Chapter 21

Chapter 21

“Ready?”Azazel’s eyes met mine.

I blew out a heavy breath—or would have, if I hadn’t been in ghost form. Even though my body was incorporeal, I could have sworn sweat still slicked over my skin, my pulse fluttering.

We stood in the backyard of my father’s house in Gresham. The wind rustled the leaves in the tree above us, yet I didn’t feel the air in my spirit form. Sunshine glinted off the water drops from the most recent rain shower, and somewhere a block over kids were laughing and squealing. The world went on about its business, oblivious to the demon and the ghostly human in their midst.

We’d come here soon after our return from Lucifer’s palace, and now I clenched my hands at my sides, my emotional state somewhere between numb and uproariously agitated. This was it. We were about to release my father’s soul here on Earth.

I nodded at Azazel and braced myself. “Do it.”

He pressed a button on the small box in his hand, it sprang open…and with a bright flash of light, it spat out its content. A shape appeared on the ground—a man on all fours. Trembling, he let his head hang between hunched shoulders. When he looked up, his eyes were unfocused, but their color was a shock of familiarity. Hazel, a mirror image of my own.

Brown hair cut short, his face an aged version of the one I once knew so well, my father stared unseeing at his surroundings. My chest squeezed tight. I hadn’t seen him in so long, I’d almost forgotten the details of his features. Time had deepened the lines around his eyes, his mouth, had sharpened his cheekbones and jaw.

But he was still the man I’d looked up to as a child, the one who held my hand until I fell asleep when I was scared, who always slipped me extra candy when mom wasn’t looking.

Heart heavy with too much at once, I raised a shaking hand to my throat. He was here, truly here.

He blinked, squinted, and glanced around.

“Dad?” I ventured softly.

His eyes landed on me, and he jerked. His face contorted in agony. “No,” he said, his voice plaintive. “Please, not again.” He clutched his head in both hands and rocked on his knees. “Not her again. I can’t take it anymore. Please stop. Not her. I can’t take her pain. It hurts too much. Not again, not again, not again—”

“Dad…” My voice broke. “What—”

“Torture,” Azazel murmured from beside me. “They tortured him with you.”

I startled, turned to him. “What?”

“We punish not just physically.” He put his hands in his pants pockets. “Emotional torture often causes even more pain, especially when there’s guilt involved.”

“But—how—”

“He was likely shown scenes where you confronted him about his abandonment and either cried or yelled at him.” He cast me a sidelong glance. “Or both at once, since you’re an angry crier.”

“That is horrible,” I whispered.

My father was still rocking in a panic on the ground, and it broke my fucking heart to see him this way. There was a time when I would have thought I’d relish watching him feel the weight of what he did to me, knowing that he suffered from guilt over his actions.

The bleak reality was, it gave me no satisfaction at all.

Sick to my stomach, even in my spirit form, I sank to my knees in front of him and laid a hand on his shoulder, able to touch and feel him since we were both spirit.

“Dad. Stop. This isn’t a hallucination. I’m real. This is real.”

He stopped rocking.

“You’re not in Hell anymore.” I squeezed his shoulder, shaking inside and out. “It’s over.”

Haltingly, his eyes met mine. “Zoe?”

“Yes.” I felt the threat of tears in my eyes, knowing they wouldn’t fall. Not while I was here on Earth. “It’s really me. I’m not in your head. I’m not here to hurt you.”

His features slackened. “You’re really real?”

I nodded.

“Oh, my God.” He rubbed a hand over his face, then stilled. “Why don’t I feel my—” His gaze fell on Azazel, and he flinched as if whipped. “He’s one of them. He—he’s a—” He scrambled backward. “Zoe, get away from him!” Reaching out to me, he grabbed my arm and tried to pull me behind him.

My heart broke a bit more. “It’s okay,” I said soothingly, laying my hand over his. “He’s with me.”

My dad’s startled gaze swung to me. “What?”

“Um…” This was going to be awkward. “He’s my husband.”

A blank stare.

“We’re married.”

His mouth moved, but no sound came out.

“I think you broke him,” Azazel muttered from behind me. “Weeks of torture in Hell, but this is what did him in.”

