It was a sign of God’s favor, I was sure of it, because there happened to be an object that was both very, very old and of great importance to Lucifer: a bronze mask lined in ivory and gold, a relic that had been soaked in blood and screams in the thick rainforests off the coast of West Africa. It was the ideal lure, bait blessed by the Almighty and circumstance. And so, I became the curator who could lead Elijah to this piece, persuade him to display it to a select group of powerful people, whisper that while he was in the States procuring it, he might as well see his daughter and show her the mask in person. With all its weight of history, surely she should behold it and celebrate with her father that it would be returned to the land on which it was first created.
Elijah didn’t take much convincing. The artifact was brought to Salvation, and then it took even less effort for me to draw Lucifer’s attention with the mask, enough for him to come topside himself. I knew thatonce an antiquity of dubious acquisition entered Elijah’s possession, the man wouldn’t hesitate to deploy his considerable resources against any entity that tried to take it away from him. It left the gate wide open for Lucifer and his false security team to slip into the picture, and so, under God’s righteous eye, all the pieces on the board moved obediently where they ought to.
“It’s safely stored away,” Elijah replied. “I cannot thank you enough, Inès. What a coup to be able to return that piece to its people.”
I inclined my head slightly. “Only made possible by your generosity,” I countered. “Did your daughter enjoy viewing it?”
“I’m going to take her to see it later myself, after the guests are gone. I find it almost a spiritual experience, you know? The popular opinion among my experts is that the mask was a ritual item of great importance.”
I kept my face still so my amusement wouldn’t leak through. He had no idea, this human only mere decades or breaths away from his death, of how close a line he walked to catastrophe by keeping that object in his house. It had been baptized in horrific acts, washed over and over in blood, enough sin to turn it into what it eventually became. Evil like that doesn’t evaporate over time. It remainssticky—but none of this was my concern. Elijah had done exactly what I wanted. Lucifer was here. Galilee was here. They had met and become entangled, and now all I needed to do was wait and watch while the justice of the Lord settled on us all like the shadow of a mighty wing.
“I agree,” I said to him. “The spirit moves in its presence.”
Elijah grinned at me. “Amen, my sister,” he said. “Amen.”
4.
Lucifer
It shouldn’t have been that hard to walk away from her.
Lucifer had been topside for the past month and he was fucking sick of it. He missed Hell. He missed the weight of it, the pressing silence and bottom-of-the-ocean darkness—he’d done away with the stereotypical sulfur and brimstone a while back. Silence was comforting to him and a very effective mode of torture for human souls when you wielded it the right way, and Lucifer had foundmanyways to wield it. Earth was glaring and loud, but being confined to flesh for this long was even worse—or, at least, it had been, right up until he’d thrown Galilee Kincaid’s leg over his shoulder and used his mouth on her. He could still taste her on his lips, but the mansion had quaked around them—something the humans couldn’t feel, but a red flag that he needed to return to the artifact immediately.
His princes hated working for Onyearugbulem—they thought humans were beneath them—but it meant nothing to Lucifer. Power remained power, no matter what vessel you shoved it into, and this was just temporary, unless it all went wrong. They were there to do a job. It was understandable that the team was irritated and overextended—they’d spent the last few weeks maintaining the wards around the artifact because none of them could figure out how to fix the damn thing. Someone had used alotof power to create something that the King of Hell couldn’t reverse engineer, and when Lucifer found out who it was, he was going to skin them strip by strip and make sure they stayed awake and screaming for all of it. The last thing he needed was a variable like Galilee walking right up to his warded doors with her dark eyes and freckled skin. He would never forget his first sight of her: the way light refracted through the beads of her dress, the way her mouth parted just a fraction. Her presence hadpulsedthrough the air, and when she’d walked up to him and placed her hand on his chest, the nonhuman forms he kept buried inside him had snarled up in hungry response, threatening to burst through his skin.
