Chapter 32

CHAPTER32

Destatur’s strike never landed.

My pulse pounding in a ghostly echo of my real heartbeat, I lay there, draped over Azazel with panic tearing at my mind and waited for the killing blow that didn’t come.

Instead, I heard the clanking sound of metal hitting stone, like a sword clattering to the ground. Followed by a heavy thud, like a body collapsing.

Blinking away the blurriness over my vision, I lifted my aching head and looked behind me to Destatur.

To see her sprawled on the ground, spasming from some sort of seizure. Faint light glowed over her body—the same faint light that illuminated my own skin. Mouth agape, I glanced down at myself, at the shimmer of power coating me, flown from some inner source.

Lilith.

I could taste her essence, her energy, stored in that kernel of herself she gifted to me, now fused with my soul. All this time, I’d thought it useless as a power to be directly wielded. But now…now it had come to my aid, protecting me when I needed it most.

My gaze fell on the spot where Lilith had been killed, and my chest drew tight. Why hadn’t it protected her?

Destatur twitched, and my eyes flicked back to her. I could dwell on the why’s and the how’s later. First, I needed to make sure we were safe. Who knew how long Destatur would remain stunned?

I was almost in a weird, dream-like state as I dragged myself over to Destatur, grabbed her sword, raised it—and then brought it down on her neck. Blood sprayed my face and my hands and arms, and I blinked. Shit. I hadn’t managed to completely sever her neck. It gaped about halfway open, tendons and muscles exposed, blood spurting from the large wound.

Destatur twitched and gurgled.

I realized how disassociated I was when instead of thinking, “Oh, God, she’s still alive, I’m going to throw up,” my only thought was that I needed to do better because obviously that’s not how one should behead a person. My brain, storage to random tidbits of knowledge, helpfully supplied me with the information that executioners of eons past had to train hard in order to be able to cleanly cut someone’s head off their body, and how it was seen as a disgrace to their profession if they couldn’t manage it in one strike.

I mentally apologized to all executioners who had gone before me.

It was a lot fucking harder to decapitate someone than it looked.

After hacking unsuccessfully at Destatur’s neck trying to sever the last of the tendons and muscles, I simply rolled her over onto her front. This way, the still attached part of her neck was on top, and it’d be easier for me to cut through it.

Such clinical thoughts. No emotion behind them.

There was no nausea, no scruples, no doubts or hesitation, only cold, detached understanding of what needed to be done.

Later, I would look back at this moment and shiver at the way my mind had completely disabled my feelings in order to protect my sanity.

Right now, though, I had a demon to behead.

I finally managed it, and Destatur burst into sparks of light, leaving only her clothes behind, like the other killed demons and angels. I marveled at the beauty of this kind of death. To dissolve into light, and be swept away. No decaying body, no bones left behind.

With a start, I snapped out of my reverie and scrambled back to Azazel. He lay still, his usually dark tan holding a lightly gray pallor, the blood of his wounds fresh and glistening. He should have long woken by now. I remembered the times I’d seen other demons incapacitated by a blade to the heart—it normally only took a few minutes for them to regain consciousness.

But Azazel was still out, and his wounds weren’t closing.

Panic crept back in. My hands trembled. What was I supposed to do? How could I help him?

Maybe he wasn’t healing because we were on Earth? I thought back to how he’d told me that demons drew their energy directly from Hell itself. What if he needed to go back to regain his strength?

I snapped my head up and stared at the spot where the hellgate was located, invisible until someone drew the correct sigils and activated it. Determination steeling my spirit muscles, I grabbed Azazel by his ankles, my back to the hellgate a few yards away, and pulled.

Oh, God, he was heavy. I barely managed to drag him an inch before I had to take a break. The fact that his wings were still fully extended didn’t make it easier to move him.

How could he be so heavy when he was, right now, invisible to the human world? How the fuck did that even work? And why was I getting a muscle cramp when I didn’t even have a physical body at this moment, strictly speaking?

I turned around so I faced the hellgate and repositioned my grasp on his ankles. With a drawn-out grunt, I pulled and pulled and pulled, moving him inch by slow inch toward the portal.

“I never thought I would be the one to be dragged to Hell,” Azazel drawled, his voice as raw as if caressed with a cheese grater.

I froze, dropped his legs, and spun around.

“Azazel!” I shouted and threw myself at him.

He winced and grunted when I landed right on top of him, but his arms wound around me, pressing me close as I buried my face in his neck. I breathed him in, and everything righted itself. My heart, so close to breaking, so full of concern for him, softened at the feel of him underneath me, awake and moving. Alive.

“I was so worried,” I whispered as I peppered his face with kisses. “Are you okay?”

“Better now with you on top of me.”

I drew back and gave him a gentle slap on his shoulder for that inappropriately funny remark. “Be serious,” I said, heat pricking behind my eyes again. “You got skewered by a sword. And Li—” I paused to stave off the breaking of my voice. “Lilith is dead. We need to get back to Hell before Lucifer shows up.”

Azazel’s brows drew together, and he sat up with a wince. “What happened? The last thing I remember is Destatur stabbing me, but I don’t see her around anymore. I thought she was going to kill me.”

“She was planning to.” I gulped and then launched into a brief explanation of what had occurred, not just after he’d lost consciousness, but also the specifics of how Destatur and Enaia had been colluding with the angels to kill Lilith—something Azazel apparently hadn’t really seen while he was locked in the fight with the angel.

“You killed her.” His gaze held a gleam I couldn’t quite place.

I shrugged. “It seemed like the reasonable thing to do.”

The smile that broke across his face glistened like sunlight on ocean waves. “That’s my girl.”

His words caused a full-body shiver in me, even in my spirit form.

