Chapter Thirty-Six - Lucifer #3
Page after page. Title after title. Mask after mask.
My names and not my name. The pages kept turning until they stopped on an entry that looked wrong even before I read it.
The top was crowded with titles, layered over one another until the ink nearly blackened the page.
Then the next lines appeared in steady black ink, and somehow that was worse than a blank space.
First Named: no record.
Created By: no record.
Heavenly Lineage: assigned.
True Name: inaccessible.
Binding: self-fashioned.
Origin System: not recognized.
My blood ran cold as I stared at the words.
Not recognized.
Vespera whispered, “What does that mean?”
No one answered. Even Thyronis had gone very still. Morathis looked from the page to me, and for the first time, the Mirror had nothing clever to offer.
“That is impossible,” Thyronis said.
I did not look at him. “I grow tired of that word.”
“No,” Morathis said softly. “This time, it is accurate.”
The page trembled. Then the titles began to shift again, nearly turning the page black.
Damien’s voice came from the corner. “Elias.” The word was so soft at first I nearly missed it. Then again, rougher. “Elias.”
I turned slowly. Damien’s face had changed. All the defiance had been stripped out of him, the arrogance, the spite. Even the anger had been reduced to something small and raw enough to make the room uncomfortable. He looked at the Book the way starving men looked at locked doors.
“No,” I said.
“Please.” Damien swallowed hard, chains scraping as his hands curled behind him. “Please, Lucifer. If that thing can find pages, if it can find names, then let me know if he’s alive.”
I wanted to refuse on principle and out of spite.
Because of all the shit he’d pulled over the centuries.
Because he had taken Topher and used him.
But then I thought of Evie and what I would do if she were still in The Beloved.
What I would beg for. What I would burn.
And I hated Damien more for being understandable.
I crossed the room in three strides. Damien went still as I reached him. For one second, his eyes flicked to mine, and whatever he saw there made him stop breathing. I grabbed the chain at his wrists and hauled him upright.
The chair scraped violently across the floor behind him before toppling sideways with a sharp metallic crash.
“Lucifer,” Vespera said, but I ignored her.
Damien stumbled as I dragged him toward the table, the chains clanking against the stone, his boots catching twice before he found his balance.
“You want to know?” I said.
His jaw tightened. “Yes.”
I shoved him down beside the table hard enough that his knees hit the floor.
“Then look.”
Damien lifted his head.
The Book waited.
For once, he did not have a clever answer. No sneer. No bitter little barb dressed up as courage. Only fear. Only hope. The ugliest hope I had ever seen.
“Don’t waste this,” I said.
His eyes stayed on the Book. “I won’t.”
“The Book needs an anchor,” Morathis said.
Damien didn’t look away from me. “I have one.”
“Blood?” Thyronis asked.
“No.” His voice shook. “Memory.”
The Book turned toward him, but not physically. It only felt that way. And Damien flinched.
“Use it,” I said.
Morathis stepped closer. “Careful. A true memory may be taken.”
“I don’t care,” Damien said.
“That is rarely true,” she replied.
He ignored her as the Book’s pages began to turn, slowly this time.
Damien closed his eyes. His face tightened, and for one second, I saw whatever memory he gave it.
It wasn’t mine to see, but I saw a flicker of a man laughing in warm lamplight, dark hair falling into his eyes.
A hand brushing a wrist. A mouth saying his name like it was something sacred.
Then the memory vanished, and Damien sucked in a breath like the Book had taken a rib with it. It stopped on a page that looked blank. And a name surfaced—Elias.
Damien made a sound like something had broken open inside him. Another line appeared beneath it.
Elias
Called: The Devoted.
His face twisted. “No,” he whispered.
The Book didn’t care as more ink crawled into place.
First Named: Elias
Created By: recorded
Heavenly Lineage: prophet
Binding: imposed
Location: The Beloved
State: living
Memory: altered
Will: suppressed
Claim: active
Damien sagged against the chains. Living.
I saw the word hit him, how it saved him and destroyed him in the same breath.
Then the page shuddered. The ink blurred.
For one second, it became a room with white curtains and gold light.
A man sitting very still with flowers in his hands.
He was both beautiful and wrong, but empty in a way no living thing should be.
Damien stopped breathing. “Elias,” he whispered.
The man on the page didn’t look up. And then the image vanished, and the page was blank again. Damien bowed his head.
For a long moment, no one spoke. Even Vespera looked away. I should have closed the Book then. I knew that. Close it. Cover it. Lock it away. Go back to Evie.
Suddenly, the Reliquary doors burst open, and Topher stood there, barely. Liora was behind him, one hand hovering near his shoulder like she expected him to fall and was trying not to make it obvious.
