Chapter Twenty-Eight - Lucifer
CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT
Lucifer
I DIDN’T WANT to, but I left Evie in our bed with an IV in one hand, and the other curled protectively over her stomach as if she could guard our children from the entire universe by sheer stubbornness alone.
Knowing Evie, she might manage it.
Azazael stood near the bedroom door, motionless like an executioner waiting for a name. Liora sat in the chair beside the bed with a book open in her lap, though she hadn’t turned a page in the twenty minutes she’d been here.
The nurses had just changed shift, and this new one kept pretending she wasn’t terrified of me every time I moved. A wise woman.
By the time I left, Evie was falling asleep again. Her hair was loose against the pillow. Her face was still too pale and thin. Her mouth was pressed into the shape of an argument she did not have the strength to win.
“You’re going to find him?” she asked.
“I’m going to start with finding someone who owes me a favor and can tell me where to start.”
“That is not the same thing.”
“No,” I said. “But it’s better than nothing.”
Her mouth twitched, tired and almost amused. “Don’t kill anyone unless they deserve it.”
I looked at her.
She sighed. “Fine. Don’t kill anyone unless they really deserve it.”
“That I can work with.”
Her eyes softened, and for one dangerous second, I nearly stayed. The urge was pathetic. It was also feral.
I wanted to lock the doors, shutter the windows, tear the wings off anything that came too close, and pretend the world had narrowed to the shape of her breathing.
I wanted to pretend Topher wasn’t missing, Destiny wasn’t dead, and Heaven hadn’t left its goddamn fingerprints all over the woman I loved.
But pretending was for gods and cowards. And I had been both long enough. So I bent and kissed Evie’s forehead, because her mouth would have ruined me.
“Rest,” I murmured.
She gave me a look. “Bossy.”
Then she reached for my hand. I gave it to her immediately, because I wasn’t strong where she was concerned. I had never been strong there, not even when I had forgotten why.
Her fingers squeezed mine once. “Bring him home,” she whispered.
I looked at her hand in mine, then at her face. “I will.”
The promise tasted like blood.
By the time the private elevator carried me down from the penthouse, I had already called ahead.
“Have the car brought around,” I told the front desk.
“Yes, sir. Rafi?”
“Yes.”
“Of course, Mr. Morningstar.”
The elevator doors opened into a private corridor below the main casino floor, where the air changed immediately.
Less quiet, more human. Perfume, liquor, money, and smoke threaded into fabric though no one had been allowed to smoke inside my hotel for years.
But desire had a smell and so did desperation. And the Revel breathed with both.
I should have gone straight to the car. Instead, I turned toward The Serpent’s Tongue.
The bar glowed like a secret beneath the casino, dark, moody, and opulent. The velvet booths and polished black granite. There was low light pooled in every corner, turning the shadows soft and dangerous.
It was the kind of place that whispered sin and poured it neat, seduction without trying, and luxurious in a way that felt almost obscene. A bar built for indulgence, for confession, and for bad decisions made with steady hands and hungry mouths.
My chest tightened, and I hated the feeling.
Evie’s bar. The thought struck harder than it should have.
I saw her everywhere. Behind the counter, her pink hair catching the glow and rolling her eyes at some drunk idiot who thought tipping twenty dollars gave him the right to be interesting.
Laughing with Destiny near the service station and looking at me that first night like I was a problem she had not yet decided whether to solve or make worse.
I had built empires from grief. I had turned exile into architecture. I had made Hell out of ruin and spite and a refusal to kneel. And still, one woman’s absence from a bar nearly put me on my knees. It was pathetic, and worse, it was true.
The Serpent’s Tongue was half-empty this early, occupied mostly by the usual rot that crawled out before the night’s better-dressed rot arrived.
A pair of incubi lounged near the back wall, beautiful and bored, sharing a bottle of something older than the nation it had been distilled in.
A horned brute from the lower districts nursed a glass of bourbon with hands too large for the tumbler.
Three minor greed demons argued over a sports bet they had all cheated on.
Near the far booth, wearing a cream suit he had no business staining with his existence, sat Marcellus Vane. He saw me and stopped smiling.
Good.
Marcellus was a whisper demon, though he preferred to introduce himself as a consultant which was charming in the way a poison apple was charming. He dealt in secrets, favors, debts, and blackmail polished enough to look like opportunity.
He had also once sold a dozen damned souls to a cult outside Prague while using my name as collateral, and that had annoyed me.
Not because I objected to soul trafficking on principle, although I had standards, contrary to popular slander.
