Samael’s screams. They ripped through his mind. Abruptly, as if yanked by a rope, Lucifer came back to himself. But the world still rang with those terrified, tortured cries, for they were tearing out his throat, endless, endless, endless screams. He found himself kneeling atop the L.A. beach’s jagged black boulder, his hands—grotesque hands, the skin too red, too thick, too shiny, patches of it raised like fire-crackled continents—making frantic swipes over the rock’s streaks of red quartz. As if to wipe away his blood.
As if to wipe away his Fall.
Lucifer grabbed his flask from his suit jacket pocket, drained it. But all he tasted was his own bile. He lifted his arm and smashed the flask down, smashed it down, smashed it to smithereens against the Not-the-Rock-of-Justice-Tempered. He sprang to his feet and shook his fist at the Sky.
I know why I want, you Bastard. I’ve figured it out, haven’t I? You created me to help the humans fulfill their desires. But how could I know what You even meant me to do if I didn’t truly understand “want,” if I didn’t truly feel it? Was I only supposed to want just a little, just enough to serve your Grand Plan? But somehow, things spun out of your control? Or did You willingly give up that control—a bit of Chaos is needed for Creation, isn’t it? But I went too far—
He leapt down from Not-Rock and roared a Devil Roar at God.
I am your Divine Mistake! And You punished me for it!
The cliffs thumped with his Roar, echoed it, re-echoed it, until the cliffs burst into one great Sea-and-Sky-and-Heaven-engulfing Devil Howl, sounding and resounding, a Howl to rival the Vortex’s, to throw the Vortex back at Him, to shake Him to His ineffable bones, to rive Him from His Creation and cast Him into Dark. Lucifer snatched up the one-ton Not-the-Rock-of-Justice-Tempered and slung it into Earth’s sea. It splashed down a mile out. The surf roiled and seethed.
Thunder rolled across the skies like drumsticks beating against a distant war drum.
Listening, are You? Strike me down! Finish me! Surely You know what I’ve decided to do, you Omniscient Bully. Or haven’t You the balls to end me?
Lucifer touched his hands one to the other, and then he touched them to his face, to the ugliness there, to the clefts and ridges and deformities cursed on him by Dad. He closed his eyes and drew upon his Power, a Power of which he did not know the source, but likely Hell, where all doomed souls suffered loops of deception after deception after deception. In an instant, as if he’d been doused with a miraculous skin spray, his fingertips caught on the supple firmness of healthy skin, on the rough scruff of beard, on the visage of his self before his Fall: Dad’s most beautiful Angel.
His demon approached.
“Mazikeen. Get out your demon blades.”
She grazed his sleeve with her fingers. Slim fingers. Graceful fingers. Fingers capable of wielding infernal implements of torture with the efficiency of a cold-blooded assassin. And yet, she’d paled several shades, like a frightened ghost.
“Lucifer, what are you—?”
He whirled on her. Deep, guttural gusts of sound erupted from him. “I command you!”
The Lilim syllables descended into cavernous, Hellish reverberations, ten times more powerful than his Roar. The vocables smacked into the cliffs, and sandstone chunks the size of sixty-ton meteorites sheared off. Chunks thwacked down all around them, either missing them by yards and bounding away along the shore or plummeting straight into the ocean, huge exclamation points of spray rocketing into the sky. Mazikeen fell to her knees and cowered, her arms covering her head. As if the raining rubble—or he—might strike her.
“My Lord.”
No. No. She would not kneel to him here on Earth.
He held out his hand. She took it. He raised her up. “Take out your blades, Mazikeen. Obey your king.”
He walked on. She did not follow. No matter. She’d come.
He placed his hands palm to palm, prayer position, the ritual position that attuned his mental energies to those of his chosen sibling, transmitting his thoughts, enabling him to receive theirs—telepathy, humans might name it. When he’d first landed in Hell, he’d called many, many times, to many, many siblings. No one ever answered. And so, eventually, he’d given up. And of course, little point in calling Dad. Dad never answered, ever.
