by Emma Castle
Midnight with the Devil
Unlikely Heroes - Book 1
Emma Castle
Contents
Prologue
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Epilogue
A Wilderness Within
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Other Titles By Emma Castle
About the Author
This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is coincidental.
Copyright © 2018 by Emma Castle Books, LLC
Edited by Bootcamp Editors
Cover Art by Cover By Combs
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All rights reserved. In accordance with the U.S. Copyright Act of 1976, the scanning, uploading, and electronic sharing of any part of this book without the permission of the publisher constitutes unlawful piracy and theft of the author’s intellectual property. If you would like to use material from the book (other than for review purposes), prior written permission must be obtained by contacting the publisher at [email protected]. Thank you for your support of the author’s rights.
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The publisher is not responsible for websites (or their content) that are not owned by the publisher.
ISBN: 978-1-947206-39-7 (e-book edition)
ISBN: 978-1-947206-40-3 (print edition)
Prologue
What time his pride had cast him out from Heaven, with all his host of rebel Angels. - John Milton, Paradise Lost
“How you have fallen from heaven, Morning Star, Son of the Dawn!”
“Favorite son no more!”
“No longer will you shine!”
The taunts from his brother angels filled his head as he fell through the clouds. Light and darkness consumed him in flashing turns as he passed through the stars, into the clouds, and toward the earth. The air cut him, and the wind roared around him so deafening that his eardrums burst. Dawn was on the horizon, and he would die before he saw it fully claim the skies.
“You, my brightest star, my favorite among the angels, how you have disappointed me.” Father’s voice was the hardest to bear.
Lucifer closed his eyes, welcoming the end, the death of light, the death of life.
“You were to bring light into the world, inspire my creations, not corrupt them with your jealousies. Now you will rule the corrupted who follow you and become the king of hell.”
The earth rose up to meet him, and he embraced the pain. His angelic heart shattered at the same moment his body broke upon impact. Everything went dark around him. Then bit by bit he became aware of himself, feeling every muscle, every bone, every atom that made up his body, screaming with pain. He hadn’t died?
Lucifer gazed up at the endless clouds above him. The rift in the sky that would have let him back into the heavens was closed. He drew in a breath, the air like knives in his lungs. Something was different. He felt…empty. White feathers floated around him, their heavenly luminescence glinting in the sun.
My grace…it’s gone.
It seemed like a millennium passed before he realized he lay upon the broken, cracked ground of the earth. His body hurt all over, but the pain was greatest along his shoulder blades. He was glad he could not see his back. There would be two terrible wounds replacing his snow-white wings. He reached out and grasped one of the remaining feathers that floated along the ground close to him and slipped it into the folds of the white tunic he wore. He needed that one bit of heaven, that one bit of home, or else he might go mad with grief.
The light inside him—the glowing essence that had once brought him only joy—was gone. There was nothing left inside him, nothing but darkness. He was in a crater in a desert land. Lucifer struggled to roll onto his stomach, his body too weak to stand.
He lifted his head, hearing the distant sounds of birds. Beyond the wasteland he’d fallen to, a beautiful Eden lay ahead, a land of green, full of beautiful beasts and flowers. Father had spoken so often about the world below the clouds.
Rage flooded through his body, giving him new energy and strength. Somewhere in that Eden were his father’s favorite beings—humans. A vile word for vile beings who were no comparison to angels. But he was no longer an angel. He was fallen. A being without wings, without grace.
What am I now?
The question had no ready answer, and he cringed. For the first time in his existence, he didn’t know what he really was.
He dug his hands into the arid dirt, clawing his way toward the garden ahead of him. At the center of the beautiful world, a single tree stood tall among the rest. Amidst its branches hung gleaming red apples. Father had spoken of this tree, the one that bore knowledge for the ages. Humans had free will, which angels did not, and if those humans dared break their promise to stay away from the tree, Lucifer would have his revenge and watch his father’s favorite creations fall from grace.
Lucifer’s lips twitched. He would not have long to wait to get his revenge. He could see the weakness and frailty in humanity. Bringing down the humans, one by one, would break his father’s celestial heart, just as he had broken Lucifer’s.
The wind carried away the feathers of his once angelic wings. He was glad he had caught one and tucked it safely near his heart. Paradise was lost to him, and he would make sure those damned humans would never reach it either.
1
Better to reign in Hell than serve in Heaven. - John Milton, Paradise Lost
Hellfire Rising was a den of corruption.
A hotbed of sin and scandal.
Here hearts were broken, dreams destroyed, and dark fantasies realized.
It was the closest thing to a home Lucien Star had. He leaned against the balcony overlooking the dancers below, and with a snap of his fingers he held a glass of brandy. He took a slow sip, savoring the dark, hard flavor of the alcohol.
