by Nana Malone
“Lucifer!!!” Azrael shouted.
What was that human movie he’d watched about a woman who visited a cannibal in prison to help her crawl inside the mind of a serial killer? Yeah. That was what he needed to do. Touch base with Lucifer, though it’d give Hashem conniption fits, to figure out what the devious bastards were up to.
A rustle behind the door. At last! The door slid open and an elderly, plump Sata'an-human hybrid woman wearing a maid's uniform peeked out.
“He’s indisposed,” the maid said. “Go away and come back later.”
“I need to speak to him,” Azrael said. “It’s urgent.”
“Not now,” the maid said. “Come back in a few days. After he’s recovered.”
He’d admit it! He had bitten off more than he could chew. It was one thing to taunt Moloch from the relative safety of Gehenna, where he could dart into the fires-of-uncreation where even Moloch couldn’t survive. It was another thing entirely to have an Agent the size of Chemosh loose in the universe. All this time he’d been thinking he was the biggest, baddest thing out there and Chemosh had firmly put him back into his place.
Such a cute little void-creature…
“It might be too late by then,” Azrael allowed his worry to show. It wasn’t the maid's fault Lucifer was an ass. “Please?”
The maid opened the door all the way. A copper-iron scent Azrael knew well wafted his way as she did. Blood. Azrael glanced down at her cleaning cart and realized it was full of bloody towels.
“What the hell is going on here?”
“If you’re not going to help him,” the maid said, “then I’d appreciate it if you'd just leave. Haven’t your kind made him suffer enough?” Her serpentine eyes narrowed to slits, a mother-cobra threatening to strike.
Huh?
The maid blocked the doorway and refused to budge. Nor did Azrael wish to push past her. To do so in his agitated state, even with his cloak pulled tight around his non-corporeal form, might lead to her death. Azrael had glimpsed this particular cleaning lady many times, but he’d never realized she had a place of authority above that of the guards. Cleaning lady his tailfeathers!
Was she a mistress? No. He distinctly remembered seeing the maid embrace a blind elderly human male on several occasions. She wore a mate-ring on her left hand. Although Lucifer was infamous for seducing human females, married or not, he scrupulously avoided shitting in his own back yard. Sata’an-hybrid females had been off-limits for as long as Azrael had known the Fallen Angelic.
The scent of fresh blood filled the room. Lucifer’s blood.
Assassin?
“What the hell is going on here?” Azrael threw back his cape and prepared to do battle. He sized up the maid, expecting to find a squatting Agent, and found none.
“If you’re going to jolt anyone out of their mortal shell,” the maid stood her ground. “Jolt Lucifer. Please. You guys can’t keep breaking your promise to him.”
Azrael stepped back, confused. This was the strangest conversation he’d had since the day Hezekiel had come running out of Elissar's house and revealed there were Sata’an descendants numbering amongst the Fallen.
“I … I don’t understand,” Azrael mumbled. “I just … I smell … blood.”
“Of course you do,” the maid sighed. “How many of our generations have you been coming here and you’re just noticing this now?”
Azrael tucked his wings against his back, trying to appear as non-threatening as possible.
“Please,” Azrael said. “I don’t know what’s been going on here and for that I’m sorry. But I really need his help. We have a situation.”
“Of course you do,” the maid stepped back, gesturing to the room beyond. “You always do. That’s why they won’t let the poor bastard die.”
The maid grabbed a pile of fresh towels from the cart and gestured for Azrael to follow. The enormous sleeping quarters with its swimming-pool sized hot tub and gold-canopied bed with garish red silk sheets was neatly made up and empty. The wet-bar was wiped clean, black granite shining against carved mahogany cabinets. The maid's soft-soled shoes made a reassuring squish-squish-squish noise on the marble floor as she led him through a small door into a long, narrow hall. They followed it quite some distance, past a modest kitchenette with a table set for three people and a small, open door where the elderly man Azrael had noticed earlier sat reading a book, his fingers skimming the Braille text.
