She washed the heart and her hands with purified water from a virgin spring from which no soul, dead or alive, had ever drank. After, her skin gleamed white and the pearl ring on her thumb shone as bright as the moon.
Lilith poured volcanic ash in the center of the star and rubbed it into the earth like a woman kneading dough.
She picked up the lion testes, thought ‘the things I do to survive,’ and gulped it down like dry-swallowing a pill.
Then she started. She tiptoed, as best she could with a busted ankle, toward the first mirro. Staring into her own reflection, she said, “Exsurgat Deus et dissipentur inimici,” to her reflection, as if whispering to a confidant. Upon hearing the incantation, the reflection whispered back, “Exsurgat Deus et dissipentur inimici,” which meant, “Let God arise, His enemies be scattered.”
The irony wasn’t lost on her; she might be God’s enemy.
Lilith went to the next mirror and repeated the process. When the image chanted back to her, she continued to the next. Soon, five images of herself droned the verse on a loop from their respective points of the pentacle. Everything was working.
She winked to her image. They all winked back.
Except number three.
That one smiled like a coyote, a grin full of carrion-ripping teeth.
A shudder darted down Lilith’s spine.
Chapter 29
Fort Independence’s stone wall began crumbling, and Haniel’s bellowing curse rang out. He must have realized the dragon had escaped with Maggie. His gnarly voice, which felt like it had haunting reverb, had only grown worse: rougher, scorching.
As if brimstone burned in his heart.
Lilith spun around.
Haniel charged into the courtyard, flanked by demons. Five-horn on his left, Almost-wing at his right, and dozens more following behind. And every one of them looked bigger, battle roughened, and pissed off. The hell-fiends were coming of age.
Hoping she’d drawn the lines well, she frantically began working the rest of the spell. “Domini exitus mortis.”
Her mirror images chanted around her, words humming together in a stream of music like bees buzzing. Hurricane winds gathered, swirling off the ocean, clashing against a hurricane struggling to gain ground outside the bay.
Lilith set the dragon heart atop the ashen earth, she sprinkled it with purified waters, the menstrual blood of a lamia.
“Oritur sol et occidit et ad locum suum revertitur ibique renascens…”
The storm snapped against the circle, wind like the cracking of a whip.
She drew a line of ash down her chest, over the amulet, and said, “Having no love for any god, church, or man, I consecrate myself to the Ars Goetia.”
Hail came, mixed into the rain, and pelted her like clots of ice.
Nature’s onslaught didn’t deter her. Instead, she hurried with the spell.
“Like the serpent of old who deceived the world, I shall take what is mine.” Lilith clutched the amulet and said, “With a proud look, a lying tongue, hands that shed innocent blood, a heart filled with wicked plans, a hunger for evil, lies shouted to God’s face, and a desire to sow discord among brethren. I shall deliver you, and myself, from bondage.”
“Lilith!” Haniel shouted, and the panic in his ruined heaven-sent voice broke through her concentration. “Whose heart is that?”
She glanced down, guilty as sin, at the heart which looked too small to belong to a dragon, and she gulped because she knew what he thought it was, and he wasn’t right, but he wasn’t wrong.
It wasn’t Maggie’s heart, but she had sacrificed Maggie to get here.
Wind buffeted her, ripping water through the air. The hurricane turned vicious. Soot burdened the fiercest winds, dragging them down to earth. Triceratops scratched at the ground, digging up armfuls of cold dirt, like she would burrow under the circle’s lines, which she couldn’t—could she?—and Haniel roared, his voice rivaling the hurricane in volume and horror.
Goosebumps rose on her skin.
She couldn’t work in these conditions.
“Yes,” she sneered, “it’s Maggie’s heart. She’s dead. I told you that all along. You were never going to have her.”
Haniel snarled and charged her. Crack! He smashed against the pentacle circle and squashed like a bug. His nose dripped blood, and he bared crimson teeth.
“The key,” she demanded. “Give me the key! You swore, whether she was dead or alive. Well, she’s dead, now give me that which you promised.”
