Why wasn’t he letting this go?
“Yes,” I said slowly, furrowing my brows. “Of course.”
If I said no, Lucifer would lose his ever-loving shit.
“I see.” Az’s eyes shuttered. “You may go now.”
Shaking my head, I minced out of the club’s main room and headed to the dressing room. That had been a weird-ass exchange. I couldn’t very well say, ‘Nope, the last thing I want to do is have a date with the King of Hell. How about we go back to your penthouse after work? I’ll give you head in the shower like we did earlier today when we were on the run from him.’
That would be jumping right out of the frying pan and into the fire. To put it mildly.
When I pushed into the dressing room, the other girls were mostly ready. Priyanka sat in front of the bank of mirrors, half-dressed and hair uncurled. She flipped a massive golden coin. Heads. Tails. Heads again. Both sides were covered in demon seals, unlike human money. I’d never seen this kind of currency before, but it was the vacancy in her eyes that caught my attention.
I trailed over to her and placed a hand on her shoulder. She jumped. “Everything okay?”
“No.” She threw the coin. It slammed against the mirror, shattering it in an instant. Shards rained down on the array of makeup and hair products scattered across the table. A hush swept through the room.
I knelt beside her, searching her tear-stained face. “Pri, what’s going on?”
She glanced up at me. Her dark eyes were shot through with red. I understood at once what that meant. Pri was a fae, and they could sometimes lose themselves to the ferocity inside of them. She was barely holding on to her humanity right now. One wrong move, and she’d let loose her rage.
“Run,” she hissed. “All of you should run.”
“No,” I said firmly, squeezing her hand. “Tell us what’s going on. We can’t help you if you keep it to yourself.”
“I was seeing someone.” Her voice wobbled as several tears spilled down her cheeks. “A wolf who lived down in the Village. We’d only been out a few times, but…it felt good, you know? Anyway, it didn’t last long. The fallen angels are back to their old tricks.” She motioned at the glass. “I went to see him before work. He’s dead. They sliced his neck. And they left that behind.”
I closed my eyes and wound my arms around her as she cried. Gingerly, Piper tiptoed over to us and fished the coin out of the shattered glass. She held it up before her eyes, squinting at it. And then her mouth dropped open.
“Oh, shit. The bastards.”
“What?” I asked, turning toward her. “Whose seal is that?”
I hadn’t gotten a good look at it, but I’d seen enough to recognize it wasn’t Az’s or Lucifer’s seal. There were similarities, of course. Squiggly, twisting lines within a deeply-etched circle. But I’d studied Az’s ring enough to have made order out of the chaos of those lines.
“It’s Morax’s,” Pri said hoarsely.
My stomach hollowed out. “Morax’s? The one that Eisheth destroyed?”
“It’s the one thing in his life that Az has never been able to move past.” Priyanka swiped the tears away. “It’s a message to him. They’re pissed off, probably because he’s trying to convince Lucifer that they’re lying, delusional, or both. Don’t forget, they know the truth about everything.”
An uneasy chill slithered down my spine. In all the chaos of the past few days, it had been easy to forget about the fallen angels. They’d witnessed Az and his Legion storming in to rescue both me and Serena from their wrath. And then he’d tried to make them look like fools. We thought it had worked. Clearly not. We’d only made it worse.
“I’m sorry, Pri.” Sighing, I pulled her close and wished I could do something to numb her hurt. But I couldn’t imagine how she felt, especially since she’d been the one to find him lying in a pool of his own blood. “You should go home and get some rest.”
“I can’t,” she growled in a voice that sounded far more feral than human. “Lucifer came by earlier and ordered all of us to dance, whether we want to or not. It’s a big night, he said. A special guest will be arriving.”
“A special guest?” I frowned. “Who?”
“It’s the last person you’re going to want to see,” Piper said as she dropped the coin onto the table. “Eisheth is coming toInfernal.”
* * *
Eisheth? Gritting my teeth, I slashed my eyes with a dark liner. I needed to get out of this. And soon. Eishethmorethan knew who I was. She’d been at that damn ball when Az had pretended he wanted to sacrifice my soul. Somehow, he’d convinced her. Andshe’dconvinced Lucifer…kind of. If she saw me here now, dancing in that damn birdcage, it wouldn’t take her long to figure out that she’d been had.
“I need a wig,” I muttered at my face in the mirror. My features were pretty plain, at least compared to the rest of the girls. In the dark, pulsing light of the club, my eyes and nose might not stand out to a vampire like Eisheth. It was this damn blazing hair that was the problem.
I’d tried to die it over the years, of course. Just to try something a little different. The color never stuck. Within twenty-four hours, the red took over like an encroaching storm of kudzu. Nothing could battle the flames.
