Chapter 28
“Sorry, Luci. I don’t think the eyeballs are usable.”
I stared down at what was left of my ex-boyfriend. I stared at Joe’s ruined head, the way his jaw hung at a wrong angle, lips mashed and split, nose sideways. His eyes were still open, cloudy and shocked, and teeth glittered in the dark like someone had dropped a fistful of cheap pearls.
“Hmm,” I hummed under my breath. “Might make a good necklace.”
“Do not collect that man’s teeth, Dany. Even you must have limits.”
“None I’ve found yet,” I shrugged.
I faced Luci and found him staring.
His gaze dipped, slow and unhurried, tracing the bullet holes my body had already erased. The shredded fabric. The pink, tight new skin where my chest had been swiss cheese a minute ago.
“You’re beautiful like this,” he said.
“Like what?” I scoffed. “Like a crime scene? You should probably call CSI. Or maybe Adam. I think I just killed Abel with a rock.” I gestured toward Joe’s lifeless body.
He hummed and ignored my humor. “Like you. Desolate beauty, unwanted by the world.”
“Is this your poor attempt at flirting?”
He stepped closer. “And if it is?”
“You probably shouldn’t tell a girl no one wants her if you’re trying to get into her blood stained mini-skirt.”
“I didn’t say no one. I said the world, and I, dearest Dany, am not part of this world.” His hand lifted to graze my cheek and I couldn’t help but to close my eyes and lean into it.
Though I hadn’t killed Callen yet, I felt a sense of freedom, like a weight lifted off of my shoulders. Now, I just needed to get the boulder off my chest.
“While I’ve half a mind to to fuck you over his cooling body,” Lucifer started, thumb catching my bloodstained lower lip.
“I wanted to give you a gift first. It’s not a necklace, or note in a tidy box.
” He took my wrist in his hand and lifted it between us.
The red band that represented Callen’s life shone in the moonlight and tingled when Lucifer ran his finger across it.
Time slowed to a stop. The street lights didn’t change colors, the birds flying in the night sky froze mid-flap, and even the breeze rolling off the river ceased to blow.
“I release you from our bargain,” he whispered, staring so deep into my eyes that, had I a soul to give, he would’ve seen straight through to it. “Your death is no longer mine to take, and your vengeance is owed only to yourself.”
Red lightning arced across the sky, leaving behind the stench of scorched ozone and a foretelling buzz that shivered where our skin touched.
But–
“Luci? I don’t understand.” My confusion was palpable and molded into panic quickly.
Who was I without Lucifer? What was I supposed to do if he released me from this bond? Mostly, though…
I didn’t want to lose him. With no bargain, he had no reason to keep coming back to me.
“You’re ready, Niepozadany. You don’t need me to fulfill your death’s legacy now.” There was a softness in his eyes I’d never seen before. It was full of pride and sadness, and I was fucking terrified for what that meant.
“Lucifer, I–how will–”
The Devil waved a hand, his features turning stoney, and from the shadows came the man of my nightmares.
Callen.
His face was frozen in a scowl and my knees began a traitorous tremble. He was here in front of me, ripe and for the picking.
Callen was much older now than he was on the worst night of my life, though he’d aged handsomely. Well placed wrinkles, salt-and-pepper hair that was still full and thick despite time, and piercing eyes that would capture anyone.
“Consider this my last professional courtesy,” Lucifer said, tone gone remote. “You wanted him. Here he is. No deal. No leash. Just you and your monster.” He held out my favorite butcher knife with a nod.
I hesitated. Why had he gone so rigid? Jesus and Judas was he really able to wipe me from his mind that quickly?
The cold pommel settled against my palm where he placed it and my hand tightened on instinct.
“You set all this up,” I said to Lucifer, not taking my eyes off Callen. “Every step.”
“Yes,” he answered so coolly that it made my ears burn hot.
“You ripped the brand off right before this.” My voice was rising right along side the fucking embarrassment I felt for falling for him when all he was doing was dumping me in the garbage like everyone else. “You knew.”
“Yes,” he said again.
I swallowed.
“So this is what? A test?” My laugh was humorless. “See if your favorite project can stand up without her training wheels, huh? Taking pity on the poor dead girl because she was too pathetic to pass up?”
“Wrong metaphor,” he responded right on my heels and ignoring the jab. “You never needed the wheels, dearest Dany. You just liked pretending they were there.”
Callen let out a wordless yell and I turned my scowl to him. My grip on the knife white knuckled. I’d half a mind just to kill the bastard right now as an afterthought to the battle I was preparing to fight.
Whether it was against my own pride and ambition or Lucifer’s manipulation, I wasn’t sure yet
The brand was gone, and our deal was done. If I killed Callen right now, it would be me doing it. Just Dany, a girl who died on an old gravel road and came back as a murderous mistress of Satan.
I wanted it so bad my teeth ached from the grind, so why wouldn't my feet move? Why could I not stop staring at Lucifer like I was both begging him to stay and daring him to leave?
Because the thought slid in again, quiet and ugly, between one breath and the next:
If Callen is dead… what happens to us?
Us.