His eyes flared red. He roared. Spittle struck the barrier and dropped to the dirt. He beat his fists in the air. Crack, crack, as they smashed against the wards. Lightning zapped through the sky. The storm raged.
“Where’s the rest of her?”
“Give me the key, and I’ll tell you.”
“You planned this all along,” he accused. “You were never going to help me, were you?”
“That’s not fair,” she said, though maybe it was. “I never promised you’d get her alive. In fact, I warned you several times not to get your hopes up.”
She had wanted to help him. Not so much in the beginning, but later, after traveling with him. After he’d tried to save her from the wolf, and convinced her to ignore Fate’s warnings. When Five-horn and the snakes frolicked in the chapel entry way, she’d hoped everything would work out. She’d been lulled by his companionship, by sentiments and aspirations.
Talk about stupid, she thought.
What could be more important than survival? Everything else could go to hell.
Her friends, Lane and Catherine, had died for this. She’d lost her daughter to a false ideology. She’d betrayed Fate and pissed off a dragon. She’d sacrificed a girl and enraged a demon. She’d forfeited the chance to run and hide, and she still hadn’t finished the goddamn spell.
Everallin had promised when Lilith found Maggie, Haniel would realize what she needed and he’d give her the key, but the punk demon wasn’t playing his part.
Haniel insisted, “I’m not giving you anything.”
“This power is mine,” she said. “I deserve it.”
“You deserve to rot in hell.”
Sulfur ripped through the storm like lightning bolts of brimstone. Snap. Crackle. Sizzle. Singeing her nostrils. A zap of red lightning shot through the sky and slammed into earth, deep down into it, cracking the world. The schism zigged and zagged, shearing past Triceratops. The little demon yelped and leapt back.
More claws poked up from the earth, seeking, probing, and fingering the chasm. Minions—not so cute and little and charming—pulled themselves up and barged into the world.
Silverback demons with spikes and hooves and scales and whip tails. Big boys. If Five-horn had been a toddler when she met him, he was now an adolescent. And these things crawling from the ground were twice as big.
Not a good sign.
From bad to worse, one might say, and Haniel’s sinister grin implied he knew it. He had her cornered. Surrounded. And he clearly had no intention of helping her after all she’d done for him.
The legion pouring out of the earth attacked Lilith’s snake, swarmed and overwhelmed it, an act of violence highlighted by ungodly shrieks, cackles, and blood splatters.
SNIP.
One of the vermin lobbed a snake head over the crowd, and they ate.
Haniel stood by.
“Maggie wouldn’t have loved you anyway,” Lilith said, determined to hurt him one way or another. “Look at you. A liar, a fool, a shit friend. And you would have been a horrible lover. A prude with a self-righteous stick up your anal retentive backside! Maggie’s probably glad the dragon swooped her away from you.”
Maggie certainly hadn’t looked glad, but Haniel didn’t need to know that. Just as he didn’t need to know that Maggie was still alive, flying off with a rapacious stud.
Whether it was her words or the reminder that Haniel’s virgin love had been violated by a dragon, it pushed him over the edge.
&nbs
p; Demons drooled at her across the once-no-demon’s-land, and Lilith sat there in the dirt with a smoldering dragon’s heart turning to ash between her knees. The spark in her chest throbbed tentatively, but she didn’t have anything left. The spell hadn’t worked. All hope was lost. They were going to kill her now. Quickly, if she was lucky.
She gulped, because she’d never been particularly lucky.
She thought about arguing, telling him the heart wasn’t Maggie’s, that Maggie was technically alive, but Lilith couldn’t exactly reveal she’d given the girl away, could she?
“You knew what I was, Haniel. You brought this upon yourself.”
“You betrayed me.”
“Maybe a once-upon-a-time angel who’s surrounded by demons shouldn’t be so finicky about betrayal.”
“Lilith, I trusted you.”
“No, you didn’t!” She shrieked, “If you’d trusted me, this wouldn’t have been any trouble at all, and we’d all be happy!”
