Chapter Twenty-Four - Lucifer
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
Lucifer
THE FIRST TRUE sight of Heaven hit. It looked as much as I remembered.
Cloud banks layered the horizon in luminous tiers, broad and gleaming and so offensively perfect, with bridges of white stone and gold filigree arcing between them like the whole realm had been designed by someone who thought symmetry could pass for holiness.
Towers rose from the larger banks in polished clusters, all shining colonnades and flowering terraces and gilded rooftops.
Farther in, above everything else, the grand palace caught the light and threw it back harder, a golden sprawl swollen with self-importance.
The Throne of Dawn.
Beneath its gardens, hidden in cloud and hedgework and all the pretty lies Vespera had sketched for us on paper, the Beloved were kept. Evie was there.
I barely had one good look at everything before I started assigning routes.
“Topher,” I said, pointing low and left. “Take Destiny through the lower cloud banks. Stay under the main traffic line and keep your head down.”
He nodded once, already adjusting course.
“Vespera, you’re with Liora. East side approach. Cut through the secondary courts and angle in toward the gardens from there.”
Vespera smiled like I’d handed her a private invitation to misbehave. Liora just rolled one shoulder and adjusted her grip on the weapon at her back.
I looked at Azazael. “You’re with me.”
He gave me a look that said, “Obviously.”
I let my gaze cut across all of them one more time. “If any of you see her first, you get her out. If anything gets between you and that objective, remove it.”
Destiny lifted her chin. “Gladly.”
I pointed once toward the shining center of the realm. “Move.”
Topher took Destiny and dropped left at once. Vespera and Liora peeled away in the opposite direction, swallowed fast by the gleaming traffic of the cloudbanks.
Azazael stayed with me. We flew hard and low toward the palace approach, then cut down two cloud banks before it and landed behind a bright white building wrapped in flowering vines and gold-edged columns. We landed in shadow for one precious second.
It was enough time. Barely. Azazael rolled his shoulders once. His wings flexed in irritation. The gray in them was too obvious. Same with the darkness of mine.
I called what clean brightness I could still counterfeit and forced it over us.
It wasn’t elegant. Azazael’s wings lost some of their deadened gray.
Mine blurred cleaner at the edges, the ash dulled.
We made ourselves nondescript as best we could, lesser angels on some forgettable errand, bright enough to pass at a glance, not bright enough to invite real notice.
Azazael looked at me, and I looked at him.
“This is terrible,” he said.
“Clearly.”
We stepped out into traffic. And for one brief, insane second, I thought the glamour might actually hold, at least enough to get us across one more cloud bank before anyone looked too closely.
Then a male angel stopped dead in the middle of the walkway and stared at me. His expression changed by degrees, confusion first, then disbelief, and then something sharper, like some half-buried recognition rising through whatever millennia had settled over it.
He took one slow step closer. “Wait,” he said, voice catching on the word. “Are you…”
Shit.
I kept walking. That was the first rule with moments like this—keep moving like the question was beneath you. I turned my head just enough to give him a look that said he was seconds away from embarrassing himself in public.
“I’m sorry?”
The angel’s eyes widened further. “Morningstar?” he whispered.
And… there it was.
Beside me, Azazael made a soft sound under his breath that could’ve been a laugh if it hadn’t sounded so much like irritation.
I gave the angel the same stare I gave the cop who’d pulled us over, letting my eyes do the work. “You’re mistaken.”
So close. It almost worked. But his gaze slipped from mine and flicked to my wings, then back to my face, then over to Azazael as if trying to decide what this was, if it was blasphemy, madness, or the worst day of his life.
Az stepped closer before the male could think too hard and planted a hand flat against his chest, not hard enough to send him flying, just enough to stop his forward motion.
“Easy, brother,” Azazael said, all false calm over a blade’s edge. “You mistake what stands before you.”
The angel blinked and looked up at Az, but he kept his hand there, casual as a threat. I could feel him looking at me without turning his head, the silent ‘we need to leave right now’ hitting as cleanly as words.
I agreed. Completely. And I started to angle away.
The angel’s shock finally caught up to his body. “Hey, wait—”
Fuck. Too late.
We launched into the air at the same moment, wings snapping open in two violent bursts of white and ash-softened glamour. The angel stumbled backward under the force of it, shouting now, loud enough to turn heads.
