by J. L. Myers
Lucifer went to stab the remaining cluster when shouts of warning rang out.
Hybrids appeared at the mouths of the stairwells. Some were Earth dwellers, but others were dead, having already fallen to Hell before being released.
“Get them!” Lucifer ordered. For the moment, his side outnumbered theirs. “Take them out now!”
Thanatos thrust his sword into the air. “Charge!” He rushed with his brothers and sisters after the hybrids that quickly turned to retreat.
The hybrids on the other stairwell took off, and Bathory took chase with his vampires. Zachias hesitated, but a nod from Lucifer had him racing after their enemies.
Lucifer acted quickly now that he was alone, slashing out with his whip as the remaining hellions roiled and writhed, climbing over the bodies of their fallen to lash out at him. Warm wetness streaked across Lucifer’s arms and down his legs with each connecting claw. A dark trail forged a path down his forehead, muddying his sight before he realized it was blood. For every hellion Lucifer sliced into with the curling whip, another lashed out at him. His blood ran freely while theirs sprayed out with his attacks.
A stab to the heart was the only thing that quieted one after the other, but as Lucifer reached the last five, he felt that horrid sensation strike. The need to breathe in the vile souls he was unleashing surged with force.
Staggering forward, Lucifer locked the sensation down and fell to his knees, crawling over the lumpy, wet bodies with their mash-up of wiry hair, scales, and slick leather skin. He stabbed one, roaring as a slash of pain struck him from inside. Then he stabbed another, and another.
The last two clawed at Lucifer as he reared up to his feet, bird-like talons biting into his arm and then leg and throwing him down atop a pile of dead flesh. A roar tore from Lucifer’s throat, rebounding off the curved ceilings and structural columns. Every kill was another soul to reabsorb, and with so many in limbo, the time to wait was gone.
Restrained as one of the two hellions licked his arm that it strung out to the side, teeth gnashed into his shin, hitting bone. Lucifer wrenched the hellion down from above his head, landing its spindly body atop of his—and meeting the hellion’s heart as he thrust the dagger up.
Lucifer shoved the suddenly limp body off him, fighting to hold back the total paralyzation that wanted to devour his strength. Then he ratcheted his torso up, driving the dagger down through the wide ribcage of the last hellion as it chomped into his thigh again.
Lucifer collapsed backward as the hellion went limp. The words from his mouth were barely a whisper. “From Heaven’s light to Hell’s fire, deliver back unto darkness.” The hellions—every single one of them—combusted around him, bursting into live coals that singed his skin for a few blistering beats before popping out into suffocating puffs of black smoke.
Lucifer dropped to the stone ground beneath him, no longer held elevated above it by the dead. Air belted from his lungs and he opened his mouth up wide. Even as his gag reflex kicked in, he sucked in an endless breath, the black all around siphoning from the air and into his lungs to darken his heart and soul. Utter revulsion filled Lucifer from the inside out, twisting his insides and making him want to roll over and heave. Black veins brewed like a darkening plague over his body, forking and bulging as they tracked over every inch of his flesh.
Then all went quiet and still.
Lucifer’s heart stopped. His lungs hitched.
He was all but dead, a lifeless body like the ones he’d left in the streets of Babylon. Like the woman he’d shown mercy to in ending her suffering.
A chuckle broke the deathly quiet, followed by footsteps. One set.
The last of Lucifer’s mobility reacted, his hand twitching to tighten around the double-tipped dagger that lay across his loose palm.
“Uh-uh-uh.” The blade was kicked from Lucifer’s hand, skittering across the ashy stone with a tink-clink before hitting a wall. Darius’s face came into view. The son of a traitor smiled gleefully, his red eyes glowing and his mouth too wide to hide his fangs. He stood over Lucifer, swinging the angel sword in a circle from his right hand. “You’ve had your fun. Now it is my turn.”
Lucifer croaked, his whole body tensed—on the inside. He could not move or fight back as Darius lined up the angel sword over his heart. The tip blazed to life with blinding blue light and bit right through his chest plate.