“That you, Nyx?” the old man called. He reached for the long, white cane at his side. “Who’s that with you? I smell … salt air.”
“It's just Azrael, dear,” the maid, who Azrael assumed was Nyx, answered her husband. “He needs to see him.”
“He’s in no condition to be seen,” the old man snapped. “Tell him to come back later!”
“It’s an emergency, dear,” Nyx called. “Perhaps it's time he saw for himself?”
The old man grunted something that might have been approval, or an expletive. He settled back into his chair to ‘read’ whatever book captured his interest with his fingertips.
Azrael was puzzled. He’d always assumed the sleeping quarters he’d glimpsed from the door were ‘it,’ but he now saw the garish front room was merely the parlor for a set of much smaller, simply furnished rooms. Lucifer’s real living quarters. Nyx led him to an ordinary-looking door and paused, clutching the clean towels to her chest.
“He’s had another one of his spells,” Nyx's gold-green eyes filled with concern. “He usually gets them around the … um … anniversary. But sometimes other things set him off. He’s been this way for the past five days.”
Five days? What had happened five days ago? Azrael wracked his brains. Five days ago Sam had made a joke about Elisabeth finally giving him the time of day. Lucifer had gotten a poignant expression upon his face and congratulated him. Since then, Azrael had reaped many souls in the battles for Najaf, Karbala and Baghdad, but it had been Sata’an soldiers with canisters who’d taken each Agent off his hands, not Lucifer. That, in itself, hadn’t seemed odd. Lucifer was frequently out doing whatever nefarious deeds debauch fallen sons of gods did to pass the time. But this?
Nyx pushed open the door. The scent of blood and disinfectant overwhelmed his senses as she walked past an ordinary-looking bed to a small shrine set up with pictures and candles against one wall.
A pile of blood-stained feathers, splotches of brilliant scarlet highlighted against the palette of snowy white, lay curled up on the floor entombed in the sarcophagus of his own bloody wings. Blood was everywhere. On the bed. On the floor. Only the tremble of Lucifer's feathers let Azrael know the Fallen Angelic was still alive.
“Lucifer,” the maid patted his enormous white wings as though he were a child. “Sweetheart. You’ve got to pull yourself together. You’ve got company.”
“Go away,” Lucifer groaned. “Can’t you see I’m busy?”
“I know,” the maid spoke in the gentle voice a mother might give a grieving child. “But maybe it's time he saw what his kind have done to you?”
Lucifer sobbed something unintelligible while the maid used the towels she’d brought to mop blood off the floor as though it was the most normal thing in the world. The blood was … Lucifer's?
Nyx grabbed something Lucifer had clutched in one fist the way a mother might pry a lollipop out of a toddler's hands. “Let it go, Sweetheart. C’mon. Release it or I’ll have to call in the others.”
A knife. No. Not a knife. It looked like a piece of sheet metal pried out of an air duct? A shank. The kind of weapon one might create after someone had hidden all the knives. Nyx tossed the sharp implement out of Lucifer's reach and began dabbing at the blood covering his forearms as though this sort of thing was the most normal thing in the world.
“Why won’t they let me leave?” Lucifer wept. “My life sentence was up 4,500 years ago.”
Nyx crooned reassuring words as she cleaned up the worst of the blood. As she did, Azrael witnessed the gashes Lucifer must h
ave sliced into his arm while Nyx answered the door simply scab over and heal. Azrael had always assumed Lucifer came out of whatever drunken scrape he forever got himself into by healing himself. He'd never realized the healing was involuntary.
“He’s tried every way a living creature could possibly try to do himself in,” Nyx explained as she cleaned him up. “Cutting his wrists. Jumping off a cliff. Suicide bomb. But She-who-is won’t let him die. Doesn’t stop him from trying, though.”
It had taken Azrael a couple of thousand years to realize the reason Lucifer egged him on was because he was suicidal, but he’d never realized how bad it really was.
