23.
Leviathan
Leviathan had seen some of the world end before, more than once, his memories bright with apocalyptic light and rushing water. This time, he watched as Lucifer fell to his knees before an imploding Galilee. Her flesh was fraying at the seams, split apart by fractures of brilliance, and Lucifer’s hands shook as he reached out to her. Leviathan cursed and ignored the ward they were trying so desperately to hold together, breaking away so he could grab Lucifer’s hands and pull him away.
“You can’t touch her,” he said. “She’ll incinerate you like this!” Tiny tongues of fire were dancing in the air around them, making hundreds of small burns on his face as he crouched down next to the son of the morning.
Lucifer barely seemed to be listening to him. The Devil was gazing at Galilee as her human form groaned and flickered under the weight of her pain. “She’s going to shift into an angelic form,” he said, and despair was a choked hand around his voice. “What have they made her into?”
Leviathan did not want to think of the possibilities—the girl was the get of an angel and a loving human vessel, with an archangel’s powerseeded into her. He did not let go of Lucifer; any doubt that Galilee could kill the Devil had long since evaporated.
“Shecan’tshift,” he said as his fingers dug into Lucifer’s skin. “The gate destabilized as soon as she started changing form; it will fall apart if she continues.” And they would all be condemned by the same angels in Heaven who had set them up, and no one would care, because they were of Hell and deserved whatever was coming to them.
Belial cast a wild-eyed look their way. “Stop her, Lucifer!” She and the other princes had their wings out, membranes of blue and bloodred and slick mother-of-pearl pressed together in the room as they fought the gate. Mephis and Astaroth had returned from the hunt and were throwing everything they had into the wards. It wasn’t working.
“We have to shift forms,” Leviathan decided. “We’re wasting energy maintaining these ones.”
Asmodeus glanced anxiously at Lucifer. “That’s the Morningstar’s call, Levi. Topside rules, remember? We don’t shift unless he says.”
“Does helooklike he’s about to give any fucking orders?” Leviathan growled.
The princes turned their heads, and coiled emotions ran over all their faces, from dismay to anger and disappointment. Lucifer was motionless, still on his knees as Galilee hiccuped between forms, an arm dissolving into a falling puzzle of boiling water, her face coated in ash and light. With each glitch, the hellgate responded, tearing gashes into the air and spilling screams out.
“Levi’s right,” Belial said grimly. “We have to shift.”
She abandoned her human form immediately, pale scales rippling where skin used to be. Her jaw elongated and hung open, showing rows and rows of daggered teeth, and several arms emerged from her warping rib cage. The only wings that stayed the same were her wings, still a bottom-of-the-sea blue black.
Asmodeus was stitching together a gash in the air where reality wasthreatening to give way, his face worried. “Will the house hold if we all shift, Levi? Should we evacuate the humans?”
Leviathan couldn’t take his eyes off Galilee. “If that gate breaks, As, there won’tbeany humans in a hundred-mile radius to worry about.”
He heard the crackles and snaps as the rest of the princes shifted, smelled the sulfur and smoke, the inhuman worlds bursting under their skins, but Leviathan remained transfixed by the sight of an angel’s child being born into her true form. Galilee was shattered hail whipping up into a tornado. She was crystal and light and pain, copper hair bleeding white as an avalanche. Lucifer was weeping without sound as he gazed upon her, and Leviathan could feel the guilt pouring off him. Deziel had broken the girl’s heart so utterly that she was going to set off an ending. Galilee had been a bomb all along, laid in place and with an angel breathing on the fuse—this catastrophe was, like her, inevitable.
