Prologue
Once upon a time, I was considered to be a textbook “party girl.” We're talking hardcore, down the cheapest, paint-peeling bottle of vodka in a single night and still bust out the best moves on the dance floor in four-inch heels kind of girl. My alcohol tolerance, beer-pong-skills, and knack for pulling hot guys’ phone numbers into my orbit were a thing of legend back in college. I could party all weekend and somehow be up at the butt crack of dawn Monday morning for finals and still managed to pull off an A, a fabled grade among my crowd.
Crazy weekends were the norm, and that carried on well after I graduated with my nursing degree and bagged a position at Seattle’s best hospital. I’d work insane double shifts in the ER, care for my sick father back in the duplex I could barely afford and was lucky if I could manage a few hours of sleep every night. But no matter how torturous my week was, when Friday rolled around, relaxing wasn’t anywhere to be found on my dubious list of priorities.
I’d always been one of those “I’ll sleep when I’m dead” kind of people. Because the little voice in my head I’d coined as “Reckless Jess” pushed me to opt for a weekend itinerary that would have even the most intense adrenaline junkies blushing.
Sometimes it went beyond drinking, clubbing, jumping on the back of some biker’s motorcycle to wake up in his bed the next day. There would be times I’d give in to the voice and impulsively buy a plane ticket to some random place, then barely make it back in time for work.All because some demented voice in my head was always pushing me to find whatever it was that would fill the hollow feeling in my heart.
Reckless Jess pushed me to do things that scared the shit out of me. Things that no woman ought to be doing in a dangerous city crawling with supernatural creatures that would be tickled pink by the thought of having me for breakfast.
Turns out, she was more than just a little voice in my head telling me to drink the Kool-Aid.Reckless Jess was my beast, the spirit of the demon that possessed my body, driving me to hunt for her long-lost mate. But no matter how stupidly insane my weekends could get, it was that same entity that got me home safe every Sunday night no matter what shit-storm she managed to stir up.
But this weekend was different.
This time around, I wouldn’t be home in bed come Sunday night.
I wouldn’t be going home at all.
This time that spirit inside me that shifters refer to as their “beast” had led me to the very thing she’d been searching for. A lover from a life long gone, a life that seemed too impossible to have ever been mine. But thanks to Lucifer’s tour through Hell, things were coming back to me.
Ancient memories were stirring. Feelings that had never really gone away were all rushing back to the surface.
Discovering you’ve lived an entire life eons ago as a demon shifter probably wouldn’t sit right with most humans. But even when I thought I was “normal,” I never really came close to the word. Heck, being the queen of the dead and the mate of Satan himself actually made a ton of sense. As bat shit insane as that may sound.
Turns out, he’d been looking for me too.
Thanks to the tour through the Hell we’d built together, I remembered exactly who I was.
I was still Jessica Sims. That wouldn’t change. I still loved booze and parties and ordering way more than I could eat at Taco Bell after a 3 a.m. club hop. My best friends were still Melanie and her guardian angel, Gabriel. I still loved watching baseball games with my dad over TV dinners on his set of recliners that were probably as old as the demon spirit inside me.
But now, there was more to me than that. I was Lilith, Queen of Hell. A demon shifter born of darkness, destined for the light. And that light came in the form of a forsaken celestial with a masculine beauty that made my beast whine and my body ache.
My Light Bringer. My Morningstar.
My devilish mate.
Most of my memories from my old life had come back to me, but there were still muddled bits and pieces that hadn’t yet surfaced. Like the moment I’d met Lucifer in the Ninth Circle. The details of that fateful day were hazy, but the way I’d felt when I’d first laid eyes on the celestial sat in my heart like a lover’s ache. As a demon shifter born of the Eighth Circle, the notion of love was a foreign one back then.
Maybe I didn’t know at the time that I already loved him. But I did know The Fates had sent him to me. The Fates had deemed him mine. The struggle was to get him to see it before he made his way out of the nine circles because his father had lied to him about his mate being some human.
Eve.
I didn’t even know her. But back then, his blind devotion to her had been like driving a dagger deep into my heart and giving it a good twist for extra measure.
After he’d beat the crap out of Abaddon and took his crown like a toddler getting his toys confiscated, I’d offered to guide Lucifer to the surface. I never actually wanted him to leave. After all, why should he go crawling back to a human that wasn’t his fated one and a father who cast him out for denying the natural nature of shifters?
My purpose was to convince him to stay in Hell, become its permanent king, and take me as his mate.
The journey through Hell with the sullied Son of God had been nightmare-fueled. We had starved together. We had walked until our legs were nothing more than ragged muscles and brittle bone. We witnessed the true horror of eternal suffering Abaddon had forced the human souls to endure in his hellish kingdom. From the ashes of the old king’s destruction, we built something better, worthy of the new king who built it with his own sweat and blood rather than the pain and suffering of his subjects.
To say our journey was taxing would be the biggest damn understatement in all of time. The trials we’d encountered completely shattered us, again and again. Every time we thought we were broken beyond repair, we’d been there to put the other back together. Even when every fiber of our beings was begging, screaming at us to stop.
We never gave up.
We kept going.
We had pushed each other to limits we never knew we had.