“There, there, Sweetheart,” Nyx, who was obviously more of a mother-substitute than a maid crooned. “I know it hurts. But we’re here for you.”
More unintelligible sobbing.
Azrael looked around the tiny bedroom which was Lucifer’s real sleeping quarters. Twin bed for sleeping alone. Simple bureau. Few ornamentations. The other room was a front for doing the task Lucifer seemed to feel was his goddess-mandated job. Beget offspring upon human females. This room was … personal.
Photographs. Lucifer and a smaller man, arms thrown around each other's shoulders as though they were brothers. Smiling. So many pictures. Hunting an auroch together. Surrounded by Angelics Azrael knew had been the other Fallen. Lucifer’s mate. The one he still grieved.
“Let us call her,” the maid pleaded. “Please. You know she’ll come for you.”
“No,” Lucifer whispered, his voice raspy and low from crying. “When she comes, they argue. And when they fight… He’s the only one who can help her control her power.”
Her? Who?
A photograph caught Azrael’s eye. Lucifer. His lover. And a petite, black-haired woman with an utterly miserable expression upon her face propped up between them. Despite her lack of wings, Azrael would know that woman anywhere.
The Regent.
“I’ll be right back,” Azrael said.
With a flash, he teleported himself halfway across the galaxy to Haven.
* * * * *
Chapter 48
By night on my bed I sought him
Whom my soul loveth:
I sought him but I found him not.
I will rise now,
And go about the city in the streets,
And in the broad ways I will seek him
Whom my soul loveth:
I sought him, but I found him not.
Song of Solomon, 3:1-2
Galactic Standard Date: 157,843.04 AE
Haven-2: Cherubim Monastery
“How long has he been doing this to himself and you didn’t tell me?” the Regent asked.
The General retreated behind an unreadable expression, shooting Azrael his iciest ‘I’ll deal with you later’ look.
“He deserves whatever misery he gets,” the General stated flatly. “My son won’t speak to me because of that bastard.”
Son? Which son? The couple had so many Archangel offspring, Azrael wasn’t sure he’d even met them all, but he'd never heard of the General being estranged from any of them.
“Nobody deserves to spend eternity separated from their mate!” the Regent shrieked. “You told me he was doing better!”
The room thrummed with the dark power contained within her voice. The Regent closed her eyes and forced herself to get her emotions back under control before she accidentally vaporized the walls of the Cherubim monastery.
Azrael backed into the wall, considering whether or not he should just fade right through it without first being dismissed by his commanding officer. Never, in all the time he’d known the couple, had he ever seen the Regent and the General argue. Ever. He’d just stepped into it. Big time.
“Now he knows how you felt,” the General said in a voice so cold if felt as though the temperature dropped in the room.
“The affront was against me,” the Regent hissed. “I’m the one who suffered. Not you! You didn’t even have a clue until you nearly got yourself killed trying to go out in a blaze of glory! If I hadn’t come for you, you still wouldn’t have figured it out!”
Guilt spread across the General’s face. Whatever this argument was, it was a very old one. One that had existed long before Azrael had been born.
“Which is precisely why I can’t forgive him,” the General's look of remorse had nothing to do with the reason Azrael had come here. “If I’d succeeded … you’d have died, too.” His wings drooped so low they scraped upon the ground.
“Come,” the Regent grabbed Azrael by the hand. “Take me to him. If you want something done right, you need to do it yourself!”
Ohthankthegods! Azrael focused on the processing chamber at the entrance to Gehenna and transported both of them there even though she was quite capable of transporting herself.
“Where is he?” the Regent asked.
Her bottomless black eyes flashed with anger against her pale, porcelain-white skin. Wing-spikes rustled like swords against a whetstone as they scraped lightly against the floor. Sata’an-human hybrids shrieked at the sight of the Dark Mother materializing into their midst and ran helter-skelter away from her deadly, razor-sharp wings.
