Chapter 26
How could I not have known?
Every nagging feeling when we were together that I was too stupid to listen to and, devil-damn me, Joe was the spitting image of Callen. I’d thought his face was burned into my memories for the rest of eternity. So why, then, did I not see it coming?
“I’m sorry, Dany,” Lucifer whispered.
I jumped, having forgotten he was still there.
Lucifer sat looking sorry but not ashamed. As if he were sorry it had to happen this way, but not ashamed of orchestrating it.
All of the warnings, the snide remarks and intrusions when I was with Joe…
I shoved the car door open and stomped in the opposite direction of Callen and his piece of shit son. The world blurred around me as tears gathered and fell relentlessly.
“Dany,” Lucifer protested when he caught up.
“Did you know?” I stopped to face him and hissed between gritted teeth.
His only answer was an unwavering stare.
“Lucifer! Did. You. Know?” My voice crescendoed in time with the wrath boiling beneath my skin.
Again, no answer.
Red blurred my vision and I snapped. The worn hilt of a butcher knife materialized between my clenched fist before I lunged. He could have moved. The devil could have disappeared or snapped his fingers to end me for eternity.
Instead, the breath left his lungs in a whoosh as we collided, his back against the moonlight brick wall as I buried my knife in his stomach.
“You bastard!” I screamed, tears streaming uncontrollably down my face.
I pulled the knife out only to drive it back in. Hot, sticky blood bloomed between us as I stabbed God‘s favorite son over and over and over.
My hand gripped his throat, holding him fast against the wall, while I poured my rage into the universe. Lucifer‘s hands were on my shoulders, holding me tightly as if he were comforting me while I tore him apart. Each stab was met with a grunt, and yet he did not push me away.
When his stomach was thoroughly shredded, I changed the grip on my knife and sank the dulling tip into his chest. Muscle and bone fought against me, forcing my hand to slip on the handle and earning me a deep slash down my palm and wrist.
I didn’t stop. Couldn’t stop.
I was so fucking angry.
I hated God and his bullshit free will experiment. I hated Callen for what he did to me and Lucifer for keeping secrets.
Most of all, I hated Joe. He fed me a buffet of bullshit, and I ate it without a second thought. He sized me up, figuring me out down to every last insecurity, and turned it against me without a drop of remorse.
“I hate you,“ I screamed. My arm was numb, overworked, and exhausted as I put every last ounce of effort into erasing Lucifer from existence.
How could he do this to me? To let me think I could live a normal life while Joe was abducting my friends behind my back, and then what?
Serve them up to me on a silver platter?
“It’s alright, Dany,” he gurgled, comforting me, even as I took his life.
“How can you say that to me?” I cried. “None of this is alright. You should have let me die,” I cried, and the revelation was like a gut punch. Dying would have been easier than his betrayal.
Lucifer gripped the back of my head and forced me to look at him.
“Never,” he snapped back with conviction, a defiant gleam burning in his devil eyes.
“There is not a moment in my existence that I could ever let you slip away. I will always save you, Dany. In any universe, before any jury or judgment…” he paused, teeth, covered in blood and dribbling down his ashen skin.
“I would see heaven and hell fall just so you could burn. Do you understand?”
My knees buckled, and we both fell to the ground. Luci held me as I sobbed until the moment his lifeless hands slid from my shoulders, and he was gone.
I took no satisfaction in knowing that he would just reappear. Even more so when his preferred vessel turned to ash underneath me.
He’d be back and, if he was lucky, I wouldn’t kill him all over again.
The shipping yard appeared in a red haze. Whether it was the flames of dawn breaking across the horizon or the blood lust burning through my veins, I didn’t know. Both felt empowering and fueled my hasty, determined steps.
By the time I reached the yard, I was already shaking. Not with fear, though. No, that part of me was long dead.
Clarity.
The kind of clarity that comes when the last lie falls away. The kind that’s sharp enough to cut down whatever god stood from the heavens and hold him accountable for the cruelty against humankind.
Two shadowy figures stood guard by the shipping container; the one holding a bunch of innocent, defenseless women at the end of their rope.
I tucked one wireless headphone in my ear, fingered the knife sheathed in the leather thigh strap, and hit play on my favorite Kiss song. The quick pace of the guitar sent a shiver rushing over my skin.
Bring on the blood.
A quick once over revealed that both men had a gun strapped to a hip holster and enough muscle to be more than an inconvenience if I didn’t keep the upper hand.
Good thing I had come-fuck-me-eyes accentuating my nice tits. They’d never see it coming.
