Lauren Kate: Passion

He was no mere demon, not like Steven, or even Cam at his worst.

He was Evil incarnate.

And he had been with Luce, breathing down her neck the whole time.

She tried to turn away from him, but his darkness was everywhere. It looked as if she were floating in a night sky, but all the stars were impossibly far away; there was no sign of Earth. Close by were patches of darker blackness, swirling abysses. And every now and then a shaft of light appeared, a beacon of hope, illumination. Then the light would vanish.

“Where are we?” she asked.

Satan sneered at the pointlessness of her question. “Neverwhere,” he said. His voice no longer had the familiar tone of her traveling companion. “The dark heart of nothing at the center of everything. Neither Heaven, nor Earth, nor Hell. A place of the darkest transits. Nothing your mind at this stage can fathom, so it probably just looks”—his red eyes bulged—“ scary to you.”

“What about those flashes of light?” Luce asked, trying not to let on just how frightening the place did look to her. She’d seen at least four flashes of light already, brilliant conflagrations igniting out of nowhere, vanishing fast into darker regions in the sky.

“Oh, those.” Bill watched one as it blazed and disappeared over Luce’s shoulder. “Angel travel. Demon travel. Busy night, isn’t it? Everyone seems to be going somewhere.”

“Yes.” Luce had been waiting for another burst of light in the sky. When it came, it cast a shadow across her, and she clawed at it, desperate to shake out an Announcer before the light disappeared. “Including me.”

The Announcer expanded rapidly in her hands, so heavy and urgent and lithe that, for a moment, she thought she might make it.

Instead she felt a scabrous grip around her sides. Bill had her entire body nestled in his grimy claw. “I’m just not ready to say goodbye yet,” he whispered in a voice that made her shiver. “See, I’ve grown so fond of you. No, wait, that’s not it. I have always been … fond of you.”

Luce let the shadow in her fingers wisp away into nothing.

“And like all beloveds, I need you in my presence, especially now, so you don’t corrupt my designs. Again.”

“At least now you’ve given me a goal,” Luce said, straining against his grasp. It was no use. He gripped her tighter, squeezing her bones.

“You always did have an inner fire. I love that about you.” He smiled, and it was a terrible thing. “If only your spark stayed inside, hmm? Some people are just unlucky in love.”

“Don’t talk to me about love,” Luce spat. “I can’t believe I ever listened to a word that came out of your mouth. You don’t know a thing about love.”

“I’ve heard that one before. And I happen to know one important thing about love: You think yours is bigger than Heaven and Hell and the fate of all that rests between. But you’re wrong. Your love for Daniel Grigori is less than insignificant. It is nothing !”

His shout was like a shock wave that blew back Luce’s hair. She gasped and struggled for air. “Say whatever you want. I love Daniel. I always will. And it has nothing to do with you.”

Satan held her up to his red eyes, pinching her skin with his sharpest pointer claw. “I know you love him. You’re a fool for him. Just tell me why.”

“Why?”

“Why. Why him? Put it into words. Really make me feel it. I want to be moved.”

“A million reasons. I just do.”

His snaggletoothed smile deepened, and a sound like a thousand growling dogs came from deep inside him. “That was a test. You failed, but it isn’t your fault. Not really. That is an unfortunate side effect of the curse you bear. You don’t get to make choices anymore.”

“That’s not true. If you remember, I just made a big choice not to kill my soul.”

That angered him—she could see it in the way his nostrils flared, the way he reached up and balled his claw into a fist and made a patch of the starry sky go out like a light switch had been flicked somewhere. But he said nothing for the longest time. Just stared away into the night.

A horrible thought struck Luce. “Were you even telling the truth? What would really have happened if I’d used the starshot to—” She shuddered, sickened that she’d come so close. “What’s in all this for you? You want me out of the picture or something so you can get to Daniel? Is that why you would never show yourself in front of him? Because he would have gone after you and—”

Satan chuckled. His laughter dimmed the stars. “You think I’m scared of Daniel Grigori? You do think very highly of him. Tell me, what kind of wild lies has he been filling your head with about his grandiose place in Heaven?”

“You’re the liar,” Luce said. “You’ve done nothing but lie from the moment I met you. No wonder the whole universe despises you.”

“Fears. Not despises . There’s a difference. Fear has envy in it somewhere. You may not believe it, but there are many who wish to wield the power that I wield. Who … adore me.”

“You’re right. I don’t believe you.”

“You just don’t know enough. About anything. I’ve taken you on a tour of your past—shown you the futility of this existence, hoping to awaken you to the truth, and all I get from you is ‘Daniel! I want Daniel!’ ”

He flung her down and she fell into blackness, coming to a stop only when he glared at her, as if he could fix her in place. He moved in a tight circle around her, his hands behind his back, his wings drawn tight, his head tilted toward the sky. “Everything you see here is everything there is to see. From far away, yes, but it’s all there—all the lives and worlds and more, far beyond the weak conception of mortals. Look at it.”

She did, and it looked different than it had before. The veldt of stars was endless, the dark of night folded again and again over so many bright spots that the sky was more light than black. “It’s beautiful.”

“It’s about to be a tabula rasa.” His lips curled into a twisted smile. “I’ve grown tired of this game.”

“This is all a game to you?”

“It’s a game to him. ” He swept his hand across the sky and left a dark swath of night in his wake. “And I refuse to concede it to that Other simply because of a cosmic scale. Simply because our sides are in balance.”

“Balance. You mean, the scale between the fallen angels who allied themselves with you, and those who allied themselves with—”

“Don’t say it. But yes, that other . Right now there is a balance, and—”

“And one more angel has to side,” Luce said, remembering the long talk Arriane had given her at the diner in Las Vegas.

“Mmm-hmm. Except this time, I won’t leave it to chance. It was a shortsighted goal of mine, the whole starshot bit, but I’ve seen the error of my ways. I’ve been plotting. I’ve been planning. Often while you and some past iteration of Grigori were preoccupied with your B-grade heavy petting. So, you see, no one will be able to sabotage what I have planned next.

“I’m going to wipe the slate clean. Start over. I can skip the millennia that led up to you and your loophole of a life, Lucinda Price ”—he snorted—“and begin again. And this time, I will play more wisely. This time I will win.”

“What does that mean, ‘wipe the slate clean’?”

“All of time is like a grand slate, Lucinda. Nothing is written that can’t be erased by one clever sort. It’s a drastic move, yes, and it means that I’ll be throwing away thousands of years. A big setback for everyone concerned—but hey, what’s a handful of lost millennia in the yawning concept of eternity?”