Chapter Twenty-Eight - Lucifer #2
“I don’t,” he said quickly. “I swear it on my remaining eye, and I am very attached to that one.”
“Where is it?”
“No one knows.”
“Someone knows.”
“Obviously someone knows,” he snapped, then caught himself and visibly regretted discovering a spine. “But not me.”
I watched him as he fidgeted under the weight of it.
“However,” he said.
“There it is.”
“There’s another whisper. Smaller, dirtier, and probably truer.”
I said nothing. He looked toward the door, then back to me.
“The Nephilim knows something.”
My blood cooled. “Vespera.”
He nodded. “They’re saying she’s been asking questions. Following old routes. Buying silence in places where silence costs more than blood. The sort of thing one does when one is either hunting something or hiding from it.”
“Vespera isn’t hiding.”
“That I don’t know,” Marcellus said carefully. “But she might be hunting someone who is.”
It had to be Topher. I’d sent her after him. I looked at Marcellus for a long moment. He tried not to tremble and failed.
“Who told you this?” I asked.
“A bone courier out of the Red Chapel.”
“Name.”
“Pulcin.”
“Alive?”
“At last rumor.”
“Where?”
“South end. Underpass near the old flood channels. But he won’t know more than I do.”
“I’m sure everyone knows more than you do.”
“That wounds me, sire.”
“Good.”
I turned for the door. Marcellus exhaled behind me too soon. And I stopped. He froze.
“One more thing,” I said.
“Yes, Your Highness?”
“If I discover you knew more and decided to ration truth like a miser, I will take the other eye.”
His voice thinned. “Understood.”
“And Marcellus?”
“Yes?”
“Prague isn’t forgotten.”
His face fell. “I was afraid of that.”
“You should be.”
I left him in the storage room with the shattered gin and the smell of his own fear. The bar went silent when I stepped back out. No one looked at me directly. Demons had many flaws, but survival instinct was rarely one of them.
I crossed The Serpent’s Tongue without stopping, though my gaze snagged once on the empty space behind the bar. Evie should have been there, throwing attitude at customers and pretending she didn’t watch the door when I walked in. And me pretending I didn’t enjoy being watched.
Instead, she was upstairs, trapped in our bed, trying her best to carry our children, while the universe sharpened knives around the only home I had ever wanted.
My phone was already in my hand before I reached the lobby. I called Vespera. She answered on the fifth ring, which was either an insult or a sign she was somewhere inconvenient. With Vespera, it was often both.
“Lucifer,” she purred, breathless in a way that suggested violence, sex, or stairs. “How’s Evie?”
“She’s at home, doing better. But I just heard a fascinating rumor.”
“Oh, good. I love gossip.”
“The Book of Names is missing.”
She was silent, but not surprised. And that was the problem.
I pushed through the revolving doors into the night. The Strip burned around The Revel in neon and hunger. Cars slid along the curb. Tourists laughed too loudly. Somewhere nearby, a woman shouted at a man dressed as a vampire for losing her purse.
Rafi stood beside the black car waiting at the entrance, immaculate as always, one hand resting lightly on the open rear door. He saw my face and wisely said nothing.
“Vespera,” I said.
She sighed. “I—I was going to tell you.”
That, too, was a problem.
“When? After the next apocalypse?”
“When I knew more.”
“I sent you to look for Topher.”
“I am,” she said, and the flippancy left her voice for half a second. “But with Evie, and her being sick, you were one bad look away from flaying anyone who breathed too loudly.”
“Vespera.”
“I didn’t want to bring you a rumor when I could bring you a direction.”
I stopped beside the car. Rafi’s eyes flicked toward me, then away.
“What direction?”
Vespera went quiet again, but this time I heard noise behind her. Music, low with a filthy bass. Then, laughter, and a woman moaning theatrically enough that I doubted she meant it.
My grip tightened on the phone. “Where’re you?”
“Following a trail.”
“To Topher?”
“Yes.”
I looked out over the bright, stupid city and felt Hell open one patient eye beneath my skin.
“Tell me where.”
“There are whispers he crossed through the west tunnels two nights ago,” she said. “I’m not sure if he was alone, or even conscious. Hard to say. Every witness suddenly developed memory problems, which means someone paid well or frightened better.”
“Who?”
“That’s what I am trying to find out,” she said, exasperated.
“Where are you?”
A pause. “The Velvet Ash.”
My jaw flexed. Of fucking course.