“Shush,” I shot back over my shoulder. To my dad, I said, “This is Azazel, and he’s not like the others. He won’t hurt you. He’s the one who got you out for me.” I squeezed his hand. “He saved you.”

My dad’s eyes flicked to Azazel, but he still winced. I grimaced in sympathy. Yeah, it took some time to get used to his powerful presence.

“I don’t understand,” my dad rasped. “What happened? What’s going on?”

Oof, where to start?

While I was still pondering how to explain everything to my dad, Azazel said, “Call me if you need me,” and retreated to the front of the house, giving us some privacy.

I looked at my dad and bit my lip. “Well,” I said, “so I made this deal…”

And I told him. Starting with the séance, to the moment I’d found out about his soul in Hell, to our reckless rescue mission, to this instant right here, leaving out any details that were Not Safe for Parents.

My dad listened through it all, his eyes growing wider by the minute, and when I finished, he shook his head. “This is amazing.” His face full of wonder, he added softly, “You’re amazing.”

I ducked my head, foolish, childlike pleasure at his praise blooming warm inside me.

“Thank you,” he said hoarsely. “You got me out, when you had every reason to watch me burn.”

I shook my head, my voice hollow. “I don’t want to watch you burn. It’s not—” I broke off, pressed my lips together. “Seeing your pain doesn’t lessen mine.”

“Zoe,” he began, then stopped, seeming to gather himself. “I said this a thousand times to you back in Hell, to that image of yours they kept sending me. You weren’t real, but what I felt was.” He paused, his features trembling. “I’m sorry.”

I hadn’t known how much those two words would make me feel.

“I’m sorry for the pain I caused you,” he went on. “For how I left. It wasn’t right, and I should have shown you that I still loved you.” He grimaced. “It’s no excuse, but back then I was…not in a good place. My life was upended—”

“By your own damn fault,” I interjected quietly.

“Yes.” He nodded, his expression resigned. “That’s on me.” A deep sigh. “I don’t regret having a family with Olivia, because I love the girls. But I should have done it right.”

I stared at him, my heart twisting. “Why didn’t you? Why did you lie to us, for years?”

His shoulders slumped. He looked at the ground. “Because I was a selfish coward. When I fell in love with Olivia, I didn’t stop loving your mom. It’s not like turning off one switch and turning on another. I cared for your mother, deeply. And I didn’t want to hurt her. I knew that if I told her…it would cause her so much pain. So I didn’t.”

I narrowed my eyes. “That’s the worst load of bullshit I’ve ever heard.”

He uttered a dry laugh. “Yeah. Yeah, it is.”

“If you really loved her and didn’t want to hurt her, you wouldn’t have gone and done something you knew would hurt her in the first place. And you would have told her, if only just out of respect and to give her the choice what to do about the situation.”

He nodded again. “I know that now. I know how reckless I was. How selfish.” His eyes met mine. “Even before my time in H—down there, I’d come to realize my mistakes. Your mother is a good woman, and she didn’t deserve how I treated her. She deserved a stronger man, and you deserved a father who was there for you. I wish I could take it all back, the lies, the hurt, the years of distance. But I can’t. I can’t make amends. This pain and regret are mine to carry, for the rest of my l—” He broke off, shook his head. “Well, I guess that’d be for all time, then.”

He looked down at his hands in his lap. “I just want you to know that I’m sorry. Even if it doesn’t change anything, even if it’s too late. You deserve my apology, at the very least.”

I nodded, not trusting myself to speak. I might just start crying without being able to shed tears.

“I’ve heard you yell at me so many times,” he said quietly. “But that was…there. It wasn’t you, so if you want to, you know, rant and rail at me, go ahead. I’ll take it. If you need to let it all out, I’m here now, and I’m listening. Your pain is valid. I deserve to feel it.”

Pressing my lips together, I looked to the side, focused on the play of light and shadow underneath the tree. I’d had so many things to say to him, but they all seemed to have been sucked away now. What was left was simple, and yet so complicated.

“I don’t think I can forgive you yet,” I said, “and I don’t know if I’ll ever get there.” I brought my gaze back to him. “But I still love you.”

Simple, yet complicated.

