Blood-curdling screams tore Lucifer from sleep, dissipating with the flutter of his eyelids. Still the quiet did nothing to slow his racing heart. He had been dreaming of the night before. The first of many to come that had been plagued with havoc, mayhem, blood…and the screams that had woken him. His sense of achievement resurfaced as he recalled the hours he had spent driving men of God to the temple for a mass initiation into his army of monsters. After the hunt, the king and the few already infected guards restrained them. As the trapped women screamed, he had bled into each and every man.

The dreams he had experienced on long-ago missions had introduced him to the ability to sleep…and to see all that he desired in moving images when sleep claimed his eyes. But the ability to dream had been lost to Lucifer since his fall.

And this, the very first that had repeated over and over all the vividness of her desperate words for him to stop on the path he had chosen…could it have been real, a true heartfelt warning? Was it proof that she was watching? That she cared?

With his heart finally slowing at the possibility, he stretched out on his bed. His naked skin felt warm as he grazed against—other warm bodies. Lucifer tensed and forced himself not to suck in air as he remembered the rest of the night. The women draped over him shifted too, most in a daze. They had been weakened by the feedings the king and their new soldiers had subjected them to. Now smeared in crimson remnants from the attacks, they were fortunate to still be among the living. The hunger of his creations was endless. So many had died in the temple, torn into from multiple places on their bodies to drain every last drop. Stating the women had purpose had been interpreted not as Lucifer had intended. Though he did not particularly care if they lived or not, given where they would end up if they died, he saw purpose in their survival.

Blood Whores.

But King Cyrus had other plans.

Despite the bloody mess of it all, the pleasure Lucifer had handed out afterward to the women draped over him had been readily accepted. The king’s order to obey could not be denied. One direct look from their king’s eyes with his spoken words had stripped the terror from their faces and left them malleable. The power Lucifer had lost. A power that would now again be a valuable weapon to order any man, even armies of men, to do their bidding.

The king’s attempt to spell Lucifer’s own actions, much to his anger, had failed.

Now as Lucifer rolled over and fondled the closest warm body, he felt drained. All the sex was only partially to blame. More than exertion was weighing him down.

Like a fist in his throat and a twisting of his guts, an emotion he had never experienced before refused to budge. Taking all the women around him had not been part of his plan. Yet he had not declined the offer. After the shock of Gabriel’s voice and her pleading words, anger had boiled in him. In the two decades since his fall, she had not once reached out to him. In the millennia before then she had not tried even once. She did not care for him. She was God’s messenger. Her duty to their maker had killed their love—if she had ever even loved him at all.

And in that moment last night, he had needed to forget.

He’d expected bedding these women to rid her from his mind. To remove her memory. It hadn’t. Not even close.

Lucifer sighed.

As a new day rose, the light had long chased away the shadows and screams of Lucifer’s new subjects as well as the women he had dominated. For the first time in so long now, he was at the beginning of something epic. He should have felt whole. He should have felt like he belonged. And yet…there was an emptiness to it all that threatened to drown him. An emptiness he struggled to ignore. What was the point of all of this? He suddenly felt tired.

Lucifer freed himself from the arms and legs that tangled around him. Gentle groans emerged when he stood. As he crossed the room to the balcony, sunlight bathed his bronzed skin, warming him from the outside in. The town was quieter down below, only peasants scurrying to drag the dead back to their homes. Those meager lives didn’t hold his gaze for long. The one thing he still missed after all these years, despite how hard he tried not to, was not down there amongst the filth. It was above…

Face lifting to the heavens, his long golden hair brushed past his shoulders to his back. Lucifer sighed once more, and the flow of air added an ache to his constricting lungs. The only being he had ever trusted and wanted by his side was not with him. The one and only angel who had ever meant anything to him. Gabriel.

For the first time in so long, he let his mind drift back. At the start of days, they had been beside each other with the other archangels around the looking glass. Together they had watched the Earth form and change. Together they had created vocal language, and after experiencing kindness and love from the first angel to evolve out of all of them, she had taught him how to feel too. How to love…and as a result of the despair of losing that love, how to hate.

As he glanced back at the mess of women cramping his bed, he felt a sense of shame.

