In Hell, we tell our stories on the surface of things. The histories are forged a piece at a time, hammered on posts and pillars, pounded into the tiled streets. The Spire building, where I’ve lived my whole life, is a celebration of the deeds of my family.
The stairs to the roof are polished to a high shine, carved with engravings of the fallen army. At the top, I push open the little gate and step into the courtyard. Lilith’s garden is a squirming mass of silver flowers and metal vines. My father built it for her. Every leaf and branch is handmade.
She’s sitting with her back to me, on a filigree bench beside a man who isn’t Lucifer. Her hair has slipped loose from its combs, spilling in a black curtain over her shoulders. Her dress is long, red as embers, and open all the way down the back. Her skin is blinding white.
“Come in,” she calls without looking in my direction. “Don’t hover.”
Her companion glances at me and gets to his feet. The heels of his boots are heavy, carved with twin crocodiles, and they clang like bells on the tile roof.
“Look who it is,” he says, smiling broadly, showing gray teeth filed to points. I can tell he doesn’t know my name.
“Daphne,” my mother says, sighing like the word has unbearable weight. Like two syllables can contain a whole tragedy. Then she turns to her latest admirer. She doesn’t even say anything, just lifts a hand and he knows it’s time to go.
When we’re alone, she motions me to sit down. The bench is small and we sit side by side, uncomfortably close.
“I think you should start spending more time with your sisters,” she tells me in a cool, offhand voice, like she’s telling me that smoke rises.
It isn’t what I expected and I don’t answer right away.
She says
sisters
, but really, she’s talking about the Lilim. She says
more
, which implies that I spend any time with them at all. They might look like me, but their fathers are all minor demons like the one my mother just dismissed.
“Why?” I say, trying to sound just as indifferent as she does. “I’m nothing like them.”
“Of course you are,” she says without looking at me.
She stares out at the shining garden. Her eyes are silver-gray, flat and pale. Our faces bear more than a passing resemblance, but my eyes are dark like my father’s.
I don’t point out all the things that set me apart from my sisters and would be obvious if she ever really looked. Like my smooth, translucent fingernails and that fact that I can talk about something besides what it’s like to prowl around on Earth, tricking men into offering themselves up for nothing.
“How do you know what I’m like?”
“Smile for me,” she says, like it will prove something.
I don’t smile. My teeth are my most striking feature, but my mother won’t see it. My whole mouth is full of enamel, white like my father’s, but she’s only interested in the flaws—the twin metal points of my dogteeth, which prove, more than my colorless skin or my black hair, that I’m hers.
“Bad blood will out,” she says, as though I’ve illustrated her point. The look she gives me is triumphant. It says that bad blood is the only kind of blood worth mentioning.
What my parents have is nothing like the crumbling marriages in movies. There are no thrown dishes, no tears or arguments, just Lilith’s endless supply of lovers, and all the ways that she can slash at my father without even leaving the rooftop garden. If I start tagging around after the Lilim, then I’m just another one of those ways. He might not care what her other children do, but he’s less cavalier about his own daughters.
“I’m not going to go do something common so you can gloat about it,” I tell her. “If you’re mad at him, that’s got nothing to do with me.”
Lilith acts like she hasn’t heard. She crouches on the bench, staring down at a huge silver sundial set into the roof at her feet, intent on something I can’t see.
My father gave her six daughters before me and all of them are gifted with some kind of sight. They were all born a long time ago, and maybe that’s why. The world was new and raw, still full of magic. Or maybe it’s just that I was born after my parents stopped loving each other.
The face of the sundial is as smooth as a mirror, and Lilith watches it the same way I’d watch the television. She sees the world in flashes, tiny scenes in every reflective surface. After the Fall and the temptation in the Garden, she and my father were punished, exiled to Pandemonium, and now this is the only way she can even pretend to visit Earth.
