Chapter 3

CHAPTER 3

M y brain stuttered. My thoughts all derailed.

What the fuck?

I stood there with my arms held half raised, loath to touch him, paralyzed by shock, while Lucifer, the supreme overlord of Hell, First of the Fallen and antithesis to God, hugged me like he’d just recovered a long-lost treasure.

There was nothing sexual or suggestive in the embrace, thank fuck , just a world of relief and affection— ew —mixed with despair and heartache.

His face still pressed against my front, his shoulders began to jerk, almost as if?—

The sound of a sob broke the oppressive silence of this tomb-like room.

My eyes widened. I drew in a sharp breath through my nose, my mouth shut tightly so as not to make a noise.

He wept .

Lucifer knelt there before me, grabbing me in a disturbing kind of hug, and cried, hunched over, into my stomach.

Help. Someone help me. How had I gotten into this situation? How had I ended up as the Devil’s comfort blanket?

And how could I get out of it?

After an awkwardly long moment of near-silent sobs, during which I stood there with my hands still hovering half raised, pretending Lucifer wasn’t currently wetting my bruised and battered fighting gear with his tears, he pulled back a little and straightened, his expression so agonized it pierced my soul.

Closing his eyes, he laid one hand on my chest, just over my wildly galloping heart—the touch remaining nonsexual—his power flowing into me as if seeking.

Deep inside me, that kernel of Lilith’s essence she’d gifted me responded with a warm glow.

The anguish in his expression gave way to a relieved kind of joy, a profound, blissful contentment, like someone relishing the warmth of a crackling hearth after wandering through a blistering snowstorm. I’d seen the same expression in footage of people rescued from being adrift at sea.

Then agony carved lines into his face once more, and he laid his forehead against my chest, right where his hand had felt for Lilith’s spark.

For the last part of her that was left in this world.

This time, his sobs tore my heart to shreds.

When he finally let me go, my eyes were burning. He got to his feet, abruptly turning away from me. His shoulders heaved, his hands balling into fists at his sides. With a flick of his fingers, he summoned a tissue and wiped it over his face with angry, jerky movements.

A moment later, he tossed the tissue to the side, and it went up in flames, the ashy residue falling to the floor.

“Take a seat,” he said, his back still turned.

I glanced around the ruined room, trying to figure out where I could perch my butt without something crumbling beneath me. I wouldn’t sit in his armchair; that was for sure.

He waved a hand, and an entire sofa appeared, thankfully in one piece and seemingly good condition.

I gingerly sat down, twisting my hands in my lap.

A small table plopped into being before me, decked with a steaming mug of tea and a platter full of delicacies. I stared at it with the same suspicion I might bestow upon an unknown cat presenting me her belly for rubs.

“It’s not poisoned.”

At Lucifer’s dry remark, I looked up at him. He’d settled onto his armchair again, that otherworldly, eerie note of his energy now a bit less noticeable. He seemed a touch more like the demon I’d known him to be, rather than an eldritch creature slithered in from another dimension.

The emo-goth look remained, though.

“It’s not that, Your Grace,” I responded carefully. “It’s just that the last time I ate food you offered me, you made me puke it out again not long after with your psychological torture.”

One corner of his mouth twitched up in a half smile, there and gone again in a second.

Look at me, amusing the Devil by reminding him of how he used to hurt me. Good times.

“You don’t have to worry about that,” he said quietly, his face a cold mask.

I cleared my throat, my brows rising. “Oh, really?”

“I have something else planned for you.”

My stomach twisted itself into knots. That was about as ominous as the dreaded We need to talk in a relationship.

“What is it, Your Grace?” I asked, forcing my words and tone to be polite and respectful.

“You’re going to find her for me.”

I blinked. Tilted my head. Shook it a little to get rid of the befuddlement caused by his weird statement. “Excuse me, what?”

He summoned a glass with an amber liquid in it and took a sip. “That spark of her inside you,” he said with a nod at me. “You will use it to find her reincarnation on Earth.”

My jaw dropped, and I sat there for a good few heartbeats of stunned silence, staring at him in disbelief.

