“Lucifer.” Leviathan’s voice was quiet and filled with warning, but Lucifer paid him no mind. Now that Michael had confirmed an angel’s involvement—Deziel’sinvolvement—the wounds to the gate made more sense, the power that had stitched them together, the weaves that felt faintly and horrifically familiar now that Lucifer knew his former lover had made them. He could almost taste Deziel in the damage—she’d come close to breaking the gate herself, which she undoubtedly could have, but it seemed to matter to her that it broke under his watch, not under her hands.
Belial and Asmodeus retreated to the walls of the vault to reinforce the peripheral wards while Leviathan remained by the plinth, within touching distance of Lucifer.
“What did Michael tell you?” he asked quietly, even as his fingers caught screams out of the air and flung them back to the gate.
“He confirmed an angel,” Lucifer replied. Even knowing the nature of the wound, even with his own angelic power, the ward he had placed was barely holding. This was bad.
“Which one?”
Lucifer ground his teeth and pushed more power into the gate. “Deziel.”
Leviathan gave Lucifer a shocked look, and the Devil winced. When he’d first Fallen, Levi had heard him call out Deziel’s name in his sleep, before he learned how to let everything he had lost go.
Across the vault, Belial did a double take, and a splash of blackness burned against her cheek as it shot past. “Deziel?From the fucking war? Deziel-who-lives-to-suck-the-cock-of-righteousness Deziel?” The prince shook her head and wiped at her face. “No fucking way, Luci. She’s gargled Heaven’s balls since the beginning of time. They’d crush her for this.”
“Unless they sent her?” Leviathan suggested.
Belial gave him a look. “It’s Heaven,” she said. “They’re straightforward murderous. This is too underhanded for all their bureaucratic bullshit. If they wanted to hurt Luci, they’d just smite him, no?”
Lucifer almost smiled. She had no idea what the angels were like.
“Their hands are tied by the treaty between Heaven and Hell,” he said. “Breaking it overtly would give us grounds to go to war against them.”
Belial’s eyes lit up. “I’dloveto hurt an angel.”
“It’s overrated,” Galilee called out from where she was standing, and Belial shot her an evil glare.
“Shut the fuck up,” the prince snarled. “None of us see what you do to Lucifer as ajoke.”
Galilee grinned at her, emboldened by what the garden had made her into. “Wanna find out if I can do it to you too?”
“That’s enough,” Leviathan growled. “We’ve got bigger fucking problems here.”
Lucifer had been so focused on the gate, on the taste of lost angel woven into the bronze and the gold-threaded ivory, it took him a moment to register the cruel chill that crept up his spine, the slight shift in the air of the cavern, the way that taste was suddenly not in the mask butin the vault itself. Warning flared through his body a split second before a soft ghost’s voice joined theirs, magnolia drifting around it.
“Why, yes,” it said. “Yes, you do.”
Lucifer whipped his head around, keeping his hands centered on the artifact, his heart dropping. All his princes had spun in unison, weapons flying into their hands.
A tall woman was standing in one of the room’s corners, dressed in jeans and a flannel shirt. Her hair was iron gray and braided down her back, and her face was a flawless heart balanced on a long, graceful neck with moss-green eyes, dark bronze skin, and a red, red mouth.
“All these wards, and none against angels?” She smiled slowly. “You’re getting sloppy, little brother.”
Every single prince blurred their forms instantly, their eyes bleeding out of the white. Leviathan pulled his sword out in a soundless slide, and Belial’s face was contorted into a mask of contempt. Lucifer kept his energy focused on the work he was doing, but he met the woman’s eyes and gave a small nod that belied none of the rage he felt. He knew that vessel too, had loved it topside more times than he could count, which meant he knew the angel puppeting it around, keeping it alive longer than should have been possible.
“Deziel,” he said, calm as a sleeping monster, as if it didn’t hurt. “Welcome, I suppose.”
21.
Deziel
I felt my mouth curve wider and wider, like a splitting fruit. “And here I thought you wouldn’t recognize me in this vessel,” I said to the Devil. “It has been so long, after all.”
Lucifer was expressionless, his arms corded as he held the ward he was working over the gate. “You smell the same, Deziel.”
Thatwas curious. “Still magnolia?”
“Always.”