She holds perfectly still, ignoring the vines that writhe up from the flower beds, creeping over the bench, winding themselves around her ankles and her wrists.
The murals on the roof are all about the war for Heaven and the Fall. Lucifer, the vengeful outcast and fallen revolutionary—villain of the deepest dye. Lilith, standing alone on the black stone beach. She was pale and remote, the beautiful demoness. He was proud but wounded and saw himself in her.
Now, she’s sitting in a metal garden, in a place she can never leave, and my father is somewhere in a gleaming skyscraper, wearing a tailored suit and overseeing an empire. She blames him for everything.
Below us, the city shines silver, as highly polished as a wish. The streets sprawl out in complicated spirals, winding between glossy buildings. Far out at the center, the Pit glows red with the heat of the furnace.
“I’m not going,” I say.
Lilith smiles into the face of the sundial. “Don’t be ridiculous. You love Earth.”
For a moment, I just look at her. I like paper flowers and Cary Grant movies. I like the stories my brother Obie tells when he comes home after one of his jobs. I can’t say that I like Earth, because I’ve never been there.
Life outside of Pandemonium is for girls like the Lilim, girls who crave things, while I’d like to think my own interest in the world is merely scholarly. A fascination for things rather than people. I keep hoping for some piece of undeniable proof that I’m nothing like my sisters.
If I had the gift of sight, even a little—the power to see the future or divine people’s secrets in a sheet of polished metal—it would show I was meant for something else. But sometimes, especially when the phonograph is playing love songs or James Dean is on TV, I feel strangely hollow, gripped by a want that seems to sit inside my bones, and then I suspect I’m just like the rest of them. Made for preying.
“Are you afraid of Earth?” Lilith says, like it’s a challenge. “Don’t be afraid. You might have weak, worthless teeth like your father, but you have my blood.”
Demon blood is powerful, but hard to predict. On Earth, it can burst into flames or eat through the floor like acid. Some demons find that they can escape through tiny cracks or vanish in a flurry of shadows, and others have skin that can’t be cut and bones that can’t be broken. They eat glass and jump from buildings and climb straight up the walls.
In Pandemonium though, those things don’t matter. Down in the Pit, the damned might shriek and suffer, but we can’t feel a thing. The blood only matters on Earth, because it gives us an advantage against Azrael.
He’s there on the wall with the rest of the archangels, looking righteous, but not beautiful. His features are ruined by a thin, ugly mouth, eyes gouged so deep they look black. They seem to bore into me and I prefer the engraving of the angel Michael. Even with his spear leveled at my father’s chest, he seems noble. Azrael looks like he wants to burn down everyone.
“You don’t have to worry about
him
,” my mother says, turning to follow my gaze. “He doesn’t waste his time on girls like you, as long as they don’t make trouble or stay too long on Earth.”
I’m not studying him though but the engraving of his monstrous beast, Dark Dreadful. She looks like a woman, but sharp-clawed, gaunt, and towering. She does his killing for him because demons are notoriously difficult to destroy. The stories say she’ll tear you open and drink your blood to take away your power, then peel away your skin and string your bones to make garlands.
“He won’t bother you, as long as you don’t stay,” Lilith says again, like the thing I’m scared of is a monster carved on a wall and not the thought of becoming my sisters. “Azrael might do everything he can to keep us from infesting Earth, but he can’t be bothered with the occasional visitor.”
In his portrait, he looks proud and cruel. Behind him, Dark Dreadful towers above a heap of bodies. Her dress is ragged, covered in bones and strands of teeth, braided hanks of hair.
I’ve seen the picture so many times before, but now it bothers me and I sit looking up at it, looking up at Dark Dreadful, and the vengeful face of Azrael. Like something is getting closer and I just don’t see it yet.
OBIE
CHAPTER TWO
M
y mother finally dismisses me, and I go back my room.
The artisans in the Pit have closed the doors to the furnace to let their newest batch of sheet metal cool and the sky is a deep, smoky gray.