“Your time has come, Lucifer. I will see you in Hell.”
This was the end. His end.
Lucifer’s eyes slid shut, and what he saw behind his lids lit like fire in his belly. Gabriel. Naked. Black and blue and covered in welts and cuts. He couldn’t give up. He couldn’t fail her.
Eyes turning black with the summoning of all the darkness inside of him, Lucifer felt his strength growing. He had only one shot at this, one attempt to change his fate and hers. “Kill me and you will never unlock the gate. The only way back to Hell is through me. There is no other way.”
Darius chuckled. “The path is set. My plans cemented—” He retracted the blade and drove it straight down. “As is your death.”
Lucifer rolled sideways, the sword tip burning a black channel through his breastplate. Then he was up, running for his dagger when a stab of agony penetrated his back. Blue light glowed up at Lucifer’s face as he looked down in shock. Silver-black blood dripped from his gaping mouth—down onto the angel sword that speared out through his chest armor.
A swarm of tingles inundated Lucifer’s mouth, spreading like wildfire down his throat and through his bones. His body seized where he stood. The angel sword that buried along one edge of his heart was pulled free. Then Darius appeared before him. He ripped Lucifer’s breastplate off and smashed his head into the fallen angel’s, dropping him like a stone to his back.
This was the end.
There was no escaping this.
The only weapon that could end an angel without hope of healing.
“Gabri—” The choked air belted from Lucifer’s lungs as his bloody back smacked the stone ground with a wet slap. His skull pounded where he’d hit, and his words of farewell died in his throat. He was humming all over now, brimming with the angelic essence that was removing itself from his being.
Darius smiled down as he stood over Lucifer. The angel sword stabbed into him again for good measure, piercing his chest and trimming the other side of his heart down. “How I would love to do this for eternity…”
Silver-black blood spurted up from Lucifer’s mouth, raining down over his sweating face. Staring skyward, his enemy’s face along with the bloodstained ceiling between pillars would be the last thing he saw. And he could not stand it. With the last ounce of anything he had left, Lucifer’s shaking hand climbed its way up his wet body, jarring over his chest as skewering metal from the sword cut his wrist and forearm. He didn’t stop. There was no time. And then he found it, swimming in a pool of blood at the base of his neck. The mirror pendant. Lucifer’s numb, icy fingers took hold, curling tight as his body began to grow stiff like the dense stone that surrounded him.
A sudden bark of alarm echoed down through one of the stairwells. Darius’s head snapped up, lips twisting with irritation as his eyes narrowed. His crimson gaze returned to Lucifer with a huff. “Looks like we have company. Guess our time for fun has ended.”
Sight going black as if smoke was shifting in from the edges of his vision, Lucifer couldn’t see the face of the man that lingered in the stairwell. His voice had been familiar, but with his pulse pounding in his ears as his heart failed, discerning an identity was his last concern. Lucifer’s mouth gaped with a choked sound, desperate to try anything to stop his immortal death.
Nothing came out.
“Now!” the looming man screamed.
“I’m coming,” Darius snarled at the exit. Then he retracted the glowing angel sword and drove it back down. “Until we meet again, Prince of Hell.” The weapon hit the mark this time, stabbing Lucifer dead center through the heart. “Good riddance.”
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Chapter Fifteen
“When will I get to meet him?”
Michael breathed in quickly through his nose, surprised by Evangeline’s small voice and her question. He’d been far away in thought, lost in the past—and a morbid future that was yet to come. Aside from the war, Michael was all set to retrieve the angel sword and free Bathory. But first…
Michael’s eyes lifted from his hand that clung tightly to a stone tablet. It was one of many that surrounded him, with more piled up on the uneven floor of the cave’s platform along with curled scrolls. They were all the early learnings of the world, transcribed by angels as they watched from Above. The girl before him was still so small for her almost fourteen years of life, appearing more akin to a six-year-old child. Her silvery eyes were wide and innocent as she sat crouched on bent legs with her hands clasped in eagerness. Evangeline paid no concern to the thick glowing cuff that encircled her ankle and anchored her to the cave. She’d never even questioned it. This was Evangeline’s reality, her life, all that she had ever known. It was her normal, to be chained and kept in solitude but for the short moments Michael spared for her. Moments he spent teaching her of the world and Heaven, of Hell…and the war to come.