“Not to repeat myself,” I said eventually, “but—excuse me, what ?”

“I see that the transformation to angel and then demon didn’t do anything for your intelligence.” His black eyes glinted coldly.

My nostrils flared. “I just…” How to put this delicately? “Lilith was human. Humans don’t get reincarnated. So, after her passing, she’d…”

I paused, suddenly struck by the realization that I had never considered what might have happened with her soul. As a human, she ought to have gone to either Heaven or Hell, and seeing as she’d been just as bound to a demon as I’d been, her soul would not have been eligible for Heaven, which only left Hell as her destination.

But undoubtedly, if her soul had come down here, Lucifer would have taken her into his care, making sure she’d never feel a single second of torture. And if he had her soul here with him, he’d be… happy maybe wasn’t the right word, but…less depressed-looking?

Given the oppressive weight of grief that lay upon this palace, though, it was clear that Lilith wasn’t here, not even as a damned soul.

“Now those wheels are turning,” Lucifer murmured and took a sip of his drink. “Do let me know when you’ve figured it out.”

I narrowed my eyes at him. “Just because her soul didn’t end up here doesn’t mean she got reincarnated. That only happens to demons and angels.”

“When that blade cleaved through her neck,” he said with surgical precision, an abyss of sorrow looming behind that chilling tone of his, “what happened?”

I gulped. “She, uh, she dissolved into particles of light,” I said softly, new grief gripping me at the vivid memory of that scene.

“And that usually happens at the death of whom?”

“Demons and angels,” I whispered. “But…she wasn’t one, was she? A demon?”

He shook his head. “Nor was she human any longer.” His gaze fell to the liquid in his glass. “Not after all this time.”

I processed that for a moment, trying to understand just what he was asking of me. “How…how am I supposed to find her?” I waved at my chest. “This isn’t a radar. Or a GPS tracker. It’s not like this’ll let me pinpoint her location.”

“Her essence will call out to you.”

I threw my hands up. “Over thousands of miles, all around the world? We don’t know where she got reincarnated—if she did at all.”

He glared at me, and the lone candle in the room flickered precariously, while a morbid chill whispered over the floor and crawled up my legs.

I cleared my throat. “Um, yeah, without deets on her absolutely for sure, factual reincarnation that totally happened, I don’t even know where to start looking. And I doubt I’ll be able to trace her essence from the other side of the world, so…”

“You’ll feel a kinship when you’re near her.”

I opened my mouth and closed it, narrowing my eyes and raising my hands to ball them in frustration right in front of me. With a deep breath to gather my composure, I straightened my fingers. “So, do I understand this right? You want me to comb the entire earth for her?”

“Yes.”

I closed my eyes briefly and pressed my lips together, hoping that when I opened them again, I’d be dealing with a less unhinged version of Lucifer.

Alas, he looked just as insanely determined as before.

“This is madness,” I whispered.

The smile he gave me was something out of a horror flick. “You haven’t seen madness yet.”

“Do you know how many people there are on Earth?” I sounded just as aghast as I felt.

“Eight billion one hundred three million seven hundred fifty-four thousand and sixty-three.” He made a pause. “Sixty-eight.” Another pause. “Seventy-two.” A second later: “Seventy?—”

“All right, all right!” I waved my arms. “Point made. But also, you can’t honestly expect me to go looking for her in such a huge crowd. It’d be easier to find the proverbial needle in a haystack.”

“Searching for her,” he replied with icy calm, “will be your only purpose from now on. You will scour the earth for her until you find her.”

“But that could take years! Decades, even!”

“Then I suggest you hurry, because she doesn’t have decades.”

I stared at him, my mouth hanging open. “What do you even intend to do when I find her? Bring her back down here?”

“Precisely so.”

My brows drew together. “But…you do realize that living in Hell made her?—”

I broke off at the terrifying speed with which his expression darkened, inky veins spidering out from his obsidian eyes.

“Made her what?” he asked in a deathly quiet whisper.

I clamped my mouth shut with a squeak. I would not be the one to break to Lucifer that his beloved wife and soul mate had been miserable living in his home realm. Nope, no, not gonna happen.

