Chapter Thirty-Seven - Evie #2
The next two days passed in a strange, tense blur.
Malach came back the following morning and did an ultrasound, which I realized would be my new normal.
Both babies were exactly where they were supposed to be, small and real and stubbornly alive on the screen.
Their heartbeats flickered in rapid little flashes while Luc stood beside me with one hand on my shoulder, silent in a way that made me want to cry and make fun of him at the same time.
Malach finally cleared me to get out of bed, but I was supposed to be cautious. I was no longer technically imprisoned in our bed, though Luc heard “be cautious” and translated it into “personally supervise my relationship with gravity.”
Still, I took the win.
By the third morning, when we were supposed to meet Lilith, I had a bad feeling before we ever left.
It wasn’t nerves. Nerves were fluttery and shallow and usually involved things like public speaking or seeing an ex in a grocery store when you looked like you’d recently been sleeping at a bus stop.
This was different. This sat low in my body like a stone. And by the time I stood in the middle of our bedroom at a little before four in the morning, pulling on boots with Luc watching me like he was considering physically carrying me back to bed, that feeling had only gotten worse.
No one had really slept. Not me or Lucifer, and I doubted anyone else had gotten any sleep either, including Topher.
He was almost back to normal in all measurable ways. The bruising had faded. The blackness that had once crawled under his skin was gone. The tremors had stopped. He could walk, speak, focus, and open paths without nearly folding himself inside out.
But he still wasn’t himself. The dry wit was gone. The little cuts of sarcasm. The crisp irritation that always made him sound like the universe had inconvenienced him personally and would be hearing about it in writing.
Now he spoke only when he had to, and even then, his voice sounded like something dragged up from underwater. I’d caught him once the day before, standing in the hall outside the guest room window, staring out at Vegas with an expression so empty it made my throat close.
When I’d asked if he was okay, he’d looked at me for one long second and said, “No,” like it was just a question about the weather. Then he’d walked away. And it nearly killed me.
I finished with my boots and stood. Luc was already dressed in black, of course. Dark button-down. Dark pants. Dark coat. The kind of outfit that made him look like death had developed exquisite taste and cheekbones.
He watched me from where he stood near the bed, arms crossed, expression carved from all the things he wasn’t saying.
“You’re staring,” I said.
“I’m thinking.”
“That sounds ominous.”
“It is.”
I moved toward him anyway, and he uncrossed his arms just in time for me to step into them. The second he touched me, my whole body tried to give up all its borrowed strength and just stay there.
His mouth pressed to my temple as his hands settled low at my back.
“I don’t want you to go,” he said quietly.
I leaned back enough to look up at him. “You literally told me that sixteen times last night.”
“It was true every time.”
“I know.”
That was the problem.
He wasn’t trying to control me. He was trying not to lose me. And unfortunately for both of us, that made his high-handed nonsense much harder to argue with.
I slid my hand up his chest and caught a fold of his shirt in my fist. “I have a bad feeling.”
His face changed immediately. A tightening around the eyes. A stillness in his mouth. “About this morning?”
I nodded.
“Specific or general?”
“General with a strong undercurrent of please let’s not do this.”
One side of his mouth hitched up. “Compelling.”
“I’m serious.”
“I know.”
He brought his hands around to my belly as I looked down.
I hadn’t felt the bubbles again. Not in the last couple of days. No tiny flutters. No strange answer, like when Luc touched my stomach as if they already knew the shape of his hand.
I kept telling myself that was normal. It was too early. Maybe the times before had been gas or my imagination, or even my body carrying the memory of that strange garden dream, because apparently my nervous system had decided to leave echoes in places I could feel.
I laid my hand over his. “I don’t like it.”
His fingers spread slightly beneath mine. “Neither do I.”
“Then tell me we won’t go.”
“No.”
I looked up sharply. He held my gaze.
“Because if we don’t go,” he said, “we lose that map. We lose whatever chance Lilith is offering, however poisoned it is. We lose what we need to get into The Beloved on our terms. Don’t you want to save them?”
“She’s probably lying.”
“Yes.”
“That doesn’t bother you?”
“It bothers me constantly.” His thumb moved once against my side. “But lying and useful are not mutually exclusive. I should know.”
I exhaled.
He leaned down and kissed my forehead. “Stay close to me,” he said.
“I always do.”
“Closer.”
“That’s hard to accomplish when you’re already trying to crawl under my skin.”
“Be grateful I haven’t tried harder.”
I almost smiled, but that bad feeling stayed put.
Down the hall, I heard footsteps. Then Topher’s voice, low and toneless. “We should leave.”
I closed my eyes briefly against his chest. Luc didn’t move.
And for one selfish second, I thought maybe we might just stay exactly there.
The dawn could come and go. Lilith could wait.
The Valley of Fire could burn itself down without us.
We could go back to bed and pretend the world had run out of ways to be cruel.
Then Luc stepped back. Because fate had terrible timing and he had a crippling inability to ignore the edge of the cliff.
“Come on,” he said.
The drive felt wrong as soon as we left the parking garage. Before I knew it, Vegas fell away behind us, all glitter and lies, and the desert opened up like a wound.
When we arrived, the Valley of Fire looked even more unreal in the dark.
All those red formations rising out of blackness, ancient and jagged and waiting for the sun to expose them.
The amphitheater sat inside it like some natural cathedral carved by heat and time, its sandstone walls folded around the clearing in layered bands of rust and blood and ember.
It was still mostly dark, that strange hour before dawn when the world held its breath. But Lilith was already there. Of course, she was.
She stood at the very top of the amphitheater in black leathers and blood red lipstick, because subtlety had never once threatened her. Her hair blew in the desert wind. Her hands were empty, but her expression wasn’t.
Luc stopped in the center of the amphitheater floor.
I was behind his left side. Thyronis was there, grave and silent as a tomb door on the other side, and Morathis stood a little apart, looking like a woman who had arrived for drinks and happened to find herself at an extortion ritual.
Vespera lounged near one of the rock ledges, predatory and elegant.
And Topher stood off to the far right, still pale and hollow-eyed and so stripped of himself it hurt to look at him.
The wind moved across the amphitheater floor in thin, cold streams. Lilith looked me over first, then Luc, and smiled as she walked down the steep incline.
“I see you brought most of your household anyway.”
Luc didn’t smile back. “You asked for this,” he said.
She lifted one elegant shoulder. “And you asked for a map.”
When she got to the floor, she held it up. A folded object in one hand.
Luc’s face didn’t change. “You’ll draw the map here, in front of me.”
Topher stepped forward, pulling folded paper and a marker out of his back pocket.
“Not until I see what I’m getting.”
“You’ll see the page when I’m satisfied.”
Her smile thinned. “Still so fond of terms.”
“Still so fond of betrayal.”
Her eyes narrowed with the hit.