Chapter Thirty-Two - Lucifer
CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO
Lucifer
BY THE TIME we got Topher into the car, he was barely conscious. That was probably for the best. Rafi drove with both hands on the wheel and the focused silence of a man who understood he had somehow become chauffeur to a disaster with a body count pending.
Vespera sat in the front passenger seat, one knee angled toward the door, her head turned just enough that I knew she was watching Topher’s reflection in the side mirror.
Damien sat across from me in the back, wrists bound in a length of infernal chain I had taken from The Velvet Ash because I still didn’t trust him.
Topher was beside me, slumped against the window, his head tipped against the glass as the desert blurred black beyond him. He was alive. Alive, and that was all I let myself care about for the moment. But it wasn’t absolution.
I looked at Damien. His face was turned toward the window, the passing dark cutting across his reflection in thin, broken strips. He looked exhausted and hollowed out, but not frightened enough, which continued to irritate me. His throat was already bruising where my hand had been.
Good.
“Where is it?” I asked.
Damien didn’t look at me. “Where I told you it was.”
“You told me nothing.”
“I told you it was safe.”
Vespera sighed from the front seat. “Damien, do you want to die tonight?”
His gaze flicked to the front seat. “I’d forgotten how much I missed your commentary.”
“No, you hadn’t.”
Rafi said nothing. A wise man.
I leaned forward just enough for the chain around Damien’s wrists to tighten. It looped through the handle above the door and held there with a minor Hell-binding that was both elegant and painful, and impossible to break unless he intended to leave both hands behind.
I wasn’t opposed to that experiment.
“I am going to ask one more time,” I said. “Where is the Book?”
Damien finally looked at me. There was resentment in his face, but it wasn’t just resentment. There was grief and the brittle fury of a man who had convinced himself that desperation was the same thing as righteousness.
“I don’t have it.”
I let the silence sit for half a second, and then I smiled.
His jaw tightened. “Lucifer.”
“Careful.”
“I’m telling you the truth.”
“You dragged one of mine into a demon dungeon over a relic you no longer possess.” I let my voice go soft. “You can understand why your bullshit answers fail to soothe me.”
“I didn’t say I never had it.”
“Then use the brief remainder of your life to become helpful.”
Damien’s eyes cut toward Topher. I followed his gaze to the man slumped against the window.
Topher’s lashes rested against his cheeks.
His breathing was uneven but steady enough.
His fingers twitched once against the leather seat, as if some part of him had heard us talking about the thing he had tried to bury.
I looked back at Damien. “Explain.”
He swallowed. “When I found him, he had it.”
The road hummed beneath us. I said nothing.
“He had the Book wrapped in black cloth and so many wards they were bleeding light through the fibers,” Damien continued. “He was barely standing, but he knew enough to keep it away from me.”
“Where is it now?”
“He hid it.”
“Where?”
Damien gave me a humorless little smile. “Not in a where.”
I went still. Vespera’s expression changed in the mirror.
He saw that we understood enough to dislike the next sentence. “He folded it into a pathway,” he said. “A dead one. Between… realms, somewhere no one can touch it unless he opens the way back.”
I looked at Topher again.
Vespera’s voice came quieter. “What kind of dead pathway?”
“The kind only he could make,” Damien said. “You know how good he is at shortening pathways, cutting them off, folding a route so neatly no one can follow unless he wants them to.”
I did know, and that was the problem.
My eyes returned to Damien. “Do not call him Sariel.”
“I didn’t.”
“You were about to.”
His mouth tightened, and I was glad.
Topher stirred at my side even though he wasn’t awake. But when Damien said pathway, something in him answered. His fingers curled slightly against the seat. His breathing hitched once, then settled.
The Book of Names was nowhere, and the only person who could retrieve it was barely conscious beside me. I leaned back in my seat, rage moving through me with nowhere clean to go.
“Why?” Vespera asked.
Damien looked at her in the mirror. “Why what?”
“Why hide it there?”
His laugh was short and ugly. “I have no idea. But my guess is that he knows Heaven wants it. Hell would probably sell it. And Lucifer would open it.”
I smiled without warmth. “You are very comfortable accusing me for a man in chains.”
“I am very comfortable being right.”
The binding around his wrists tightened on its own, responding to the shift in my mood. Damien grimaced but didn’t look away.
Vespera’s mouth curved faintly. “I’d be careful, darling. His patience has been medically downgraded from limited to decorative.”
Damien ignored her. “The safest place for that goddamn Book is where no one can find it.”
“A dead pathway,” I said.
“Yes.”
“But you brought him to the Cinder Maw to force him to open it.”
His gaze sharpened. “No.”
“No?”
