Celix moved like lightning and was pressed against my back again.
“Decent reflexes, but in a few weeks, you’ll want to go over instead of under,” she said, exploding at my face.
I blocked her, and she hitmuchharder than any human. And I could appreciate that Celix didn’t jump in and try to take the hit for me. He’d only seen me take down Kujo once, but he trusted I could handle myself. I didn’t think my ex had ever given me that the entire time we’d been married.
I tried to hit her, but she was good. Wrathhog easily blocked me and countered with a kick to my gut. It hurt like a bitch and knocked the wind clean out of me, but I was having more fun than I’d had in a long time.
Kujo and Nero did that whole superhero landing thing they did in movies. Yeah, I was doing all my landings like that when I got my wings. We had her completely surrounded, but Wrathhog wasn’t taking to the air again where she could even the numbers a bit. I didn’t get it.
She was keeping us back with her wings and those were kind of a bitch to avoid. She briefly took all four of us out. I slammed into the wall so hard, I was sure something might be broken, but I jumped right back in.
Was Wrathhog letting us win? She eventually stopped using her wings, too, and was just using her fists. It took all four of us, but eventually Nero got the pressure point in her wings. I’d give it to Wrathhog. She said it hurt like a mother fuck and I could tell her wings just drooped. She couldn’t control them anymore, but she was still fighting us.
She wasn’t yielding, and I wasn’t sure when the fight was supposed to be over. While she was fending off Nero, Celix, and Kujo and she couldn’t use her wings, I jumped on her back and put her in a choke hold.
“Yield!” I yelled.
I thought she was really going to let me choke her out, but she finally tapped my arm and I let her go. She walked us through which pressure point to hit again so she’d have use of her wings since she was one of us and they’d need it for me, too, eventually.
“Thank fuck,” she said, collapsing on a chair and grabbing her water bottle. “It’s the worst when someone triggers that pressure point. What did we learn?”
“Did you make it easy on us?” I blurted out.
“Fuck no. Lesson one. Angels get just as tired as everyone else. Wings are heavy. Flying is easy but using them to fight is not. It tires you out. Your first instinct is going to be to take to the air if you’re in a fight with an angel, but that’s wrong. You only want to take flight if they do and you want to bring them down as soon as you can so you last longer.
“I only did it because I wanted to play and to show you by example that it was easier to beat me that way. When your wings come in, it’s fun. You’re going to want to fly and use them all the time. They aren’talwaysthe answer. Sometimes, they can be your downfall.”
“Noted.”
That made sense. I thought she was making it easy on us to make me feel better, even though I didn’t get vibes off her she was that kind of friend. She was letting herself get exhausted and hurt to prove a point to me because she wasthatkind of friend.
“I’m done for the day. I’m not going to be able to teach you much else. Lucifer and Dad were good friends before he went missing. We were over here all the time as kids. You should explore the place. He’s got several rooms just dedicated to fun shit. I’m out.”
I didn’t need to explore the house for fun. I needed to findanytype of clue as to where Lucifer was.
Wrathhog said she was going home to soak in the tub, but she’d be back in the morning. We had a few hours to kill before bed, so it was time. I hadn’t really explored this house. There was a room that was obviously Lucifer’s and I didn’t sleep in that room. I wasn’t going to go snooping in there either unless I needed to.
Who was Lucifer? I knew the stories. He was a bad guy to a lot of people, but didn’t he just ask for equal rights? If I was a few years older, Mom would have had trouble getting the loans she did without my father in the picture just because she had avagina. Mom was just a kid when schools were desegregated, but she told me how awful some people were about it.
Yeah, I didn’t blame him for that. I didn’t blame him for the rebellion, either. I still wasn’t all that convinced he saw two lines on a pee stick, flipped out, and decided to fuck out of literallyallof his responsibilities, but I was curious to find out now.
Nero, Kujo, and Celix had never met the man. They just heard the stories. They’d heard more stories than I had, so I was letting them tell me as we explored this massive house.
“He’s supposed to be the nicest,” Nero said. “This happened thousands of years ago, but everyone says Hell would be different if his son wasn’t murdered. He had been committed to changes and then it happened. He threw himself into catching who did it and then just withdrew from everyone when none of the leads panned out.”
I just grunted because he eventually had another child and I could have been murdered, too, but demons found me before the angels did.
“Princess, wipe that look off your face,” Kujo said. “I hate everyone in this place except Nero and Celix. Wrathhog is pretty cool, but I don’t know her enough yet to not hate her. Lucifer might be a big cuddly bear for all I know, but he never didmeany favors, so I hate him, too. I’m not particularly fond of you, so I’m not exactly sure why I care that you look upset, but Lucifer took his eyes off his son long enough for a trip to the mortal realm and lost him. Itdevastatedhim. If he knew your mom was pregnant, theonlyreason he wouldn’t be there was if he couldn’t.”
“Well, that was a shitty pep talk and I don’t like you, either, but you’re dealing with decades of abandonment issues and me being a card-carrying atheist, so it’s probably going to take a few days to sink in that my father was Lucifer and he didn’t abandon us, he was probably kidnapped by angels. That’s fucked up. Youcan see how that would be fucked up for me, right? You’re probably going to have to tell me he’s not a deadbeat a few more times.”
“You don’t have to be mean,” Nero said.
“Yes, I do. The sooner she accepts all this, the less likely we all are to get killed trying to protect her.”
Dick. He wasn’t wrong, but give me five minutes. I’ll bet whoever fetched him from the mortal realm when his magic showed up gave him a little more grace than he was giving me. I marched straight to an ornate door at the end of the hall so I didn’t kick him in the nuts again.
I threw the door open and found myself in a study. There was a massive desk in front of a fireplace and books everywhere. He disappeared around the time I was born, so unless Hell had vastly superior technology, I wasn’t going to find a cell phone or laptop some genius might be able to get into that would have all the answers.
