He nudged one of the Sin Eaters with the toe of his boot. “I’ve been tracking my father’s loyalists. These ones got away from me.”
“They’re a slippery sort,” I agreed. And now they were extremely dead. That’s what they got for threatening me with rape.
Adranos glanced at me with his warm almond eyes, and then away. He didn’t seem to like direct eye contact for long. “Have you found any sign of your friend?” he asked. “I mean, your succubus friend. The girl like the moon.”
I stared at him for a moment, my heart contracting. The girl like the moon. Even Vyra, with her dislike of men, might’ve melted a little bit over that.
And it was kind of him to think of her. He didn’t know her name or who she was, but he’d cared enough to ask.
“I think we have. We’ve got a good idea of where to look now.”
Adranos nodded again, his lips set in a flat line. “That’s good. I hope you find her.” He paused, looking over the other corpses. “I talked to Leviathan. The assassin was another one of mine. I apologize for that.”
I rested on Belial’s snout, keeping one hand curled into the thick mane near his cheek. “There’s nothing to apologize for. You’re made a Prince under… um… extraordinary circumstances.”
It felt odd to be so close to apologizing to him, for giving my condolences that he’d needed to slaughter his own father.
But I had the distinct impression that like killing Gabriel, killing Mammon hadn’t exactly been a source of disappointment. Adranos’s entire life had been predicated on being the son of Treachery; he’d as much as said at the meeting of the Princes that he expected no one to trust him because of it.
In my humble opinion, he was worth every bit of it. He hadn’t failed us when we’d needed him, and he couldn’t control every demon in the Circle. He’d have to weed them out just like we were going to weed the deposed king.
“You want help bringing them back?” I asked, wanting to make some sort of peace offering, but of course the only offering I could think of would be gory work. “You could make a nice warning sign out of the leftover pieces.”
Something that might’ve been a smile touched his face, there and gone in an instant. “No. Let the wastelands have them.”
I went and gathered Capheira from the top of a dune, where she’d taken shelter from the fight, and led her back to Belial. Tiredness was finally starting to eat at me after a whole day under the endless sun.
I didn’t turn to look back at the bodies. The desert could have them.
And no one would ever think of them again.
17
Lucifer
I woke up elbow-deep in a corpse.
It wasn’t like surfacing from a deep sleep. One moment I was gone, and the next moment I blinked, and my consciousness surfaced with a gasp.
My hands were warm, painted up to my biceps with slowly congealing blood. The scent of copper and ashes filled the air, so thick and choking that not even the slight breeze could wash it away.
I looked up from my grisly task, still gasping for breath like I’d been drowning, the absence of pain a total shock to my nerve endings.
There were mountains around me, jagged and pointing to the sky in spikes. I knew this land: Irkalla. Everything was so dark a black it almost looked like the obsidian of Dis, but it lacked the warmth of the stone of my home, and piles of gray ash had swept up against the crags.
I was on one of those crags. The body in front of me was still warm. A demon, his eyes already glazing over, a ring of small horns circling his brow.
A deep puncture wound had been gouged deep into his chest. The charred marks and burns surrounding it told me exactly what had killed him.
I had. Those were the marks of my light. I took a deep breath, almost wiped my face with my hand, and remembered at the last moment that I still had blood all over me. Instead I blinked the ash away.
I didn’t remember doing this. I didn’t remember much of anything from the last… how long had it been? Days? Weeks? I remembered plunging into the Pit, breaking the barriers between Satan and the fury of Dis, and then… agony.
Blinding agony, and nothing else.
For several long minutes I just stared at the corpse, willing the memories to resurface. They were faint and foggy, but I knew why I was here, mutilating this demon…
Because he was a puppet. A flesh-and-blood glove for Satan to wear. My father’s might was massive, but he was ungainly in his draconic form. He was easy to find, harder to hide while he licked his wounds.
He’d wanted a new body to wear.
Because there was someone else with us.
I squeezed my eyes tightly shut for a moment, my hands shaking as another memory surfaced.
I’d attacked Melisande. I still felt the vibration of my spear crushing through the delicate bones in her wing. My stomach heaved and I swallowed hard, replaying the image of her tumbling into the abyss, her face frozen in shock and pain.
One of them would’ve caught her. They had to have caught her. There was no possible way she was dead, because I could’ve sworn I’d felt her since.
I’d seen her in front of my eyes. Of course I’d reached out, intending to remove her from the world permanently as instructed, but she’d been standing here, in Irkalla, her eyes huge and the violet of her hair like a beacon in the darkness.
It wasn’t possible, but… I’d still seen her. I’d swear on it.
She was alive.
I clung to the thought like a talisman. If Melisande was still alive, then I had something to live for. Because the idea of taking the knife in my hand and driving it into my own neck, depriving my father of his toy, was all too appealing.
I sat back on my heels and wiped as much blood off my arms as possible, revealing the spiraling marks on my arms.
They were darkening, the scarlet fading into black. It was too much to hope for that Satan had just suddenly dropped dead, but for a little bit, I had my own mind back.
Which meant I had work to do.
He wanted this body as a puppet to live and play in. I’d give him a new puppet, but it would be an unsatisfying shell to live inside.
I gripped the knife and climbed over the demon’s body, maneuvering his stiffening limbs.
Then I started slicing.
When I was done, I leaned back on my heels and looked at my handiwork. I’d cut away everything he might use to harm Vyra: the claws ripped from the fingertips, the forked tongue, but the largest wound was where I’d cut away his cock.
I dropped the knife, cupped my hands, and summoned my burning light into existence before pressing it to the corpse’s wounds, cauterizing them.
By the time I was done, the body looked nothing like the demon it had been before. It was a disgusting charred mess.
And to think this monstrosity would be even worse once Satan’s darkness infected it.
I sheathed the knife, picked up the corpse, and flung it over my shoulder. I had a few memories of traversing this way while in the grip of the soul-bond, laying traps for demons all over the mountain range, so I knew exactly which way my father and Vyra waited.
I flew up over the mountains, cutting through the ash that caked my wings and turned them dusty and gray, and it was easy enough to find the crevasse where my father had taken refuge from the sun.