I hummed along to the lyrics, letting the hype music flood my body with an electric high.
“Hey, sweetheart,” the one on the left said with a smack of his chewing gum. “You lost?”
“Tonight,” I sang with a seductive sway of my hips, pointing at him with a crazed smile. “I wanna give it all to you!”
He didn’t even get a sound out before I pulled the knife, rushed forward and slipped the blade between his ribs. Stubble scratched my tongue as I ran one long lick up his cheek.
The second tried to pull his gun, but the shock made him one second too slow. I shoved him against the container, fisted his hair, and drove my knife up through his chin at the perfect angle to nick the brain stem and embed into the temporal lobe.
“Tonight, I wanna see it in your eyes.” My vitriol induced a manic laugh as I watched them dim to lifeless orbs.
The motherfucker was dead before he hit the ground.
“Hey!” A gruff voice yelled from behind, followed by a chorus of stomping feet.
“Feel the magic.” I reached down to pull my knife out of ole’ boy’s skull and smiled as I wiped the blood off on my leg to use it as a makeshift microphone. “There’s something’ that drives me wild!”
A crack rent the air, the force of a bullet to the left shoulder sending me stumbling backward.
When I didn’t fall, fear stopped his feet. And, as I laughed, horror froze him in place.
I pointed a finger in his direction, yelling, “I was made for lovin’ you baby!” Before letting loose the knife, reveling in the sound it made as it cut through the air and landed with a thud in his forehead.
It was easy to lose myself in the massacre, letting go to become the monster I’d always craved to be.
No mercy. No regrets.
I was hell’s bloody angel of vengeance in fishnets.
One tried to call for more backup. I slit his throat mid-sentenced.
“Ahhhhh!” I screeched as the vox organ introduced Cyndi’s iconic anthem.
I carved my way through the shipping yard like a woman possessed. Or maybe, just released.
One after another they fell as I spun, cut, stabbed, and lusted.
By the time I reached the far end, I was soaked. Hands sticky, Def Leppard crop top torn, hair clinging to my face in sweaty clumps with eyeliner smudging deep circles beneath my eyes…
A goddamn omen.
Muffled whines pulled my attention off to the side. I made eye contact with a boy who could have been no older than twenty-five before he dropped his gun and bolted like a sewer rat.
“You better run. Run, run, run, run…”
He did.
Smart boy.
Too bad smart didn’t mean shit anymore.
I launched after him, boots skidding on concrete sticky with blood and brain matter. The bass in my earphones pounded, blending with the thunder of his boots slapping panicked rhythms against the cracked concrete. He zigged between stacks of containers like a scared rabbit.
I zagged like the wolf I was.
“C’mon,” I panted, laughing, the sound high and a little unhinged. “You were man enough to hold the gun, be man enough to—”
He shot blindly over his shoulder.
The bullet grazed my ribs, a hot kiss that tore fabric and skin. The sting sizzled through me, lighting up my veins like I'd mainlined lightning. I hissed, more offended than hurt.
“—meet my fucking knife,” I finished, breathless with glee.
He tried to duck behind a pallet of shrink-wrapped boxes, but hiding was futile. Fear rolled off of him in acrid waves, and the line of piss that dripped out of his pants still wetted the concrete.
I tackled him from behind and we went down hard. His scream choked off when I bounced his face off the concrete once, twice, three times for good measure.
“Please, please, please—”
“You had a gun pointed at a bunch of naked, trafficked women,” I reminded him, pinning his wrist with my knee until the small bones in his hand cracked. “We’re past ‘please.’”
“I didn’t know—”
“Bullshit.” My palm slapped over his mouth, smearing someone else’s blood across his lips. “But hey, silver lining? You get to be part of something bigger than yourself.”
His eyes went wet and wide. “Wh–what?”
“Motivation,” I purred, and slammed his head down again. “For me.”
I didn’t even bother with the knife. Fingers hooked under his jaw, I twisted. There was a pop, a wet crunch, and then dead weight.
The shipping yard stretched around me. It was silent other than my adrenaline fueled, heavy exhales.
“Dany.”
The icy voice came from the shadows behind me and my body heated to an impossible temperature.
Of course he was here.
I turned slowly, the world narrowing to the shape peeling itself out of the dark between two stacked containers. Frost breathed along the metal as he passed, curling in delicate patterns that had no business being beautiful in this slaughterhouse.
Lucifer straightened his cuffs like he’d just stepped out of a board meeting, not my murder spiral.