Chapter Thirty - Lucifer #3
A little farther on, we found the first sign. Black on black, easy to miss unless you knew what blood was supposed to do. A smear streaked low across the wall, half a hand dragged through soot-colored stone.
It wasn’t red, not even dried brown. This was black. Wet-black. The sheen of oil in firelight. Too dark to be human, too heavy to be anything but Fallen blood.
I stopped. Vespera saw it a second later. Her face changed.
“Topher,” she said quietly.
I reached out and touched the edge of the smear with two fingers. Still tacky and warm. The blood clung to my skin like it resented being left behind.
A sinking feeling ran through me. “He was here.”
Nix had gone rigid. “I told you.”
“Congratulations,” I said. “You’re almost useful.”
We kept moving.
The second sign was a feather caught under an iron hinge where one of the vanished doors had partially failed to disappear. Not white. Black at the shaft, dark gray at the edges where the light hit it. Fallen feathers did not gleam like Heaven’s. They drank light instead of reflecting it.
Vespera bent and pulled it free. It sliced her thumb on the way out. She stared at the blood welling there, then at the feather in her hand.
“This doesn’t look like a clean molt,” she said.
“No.”
Topher hadn’t been shedding. Something had torn it.
A few paces later, Nix stopped so abruptly Vespera nearly walked into him.
“What now?”
He pointed to the floor. A syringe lay in the ash, partially crushed under a boot heel. The barrel had melted at one side, warped inward as if something hot had touched it. Beside it sat a tiny black bead that at first looked like a burn mark. But it wasn’t.
More blood.
My jaw tightened hard enough to crack a tooth. Whoever had brought him here was already living on borrowed time.
Nix took a step back from the syringe like it might bite him. “That wasn’t there before.”
“Then someone came through here recently,” Vespera said.
I stared at the syringe. “Or someone brought him through here and made sure he couldn’t fight his way back out.”
Neither possibility improved my mood.
The corridor narrowed again, forcing us single file. The air grew hotter with pressure and old wards. Iron plates appeared on the walls, blank at first, then not. As we passed, ash would gather over them and form half-words before blowing away again.
A plea. A debt. A command. And once, I could have sworn one plate tried to spell Sariel. But I ignored it.
Nix stopped again at a black-glass door veined through with old cracks. There was no handle or hinges visible, just a slab set into the stone.
“This is it,” he whispered.
“How do you know?”
“Because nothing down here wants to remember this room.”
Vespera crouched, touched the floor near the threshold, and lifted her fingers again.
More black blood.
“He was dragged the last few feet,” she said.
No. I looked closer. There were two handprints, black and smeared, low against the glass itself as if Topher tried to hold himself up. Maybe tried to get in. Maybe tried to get out. And that difference mattered.
“Move,” I told Nix.
He didn’t. I turned my head slowly. His face had gone slick with sweat.
“I—I’m not going in there.”
“Then die out here,” Vespera suggested.
He looked between us, decided neither option came with dignity, and pressed himself flat against the wall.
I stepped to the door. My reflection warped faintly in it, the outline of horns not present, the suggestion of wings that were not there until I wanted them.
I put one hand against the surface. It was warm, alive in the worst possible sense. Then I felt that thread again—Topher. My throat tightened.
“Open,” I said.
The door didn’t move.
Vespera arched a brow. “Commanding architecture. Always effective.”
I ignored her and let my voice drop, lower and deeper, until the stone felt it. “Open.”
This time, the door shivered. The glass peeled back soundlessly into the wall.
The chamber beyond was circular and low-ceilinged, carved from black stone and ringed with old iron restraints bolted directly into the floor and walls.
Not the polished devices from the upper dungeon.
These were older, uglier, and functional.
A single iron frame stood at the center of the room.
And in front of it, hood thrown back, hand braced against one of the uprights as if he’d been waiting for us, stood Damien fucking Crowe.