But…
Hear my message, O Great Judge. On the Beach of Eternal Mercies, You stole my freedom. I reclaim it here, on this beach! The humans will come to see I am not the “Original Poison” You’ve allowed—nay, You’ve encouraged—them to believe I am. Evildoers are not, as your priests and preachers blather, merely infected with and spreading the Poison of my rebellion. I am not the root cause of human evil, I am not The Tempter who leads the good astray, I am not the cause of their suffering—
Another Devil Roar loosed from his throat—mauling the sky, clawing the Universe, rising up on Dragon feet and battering Heaven’s Walls with taloned fists until the Gates rattled and shook on their hinges.
I am not the monster You’ve made me out to be!
Thunder grumbled, in the distance. Lightning flashed, but far out at sea.
That’s it? Not in much of an Old Testament-y kind of mood tonight, are You, Dad? Stick around—maybe I can yet arouse your ire.
He halted. Shoved his hands in his pockets. At last, Mazikeen’s footfalls sibilated through the sand. She stopped at his shoulder. Her breath shuddered in and out, in and out, and her dark eyes shone wet. She stood at stiff attention, spaulders and couters and poleyns polished for battle, demon blades gripped tight. Ever his soldier. No matter the cost.
She stood too close. He took a step. With a roll of his shoulders, his wings whooshed, and Mazikeen’s shoe slaps scurried backwards. He knelt. He waited. She understood, didn’t she? Surely his demand was clear? Unless she lopped his damned head off.
She neared. He trembled. Panting noises escaped him.
She sliced—
His breath jolted from his lungs. His heart nearly jolted out of his chest. The pain nearly sliced him in two.
She sliced into the wing’s shoulder joint, through flesh and muscle and nerves and—
She struck the scapula, splintering the bone—
He clenched his teeth against a whimper, a moan, a scream. The cut hadn’t been clean. Why should it have been? Who had ever dared to de-wing an Angel of God?
She slashed through his wing’s humerus.
She sawed at his skin.
She snapped his tendons.
She burst his blood vessels.
Schluk, Schluk, Schluk, the sounds of ripping tissues, thick and wet.
As if he were an animal being butchered alive.
His every ripped cell shrieked, writhing in the throes of a bloody death. He wobbled, almost pitched forward onto the sand, but forced himself upright. He would not give Dad the satisfaction.
Three more vicious strokes, and a weight, lighter than he’d expected, dropped from his back. His right wing.
He raised his gaze Heavenward and curled his lip in a sneer. A snarling, if quivery, sneer.
I reject You!
Thunder thrashed.
Lightning lurched.
His demon sobbed.
The ocean rolled.
The sand dipped.
Lucifer rolled and dipped.
Strong arms snaked around his chest before he could smack face-first into not-cloud. Mazikeen pulled him upright, and a wildfire of agony lit in his shoulder blade, raged through its shredded rawness, leapt and raced along every axon, every dendrite, straight into his brain. A wail nearly burst his throat. But his jaw muscles, all his muscles, clamped to their bones and refused it exit. No Samael, he.
“Don’t stop now, Mazie,” he ground out, teeth locked, dredging up a devil-may-care laugh. “I’d be flying around in circles.”
The going on the left wing was no easier. Worse, even.
The blade drove into the joint. And sliced. And slashed. And sawed. He grunted. He groaned. He bit his tongue. Blood dribbled down his chin.
Mazikeen sawed.
His thigh muscles quivered with the effort of holding him upright. The muscles gave out. He sank back onto his heels.
She sawed.
His core muscles gave out. He sagged forward and supported himself on folded legs and forearms.
She sawed.
He face-planted.
She sawed.
Blackness swallowed him.
***
He was Falling, Falling, and a Blackness snatched hold of him and shook him to his atoms. He swirled and tumbled end-over-end, swirled and tumbled within Blackness, a sharp and jagged Black that bit and tore at him. He flung out his hands—let him catch onto something, anything! But he found nothing to grab, nothing to strike, he found Nothing, only Nothing, only Nothing—
“Whoa! I’ve got you!” a voice said.
He snagged hold of wrists. Slender wrists. From behind him, a female had wrapped her arms around his torso and was hauling his face out of…sand?
She sat him upright on his heels. He spat out beach. It had invaded his teeth, his hair, his ears, and had even crawled down his shirt front. Salt spray stiffened his robes. Rivulets of sweat ran down his sides. He shuddered so violently it was a wonder his trunk didn’t tumble off his legs.