“I understand.” He nodded, his eyes full of emotion. “I’ve missed you, kiddo. And I’m so proud of the woman you’ve become.”

My soul hurt in too many places at once. Quiet, my voice was so quiet. “I’ve missed you too.”

“I wish…I wish I could have seen you live your life. See you happy and thriving.”

I picked at a blade of grass, not feeling it in my fingers. “I could come visit.”

He stared at me for a long time. “Would you?”

I was silent for a moment, thinking of the keening sense of loss I’d felt after I found out he’d died, the regret about time lost and opportunities forfeited. “Yeah,” I said eventually, my eyes on the grass. “I think I’d like that.”

“So what now?” he asked after a minute of companionable silence. “How do I go on? Do I?”

Right, there was that. Azazel and I had talked about it on the way here, and I told my dad what we’d agreed on.

“You can stay here, as a ghost,” I said, “and you’ll be good for a while. However, there will come a time when your spirit will…degenerate. You’ll become something like a poltergeist, violent and aggressive. At which point you’ll lash out at the living, and you’ll hurt the very people you loved in life.”

He drew back, dismay written into the lines of his face.

“I can’t tell you when that will happen, but it usually takes some time. Decades. You have many good years ahead of you.” I swallowed hard. “No other demon will be able to drag you back to Hell—Azazel will have someone here to watch over you. And if you should turn…”

“I’ll be put down?”

I gave a shaky nod. Wraiths could never be rehabilitated, but they could be destroyed, their soul essence smashed to smithereens.

My dad looked toward the house. “Good,” he said, his voice rough. After a minute, he turned back to me. “And you?”

“I’ll be with Azazel.”

His gaze mapped my face. “Will you be happy?”

A small smile stole onto my lips. “I already am.”

“Then I’m happy for you.” His answering smile was genuine but brittle, underlaid with pain and sadness.

Much like our relationship.

I stood, and he got to his feet as well.

“I’ll be by,” I said.

A self-deprecating smile. “I’ll be here.”

I hesitated for a moment, my heart in knots. Then I reached out and hugged him.

Startled, he didn’t move at first. When his arms closed around me, I thought I felt him choke back a sob.

Throat tight, eyes pricking hot with the ghostly memory of tears, I let him go, nodded, and walked around the house to the front.

Azazel took one look at me and opened his arms. I walked right into his embrace, burying my face in his chest. His scent wrapped around me, strong and reassuring, his energy a comforting caress.

“He’ll be okay,” I murmured into his shirt.

“So will you.”

Eventually. Or maybe not. Considering that Azazel held onto his loathing for his father for thousands of years…some wounds might never close.

And thinking of his father…guilt coiled in my guts for my lie of omission about his mother.

When Azazel asked me about what happened in Lucifer’s palace and what I’d done to make Lucifer indebted to me, I stuck to the truth as much as possible. He’d seen my dagger lodged in the chest of one of the insurgents, and I told him that by defending myself from the demon, I unwittingly saved one of Lucifer’s treasures from being destroyed.

I was upfront about the vow Lucifer had extracted from me, that I was sworn to secrecy about the treasure itself.

Azazel wasn’t happy about it, but he seemed to accept my explanation. He knew better than anyone that incurring Lucifer’s wrath by breaking my vow to him would be a thing of madness.

Still, my secret ate at me, and I couldn’t shake the feeling it would come back to haunt me in time.

My fingers dug into Azazel’s shirt. I would cross that bridge when I got there.

Until then, I’d hold on to what I’d found, to this love that had sprung from the most unlikely of circumstances, and I’d relish every minute I spent with my own personal demon. He was a gift I hadn’t seen coming, my love for him something I still marveled at in quiet moments.

Looking up at him, I slung my arms around his neck, pulled him down for a kiss. When we came up for air, his eyes were a storm of silver lightning.

“Let’s go home,” I whispered.

His smile promised sin and seduction. Grabbing me tighter, he unfurled his mighty wings and shot us into the sky, hellbound.

* * *

Thankyou for reading Hellishly Ever After!

Would you like to read the Zaquiel meeting scene from Azazel’s POV? Join my newsletter, and you’ll receive it as a welcome gift. Sign up here.