All I saw was him, and that was enough. My body moved before thought did. I crossed the room so fast the ash jumped in my wake. Damien barely had time to turn his head before I hit him, drove him backward, and slammed him into the nearest wall hard enough to crack the stone.
My hand closed around his throat. His boots kicked once against the floor. Vespera did not bother pretending surprise. Nix made a little choking noise behind us and retreated into some corner of the room like a prey animal.
“You,” I said.
Damien’s face had gone thinner since I’d last seen him.
Harsher. Less flesh over the bones. He’d been down in Patagonia, where I’d left the others, but he looked like hell, like grief had been eating him from the inside.
He clawed once at my wrist and gave up quickly when he realized I was past negotiation. His eyes, though, stayed hard.
“You double-crossing bastard,” I said quietly. “I should have fucking known.”
He made a sound that might have been a laugh if my grip had not been closing off the better part of his windpipe.
“That,” he rasped, “narrows it down so little.”
I tightened my hand. The wall behind him groaned.
“Lucifer,” Vespera said, not warning me exactly. Just reminding me she was there to enjoy this if I wanted an audience.
Then I saw movement past Damien’s shoulder, and I looked beyond him.
And there was Topher, hung half-suspended in the iron frame at the center of the room, wrists bound above him with black straps, held upright because I doubted he could have stayed standing without the help.
His head was bowed. Blond hair hung damp over his face.
His shirt was gone, exposing skin too pale, too hollowed, and streaked with black blood at the mouth.
But it was his arms that stopped me cold. The inside of both his elbow was marked with bruises and punctures. Some had healed, but others had opened again, dark around the edges where his skin had tried and failed to close over damage it did not understand.
For one second, I didn’t understand what I was seeing. Then I did. Track marks.
Topher didn’t use. He barely drank unless forced into it by social obligation or the sort of evening that ended with me replacing furniture.
Topher wore pressed shirts, kept impossible schedules, and treated disorder like a personal failing.
This was not him, which meant either someone had done it to him, or grief had.
My hand loosened around Damian’s throat by a fraction, not because I was finished with him. Because the shape of the crime had changed.
Damien saw me look. “Still want to kill me first?” he asked, voice raw under my hand.
“Yes.”
“Tempting,” Vespera murmured.
I didn’t let go of him. Yet.
“You have one chance,” I said. “One to explain why I should not rip your throat out and leave you for the Maw.”
Damien coughed once, then grimaced his way through a laugh. “Because he’d be dead if I hadn’t gotten to him first.”
I tightened my grip again. “Poor start.”
“It’s the truth.”
“You chained him in a hole under a brothel.”
“I kept him alive.”
“Lucifer,” Vespera said, this time a little sharper. “Listen first. Kill later.”
I hated when she was sensible, and I hated it even more that she was probably right.
Slowly, I loosened my grip enough for Damien to drag in a breath. He sagged, but only for a second before his eyes went back to Topher, and something ugly and exhausted crossed his face.
“I found him in a motel,” Damien said, his voice scraping on the way out. “Off Boulder. Curtains shut. Room stinking of piss, blood, and heroin. He was out of his fucking mind.”
I said nothing. He looked back at me.
“There was a needle on the floor. Another in the mattress. He could barely stand, but he kept trying to get up. Kept trying to walk through walls like he thought one of them might turn into a door if he tried enough.”
Vespera went still. I did too. Topher made a weak sound from the frame. His lips moved.
“Desi,” he whispered. It was barely a sound at all, just the ghost of her name.
Something settled in the room when he said it. Vespera closed her eyes once, fast. When she opened them again, the amusement was gone.
I looked at Damien. “You expect me to believe this was protection?”
“I expect you to believe what’s in front of you.” His jaw flexed. “He was strung out. He was bleeding from the mouth. His wings were trying to tear through his skin every time he twitched. He had the Book with him and no idea what he was doing with it.”