“Sorry, sweetheart. What was your question?”
Despite Evangeline’s small stature and physical development, her vocabulary now surpassed even her living years with her teachings of human words and how to read, and Michael’s decision not to let her innocent mispronunciation continue after he saw her wings. That day had changed things, and he could no longer hope so ardently for her to stay innocent when she was half Lucifer’s. “God. Will I ever get to meet him? You said he saved me. That I would have died if not for him.”
Michael didn’t have the heart or the right to tell her that she would have died by God’s hand if he had decided so. It was a puzzling miracle that he’d chosen to spare her. That God had chosen to put the fate of Heaven and Earth in Michael’s own hands and in his ability to draw all that was light and pure to the surface while burying all the darkness that existed inside her. Darkness he’d never witnessed, not even once—but that had the potential to evolve given she was the spawn of the Dark Prince of Hell.
But perhaps God had been wrong in his worry.
Perhaps this girl, this sheltered and innocent girl, was their saving grace. Despite all he knew, Michael still had to hope that was true.
“Not every angel is privileged enough to gain time with God. He is a very busy ruler.”
Michael stacked the tablet he held atop a skewed tower, reminding himself that he really needed to remove the older ones before they toppled down into the pond below. He’d gone to take them before—but with being away most of the time, even more so since relocating and training his nephilim, these were all Evangeline had to connect her to the outside world. They were her only link to humanity.
Michael glanced out over the edge, and his chest lightened at the sight. Every day the view changed, growing, repairing. Evangeline’s light was like nothing he had ever witnessed before. Once a rocky drop-off, it was now brimming with life, no longer jagged and gray but vibrant and green in an undulating decline of soft moss and tiny white flowers. And it didn’t stop there. The water had shed its murky color, now glimmering like still glass with the vibrancy that glowed down from above. Wild grass spanned out from the pond’s edge, fawn, golden, and even violet in places with pops of yellow daisies. All the charred trees remained, but instead of being black fossils that jutted out from the ground with scrawny limbs, they were now blooming with fresh green sprouts that grew like a fur over their scarred bark.
It was remarkable what Evangeline had done all while trapped up on this ledge. But would it be enough? Was this side of her stronger than what hid buried under the surface? Was her light more powerful than the darkness that she’d been created in?
“You are sad, Father?”
Michael cringed at the title she’d given him, the one she believed to be true of who he was to her. Unable to tell her the truth for fear of swaying her biology, he had never corrected the misassumption. “Evie, it is noth…”
Evangeline’s small hand on Michael’s arm drew his eyes from what had become, once again, a garden of beauty and purity. Instead of ending his sentence, the tingling of her touch kept Michael’s words trapped on his tongue. He hardly ever let Evangeline touch him, it was too close to allow her to get, too trusting for her to be with the man who may one day have to kill her. But now Michael could not take his arm out from under her warm palm. It was as if those tingles were thin strings burrowing into his flesh, keeping him from pulling away. His light pulsed, the halo around his body burning brighter for a few beats. Reacting to Evangeline’s touch? Feeding off of it?
But then the sensation changed.
No longer merely connected, Evangeline’s power clung to Michael as if sprouting tiny hooks beneath his skin.
Evangeline gasped, a small cry of surprise bursting from her rosy lips. “It…I don’t like it.”
Michael looked up fast, seeing fear in her wide eyes as tears welled. All around Evangeline the dim light that always existed grew brighter and brighter while his own light dimmed ever darker. Her skin glowed as if she were a star being born.
“Father…help…please.”
