When his mouth opened in a silent scream, I remembered that I wasn’t actually there, witnessing this. It was all so real, but this was just a vision.
Who was he? What was Clotho showing me?
The man’s hand came up to sweep his hair back from his face, and that’s when I saw his eyes. As hot as molten lava and as gold as a dragon’s treasure. They seemed to be looking right through me as if he sensed I was staring at him from another time. Because I knew, without knowing who he was, Clotho was showing me something that had yet to pass.
The man was gorgeous. With soft skin the color of a demon’s secondary form, but his was lightly sun-kissed. Wherever he’d come from, it wasn’t Hell.
He clawed his way up onto the ice, and when he did so, I glimpsed the muscled planes of his back...streaked in red. Blood. Between his shoulder blades were two gaping wounds like long slashes down his back.
I’d seen wounds like that in the most grizzly of executions.
The poor man had had his wings torn from his being.
And that’s when I knew exactly what this creature was.
He wasn’t any demon. He wasn’t a human soul. This fallen male was somewhere between the two, an immortal shifter that our kind had only heard tales of. A brethren race that lived far beyond even the surface, in a place only fabled to be reality.
He was a celestial, with an aura burning so bright he couldn’t be any common born. He was powerful. He was royalty.
Perhaps, maybe, he was the salvation I’d been praying for to no god in particular.
It was a prayer Clotho, my newborn niece, had answered.
“What is it, Lilith?” my sister’s voice came, pulling me back to the present. I swung my eyes away from the baby to my poor sister, who looked so exhausted, sprawled out on the stone slab.
Then I looked back to the baby in my arms who had started to cry, her tiny eyelids squeezed shut and her mouth wide open as she wailed. The vision was gone, but I still felt the weight of the celestial’s eyes on me. A flutter of heat licked at the place between my thighs, despite the incredible pain that still throbbed from the last few days of Abaddon’s brutal claiming.
And just like that, all the pain was gone, replaced only by the pleasant warmth the celestial invoked.
“Lilith, what is it you see?” Nyx called to me again.
I looked up at her, my vision swarming with the thick tears of relief that sprung in my eyes. “I think... I think I just saw a miracle.”
6
Reality came slamming back into my gut like a wrecking ball. Or maybe it was just Miley Cirus’s ‘Wrecking Ball’ playing quietly on the elevator speaker that made the shift back to the present so incredibly jarring.
Or, maybe it was Abaddon’s mouth on my neck, his feverish hot breath making my skin sweat as his ogre-sized hands helped themselves to handfuls of my breasts.
I steeled myself, allowing the beast to paw me as I tried to cobble my thoughts together.
Those memories were buried so deep inside me, I’d completely forgotten them. Most of them for good reason. But revisiting them had been necessary. Back then, I’d been stubborn about pushing those memories I shared with Abaddon to the darkest part of my being, hoping that they would just go away.
Abaddon had marred me, deeply. And even after all this time, those scars hadn’t healed over.
I’d been stupid for never sharing the true extent of my trauma with Lucifer. If I had opened up to him completely, he would have never allowed the archdemon to play his way back into his good graces. But now, I could finally face the man who had hurt me. And make good on that promise I’d made to myself back then.
I almost felt liberated in a way.
I had a renewed sense of purpose, one that made Restless Jess—my beast—come alive. I had never seen eye to eye with the demon spirit inside me, but she had always done what she could to protect me against Abaddon as much as she’d been able. She’d fight him until she had no strength left and then draw me inside to where I could hide in the furthest recesses of my mind while she took the brunt of his abuse.
For the first time in probably ever, I was thankful for her.
The memories of the birth had been incredibly helpful for another reason.
Everyone knew who The Fates were, now that they were the closest thing to gods the Underworld had. Their will was just and all-knowing. And they were extremely private.
The last time I checked, they were still living in the caves in Devil’s Head Mountain.
