CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
I stared at the demon—the wings, the grin, the incessant glowing, and the pieces fell into place, allowing this fake psychic to see through it all, right to his intentions.
He was performing for me.
Fine. I’d play. I crossed my arms and arranged my features to show disbelief. “Like, the Lucifer?”
The demon beamed down at me. “You’ve heard of me?”
“Uh, yeah. The Bible has plenty to say about you.”
Lucifer rolled his eyes and folded his wings in place but I still couldn’t see anything beyond his glowing silhouette. “What the church did to my origin story is as egregious as the first incarnation of Deadpool.”
I hate to admit it but I snickered at the King of Hell making a pop culture reference. He delighted in the sound, closing his eyes as he let it wash over him.
“I gotta say, Lu—you don’t mind if I call you Lu, do you?”
He smiled down at me, goddamn it was a beautiful smile. “Call me what you like, Zurie. I have many names.”
“Right. Well, Lu, that kid of yours told us you were totally off your rocker. But you don’t seem crazy.”
The demon’s smile edged from radiant delight to sinister and dark. “Ah, Dex. Yes. He fed you lies I crafted myself.”
Lucifer’s surrounding glow receded and the room, once limned in light too bright to gaze at, came into view.
Into horrid, grisly view.
I screamed but the sound wouldn’t leave my lungs, only an awful, creaky moan.
Emma sat in a gilded cage suspended from a rafter as did the members of my horde. Raksha lay nude in a cage three times as large as the others. Each seemed to be in their own world, eyes glazed over, mouths moving soundlessly.
My hands fisted and my cheeks blazed with rage. “What have you done?” I ran to Emma, jumping to reach her but my muscles were weak and stretchy and I fell several feet short of the cage. “What have you done to them, you sick fuck?”
Lucifer smiled as he perched once more on his bone throne. “They’re not in any pain, dear. They’re merely in a void of my own making. No magic, no senses, nothing.”
“Release them!”
“Now, that I cannot do.”
“Release them,” I repeated, reaching for the shifter power within me.
But nothing reached back, no power rose to meet my summon. I reached again, this time deeper and for anything—shifter, green, arcana—but there was nothing. It was gone. Lucifer grinned as he watched the understanding descend on me.
My powers had been stripped from me the moment I shimmered in. It was the reason that shimmer took so damn long. I was just too stupid and cocky to recognize the chafing and sore feet for what it was.
My human-ness.
“I wondered how long it would take you to turn to your powers. Or should I say, my power.”
“What are you talking about?”
Lucifer rose, stretching his wings as he walked the length of the dais. “Sweet and brave Zurie, you were everything I needed in a Chosen One. You’d seen enough in your horrendous upbringing to accept our realms without the need for coddling. You have no issue bending the rules to suit your needs while still remaining on the right sight of human morality. And finally, your life was shitty enough to give up in favor of what you deemed to be a noble quest. And now here we are, both having worked very hard to get you here.”
My head spun at his words. I searched for something, anything to hold to ground myself but my gaze only landed on the vacant faces of my loved ones. “What are you saying?” I asked, voice thick with dread as the ground fell from beneath me.
“I couldn’t get all the realm leaders here at the same time, not on my own at least. So, I concocted a tale, a prophecy, if you will, telling of one who would reunite the realms and restore order, putting all that was wrong right again. It was a long con, for sure, but oh, how I’ve enjoy watching as it unfolded. This last week has been captivating.
“You see, I can’t take all of a hold’s power, not if a leader is still in place, and simply killing him or her won’t grant me its power either. A realm leader must give their power back to the hold, as is done when a new leader is crowned, or when weaker demons decide to give up their fight. Only then can I truly have all its power.
“The only problem is, a hold will only accept resigned power on a new moon, when magic is thinnest.”
Lucifer stopped, meeting my gaze with a cold, hard stare. “In one week, Zurie, the moon will be new, magic will be at its thinnest, and the holds will be primed for a new leader. That’s when the ceremony begins and when I will wield every bit of magic this plane has.”
The Blood King clapped his hands and two guards shimmered next to me. They grabbed my arms, and I went limp in their hands as they shimmered me out.
Cold, impenetrable darkness. The air smelled of mold and dampness. I tripped over a hard bar in the ground as a guard pushed me forward. I fell on my knees and the metallic scrape of a cell door closing echoed in my ears.
I retched in the corner—I hope it was the corner. I retched and heaved my fucking guts out but I refused to let a single tear slip down my face. I would not cry over this.
We were tricked. All of us. By the King of Lies himself. I wouldn’t feel bad for that. I wouldn’t blame myself.
So I’m not a prophecy girl or the human-born to unite the realms. The power I had was Lucifer’s—stolen from each realm—given to suit his purpose and taken back the minute the need was met. So what? I could figure this out. I could work this problem.
I took longer than I’d like to admit to work up the courage to explore my dark prison. One booted foot in front of the other, I found a wall and painstakingly worked out the dimensions of the cell. Longer than it was wide and about the size of my old bedroom—so, not very big. I took one step out from the wall and walked around again searching for furniture or a toilet or anything. I found a cot, a blanket and a toilet. I also found my pile of sick which was unfortunately not in the corner.
Fingertip trailing the cold stone wall for guidance, I paced the length of the room. I needed to think, to come up with a plan. Except my brain wouldn’t cooperate. It kept showing me Emma’s face, locked behind golden bars, and Lucifer’s throne of bones, and all the ways this should have played out.
Footsteps, metal scraping, but not the door sliding open; this scraping came from the floor.
“Eat,” a gruff voice called in the darkness. “The King wants you healthy and strong for the ceremony.”
“Okay, then how about not keeping me in complete darkness?”
The guard grunted and shuffled away.
I found the tray and pushed it to the corner. Who feeds a prisoner just as they arrive? And why wouldn’t he just put me in a cage until the ceremony like the rest of them? Why was I here? Why was I being treated differently?
Those where the questions I needed to focus on. They were the key to my escape—to winning this.