Two years ago, he had left behind the devil that his father expected him to be and remade himself into a different devil. Lucifer—the Morning Star, the once favored angel, the ruler of hell who never left the darkness—was gone. He was done spending the majority of his days in the dark abyss and the fires of hell in the realm of the evil and the damned. He stopped calling himself Lucifer and instead became Lucien Star. He used his powers to create a world that catered to his own desires, Hellfire Rising, a club in downtown Chicago.
He returned to the abyss, to the darkness, only when absolutely necessary to see to his duties. The gates of hell needed guarding, or else they would break and demons would flood into the world, destroying it. That was not what Lucien wanted. Contrary to popular opinion, he rather liked the human realm the way it was. He didn’t want to see it destroyed by flames and left in eternal darkness.
A woman below him on the stairs glanced up, flashing him a sultry smile in open invitation. He raised his brandy glass in salute, but he wasn’t interested. His mind was on other matters, like the strange preoccupation with deep, troublesome thoughts. It was so unlike him that it rattled the bars of the hellish emotional cage he felt trapped in tonight.
He wished hell could run itself, and it did…mostly. The damned didn’t need him there to continue their suffering at all times, which was a r
elief. He despised hell. But he couldn’t avoid his job completely. He had to watch out for stray demons that wandered into the paths of mortals, then catch and destroy them. That didn’t give him joy either.
He preferred the mortal plane, watching humans make decisions that put them on the path to sin. He loved the secret language of hidden smiles, seductive glances, exploring hands as they gave themselves over to their darker desires. He craved corruption, not evil.
“Lucien.” The smooth, dark voice caught Lucien’s attention. He still stood at the edge of the balcony on the top floor of his club that led to his private office. From the relatively secluded spot, he could see the club patrons below him dancing wildly.
“Yes?” He turned away from the smoky haze of the strobe lights that lit the club below and faced Andras, one of his fellow fallen angels. The blond-haired man had the palest blue eyes, like frozen glaciers. They had once been brothers in the glittering city of clouds, but now they were brothers bound in darkness.
“You asked me to bring you a list of the deals made on crossroads this month.” Andras walked over to Lucien and held out his palm as though to shake his hand.
Lucien put his hand into Andras’s, and his head suddenly filled with a flood of images. A hundred souls, a hundred deals made. Deals made out of anger, greed, and lust.
How utterly dull and predictable.
Lucien released Andras’s hand and sighed as he turned back to face the crowd below. Andras joined him at the railing and remained quiet for a moment. Lucien again fixated on the feeling that had increasingly haunted him the last few years. He wasn’t content. There was a cloying emptiness that seemed ready to strangle him, and he couldn’t shake it. He was no stranger to that hollow feeling, but it seemed worse of late.
“Sir, you seem…unsatisfied.”
Lucien nearly denied it, but he never lied. The devil only ever spoke the truth. Everyone painted him a liar, but it wasn’t true. They lied to themselves and each other in his name.
“I am unsatisfied,” he finally admitted. From the moment he’d been cast out of heaven, he had been restless and full of rage. The rage had faded over the many years he’d been in hell. Corrupting souls was too easy. A hint here, a little nudge there, and these mortals fell into sin so easily. He craved a challenge. The gates of hell required pure souls to be corrupted in order to stay strong. The more souls he took below, the stronger the powers keeping demons in hell were. In a strange way, corruption of a few protected millions. And it had been a long time since he’d focused on pure souls as targets. The gates were starting to crumble.
Nothing like a challenge when hell itself needed saving.
“Are there not any good, incorruptible souls still out there? The gates are weak. I can feel it,” he muttered. It was a rhetorical question, but Andras straightened.
“There must be. Shall I find one for you? I too have been worried about the gates. It’s been a long time since we’ve gone in search of pure souls to power the portal.”
Lucien crossed his arms over his chest, frowning at the crowd below him. He hadn’t expected Andras to offer to find one. He’d been thinking aloud more than anything, but Andras was a loyal soldier and clever. If anyone could find what he needed to protect the gates, it was Andras.
Do I want that? Would the challenge sate my emptiness? Or should I leave it up to Andras to secure the safety of hell?
No, he had to be the one to do it. When he corrupted the soul and secured it in hell, it kept the gates strong and the demons where they should be—locked away in crushing darkness.
If there was even the smallest chance of relieving himself of that awful ache, he had to try.
“Find me a pure soul. One that will be a true challenge. The gates need one that will truly test me if we are to secure the portal.”
“Understood.” Andras vanished, and the flutter of his invisible shadow wings was the only proof of his ever having been there. When Andras fell, he too had lost his snowy white wings. In their place, the scars had formed what were called shadow wings, and those were all that remained.