A few nearby angels looked up. Then more, reaching for their weapons. The neat current of Heaven’s traffic snagged around us in little ripples of confusion, bodies slowing, heads turning, wings shifting as attention spread.
We’d made ourselves a goddamn point of interest.
All at once, the air turned syrupy. Pressure rolled through the cloud banks so suddenly it felt like the whole realm had drawn a breath and held it. A low harmonic note opened overhead, like the sky had become a living instrument.
Az and I both felt it. We stopped fighting the air and dropped as light gathered above every cloud bank. But it wasn’t sunlight. It was… Him.
His old display, that I remembered well, unfurled across the open air in gold and white and impossible scale, vast enough to dominate the whole horizon.
I had thought it stupid the first time I saw it, arrogant in a way only He could make look pious, and time had done nothing to improve it.
The First Light hung above the realm in all His preferred grandeur.
His face was composed into that false serenity He always wore.
Below us, the entire realm bent. Knees hit the stone, heads bowed, and wings folded. Az and I landed behind a low carved wall on a terrace just before the nearest eyes could track us properly. And then we dropped with everyone else, one knee to the white stone, heads lowered just enough to pass.
For one beat, I saw nothing but glowing marble and the edge of Az’s wing.
But some warning in my blood made me look up, and across the open distance, someone moved wrong.
On the bridge connecting the next cloud bank to the palace, a figure remained standing for one breath too long after everyone else had hit the ground.
A female. Long brown hair. An Artisan’s dress. My stomach dropped.
No.
The memory of her hit first, bright and devastating.
I was staring at Ediphiel’s shape, the old image of her made flesh so perfectly it nearly stopped my heart.
Fear went through me at the thought that He had created this trick and thrown a ghost in my path because He knew eventually I would come.
He knew exactly what could split me open.
Then she turned, and I saw her eyes. Even far away, I knew.
Evie.
Had she glamoured herself? Was that even possible? Or had someone helped her?
Az saw whatever changed in my face and bent closer without lifting his head.
“You see her?” he murmured.
I couldn’t take my eyes off her. “She’s up on the bridge.”
He glanced up just briefly before dropping his gaze to the ground again. His mouth twitched once, not a smile, but something meaner.
“Stop looking at her like that before the whole realm notices.”
I dragged my gaze down by force.
The projection overhead was still speaking, everyone was still chanting, but none of it was getting into me. She was there. On that bridge. Too far. Too exposed. Too close to Him.
I started to rise. Just an inch. Just enough to shift my weight forward, already moving before thought could catch up. Az’s hand locked around my wrist and yanked me back down hard enough to jar my shoulder.
“Are you fucking crazy?” he hissed.
I turned on him with murder already in my eyes, but he leaned closer before I could speak.
“We have to wait until this is over,” he said, voice low and razor-tight. “Or He’ll see you coming and put Himself between you and her.”
I knew he was right, which did absolutely nothing to make me less likely to kill him next. But I forced myself still, even though I was barely holding on.
Every instinct in me strained toward her, hot and violent and immediate, but Az’s grip stayed locked around my forearm. I dragged in one breath. Then another. Everyone around us remained bent in worship as they chanted on in that polished, nauseating cadence while He hung over it all.
And across the bridge, she was still there. Alone. I needed to get to her.
I kept my head bowed, but my eyes cut up once more, just enough to mark the distance, the route, the bodies between us. One span. If the moment broke easily, and the nearest angels were half a beat too slow—
The bond lit up like a live wire, and everything around me disappeared. Her panic slammed across it immediately, bright and brutal, soaked in terror that only came from being trapped inside someone else’s control.
My head snapped up, and then I saw it, her breath catching hard enough to jerk her body with it, the small visible shaking she was trying and failing to hide. Distance should have blurred it. It didn’t. I saw every bit of it with a clarity that made murder feel holy.
Az felt the shift in me even without looking. “Do. Not. Do anything heroic. Not yet,” he muttered.
I kept my gaze low. “That word has never applied to me.”
“It applies even less if you get us both killed before we reach that bridge.”
The projection looked right at her, like He owned her. And something in me just… snapped. I was on my feet before I knew I’d moved.