Chapter 1

CHAPTER 1

“ I hereby claim you in the name of Lucifer,” the demon Haniel said.

And as if to underscore his words with fateful finality, magic seemed to lock around me, the snap of invisible shackles echoing through my soul.

“No,” I rasped in spite of the power that brimmed along the newly forged connection between Lucifer’s proxy and me.

“See, that’s the thing.” Haniel casually stepped closer. “You don’t really get a say in this.”

I shook my head and stumbled back, almost tripping over a pile of rocks. My heart beat so fast, so hard, it threatened to break out of my rib cage. “I’m not coming with you.”

I’d wait here for Azazel, thank you very much. Or rather, I’d run away and hide, seeing the determination on Haniel’s face. Unless I managed to ditch him, he’d really drag me to Lucifer with him.

“Fallen angels are fair game to us.” Haniel raised his hands in a shrug. “And whoever is here first gets to call dibs.” He made a show of looking around. “I don’t see your boyfriend here, do you?”

“Husband,” I hissed.

He clucked his tongue. “Till death do you part. And correct me if I’m wrong, but you did die, didn’t you?”

My mouth was suddenly as dry as desert sand. The threat of this demon claiming me for Lucifer aside, was it true what he’d just said? Had my bond with Azazel really been broken? Fissures of pain cracked my heart. I hadn’t even considered that.

Not that it meant we couldn’t be together, of course, but that marriage, the way it’d defined the weird start to our relationship, it had meant something to me, and I hadn’t realized how much until now. Not to mention there’d been an actual bond tying us together, a tangible connection beyond the love we felt for each other.

The thought of having lost that caused a deep ache within me.

“So,” Haniel said, his dark gray eyes glittering, “what’s it going to be? Are you coming along like a good girl, or do I need to drag you with me, kicking and screaming? I’m fine with either option, just to let you know.”

I only stared at him for a second.

Then I ran.

Or, to be more precise, I tried.

But considering that my body was broken in more places than I could count from my crash landing on Earth, and given that I wasn’t yet healing as fast as I would as an angel in Heaven—or a demon in Hell—I was currently as nimble and swift as a sea lion on land.

I only made it about two feet up the incline of the crater, my shattered bones screaming at me as I scrambled up the rubble, before Haniel was on me. I still fought him like a wildcat, but the combination of my injuries from the fall, my power being weakened from having God’s grace stripped from me, and the fact that I was exhausted and not at my best after the shit I’d been through resulted in Haniel overpowering me in no time.

After punching the crap out of me, he grabbed me by my hair and proceeded to drag me along the ground like some barbaric caveman of yore. I screamed bloody murder and clawed at his hand holding tight to my strands while the sore spots on my back where my wings had been fired volleys of pain through me from being hauled over the rocky terrain.

“All right, that’s it.” Haniel stopped and faced me with an expression of utmost annoyance. “I can’t fucking take the shrieking anymore.”

And before I could so much as twitch, he drew a dagger, swung, and planted it right in my heart.

I grunted, choked, and pawed weakly at the blade protruding from my chest, and then everything went dark.

When I came to again, the heat of Hell pressed against my skin.

And it felt wonderful .

That was the worst, best, weirdest feeling.

It felt like coming home.

And not just because this was the realm I’d been meaning to get back to given that I wanted to live with Azazel, but because…I now drew energy from the very land itself. I breathed in the air, and it nourished me. Every beat of my heart fed strength through my veins, pulled directly from the fabric of this world.

I felt this realm and all the creatures and plants like an extended part of myself, just like I had in Heaven when I’d been an angel.

My eyes flew open at the realization of the latest transformation I’d gone through, this time from fallen angel to…demon.

Holy shit.

I was a demon .

Of course, I’d known I’d become one as soon as I’d recovered my memories and realized that I’d have to fall and be claimed for Hell in order to be with Azazel again, but that had been a rational understanding.

It hadn’t really sunk in at the time.

It did now.