“I brought him there because the Maw is filthy enough to hide the scent of it while I figured out what the hell to do next.”
“Touching. Almost paternal.”
His eyes flashed. “I was trying to keep him alive.”
“You were trying to keep your leverage alive.”
“Yes,” he snapped. “But… both can be true.”
And there was his honesty.
Vespera looked from Damien to Topher and back again. “And what was your grand plan? Waltz up to Heaven’s door with the Book in one hand and Topher in the other?”
Damien’s face changed, not enough for most people to notice, but enough for me.
“Not Heaven’s front door,” he said.
The car seemed to shrink around us.
I tilted my head. “You found another way in.”
“I found rumors.”
“Through whom?”
“Those who hate Heaven almost as much as I do.”
“Specific.”
“Those who don’t want to be named in cars with the Devil.”
“How delicate of them.”
Damien leaned forward as much as the chain allowed. “You think I did this because I wanted to cross you.”
“You do have a history.”
“I did this because I gave you The Beloved, and you got Evie out.”
Her name hit me like a match.
My eyes narrowed. “Careful.”
“No.” Damien’s voice cracked, then hardened around the break. “I was careful. I was careful in Patagonia when I watched Liora and Vespera leave to help get her back. I was careful when no one asked if I wanted to come. I was careful when I heard she survived.”
Vespera went very still.
Damien looked at me. “And I was glad,” he said. “God help me, I was. But Elias is still in there.”
The car fell silent. Elias. I had to reach for the name. Because I had buried it beneath everything. But Damien saw it. The flicker in my face. The half breath of delay. And his mouth tightened, and the guilt struck harder because I deserved it.
Rafi’s hands tightened once on the wheel.
Damien’s jaw worked as if he hated the next words before he said them. “I gave you the door to your miracle, Lucifer. Mine’s still behind it.”
I said nothing. Because if I spoke too quickly, I might say something true.
Damien leaned back against the seat, the chain scraping softly over the leather.
“So yes. When I heard the Book was missing, I wanted to find it first. Not because I care what’s in it.
I know it’s not hiding some fairytale key to save him.
” His mouth twisted. “I wanted it because Heaven wants it back.”
“Leverage,” Vespera said.
Damien looked at her. “Exactly.”
My voice went cold. “Against Heaven.”
“Against anyone who can open a way to The Beloved.”
I looked out the window. The desert stretched black and empty beyond the glass. And I hated how well it fit and that Damien knew it.
“Where is the anchor?” I asked.
Damien went quiet.
“Lucifer,” Vespera said softly.
She heard it too. The danger in the question.
Damien looked at Topher. Then at me. His breath fogged the window. In. Out. Uneven, but there.
“The Book is anchored to him now. Isn’t it?” I asked.
Damien didn’t answer. He didn’t need to.
I leaned back, very slowly, and stared at the road ahead. Somewhere between places, hidden inside a dead path only Topher could reopen, the Book of Names waited. Tethered to the man beside me. And if Heaven wanted it badly enough, they would come for him.
I slipped my phone out of my pocket and dialed.
Vespera turned toward me. “Who are you calling?”
“Az.”
Damien’s gaze sharpened. “Why?”
“I left him with Evie.”
The bond in my chest tightened the moment I thought her name. The only home I had ever wanted, sleeping above a city full of teeth.
The phone rang once, twice. Then Az answered. “Lucifer.”
“Is she asleep?”
A pause. “No.”
My chest tightened. “Why not?”
Az’s voice lowered. “She woke up asking for you.”
The desert blurred past the window. I looked at Topher. Then at Damien. Then, at the dark road ahead, stretching toward Vegas like a vein cut through the night.
“What happened?” I asked.
Az was silent for one beat too long. Then he said, “She said the babies communicated with her.”
Every part of me went still. The kind of stillness that came before violence, prayer, or ruin.
“What?” I asked.
“In a dream. In a garden,” Az said. “She said—”
“Put her on the phone.”
A pause. “Lucifer—”
“Now.”
The car went silent around me. Vespera turned fully in the passenger seat, one arm braced against the back of it. Damien stopped moving. Even Rafi’s eyes flicked to the rearview mirror before returning to the road.
There was rustling on the other end of the call. A low murmur. Az’s voice, gentler than I had expected from him. Then the faintest sound of shifting sheets.
And then her. “Luc?”
My ribs tightened around the sound of her voice. “Love.”
“I’m okay.”
“You’re never allowed to begin a sentence with that again.”
A weak breath moved through the line. Almost a laugh, but not quite. “I’m fine, really,” she said.
“Marginal improvement.”
“I’m not hurt.”
That should have soothed me. It didn’t.