Page 122 of All's Hell That Ends Well

The guards shot us weird looks.

Snickering, I stepped into the room.

We sat once moreacross from Lucifer, the fire crackling in the hearth behind us, food and drinks spread out on low tablesbefore us, and draped over my shoulders lay a hellcat who hadn’t even introduced herself before becoming a living shawl. And while her purr eased some of the tension in my neck, she did smack me in the back of the head with her wing when she twitched in her sleep.

“Out with it,” Lucifer said as he plucked a grape from the cluster and threw it in his mouth. “You’ve news from Heaven, and I can smell your trepidation about it from here.” He wrinkled his nose.

I glanced at Azazel and nudged him with my elbow. “You tell him,” I said under my breath.

Eyes studiously on his drink, he subtly shook his head. “You do it,” he replied just as quietly.

“Uh-uh. You’re his actual blood relative. This is your responsibility.”

“But you’re so good at slapping him upside the head with uncomfortable truths. You’re much more practiced in it than me.”

Lucifer cleared his throat. “This is your reminder that I can simply rip it from your mind.”

“Fine!” I threw up my hands.

My movement jounced the hellcat, who jerked and hit me with her wing, almost taking my eye out.

“Like a bandage,” I mumbled. Then I said out loud in a rush, “You’re Death incarnate. You personified yourself to be with Lilith and then forgot you’re the Grim Reaper, but your essence is still toxic to life, and that’s why you can’t step foot on Earth, because you’d kill all living things around you”—I sucked in a breath and added softly—“including Lilith.”

Lucifer stared at me with much the same intensity as when I’d told him I’d found Lilith’s reincarnation.

Azazel patted my knee and murmured, “Good job.”

I slapped his hand and glared at him.

“Who told you that?”

Lucifer’s quiet question drew my attention back to him. His face a mask of hardness, he pinned me with a stare that arrested my breath.

I shifted my weight on the couch. “Um, Metatron and Shekinah.”

“They spoke to you?”

I nodded.

“They personally came to Earth to give you that information?”

“Yes. Well, Metatron only wanted us to know that you can’t be on Earth, but he refused to tell us why at first. It was Shekinah who revealed the reason, and it seemed she was getting permission for that from God himself.”

Lucifer closed his eyes, and his power appeared to curl into him—that dark, dark power with a chilled note.

I’d sometimes wondered why that was. Why, when the energy of demons was of a fiery nature, and Hell itself burned and blazed, Lucifer’s power was icy at its core.

Now I knew. It was because death was cold. When life left a body, the warmth went with it.

And Lucifer had likely crafted Hell as a dimension of heat in order for its inhabitants to withstand the chill of death—even if he hadn’t been aware of it all.

“Tell me everything,” Lucifer whispered, his eyes still closed.

And so I did. Word for word, I relayed what Metatron and Shekinah had divulged, and the more I spoke, the more it seemed that whatever barrier or fog that had suppressed his awareness of his true self now slowly dissipated. As before, in those moments when he’d shown that unnerving eldritch version of himself, there was a change to his presence, a different vibration to his energy, and my heart stumbled at the realizationthat I was indeed breathing the same air as the personified force of death.

My bones ached at the pressure of a power so ancient, so primordial, it weighed like a ton on every cell in my body.

When Lucifer opened his eyes again, they held the fathomless darkness and freezing cold of the space between stars. The air around him bent and flickered, as if that energy he’d once poured into a body now fought its constraints. Ice crept out from where he sat, limning the fabric of his chair in intricate swirls of crystals.

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