I thought of Lucifer letting me carve him open. Staying. Coming back. Over and over.
My fingers opened and the knife hit the concrete with a pathetic little clatter.
“No,” I said, willing steel into my voice.
Lucifer went very, very still.
“What did you say?” he asked slowly, each word enunciated as if he were speaking to a child.
Whatever emotion flowed through him was strong enough to shift its focus from Callen to me. Callen hit the ground with a grunt before I saw him sprinting away in my peripheral.
The only sound left was my breathing, ragged and uneven, and the slow, lethal grind of Lucifer’s teeth.
“I said no, Luci,” I whispered. “I’m not going to kill him. I want to strike a new bargain.”
What sort of bargain, I had no notion, but something, anything to make him stay.
Lucifer recoiled like I’d slapped him across the face. “A new bargain? Was the first one not good enough, Dany? Was your life not good enough?” His gaze went cold, then hot, then something in between that burned.
We stared each other down over the corpse of the boy who’d come between us and the empty space where a monster should’ve died.
I didn’t have a good answer, and I could hear my low whine in my ears as I searched for a reason to put between us that kept him coming back.
“Fine,” he said. The word cracked like a whip. “You want a new deal?” Something in the air shifted, thickened. The space between us sang with power, the hairs on my arms lifting. The wind gusted, whipping hair into my face. For a second, the yard flickered—a gravel road overlaid on top of the shipping containers, young me on the ground brutalized and begging for mercy while Callen’s shadow swallowed the world.
I gagged and Lucifer’s eyes went black.
“You have until sunrise,” he said. His voice wasn’t a voice anymore. It wassound: a low, inevitable roll of thunder under my skin. “Kill him, take your vengeance, or I will make you relive your death day in one inevitable loop for the rest of your eternity.”
His words were like a fucking sucker punch to gut. I tried to drag in air, to breathe, but it wouldn’t come. He wouldn’t do this to me. Couldn’t do this to me. Not after–
“Every heartbeat, every pained breath, every beer bottle on a loop. You will never get past it. Never get anything but his hands and your blood and the moment you said yes to me and thought it meant you were choosing something else.”
“You wouldn’t,” I said.
His rigid expression said otherwise, and I stumbled back from the pure, unbidden malice.
“I am the Devil,” he said low and controlled. “There is nothing I wouldn’t do. Especially for someone I—” He cut himself off.
The word he didn’t say hung between us like a guillotine ready to fall and snap the tether.
My eyes burned. “Say it,” I rasped. “Say it you fucking coward!”
“No,” he said. The refusal shook the air and every molecule inside of me. “I am not your next excuse.”
Rage flared, bright enough to punch through the hurt and fear.
“Fuck you,” I choked. “You don’t get to say that to me! Not after–” I choked on a sob as every good thing between us flashed like a montage of memories going through a shredder.
Lucifer stepped back. The shadows clung to him as he calmed the storm and said steadily, “Sunrise, Niepozadany.” Lucifer swallowed and a big part of me hoped it was because this hurt him as much as it did me. “One way or another, your loop ends.”
“Don’t you walk away from me,” I demanded and took one step forward.
“The next time I see you,” he said, already fading, edges smearing into steam left behind in the cold, “either you will be standing over his body, or I will be standing over yours as you beg me to stop the replay.”
“Lucifer fucking Christ!” I screamed, lunging forward, but my hand hit coldair where his lapel had been a second before.
I had only one breath to scream into the night before it shifted around me, his magic manipulating space and time until I was bloodstained and crying on my couch.