She knelt beside him and pressed a bottle to his lips. Water poured into his mouth. His mouth lunged for the bottle, his hands grabbed for it, his shaking fingers nearly knocking it from her grip.
Water leapt and leapt and leapt down his throat.
“Hey, take it easy!” she said.
She pulled the bottle away, and his mouth snarled and lunged after it—
“Empty.” She stood, tossed the bottle into a tide pool. “We’ll get more on the drive back to Lux.”
Drive.
Lux.
Her strange words slapped his face like dashed buckets of cold water.
He fingered his cuffs. Not those of his Heavenly robes. And the sky—darkness clung to it like a fungus. Not Heaven’s Sky.
Not Heaven’s Sky?
“Wh-where am I?” he said.
“Same crummy beach you dragged us to.” She brushed sand from her black leather leggings, squirming about as if brushing away thousands of biting fleas.
What was this strange, insolent creature? She did not smell like his siblings. She smelled like… He took a deep sniff. An exotic scent: smoky, dark, alluring. Like burning cypress and black orchids.
“N-not the Beach of Eternal Mercies?”
She wiped a bloody blade on her black sleeve and stuck it in her weapons belt. She wiped a second bloody blade, twirled it around her forefinger in a brutal blur, and stuck it beside the first. “Wasn’t too merciful to you, was it?”
A fiery pain tore deep into the flesh of his back as if she’d plunged those blades into it. But why wasn’t she still plunging, cutting out his heart, serving up fried Angel liver and scrambled eggs? Why was she talking to him, giving him water?
Questions swarmed through his mind like a confused flock of seagulls, zooming, dipping, diving. One seagull kept darting to the fore, and he kept shooing it away, for on its wings it carried sounds and images: Gabriel’s Trumpet ringing forth. Fistfights. Thunder. Waves roiling the Sea. Screams. Soldiers falling. Blood filming his tongue. Be not afraid!
Falling, Falling, Afraid.
Best not to know the answer.
But the question-seagull swooped forward again, pecked his cranium.
“All right! All right! Who’m—?”
Lucifer landed in his head. Lucifer, The Fallen One. Lucifer, The Fallen One, shuddering on a lonely beach off the Pacific Coast Highway.
More facts slotted into place. But a nebulous thought, a wordless intuition—no seagull, but a great black flapping thing, dangerous and muscular—swooped around the edges of his mind. He clutched his arms as if that could contain his trembling. His teeth chattered like a clacking toy skull’s.
“Wha’ h-happened?”
She tossed off a shrug. “You fainted.”
“The D-devil doesn’t faint.”
“Right.” She sauntered away a few paces. “Coming?”
Ocean swayed, boulders glistened, cliffs hovered above him. But something about them was wrong, something about everything was wrong—
“S-something’s missing.”
“No shit.”
“Not my wings, Maz’keen. The ss-sand.”
“The sand’s missing?” Maze’s boot kicked sand, sending up a spray. “This is getting weird…er.”
“Can’t you see?”
He leaned forward, windmilled, his body toppling, and Maze dashed over, hooked him by his shirt collar, hauled him back upright. Caught in her near-strangling grasp, he scooped up a palmful of beach. He held it up to her as if showing her a dead baby bird.
“See? It’s wr-wrong.”
The white, white sand had faded to a miserable shade of cardboard.
Mazikeen again knelt beside him. She folded his fingers over his fistful of sand and cupped her hands over his. “Lucifer, it’s perfectly fine.”
“But I can’t hear it, either.” His gaze snagged on the cliffs. “Oh!”
He bobbled to his feet and, Mazikeen’s arm tight about his waist, he stumbled to the cliffs. He ran his fingers over the rock’s bumps and grooves. The baby pinks and buttery yellows and spider browns had dulled and darkened, as if slimed with mud. And they didn’t—
He reared back his fist, smashed it into the rock, jars and jolts hurtling from his knuckles to his shoulder blades. He smashed the rock again, an inferno flaring up along his nerve endings, flaming tongues licking his raw wounds. He smashed the rock again. “Sing, damn you, s—!”