His eyes gleamed red, roiling with brimstone. His mouth fell open, but he seemed not to breathe, but to spread his maw for the devouring of prey.
“To hell with all of you,” she said, meaning him, the legion, the angels, Elohim, Destiny, everyone.
Haniel raised his arms out, as if gathering his minions, as if he had wings and had forgotten he wasn’t an angel anymore.
“Gonna rip you apart,” he growled.
Lilith reached for the smoldering heart and rubbed it obscenely, even as it singed her hands and cast incense up to blend with the brimstone stench. She taunted him because she had nothing left to do.
“Fuck heaven,” Haniel said. “Fuck God. And fuck you.”
And his eyes flared red, red as the heartsblood, red as rubies and the inferno of hell. And as his words echoed through the courtyard and up to the clouds and across the city, something fell.
Another veil.
Another barrier.
Power burned in his chest, lighting him up. His roar became syrupy and thick like decadent chocolate ganache. His legion spread their forelegs and arms and claws and roared with him, howling into the wind, a fat hellacious chorus.
He looked voracious and vicious and violent.
Black pitch filled his eyes.
He wasn’t falling.
Not anymore.
He’d finally descended.
Chapter 30
Lilith watched a brilliant light flutter in Haniel’s reddened chest. The glow danced like a lightning bug in a bonfire and bounced against his solar plexus. It grew, amplified, and pounded faster against the cage of his body.
Whatever heavenly magic he’d held onto had shattered, and he gave up the pneuma. Heaven’s magic shot from his chest like a star streaking across midnight sky—
Charging straight at Lilith.
She gasped. Her eyes widened. She ducked, throwing her arms over her face and screwing her eyes shut.
White light swallowed her. The sheer radiance was so pure it hurt, acutely, even with her eyes clamped shut. Blood oozed under her eyelids and ran down her face.
Raising her arms had done nothing; the light blasted right into her hands with such force that she smacked herself in the head and tumbled over backward.
She lay on the ground, sprawled atop the charred heart, her limbs spread snow-angel-style. Blinking, she realized something was wrong with the sky. Night flared with a kaleidoscope of heaven’s light and midnight dark and a prism of rainbows dancing between. An aurora?
She felt like a punch-drunk boxer after ten rounds, complete with stars prancing through her eyeballs and birds tweeting around her head.
But it didn’t hurt, and that worried her.
I’m dead, she thought.
She lifted her head. Her legs and arms and skull were laid out perfectly within the pentagram, fingers reaching all the way to the mirrors, toes touching the southern mirrors. When she craned her neck to look behind her, the image in the third mirror smiled back, its grin outlined in blood.
What the hell had happened?
As if to answer, agony struck every fiber and neuron of her body.
In some places, it was worse, nearing on rapture.
The torture crested, washed over her limbs, and became localized. Her hand raged in pain, pinched and crunched and scalded. The ring on her thumb, the one the witch had given her with a rugged pearl harvested from a whale fall, burned into her skin. It flared white hot and blackened her flesh. The metal band seared through meat until it scraped against the bone. Marrow boiled inside her finger, and she shrieked in agony.
Everallin’s words echoed in the back of her mind, reminding Lilith that she’d been making ‘an embarrassingly simple miscalculation.’
Lilith could have face-palmed herself.
The Sacred heart of the Most Profane, the Seven-times betrayed heart.
She’d been missing two ingredients, not one.
Her spell required a twofold key: the grace of a fallen angel and the seven-times broken heart of a seven-hearted demigod.
The pain was so bright and blinding and vivid that it slayed the world. Wiped everything else from existence. In all her life, she’d never felt such torment. Never seen such a brightness—except, perhaps, on the night when a demigod dragged her from her grave and sent her on this cursed path.
She screamed and tried to shake her hand, to fling the ring off, but her limbs were plastered to the earth.
Paralyzed. Helpless, she couldn’t move.
Haniel, the fucking devil, cackled. His legion of overfed imps ambled closer, frothing at the mouth, eyeballs rolling in their skulls.