She definitely wasn’t human—she smelled entirely too wrong for that—and she hadn’t flinched at his eyes going black or at the darkness he’d called up to cloak them. The clearest sign had been the first time she’d touched his skin, because heat had seared through him instantly,painfulheat, all the way down to his bones. The shock was so great, Lucifer hadn’t been able to control his eyes reacting to it, flooding black. No one should have been able to burn him like that. He was theKingofHell, for fuck’s sake. He was supposed to be both invincible and immortal, and if Galilee was capable of actually hurting him, protocol dictated that Lucifer should’ve dragged her into some alcove and slit her throat before she could escalate the threat that she was. Instead, Lucifer had been fascinated.
She hadhurthim. She hadburnedhim.
There was no human measure of time that could communicate how long it had been since anything had punched through the numbness that clung to him like armor. Lucifer had been who he was for unfathomable eons. Ever since his Fall, he’d done his job and he’d done it well, and there had been little else. He came to earth in different skins, made his bargains, walked the clay roads with a whistling tune, tipped his hat and smiled with edged white teeth. Those games entertained him, asdid the souls, but nothing,nothing, had felt like the searing cut of Galilee Kincaid’s touch. His second-in-command, Leviathan, would disapprove, but Lucifer had made his choice in that hallway. He’d chased the flame and let Galilee incinerate him with her hands in his hair, with her mouth in that kiss, with her pretty cunt fucking his face.
It made no sense that she was pretending to be a human. Her power crackled in the air around her, humming like a swarm. She tasted like a sea he’d drowned in lifetimes ago, all sweet and salt and soft, soft sin. Lucifer almost regretted leaving her in the hallway with a faint bruise of hurt in her eyes and her glass dress murmuring against her flushed body, but it was necessary. She had unsettled him, and the wards had faltered, so he’d pulled back from the flame, finally coming to his senses.
Whatever Galilee was, she was obviously new in the flesh—she would be easy to handle. Lucifer had existed before this planet was even formed, when rivers of hungry night poured out from underneath his lashes, eating worlds in their wake, but now his work was tied to these humans. He had responsibilities, and there was too much at stake to be distracted by Galilee’s soft flesh, that freckled deep honey skin, those hips, that ass. The sounds that had spilled from her mouth made Lucifer want to keep the darkness cloaked around them for hours more, eons more, until he’d worked his way thoroughly under her skin, beyond her secrets. Instead, he’d wiped her scent off his face and made himself return to his team. He’d have to consult with them on how to handle her, but every step was a struggle to not turn around, hunt that little doe-eyed pretender down and fuck the truth out of her.
Huh.
Leviathan was going to want to kill her.
It was a sound strategy, even if Levi’s usual solution to most problems was to kill someone, but in this case he would be right. Galilee smelled like a harbinger, and sometimes the best thing to do was indeed to kill the messenger before the message could do its harm.
Lucifer stepped into the corridor leading to the carved wooden doorsthat marked the threshold of his domain within the Onyearugbulem mansion and cursed softly to himself. One of his princes was leaning against the door, spinning a throwing knife in one hand. She was dressed in matte black tactical gear like the rest of his team. Her body was lean and muscled like a whip, and she lookedpissed.
Lucifer stopped in front of her and sighed. “Belial. I felt the wards tremble.”
“It’s fine,” she snapped. “I reinforced immediately. Used the new weave you taught us.”
He nodded, then looked around. “Where’s everyone else?”
“Oh, I don’t know, Luci.” Belial leaned forward, and the light gleamed off the snakes tattooed on her shaved head. “Maybe they’re inside supervising theunauthorizedhumans you told them to let in while you went off with some little wrong-smelling bitch you couldn’t stop yourself from eye-fucking.”
Yeah, soallhis princes were going to want to kill Galilee.
“Get Asmodeus out here to cover the door. You and I need to talk in private.”
He was going to need Belial on his side to leash Levi, or else Galilee might not survive long enough for Lucifer to fuck her, and there weresomany things he wanted to do with her soft, honeyed body before it came down to killing her.
Belial glared at him, her shoulders tight with anger, then she walked through the closed door. A few moments later, Asmodeus stepped through the door, also glaring at Lucifer. He was built like a tank, with broad shoulders and huge thighs. He’d been there when Galilee had arrived and had tried, in his own way, to get Lucifer to think about what he was about to do.