Maze snatched his elbow, locked it in her grip. “Are you crazy?”
“There’s no music!” He jabbed his elbow into her chest, tried to thrust it forward, tried to launch another punch—
She gripped his elbow tighter. “What music?”
“The music of the colors!”
Mazikeen hung on to his struggling elbow, her eyebrows kicking upwards as if awaiting whatever bizarre notion might next fall out his mouth.
Gah! He wrenched free of her, lifted his hands beside his head, shook them, as if that might shake sense into her head. “Surely you’ve heard it! Each color sings or, or, is like an instrument—the pinks plink, little banjos, and the grays drone on and on, tambura-like, Amenadiel-like, and all the colors harmonize—”
He threw glances about. The silky sea, the velvety sky—everything had lost luster.
Nothing sang.
“Bloody hell! I can’t hear! I can’t see! I can’t— I can’t—” He rubbed his eyes and looked, rubbed his eyes and looked. “Mazie!”
Mazikeen slapped away his hands, seized his face, and pressed the pads of her fingers against his cheeks, his brow. “No fever. Were those things connected to your brain? Did I, like, give you a lobotomy or something?”
“To, to my brai—?” His thoughts stuttered to a stop.
Everything inside him stuttered to a stop.
No breath; no heartbeat; no sensation that his body carried any weight. Perhaps he’d simply ceased to exist. Perhaps he’d never existed. Perhaps nothing had ever existed. Perhaps all was Void—
And then the great black flapping thing came surging up from deep inside him, screeching, screeching like a Hell-Bat—only it was he, it was he who was screeching, screeching at the sky: “You self-serving Prick! You never told me!”
He pushed Maze away and raced, lurched, careened through the sand—
His wings—
Thirty feet, twenty feet, ten feet—
His wings—
Mazikeen tackled him and they tumbled to the ground and she wrapped her arms around his legs like a two-bodied python.
“Get off me, let me—!”
“Lucifer! Let them go. It’s done.”
“No!”
He stretched his fingers for his wings. They lay beyond his grasp. Beyond his grasp, magnificent, pristine white feathers that glowed with Divine Light. Beyond his grasp, magnificent, pristine white feathers that sang with Divine Song.
Oh, dear Dad.
Throughout the eons of his life, everything in Dad’s Creation had glowed and sung, from the tiniest flecks of dust to immense whirling galaxies—and his wings most of all. And now he knew: Inner Divinity blessed colors with brilliance, luminescence, vitality. Inner Divinity blessed colors with subtle hums, harmonics, voice.
And for him to witness Inner Divinity, he had to be attached to his wings.
And all that remained of that attachment? Bloody stumps.
He was Deaf and Blind.
The Lightbringer knew The Light no more.
He pressed his fists to his mouth, clamped down on his throat. But a sob broke through. He’d cried out in horror when he’d first come to consciousness in Hell, but he hadn’t wept. He’d pleaded and prayed, but he hadn’t wept. He’d raged and cursed, but he hadn’t wept. For eons, he’d gone through the motions of ruling Hell, much of that time all of Creation seeming pointless, worse than pointless, a cruel joke inflicted by an unloving God—but he hadn’t wept.
Now he might never stop.
***
It seemed he might never stop.
This behavior was useless, useless!
But his body ignored his scoldings. It hitched and heaved and convulsed with his sobs.
His demon, not known for her kindness, sat cross-legged beside him and stroked his hair.
***
Mazikeen scooped her hands under his armpits and hauled him to his feet. With his left arm lying limp across her shoulders and her right arm wrapped around his waist, she half carried, half pushed him in the direction of…somewhere. But he couldn’t always get his one foot to pay attention to where the other had just been, and he kept tripping and falling on his face. His eyes had squeezed themselves closed. He must never again open them. For a reason he couldn’t recall. For a reason he mustn’t recall.
“Am I in Hell?” he said—or tried to. His tongue worked no better than his feet, the consonants and vowels jumbling together into gobbledygook. Was he speaking English? Or Lilim? Or, fuck, Inner Mongolian?
“You’ve asked that a million times.”
“Have I?”
They shuffled forward.
“You’re on Earth,” she said.