She could do nothing to stop them. Couldn’t even beg.
Lightning cracked across the sky, lancing storm clouds and spilling torrents of rain. The air intensified, as if the atmosphere was luring all the gravity in the universe toward her. And worse, the rain smelled like lilies.
The demon horde looked up at the sky. Paused. Silence fell, and the world became vast. Vacuous. Hallowed. The ocean thrashed against the shore. Wind blustered in torrents of cold. Trees rustled their limbs together.
A real angel arrived.
It had six wings. Six massive, iridescent, pearlescent wings. Two wings covered its head, two its feet. It flew with its broadest pair, the middle set, and when they flapped, the gust swept away the storm. The hurricane tumbling aside. Rain flew like shrapnel in every direction.
Lilith had marveled at the humbaba’s wings, but now she was stunned. Horrified. Enthralled.
She didn’t think the angel could shine any brighter.
Then it spread each of its wings wide, and light flashed across the world. Raindrops gleamed like diamonds in the spotlight. Her eyes burned, retinas peeling, optic nerves vibrating in pain.
She’d been electrocuted once. Stuck her hands on a transistor to see what the hum was about. That was a cakewalk compared to this.
But she couldn’t not look at the creature.
Others might have hidden their face. Died of fear.
Lilith had spent her entire existence defying heaven, but she sure as hell wouldn’t stop now.
The angel’s wings spread wide, jutting off in three directions, and he reminded Lilith of a dragonfly. She assumed he was male because his armor; it had a codpiece.
His body wasn’t much larger than a normal man’s. A tall man, sure, with amazing shoulders and long, supple legs. His left hand held a fiery sword, which added a warm amber glow to his overall effect.
He flew nearer and nearer, as if drawn by a beacon or a homing device.
When he came close enough, she realized lights glowed along his wings, arms, and face. No, not lights. Eyes. Eyes bright with heaven’s purest lights. A hundred eyes strung along the rim of his wings, like Christmas lights, glowing, glaring at her. An entire jury to judge her.
She wished she could wither into the dirt.
She wished she’d let the demons kill her.
The angel utterly ignored Haniel, who had thrown an arm over h
is eyes to block out the caustic light. When Haniel peeked around his forearm, he laughed.
“Kushiel?” Haniel called.
The angel, Kushiel, didn’t answer. His bones were lightning and his flesh was gold and his hair was coiled and his eyes like gems flashing blue as azure skies. His wings bashed the world until all around them fell still. He’d parted the Red Sea, if the sea was a hurricane. His hair sat unruffled, his clothes unaffected.
“What the hell, Kushiel? Not even a greeting?” Haniel said. “How’s your brother? How’s heaven? And stay away from that vampire. She’s mine.”
Haniel’s grin spread, vulturine, and his eyes flashed with the fires of hell burning in pitch.
At this point, Lilith hardly paid attention. While she laid stretched out on the earth, pinned like a bug with an angel leering above her and a devil seething beside her, something else happened.
The amulet fidgeted.
Lilith hadn’t recognized the movement until the twitch grew into a solid thump. Like a heavy heartbeat. Like a meaty-fisted but polite stranger knocking on the door.
The banging swelled, and the amulet became livelier.
She simultaneously thought ‘it’s about time’ and ‘uh-oh’ because she had no idea what was supposed to happen, and it could be anything, and she was pinned to the ground beside a murderous angel and a vengeful demon.
Whatever was happening, she decided it was good. The amulet’s binding spell must be loosening, and soon she’d have the power to vanquish her enemies and run like the dickens back to wherever she pleased.
The thumping pulsated through her, growing progressively bigger until…
Heat flared so fast and hot that it lanced her heart.
She cried out, sure she’d been stabbed—and having been stabbed repeatedly by a boy in the back streets of Dubai, she knew what she was talking about. Yet when she glanced down at the amulet, it appeared as docile and unassuming as before.
When the angel saw what she was wearing between her breasts, his eyes—all hundred or so of them—widened.
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