It had never been that way with Gabriel, all animalistic while needing a physical release of tension and pent-up loneliness. What they had shared was powerful and so much more profound. It had been infinitely more than a progression of physical intimacy that had never reached that climactic union. With her, his words, his kiss, his touch, they had all been a display of his pure and passionate and undeniable love. Love he had thought—believed—she had reciprocated. Despite being abandoned, he would have given a thousand women like the ones he bedded last night merely to see her face. To hear her voice and its compassion and understanding. Only in his deepest, darkest yearnings had he ever envisioned being with her in that primal sense. Again he thought of last night and his recurring dream. Was she looking down on him now? Had she seen all that he had done in the past day? In the past two decades?

Lucifer would never apologize. He would never change himself for her—he couldn’t. While still above, he had tried so hard. Yet he had been powerless each and every time to stop the part of himself that longed and needed more from her than platonic companionship. And that, apart from Michael’s interference and God’s rules, had been the problem. Despite her acceptance back then, he knew he had never been worthy of one like her.

Lucifer sighed again, his chest burning as he let himself feel a sliver of what he had locked deep down inside. “I miss you.”

A clatter and then shouting pulled Lucifer’s head out of the clouds. He spun and raced into the room as the king stumbled into his chamber. Right behind him were four of his six infected guards, all their faces still marred with last night’s bloodshed. “Get out!” the king screamed, frightening the blood-smeared women who instantly awoke. They scurried up in their nakedness. Fear plagued their eyes as they ran to escape Lucifer’s chamber and the fanged monster that used to be their king.

When the door slammed on them, any questions on the sudden interruption died on Lucifer’s tongue. He gaped at the sight of the five men.

The king stalked forward, his sword free in an instant and poised at Lucifer’s throat. His skin was covered in reddened bloody welts, as were his guards who hissed as they created a tightening semicircle around Lucifer. “You have cursed us, and now you will die.”

“What ailed you since last eve—” Lucifer leaped back as the sword sliced for his jugular. Any questions stalled on his tongue as the men’s welts shrank and repaired before his very eyes. “You heal as I do.”

The king lunged again and scored a track across Lucifer’s chest. His guards pounced as Lucifer stumbled back to the balcony. But as he scrambled up, ready to defend, none of them came any closer.

The king glared at the naked angel bathed in sunlight. He spat through clenched teeth, “You have condemned us!” His arm lifted, fingers tense like he was imagining how much he would love to strangle Lucifer. But it was the step forward that made the difference. Bathed in sunlight, Cyrus’s arm bubbled and smoked, continuing to sizzle after he pulled it back out of the light. “Monsters chained to darkness. Two of my guards perished this morn, burned to cinders while they screamed.”

The noise Lucifer had woken to. Not a dream.

After the success of last night, Lucifer could have taken this revelation as a downfall, a setback. Instead, he saw the advantage. Now the king had a weakness, one that gave Lucifer more power than before. “It matters not to our plans. This changes nothing.”

The king bared his fangs, red eyes pulsing. His guards looked equally ready to tear Lucifer’s head off. “This changes everything. We cannot fight wars if we cannot step outside.”

Lucifer shrugged, easing down onto the animal furs on the step down from the balcony. The cut on his chest tingled as it healed. “We fight wars as we have always done. With men willing to kill and lay down their lives for their king. Who care not for whom they kill or why, but who kill solely to follow your rule.”

“Then this thing you have created of us, it is nothing but a curse—”

“No!” Lucifer’s shouted interruption made the king’s face redden. He stood and came face to face with King Cyrus in the shadows. “It is a gift. What you are, and the superior beings we will continue to make, are my gift to you and this Godforsaken world. At times of war when soldiers come to collect their dead at night, when the exhausted armies and their commanders retire to battle another day, we will strike. We will hit them when they least expect. We will take them in their sleep. Their men will feed your bellies and our numbers. Their loss will be our triumph. No army or king will ever take what you have, and none will ever keep what you want to take from them. I promised you the world, and now I deliver, Cyrus the Great.”

The old king would have balked at the idea of killing without honor, of taking people out while they slept—but not the new king, the improved king. Cyrus the Great smiled, the dried blood on his lips cracking as his grin stretched wider. “Looks like this day you live, fallen one. Now, have chambers sealed of sunlight. Many of them. And do it this day. We need a safe space to build our army of monsters.” Facing his men, he declared, “For this night and every night thereafter, we shall feast!”

The guards grunted and cheered their king.

Lucifer donned a clean robe and made for the door, complying only because it served his cause to ruin God’s sinning race. “It will be done.”