“It must be you, Foster, I’ve done all I can. Prepare the final strike.”
They walked casually along the second path, pausing every so often for Michael to observe a crushed flower, a snapped twig, or a trampled patch of weeds that would guide them on.Lucifer hummed a lilting tune, and Michael fought the urge to ask him to stop, even as it grated on his frazzled nerves. This was themost casual interaction they’d had in centuries; he didn’t want to ruin it by being petty.
As if reading his mind, Luce stopped humming abruptly. Michael looked to the side and saw him staring straight ahead, eyes round with surprise.
“How sharp the tack that pricks the unprotected side,” he mumbled, sounding stricken.
Michael followed his gaze, between two ancient oaks to a small clearing, and felt his stomach twist.
Standing mere feet from them was the imposter.
He was shucking his clothes, tossing them haphazardly into the bushes, and doing a sort of strange shimmy. With growing horror, Michael realized the unusual movement served a perverse purpose.
Lucifer was blessed with perfect skin; a fact he happily lorded over everyone as he tanned beautifully and never suffered a blemish. That deep tan was now splitting, wrinkling, and folding as it was shed and discarded like an old, worn garment.
Skin pale as moonlight was revealed in its wake, and the head of tousled chocolate waves fell like forgotten petals to be replaced with curls of deepest black. The impostor stretched and groaned, shaking out his wings as they molted from purest gold to ebony.
Standing naked as a babe in the early twilight, Gabriel laughed.
Foster swallowed against the threat of bile and found his throat scratching like sandpaper. His hand ached where he held the athame in an iron grip, his knuckles blanched white by thetension. The jeweled inlay on its hilt cut into his palm, drawing the silvery ichor of demigods from shallow, crescent wounds. His free hand reached to stroke Sra. Delgado’s bandaged face with trembling fingers.I can’t do this.
He drew a breath to say what his heart was screaming, and Gabriel gripped his shoulder hard. “Now, Foster!”
Closing his eyes against the flood of hot tears, Foster plunged the dagger deep into her heart with both hands and a guttural, broken shout.
Chapter Twenty-Three
Luce whimpered. Michael turned to him in shock. For what was simultaneously seconds and days, they stared at each other, equally speechless.
“I should have seen it,” Luce finally broke the silence, casting his eyes down at his hands as if his upturned palms would have answers for him. He lifted his haunted gaze to Michael’s. “How did I not see his machinations?”
“Because we never want to believe theoneswe love could betray us.”
“You believed I had betrayedyou,” Luce argued. “And I never considered Gabriel had set me up. I only thought he had abandoned me during my trial.”
“He was too busy weaseling into your place to speak in your defense.”
“Of course he was,” the Devil sighed. “He always was the most ambitious of us. That’s why I said you were better off asking him to join the rebellion.”
Michael’s brow furrowed. “What?”
“What do you mean, ‘what’?” Luce mirrored his expression. “The only reason I was in the Garden that day was becauseyouencouraged me to hear Adam out.”
“I have no idea what you’re talking about.”
“Yes, you do!” Luce huffed in frustration. “A few nights before, we were in bed. I was telling you how Adam had begun asking questions about his purpose, about the restrictions my brother had imposed. I was considering challenging Jehovah’s edict, and you encouraged me to speak with Adam about it.”
“I was away, Lucifer.” Michael's stomach twisted violently and he slowly shook his head. “I was on a scouting mission with Uriel for almost a week, and Jophiel accosted me the night I returned.”
The other man paled. “Oh, no.”
“I’m...so sorry. You weren’t in bed with me that night.”
Luce flinched back with pain in his eyes. “I’m going to be ill.”
Michael was lifting his hands to comfort him when a violent shudder raced along the earth and threw him off balance. His hands sought purchase instinctively, landing on Lucifer’s shoulders and holding tight.
“Shit,” Luce groaned, and answered the unspoken question in Michael’s eyes. “We’re being kicked back.”
