one piece, or if I get handed what’s left.”
Az didn’t interrupt me or try to soften it. He just watched me, his eyes dark and unblinking.
“He collects,” I went on, my voice dropping. “He keeps things. I may have never seen The Beloved. But I know Him, and I’ve seen how He breaks things slowly and calls it love and devotion. Hell, you’ve seen it, Az.”
He tilted his head and let out a sigh.
I huffed out a breath, “Every second I spend opening the wrong door, He has more time to—”
My throat closed. “Ev—” The sound caught, scraped raw on the way out. I swallowed hard, my teeth grounding until they ached.
I dragged in a breath like it hurt to breathe at all. “I can feel her,” I said, quieter now. “And if I’m wrong again, if I can’t find the second one who can help us get her back…”
I didn’t finish it. I didn’t need to. Az stepped closer, finally, just enough that I could feel his presence like a brace against my back.
“You don’t know how this ends,” he said. “Not yet. And neither does He.”
I laughed once, short and bitter. “You’re very confident for someone who doesn’t have a god playing with the person he loves.”
His jaw tightened. “In case you forgot, you and He locked me in a fucking hole for a very long time, Luce,” he said evenly. “Alone. With nothing but time and my own thoughts. Don’t tell me I don’t know what waiting does.”
That shut me up.
He held my gaze. “Stop this,” Az continued. “You can’t just tear this place apart, hoping something screams back. You listen. Because whatever you’re looking for isn’t hiding.”
He glanced down the corridor we’d just come from. “It’s just where we’re not looking, yet.”
Before I could respond, raised voices echoed down the hall. Low. Urgent. Too close together.
“I’m tired of pretending,” Destiny said, her voice pitched just above a whisper, tight with something that wasn’t anger so much as ache. “I’m tired of looking at you like you’re nothing to me when you’re—”
“Desi,” Topher cut in quickly. “Not here.”
“That’s the problem,” she shot back. “It’s never here. Or anywhere. We keep doing this like it’s temporary, like we’re just…”
“It’s not… We’re not… temporary,” he said, just as quietly, and somehow that was worse. “This just isn’t the right moment.”
Her steps slowed. I could hear it in the change of her breath. “You’ve been saying that for a while now.”
“And you know why,” Topher replied. “If anyone finds out—”
“Who exactly?” she demanded. “Lucifer? Why would he even care? You think he doesn’t have bigger things to worry about right now?”
“That’s exactly why,” he said. “Because everything is already breaking. I’m not adding us to the list.”
They rounded the corner then, still too wrapped up in each other to notice us standing there.
Destiny was flushed with her arms crossed tight against her chest like she was holding herself together by force. Topher’s jaw was clenched, his focus entirely on her, one hand half-raised like he’d meant to touch her and thought better of it.
“I don’t want to hide anymore,” she said, softer now. “I don’t want to keep pretending you don’t matter.”
“I know…”
She stopped short when she looked up and finally saw us.
Topher froze a heartbeat later, color draining from his face as his gaze flicked from Destiny to me to Az, realization hitting all at once. No one said a word, and then Az cleared his throat and very deliberately looked at the ceiling.