“You’ll need a special blade, there aren’t many left.”
“I know this already, and I—” I almost slip up and tell him that I almost asked his baby mama to make me a dagger to kill my nemesis. Truly a low point. Man, are things getting desperate.
He waves a hand at me. “You know I could very easily drag him to Hell for you, love.”
I squint and shake my head. “You didn’t do it before. And, of course, you’re saying everything I want to hear in a dream.”
He groans and lies flat on the grass.
“You’ll wrinkle your suit.”
“Don’t give a shite. I miss you, you know.”
I sigh and lie down on the grass next to him. We don’t touch, but I wish we would. “Ugh, I miss you too,” I tell him honestly. If there’s one place you can be a hundred percent honest, it’s in your subconscious.
When I tilt my head, I see a ghost of a smile on his lips as he looks up at the clouds. I never got to see him so relaxed in Hell; he doesn’t even have a suit jacket on.
“Do you know anything about the Diadem of Kinship?”
“Where the fuck did you hear about that?”
I shrug my shoulders and look at him.
“Lilith, who told you about that?” He props himself on his elbows as he looks at me.
“This is supposed to be a good dream. Where you tell me all about how much you fucked up and missed me. Not you yelling at me.”
“Lilith,” he says, reaching out his hand, and it’s what snaps me out of my dream.
When I wake up, it’s with a gasp of breath and my heart hammering in my chest. The dream was so vivid. I’m just exhausted, tired of looking for answers where none are to be found. I’m tired of Earth. It was fun at first, truly, when I was numbing the pain of Diana’s death and just experimenting in the mortal realm with Kas. But now it’s like sunshine and people are terrible, and Hell is where I really belong.
I stop that train of thinking before it goes any further.
I have a fucking job to do. Kill Beelzebub and find out what Diana was warning me about. Until I do that, there’s no time to think about my selfish wants.
Chapter twenty
How fast does mortal time move compared to time in Hell anyway?
“Thisisbullshit,”Itell Kas as we sit at the cafe in Hallowsdeep. “It’s been how fucking long, and we haven’t found him, haven’t even found anyone who’s seen him.”
“We’ll find him,” Kas reassures me.
My focus on killing Beelzebub has become borderline obsessive.
Time in the mortal realm is an odd thing, I guess since I’m not battling with the idea of my morality, it seems to be moving like a blink of an eye. It’s been forever since I’ve had any rumblings of information about Diana from Rainn, and since I haven’t made any headway on the Diadem of Kinship, he seems to have lost interest. It’s frustrating, but putting any faith in an angel seems pointless. Earth is beginning to feel pointless as well.
Time doesn’t heal all things, but time does seem to be making things easier—even if it seems to be moving at an unrealistically fast pace.
To my core, I am an unforgiving person, but there’s a piece of me that wants to forgive Lucifer... and myself. It doesn’t help that my subconscious wants to forgive him too. I keep dreaming about him. Sometimes they are down and dirty. He doesn’t talk much in those, and then other times, they are so sweet and domestic. I want to scream.
The idea of wanting him—that some part of me misses him—makes me feel guilty. He wasn’t cruel to me, but he wasn’t nice either. He gave me pretty words and an amazing orgasm—and continues to in some dreams—but besides that, he can’t give me what I want. I want to be someone’s everything, and I don’t think Lucifer is capable of something like that. He’s hardly capable of being remotely honest with me. Well, in person, anyway. Sometimes in my dreams, he’s so kind and generous with information. I feel like if he was more vulnerable and honest in real life, I wouldn’t feel so guilty about wanting to see him again. I hate that after all this time, my body and mind want him, it’s evident in how often I dream of him. I do love my time with Kas, it’s fun. She’s the first person I’ve ever truly been myself around, and she likes me for who I am. She’s just as violent as me and revels in making the most vile people pay. In many ways, Kas and I are similar. But I can tell she is growing bored. It might not be the proper term, but I think that she needs a new adventure.
I sip my coffee and glance at her. “If you wanted to take a job or something, you could, Kas. I can be left alone.”
She smiles, her long black, matte nails clicking against her teacup. “I know you’re more than capable,” she says, making me grimace. After all this time, no other gifts have presented within me. I have the standard demon gifts of persuasion and strength, but beyond that, there’s nothing extraordinary about me. “I know you can handle yourself. We’ll see if any interesting jobs come up. In the meantime, collecting souls isn’t so bad.”
I shrug my shoulders. As much as I hate to admit it, I liked working with Lucifer more than collecting souls. Mostly because if I find out just how bad they are, I wind up killing them instead of making a deal for their soul. It’s the same result, but it isn’t protocol. Piles of dead bodies make suspicions grow and create more tension in the supernatural community. At least, that’s the spiel I get each time I accidentally get a little too stabby on a mission.
