“Ma, stop it,” Galilee said. “I told you I’m fine. He didn’t do anything to me.”
Lucifer would have begged to differ, but he was holding his tongue and examining the boiling resistance he’d felt at the idea of anyone taking Galilee away from him. Whatwasthis connection the two of them had? Why did it feel so necessary?
Collette’s face clouded with sorrow. “Baby, don’t you see? We already knew you’d say that now that he’s gripped your mind.”
Lucifer saw anger flash through Gali’s eyes, her jaw tensing before she swallowed it down and turned to her grandmother. “Nana Darling, you have to listen to me. There’s nothing wrong. Please go home.”
Her grandmother’s mouth thinned as she looked between Galilee and Lucifer. “Child, the wind already carried stories we know to be true. Leaving you with him is completely out of the question.”
Galilee cast a betrayed look in Celestial’s direction, and her cousin shrugged apologetically. Lucifer watched the lines of tension swirling among the family, as Oriak? and Bonbon held each other on the periphery, and he waited silently as Galilee confronted her kin. This was his fault for being careless. He should have shielded her when he brought her to the house, instead of letting what they’d shared together be reduced to gossip on the wind.
“The stories are none of your business,” Galilee bit out. Something new had entered her voice, a sharp buzzing texture to the rage he could sense unfurling inside her. The swarm above her became agitated, thousands of wings vibrating through the air. As Galilee spoke, her words began to singe some of the leaves of the hedges and willows around them. The Kincaids didn’t notice the thin blackened edges, but Lucifer did. He kept his shoulders relaxed, his stance casual. This was between Galilee and her family until it wasn’t. He’d get the truth of what she was eventually from them, because he had to, but if Galilee could manage the current situation, he wasn’t going to get in her way by opening his mouth.
Her grandmother tried to soften her tone. “We know you couldn’t offer consent freely, child. You don’t need to protect him. Step aside, Galilee.”
It was only then that Lucifer noticed Galilee had been slowly edging herself over till her body was placed between her family and him. The heat coming from her redoubled, and the Kincaids began to notice. Some of the Kincaids lowered their weapons when Galilee got in the path of their shots, but others didn’t, their jaws set as their eyes flicked over the low burn spreading over the leaves in the garden with alarm.
Celestial raised her forearm and licked at a dribble of blood that had run from the wound on her palm. The crossbow bolt lay in the grass by her feet. She didn’t say anything.
“What makes you think I couldn’t offer consent?” Galilee asked, deceptively calm. Oh, but she tasted like a storm, and Lucifer wanted her. He could smell a leash being taken off and it excited him. All around her, the blackening edges flared into red embers, thickening on leaves and branches. A low hum crept into the air, hovering just below their hearing.
“Come on, baby,” her mother cut in. “He’s the Devil. What power could you possibly have against him?”
A strange look flickered over the grandmother’s face, and Celestial’s nostrils flared imperceptibly. Lucifer’s eyes slitted—those were the two who held answers, deep in their bellies, from the look of things. He’d carved buried truths out of people before, but he’d promised Galilee her family wouldn’t be hurt. The other Kincaids might have fragments of the truth, carefully crafted stories, or warnings currently bolstered by how Galilee’s growing rage was incinerating a small patch of the garden, but it was the grandmother who watched Galilee with wary calculation, not an uninformed fear.
“You think I’m tooweakto say no to Lucifer?”
Galilee’s voice was getting wild now, and her lips were flushed fromthe heat pushing off her. Lucifer could feel the sting of it against his skin even from where he stood. He wanted to call out to her, to brush his skin against hers, but this was hers and hers alone, and it was glorious, despite her hurt. She had forgotten about her human friends, forgotten that they had been shielded since she’d known them, and so she didn’t notice the way they were staring at her as red coals burst out of the ground by her feet, as her hands began to glow, light spilling out from her palms like a threat or a blessing. Lucifer bit back a sharp grin. His honeycomb lover was unfolding before his very eyes, and she was the most beautiful thing he’d seen, all simmering fury and burning power.
“Gali, you gotta hold it,” Celestial said, her feet shuffling on blades of grass that crumbled to ash as she moved.
Galilee didn’t take her eyes off her mother. “Nah, let her say it with her chest. You think I’m so weak, Ma?”
Collette blinked and glanced at Gali’s hands. The light coming off her daughter’s skin illuminated the red coals circling her on the ground. “Galilee, we just want to protect you.”
“Who told you Ineededto be protected?” Galilee hissed. A willow tree by them groaned as its waving branches caught aflame. The Kincaid women glanced up at it, and several of them gasped. They stepped back, dark caution warring with love in their eyes as Galilee clenched her fists and the light from her hands whitened into something clear and sharp and dangerous. They had never seen her like this, Lucifer realized, and they were afraid.
Still, as much as it pleased him to see her drop the helpless skin they had stitched her into, Lucifer also knew Galilee would never forgive herself for losing control and hurting the people she loved. All her rage was really just rooted in an old, old hurt. These people had kept the truth from her for years, and they were still working so hard to convince her she was just like them, instead of setting her free, preparing her for what lived inside her. It was one thing to keep your true form leashed, like hedid. It was another to have been raised entirely on a leash, to not even realize the leash was there, or who was holding it, or why they had placed the leash in the first place.
Galilee was breathing hard, her hands bloodless and throbbing with white light. “ItoldCelestial I didn’t need y’all riding to my rescue, but none of you ever fuckinglistento me. I will not step aside, Nana Darling. I chose him because I wanted to, do you understand?” Her eyes were shattered ink, frozen in place, piercing into her grandmother’s. “Do you hear me, Nana?Because I wanted to.”
Something unspoken passed between them as the ground burned around Gali, and her grandmother closed her eyes, her body sagging. “I warned you, child,” she whispered. “I warned you about that want.”
Galilee made a visible attempt to gentle her voice in return. “I know, Nana Darling. But the sun still gonna rise in the morning, whether we like it or not.”
Her grandmother looked devastated. “And so you lay with Satan himself, with the enemy of worlds? That did not have to be inevitable, Galilee. Look how you burn even now, as if he raised you from a pit of Hell.”
Lucifer felt the words land on Galilee as strongly as if her grandmother had struck her. The heat around them tightened, and the light from Galilee’s hands flared, casting deep shadows on her face.
“So I’m evil now, Nana?” she asked unsteadily, looking around at her family. “That’s what you going with?”
A Kincaid with a sawed-off shotgun shifted her weapon from Lucifer to Galilee, and after a brief hesitation, another Kincaid with a pair of pistols did the same. Galilee drew in a ragged breath as she watched them do it, and her friends gasped softly, alarm filling their expressions.
“Please,” Bonbon said. “Don’t hurt Gali.”
“Stay out of this,” the one with the sawed-off snapped. The family was now split, most of them staring at those two in shock.
“Jesmyn, baby,” one of them said to the woman with the pistols. “She’s ourniece.”
