"She is. And very well cared for."
"I always wanted a daughter." He growled and punched the nearest wall before grabbing me and pulling my body into his tight embrace... "I wanted your daughter."
My tears fell unchecked as my heart, barely holding together, cracked into pieces. "Me, too, Lucifer. Me, too."
Chapter 26
Constance-Lilith
It tookus several minutes to calm down. "Let's go sit down and see if we can piece things together." Gabriel put a little pressure on my back to get me to move in the direction of the living room. "We need to compare notes."
Relief at finally having everything out in the open washed over me. I hadn't realized how much guilt I'd been carrying that Lucifer didn't know that I had Michael and Gabriel back.
"I have no notes," I said as I sat up against Lucifer. He needed comfort right now. Hell, so did I. Jellybean settled at my feet. "For my part of it, Gabriel woke me up a few weeks ago. I was pregnant. I didn't want him to kill you until the baby was born. We managed to make it until Ariel was born, I found her a good family and..." I ran through the past few weeks to see if I was forgetting anything vital. "Then we tried to kill you, which didn't work."
Gabe nodded. "Brief, but that's about it. You two were here on Earth with Michael, and I was waiting for you guys to come back at some point, but then the years stretched and stretched. When you hit forty-three, I started searching for you. Took me a while to find you, but once I did, I watched for a couple of days, then woke up Lilith's memories."
Lucifer looked at Michael. "And you?"
He shrugged. "I've had a lot of my memories since we were kids. I knew who Connie was, and you, but some things were fuzzy." He laughed and pushed at Lucifer, who grinned, but his heart wasn't in it.
"The baby?"
"Sandalphon," Michael said darkly. "He has been following Lilith's lack of children for eons, apparently." He rolled his eyes. "Thought he'd be helping by giving her a child."
Lucifer grinned. "I'm glad he did. I know it’s bad timing and coincides with the curse and what the heck we're going to do to solve it, but this is amazing. I'm a father!"
His words shot straight to my heart. I hadn't been looking at it that way.
"You know it was Raphael, but why?"
We stared at each other, all four of us at a loss. "Any ideas?"
Lucian shook his head. "I can't see why an Archangel, one of the highest in the universe, would want the gates to fall. I don't know."
The humans liked to believe the Archangels and Fallen were at a huge war with one another. We were, in some ways. The Fallen believed the humans deserved free will, the right to make choices, make mistakes. Hell worked as a reform school of sorts, with most of the souls that came to us being redeemable. They'd been hurt to the point of lunacy or born with a defect that made their mind work in strange and unsettling ways. Very rarely were they truly evil. Those that were, ended up being demons.
"Does he want Hell on Earth?" I asked. "Could that be his end goal?"
None of us knew. Until we heard from Raphael, his intent could've been anything.
"So, how do we kill me?" Lucifer sat forward and put his face in his hands. "This is a nightmare."
I put my hand on his back. He sighed and stood, pacing in front of the couch. Jellybean jumped up and followed his footsteps back and forth. "How bad are the gates?"
"Bad," I said. "I obviously haven't seen them, but I've seen a low-level demon, and then there's Jellybean."
Lucifer stopped and looked at me. "What about Jellybean?"
Laughing, I waved off his silly questions. "Oh, stop."
He turned around and stared at the dog, who still looked like a retriever. After a few seconds, he stepped back. "Oh. I didn't see that before."
Gabriel waved his hand and the glamour on the Hellhound disappeared. He morphed from a cheery-looking golden retriever to a huge, black beast. His big jaws spread apart in a grotesque doggie grin. Lucifer gave me an incredulous look. "You named him Jellybean?"
Laughing, I grabbed the pooch's head and kissed him. "No. You did if you recall."
Michael and Gabriel burst out laughing, and even Lucifer gave me a good chuckle. "But he showed up here out of the blue. If he got out of Hell, the gates are crumbling. There's no telling how many demons are roaming the world right now."