No, it had annoyed me because he had promised those souls protection under my banner.
My banner. Without permission.
When the cult collapsed in fire and screaming, as cults often did when idiots with candles mistake theatrics for theology, Marcellus came crawling to me with three broken ribs, one badly damaged eye hanging by tethered threads of tissue, and enough nerve to ask for sanctuary.
I gave it to him. After I took the eye.
He owed me for his life. He owed me for the lie. And most of all, he owed me because I had let him keep breathing, even though making him into wall art would have improved the ambiance of several rooms.
His one remaining eye flicked toward the exit. I smiled, and he froze.
“Marcellus,” I said.
The incubi stopped talking. The greed demons found sudden interest in their drinks.
“Your Highness,” Marcellus said, rising too quickly. “What an unexpected honor.”
“Is it?”
“Always.”
“Liar.”
His smile trembled. “Only recreationally.”
I crossed the bar toward him, and he had enough sense not to run.
I reached him, clapped one hand on his shoulder, and felt his bones remember me.
His glamour flickered. For half a second, his cream suit became ash-stained skin, too many teeth, and a mouth that opened farther than any face should allow.
Then he was handsome again. Sweating.
“We need to talk,” I said.
His gaze darted around the room. “Of course. Here?”
“No.”
I dragged him by the back of his collar toward the service hallway.
He stumbled once, caught himself, and gave a nervous laugh. “Still so direct. I’ve always admired that about you.”
“You once told a room full of Latvian necromancers that I authorized a blood tithe.”
“Yes, well.” He winced as I shoved open the back door. “I was younger then.”
“That was twelve years ago.”
“I age emotionally at a glacial pace.”
I threw him into the storage room behind the bar.
He hit a stack of liquor crates hard enough to rattle glass. A bottle shifted, fell, and shattered against the floor. The smell of gin bloomed sharp and botanical between us.
I shut the door behind me. The noise of the bar dulled to a bass-heavy pulse.
Marcellus straightened and brushed invisible dust from his lapel. “If this is about Prague—”
“It’s not.”
“Oh, good.”
“Yet.”
His mouth closed.
I stepped closer, and he stepped back until the crates kissed his spine.
“I need whispers,” I said.
His expression changed. The fear remained, but a little interest crawled in beside it. He was what he was. A creature made for the rot under doors and the secrets spoken into voids.
“Whispers about what?”
“Heaven.”
That made him go pale, not human pale. Demon pale, like coal ash.
“I don’t traffic in that realm.”
“You traffic in anything that buys you another day.”
“True, but I prefer my days with my skin attached.”
I tilted my head. “Marcellus.”
He swallowed. The sound was small.
Good.
“I need to know if anyone has heard about Sariel.”
His eye sharpened. “Sariel?”
“Don’t play stupid with me.”
“I wouldn’t dare.”
“You would. You’re simply afraid to do it badly.”
He gave a weak smile. “That’s… fair.”
“Topher,” I said. “My employee. Sariel, to anyone still stupid enough to use Heaven’s names. He’s missing.”
“Ah.”
Something about the sound made my hand close around his throat before I thought about it. I lifted him onto his toes.
“Ah?” I asked softly.
His fingers clawed at my wrist. “Not judgment. Recognition. Very different sounds. Easy mistake.”
“Speak carefully.”
“I have… heard… things.”
My grip tightened. His eye bulged. I loosened my hand enough for him to breathe.
“Where?”
“I don’t know where he is.”
“Then I’m already bored.”
“But I know what the whispers are tangled around.”
I waited. Marcellus licked his lips, suddenly miserable in a way that pleased me only a little.
“There’s a rumor,” he said. “The sort of gossip that comes through things with wings and no loyalty.”
“Say it.”
“The Book of Names is missing.”
For a second, the world narrowed. Every sound in the storage room became brutally precise. The drip of gin from the cracked bottle. The faint electric buzz in the ceiling light. Marcellus’s breath scraping too quickly in his throat.
“The Book of Names,” I said.
“Yes.”
“Is missing.”
“So they say.”
My hand fell from his neck. He dropped back onto his heels and immediately pretended he had chosen to stand that way.
I stared at him. The Book of Names could not simply go missing. It was the oldest binding in existence, a record and a chain, a holy lie written beautifully enough to pass for truth.
It was guarded in Heaven by the angels. It held names. True names. Given names. Stolen names. Names erased so completely, even memory bled around the wound. I still had Evie’s page hidden, which had been torn from it once.
“Who has it?” I asked.
Marcellus lifted both hands. “That, I don’t know.”
I stepped toward him.