During all my time spent in Hell, I’d been this comparably weak creature, a human, always one step below demons, always aware of just how much power and strength I lacked. In my quieter moments, the ones woven through with a subtle kind of despair about facing an eternity of this, I’d sometimes fantasized about what it would be like to be able to become one of them. To have wings, to have power flowing through me with which I could hold my own.

And now, those fantasies that had seemed so impossible had actually come true. I was a full-blooded demon, even more powerful than a half-blood.

How absolutely mind-boggling.

Blinking, I took in my surroundings.

I was hanging over Haniel’s shoulder, swinging limply with his steps, my arms dangling down his back. My gaze snagged on the skin on my hands, all the scrapes and bruises from my crash now healed. My once broken bones had set themselves right, my face no longer feeling swollen. Between my shoulder blades, the spots where my wings had been didn’t quite burn anymore. They hurt, but this pain felt different. There was a healing quality to it, the promise of wholeness. And they fucking itched like crazy.

Because I was growing new wings.

I sucked in a breath, elation rushing through me.

Which was immediately dampened as I recognized the style of the hallways Haniel carried me through. The polished marble floor had lost some of its shine, the elaborate curtains framing the high windows hung in tatters, the statues once framing the walls half destroyed, and yet I knew these corridors, remembered them from the last time I’d been here.

We were in Lucifer’s palace.

A full-body shiver took hold of me, fear icing my stomach.

“Let me down,” I said, my voice shaking.

“I’m not in the mood to chase you again.”

“I won’t run,” I bit out.

And I meant it, because what was the point? It was too late now anyway. I could feel not only the connection to this realm as a newly minted demon but also a faint tether binding me to this particular territory. Lucifer already had his claim on me, staked by proxy through Haniel.

And I knew how these things worked down here. Once a demon’s allegiance was set, there was no deserting, there was no free choice, no way to leave and pledge one’s loyalty to another without permission from the current liege.

A higher-ranking demon could conscript someone from a lower-ranking lord in his service and thereby change that demon’s direct allegiance, similar to what Azazel had done with Caleb when he’d pulled him out of the sub-territory of Caleb’s father. But that wouldn’t happen for me…because Lucifer was my direct liege, and no one outranked him.

Haniel dropped me on my feet, and I swayed for a moment, my legs shaking.

“What does he want with me?”

Haniel gave me a bored look. “How should I know? My orders were to fetch you, nothing more.” He turned to walk on. “Our king is not in the habit of explaining his reasons for anything he does.”

Following him, I let out a raspy breath, my fingers turning numb. “So he knew I’d be there? At that time? He knew when I’d fall?”

I could tell Haniel rolled his eyes even though he had his back turned to me. “Obviously. Not the precise moment, though. He had me staking out the place for a few days already.”

I almost stopped in my tracks. Naamah’s words echoed through my mind. I promised him. I owe him this much.

My thoughts all stumbled over themselves.

Oh, my God. She’d been talking about Lucifer .

I’d thought she’d meant Azazel, even though it hadn’t made sense, and it had felt wrong, and now I knew why. I’d known deep in my heart that Azazel wouldn’t go over my head like this, that he wouldn’t disregard my request for more time to say goodbye to my mom.

Gah, I’d been mad at him for no reason when I should have had more faith in him, when, really, the person I had all the reason to be mad at was Naamah, and her alone. She’d basically sold me out to Lucifer!

Anger and betrayal made my skin flush hot, and a growl worked its way up my throat.

I’d thought she was my friend. I’d thought she cared about me, but all along, she’d been planning to sabotage the timing of my fall from grace so that Lucifer would be the one to snatch me up.

And why? What did he want from me?

A thought struck me, and this time, I really did stop walking, my bones icing over.

What if…he wanted revenge because he thought I’d been involved in Lilith’s murder?

Of course, I had been involved in it, albeit unknowingly and unwittingly—Destatur had roped me into her plan without telling me, convincing me to take Lilith to Earth, the one place where she could be killed by angels, which would then prompt Lucifer to cancel the truce and start Armageddon.