I knew the fate of the bearers of bad news.

Lucifer’s focus on me narrowed to that of a cobra zeroing in on a mouse.

“Pray tell,” he murmured, and at the same moment, pressure clamped down on my throat.

Not to strangle me—that would not be possible, seeing as he was unable to hurt me physically. No, this pressure was of a different sort.

It pulled the words from my throat. All those I’d just bitten back.

“Miserable,” I choked out, the word ripped from me against my will. “Sad, depressed, withering, forlorn, numb, unhappy, fading, dispirited, downcast, dejected, despondent—” I stopped and hauled in a huge breath, my heart threatening to beat out of my chest. “Oh, God, did you have to make me recite the whole fucking thesaurus? Geez.”

Lucifer’s eyes were black chips of ice.

The room temperature dropped so sharply that the liquid in his glass froze, same as the tea on the table in front of me. My breath misted in the air, the chill of death creeping into my bones. Frost crawled over the floor, spreading out from Lucifer’s chair into the corners of the room. I couldn’t feel my fingers or my toes.

“If I die from hypothermia,” I whispered, my lips barely able to move, “I can’t find her for you.”

The frost receded, the chill drawing back into him, and I sucked in once-again-warm air to thaw my lungs. My hands and feet tingled to the point of itching.

Lucifer sipped from his drink, the contents of the glass no longer frozen. “Demons can’t die from cold.”

I rubbed my arms. “Are you sure? I mean, our home realm is a fiery one. We’re all used to heat, so how do we know we can survive freezing temperatures? Have there ever been any demons in the Antarctic? Like, did you guys do an expedition to test?—”

“You’ll spend three weeks on Earth searching for her,” Lucifer interrupted my nervous babbling, “and then one week down here to recharge your energy, after which you’ll go to Earth for another three-week term, and so on.”

I sat up straighter as a thought struck me. He was sending me to Earth…the place I hadn’t been able to go to for the past eight years, even though I still had two people there I’d been visiting regularly while I’d been living in Hell with Azazel. I could finally see Taylor and my dad again! And maybe I could check in with my aunt, Cora, as well. Of course, I wouldn’t be able to talk to her, but I’d love to see her after all this time.

Surely Lucifer wouldn’t even notice if I spent some of my trips to Earth hanging out with my human loved ones.

And Azazel could join me. I refused to entertain the thought that I wouldn’t get to see him. I’d made it back to Hell, I was a demon now, and we should be able to finally be together again—even if being under Lucifer’s control meant I couldn’t live with him. Yet. I’d find a way to make that possible.

And until then, Azazel and I could meet on Earth as well as here in Hell. Maybe he could even come travel with me?

Lucifer tilted his head as he regarded me, his gaze far too perceptive. “You’ll be assigned an escort to make sure you’re actually traveling around looking for her, and not just frolicking among humans. And no, that escort will not be Azazel.”

Well, shit. There went that idea.

I narrowed my eyes. “If I do this for you?—”

“There is no if.”

I gritted my teeth and drew in a sharp breath through my nose. “Seeing as I’m doing you a big favor here?—”

“I am your king and direct liege, and my orders to you are not favors the fulfillment of which depends on your whims, but commands that you have no choice but to obey.” Shadows pulsed around him, the temperature of the air sinking again. “Remember your place.”

I took a moment to rein in my rising anger and resentment. I’d never been good at respecting authority. But to antagonize him was a bad idea—even my weird brain understood that.

“Your Grace,” I began, adding a sweet note to my voice, “I humbly request that you consider allowing me a day or two during each three-week stay on Earth to visit my loved ones. I will be much more highly motivated to conduct my search if I get to spend time with the people I care about.”

He swirled his glass, his disturbingly dark gaze on me. “Like your father’s soul that you stole from my Pit?”

I froze. Oh, shit, right, there was that. He knew . The memory of that moment when he’d taken me down into the bowels of his palace to witness the torture session and had revealed that he’d long figured out we’d freed my dad’s soul from his clutches came careening back, and my breath stuttered out of me.

