Lilith Saintcrow - Working for the Devil

Something thudded on the marble. Jace's boots rang—but the thump was from behind me. He reached me, dropping to his knees with a heavy sound, grabbing my shoulders. We watched together as the limohovers lifted into the sky, quickly, then dived over the well of Nuevo Rio. The police cruisers made one circuit of the mansion and then slid down into the city, going back to patrol probably.

Game over. Lucifer wins.

Jace cursed, shook me. "Danny! Danny !"

"What the fuck ?" My tongue felt too thick for my mouth.

Jace's arms crushed me. "Fuck, Danny. What happened? The kid heard his voice on the commlink and just walked out; she said her daddy was here to get her."

I groaned. "I hate this line of work," I husked dryly, then looked back over my shoulder, to where the limohovers had rested.

Another black blot on the pavement, this one with short ink-black hair.

"They tossed him out," Jace said into my hair. "Danny—"

"Help me up. Help me up ."

He dragged me up to my feet, steadying me as I swayed.

"What the fuck is going on out there?" Eddie yelled from the hatch.

"Go back," I told Jace. "I'll be fine."

"You're not fine," he shot back at me. "Look at you. Your hand—your throat —"

"Go make sure Gabe's okay," I said, and shoved him away. "Go on."

Maybe I shouldn't have done that. He took a step back, his face going cold and hard as the marble under us. I think I watched Jace Monroe age five years in that one moment, his shoulders slumping, his blue eyes gone pale as frost.

"Danny," he said. "You're not seriously…"

The heat poured down on us like oil from Nuevo Rio's blue sky. "Go on, Jace. Go."

I turned away. Limped toward the crumpled dark shape lying against the whiteness. Too still. He was too still.

"Danny," I heard Jace say behind me, shut the sound out. I didn't care.

It took me a long time to limp across the marble. I finally reached him and went down on my knees. He lay twisted against the smooth slick stone, legs shattered, his face unrecognizable. Nothing could possibly be that broken and live.

I flattened my left hand against his shredded chest. His wings lay bent and broken, tattered, draped across him. He had stopped bleeding. Smoke threaded up from his wings, his blood burning, burning.

"No," I whispered. "No."

His eyes were mere slits, glazed over. "Japhrimel?" I whispered. The mark on my shoulder had stopped its flaming pain. Now it was cold, all the way down to my bones. Numb cold, the cold of shock.

No spark of life. I touched his throat, pried up one ruined eyelid and peered at his eye. No pulse. No reaction in the pupil. Just the steady drift of smoke rising from him.

My head dropped. I sighed. The sound seemed to go on forever. My throat pulsed with pain.

I reached , with all the Power I had left. I tried to find the spark of life in him. I rested my left palm on his body and closed my eyes, searching, but nothing was there. This was only a shell.

Japhrimel was gone.

Free. He was finally free. Lucifer had killed him—or let him die.

I didn't realize the tears splashing his battered face were mine. I bent over him for a long moment, frantically searching for any sign of life, and then settled back on my heels, cold in the middle of the furnacelike sunshine. The flames began in earnest, eating his demon body, self-combusting with a smell like burning cinnamon.

Then I tipped back my head and howled to the uncaring blue sky.

Gabe was fine. Shaky, battered, weak from blood loss, and possessed of an interesting new set of scars where Santino had ripped her belly open, but fine. She lived, and after a couple of days she called me to say Eddie had stopped rampaging through the mansion threatening to break windows. I stayed in a hotel down in Nuevo Rio, a cockroach-infested place where I had to listen to screaming and the pops of projectile guns outside my window every night. Gabe also told me Jace was going to give them the Baby , and they planned to fly the garbage scow back to Saint City. Eddie had wanted a hover anyway.

I said nothing, just listened to her on the phone and then slowly closed the sound of her voice away, setting the receiver down in its cradle. Good for them.

I flew first class in a passenger transport My right hand was an awkward claw, but I got around with my left just fine. It would take me a long time to bless another sword if my hand ever straightened out.

I carried the urn with me. It was black lacquer, beautiful, and heavy. Pure fine cinnamon-scented ash, scraped together from white marble and carefully placed in the urn's embrace. Every speck of ash I had been able to find had gone into the urn, left by Lucifer as a parting gift maybe. Just to rub everything in.

Jace did not see me off at the dock. I didn't expect him to. I'd left his mansion like a thief in the middle of the night, carrying Japhrimel's ashes with me. Jace hadn't tried to find me or talk to me.

Good.

It was while I was sitting in the hover, resting my head against the side of the seat, that everything became clear. Of course Japhrimel had helped Vardimal escape Hell. It made sense, especially since Lucifer probably let him do it, figuring that Vardimal wouldn't find anything of value among humans, even humans carrying the strain of the Fallen—psions. What Lucifer didn't know, and Japhrimel probably didn't know either, was that Vardimal had taken the Egg. And when Lucifer found that out, suddenly Vardimal wasn't so little a threat. If Lucifer hadn't known about the kid then, he'd probably guessed when he found the Egg gone and took notice of the human world again; finding out that Vardimal, true to form, had been taking samples from human psychics and had then disappeared. And at some point, Lucifer had made contact with Eve—way before I did, but probably by following the same link of blood I'd followed. Only his link with the child would be stronger, since it was his genetic material, and I only had the fading echo of my love for Doreen and our shared human link.

And if Lucifer had been unable to leave Hell without the Egg, all of a sudden it became necessary to attack Vardimal from a direction the scavenger demon wouldn't see coming. No demon would think that the Prince would hire a human.

Lucifer had been playing to retain his control of Hell;

Eve was another playing piece with potential value as a created Androgyne. It would be child's play for Lucifer to reverse-engineer and find Vardimal's "shining path of genes," securing his own grasp on the reproduction of other demons. And it probably piqued the hell out of Lucifer that Vardimal had managed to do something the Prince couldn't.

Vardimal had been playing for control of Hell itself. Japhrimel had been playing for his freedom, and just when it seemed possible that he might live out the game, Lucifer had killed him for letting Vardimal escape—never mind that Lucifer allowed and probably facilitated it.

It was all very logical, once I got a chance to think about it. Simple enough.

Me? Just a human tool. I'd been playing for my life. And here I was alive, and the demon who lied to me was dead. I'd killed Santino at last, but Lucifer had Doreen's kid. If that made us even, it also made me the loser.

Maybe Lucifer hadn't expected Japhrimel to turn me into whatever I was now. And that was a problem—just what the hell was I? Japhrimel had expected to be alive enough to explain it to me when everything was said and done. Maybe he miscalculated just how deeply Lucifer would detest the idea of anyone winning anything from him—even his assassin, whom he'd thrown away anyway.

The transport finally docked, and I waited until everyone else had a chance to get off before I made my way out into the hoverport, breathing in the Saint City stink again, feeling the cold glow of my home's Power rasping against my flesh. It took me bare seconds to adapt, because I wasn't… human.