Страница 69 из 71
My left shoulder began to burn. Faintly at first, but steadily. The black spots danced over my vision. I kicked, weakly, once, twice.
"Ah." Staring over my shoulder, out the window, he dropped me like a pile of trash and I coughed, rolling onto my side and rubbing my throat. Blessed air roared into my lungs. It took me two tries to get to my feet. The side hatch of the hoverlimo was open, white sunlight from the Nuevo Rio day pouring up and making a square on the ceiling.
I half-fell out of the hover and down the stairs, sharp edges biting into my hip, smacking my head on one. The skin split and blood dripped down my face. I landed in a heap on hot slick stone and scrabbled to my feet.
The child—Eve—stood by the garbage scow, the fierce sunlight making her hair seem even paler, glittering. Her eyes blazed, incandescent blue.
And Lucifer stood in front of her.
"No—" I choked, scrambling over the marble. "No!"
The Prince of Hell knelt slowly, sinking down, a black blot on the carnivorous white of the day. I saw Jace, braced in the side door of the hover, shaking his head as if dazed. Lucifer held up the Egg, and settled the thin gold chain around Eve's neck.
She smiled up at him.
My abused body couldn't go anymore. My feet tangled, and I fell. Lucifer rose like a dark wave, and the child put her arms around his neck and hugged him, resting her head on his shoulder.
Just like a little girl with her daddy. My gorge rose. But demons weren't human—and human rules didn't apply to them. For all I knew, all of Lucifer's bed-buddies were his children. He was the Androgyne. The first.
Then Lucifer turned on his heel, took three steps, and lifted one golden hand. His hair ran with sunlight, a furnace of gold, glittering unbearably. I heard the whine of hover displacement, didn't care. I saw Iblis Lucifer rip a hole in the fabric of reality and step through as if going from one room to another. Flame licked the corners of the hole he made, and the last thing I saw was Eve smiling over his shoulder, her blue eyes fixed on me, calm and tranquil and utterly inhuman. Power rippled, rent the air, nausea spiking under my breastbone.
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. "Da
"What the fuck?" My tongue felt too thick for my mouth.
Jace's arms crushed me. "Fuck, Da
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. "Da
"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.
"Da
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.
"Da
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 ci
Then I tipped back my head and howled to the uncaring blue sky.
EPILOGUE
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 pla
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 ci
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.