Chapter 26

CHAPTER26

Adelicious meal, a hot shower, and a full night’s sleep in a luxurious bed later, I woke rested and recovered in the room Lilith had assigned to me. In stark contrast to the chamber Lucifer had put me in, this one was finely appointed, the walls hewn from glittering light gray marble, hung with decorative tapestries, the floor covered in comfy rugs. The room was large enough to feature a bed of impressive size and a sitting area.

I dug into the breakfast that some merihem delivered, knowing I wouldn’t have cause again to puke it all out later. Lilith had made it clear she wouldn’t have me do anything that would come close to what Lucifer had put me through.

Thank fuck and all my lucky stars.

I’d somehow managed to procure protection by the only person who could slap Lucifer’s fingers and make him say thank you for it.

I was just finishing off the plate when a knock sounded at the door.

“Come in,” I called out.

Lilith smiled at me as she walked in. “I take it you’re well rested?”

“Yes, Your Grace.” I put down my fork and wiped my mouth with a napkin, then stood and bowed deeply. “Thank you. I cannot tell you how much I appreciate your help.”

I hadn’t had a chance to properly express my gratitude last night, what with how exhausted and wrecked I’d been. I’d pretty much only been able to scarf down food, clean myself up and then fall into bed.

Lilith clucked her tongue. “None of that now. You are my guest. I am happy to provide you with comfort.”

“Thank you,” I said and then grimaced. It was like when I was at a restaurant and kept thanking the waiter for every little thing they did because I wanted to be polite. Waiter sets the table? Thank you. Waiter brings the bottle of water? Thank you. Waiter pours the water? Thank you. Waiter sets the water bottle down? Thank you.

Dining with me was a cringe fest of nervous politeness.

“Now,” Lilith said, “please come with me.”

I followed her out into the hallway, where the same demons from yesterday made up her retinue again. As we walked, Lilith made introductions. The blonde who’d carried me was Enaia, the dude with the curly hair was called Thamuz, and the ginger-haired one was Destatur. They’d been serving as Lilith’s entourage and inner circle for millennia, apparently.

While Enaia peered at me with open disdain, Destatur gave me a warm smile. Thamuz seemed kind of aloof and uninterested in pretty much anything.

Lilith stopped at an ornate door and faced me.

“I’m sure you must be eager to return home,” she said. “Before I can give you leave to go, however, there are still amends to be made for breaking the vow. It is not quite an arbitrary decision—there are rules to how this works. Once begun, a penance must be completed.”

I gulped. “Okay.”

She nodded gravely, and with a push of her hand, she opened the door and waved me inside. Warily, I stepped over the threshold and into…a massive library. My mouth hanging open, I craned my neck up to take in the high bookshelves that covered every wall of the ballroom-sized hall. An old, intricately carved desk stood in the center of the room, with several other seating areas off to the sides. Books littered the desk and other tables next to the armchairs and sofas.

“Your task,” Lilith said from behind me, “is to sort these books back into their proper place, by alphabetical order within sections based on subjects.” Her hand came to rest on my shoulder. “We are so messy, you see.” A slight squeeze. “We never seem to have the time to put back the books we pull out. It’s just so tiresome. No one wants to do it. Quite the right task for a penance, don’t you think?”

I looked back at her over my shoulder. A sly smile sat on her lips, a glint of mischief in her eyes.

“Oh, yes.” I nodded with all the fake earnestness I could muster. “Very punishing, indeed.”

“Tedious work.”

“Absolutely onerous. I will have nightmares about this.”

Lilith pressed her lips together as if to keep in a grin. “Then it is settled. A fitting punishment for breaking the vow. It will suffice.”

“Yes, Your Grace.”

She gave me a curt nod. “I will come back in a few hours, and we’ll have lunch together.”

“Okay.”

With that, she left, and I allowed myself a grin as the door closed behind her and her retinue. As far as pleasurable punishments went, this one was high up on my list, and of course, Lilith knew it. The only other one that would top having to do the “tedious” work of a librarian would be having to take care of a roomful of kittens. Oh, the horror!

She’d cleverly phrased it in a way that would still make it work as a penance. I didn’t know exactly how the magic around vows, oaths, and such functioned, but I guessed there was some leeway as to how the requirement for making amends might be satisfied.

And because I didn’t want to trigger anything within the framework of this “penance,” I cracked my knuckles and really did get down to business. There were scores of books scattered across the available surfaces in the room, and depending on how intricate their shelving would be, it could well take me hours to put them in their right place.

Of course, I also checked out some of the books and leafed through them, which was the part that made the whole thing enjoyable. So many of them were old tomes, from centuries ago but so well preserved, there had to be some magic keeping them from falling to decay. And not all of them were books in the modern sense of the word—quite a few were parchment rolls or a stack of leaves tied together with string.