“Th-th-this way,” Azrael stammered. Oh. Boy. The General was going to kill him! He led her through the garish party-room to Lucifer’s personal quarters. The Regent appeared to already know the way. The maid had finished cleaning up the blood and removed the shank he’d been trying to use to cut his wrists faster than She-who-is could heal them, covering Lucifer with a blanket to keep him warm.
The Regent glanced at the altar filled with photographs of Lucifer and his lover and hissed, baring her fangs. Her black, scorpion-like tail rose up as though readying to strike. The air shuddered with dark power. Azrael had heard stories about what happened when the Regent became angry, but he’d never caught a glimpse of it himself. Was she angry at him?
No. Whoever she was angry at, it was neither him, nor the Fallen Angelic lying upon the floor…
“Lucifer,” the Regent kneeled at Lucifer's side. She placed her hand upon his wing. “What can I do to ease your pain?”
Lucifer crawled on hands and knees like a dog, his wings trailing limply behind himself, until his head rested on her lap. Azrael could feel the energy in the room shift as the Regent began to sing. Underlying her mortal song, the faint song Azrael could always hear playing in the background, the Song which had grown louder ever since Elisabeth had started speaking to him, filled the room in a symphony of music so beautiful and sad it brought tears to Azrael’s eyes.
He hadn’t heard the Song that strongly since Ki had asked him to descend from the upper realms to finish evolving…
“He was my friend, too,” the Regent said, slipping her fingers through Lucifer’s bloody blonde hair. “I forgave the both of you a long time ago.”
Lucifer mumbled between sobs: "He can convince him to change his mind. I know he can. He can convince her to let me go."
Who? The Emperor? Or the General? Or was he talking about She-who-is? Azrael’s mind raced to put together new pieces of a puzzle which had always eluded him.
“What really happened?” Azrael asked. “How can I act as intermediary between these two if I don’t have all the information?”
“It’s not what Lucifer did while he was possessed by Moloch the General can’t forgive,” the Regent said. “It’s what he later found out he didn’t do once Moloch had been cast out and he was himself again.”
She looked down at Lucifer and murmured something into his ear. Lucifer moaned, a sound so low and pitiful he sounded like a cow whose jugular had just been pierced and left to bleed out for slaughter.
"What in hell's creation could Lucifer have done that was worse than trying to usurp the Emperor or sending an assassin to stab the General in the heart?" Azrael asked.
“Enough questions,” the Regent snapped. “Come. I’ve got to get him up off the floor. Pull back the covers.”
Azrael felt like
a fifth wheel as the Regent did the heavy lifting. She was with child again. She shouldn’t be doing this kind of thing alone, but the maid had disappeared. All he could do was try to not zap Lucifer dead as she heaved him up and rolled him into bed. Perhaps he should summons the guards to help? No. It would serve no purpose to let his minions see how very far their leader could fall even though these ‘episodes’ appeared to be something the Sata’an-hybrids were aware of. Lucifer curled right back up into a fetal position, his wings trembling like a dying bird. The Regent covered him up.
“Go tell my husband I won’t be back for a few days,” she ordered. “I appreciate your having the guts to tell me Lucifer was having another episode. Usually we see it coming and can head it off before it gets this bad.”
Azrael backed out of the room, his mouth opening and closing with unasked questions. She grabbed a second blanket and curled up on top of the covers against Lucifer's back, covering him with her deadly black wings as though they were a blanket, and sang that beautiful, sad song that made him think of beauty and heartbreak and joy and sorrow all at once. Whatever Lucifer was feeling, it appeared the Regent could relate to it only too well.
It was time to go get his tailfeathers handed to him on a silver platter for interfering in whatever was the real reason the General hated Lucifer so much. Although, given the fact he’d just left the General's wife curled up in bed behind the biggest womanizer in the universe, that alone was justification for any normal male to hate Lucifer.
How the hell was it that, in 2,300 years of study, he’d failed to notice there was a much bigger picture overshadowing the ancient hostility between Lucifer, the General, and Hashem? Talk about an unobservant watcher!
* * * * *
Chapter 49