And I’d been so naive, so trusting, that I’d just gone along with it, thinking I was doing Lilith a big favor by escorting her to Earth and playing tour guide.

My grief over her death and my role in it were now only eclipsed by the fear striking its talons in me about whether Lucifer thought I’d been in cahoots with Destatur and now wanted payback. Was that why he’d claimed me? Did he want to torture me in retaliation?

The floor threatened to tilt under me.

My only hope was that the kernel of Lilith’s power that I apparently still carried within me would keep him from causing me physical harm…though it wouldn’t prevent him from exposing me to psychological torture, as I well knew.

“Keep up!” Haniel barked from a few paces ahead of me.

I flinched and hurried after him.

But come to think of it, Lucifer wanting revenge was unlikely, wasn’t it? If he believed the lie that Destatur and Enaia had wanted to dish up, namely that Azazel and I had been the instigators of the conspiracy to murder Lilith, then Azazel wouldn’t be alive and walking around freely. He’d either be dead, or suffering eternal punishment chained to the subfloor of Lucifer’s entrance hall.

So, the simple fact that Azazel was alive and well meant that Lucifer had somehow learned the truth, which in turn meant he would know that I had been a mere pawn in Destatur and Enaia’s game.

The relief flooding me was tempered by the nagging, terrifying question of what—if not revenge—Lucifer wanted with me. This uncertainty left me reeling. If I knew what he intended, I could at least prepare myself, trying to find ways to mitigate it or form a plan of how to deal with whatever loomed.

As it was, I was walking into this completely blind, and it scared the fuck out of me.

Maybe this was just another way for him to hurt Azazel? It would fit his style to make a grab for me in order to keep Azazel and me apart as well as use me to lash out at Azazel by intermittently hurting me and letting Azazel know.

And, much like the time I’d broken my vow to Lucifer and faced suffering the consequences, there’d be no legal way to get me out of it. I belonged to Lucifer now, and with the steep hierarchical and feudal setup of Hell, Lucifer could do whatever the fuck he pleased with me, and I couldn’t even quit and join another archdemon’s territory instead.

As we walked through the hallways—Haniel stopping here and there to inquire about Lucifer’s current location with some of the staff—I noticed some things that gave me pause.

I’d been in Lucifer’s palace only twice before, but each time, everything in here had been spick and span, the luxurious furnishings in tip-top shape, the floors polished to a shine, the gold and silver adornments of the decor gleaming in the light of the torches and chandeliers. Even at the Fall Festival, when there’d been a good degree of chaos with the masses of guests milling about, there’d still been a general sense of orderliness underneath it all, a feeling of strictly held control that temporarily allowed some leeway for the crowds partying at the festival.

Now, though…the overall impression I got was one of neglect.

The floors had lost their shine. Furnishings were torn in places, some of the curtains ripped, and no one seemed to care to fix them. There were cracks in a few walls, and I spotted what might be rat droppings in the corners. Only half of the chandeliers or torches appeared to be lit, providing just enough light to not bathe the entire room in darkness.

A dread-filled sense of doom gripped me as my gaze roamed over the obvious signs of decay and negligence.

Here and there, either in the hallways or visible through an open door in an adjacent room, we came across other demons, some of whom looked harried and hastened to run past, whereas others seemed to entertain themselves with various raucous games or lavish feasts.

We were just walking past another of those open-door ballroom-like chambers when shrill shrieking caused me to wince and pause. Peering into the room, I spotted a group of three male demons standing around something on the floor.

One of them laughed and gestured to the bundle on the ground. “Again, again!”

The tallest of them, a dude with long, silver-white hair, flicked his hand, and flames erupted over the thing on the floor—which started shrieking again, convulsing in pain.

Horror rolled through me, squeezing my stomach.

That thing on the floor was a hellrat. Burned, bleeding, mutilated, but alive.

And they were torturing it for fun.

“Stop!” The shout was out of my mouth before I’d registered the impulse to say something.