“My back hurts, Maze. My whole body hurts. Even my”—for some reason, the word “soul” almost slipped out—“never mind. Maze, something’s wrong. Terribly wrong.”
Her hand latched onto his belt and tugged him upright, his knees giving out and his body starting to slip down the length of hers. And not in a fun way.
“We cut off your wings, remember? You said the sand’s weird and rocks don’t talk anymore.”
“Oh. Right.” Sort of. “‘Sing.’”
“Whatever.”
Whatever. As if cutting off his wings had rendered him a bit astigmatic, no biggie. As if cutting off his wings had deafened him to a few high-frequency tones, nothing to cry about. But what would a never-winged demon know of flying high, high, high into the atmosphere to witness an aurora, its immense, ghostly swirls of brilliant greens and blues, its giant curtains of Divine Light dancing and sparking and shimmering across an inky, star-pricked sky? What would a never-winged demon know of hearing its song, surging and swooping in smooth glissandi? Of singing with it, the music stealing across her heart, capturing and enrapturing her?
Cold tingles stung his thighs, his mid-back, his left cheek, like his thoughts had hit him in the head with a brick.
“I’m cold,” he said.
“Think warm thoughts.”
“Funny, Maze.”
She again tugged his slipping body upright. “Look, you’re in shock. Like when you fell to Hell.”
“Really?”
They shuffled forward.
He’d gotten used to Hell. Sort of. Eventually. He’d get used to this too. Wouldn’t he?
Time to face the Not-Music. He dragged his weighted eyelids up. “Oh!”
Above him, a hint of sunrise brushed delicate pinks and lavenders across the lightening sky. On his right, the ocean, shaded in an aurora’s turquoise greens and sapphire blues, gave a lazy, jeweled sweep over the sand, where she paused, sinking in her toes, warming them, and then she receded. To his left, brown-toned cliffs, scoured by raging seas and wild winds, reached high for the sky, striving on tiptoe to grasp puffy fluffs of cloud. All around him, a breeze, a bit sulfury, with dollops of algal tang and a bright finish of brine, skimmed over the off-white expanse of boulder-dotted beach and tickled the palm trees’ hula skirts. Somewhere close, a gull squawked. Far out in the waters, maybe fifty thousand swim strokes away, a school of whales tuned up and harmonized, singing sea songs nearly as old as the sea.
And if the ocean did not glimmer with its own, intrinsic Divine Light, well, the sun’s light sparkled upon it, as if hundreds of thousands of tiny stars had been cast down from the heavens along with him to dance upon the waves. And if the ocean’s colors didn’t sing with Divine Song, well, other sounds—of lapping waves and shrieking birds and clicking, whistling sea creatures—frolicked freely, their Earthly timbres ringing strong and clear, stronger and clearer than ever before.
Lucifer reached out a hand as if he could touch it all—dancing stars, jeweled ocean, striving cliffs, perfect-paletted sky, and squawking and whistling creatures.
“It’s beautiful,” he said. “Different than before, but beautiful.” His whole Immortal life stretched out before him, the possibilities of Earth beckoning him like forbidden fruit eager to be plucked.
“I’m free,” he said, testing out the words. The syllables tasted of broken struggle and shattered victory, but they glided easily over his tongue and ended in an open, hopeful sound that silently carried on forever.
“Sure, Lucifer.”
They shuffled forward.
Free. Cut free. A creature bound to Earth, like the humans, and no longer subject to Dad’s Commands. He couldn’t even be forced to carry out Dad’s Will, for, compared to a pompous Angel swooping down from Heaven, his motoring up in his Corvette and yelling, “Behold, I bring you good tidings of great joy!”, just wouldn’t have the same “shit your pants” effect.
And the humans. They would judge him for his own actions and not have their vision clouded by made-up stories—as if Celestials and mortals throughout the millennia had been playing a colossal, evil game of Telephone, the Devil the subject of their malicious gossip.
Free of Dad. Free of Hell. Free to do as he wished. Free to have what he wanted. Free to be seen as he truly was.
