He hummed, a deep and resonant tone that vibrated all the way through her, then shoved two fingers inside her, and Gali broke completely apart, her scream tearing out from her throat, her body convulsing as he kept going, his tongue flickering at her clit and his fingers curling inside her. It was a storm, splintering light, and she wasn’t entirely sure she hadn’t left her body briefly. The mansion itself seemed to buck and shiver around them, walls and floors contorting. By the time she came back to herself, Gali looked down to see the stranger sitting back on his heel and watching her face, his lips slick with her come. The corner of his mouth curved into a smile as he pulled out his fingers, and Gali gasped, making his smile widen even more. He lowered her leg and stood up, helping her tug her dress back into place. The cloud of darkness was still a wall around them, locking them in. Gali dragged in a breath as he slipped a hand under her dress and rearranged her panties, his fingers brushing against her folds. God, she wanted him even more nowandher migraine was gone.
“Thank you for that gift, Galilee,” he said, the heat of his voice razing her skin lightly. His mouth was slick and smiling, and though his eyes were still blacked out, she thought he almost looked a little shaken.“Forgive me, but I have to return to work. If you head straight down and take your second left, there will be staff who can direct you back to the party. We’ll take our dance another time.”
Gali swallowed back a confused sound.What?
It took her a few seconds to process his words. He was leaving. He was giving herdirections. The bastard hadn’t even unbuttoned his shirt through the whole thing. Just pinned her against a wall and made her come on his face, and now he was about to walk away as if it had been nothing but some quick fun in his employer’s hallway. The darkness he’d called still hung around them like a shroud.
“You didn’t even tell me your real name.” Her words came out with a bite scraping through them.
The stranger wiped his chin, staring right at Gali as he tasted her off his fingers. It was unbearably sexy to watch—he looked like he was still starving for her. His eyes floated closed, and when they opened again, the blackness had faded from them and the cloud in the hallway dissipated into nothing. Gali held her breath as he stepped in and bent his head, kissing her lightly on the cheek. With his mouth by her ear, his voice sounded like a stream of live ash, soft and still burning.
“My name is Lucifer,” he said. “Next time, you’ll scream it for me.”
3.
I wanted to see it for myself, the moment Galilee Kincaid and the Devil first laid eyes on each other, but I was embodied, and Lucifer would catch my scent if I went too close. I hovered in the hallways instead, waiting. I had spent that girl’s life waiting—what was a little more time in the measure of things?
The body I wore was a supple skin, fine wrinkles around her eyes and gray in her hair. A pale blue gown clung to my flesh like a startled dawn, faint trails of pink and orange swirling up my legs. Eyes had followed me as I left the ballroom where the party was being held, and I felt the weight of their covetous gazes on me. If I was as carnal as the others, perhaps I would’ve taken one of them to bed, but those appetites deserted me a wartime ago—or so I thought, until Lucifer Morningstar strode down the hall with Galilee Kincaid by his side. It felt like a flaming sword had carved out my stomach, how much it hurt to see him again, how much italwayshurt to see him. I avoided it for thousands of years at a time until inevitably I would give in and find him topside, watch him from afar while hot pain burrowed through me. I did nothing to deserve this. GodknowsI did nothing to deserve this! And yet, it’s as if I was the one being punished, while the creature I once loved put on a man’s skin to flirt in crossroads.
I looked away when he threw Galilee’s leg over his shoulder, and Iwinced at the memories. There was a time Lucifer used to convince me to wear bodies so I could feel what they felt, the sharp ecstasies that could be dragged out for hours on his tongue. It’s one of the many sins I now hold against him, the corruption I should have seen earlier. He presented it with such innocence back then, an awe at the humans and what God had made them capable of, every bit of it from the blood and the slaughters to the screaming delights and easy laughter. He was never satisfied with what we were, God’s most beloved. I should have seen it then, his inevitable betrayal, but he was the Morningstar, and he was so unbelievably bright, he dazzled me. He dazzled all of us, right up until the war began.
Despite the cloaking Lucifer had thrown around them both, despite being turned away, I still knew the exact moment Galilee surrendered to the Devil’s forked tongue, because I heard her scream. She had no idea what she had just done to herself, but far be it for me to stop her. Still, I must confess—I hadn’t thought remembering would sting like this. There was a time when Lucifer had touched me with such wanton tenderness, gazed into my eyes with such a smile, almost convinced me to follow him. We were soldiers together, siblings in arms, and I loved him dearly. He was always obsessed with the humans, but the rest of us thought it was harmless, adorable even. The humans were made from dust, and they were fleeting amusements at best. I played Lucifer’s games with him because it was fun and he was right—the experience of embodiment was a new thing, and we’d been alive for so long, we cherished all novelties. But I never thought the humans would be the catalyst to splinter Heaven or that Lucifer would be the wedge breaking us apart after God set in motion a great flood, one that would churn over the land and drown everything that lived. Most of us had shrugged—what difference would it make to their brief lifetimes, after all? But not the Morningstar, not when his beloved humans were sentenced to a dark and heavy death.
