Chapter Twenty-Six - Lucifer #2
I looked away first. That irritated me more than it should have. Because beneath the bite of it sat the memory of the night before, the terrace, the map, the way I had asked her questions I never should have let anyone hear.
I regretted every second of it, not because what she told me was wrong.
Because I had let Vespera see the exact shape of my fear.
And that was a weakness I couldn’t afford, especially by someone who remembered too much of what I’d been before.
And especially now, with Heaven’s realm still fresh on my hands and Evie asleep down the hall so fragile.
I straightened and pulled what remained of my pride back over myself like armor.
“Find him,” I said.
Vespera gave a little mock bow from the shoulders. “As you wish, your majesty.”
I ignored that.
Liora pushed off the wall and glanced once toward the bedroom windows, toward where Evie slept, then back at me. There was no judgment in her face, but somehow, that was worse.
“We’ll bring him back if he lets us,” she said.
“If he doesn’t,” Az muttered, “good luck.”
Vespera snorted softly and finally lit the cigarette. “Please. Males are tedious, not invincible.”
She and Liora moved for the doors. At the threshold, Vespera looked back once. Her gaze flicked toward the hallway, then settled on me.
“Go,” she said. “Before she wakes up and finds the wrong side of the bed empty.”
Then they were gone.
Az was still on the terrace, staring out at the skyline like he’d rather fight something than say anything useful. I stood there for one more second, hating all of it. The guilt. The pull. The fact that I could not tear myself cleanly in half to satisfy them.
I went back inside to the hushed silence and crossed the living room without turning on any extra lights. The bedroom door was still mostly closed. I pushed it open carefully and stepped inside.
Evie was where I’d left her, curled into the bed, still in my shirt, a pink spill of hair across the pillow, one hand tucked near her mouth. She looks fragile, and it was still too easy to picture her on that bridge with Him standing over her like He had any right.
I shut the door behind me and stood there for a second, just watching her breathe and telling myself I should have done any number of things a better king, a better friend, a better man might have done. Instead, I crossed the room and sat on the edge of the bed like gravity had chosen for me.
She made an intake of breath and shifted toward the warmth of me, unaware she was doing it, and that hit somewhere behind my ribs so hard I had to close my eyes for a second. I stripped down and then crawled in beside her, slow enough not to jostle the mattress too much.
And then I stopped. Because for all the things I had done in the last few hours, all the violence, all the rage I had unleashed across Heaven’s bright, stupid face, this felt so much harder. After the way she’d flinched in the van, I was afraid even an arm around her would feel like too much.
I lay there stiffly beside her, not touching, staring up at the ceiling like it might instruct me how not to fail her next. It didn’t, but Evie, mostly asleep and all instinct, solved it for me.
She shifted again, a sleepy little movement, then wiggled backward until her spine met my chest and her body fit against mine like it had been looking for me in the dark.
My throat tightened as I, very carefully, wrapped my arm around her waist. She didn’t flinch or pull away. If anything, she sighed softly and tucked herself closer, like her sleeping body had decided mine was still home even if the waking parts of her were bruised all to hell.
I bent my head and breathed her in, shampoo, salt, the last faint traces of Heaven I hated more than language could hold, and beneath all of it, Evie. And that was enough to undo me.
My eyes burned just in the quiet, private way things sometimes did when there was no one watching. And I held her while she slept. Eventually, somehow, I did too, and I dreamed of losing her again.
In the dream, I was back on the bridge, but it wasn’t the bridge anymore.
It was every place I had ever been too late.
Evie was ahead of me in that same white draped dress, but every time I got close, the space between us lengthened.
The First Light watched from above with that awful patient smile I wanted to rip from His face, and the closer I got to her, those spinners would appear crawling over her skin, unraveling it into gold-white, luminous, light.
I ran harder, and she turned toward me, her mouth moving, but I couldn’t hear the words. Then the bridge cracked beneath her feet, and the whole thing opened up into the Lattice and Riftspinners clicking and swarming and sewing the world shut one bright stitch at a time.
I jumped for her and woke with my heart trying to punch its way out of my chest. Broad daylight flooded the room. And for one disorienting moment, I didn’t know where I was, only that something was wrong, because the bed beside me was empty and cold.