Michael followed Evangeline’s line of sight down to her own hand. Now clutching his arm, blue filigrees swirled up through her skin, painting their patterns over her hand in curls that twisted and twined up her forearm.
A breeze grew out of nowhere. It swept through the long grasses with a whoosh, coiling around the trees that suddenly burst to full life as their black branches sprouted with new red, gold, and green foliage.
A dizzying wave washed over Michael, making his head spin and his heart pound harder and yet slower at the same time. A wet drop hit Michael’s forehead between his eyes, and as his head cranked up, he bit back a curse. Water was tumbling over the top of the cliff—and it was plummeting straight for them.
Michael scrambled up quick, and his wings beat the blasting air to propel him forward. He plowed into Evangeline, swooping her up and back into the cave as the water hit. His feet felt the downward pressure of drenching wetness as he got them to safety, saving her from being washed over the edge and drowned in the rush of water with her chain suspending her in place. Sounds of shattering stone coupled the gushing water that hit like a meteor into a sea as it plunged into the pooling water below.
Evangeline’s hand broke from Michael’s arm in the commotion, and they both gasped for air.
She scooted away from him, pulling her knees to her chest so that her dirty robe covered her down to her ankles. Her wings sprouted and fanned out around her, as black and white as ever and the most corporeal Michael had ever seen. Fear resonated in Evangeline’s eyes that pooled silver, and her bottom lip quivered along with her wings as she stammered, “W-what happened?”
Michael shifted from his knees that were digging into small sharp stones, but she didn’t react to his closeness. Because it wasn’t him she was afraid of. He looked down at his arm to where a red welt was left painted across his skin in the shape of a small hand. Evangeline’s hand. She had drained him with her touch, stolen his angelic light without even intending to do so.
Michael fell back on his butt, his wings shooting out spears of pain at being landed on. This small girl, the creation of both Heaven and Hell, had the power to create life from death. And she had the ability to steal that same power at a single touch.
She had the power to kill.
The words from Michael’s mouth were steady and calm, spewing out his lies in spite of the horror that had its hooks in him. “Everything will be fine. Do not be afraid.” He let his head fall back against the rough cave wall, hating what now seemed inevitable.
“Michael. There is a co—” Remiel appeared through the once blackened tree, the draping branches brushing over his gray wings—the eternal proof that he had forsaken God to help Michael
save Gabriel long ago. His words stopped, seeing first the life that filled the garden, then Michael and a frightened Evie. His urgency paled to concern. “What happened?”
Michael shook his head and peered past the veil of tumbling water. “Nothing. Why are you here?”
Earlier panic returning, Remiel’s words rushed. “There is a commotion in Babylon. The angel warriors await your descent.”
“The sword? Bathory?”
“I do not know, but we must fall now.”
Michael hiked his chin, “I am coming,” and Remiel spun to dart back through the tree. He spared a look at Evangeline, reminded of the larger threat she posed to them all. “I will return later.”
He almost wished something would stop him from ever coming back. Evangeline’s small teary smile only hammered the desperate need in even harder.
This girl with such promise and light, with such power…had to die.
And soon Michael would be the one to kill her.
Chapter Sixteen
It started with a kiss. Or at least the sensation of one. That light touch as Gabriel lay in a heap in the dark and desolate cave was as light as her feathers that draped over her weak body. Red receded from her vision and her mental clarity rushed back. “Lucifer…” Gabriel could not help the whisper of his name passing her cracked lips or the ache that struck her at the mere thought of him. It had been so long. Years. Over a decade? Maybe. Probably.
Lifting the veil of her wing from over her body, Gabriel peered up the cave tunnel. Two guards stood there, conspiring amongst themselves. They hadn’t heard her speak.
Gabriel breathed a sigh of relief, letting herself remember the man she loved. Lucifer’s fierce love of her and his need to save her had forced him to leave her in Hell. Alone. He had left her here all the while knowing what she would be subjected to. Knowing she would be tortured or worse. He hadn’t wanted to—Gabriel had witnessed the resistance in his striking silver eyes. Yet he had—because of her.