“Oh my God! Why did you do that to yourself?” But the burns were already healing. “This is mental.”
“It’s your daemon blood, Nadia,” Gabriel explained. “You are from a line he created.”
Nadia scowled. “Does this make you my great-great-great-grandfather or something? If so, those kisses were highly inappropriate and downright disgusting.”
Luc laughed. “There is nothing incestuous about our kiss. I am not your ancestor.”
“How are daemons made? I couldn’t find it in any documents. Just obscure jottings about fragmented souls.”
“True creation belongs to the being you know as God. We call him Father or The Creator. He conjured life from nothing, then gifted his miracle through the procreation of male and female in any species. What I did came after I was cast out.”
“It wasn’t the same?” she asked, curious despite her anger and hurt.
With a healthy sigh and a wry glance at Gabriel, Lucifer explained. “Others fought on my side in the first war between Michael and me. Some were mortally wounded. For those who wished to live, I used the knowledge I’d acquired, working with what remained of their broken bodies and fragmented souls by harnessing the shattered celestial light.”
“What existed was raw power scattered like raindrops on the earthly battlefield, where the war had waged for years,” Gabriel added.
Luc nodded. “I fused the power into the dying, but most did not survive. The ones that did required an additional anchor, so I bound them with my personal essence. They were not truly born of any bloodline. You could say they were constructed and sustained by my will, not my lineage.”
“What about me?” she asked.
“You were born whole from a daemon hybrid and an archangel. There is no shared origin between us.”
Gabriel twisted around so fast that his neck popped. His tone was sharp as nails when he said, “I thought Nadia was created from my escaped essence during the war.”
“No, she was conceived the old-fashioned way.”
“You said daemon hybrid and archangel. Adalyn?”
“And you,” Luc confirmed.
Gabriel paled as he stared, aghast. “But that was almost a century ago!”
“If my math is correct, Nadia is eighty-two years old,” Lucifer replied.
“The gig is up, fellas,” she said in disgust. They had her going until the age thing. How could she have fallen for such an elaborate prank? What must it have cost them in pyrotechnics and prosthetics? And how the hell did Luc perpetuate the sensation of flying and landing in a different location? Drugs? Had he slipped her a hallucinogen this morning?
Pivoting on her heel, she charged for her complex, determined never to accept another danish from him.
* * *
“Is she always like this?” Gabriel asked as they trailed Nadia’s wake.
“Like what?”
He wanted to say his wife, but because no one knew he’d exchanged vows with a daemon, he said, “Adalyn.”
“I didn’t know her as well as you, brother. But yes, she possesses her mother’s temperament.”
“Who has been protecting her all this time?” Gabriel’s curiosity was piqued. In front of him was the daughter he never knew existed, and by some miracle, she’d been hidden from their kind until now. “Who cared for her after Addy’s death?”
“I don’t know, and Nadia remembers nothing from before ‘childhood.’ She thinks she went to college like a mortal. I believe false memories may have been implanted in hers and her friend’s minds.”
Keeping an eye on the sky, Gabriel asked, “You believe her?”
“I do.”
“You hold everyone in suspicion, Luc. Why not Nadia?”