Lucien turned his back on the club and returned to his office. He closed the glass doors to his balcony and sat in his black leather desk chair. Taking a cigar from the cherrywood box, he removed his silver cigar cutter and cut the tip. Then he snapped his fingers, and a flame blossomed from his fingertips to light the cigar. He drew in a slow breath, relishing the rich, sweet aroma of the smoke, and blew the air back out. The smoke escaped his lips in tendrils that coiled into the air to form a slithering snake.
Andras would find him a soul, a perfect one to corrupt, and it would restore Lucien’s purpose and keep the gates of hell intact.
It’s time the devil got back in the game.
Life isn’t fair.
Diana Kingston knew that was the truth, but it didn’t stop her from hoping for fairness every day. She sat by her father’s hospital bed, helplessly watching him fight for life. He’d slipped into a coma early that morning as the final stages of cancer took hold. Her mother, Janet, held his hand and was talking softly to him about her day, hoping he could hear her. It had been a part of their normal routine before he’d slipped into the coma. When Diana got home from her college classes, she and her mother drove to the hospital to keep her father company while he underwent radiation and chemotherapy for colon cancer. She couldn’t get past the pain of watching her mother lose half of herself with the impending death of the man she had deeply loved for more than thirty years.
Most days Diana kept herself together, but today was possibly the end. The doctor had called her mother early this morning to say that her father, Hal, had slipped into a coma. Only yesterday, her father had been glassy-eyed and exhausted from fighting the inevitable but still awake and talking. The machines beeping beside his bed showed his life ticking away, slowly fading bit by bit. Her heart was breaking, fracturing like a mirror into a thousand shards. She could see herself in her father’s face, reflected a thousand times over as he gave in to death inch by inch. Would her mother look at Diana and see that reflection of her father? Would it cause her mother even more pain? Diana bit her lip hard enough that the metallic taste of blood surprised her. She licked her lips and rose from the stiff wooden hospital chair.
She was a coward; she was weak—she could not sit there and watch him die. It hurt too much.
“Mom, I’m going to get some air, okay?” She hugged her mother’s shoulders and kissed her cheek before she headed to the door.
“Okay, hon,” her mother murmured absently.
Diana paused at the door to her father’s room, drinking in the sight of her parents. Hal was a handsome man with soft gray eyes, eyes that would likely never open again, and brown hair feathered with gray. Her mother, Janet, had been a real beauty in her youth and was still stunning with blue eyes and raven hair. But her father’s illness had aged them both over the last two years, stealing time like fall leaves scattered upon the wind.
When her father died, the blow would crush her mother. They were soul mates. Diana had grown up in a house filled with life and laughter, songs sung in the sun, and dancing in the moonlight. Her parents had a peaceful life, but now life seemed determined to claw back some of the perfection it had given away too freely.
Tears welled up in Diana’s eyes as she stepped into the hallway of the oncology wing at Saint Francis Hospital outside Chicago.
Just breathe, she reminded herself. She wiped her eyes, smearing the tears across her cheeks. She’d been raised Catholic, but her faith had never been that strong, not until her father fell ill. Now she prayed like the world was ending, because for her, part of it was.
“You okay?” A nurse came over and gently touched her shoulder in the nice way people do to strangers in pain.
“Yeah,” she whispered. “Just a bad day for my dad.” The words “he’s dying” couldn’t come out. She didn’t want—and frankly couldn’t handle—anyone’s pity right now.
The woman nodde
d in immediate understanding. “Everyone has those bad days here, but they’re usually followed by good ones. Hang in there, sweetie.” The nurse’s brown eyes were tender as she smiled.
“Thanks.” Diana tucked a lock of hair behind her ear and glanced around, wishing she could get outside fast, but the hospital was a labyrinth of wings, elevator bays, and nurses’ stations.
“Why don’t you take a break in the chapel?” The nurse’s suggestion sounded good.
Diana thanked her again and walked toward the end of the hall. She reached it and glanced at the door with a little plaque that said “Healing Chapel.” As she entered, she held her breath, but the chapel was empty. A stained-glass window of Saint Francis of Assisi standing in the woods surrounded by animals was at the back of the chapel. She’d come here often these last few weeks, and while she was a lapsed Catholic, she knew enough of the saints to know Assisi. He’d become a quiet comfort to her.
The pews gleamed with a splash of colorful light pouring in from the stained glass. Diana walked to the first row and sat down, then closed her eyes as more tears trailed down her cheeks. Two years ago all that had mattered in her life was college. She would be a senior at the University of Chicago this fall, majoring in architecture. When her dad fell ill, her mother had done her best to hide it from her.
Part of Diana was angry that her dad was ill, angry that he was putting her and her mother through hell. And she was angry that she wouldn’t be able to fix her mother’s broken heart. She was angry most of all at herself for not being able to do a damn thing to help him. Anger felt good, and it made her feel strong, even if only for a short time.