Surely worth the loss of his wings. Surely worth the loss of Divine Colors and their Divine Harmonics. Surely worth the loss of, of…
He briefly squeezed his eyes tight, as if he could shut out his last image of Immortal Music’s deep-purple double-fortissimos and golden half-tones: leaping from his fingertips onto his piano’s keys; spiraling up into the ether; floating away from him. Gone from him, forevermore.
“We’ll have so much fun here, you and I,” he said.
“Sure, Lucifer.”
They shuffled forward another ten yards. Then his knees plunged and his arms flapped like broken wings and he again thudded to the sand, a pile of ragged breaths and thumping heartbeats. But this time, instead of hauling him up, Maze rolled him onto his back, propped up his knees, and stood with one of her feet pinning the tops of his. She leaned down and snagged his arm.
“What’re you do—?”
She lunged rearwards and yanked, her body arching like an archery bow. He yelped, his body whipping upright. Fast as a, well, demon, she crouched and shot her left arm between his legs, her left shoulder planting deep in his crotch.
“Oooh, Mazie, I didn’t know you cared.”
“Shut up.”
She thrust upward from her squat, hoisting him—
He found himself slung across her shoulders. “Oh! Oh! I know what this is called—a caveman’s carry! This is how the brutes carried off their women after they clubbed them over the head.”
“Don’t tempt me.”
She locked his near hand in hers and bounded across the sand. He oof-ed and ow-ed with each belly-flopper-ry step.
“The wing thing tuckered me out a little,” he said to the upside-down, bouncing sand-heavens and the scuttling sand crabs.
“I noticed,” Mazikeen said. “Say, about those wings…”
“Old news.”
“Yeah, but I’ll go back for them once I haul you to the car. Can’t let the humans find them.”
“Right.”
He endured another five minutes of this oopsy-daisy indignity in silence, thinking. Would Amenadiel stick to their deal and leave him alone, forever and ever, Amen? Would other brothers or sisters fly down and try to force him back to Hell? He could just see that pesky Uriel cooking up a plot to manipulate patterns and, instead of snaring him, setting off some Universal Catastrophe. Really, somebody ought to put a leash on the little magpie—and not the fun kind.
But the most important question clanging in his brain: when would Dad’s Wrath rouse, and in what form?
“Maze?”
“Yeah?”
“Yikes!”
His free hand clutched onto the crisscrossing leather belts on the back of her doublet, Maze springing across a fifteen-foot-wide tide pool. A sea anemone waved “Hi!” at him with electric-purple tentacles. A crimson starfish popped a mussel into her mouth and bubbled a chuckle.
His fingers toyed with the belts. “Maze, you’ll always stick by me, won’t you?”
She lugged him to a flat-topped boulder. She crouched and eased him off her shoulders and to his feet. When his legs turned into quaking aspens, she gripped him by his biceps and guided him into a sit, and when he slipped down the boulder like a water drop, she lifted him back up and planted a hand on his chest to pin him in place. Her fingertips brushed at the sand salting his stubble beard, smoothed the sea-frizzled bangs flopping across his eyes, and tugged at his half-tucked, rumpled shirt—a doomed attempt at neatening him.
“Don’t sit all slumpy,” she said. “Straighten up.”
“Okay,” he said.
He tried his best.
“Don’t fall off that rock,” she said.
“Okay,” he said.
He tried his best.
She knelt before him and took his right hand in hers. On his middle finger, he wore his Hell Ring. Its stone—blacker than anything else in Creation, smoother than anything else in Creation, harder than anything else in Creation—glinted. Not with Divine Light. With Infernal Light.
“O Lucifer, Star of the Morning, this I vow: I’ll always have your back.” She kissed the stone.
Mazikeen, closest of his Hellish companions. Volatile. Ferocious. Trustworthy to the extent he could throw her—far, not infinitely far. But even demons, perhaps especially demons, held vows inviolable.
“Maze! Look up! Your vow is witnessed.”
Sol was climbing higher, stepping into the sky from behind the cliffs, quickly now, the Artist of Dawn splattering his paint across the puffy cloud wisps—creamy yellows, bluish purples, and an un-Earthly orangey red so intense Lucifer had to squint against it.
In Sol’s sight, Lucifer placed his hand atop Mazikeen’s head and accepted her pledge with kingly formality. And then—
He toppled forward and gave himself over to the Dark and Silent.