“Well, I should start back at the beginning, I think?” She paused, chewing her lip. “You all remember, when Foster was born, I had that horrible vision?—”
“Of him ending the world,” Sachi supplied, earning a tired sigh from Luce and a pointed glare from his wife for interrupting. “Sorry.”
“It’s okay,” Mags said. “Yes, that one. Unfortunately, it has become…more likely to pass.”
“I just saw him yesterday.” Judas frowned. “He’s been a little tetchy lately, but he didn’t seem particularly…world-endy.”
“‘World-endy’,” Remi parroted slowly, as if it was the dumbest thing she’d ever heard.
Mags cleared her throat loudly, clearly becoming frustrated by the constant interruptions. “Yes, well, in my newest vision he was murdering a child, so I’d say he’s definitely on the path to‘world-endy’.”
The silence was abrupt and heavy, the tension palpable. Balthazar stopped fiddling with his rings. Judas’s fingers froze where he had been drumming them against the table, splayed in midair. Sachiel went pale, and Cami looked like she might vomit.
“You didn’t tell me that part, Mags,” Glory whispered, her sultry voice hoarse. “You said he was looking for the Gospel of Lazarus.”
“Wait, wait, no.” Judas leaned forward, splaying his hands on the table. “We talked about this. Fos mentioned the gospel, and I shut it down.”
“Youknewhe was doing this?” Lucifer leaned in too, but his expression was much angrier than Judas’s mix of confusion and anxiety. “You knew, and saidnothing?”
“No!” Judas protested, fixing him with a glare. “He mentioned it, and I thought I talked him out of it. I thought it was handled! But reading a forbidden text has nothing to do withkilling children!”
“It does if you know what’sinthe Gospel of Lazarus.” Lucifer leaned back, rubbing his hands over his face. “It’s basically a how-to guide to Necromancy, and all of the rituals require human sacrifice.”
“What?!” Remi leapt up from her chair, snatching her hand away from Rag to slam her palms to the tabletop. “How could you keep something like that from us?”
“Why is it even still allowed to exist?” Sachi frowned. “Wouldn’t destroying it be better?”
“No one believed the rituals would work,” Mags said softly. “I lost my brother to madness in his pursuit of recreating Christos’s miracle.”
Luce laid a comforting hand on her shoulder. “I should have destroyed it for that reason alone.”
“No.” She shook her head, hair falling in a curtain over her face before she swept it over her shoulder. “In a way, it was a bittersweet memento, preserved as a warning not to dabble in the dark arts. We could never have known that hiding it wouldn’t be enough.”
“We need full transparency,” Rag said, drumming his fingers on the table. “I understand why we didn’t know before, but that can’t continue.”
Bal hummed in agreement. “You can hardly expect us to mount a successful opposition without all the details.”
“Which is why I called this meeting,” Luce leaned forward, planting his elbows on the table and steepling his fingers in frontof him. “There are several ‘rituals’ in the Gospel of Lazarus; all various attempts to bring back the dead. Most are nonsense, but some, in the hands of a Divine being, have real power.”
“The first ritual,” Mags whispered, “is the death of a ‘being of purity’. The most obvious candidate is a child, I suppose.”
The outrage and disgust in the room was palpable. Glory had her hands clasped over her mouth in horror, while Balthazar looked murderous, gripping the table’s edge so hard his knuckles strained pale against his tanned flesh. Remiel was equally furious and would have likely thrown her chair across the room by now if her husband didn’t have her biceps in a death grip. Sachiel had taken on a greenish tinge as if he might be sick.
“No,” Judas was the first to speak, looking conflicted. “He wouldn’t. I know Foster, and he just wouldn’t.”
“It’s an evil book,” Mags countered, her expression pained. “It holds my brother’s madness, his essence. It has a way of…influencing you.”
“Not ta mention,” a gravelly new voice broke in, “he’s got other bad influences.”
“Cwall,” Luce blinked in surprise. “I wasn’t expecting you.”
The demon drifted toward the table, batlike wings carrying his skeletal form across the space. “I heard mutterin’ about a meetin’ and I thought ya needed ta hear my update.”
“By all means,” Luce gestured for him to continue.
“It’s not good news,” he said, trying to prepare them for the impact. “Fos… well, he killed a kid.”
Remi scoffed. “I thought the Eyes were more reliable, we already know about Mags’s vision.”
