“Let me drink,” Lucifer ordered.“Fill my mouth with you.”Offering his face, he allowed Baal to slide hardened love past his lips, into his very throat, and begin to rock forward.Michael’s hands, meanwhile, found Lucifer’s rear, his thighs.Taking a second of eternity to coat his own fingers in the wet of his mouth, Michael then prodded.The angel of beauty’s perfect entrance welcomed him, and it was as if digging into the body of a fruit.Like Baal, Michael thrust, coaxing an opening that was already eager and impatient.Choking on sweetness, Lucifer moaned, and he arched his back once more, rolling his hips back against Michael.Not deep enough, he was saying.Not cruel enough.Twist it, like a knife.Love demands blood.
When Michael returned his hand to his own body, he used his other to grip Lucifer’s hip.He guided the pretty angel onto his side, held him there, then guided his weeping arousal to push past the tight gate into paradise.Slow, he pressed on, feeling how he widened him, how a flower unfurled, how a burrow shut around a seed.Lucifer shook in bliss, and he twitched and groaned with his mouth full.The first rut forward made him twitch, and when the ruts continued, rolling into him like tides — he shook.His core burned, and the coiled tightness tore open from his belly to where the strongest prince offered himself.Michael asking to be owned by someone, having left his Father’s house, looking to be wanted and commanded.
A low, guttural noise rumbled from Baal’s throat, and Lucifer felt the angel of flight comb back his hair, then hold his face tenderly as he continued.The salt of the Earth — procuring from him, a gift to feed the most beautiful angel.Nothing but jewels, salt, and honey are to bother Lucifer; he must be spoiled.Spoiled until he rot, but it would be a beautiful rot.
‘Love me,’ he wanted to say to them.‘Love me until I can’t walk, and I must be carried everywhere we go.Hold me between your bodies, and love me until I forget if I’ve ever felt anything else.’This body of his wasn’t made to be empty; it was made to be shaped.Delight — shuddering Lucifer’s body, ‘Beg for me, every time.Pray to me.’He tried to stop those thoughts.‘Worship me.’But he couldn’t.And Michael and Baal murmured prayers as they drove into him like swords into a victim.
“Mm,” the angel of beauty continued to moan, and he saw brightness, then felt pleasantness raking its claws up his body.Death tore out of himself in tight, wet finish.And Baal and Michael were quick to follow, spilling into both mouths of the angel, then lowering to kiss him everywhere again, praising him, adoring him, the most beautiful angel in Heaven, in all of life, of all creations.The favorite.Their favorite.The favorite of no one else.
As Lucifer laid with them, eyes on the golden sky, he held the both of them to his chest, running his fingers through their hair once more; eventually, he tried to tilt their tired heads to make them kiss for him.They scowled, refused.But Lucifer maintained a light, sweet smile.
After this — the three returned to the city of angels, where there were preparations to celebrate the birth of a new star somewhere.Several colorful homes, at either side of the road, were pressed to each other, so close that it could have been that there were merely infinitely long houses trailing in every direction, only occasionally intruded on by amphitheaters, bathhouses, galleries.Walking far ahead of Baal and Michael on the crowded golden pathway — Lucifer watched plants travel alongside him — migrating fungi, wandering trees that left fruits in their wake.The beautiful angel plucked one off the ground swiftly, then made his way over with a hum to a certain figure sitting on a stone bench by a plaza.“Rosier!”Lucifer chirped over the chatter of all the hundred angels bustling about.“Brother, how are you?”
Rosier, an angel of fruit; he was working through a basket of pomegranates when he startled and lifted his head.His friend, Asmodeus, was asleep with his head draped over one of Rosier’s shoulders.“Oh.I’m well, I’m well.How are you?”His voice shook, but then he smiled gently, almost shyly, and the tall angel beside him grunted, shifted in his dreaming.
Dropping the fruit into Rosier’s basket, Lucifer smiled.“Well.We always are.”And when the angel of fruit stared up at him with a quietly pensive gaze, Lucifer added, “If you’d let me, I want to deliver fruits with you again.”
At that, Rosier laughed, though softly.“Really?But aren’t you busy?I thought you were going to lead the celebration for the new star with your songs.”
“Mm, but I have to go get my timbrel and….”His voice trailed, and he blinked, trying to remember.
“Pipes,” offered Asmodeus, though his eyes remained shut.
Just as Rosier began demanding to know how long his friend had been pretending to sleep, Lucifer stepped away, turning back to his lovers who hated each other, but he noticed a fountain, and two angels standing before it.
One was dark-haired, his face speckled, his hair enshrouded by veil.“Excuse me,” Dina was begging.The one before him tilted his head — his almond eyes widened, his feathery hair cascading down his shoulders.Phanuel.“But I wanted to ask you for forgiveness,” Dina said.“I realized it.I realized it just recently— I asked God for forgiveness for a pain that I inflicted on you.That is why I never felt forgiven.It was you that I should have asked.It was you who I should have made amends with.Phanuel, I stole your rings— During the war in Heaven, I had your rings.I was a thief.”
The angel of forgiveness stared, and he whispered that he’d forgiven Dina long ago.
