Two Kingdoms

by C. M. Owens

  “Well, it’s been done now, since she’s standing here and ranting for being called a coward,” Cain points out, smirking at Lilith, who rolls her eyes again. “Sounds just like her old self, too.”

  My head feels soooo much better.

  “Overachiever,” Hera says in a singsong voice while blowing her red nails that turn purple.

  “Purple is my color right now,” I snap defensively at her, and quickly shake my head when I realize I’ve already gotten way too distracted again, and this time I’m actually trying to stay focused.

  But…it is my color. I’ve already called dibs.

  Apparently, I’ve waited five hundred years for it, so it’s clear I have dibs.

  Great. So not the time for one of my mind rambles, nor is it the time for my weird new color obsession.

  “And Daddy would never kill his favorite,” Lilith resumes. “You’re not as heroic as you’d like to think. You just pretend to be badass. I could be your version of badass if I really wanted to be.”

  “Can I punch her?” I ask anyone who wants to answer, flicking my gaze around. “Will it affect any balance?”

  “I think it’s safe,” Jude drawls from my side.

  Lilith vanishes and reappears at Lucifer’s side, smirking as she props up on him.

  “I hate for my girls to fight,” Lucifer says on autopilot.

  “This is why she’d be a terrible champion,” one of the angels who hasn’t spoken yet finally says to the other four. “She can’t even finish a sentence without being distracted.”

  I feel like we’re all the naughty hell spawn being chastened by an archangel.

  I pause…trying to recall who, if anyone, has mentioned they’re archangels, but I stop immediately when my temple starts to hurt again.

  The twin closest to me leans over and stage-whispers, “Pssst…You forget we’re evil fucking hell spawn.” With a smirk and a normal register to his voice, he adds, “We can’t take things save-the-world-serious for too long. It’s naturally bad for our health.”

  Suddenly, those bouts of temple pain make a lot more sense. The Joker pops into my head with, Why so serious?

  I think humans understand balance more than they let on.

  “Fighting Jahl takes a lot of focus, intent, and pure determination. There’s nothing pure about her that doesn’t have an impure balance. It’s likely it would never be selfless enough to counter her selfish intentions, even if she sacrificed herself,” he continues, throwing those last words out there like they genuinely think I’d die for them at this point.

  I’m pretty sure The Apocalypse shouldn’t be expected to be quite so noble after just watching herself be gutted and having some epic romance ripped out of her hopelessly romantic heart.

  “Thank you, Michael!” Lucifer shouts, pointing at the angel who stands. “Thank you! I’ve been saying this all along.”

  “That’s nothing like you’ve been saying,” Azrael argues.

  “Of course it is. Word for word,” Lucifer states, though I suspect it’s a lie, given the expressions in the room.

  I haven’t heard him make that argument, but I’ve been missing for five hundred years!

  “I heard him. It’s the exact argument we’ve had since we came in here,” one of the twins says absently as he carves the Gemini sign into the stone table.

  Ah, so definitely a lie then.

  “Doesn’t matter the argument. We came to see if there was any way she could defeat Jahl now that she’s come back. She wasn’t an ideal candidate back then. She’s certainly not an option now. We’ll both seal our gates after she levels the world and sends the remaining souls to their eternal resting/unrestful grounds,” Michael continues conversationally.

  “NO!” Rafael shouts, pointing at me. “You saw that power. Even weakened, she’s brimming with it. A few months in hell, and she’ll be more than ready.”

  That mind-searing pain in my head is back.

  “Revelations, brother,” Lucifer bites out. “The Four Horsemen of The Apocalypse will start things off. Then she’ll level the world as much as she’s able. After that, the few who survive will face Jahl.”

  They continue arguing again, and I turn and walk out. None of this feels right. I’m trying to remember a life I can’t remember, and too many things are just popping into my mind that I know. I don’t know how I know them or why the thoughts haven’t been there up until now, or why it feels like there’s still a jack-hammering in my head, or why I really want to find my pretty crown….

