“So, I’ll have to teach you to open a portal, but right now, we need to focus on telepathy. We need to get going because punctuality is important to Auntie Lilith.”
I hated going places where I didn’t know the guest list. I needed to know exactly how prepared I was going to need to be to school my facial features around stupid fucking people. I didn’t even know Lilith had a house here or where it was. If the rest of demon kind knew about it, they would have set up a shrine at the front gate and left offerings.
I didn’t really know what to expect when I stepped through the portal, but yeah, this was about what I expected based on the short time I’d met her. It wasn’t some sprawling, gaudy mansion. It was comfortable and cozy, but also sexy.
It also looked like the people I came with were the only people she invited, which I appreciated. Most of the Fallen were cunts and the ones that weren’t I wasn’t all that sure I trusted yet. Lilith clearly had an agenda, but it seemed like it was aligned with ours. I’d hear her out. Plus, I was a little curious why she created Furies because I was guessing it wasn’t just shits and giggles.
“Welcome!” Lilith said, breezing in dressed to the nines.
She’d been gone from Hellwaylonger than I’d been alive and there wasn’t a speck of dust in his place. Also, my mother barely fed me. Her servants weren’t supposed to cook for me. If I wanted to eat, I had to scrape together something myself. You could bet Sydney’s sweet ass in that dress I knew how to cook.You didn’t randomly decide to throw a dinner party in that short amount of time unless you had staff who could throw it together.
Yet this place was still a secret. If my mother knew about it, she’d be using it to better her station. Lilith was sizing me up, and I didn’t know why.
“You’re half Fury, right?”
“Not by choice. My family was all assholes.”
“Hrm, yes. Furies were supposed to be the backup plan in case the angels decided to invade Hell and wipe out the remnants of the rebellion. Angels generally have strong mental shields because of their telepathy, but I’ll tell you a secret they don’t want you to know. If enough Furies press on them enough, they can break through them an infect an entire choir to turn on each other.”
I scoffed. I didn’t know how long she’d be gone, really, but things had gone more ass up with her Furies than any of her other creations and Hell literally had its boot on the neck of several of them.
“Hate to break it to you, but your Furies got all fucked up after you left. Their family trees are basically a wreath. There’s some Hapsburg level malfunctioning in the gene pool. Theyloatheme because they think my father being some deadbeat human is loads worse than my father being my uncle. If a bunch of angels crashed the place, they’d wait until they killed me before they got involved.”
“Hey, I stitched together different magicks and created life, but I have zero control over your personalities and actions. I realize things got fucked up for everyone when I left, but I was grieving Kir too. It ultimately drove Lucifer and me apart and I couldn’t watch him spiral anymore. When Kir was alive, there were factions and prejudices, but it wasn’t likethis.”
“Wait, I thought Kir’s mother was human,” Wrathhog said.
We all did. They didn’t teach much on the rest of the children of the Fallen, but we learned about Kir in school because he was the heir to Hell and he was murdered. Everything we were taught in history class was that Lucifer fell in love with some village girl on the mortal realm and she rejected him and their child when she found out the truth.
“That was the story we gave to protect our child. I have just as many enemies as Lucifer does. I technically rebelled too, I just left instead of starting a war about it. Most of the Fallen don’t like me much either for various reasons. It was my idea to hide it from the ones who do. Loose lips and all. Someone murdered him in the end anyway and it could have been to hurt meorLucifer. I invited you all because we need to find him, but we also need to fixall this.”
I agreed, but the chances of doing that without an all out war were pretty slim. If you had the Furies on one side and the incubi and succubae on the other, they would just cancel each other out without another powerful entity in the mix. We basically had Satan, Wrathhog, and her brothers. We couldn’t count on Abaddon and Sydney could hold her own in a fist fight, but she didn’t know the first thing about fighting with magic.
I’d been told repeatedly the other Fallen weren’t warriors, but they wouldn’t be facing off against other angels with flaming swords. There were so many ways they didn’t need to be and could still wipe out multiple demons at once.
“My dad is with you. I think Abaddon would be too as long as he doesn’t have to get into any type of physical fight. I’m with you and my brothers would be too. I just don’t know how you’re going to be able to do any of thatwithouta fight.”
“Come to the dining room so we can eat and talk. I have a plan.”
Lilith was looking right at me. I wasn’t an angel. I was just a Cambion who was disliked by others of his kind.
Why did I have a stinking suspicion her plan involved a lot of me?
Well, this was the least pretentious dinner party I’d ever been to, and I didn’t want to throat punch anyone at the table like when I got dragged along to something with my ex’s coworkers. I loved Lilith’s place, and the food was fantastic.
But onto this big plan. Kujo was our only hope of finding Lucifer and he’d only just startedseeingthings. Whoever took Lucifer was going to double the Enochian warding, which might make it impossible for him toseeanything again. And even if we did find him, I couldn’t see any way to fix anything here without a fight.
“So, a lot of my spells have been lost since I left. And for what it’s worth, I knew my wing spell was going to work on you because we used it on Kir. I just wasn’t quite ready to deal with airing that secret in front of the other Fallen, mostly because there would be tantrums among my enemies and hurt feelings with my friends.”
I shrugged. I wasn’t mad about that. I would have done it without spilling that secret. Lilith didn’t want to hurt me. As soon as she saw my picture and realized who I was, she came here to help. Now that I knew she and Lucifer were secret lovers and lost a child, I trusted her even more.
“I get it. One of those men could have killed your son. One of them probably did.”
It made more sense than some random angel discovering him on the mortal realm and doing it. Someone had insider information and they only could have gotten that in Hell. Someone had been playing a very long game, and I was certain the person who murdered Kir was trying to get rid of Lucifer. When that didn’t work, they took him.
“You keep sneaking looks at me and I’m guessing it’s not because I look amazing in this suit,” Kujo said.
And fuck him because he did. And then he opened his mouth when I was being insecure about my tits and said the most perfect, panty dropping thing ever. Wrathhog dressed them up like really hot, anatomically correct Ken dolls and every last one of them looked fantastic.
