“But it’s someone else’s favorite,” I say before I get out of the car. He trails after me as I question if I should put him back in the car and take him home before I fuck up something.
But the opportunity passes when a teenager turns around and Asmodeus sees her. He freezes, eyes fixated on her as time seems to fall to a standstill between them.
“It was too soon. I shouldn’t have done this,” I whisper. Why the fuck do I have to get in the middle of everything? Why do I want to control situations… and now I’ve fucked them up.
DEUS
A smile blooms across the teenager’s face, and I realize I’ve never seen her wear it before. It looks strange on her. But it fitsher. It fits her more than that dead look she wore all of the other times I’d seen her. The hollow look she wore when I stuffed a gun in her hands and trained her with the coldness I had always been given. She cautiously takes a step toward me as I feel frozen in place.
“Asmodeus.” The word seems more like a breath, it’s such a quiet sound.
“Lilith,” I say while she slowly makes her way over to me. She’s wary, and she has every right to be. The last time she’d seen me, I’d been coated in blood as every person in her life lay dead behind me. She’d screamed, hit me, and told me she’d find me and kill me, but she was ten. She wasn’t going to accomplish it then.
Now she’s what? Sixteen?
She steps up to me and throws her arms around me, and I feel confused by the action. My mind is telling me it’s a threat, but still I don’t pull back.
“You’re supposed to hug her back,” Ellison says.
I glance up at him and feel like having him here beside me throws life back into me. It urges me to move. It pushes my brain back into functioning, and I wrap my arms around her as she squeezes me.
“Thank you,” she whispers.
“Can you thank me for what I’ve done?”
“I didn’t know how much I wanted to be free of that place. I was so filled with rage that I wanted to find you, I wanted to kill you, I wanted to rip you apart… but you saved me before it was too late. You saved me while I could still be saved.”
“Don’t you hate me?” I ask.
Lilith shakes her head. “No.” Her hands tighten on my shirt. “No. I could never hate the man who saved my life.”
I’m reeling from her words. Even as she pulls back, I don’t know what to do with them. I don’t know how to take them.
“Come. My mom got us a table. Come on.”
She takes my wrist, and I feel overwhelming confusion when she pulls me after her. Ellison sets a hand on my back, and it gives me strength as I’m led inside and over to a table where a woman smiles at us.
“You must be Asmodeus.”
I don’t know who she is or why she knows me. I don’t know how I’m here or how Ellison found them. I’d avoided ever looking for any of the children I’d left behind, assuming they felt nothing but hatred for me.
“Can I give you a hug?” she asks as she stands.
“I don’t…” I start. “I don’t understand.”
“That’s okay. I’m sure you’re very overwhelmed.” Instead of hugging me, she gestures me toward the table.
“Sit,” Ellison urges, so I slowly sit down.
“You wouldn’t believe the surprise I felt when I saw you were working as a city hero,” Lilith says. “I remember watching TV and just shouting to my mom to come see.”
I glance at the woman who she’s called “Mom.” I know who Lilith’s birth mother was. She was a cold woman who made me use my fingers to dig the grave for a girl I’d been raised with, all because I’d hesitated and tried to help her… I still believe if they’d let me help her, she would have lived. She watched long after my fingers began to bleed, spewing words at me to make sure I knew that I had failed.
She’s nothing like this woman Lilith calls “Mom.”
“My name is Annie. I met Lily since I work for child services,” the woman says. “When the seven children you saved were handed into my care, I’d never seen anything like it before. I never… with their powers and their upbringing, so many were afraid to work with them… they thought they’d never gain ground with them. But I didn’t see the monsters the others did. I saw broken children who needed a chance. It helped that most ofthem were still young. It took time, but we found outlets for their anger, for their hurt. Lily, who was the oldest of the children, took the longest, but once she learned that life wasn’t filled with abuse—that people could show emotions and kindness—it was like a floodgate opening.
“They’re all very happy children, Asmodeus. Yeah, maybe most of them know how to assassinate a grown man, but we’ve used other outlets for their skills.”