  I pause and blow out a breath.

  “Where are you going?” Gage asks as he catches up.

  “The Four Horsemen and The Apocalypse are about to walk into a pawn shop on the seedy side of town to see a lying angel-slash-fake Elder about a dead woman in a cemetery. Just a regular…what day is it?”

  “Thursday,” Kai states conversationally as we continue walking instead of siphoning, because I really need to take a walk.

  The farther away I get, the lesser the migraines—because there’s certainly more than one going on right now—become.

  “Just a regular Thursday,” I continue.

  “You have blood dripping from your nose. Stop for a fucking second,” Jude snaps.

  “There’s blood dripping because of the multiple migraines. If this is the balance to multiple orgasms, I may forgo sex,” I tell him seriously.

  He doesn’t look convinced.

  As if he’s trying to scare me in my moment of weakness, Lucifer appears directly in front of me, startling the shit out of me.

  We all stay quiet as I just glare at him.

  “I’m not in the mood to face my Daddy Issues at the moment,” I tell him curtly.

  “You’re on your way to visit Harold,” he says with a shoulder shrug. “Understandable. You can’t kill him. The balance will be devastated. He’s currently neutral, and Lamar killed his Elder powers that I still have to restore.”

  “Lamar didn’t stab him, and Harold is definitely still alive.”

  “Yes, he did,” Lucifer says with certainty. “And he killed his Elder powers. Not his angel. You’re welcome. I made Lamar do that and wiped it from his memories. Harold would have sensed a shape shifter,” he goes on.

  I blink at him.

  “He’d have done it himself if he’d have known the truth. Killing Harold’s Elder power keeps him stuck topside, since he was close to redeeming himself and returning home,” he continues, smirking. “He’ll face Jahl too now, after you destroy the world, as punishment. To be safe, let’s not tell Manella that I used his boyfriend. He tends to be petty over such things.”

  “You’re unbelievable,” I say in exasperation.

  “I’m evil,” he reminds me. “So are you. So are we all.”

  Why do I bother? He can’t help himself. He has to lie and manipulate, and I can never tell what’s really going on in the moment. He says everything with conviction and sincerity in his eyes, and then he backs it up with a reasonable point.

  I say nothing, and he rolls his eyes. “I’m not sure why you insist on continuing to take your anger out on me.”

  “I find it really hard to believe it was so easy to simply end my life, given the fact I’m supposed to be this all-powerful entity,” I bite out. “Since I’ve returned, you’ve lied to me, you’ve manipulated me, you’ve played me like a chess piece, and you really crossed a line with that latest illusion,” I go on as the blood continues to drip and the pain in my head grows. “I’m sick of the lies and half-truths that are wrapped around—”

  My words cut off as I hiss out a pained breath.

  “What do you get when you cross a platter with a vagina?” Kai asks, confusing me as I keep my eyes shut and focus on massaging away the pain.

  “A platterpuss?” I guess.

  He snorts. Three others groan. Miraculously, my head feels surprisingly better.

  “Hilarious,” I state dryly.

  “Better than half your shit,” he mumbles under his breath
.

  “You’re my favorite just for making the effort,” I tell him, blowing out a breath of relief.

  When my eyes open, Lucifer is just staring at me, giving the illusion of a patient man.

  “Feel better?” he muses.

  “I’d feel a lot better if I could find my crown.”

  He nods like that makes perfect sense. “I’m sure it’ll turn up. Are you done with your rant or did you have more to add?”

  I tap my chin like I’m giving it serious thought, before giving him a bored look. “I think that covers it. Unless you’re willing to tell me why I wanted to walk away from a fight and take the easy way out, when it completely goes against everything I do know about myself.”

  His eyes go a little cold.

  “You were designed as a failsafe weapon, but we soon realized you were so strong. If ever too strongly imbalanced, you could damn well destroy us all,” he states like it’s no big deal, taking a few steps away as he pockets a hand. “You lessened your strength by giving away important pieces of your balance to your boys.”

