There was a portrait above the mantle on the fireplace and fuck me if it didn’t look like me with a dick.
“Is that?—?”
“Kir, your half brother. Lucifer paints. You can only own one of his paintings if you’re filthy rich, but sometimes, he auctions them for a good cause,” Celix said.
It made so much sense. Mom was also an artist. She’d been working as an illustrator when she got pregnant with me, but she couldn’t buy insurance because they decided pregnancy was a pre-existing condition. She had to take a job she hated just for the insurance because kids needed it. She’d take my favorite stories and illustrate them. I could totally see Mom falling for a bad-boy artist.
I looked up at the painting. It wasn’t just that the man in the painting looked exactly like me. Mom made sure I had a decentarts education. I was terrible at drawing, but I could appreciate it. We went to arts museums all the time.
The person who painted this really cared about the subject. Kir was posed with a sword that was covered in green flames, but he had this gentle look in his eyes like he’d only use it if he was forced. I’d never be that. If Lucifer ever chose to paint me with a sword, he’d better capture the ‘cut a bitch’ vibes or it wouldn’t be accurate.
Of course, we needed to find him first.
I was looking at the painting, but Celix and Nero were looking at the bookcase pretty hard. Lucifer seemed to read just as much as I did, though Ihighlydoubted he was reading about some mortal woman getting railed by the dragon king. Kujo was over there, too, and call me curious. I wanted to know what kind of books the devil read.
Celix and Nero were looking on in horror as Kujo started messing with the shelves. They looked like they were scared Lucifer was going to appear in a cloud of brimstone and smite their asses for fondling his books. But Kujo seemed like he was looking for something, so I asked.
“Furies are upper demons. Most of them are uber wealthy, but they are also paranoid. My mother didn’t want me, but she had to let me live with her until I could take care of myself. She wanted me as out of sight as possible, but I figured out her secrets while I kept out of her way. Theremightbe a hidden room in here. My mother had one. If the princes all distrust each other, but don’t want to kill each other, they’ve probably all got one somewhere.”
Shit, this was actually interesting. While he was looking, I was peeping on Lucifer’s books. He seemed to be a history buff and a lot of these were about the mortal world. He seemed really interested in pagan gods, which I was dying to ask him about if we ever found him.
“Here!” Kujo said.
He pressed some button that honestly just looked like a pattern in the wood and the bookcase swung open. They all hung back because I guess they wanted me to go first.
I stepped in and found the light switch. It was honestly alot.The hidden room was big, but this was clearly where Lucifer had been doing his investigation into Kir’s murder. There was a big board set up with photos or drawings of his suspects. There were drawings of people I didn’t know that had to be angels, but he also had the demon princes on his board.
There were massive shelves of identical books with ornate, leather-bound covers that had no titles on the spines or covers. I picked one off the shelf and flicked it open. Shit. Lucifer wrote extensive journals. There were shelves full of them.
I was a fast reader and had been known to one more chapter my way through an entire book in one night. Even if I stayed up and read one of these every night, it would still take me years to get through the collection.
And I didn’t exactly feel comfortable reading any of them. These were his private thoughts he opted to hide in a secret room. I didn’t want anyone reading my diaries, either. But I was going to have to. I’d have to find the most recent ones to find out who might have overpowered him or if he was just thinking of abandoning all of this and his child.
But before I could even think about looking at his board harder or digging through the diaries, this loud, obnoxious alarm started blaring.
Except it wasn’t like an alarm in the house was going off. It was like Hell itself was screaming.
Fuck! Hell had various alarms. This one wasn’t a good one. Most of Hell celebrated when the Cambion alarm went off because we were bringing one of our own home. Personally, I didn’t think it was cause for celebration. Maybe demons shouldn’t be abandoning their spawn in the mortal realm.
This was the breach alarm. The souls were constantly trying to find a way out of Hell. They didn’t exactly know that the King of Hell was missing and that’s what was causing thin spots, but they were exploiting it. The rapists and murderers who didn’t usually play well together were working together to break through.
We were about to explain to her what the alarm was, but the butler was back telling us the princes were here to see her.Fuck.The princes investigated the first breaches themselves, then decided it was too much work. It had mostly been Satan, and a handpicked team trying to wrangle the souls back where they belonged. Satan was here, and he lookedpissed.It was usually not a good idea to make the Prince of Wrath angry.
Asmodeus was smirking, and that usually wasn’t a good sign, either. Whatever was going on, some of the princes looked like they were following Asmodeus for now. Whether it was because they were using him and letting him string his own noose or they legitimately wanted him in charge was anyone’s guess.
Sydney had her hands over her ears, but she was glaring at the princes like they’d tracked dog shit in the house.
“Does Hell have some kind of alarm that unannounced assholes are about to drop by like they own the place?”
I couldn’t help snorting. I didn’t particularly care for it when she was rude tome,but it was satisfying when she threw it towards people I hated.
“There’s been a breach. We’ve decided since you want to claim the throne, you can handle it,” Asmodeus sneered.
“You don’t have to—” Satan started.
“You’re giving me the chance to be a final girl in a George Romero movie? Bullet to the head, right?”
She actually seemed excited. This woman was insane. I didn’t live in the mortal realm anymore, but everyone thought these were drug addicts, not the souls of bad people escaping Hell and jumping into the freshest corpse they could find. She did know she couldn’t just waltz around the mortal realm shooting people in the head like she was living in a zombie movie, right? She was crazy, so she might not know that.