I sat up so fast the room tilted. “Evie?”
I looked around and saw that the bathroom door was cracked open. Then I heard it. The awful, unmistakable sound of someone throwing up.
I was out of bed before the second retch finished.
She was on the bathroom floor, one hand braced against the toilet, the other pressed weakly to the tile beside her, hair hanging forward in dark, miserable strands.
The bright light through the frosted window made her look washed out and swallowed by my shirt.
She was too pale, too thin, and too exhausted to even be properly miserable.
“Evie, Love.”
I dropped beside her immediately, hands hovering for one useless second before I settled one carefully between her shoulder blades.
“Are you okay?”
It was a stupid question. Of course, she wasn’t okay.
She leaned back against the tiled wall when the worst of it passed, breathing through her mouth, eyes half-closed with exhaustion. She gave the smallest shrug, like even the effort of lying was too much for her body.
“I’m fine,” she rasped.
I stared at her. “You’re vomiting.”
She let her head thump back against the tile and closed her eyes. “Yeah. I noticed.”
I slid one arm behind her back and the other beneath her knees.
She made a tiny protesting noise that didn’t even have enough strength in it to become a word.
“No,” I said. “Absolutely not.”
Then I carried her back to bed. She didn’t fight me, and that scared me more than if she had. But I settled her against the pillows, pulled the blankets up, tucked them around her, and stood there for a second trying to think of anything useful I could do for something like this.
“Stay,” I told her.
She gave me a look too weak to qualify as annoyed.
I went to the kitchen and made toast because it was the most mortal, pathetic thing I could think of. Then I made tea too. Plain. Hot. Easy. Something her stomach might hate less than everything else. By the time I brought it back on a tray, she had drifted halfway asleep again.
I set the tea beside her and tore a corner from the toast.
“Just a little,” I said.
She humored me with a tiny bite, too tired to argue properly, nibbling enough to say she had tried. She took a few careful sips of tea. Kept them down. For a moment, I let myself pretend that meant something.
“I’m okay,” she whispered.
“You’re not.”
Her eyes were already closing again. “No,” she murmured, too tired to argue. “Probably not.”
Then she fell asleep before I could say anything else.
Topher didn’t come back that day. Or the next night.
Vespera and Liora were still out searching, but the next night Az and Thyronis went out looking for him after dark, following whatever trails men like them knew how to follow.
They came back the next morning with nothing except more silence and the smell of smoke and night air.
Evie kept getting sick. The first day, I told myself it was the aftermath of everything. The second day, I told myself it was the strain of Heaven, the seam, the magic, trauma wearing a body down in delayed waves. By the third day, I stopped lying to myself.
Something was wrong.
She was weaker now. The vomiting had emptied her out so thoroughly that there was almost nothing left to throw up.
Now she was just dry heaving, and it left her shaking and breathless.
And she was too exhausted to even be furious at the indignity of her own body.
She kept insisting she was fine between bouts, which would have been more convincing if she had been able to stay awake for longer than an hour at a time.
By the afternoon of the third day, I was done pretending this might solve itself.
“I’m calling someone.”
She looked up at me from the bed, pale and wrung out and wrapped in another of my shirts. “A doctor?”
“Yes.”
“What if it’s my magic?” she asked weakly. “This started around the same time. What if I broke something?”
I moved to the side of the bed and sat down, brushing damp hair from her face only after I made sure she saw my hand coming.
“I don’t know,” I said honestly. “Maybe it is. Maybe it’s a stomach bug. Maybe Heaven did something to you.” My jaw tightened around that possibility. “Whatever it is, I’m done guessing.”
She closed her eyes and nodded slowly, looking too tired to argue.
“I’m calling Malach. He’s one of the Fallen, but he’s also a doctor. He’ll figure out if it’s your magic or an illness.”
Malach arrived within the hour with the kind of speed only fear of disappointing Hell’s throne could produce. He was respectful to the point of irritation, tall and clean-handed and dressed in black so severe it bordered on satire.
He bowed the second he entered the room. “My liege.”
“Fix her.”
His eyes flicked past me to Evie and, to his credit, he was smart enough not to say something stupid like I’ll do my best. He moved to the bed, opened his bag, and began asking questions.