  My paintings suddenly appear on all the walls around us, and I do well not to startle about that too.

  “You’re the perfect antihero, along with your harem of destruction,” he continues. “Exquisitely balanced like no other, with a system too complicated and intricate for any other to copy.”

  He pauses in that dramatic way of his before adding, “I created you in the peak of my madness, because as we all know, with pure genius comes pure insanity.”

  It feels like he’s playing my vanity card right now, so I immediately go on alert, even if I do give into the urge to smirk.

  “Only you could take that as a compliment,” Ezekiel mutters on a groan as he scrubs a hand over his face.

  “I don’t know about the old me, but the new me is starved for a little recognition,” I state dryly.

  Bye, bye, headache.

  Lucifer gives me a thin smile.

  “Of course they wanted me to destroy you. All my brothers voted in favor of your immediate termination, before you had the ability to affect the cosmic balance with your death.”

  My little bubble just has to get popped every time it’s barely inflated.

  “I know I’m evil, but that’s a little overboard,” I decide to point out.

  He nods, his smile lifting at one corner of his mouth.

  “Indeed. But you’d already started balancing hell, and you were evolving as this magnificent, feisty, arrogant little thing. The more you worked, not even really exerting much effort, the more lucid I became. The clearer I could see things…so many things. Images were coherent instead of just the scattered, frozen pieces inside the fissures of my mind.”

  His nose drips a drop of black blood that sizzles in the air as it hits the floor beneath us.

  “You mostly balanced me. They knew I’d never give you up after that. You’re my favorite child for so many reasons. That’s just one of them,” he continues, wiping away the next drop of blood.

  “You weren’t strong enough to face Jahl, because you’d shared your balance with them,” he says, gesturing to all four of my boys. “But with your death, perhaps those pieces have returned.”

  I shake my head. “Not possible. They only get individual erections with me.”

  It’s entirely the wrong choice of words to use for the argument, but it’s a little too late to do anything about that now.

  Lucifer seems stumped on how to respond. I feel like a pat on the back is deserved for stumping the Devil.

  “We still feel her,” Gage tells him, his reasoning sounding much better than mine. “That bond is there.”

  “Of course the bond is there,” Lucifer says dismissively. “The pieces of her balance had nothing to do with the bond. That was only ever to restore your own personal balances. You no longer need her balance for that.”

  This could be a big fat lie, but I have no choice other than to roll with it.

  “Then I’m confused. How did I find them if my pieces are gone, and how is there a bond?” I ask, holding up my hand like this is class and he’s our hell teacher.

  “You spent centuries together. That sort of time is what forges the bond. It’s how you fused those pieces into them. They’d suffered the same misery in Hell’s Black Heart, and it joined them in comradery. They’d forged a bond already, and you cemented it when you gifted them with the Horsemen powers.”

  I glance back at them and then to Lucifer, suddenly seeing where this is going, and hoping I’m wrong.

  “You were never meant to be a champion. You were supposed to be the weapon to end the world in the event that the champion failed. To preserve balance, only one champion could exist at a time, and it took many centuries to grow that power before he could face Jahl. When Matthew was slain, desperation struck, and you were tasked with an impossible feat.”

  “But I like impossible feats,” I state, my journals moving through my mind.

  “You do,” he says, nodding. “And you’re fearless when challenged. You’re too vain to run from a fight, and far too wrathful to pass up the opportunity to cause mass destruction. And you can find a balance to make any decision you truly want to.”

  A stone settles onto my stomach, as another drop of blood leaks from his nose. I worry he’s bleeding because he’s being too serious, which means he could be telling the truth and only the truth.

  “You’re also reasonable,” he grinds out. “You knew you couldn’t defeat Jahl, and you’re not selfless enough to sacrifice yourself in vain. It’d shatter the balance if you did. But you wouldn’t just say that to them. You refused to give them that information, and I trusted my daughter, who lacks the capability of deception, when she told me to trust her.”