Me and the Devil. The fallen angel who had claimed my soul, my body, and somehow when I wasn’t looking, my heart.
Stupid, that voice inside of me whispered. He is the biblical fucking Devil you idiot, and you’re a literal blip in the timeline. You were never special.
“Dany,” Lucifer said, breaking through my spiral but not stopping it.
The knife felt wrong in my hand all of a sudden. Heavy. Slippery. Attached to the end of an arm that didn’t quite feel like mine. If I did it, if I drove the blade home and watched the light go out of Callen’s eyes, that would be it.
“What happens if I do it?” I asked him.
His jaw tightened. “You finally get what you asked for.”
“That’s not what I mean.” My throat felt tight. “What happens to you?”
Something dark flickered in his eyes. “Does it matter?” he asked.
“Yes,” I answered breathlessly, hinging on his answer. I could hear my pulse in my ears. Feel the empty place on my wrist like a phantom limb. The space where Lucifer’s mark had sat like a promise and a threat for thirty years.
He looked away from me, muscles jumping in his neck and jaw, and said, “Kill him, Dany. Take what is owed to you and be free like you’ve always wanted.” He met my tear-filled gaze once more. “Be normal. Find someone who makes you feel wanted and live.”
Normal…
What did that even mean anymore?
My fingers slackened on the hilt.
I saw it then—just a flash, just enough—that this was never about Callen at all anymore. Not for him. This was about whether I would choose me. Lucifer cared so much about free will that he’d be willing to walk away from whatever this was, if it was something that could even be.
I was naive enough to think I wanted to try, though.
Even if I was just a fleeting moment in his lifetime.
I thought of Lucifer letting me carve him open. Staying. Coming back. Over and over.
My fingers opened and the knife hit the concrete with a pathetic little clatter.
“No,” I said, willing steel into my voice.
Lucifer went very, very still.
“What did you say?” he asked slowly, each word enunciated as if he were speaking to a child.
Whatever emotion flowed through him was strong enough to shift its focus from Callen to me. Callen hit the ground with a grunt before I saw him sprinting away in my peripheral.
The only sound left was my breathing, ragged and uneven, and the slow, lethal grind of Lucifer’s teeth.
“I said no, Luci,” I whispered. “I’m not going to kill him. I want to strike a new bargain.”
What sort of bargain, I had no notion, but something, anything to make him stay.
Lucifer recoiled like I’d slapped him across the face. “A new bargain? Was the first one not good enough, Dany? Was your life not good enough?” His gaze went cold, then hot, then something in between that burned.
We stared each other down over the corpse of the boy who’d come between us and the empty space where a monster should’ve died.
I didn’t have a good answer, and I could hear my low whine in my ears as I searched for a reason to put between us that kept him coming back.
“Fine,” he said. The word cracked like a whip.
“You want a new deal?” Something in the air shifted, thickened.
The space between us sang with power, the hairs on my arms lifting.
The wind gusted, whipping hair into my face.
For a second, the yard flickered—a gravel road overlaid on top of the shipping containers, young me on the ground brutalized and begging for mercy while Callen’s shadow swallowed the world.
I gagged and Lucifer’s eyes went black.
“You have until sunrise,” he said. His voice wasn’t a voice anymore. It was sound: a low, inevitable roll of thunder under my skin. “Kill him, take your vengeance, or I will make you relive your death day in one inevitable loop for the rest of your eternity.”
His words were like a fucking sucker punch to gut. I tried to drag in air, to breathe, but it wouldn’t come. He wouldn’t do this to me. Couldn’t do this to me. Not after–
“Every heartbeat, every pained breath, every beer bottle on a loop. You will never get past it. Never get anything but his hands and your blood and the moment you said yes to me and thought it meant you were choosing something else.”
“You wouldn’t,” I said.
His rigid expression said otherwise, and I stumbled back from the pure, unbidden malice.
“I am the Devil,” he said low and controlled. “There is nothing I wouldn’t do. Especially for someone I—” He cut himself off.
The word he didn’t say hung between us like a guillotine ready to fall and snap the tether.
My eyes burned. “Say it,” I rasped. “Say it you fucking coward!”
“No,” he said. The refusal shook the air and every molecule inside of me. “I am not your next excuse.”
Rage flared, bright enough to punch through the hurt and fear.
“Fuck you,” I choked. “You don’t get to say that to me! Not after–” I choked on a sob as every good thing between us flashed like a montage of memories going through a shredder.
Lucifer stepped back. The shadows clung to him as he calmed the storm and said steadily, “Sunrise, Niepozadany.” Lucifer swallowed and a big part of me hoped it was because this hurt him as much as it did me. “One way or another, your loop ends.”
“Don’t you walk away from me,” I demanded and took one step forward.
“The next time I see you,” he said, already fading, edges smearing into steam left behind in the cold, “either you will be standing over his body, or I will be standing over yours as you beg me to stop the replay.”
“Lucifer fucking Christ!” I screamed, lunging forward, but my hand hit cold air where his lapel had been a second before.
I had only one breath to scream into the night before it shifted around me, his magic manipulating space and time until I was bloodstained and crying on my couch.