“You should have taken her wings,” he said, his eyes crinkling at the corners. “Start your own collection.”

“Uh, yeah, how does that work exactly? Shouldn’t the wings also burst into sparks and disappear once the demon is dead? ’Cause that’s what all their bodies did when they got killed.” I waved around me at the nonexistent remains of the angels and demons.

“The wings stay if you sever them before death.” He sobered and looked toward the hellgate’s location. “We should get going. I don’t want to be here when he arrives.” He glanced at me as he rose to his feet, his movements still a bit sluggish, his wounds still not healed. “From what you said, Enaia seems to have been in on the conspiracy, and she’ll have told Lucifer that we were responsible. He doesn’t know the truth yet. So if he finds us here…”

“We’re fucked.”

He gave a curt nod, then grabbed my hand and started walking away from the hellgate, limping slightly. Seeing him injured—actually injured and not healing right—kicked something fundamental in me out of balance. Azazel was invincible—or at least I’d somehow believed that, deep down. I’d just never seen him truly wounded. Rationally, I’d known that he could be hurt, and I’d seen him with minor cuts or bruises right after training.

But he’d always healed so fast. He’d never been impaired. Always, he’d bounced back quickly, and it had never been serious. Of course, none of the training fights had been intended to kill. Even with the battles he’d fought with other demons in Hell, there’d been the underlying understanding that there shouldn’t be any casualties, because that would incur the wrath of their archdemon.

These fights here on Earth, however, were another matter altogether. When the angels had clashed with him or Destatur, it had been with the intent to kill. Take no prisoners, leave no witnesses, fight to the death.

And Azazel now showed the signs of it.

Watching him get stabbed through the heart with a sword, seeing him fall and out of commission, and now seeing him limping, bleeding from several wounds that wouldn’t close—it did something to my mind and heart, something I was sure would leave scars that were to haunt me yet.

“Where are you going?” I asked him, throwing a glance back at the hellgate location—our only way back, right now.

“We need to find another gate.” He kept pulling me along, limping down the sidewalk, while the humans—who were still oblivious to what had gone down in their midst—evaded us like a visible obstacle they didn’t even glance at. “Do you really want to go through the hellgate at Lucifer’s palace? Walk right into him, if we’re unlucky?” He shook his head. “There are other gates in the city. We just need to find one, and then we’ll go from there.”

“Maybe we should fly?”

“I’m not sure I’m able to yet,” was his quiet reply, and it made worry and fear explode in my stomach.

A rumble shook the ground.

Azazel halted—and the humans on the sidewalk paused as well, looking around. I felt it then, a wave of such dark power hushing the air, it raised all the hairs on my ghostly body and twisted my insides with primitive fear.

“Too late,” Azazel whispered.

He yanked me to the side just as I glanced back at the location of the hellgate…where the portal now glowed, spilling inky darkness onto the pavement. Azazel pushed me into the tall bushes underneath the stone balustrade running along the elevated terrace in front of the library. Pressing me down and against the stone wall, he then folded his wings over us. I could barely see a speck of blue sky above.

A second later, another quake and roar rattled the earth, followed by screeching sounds—and an explosion of power that darkened the sky. Like the shockwave of a bomb, it hit us with enough force to flatten both me and Azazel to the ground. We landed with a grunt, half smashed into the bush next to us—which was on fire.

I blinked past Azazel’s wings at the horrific scene playing out.

Everything was on fire.

Flames licked over the ground, over buildings, engulfing cars, buses…people.

Oh, God.

There were humans running away, burning and screaming, some of them on the ground, howling in agony. Trees stood ablaze, the flames reaching high up into an artificially darkened sky with churning clouds of light-streaked gray and red. Sirens blared in the distance. The air was filled with a cacophony of sounds of suffering…and deep, bone-chilling baying.

“Hellhounds,” I whispered, clutching Azazel’s shoulders. “Oh, God, he brought hellhounds.”

And there they were, tearing out of the glowing portal along with a stream of winged warriors, their weapons at the ready. They all went straight for the humans.

Whoever wasn’t burned to a crisp already now fell prey to the hounds, who chased them all down, snarling and snapping, or to the blades of the demons, gleaming in the flickering flames of the raging inferno.

I stared, shocked beyond understanding, at a kind of wholesale slaughter worse than anything I’d ever seen depicted in movies.

And then he stepped out of the hellgate.

Pausing with just the right significance before he slowly, deliberately, placed one foot onto the ink-and-flame-coated sidewalk, Lucifer then raised his head to the sky.

I flinched at the sight of him.

His hair had turned black.

Dark veins ran out over his skin from eyes of pure midnight, as if some shadow poison had taken a hold of him. Black claws tipped his fingers, and his obsidian wings glowed with a red sheen, as if coated in luminescent blood.

But it was his expression that truly gave me chills. Halfway between soul-splitting grief and feral aggression, he looked completely unmoored, utterly void of any capacity for reasoning.

I’d been scared of him before. This, here, seeing him like this…it redefined my understanding of terror.

He bared his teeth—canines elongated like fangs—and then unleashed a scream of raw, primal fury and anguish before he launched himself forward and joined the fray.

His demons and hounds bathed the streets in blood. They even tore into the cars and buses, ripping doors open and pulling screaming people out to die upon swords or fangs.

I jerked, my soul turning over at the merciless violence and indiscriminate brutality. So much death. So much destruction. And here we stood on the sidelines, unable to help. Because even if Azazel jumped in, what good would he do against this overwhelming tide of aggression? He was one against a horde of scores of demons and hellhounds. It would be like trying to hold back the rushing water of a broken dam with a two-by-four.

Light split the darkness of the sky in a blaze so bright it bathed everything in overexposed white for a moment.

Then, silver fire rushing in their wake, angels descended from the sky.