“That look of panic is priceless,” he muttered with a chuckle and sipped from his drink.

I’d kill him. One day, I’d actually murder that cruel son of a bitch.

“Let that be your motivation,” Lucifer said, and for a second, I thought he meant my fantasy of killing him. But then he added, “The fact that, at any moment, I could order your father’s soul to be dragged back to Hell where he belongs and have him tortured right here in the palace for you to witness.”

Oh, yeah, there’d be a murder in my future. Involving this horrible bastard.

“During my week down here,” I said, stuffing my violent fantasies far down lest they show on my face, “will I be free to move around?”

If so, I’d ditch this place and hightail it to Azazel’s for the entire duration. If he wasn’t permitted to join me on my trips to Earth, then maybe I could at least see him for the whole week that I would be in Hell.

“That will depend on your conduct.”

Murrrrderrrrrr .

I clenched my jaw so hard I felt a muscle pop. I had to get out of here before I did act on those urges to attack the Devil. “Is there anything else, Your Grace?”

“As a matter of fact, yes.”

He stood and came over, depositing his drink on my table. My pulse skyrocketed, my limbs twitching with the instinctive urge to jump over the back of the sofa and put as much distance between us as possible. Whatever he intended couldn’t be good.

“For your search on Earth,” he said, his power charging the air to an almost painful level, “you’ll need wings.”

I peered up at him, wary beyond measure. “They’re already regrowing.”

“Not fast enough.” He pushed the sleeves of his shirt up to his elbows, and my stomach made a dive for the ground. “You’ll find I have no patience for further delays.”

Before I could jerk back, he grabbed me by the shoulders, and the next second, his power punched into me. Pain erupted all along my nerve endings, shooting through my body like a tidal wave of agony, and my back bowed as I screamed.

Between my shoulder blades, it felt like someone pierced me with hot pokers. On and on, pain pumped through my blood, from the tips of my toes and the top of my head to my back, as if there was a network of paths of pain that all led to the spots where my wings would grow. It burned .

I was awash in a sea of agony, lost in fiery waves that consumed me, my vision blinking in and out of focus. All the while, I screamed and convulsed, though Lucifer’s grip on my shoulders never wavered.

Eventually, the pain ebbed, until there was only a faint pulse of discomfort, a twinge between my shoulder blades, and the weight of new wings pulling at my back.

My face was all wet from crying, my throat raw from screaming, and I’d ripped the fabric of the sofa with my nails as I’d held on for dear life. Trembling all over, I sat there, weak beyond measure, when Lucifer released my shoulders and stepped back.

“There,” he said, casually pulling down his sleeves again. “I saved you at least four days of painfully slow regrowth.”

Sniffling, my sight still a bit blurred from my tears, I raised my gaze to him, rage simmering deep within me. “Like this wasn’t painful?”

His smile was pure malice. “You’re welcome.”

“I thought you couldn’t hurt me,” I bit out. “What with that precious spark inside me.”

His eyes glittered as he gave me a sly look. “Oh, but that wasn’t meant to hurt. I touched you with the intent to heal.” He laid one hand over his heart, the picture of sincerity and innocence. “I wanted to make you whole. That the process of speed-healing happens to have extreme pain as a side effect is an unintended bonus.”

I fucking hated him.

“You may take one day to rest and recharge,” he said, returning to his armchair. “And then you’ll report to me for the start of your search. You are not to speak to anyone of your new purpose. The knowledge about the search is on a need-to-know basis, and there are only very few who do need to know.” He glared at me for a moment and then waved at the door, which opened to reveal a demon standing at attention who bowed deeply at the sight of his lord. “Gilarion will show you to your rooms. Do not leave them until called.”

I rose and bowed, spreading my wings in a sign of deference, the new muscles twinging slightly. When I straightened again, my smile at him might have shown too much teeth. “Thank you, Your Grace.”

Before I turned away, Lucifer pinned me with a look and quietly said, “I don’t understand what she saw in you.”

I paused, holding his stare. Then I curled my lip and snarled, “ Likewise .”

Pivoting on the balls of my feet, I marched out of the room.