Lauren Kate: Rapture

He still loved her—and every moment that he didn’t have her hurt him deeply. That was why he’d spent the past nine days with a shadow of her soul, why he’d sought to reset the entire universe to have her back.

“Oh, Lucifer,” she said. “I’m sorry.”

“You see?” He laughed. “You are afraid of me. You’re afraid of what I make you feel. You don’t want to remember—”

“No, it’s not—”

From a hidden sheath behind his back, Lucifer produced a long silver starshot. He rolled it between his fingers, humming a tune Luce recognized. She shivered.

It was the hymn he’d written, pairing the two of them together. Lucinda, his Evening Light.

She watched the starshot gleam. “What are you doing?”

“ You loved me. You were mine. Those of us who understand eternity know what true love means. Love never dies. That’s why I know that when we hit the ground, when everything starts over, you will make the right choice. You will choose me instead of him, and we will rule together. We will be together”—he looked up at her—“or else—”

Then Lucifer came at her with the starshot.

“Yes!” Luce shouted. “I loved you once!”

He froze, the dull deadly weapon poised above her breast, her earlier soul dangling from the crook of his arm.

“But it was longer ago than you recall,” she said.

“You appreciate eternity, but you don’t appreciate how in a moment eternity can change. I did not love you when we fell.”

“Lies.” He lowered the starshot closer. “You’ve loved me more recently than you think. Even just last week, in your Announcers, thinking you loved another—we were wonderful together. Remember nesting in the passion fruit tree in Tahiti? We had earlier moments, too. I expect you’ve been remembering those.” He stepped away from her, studied her reaction.

“I taught you everything you think you know about love! We were supposed to rule together. You promised to follow me. You deceived me. ” His eyes pleaded with her, conflagrations of pain and rage. “Imagine how lonely it was, in a Hell of my own making, stranded at the altar, the greatest fool of all time, enduring six thousand years of agony.”

“Stop,” she whispered. “You have to stop loving me.

Because I stopped loving you.”

“Because of Daniel Grigori, who isn’t a tenth of the angel I am, even at my worst? It’s ridiculous! You know that I have always been more radiant, more talented. You were there when I invented love. I made it out of nothing, out of mere . . . adoration !” Lucifer frowned as he said the word, as if it made him nauseated.

“And you don’t even know the half. Without you, I went on to invent evil, the other end of the spectrum, the necessary balance. I inspired Dante! Milton! You should see the underworld. I took the Throne’s ideas and improved them. You can do whatever you want!

You’ve missed out on everything. ”

“I missed nothing.”

“Oh, darling”—he reached for her, his soft hand caressing her cheek—“surely you can’t believe that. I could give you the greatest kingdom never known—we work hard, then we party. Even the Throne offered you the benefits of eternal peace! And what have you chosen?

Daniel. What has that haircut ever done?” Luce brushed his hand away. “He has captured my heart. He loves me for who I am, not what I can bring to him.”

He smirked. “You always were a sucker for acknowledgment. Baby, that’s your Achilles’ heel.” She glanced at the glowing, still souls around them, millions of them, stretching thousands of miles into the distance, accidental eavesdroppers on the truth about the universe’s first romantic love.

“I thought that what I felt for you was right,” Luce said. “I loved you until it hurt me, until our love was consumed by your pride and rage. The thing you called love made me disappear. So I had to stop loving you.” She paused. “Our adoration never diminished the Throne, but your love diminished me. I never meant to hurt you. I only meant to stop you from hurting me.”

“Then stop hurting me!” he pleaded, stretching out arms that Luce remembered encircling her, feeling like home. “You can learn to love me again. It is the only way to stop my pain. Choose me now, again, for always.”

“No,” she said. “It’s really over, Lucifer.” She motioned toward the other angels falling around them. “It was over before any of this even happened. I never promised to rule with you outside of Heaven. You projected that dream onto me, like I was another one of your blank slates. You will accomplish nothing by dropping this Lucinda to Earth. She will not return your love.”

“She might.” He gazed down at the angel in his arms.

He tried to kiss her, but the light surrounding Lucinda’s falling self blocked his lips from touching her skin.

“I am sorry for the pain I caused you,” Luce said. “I was . . . young. I got . . . swept up. I played with fire. I shouldn’t have. Please, Lucifer. Let us go.”

“Oh.” He nuzzled his face into the body in his arms.

“I ache.”

“You will ache less if you accept that what we shared is in the past. Things are not the way they were. If you love me, you must find it in your soul to let me go on as I must.”

Lucifer took a long look at Luce. His expression darkened, then turned quizzical, as if he was considering an idea. He looked away for a moment, blinked, and when he looked at Luce again, she thought he could see her as she truly was: the angel who’d become a girl, who’d lived through millennia, who’d grown more and more certain of her destiny, who had found her way back to becoming an angel once again. “You . . .deserve more,” Lucifer whispered.

“More than Daniel?” Luce shook her head. “I don’t want anything more than him.”

“I mean you deserve more than all this suffering. I’m not blind to what you’ve been through. I’ve been watching. At times, your pain has caused me a kind of joy. I mean, you know me.” Lucifer smiled sadly. “But even my brand of joy is always edged with guilt. If I could do away with guilt, you’d really see something big.”

“Free me from my suffering. Stop the Fall, Lucifer. It is within your power.”

He staggered toward her. His eyes filled with tears.

The devil shook his head. “Tell me how a guy, with a decent job, loses a—”

“ENOUGH!”

The voice brought everything to a halt. The orbit of the sun, the inner consciousness of three hundred and eighteen million angels, even the velocity of the plummeting Fall itself simply stopped.

It was the voice that had created the universe: layered and rich, as if millions of versions of it spoke in unison.

Enough.

The Throne’s command ripped through Luce. It consumed her. Light flooded her vision, obscuring Lucifer, her falling self, the whole world with brightness. Her soul buzzed with unspeakable electricity as a weight fell from her, zipped into the distance.

The Fall.

It was gone. Luce had been thrust out of it with a single word and a jolt that made her feel inside out. She was moving across a great void, toward an unknown destination, faster than the speed of light multiplied by the speed of sound.

She was moving at Godspeed.

Nothing but white.

Luce sensed she and Lucifer had returned to Troy, but she couldn’t be sure. The world was too bright, ivory on fire. It blazed in total silence.

At first the light was everything. It was white-hot, blinding.

Then, slowly, it began to fade.

The scene before Luce sharpened: The lessening light allowed the field, the slender cypress trees, the goats grazing on blond straw, the angels around her to come into focus. This light’s brilliance seemed to have a tex-ture, like feathers brushing her skin. Its power made her humble and afraid.