I never thought Lucifer would start awarover it, but he did, and itbroke everything in my world. I can never forgive him for that, for setting me on this path I’m on now because he left me with nowhere else togo.
When he became the Devil—a new name like a skin of burning sulfur smothered over his face, smoke screaming all the way back up to Heaven—it was a punishment he was meant to suffer for all eternity.Thatwould have been some small measure of justice in the wake of his disobedience, his hubris, his unforgivable rebellion. But the Morningstar is a trickster, a conniver, a serpent wriggling away from what is righteous, because there is no suffering in the sweetness of a girl against his mouth, is there? And what is justice then, but a shadow twisting out of reach in the corners of a battle everyone else thinks has ended?
I looked back at the two of them, and Lucifer was smiling softly as he kissed Galilee’s cheek, giving her his name. He was so slick with it, so sure of himself, as he walked away from her with a loose-hipped saunter. After a few shell-shocked moments, Galilee stumbled back down the hallway and made her way to the rest of the party. I flitted about, keeping an eye on her, and then I took a champagne flute off a server’s tray and walked over, unable to keep myself away.
“You should try one of these,” I said, holding the drink out to the girl.
Galilee’s eyes skimmed over me, glassy and hardly focused. She smelled like Lucifer, like a fire that simmered in embers and a spice harsh on the tongue.
“Thanks,” she said automatically as she accepted it, taking a sip. Careless, really, to take a drink from a stranger, but she trusted me because I wore a woman’s skin.
I hadn’t been this close to Galilee since she was very small, and I took the opportunity to catalog her face as if I could forget it. Other than her coloring, she did rather look like a Kincaid, tucked in the slope of her eyes and the form of her mouth—quirks of expression that made me think of Darling Kincaid, the door whose handle I had wrenched open. It had turned Darling into a different woman, but that was thepoint. That was the sacrifice. Of course, the girl didn’t know, because she hadn’t known Darlingbefore, but her grandmother had given up something very precious on the day Galilee came into the family. I wondered what Galilee would think if she learned that was the reason some of the Kincaids resented her and made sure she felt it, becausetheyknew a cost had been paid for her life and that it was dear.
Surely it was worth it, though, for a girl like this. I knew too well what Galilee was, and unlike Darling Kincaid, I knew what Galilee couldbecome. I knew every freckle on her face, all forty-eight of them, as well as the growing chasm inside her, how it stretched and howled now that she’d met Lucifer. I almost reached out a hand to touch her hair, but I caught myself in time—it would have seemed too strange, an alarming gesture from a woman she didn’t know at a party that was overwhelming her.
“Enjoy the drink,” I said softly, before fading back into the crowd. Galilee blinked but said nothing, her mind still reeling from the Morningstar. It was laughable how innocent she was, but I could only fault the ignorance I’d carefully preserved her in for all these years. I left her standing there and slipped out of the ballroom again, this time to the office of our host, Elijah Onyearugbulem—the man responsible for Lucifer being there, even if he didn’t know it.
Elijah was a wall of a person, a slab of muscle in a bespoke embroidered agbada. The voluminous sleeves draped off his arms in starched glory, and he looked up from his desk with a thick frown that melted away when he saw who had entered the room.
“Ah, Ms. Delacourt! I’m so glad you could make it.” He rose from his seat with an easy grace and crossed the antique carpet to me, taking my hand and dropping an airy kiss against my left cheek.
“Mr. Onyearugbulem—”
“I’ve already told you. Elijah, please.”
I let the flesh I was wearing blush slightly, and the blood warmed myface. She was a curator to some, a smuggler and fence to others, and Elijah knew her in both capacities.
“Elijah,” I acquiesced. “You’ve thrown such a beautiful party, and yet you’re here hiding out in your office?”
He gestured me to a love seat against a paneled wall and then joined me on it. “And yet, you knew to find me here, Inès.”
“It wasn’t a great leap to make,” I admitted with a smile. “How is the artifact doing?”
The only reason I approached Elijah Onyearugbulem in the first place was because his daughter, Oriak?, lived in Salvation and was friends with Galilee Kincaid. From the moment Galilee was born in the muggy forests outside this town, I knew I would eventually have to draw Lucifer back here. I did not mind the wait—a quarter century is nothing in my lifespan. Elijah was perfect in many ways: he had unlimited funds and a vengeful thirst that was impressive to witness in a human, a fiery desire to see the things stolen from his homeland returned, without a particular care for legal provenance.