Thanks to my Azazel-gifted ability to understand any language that ever existed, I was able to actually read the different scripts and peruse the contents of the tomes. Poetry, fairytales, collections on mythology, historical accounts, treatises...all from various countries and empires and cultures throughout the ages. A veritable wealth of human knowledge, creativity, and ingenuity.

Right in the heart of the home of Lucifer, who—by all accounts—seemed to despise humanity.

Curious.

I’d started by clearing the side tables and the armchairs, working my way across the seating areas until I eventually tackled the piles of books on the desk. The surface was barely even visible, so many tomes littered the table. The more I cleared it, the more I noticed the elaborate wood carving underneath a glass topper. The image depicted a version of the Fall from Grace, with clouds billowing in the heavens, and an angel hurtling down toward roaring flames. The carving details of the feathers on the wings were incredible, and the flames looked stunningly real. The kind of talent and skill it took to make a wood carving look so life-like…

I picked up the last book on a pile to my right and stopped short.

Underneath the volume lay some pages.

But not pages that had come loose from a book.

They were letters.

My eyes had tracked over the content of the sheet on top before I could decide whether or not I should snoop. And then the names I’d picked up made the decision for me.

With trembling fingers, I leafed through the letters.

They were, all of them, addressed to Gabriel.

No last name, no title, no other honorific, just Gabriel.

And the content of the letter made it clear the addressee was the first of his name. As in, the archangel Gabriel.

All the pages were essentially drafts of one and the same letter, with some of the earlier versions being struck through, with variations in tone and depth of description, telling the tale of someone taking great care to phrase this letter in the right way.

There was no name signed to the bottom because none of the letters was truly finished, but even still, I had a good hunch about who the author must be.

My heart in my throat, I held the pages in shaking hands and kept staring at the fine scrawl of Lucifer’s handwriting. I recognized it from the note he’d sent Azazel last year when he’d acknowledged Azazel’s RSVP to the Fall Festival. The language he’d used back then was Hellspeak, the script elegant yet archaic, like a mix between Hebrew and Arabic. Aramaic, maybe?

Without realizing it at the moment when I’d read the note about the Fall Festival, I had already been able to read and understand Hellspeak, and now I grasped, almost intrinsically, that this language was a twin of sorts, using the same script with only few variations, the structure and grammar and vocabulary very close to Hellspeak.

Looking at whom it was addressed to, I figured it was likely the language native to Heaven. Heavenspeak? Angeltongue? Who knew.

The letter in its various forms addressed the archangel with much more respect than I’d have imagined Lucifer capable of when dealing with his erstwhile heavenly brothers, but then again, given the nature of the request he was making, it made sense that he’d try to be conciliatory, maybe even nervous about hitting the right note.

He was trying to ask Gabriel to pardon Naamah and let her ascend to Heaven.

And it was obvious from the way he phrased the petition that this was an unusual ask; he even referred to the unprecedented nature of a hellborn demon being admitted to Heaven. Fallen angels had been pardoned in the past, yes. But a demon who’d never been to Heaven in the first place? I’d never heard of it, and the letter acknowledged that this would be the first instance of that happening.

Still, some of the drafts showed how Lucifer had apparently struggled with wrangling his disdain under control when addressing Gabriel. There were slips of snide comments, word choices here and there that revealed his underlying contempt for the archangel and Heaven as a whole. Those passages were either struck out or the letter draft abruptly ended there, indicating Lucifer had scrapped the draft at that point, possibly due to his slip of the tongue, or hand, for that matter.

I perused all the pages, trying to find the most complete version. But there was no telling which was the most recent one, and I didn’t know whether this whole endeavor was an abandoned project that was centuries old, or whether it had indeed been finished, and all those drafts had resulted in one completed letter that was actually sent.

I squinted at the desk. The letters had been covered by books, so someone—Lucifer? Lilith?—had sat here and either deliberately or accidentally laid stuff on top of them. Maybe it had been Lucifer after taking a break from letter drafting. Maybe he’d been frustrated because he hadn’t been able to find the right words, and he’d paused the project for a while.

Worrying my lip, I considered the facts. Chances were that Lucifer hadn’t finished the drafting yet. Because if he had, why keep all those earlier drafts here? He’d have likely either destroyed them or put them away somewhere since they’d served their purpose. That the drafts were still here on the desk could mean that this was an ongoing project that he planned to revisit at a later point. I knew from experience of drafting cover letters for jobs and internships that I liked to keep earlier drafts on hand to keep checking back on how I’d phrased something and to play around with words and sentences and structure.

And if this was truly an unfinished project…the implications were staggering. He wanted to get Naamah into Heaven? Petitioning for her to be an angel? Why?

