Chapter Twenty-Two - Lucifer #2
At first, nothing happened, and then everything did.
The night hissed, and a seam appeared overhead, like reality had to admit it was stitched.
A long, narrow vertical distortion split the air where His claws worked, and soon pale light leaked through in threads.
The hiss deepened into a living sound, like pressure bleeding off from somewhere vast.
“There,” Morathis said quietly.
The seam widened another inch. Then another. Wind rushed down from it, but it wasn’t desert wind. It was colder and cleaner, touched with that unbearable false purity of Heaven.
“Ready!” Topher shouted.
Destiny was already moving. He grabbed her around the waist, instinctively and with practiced ease. She locked her arms around his shoulders without protest.
Azazael scooped Vespera up with one hard, efficient motion that startled a curse out of her before she snapped, “Hands to your fucking self.”
“Grow wings, then,” he said, and launched.
Liora flew on her own power. And Morathis simply rose, no wings, no effort. She just lifted from the ground as if gravity didn’t matter. Her red hair streamed back in the updraft.
I let the glamour fall from my wings. Gray and ashen feathers erupted into sight behind me, vast enough to make the air recoil. I beat them once, hard, and followed them into the wound in the sky.
Thyronis hung in the air above us, claws buried in nothing I could see and everything He could feel as He held the tear open by force of will.
The muscles in His arms had gone taut. His jackal head was lifted, teeth bared slightly, as if the realm itself were pulling against Him and He was refusing to let it win.
He ripped it wider with one last brutal pull. The seam shuddered and opened into a hissing wound in the sky, wide enough now to take a body through one at a time.
Topher looked down at me from where he hovered just off the ridge with Destiny hanging onto him and asked, “Are we doing this quietly, or do you want the whole realm looking up?”
I looked up at him. “Quietly. We get in, get her, and get out.”
His brows lifted slightly, and his expression flat enough to make skepticism feel like a full sentence.
Then the seam gave another awful hiss, brightening at the edges as honeyed light bled through the split. Heaven was open, and there was nothing left to do but enter.
“Move,” Thyronis snarled.
Topher launched first with Destiny. Then, Azazael followed with Vespera, and Liora’s black wings snapped wide as she drove upward. Morathis continued to rise after them in that eerie, elegant levitation the second she stepped into the air.
I leaped up next, and the desert vanished.
The cold Nevada night, the mountain ridge, the scrape of stone under my boots, all of it peeled away the second I crossed the seam.
For one stomach-turning instant, it felt less like flying through a gate and more like being forced through the eye of a needle.
And then I saw it. The Lattice. Heaven’s gate was no longer a gate at all. It was some kind of high-tech structure.
A vast grid of luminous threads stretched tight across the opening like someone had tried to stitch the sky shut with light.
The threads glowed white-gold and silver, each line humming with tension, crossing and recrossing in impossible geometry that extended farther than seemed physically possible.
It didn’t look built so much as woven, every strand pulled taut with intention, alive with the arrogant certainty that nothing passed through without being measured first.
As we entered, it didn’t attack. It tested. The moment I entered, a voice met me. It seemed like my own, but it wasn’t. It was mine, dragged through His mouth.
You’re too late.
The sound came from nowhere and everywhere at once, spoken in The First Light’s voice, but they were my thoughts, the exact fears I kept trying not to name. They slid under my skin like something trying to convince me it had grown there naturally.
She’s already been under His hands. Already believed His lies. Already out of your reach.
My wings jerked hard as rage surged so fast it nearly made me stall. Below and around me, I heard the others react too, something designed specifically to each of their wounds.
Then, just ahead of me, Destiny faltered.
It was only half a second, maybe less. But here, that was enough.
Her whole body was locked in Topher’s arms, but her head snapped up like she’d heard something that hit too deep, and the focus went out of her eyes.
Topher swore and hauled her tighter against him, but she’d already given the Lattice what it wanted.
The Riftspinners came. They clung to the edges of the seam in a glistening ring, dozens of them at first glance.
They peeled off the edges of the tear in a clicking white swarm, thin winged bugs no bigger than a hand, all needle-limbs and frantic hunger.
They made awful clicking sounds, fast and sharp like a sewing machine, and dove straight for her.
“Move!” Topher barked.
Destiny had gone lax as she fell prey those whispered fears, and the Riftspinners were turning toward her in a swarm, drawn to hesitation like blood in the water.
She made a broken sound and reared back as if trying to pull herself into her own body, but that was enough for the first Riftspinner to strike.
Its silver filament shot past her shoulder and stitched into the Lattice beside her. Another caught in the hem of her coat. A third latched onto her boot and started sewing the space around her tighter. Anchoring her to the gate.
Topher slammed one Riftspinner away with the back of his arm, but it burst in a spray of white sparks and split into two smaller ones, both of them clicking harder than before.
“Don’t kill them!” Morathis snapped.
That would have been useful information if it hadn’t been a second too late.
Azazael hit the swarm from the side, tearing one free before it could anchor another stitch and flinging it wide instead of crushing it. His wings beat hard and viciously, keeping the rest off her long enough for Topher to wrench her loose.
The Lattice tightened around the place she’d stalled. A whole band of luminous strands pulled taut at once, humming higher, trying to sew itself shut around them. But Morathis rose faster.
She turned in the air and threw both hands toward the tightening grid. The threads reflected back on themselves, every shining line forced to see its own shape. For one stuttering instant, the Lattice forgot which version was the true one.
The hum changed. The strands slackened. And Topher used that opening immediately, hauling Destiny through the gate. She was breathing too fast, eyes wide and empty with shock, one hand fisted hard in his shirt like she didn’t trust those creatures not to peel her away from him again.
“I’m here,” he snapped at her, voice brutal and steady. “Stay with me.”
Behind us, Thyronis snarled and dug his claws deeper into the seam. “Do not hesitate,” He barked. “It rewards doubt.”
That was not comforting.
“Don’t stop!” Topher shouted down below.
The seam shuddered again. For one terrible second, it cinched hard enough around the edges that my feathers brushed thread, a painful, humming contact that made my vision flash white.
Then Thyronis roared with enough ancient authority that the seam opened back up in a hard jerking gasp. The entire lattice seemed to flinch from him. And that did something ugly and satisfying to my soul.
Beyond the densest part of the grid, the threads stretched wider apart, their hum turning thinner and more distant. Ahead, the light expanded. I could see cloud and gold and impossible brightness opening beyond the Lattice. His lie dressed up in opulence.
Topher broke through first with Destiny, then Liora came up behind him. Morathis stayed back, holding the reflection on the Lattice.
Azazael burst out with Vespera and a trail of still-clicking Riftspinners snapping at the edges of his wings. I came through last, and all I could think of was… Evie.
Behind me, Thyronis ripped Himself free of the seam and let it slam almost shut before jamming it open again by sheer force, planting Himself at the threshold like a god-shaped wedge and turning to hold it.
There were thousands of frantic little clicking sounds rising behind us as the Riftspinners swarmed the edges.
Thyronis looked over His shoulder once, ears pinned, claws sunk deep into the wound in the air. “I hold here,” He said.
And before any of us could answer, the first true sight of Heaven hit full in the face, vast cloud banks, white terraces, gold-veined towers, and too much light, while somewhere deeper in that radiant fraud, Evie was waiting.
I opened my wings wider and looked toward the horizon. And we flew.