Page 62 of Dark Prince

I touch the curved side of the crimson fridge and take a deep breath. It’s a gamble to come out with it, but I know we are both circling around the elephant in the room at this point. And it would be really fucking nice to have someone to talk to about all of this.

“It would mean that you really were here in the fifties,” I say after a moment. “And that going to Hell and back would just mean you took a vacation back home.”

She grins broadly, letting her real eyes shine through in a burst of glowing red. “You’re a smart one. I like you.”

I laugh and lean against the counter, feeling a little boneless. “I’m just glad it’s out in the open between us now. All the way home I was trying to figure out how I was going to talk through all this without outing Lucas or ending up institutionalized.”

She goes back to her chopping, flashing a sympathetic smile at me as her eyes turn back to blue. “Well, come on then, ask whatever you’ve been dying to ask. I know all there is to know about these things—that’s why I’m one of Lucifer’s seconds on Earth.”

“Just on Earth? Not… before?”

She dumps the veggies in a hot pan, then starts filling a pot with water. “It’s a little more complicated in Hell,” she says matter-of-factly, speaking the name casually. It’ll take me a while to get used to that. “I was his aide, sort of. There isn’t really an easy equivalent. I wasn’t within the chain of command in the war, but I still ranked high enough to be the first point of contact when he got himself in a mess, which meant I was privy to a lot of the bullshit happening at the top.”

“So you know all about why he left?” I query tentatively.

“Terrible situation.” She sighs, shaking her head as she measures pasta into the boiling water. “Cephalus’s first mistake was thinking he could run ideas past his wife and get anything useful out of it.”

Lucas—Lucifer,dang it—never told me about Cephalus’s wife. His mother. Of course, it never occurred to me that the devil would have a mother, either, so I guess that’s my own fault. I shake myself from the thought and focus back on the conversation.

“She wasn’t much of a strategist, then?”

Naamah scoffs. “Oh, I didn’t say that. She’s a killer strategist—when it comes to manipulating people and making them think she’s on their side. It’s the craziest thing, though. Sometimes, one of the lower-level demons will have some petty complaint, and she’ll sit there and hear them out, all sympathetic and reassuring. Then they’ll spill more than they wanted to, they’ll hint at an uprising or something, and she’ll be totally on their side. Boosts their confidence, you know? They spill everything, thinking they’ve somehow wrangled the Queen of Hell herself into taking up arms against her own husband.”

“Oh, no,” I groan. I can see where this is going.

“Next day, bam. Everyone involved is executed, and you can always tell who had the loose lips, because they’ll be the one sitting there all shocked.” Naamah shakes her head as she stirs the pot. “Idiots. So yeah, she’s a great strategist, but she’s a pawn for Cephalus. He doesn’t care about her. Doesn’t care about his sons. Doesn’t care about anything except winning the war against Heaven.”

“That’s so sad. Can’t she see that? Why would she stay if all he cares about is the war?”

Naamah looks at the ceiling, thinking. Then she snaps her fingers and looks at me. “You know those women who will stay with a dude for years just because he feeds her promises? From the outside, it’s obvious that he’s never really going to change. But fromherperspective, he really does love her? She tells herself that he just needs more time, more help, just needs to get through this obstacle or the next, just needs to solve all of his psychological problems and put down the bottle, blah blah blah. And she bases her whole relationship on his potential and sinks decades into a failure?”

I wince. “Yeah. I had a friend in that situation for the longest time. The worst part was that she eventually did see what was happening and she knew it was never going to get better, and—”Oh, I get it.“And she decided that she couldn’t leave because she’d already been with him ten years and couldn’t stand to see all that time go to waste.”

“Bingo.” Naamah nods, making her dark hair glint in the light. “Now multiply that by a million, give or take, and you’ve got Aurora’s situation. Weird thing, though. There are stages, hundreds of stages, after the one your friend reached. When Lucifer and I left hell, Aurora was at the stage where she had adapted herself to his view entirely. Everything that didn’t fit Cephalus’s needs, she had slowly worn away. She’d become nothing more than an extension of him and his ideas. Which is why him asking her if he was doing the right thing was pointless. They practically share a brain, so if his answer was yes, so was hers.”

I shudder. “That sounds awful. Bad for everybody.”

“Yeah. Which is why Cephalus is so dead set on getting Lucifer back, even if he can’t parse it down like that. I don’t think he’s really aware of what he’s done to Aurora. But heisaware that he has little to no chance of winning this war without Lucifer. Lucifer wasn’t just his best general on the battlefield. He was his best strategist, his most far-sighted thinker. Lucifer was the first demon to ever factor the human element into the strategy. He saw their potential and figured out how to use it to our benefit, and in doing so, he complicated the situation for Heaven so thoroughly that we nearly won.”

“Really?”

She nods. “Definitely. We might have, if some petty assholes hadn’t decided that it would be fun to unleash their pets on the European countryside. For a bit there, they not only made our presence very obvious to humans, but turned them against us. Those pets of theirs should have been breaking Heaven’s ranks on the front lines, not hoarding shiny rocks and stealing virgin girls.”

My jaw drops. “No way.Dragons? Like, storybook dragons? Those are—were—demons?”

She grins at me. “Yup. Not quite the same kind of thing that attacked the jet, but the same family. They’re smart, trainable animals, but vicious and chaotic if left to their own devices. Like your wolves, sort of, but trained as warhorses.”

“They don’t look like wolves in armadillo skin, do they?”

Naamah laughs and shakes her head. “No, they look like the dragons in the medieval art. Wolves in armadillo skin? Hmm, sounds like the nomads. They’ve got more autonomous power and higher intelligence than the animals. They’re people, legally speaking, although they’re definitely outsiders. They don’t stay in one place, don’t like rules they didn’t come up with, and aren’t fans of broad society, although if you can find a way to get on their good side, you’ll learn that they have very strict micro-societies within each clan.”

“I never thought of Hell having a whole society,” I confess. “Even after hearing about the war, I sort of figured Hell to be a monolith, all military.”

“The military is a huge part of the society down there,” she explains. “And it’s only grown over the last several thousand years. With Cephalus obsessed with winning the war, the military has become the center of everything. Compulsory drafts, isolation of resources, the works.”

“And here I assumed those were human problems.”

She scoffs. “Where do you think you all got the idea?”

---