The entire idea was mind-boggling. Wasn’t she his favorite daughter? Even with her mind broken, confined to her chambers, she still seemed to hold a special place in Lucifer’s esteem. If she ascended to Heaven…Lucifer would never see her again. He was forbidden from stepping foot on Earth as per the deal he’d made with Heaven to keep Lilith. If Naamah went to Heaven, it’d be like she died—she’d be forever gone from Lucifer’s life.

Noise in the hallway outside made me jerk out of my musings. With a start and a gasp, I restacked the letters and carefully laid the book on top of them again. I didn’t remember what order the drafts had been in, but I could only hope that Lucifer didn’t remember either. I sure as fuck didn’t want him to find out that I knew about this. This might snowball into another vow of silence right quick, and I’d had my fill of them, thank you very much.

The door swung open, and I tried my best to look casual. Which resulted in me putting my hand on my hip, then deciding it might look better if I leaned on the desk, then thinking, “No, that looks staged!” and then removing my hand from the desk, only to accidentally knock off a pile of books in the process, bending down to pick them up, hitting the back of my head on the underside of the desk while getting up, jerking my head down from the pain and consequently punching myself in the face with my knee, staggering upright and stubbing my toes—peeking out of open shoes—on the leg of the desk, hopping on one foot while holding the other and uttering an ungodly howl, only to stumble and fall over the desk chair.

And this is how Lilith found me with at least three work-related injuries, sprawled out on the floor and groaning in pain.

“Zoe!” she called out and rushed to my side. “What happened?”

“The books got feisty,” I murmured.

She studied me from head to toe. “I guess I was wrong when I thought this assignment wouldn’t harm you.”

“I’m resourceful,” I said and grunted as I heaved myself up off the floor with her help.

Lilith patted my back. “Well, it is a good thing you heal fast.”

“Yeah.”

Surreptitiously, I threw a glance at the desk. The book still covered the letter drafts, and it looked like that area of the desk hadn’t been disturbed.

Lilith followed my gaze.

I held my breath.

“Don’t worry about the rest,” she said. “It is enough. The work you did will satisfy the requirement of penance.”

I exhaled on a sigh of relief, and Lilith smiled, obviously thinking I’d been concerned about my workload instead of anyone finding out I’d discovered yet another sensitive piece of information to do with Lucifer and Naamah.

I really should stop falling into these situations.

Right, I’d add that to my to-do list right after Stop being socially awkward.

“Let us eat together.” Lilith linked her arm through mine and led me out of the library.

We dined in a cozy room decked out in colorful fabrics that flowed from the ceiling and across the walls, giving the entire thing the feel of being inside a tent. Seat cushions were arranged around a low table that featured a mouthwatering feast. Lilith gracefully sat with her legs folded to the side, and her retinue settled down around her. I followed their lead and parked my butt on a comfy cushion across the table from Lilith.

“Please,” she said and waved at the selection of food that looked like it had a little bit of the best of every cuisine on Earth. “Enjoy.”

She watched me as I perused the food and then went straight for a platter of falafel, added a bit of what I assumed was yogurt sauce and grabbed a piece of fluffy bread, then piled some gorgeous-smelling biryani on the plate as well and topped everything off with a good helping of vegetable curry.

“So you like rice,” Lilith said as she started filling her own plate.

I nodded with a mouthful of biryani. “So versatile. The perfect grain.” I made a thumbs-up gesture.

“Is it your favorite food?”

I squinted as I considered it. “No, I think that distinction goes to pizza.”

“Pizza?” Lilith inclined her head a little to look at Destatur, the ginger-haired female on her retinue.

Leaning closer to Lilith, Destatur explained in a soft voice, “A round dish made of dough and topped with tomato sauce and other foods, baked in an oven.”

“Ah.” Lilith raised her brows and nodded.

I paused with the spoon halfway to my mouth. “You’ve never had pizza?”

“I’m afraid not.”

“Oh.” I laid my hand over my heart. “You should get one someday! But take it straight from Italy, baked in a stone oven. It’s THA BEST.” I made a chef’s kiss gesture. “I hear Napoli has some great traditional pizzerias, though I’ve never been there myself. But that’s sort of where it all originated.”

“Destatur,” Lilith murmured.

“On it.” Destatur summoned a notepad and pen and scribbled something down.

It was kind of cute how Lilith wanted to take notes on human culture. But also…how sad was it that she was so out of touch with modern life on Earth?

We spent the rest of lunch chitchatting about everything and nothing. Lilith was, as always, very interested in hearing about my experience of living on Earth, and I, in turn, carefully asked her about her life down here.

At one point, the conversation had gotten so comfortable that when Lilith casually mentioned Lucifer, I couldn’t hold my tongue fast enough to keep in the question that had been burning a hole in my mind ever since I’d gotten to know Lilith.

“What do you see in him?”