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I shudder, wrapping my arms tight around myself as I face the possibility of spending the rest of my life locked away in this room—this gilded cage.
Chapter15
Sophia
I hearhim before I see him, as he’s speaking to Fenriz in the hall. His violent exclamation precedes him, and he flings the door open, worried and furious. “Are you hurt? What did she do?” He comes to me, his eyes sweeping over me frantically.
“I’m okay,” I tell him. “She didn’t hurt me. We just talked.” My heart squeezes as I remember the conversation. I’d hoped that seeing his face would chase my doubts away, but the stubborn things linger. No matter how many times I try to put her words out of my head, to dismiss them as sabotage and mean-girl vitriol, I can’t seem to shake them.
“You just talked?” he asks, surprise etching into the finer details of his face.
I nod. I don’t trust myself to expand on that, because then all these feelings I’m trying very hard to rid myself of are going to come flying out of my mouth.
Lucifer takes my hands in his and kisses them, first one, then the other. “What did you talk about?” he asks, keeping his tone light and casual in spite of the fire burning in his eyes.
“Various things,” I dodge. “Friends, rubies, towers. All sorts of stuff.”
His brow furrows. I’d love to be completely honest with him, I really would, it’s just that I don’t even know how I feel about all the things she said and I know telling him outright would piss him off. He’d be dead set on giving her a piece of his mind and I wouldn’t get around to telling him what’s really bothering me.
“Sophia, tell me what’s wrong.” His eyes saypleaseeven if his mouth doesn’t.
That’s a much simpler question to answer, and I feel a little slow for not getting to that solution myself, because it doesn’t even matter what Diana said. What matters is the part that’s still troubling me.
“I don’t want to be locked up,” I tell him in a rush. “I don’t want to live up here alone, apart from everything and everybody.”
He opens his mouth, but I gesture pleadingly. I already know what he’s going to say, because it’s what I’ve been telling myself since Diana left. “I know. I know you’re just trying to keep me safe, and I appreciate that—I-I really do. I know there are people who want to hurt me, and I know that even keeping me locked up in here isn’t enough to keep me completely safe. Diana walked right in!”
I’m pacing now, agitated. Lucifer is leaning with one hip against the foot board, listening patiently.
I continue, my cheeks growing red with embarrassment and frustration, “And I know there are other ways. You could ward the room and bar the windows and call in extra guards, and even then, there will be someone in this palace who can remove the wards and the bars and the guards, and those lives would be on my conscience for the rest of my life.” I’m near the window now, looking out over the vast expanses of Hell. “I appreciate that you want to keep me safe. I want to be safe, but not at the expense of my freedom. I don’t want to end up like Rapunzel in the tower, forever wishing to be swept away.”
I turn to face him, prepared for him to be upset with me. But the fury Lucifer wore when he entered is gone, his eyes are soft and deep. He comes to me, his eyes never leaving mine. He kisses me and I fall into his embrace, relishing his touch. When I open my eyes again, he’s transformed. My demon prince stands before me, his red eyes as soft as his brown eyes were. Without warning, he scoops me up in his arms and leaps through the window. I wrap my arms tight around his neck, but I don’t close my eyes. I’m slowly getting used to being flown around this way, and there’s so much of this world I haven’t yet seen.
He takes me high above the palace, high enough so I can see all of it at once, and it’s suddenly clear why I have so much trouble finding my bearings inside it. It’s a pentagram, with a tower at every outer point and inner corner, each wedge spreading toward the ground like a staircase. The bottom floor is just a hexagon, then, with a hexagonal courtyard in the center, while each of the upper floors are increasingly separated. Anyone trying to raid the place would be baffled, or anyone trying to escape it.
Water is a feature, glistening from rooftop pools and manufactured streams, striking against the dark blacks and reds and golds of the palace itself. Fire burns artistically on topiary sculptures, and wind howls through carved stone pillars. There’s an elemental touch here, nature magic I wouldn’t have expected to find in Hell. The impassioned wicca girls back in high school would be furious.
The city spreads out around the palace, filling the space between the points of the pentagram and the circle of the outer wall. It reminds me strongly of pictures I saw in middle school of ancient cities on Earth, nestled in deserts and jungles within boundaries far more meaningful than political lines drawn on a map.
When I’ve had a good, long look, Lucifer kisses my temple and turns away from the city, flying us out over an expansive desert. Yellow sand snakes across the red soil in waves, patterns etched by wind and wildlife. The city behind us sits in the center of a broad, bowl-shaped valley, surrounded on all sides by mountains. Glistening black shale, like massive shark teeth, scrapes the sky to my left. To the right, red mountains, pocked and craggy as volcanic rock, loom ominously. Between them, where we’re heading, is a broad expanse of canyons and twisting spires of rock carved out of steep plateaus, all striped like the sand in reds and yellows. Lucifer dives into the maze, winding between the spires, flying through wind-carved holes. The colors shift in the walls, gradually changing to deeper reds, vibrant oranges, and shades of gold.
We reach a deep gorge, wedge-shaped like someone hacked into the ground with a giant meat cleaver. On the other side, the great grandfather of all plateaus rises high above our heads. Lucifer smiles and tightens his hold on me. With a great explosion of energy he climbs through the sky, faster than the barn swallows I used to marvel at, until the wall is just a blur. So suddenly that it startles me, the wall ends, leaving nothing between us and the brilliant sky.
Slowly, gently, he brings us down and sets me on my feet on the flat, dark orange top of the plateau. “Wow,” I breathe. “What a view.”
The canyon tumbles over itself back the way we came, underlining the glittering city in the distance. The wild mountains grow wilder behind us, with thick patches of scrubby forest growing in the shadows. Lucifer’s eyes gleam softly as he takes it all in. His supernatural form isn’t out of place here. There’s a sense of belonging, like the shale mountains could have shaken him loose, like he could have sprouted from the black mud on the banks of the narrow stream winding through the valleys behind us.
“Did you miss this?” I ask gently. I can’t see how he wouldn’t. There’s nowhere in California that compares to this; some places come close, but there’s nowhere quite like this.
“Oh, yes,” he says with such feeling that it takes my breath away. “Earth is fascinating and exciting, but this? This is my home.” He smiles a small, sad smile. “If it weren’t for Cephalus, I never would have stayed away so long.” He shrugs, as if shaking a thought away, then chuckles dryly. “That bastard is determined to make my life hell. Literally.”
I chuckle at that as I look out over the desert. It’s surprisingly pretty here. I never would have imagined that Hell would be so vibrantly colorful, so enticingly dramatic, but it really is.
Cassidy would love to see it.
Thinking about her makes my heart hurt, and for a moment I’m overwhelmed by the feeling that I would give up this view and everything in it just to talk to her right now.
“Huh,” I say as I slip my hand into his. “That’s kind of funny.” He gives me a curious look. “We both have family making us want to go back to Earth,” I say with a smile. “Only yours is driving you away, while mine is pulling me back.”