The Velvet Ash was not a sanctioned brothel, not officially.
It was a demon brothel, 60 miles outside of Vegas, tucked under an older brothel that had been closed and imploded years ago, though the lower levels had never quite accepted the demolition.
The entrance moved. It catered to appetites The Siren Room would have laughed out the door.
Hardcore was the polite word. The impolite ones were more accurate.
“I thought you hated that place,” I said.
“I do.”
“You used to call it a sewage pipe with mood lighting.”
“That was me being kind.”
“And yet there you are.”
“Because, unlike my establishment, The Velvet Ash takes clients who do not want beauty. They want damage. Pain. Secrets. Things without names.” Her voice sharpened. “It is exactly the kind of place a broken angel might crawl into if he didn’t want to be found.”
Topher. A broken angel. I hated how well it fit.
“I’m coming.”
“I assumed.”
“Do not go in alone.”
She laughed once. “Adorable.”
“Vespera.”
The warning in my voice made even Rafi glance over.
On the other end, Vespera’s amusement softened into something more serious.
“I’m not inside… yet,” she said. “I’m sitting across the street in a shitty biker bar, watching the entrance. I found one of their runners, and he said a man matching Topher’s description was brought in through the back.”
“Brought?”
“Yes.”
My vision darkened at the edges. “Alive?”
“I think so.”
“You think so?”
“I was in the process of removing more information from him when you called.”
“How inconsiderate of me.”
“You do have wretched timing.”
“Stay where you are.”
“I can handle myself.”
“I know.”
“Then why do you sound like that?”
Because Destiny was dead. Topher was missing. Evie still had Heaven’s fingerprints on her body. Because every person who had stood too close to me lately had become a target, a corpse, or a wound waiting to happen.
“Because I am tired of collecting pieces of people I failed to protect,” I said.
Vespera said nothing, for once.
I got into the car, and Rafi shut the door behind me with quiet precision and slid into the driver’s seat.
“The Velvet Ash,” I said.
His eyes met mine in the rearview mirror, just for a second.
“Yes, sir.”
The car pulled away from The Revel. Neon streaked across the windows.
Vespera’s voice returned, quieter now. “There is one more thing.”
“Of course there is.”
“The runner said whoever brought him in had something warded. He didn’t see it clearly, but he said it burned through the cloth they wrapped it in.”
My hand went still on my knee. “Burned how?”
“Gold light,” she said. “Not celestial, but older. And the wards were not just demonic.”
I stared out at the city. “Nephilim blood,” I said.
Vespera exhaled. “That was my thought.”
Something cold and ancient moved through me. I smiled then, not because anything was funny. If the universe insisted on handing me targets, it shouldn’t be surprised when I behaved like a weapon.
“Wait for me,” I told her.
“I’ll try.”
“You’ll need to do better than try.”
She scoffed.
“Vespera,” I said, low, letting power fill my voice.
She went quiet at that. Then, softer, “Hurry.”
The call ended, and I looked ahead through the windshield as Rafi drove us deeper into the city’s glittering rot.
Las Vegas had always understood something Heaven never had. Sin did not hide in darkness. It dressed well. It smiled for the cameras. It left fingerprints on crystal glasses and blood beneath the floorboards. And I had built this empire out of knowing the difference.
I leaned back against the seat and unzipped my jacket. “Faster,” I said.
Rafi pressed the gas. The Revel vanished behind us, and Hell rode with me into the night.
The desert swallowed the city by degrees. The lights thinned, and the road grew emptier. Gas stations. Pawn shops. A chapel with a broken steeple and a sign offering weddings, annulments, and tax preparation.
Then even that disappeared as the land flattened into black dirt, scrub, and distance. The sky stretched wide and moonless over the desert, and the farther we drove, the more the world seemed to peel back into something older and meaner.
Rafi drove without speaking. A useful quality I would reward later.
The tether between Evie and me sat under my skin like a dark wire pulled taut. She was asleep, or near enough to it. I could feel her there in the blurred, distant way of someone drifting between exhaustion and dreams as her body fought to recover and still grow two tiny sparks of life.
I wanted to turn the car around. I wanted to go back home, climb into our bed, wrap my arms around her to keep her safe, and refuse to move until the universe rotted around us.
Instead, I was hunting. Because Topher was missing. And with Destiny dead, I knew it was killing him, or maybe it already had.
I was running out of patience and beginning to enjoy the feeling. And this was not going to end well for anyone who defied me.