  He laughs humorlessly, running his hand over the continuously leaking nose.

  “Even I know how ridiculous it sounds to have the Devil ask for one’s trust,” he says, the words parroting the exact words he said to me when I once assumed he was attempting to provoke a memory I don’t have. “Those are the words you said to me when I told you to let me explain the truth to them,” he continues.

  “It was so easy to kill me, because I allowed them to do it,” I say quietly, swallowing thickly.

  “You went topside, even though we both suspected this would be something they attempted. You didn’t even fight back, because you needed that shift in balance—your unnecessary death at the hands of the pure—to achieve the impossible,” he goes on, his voice getting raw. “You didn’t even warn me you were about to put a plan into motion, because I was part of your balance for this equation. A small piece of it, no doubt, considering all you would have had to shift around to make this happen.”

  His eyes water a little as he takes a step forward.

  “Betraying me was a selfless act, because you knew I’d stop you, and there was only one way you could restore your Horsemen’s true balance, and possibly defeat Jahl. Simply because you can’t walk away from a challenge,” he goes on.

  Even without a conscience, I was almost feeling bad, until that last part.

  “You’re trying to make me feel bad for wanting to save the world?” I ask dubiously.

  His chin wobbles. “We’re not heroes. You’re reasonable enough to know this. You didn’t want to do this for the heroics; it was just your vanity and pride talking.”

  “I doubt I was trying to be a hero. From the sound of things, Jahl is eventually going to kill us all, even if we do seal everything up and level the world. It would have been a selflessly selfish decision,” I argue.

  “At the cost of my sanity for over five-hundred years!” he snaps. “And you didn’t even warn me,” he goes on, his voice growing quieter.

  When a tear drops from the Devil’s eye, I get so queasy, feeling like a horrible person. How terrible is a person if they can make Lucifer cry?

  “They were more important to you than your own father,” he goes on, another tear falling. “And you didn’t even allow you
rself to remember me.”

  “Well, clearly my memories were a huge sacrifice I had to make in order to come back,” I reasonably point out. “And my knowledge. I don’t remember my harem either.”

  Oh, fuck my life. I’m seriously trying to console…the Devil.

  He cuts his eyes away, blinking back tears as he turns his back on me.

  “How is this happening right now?” I mutter under my breath, still feeling sick.

  “My favorite daughter just…gone. Along with my mind that grew worse and worse until it was just fractured images in the fissures all over again,” he continues. “Until you came back, and I could feel the balance you were restoring. I was too scared to hope that even you’d accomplished that much of the impossible.”

  He disappears before I can say anything else, and I turn around to find my quad just staring at Lamar, who has apparently been eavesdropping, though I know it hasn’t been long.

  I get it. It’s weird to have just witnessed that and everyone is trying to avoid looking at me.

  I feel weird too.

  I turn and walk back toward my room because I need a minute to process all this shit. After all, I’m not superwoman. I’m the anti-fucking-superwoman.

  I resent that bitch for being so damn awesome. I bet she doesn’t have to deal with shit like this when she has to save the world.

  Chapter 13

  The second we’re all tucked in my room, Lamar takes a seat beside me on the floor as I stare at one of the purple walls.

  “I’m incapable of experiencing guilt,” I tell him numbly as I swallow the lump in my throat. “I’m a being without a conscience,” I go on, feeling a phantom weight pressing into my chest. “So what is this sickening knot that is twisting inside me and making me hate myself so much right now?” I ask as a hot tear rolls down my cheek.

  “It’s pure, unpersuaded, gut-wrenching regret,” he says quietly.

  Still dazed and sick, I just slowly nod.

  “I regret hurting the Devil’s feelings,” I say aloud, hearing just how ludicrous it truly sounds. “He just tortured my mind. I should have no capacity of compassion for him,” I add on a groan, pushing my palms into my eye sockets.