“Dina,” Lucifer called, then tried, “What—” The youngest angel twisted around, eyes far too wide, reddened with sadness, knowing.And before the angel of beauty could speak more, there was the sound of an angel clearing their throat.Hesitating, Lucifer turned his head another direction, and he saw now Azazel, down the road, where Michael and Baal should have been.He still carried a hole in his heart and smeared white paint on his face.
‘You never desired to go back,’ Lucifer thought at the Watcher.‘Nostalgia never made a fool of you, how it did me.’When he looked to the youngest angel again, his eyes darkening, his brows furrowing, his lips pressing thin — all the angels who’d been crowded around and preparing for the birth of a star faded into the eternal brightness of the new Heaven.Rosier was gone, as was Asmodeus, and Phanuel disappeared as well.The plants melted into the glow, then so did the last remnants of a golden street and a fountain and stone bench.
Lucifer laughed — low.
Any second now, Azazel with his bleeding heart and Dina with his frightened face would disappear like all the others.No great bang nor screams of death.Without noise, they’d drown in the light.
But he surrendered: ‘We cannot return.’His shoulders shook as he continued to giggle, more and more miserably.‘We cannot return.It can never be like before.It will never be like before.’He hadn’t even remembered Heaven well enough to recreate it accurately.He’d missed flying, but he forgot how to do it now.He hadn’t been an angel for what had felt like, what surely were, lifetimes.But what was he, if not an angel?Where was he?
CHAPTER49
Tadeo woke somewhere green, his body scarred and still bleeding.He lifted his head at the sound of buzzing — some insects whizzing by.Too, he saw trees, but not any type that he could recognize, and he noticed some birds, many of which he couldn’t quite make out either.Some had familiar calls, some sounded entirely new.In the distance, he heard the rumble of an animal.Again, this one was unfamiliar.Instinct made his hand twitch for a weapon, but he had nothing on him except his typical clothes, also slightly different.
“Hello?”he called out, then he climbed onto trembling legs.“Hello?”
Despite how dense this place was with trees, flowers, fruits, almost falling over him — Tadeo felt no claustrophobia, nor fear.He dragged a foot forward, felt himself bump into a scurrying rodent, then another animal he couldn’t recognize.Polite, he apologized to them.‘The last thing I remember was trying to make fruits for the survivors.’Well, he’d certainly succeeded — if he was alive and this wasn’t some afterlife that he’d accidentally slipped into.The thought of potentially being dead annoyed him.He had people to protect, and he had more of loving and being-loved to experience.Suddenly, he almost laughed.‘How ridiculous am I?’But there was so much left unfinished, as there always would be.He had taught the children miracles, but he was not done doing it.The world never ends; there is no return; there is just one tree ahead, then another.
Aclinksounded beneath his shoe, and he looked to see coins, some meager money but money nonetheless, in the soil like ruins.Familiar silver, never to remove its teeth from this world, however new it seemed.This new Earth, which was not quite new at all.
Soon after he’d begun trudging through the grass, trying not to crush any of the hundred creatures by his legs, he heard a sound, something human.‘Tadeo?’Is that what they were saying?Oddly, he remembered the first time he’d been able to answer to that name, the first time he’d returned home after his resurrection.His family had asked him to respond to another title, the one of a young girl, and he’d insisted, heart in his mouth, that his name was Tadeo, that he was someone new.Eventually, they must’ve stopped believing Tadeo was another person than that girl who died.He always prayed for that, that they had come to accept him, however imperfectly.But, now, he was perking up at his name, warm and confused and frightened.‘Tadeo, that’s my name.It’s Tadeo.’
He wasn’t sure whose voice it was, in the distance, or if they were even really saying his name.Yet —
‘Dante?Joana?’Or was that his father’s tired rumble?Or was that even his mother?Tadeo’s walking quickened, then his feet propelled him into a run, shoving branches out of his way.“Wait!”he called to them, and he felt himself begin to smile, to laugh happily at realizing who the voices belonged to.The dead and the living — all before him.“Tell me where you are!”he called helplessly.He would find them.‘Dante, Joana, mother, father.Everyone.’“I’ll find you whether you tell me or not!”Tadeo jumped; he waved a hand, hoping they’d see him, tears swelling in his eyes.“I love you!I’ll find you!Stay there!”
THE FINAL INTERLUDE
He dreamt: of the past, for some time.Lucifer tried to recall every detail of it, and he realized that he’d had quite the modest birth if nostalgia was an honest prophet.The archangel Raphael had been there, and Lucifer had met Asmodeus soon thereafter.When Lucifer saw himself for the first time, he had asked who it was, and then he’d said that this was too much beauty for an angel to carry.He had been right, in the end.For many slow, monotonous years, his greatest concern had been finding a purpose that wasn’t imprisoned to a body.God had held his chin and told Lucifer he was ripe for love.One day, Lucifer had stood and burst into a song of worship, and the angel Michael had seen him and said that there had never been an angel as fine as him.He’d grown vain, and the Lord berated him, and Lucifer had traded God’s love for an angel’s love.The greatest sin was to love.He was groomed to be beautiful and to be beautiful to break.He was raped by God and told no one.Had almost forgotten about it, over the centuries.