He looked terrible. Paler than before and hollow-eyed, with one hand braced against the door frame.
I turned toward him. “You’re supposed to be in bed.”
He ignored me and fixed his gaze on the Book. Whatever softness had remained in his face disappeared.
“It’s awake.”
“I noticed.”
“We need to put it away.”
“Eventually.”
“That’s never a comforting word from you.”
His eyes moved to the open pages. Then to Damien on his knees beside the table. Then back to me.
“What did you do?”
“Asked it a question.”
Topher’s expression tightened. “And it answered?”
I shrugged. “Enough.”
He swallowed, and the motion looked painful. “Then stop.”
“No.”
“Lucifer—”
“I need Lilith’s page.”
The room went still.
Vespera’s gaze snapped to mine. “What the fuck for?”
“Lilith wants her page,” Morathis said softly.
“She wants her names,” Thyronis corrected.
Topher’s eyes narrowed. “Why?”
“Because her page reveals her true one,” I said.
Damien lifted his head sharply from where he still knelt beside the table. “You’re just… giving it to her?”
“No.”
The Book turned pages by itself, slowly, as if it were listening. I hated that.
“I’m giving her exactly enough rope to see whether she knows how to hang herself.”
Topher said very quietly, “What can I do?”
I looked at him. “Can you isolate a page and hide it?”
He let out a soft exhale. “Maybe.” And then he stepped into the room.
Every ward in the Reliquary pulled tight, recoiling from both him and the Book. The air snapped, and Topher nearly stumbled. Liora caught his elbow. He didn’t thank her, but he also didn’t pull away.
The Book’s pages began to flip again. I placed one hand on the table, careful not to touch it. “Lilith.”
The pages turned.
“First wife,” Vespera said.
The Book hissed but continued flipping.
Morathis tilted her head. “Blood-bound.”
The pages whipped faster.
Thyronis added, “Queen of Hell.”
The Book stopped. A page opened near the back, though back and front meant little to a thing that seemed to rearrange itself according to appetite. At first, the page was blank. Then ink bled upward from beneath the surface. A name appeared. Then another and another.
Seventeen lines unfurled down the page, each written in a different script, some scrawled in sharp print, others in looping elegant script. And still others in ancient languages I hadn’t read in a long time.
Lilith.
Layil.
Naamah.
Ardat Lili.
The Night-Walker.
The First Bloodbound.
The Unmothered Bride.
Queen of Ash.
Bride of the Rebellion.
Keeper of the First Vow.
Nine more names followed, stranger, older, less like language and more like scars pretending to be letters. And at the very bottom of the page, beneath all seventeen, one line pulsed faintly beneath a veil of gold ink. Her true name. It was hidden and waiting.
Vespera leaned closer. “Well. That’s interesting.”
Damien’s voice came rough from the floor. “If she gets that page, she’ll be free of Him. And who knows what else.”
“And if she lies about the map,” I said, “she won’t.”
Topher met my eyes. He understood before I said the rest. He swallowed roughly. “No.”
“Yes.”
“You want to bind the page to a bargain.”
“I want to bind her names to the truth of the map.”
“That’s not the same thing.”
“No,” I said. “It’s better.”
Topher’s jaw tightened. “That kind of binding could tear through the page or through her.”
My gaze narrowed, and so did his. The only sound in the Reliquary was the soft, restless shifting of the Book.
Then I said, “If Lilith gives me a false map, I want her to feel it before we show up to The Beloved and die because she got clever.”
Topher didn’t answer, so I leaned closer. “I need you to tie this to her making a map of The Beloved. Every room. Every corridor. If she lies, omits a chamber, or makes one pretty little hallway lead to the wrong place, I want her names, one by one, to vanish in smoke.”
The Book pulsed, that hungry little bastard.
Topher’s face paled further. “Names don’t just vanish.”
“These will.”
“No,” Morathis said softly. “But they could… burn.”
Everyone looked at her. She studied the page with an expression I didn’t like.
“If you take it by smoke, it becomes unreachable. A door with no handle.”
Thyronis’s eyes sharpened. “A fitting penalty for a false map.”
Topher looked at him. “You are all too comfortable with this.”
Vespera lifted a shoulder. “Some of us have known Lilith longer.”
“And some of us,” I said, “are tired of bargaining with people who think betrayal is a signature fragrance.”
Lilith’s page remained open and waiting.
Topher stepped closer to the table. “I can make the tether.”
“Good.”
“I need something of hers.”
I looked at the page.
Topher shook his head. “Something beyond that page.”
Vespera reached into a pocket and pulled out a black pin shaped like a thorn. I stared at her.