Leviathan shouldn’t have been surprised. When they’d stood under the willow trees in the garden, Galilee had looked up at him without an ounce of suspicion in her face, just curiosity as she asked for permission to touch him. Leviathan hadknownit would be a mistake. He’d known because he had watched her mouth, the soft full curve of her lips, the glint of teeth behind them. She’d been worried about hurting him, and Leviathan had realized what Lucifer had tried to tell the princes. Galilee was inhuman and powerful, but she was also achingly sweet in a way that she couldn’t help—an innocent worried about hurting the prince who had openly argued for her death. It faintly shamed Leviathan, as did his hunger for her, so he’d kept silent, and then he’d buried it all when he watched Lucifer wrap her in his arms and lift into the sky. Deziel had mocked Lucifer for being unable to watch the girl die, and Leviathan wondered if his shame would be compounded for the same thing. The King of Hell had no pride when it came to Galilee Kincaid. He’d begged his princes; he’d believed that Galilee could be the start of something instead of the end.
Now knowing the truth of what Galilee was, Leviathan finally understood why Deziel had been so confident that Lucifer would not be able to resist the girl—she was a cocktail of Heaven and human, a possibility of the home he thought he could never return to, with all the flesh and spirit of the humans the Morningstar had Fallen for. She was already more like Lucifer than his princes could ever be—her power smelled like his because they were both angelic—but with all that familiarity, there was a ghostly promise that, with her, the Devil might never have to be lonely again. It didn’t explain whyLeviathanfelt the way he did about her, and he wondered if that was a spell driven by her touch. It really would be safer to kill Galilee and see if these feelings would pass.
“The girl has to die.” Belial’s true voice hissed through the room, echoing his thoughts. “It’s the only way we stand a chance at holding the gate.”
The princes had gained slightly more control over the hellgate with their true forms, but it wasn’t enough, and Leviathan knew that Belial wasn’t wrong. As long as Galilee continued to splinter, so would the gate, thanks to Deziel’s interference.
“If she has to die, then so be it,” Asmodeus replied. He sounded nothing like his human form—Asmodeus in his true flesh was a stone-cold efficient bastard who served Hell and would execute Galilee in a heartbeat. Leviathan should have been like that, human form or not. Leviathanhadbeen like that, but then he’d shielded the girl in the garden, and she had laid her hand on his chest, and Leviathan hadhungeredonce more.
Lucifer did not move, his eyes black and heavy with grief. “No one touches her,” he said.
“There’s more at stake than thisinfatuation,” Belial replied coldly. “You are overruled, Morningstar.”
In response, Lucifer’s wings snapped out into violent obsidian stretches. He didn’t stand up and he did not look around, but his voice became twenty upon twenty.“No one touches her,”he repeated.
Galilee stuttered into a pillar of flame and burst apart, then whirled into herself and re-formed.
Belial nodded at Leviathan with her full and terrible scaled head. “Do what you must,” she said.
Leviathan picked up his sword. It was never warm or cold, or any sensation that could be marked by human flesh. It always felt like a clear emptiness, like a pure void. Leviathan had never wondered what to do or who he was once his sword was in hand, and that did not change even as Hell raised an unholy cacophony as it squeezed fragments of itself through the gate.
He took a step toward the Morningstar and the angel’s child. Belial turned back to the gate, trusting that Leviathan would do what he was meant to, what he had always said he would since all this began, since Lucifer fell for a sweet and long-awaiting trap. The girl was young, powerful, but trapped in the liminal, flashing between forms because she didn’t know how to let go of the flesh. It would be easy for Leviathan to simply cut her down and give them a fighting chance with the gate. The Lucifer Belial knew would never counter the combined will of his princes with a hellbreak at stake, not really. The Lucifer she knew would sacrifice Galilee for the greater good and grieve her later, rather than fail in his duty.
But Leviathan knew something else: that the Morningstar kneeling before the dissolving girl wasnotthe Lucifer they knew, not right now, and he also knew that he himself was not exempt from this change. He was no longer the Leviathan he had been before the garden, before a well of honeyed want fell open in him, before he had longed for a girl who was gentle enough to worry about hurting him, yet determined enough to fight the princes of Hell for her life and the lives of her loved ones.
