Page 20 of The Devil You Know

With the tension eased, Raphael dared to approach the bed to assess the crumpled form of the Leader of Heaven. His furrowed brows told me it wasn’t good. He stripped Michael’s boots and pants to get straight to the leg and I could see it was practically pulsing with demonic energy, dark tendrils spreading over the pale skin, filling the cracks of the wounds like a demented version of Japanese art of kintsugi – but instead of beautiful gold keeping pieces together it was deep, angry crimson that seemed to want to tear Michael’s limb apart.

“Is he going to be alright?” I asked quietly.

“I need to put him in a coma,” Raphael sighed, pulling a vial of shimmering liquid from his robes.

”Is it to quicken his healing or prevent him from gallivanting off while he should rest?”

“Yes,” the healer answered dryly.

“Back then... during the first negotiations millenia ago... this wound hurts him even when he is at his full power, right? That’s why the negotiations fell apart.”

“That meeting went to, pardon the saying, hell, because you two were a mess. Of course, it didn’t help that, yes, he was in debilitating pain, and he only discovered this downside while the negotiations were already in progress. I could understand how the tempers flared in the whole situation. It’s the fact that you two dunderheads refused to meet even after there was a precedence of meeting on Earth that gave us all gray hairs,” Raphael huffed.

“Colloquially speaking, of course?” I raised my eyebrows.

“Mostly, yes. But Gabriel decided to add a white streak to his hair because, and I quote: ‘I deserve to have a sign of how much stress I go through, like humans have.’”

“That’s why he has it?” I felt the corner of my mouth tick upwards. “We were betting it was because he wanted to seduce humans with his gray fox appearance.”

“Nobody said it wasn’t two birds with one stone. Listen, Lucifer, lovely to chat with you, but you know this can’t go on, right?”

The beginnings of a smile dropped from my face as if they had never been there.

I wasn’t going to pretend I didn’t know what Raphael was talking about. My relationship with Michael. I thought I had frozen the feelings I had for him when he made me fall again, but then he stormed into the Hell itself in some misguided white knight sacrificial act and I felt the ice thawing dangerously. But the Archangel was right. It couldn’t go on. Not only because if the ice thawed completely what I know would follow would be a flood of feelings I wasn’t ready for, but also because life on the island and my current reality were completely different. Michael couldn’t even visit my home. It would be a scandal of epic proportions if we ended up together. Without the rose-tinted glasses of being stranded together, I knew this could only end in a tragedy.

“I know,” I responded to Raphael. “No matter what we do, we end up hurting each other.”

“Then you should leave.”

I dared to take another look at Michael’s face before I left. After all, who knew how many centuries would fly by before we saw each other again this time?

Months passed without Michael appearing in front of me again. Good. That was good. At least that was what I tried to tell myself. And if I agreed to go to one of the God is Dead What the Fuck meetings between angels and demons, it totally wasn’t to ask for information on a certain feathered menace. Nope. Not at all. It wasn’t my fault that as soon as Gabriel saw me, he rolled his eyes and said, “He is on Earth. Safe and sound if a bit batshit, if you ask me. If that’s all you came here for you can go and leave us to do business.”

“I came to contribute my knowledge,” I said stubbornly.

And then maybe I sulked while the team talked animatedly about the spread of power between Earth, Hell, and Heaven and how additional maintenance had to be implemented now that God’s will wasn’t doing the invisible work anymore. To my surprise, the owners of the BDSM club were here as well. As it turned out, they were renowned for their joint discoveries about the structure of power sources on Earth before they created the Steel Velvet club. After a while I leaned closer and listened with interest, letting myself be drawn into the intricacies of the problem and, in the end, joined in the discussion about the drawbacks of each proposed method of damage control.

In the middle of my animated debate with Hellion, the door to the meeting room burst open. I could only blink once before a blur of white leapt towards me.

I snatched Bane from the air and twirled him around, not caring about my chair, which clattered to the floor.

“Bane! You are here! You... you exist! How is that possible? Weren’t you just a part of the illusion?” My voice was full of wonder.

“It was Gabriel who suggested God didn’t have enough energy to create such a complicated, long-lasting illusion.” I snapped my head around, spellbound, as Michael stepped towards me. “And living creatures are especially hard to imitate. Therefore, the likely reason the island had such a mishmash of features was that God used various existing locations, which all snapped back into place after the island vanished.”

“Michael...” I forgot what I wanted to say when the fox started licking my face and wriggling happily in my arms. “Ah! Stop it, you rascal! You truly are the Bane of My Existence!”

Sneakily, Michael used the moment of me laughing at the fox’s antics to slide closer.

“I caught the fox. And I did it for you. It was clear to me that losing him would bring you immense sadness, so I found him. I didn’t do it for God. I know he is...” Michael drew himself to his full height and said firmly. “He is dead.”

He had finally said it. Admitted the truth to himself and others. Michael was no longer hiding.

Fuck, why was the ice around my feelings transparent, making me see all I was trying to keep hidden?

“Stop embarrassing me,” I snapped. Conflicted. Torn. “Are you going to keep showing up with grand gestures every month?”

“Yes,” Michael declared. “I will embarrass you as many times as it takes for you to understand that I’m not going to leave you. I’m never going to let you go again. Lucifer... I would do anything for you.” He dropped to one knee and kissed my hand, Bane jumping to the floor and running circles around us, yipping, apparently our biggest fan. “For you I would fall. You only have to ask me and I will join you in H—”

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