Now, with the city dark, I can take out all my pictures and my books and charms and tiny glass figurines—all my things from Earth—and they won’t melt or burn up like they would if the furnace was at full blaze. My favorite artifacts are delicate and bright—paper streamers and tiny dolls with satin dresses and plastic wings. In the twilight, my whole room is cluttered with trinkets.
I’m sitting on the couch with my feet pulled up, playing with a little snow globe that Obie got in Prague. Inside is a figure of a dancer, standing under a leafless tree. When I shake it, white flakes swirl down around her. The only light is flickering from my television, making everything waver.
It’s hard to know what to do about my mother. The fact is, even when I’m so sure she’s wrong, her voice has the ring of authority. I want to think I’m good for more than creeping around Earth like my sisters do. I want
her
to think that. Mostly, I just want to be good for something.
I see the shadow behind me reflected in the globe before I hear Obie’s footsteps. When I look around, my brother is standing just inside the doorway.
He’s dressed like the medical staff at a hospital, in elastic-waisted pants and a short-sleeved smock with no buttons. The whole outfit is pale green and looks like pajamas.
“Hey,” he says. “Do you have a minute?”
I nod, cradling the snow globe in both hands.
It’s a strange question—an Earth question, because there, a minute means something. There are no minutes here and time is a vast, looping thing.
“I brought you a bus schedule,” he says, tossing a folded paper booklet onto the couch beside me. “It’s only for a local line, but I thought you might like the colors.”
Against the backdrop of my room, filled with wind chimes and mechanical toys, he is Easter-egg green, like he belongs here. Under the scrubs though, he’s as colorless as I am, all black hair and white skin.
“Thanks,” I say, thumbing through the pages so they riffle one way, then the other. Each route is marked in a different shade.
Like most of the demon men, Obie works in various cities all across the world, but he doesn’t trade in suffering like they do. When it became clear that he wasn’t suited for Collections, my father took pity on him and now Obie is the sole employee of the Department of Good Works. It’s a better job than collecting, although most of the men would disagree. When faced with a choice, most of them would rather reap than save.
There’s a dark smudge on the front of Obie’s shirt, high up, near the sleeve. It’s small—asymmetrical—and I want to ask where it came from, if someone was bleeding. It would be a silly question, though. In Obie’s line of work, someone is always bleeding.
The people he’s assigned to help are the half-human children of fallen angels. They’re called Lost Ones, and most of them earn the title. I can’t remember an assignment Obie’s had that hasn’t involved a hospital or a prison or an institution. Lost Ones are always in the process of self-destructing.
He picks his way toward me, stepping around a brass floor lamp and a stack of children’s picture books. He drops onto the footstool, facing me with his hands clasped between his knees.
I watch him through the dome of the snow globe. It warps him, but I can still pick out individual features. Mouth like mine. Chin and cheekbones and hair like mine. Eyes, not.
“I’m leaving,” he says suddenly. He says it like he expects me to argue, but the announcement isn’t really worth remarking on. He leaves all the time.
“If you’re going to be anywhere near Malta, can you get me a piece of Gozitan lace?”
Obie plucks at one of the braided tassels on the footstool. Then he shakes his head. “Leaving,” he says again. “Daphne, I’m not coming back.”
And for a moment I just sit, letting the snow globe dangle in my hand. “What are you talking about?”
He looks away and bows his head. “I can’t stay here anymore. I’m just . . . it’s too hard, living here. Pretending like I belong.”
And for a moment, I think I understand what it is that makes him so convinced he shouldn’t be here. His father was an actual man, real flesh, real blood, with a soul and a heart. Virtuous. Mine used to be a star, before he became the Devil.
Then Obie glances up and I wonder how I could have doubted his place in Pandemonium. His eyes are pale gray. He looks incredibly like our mother.
“It’s not pretend,” I say. “This is home.”
He nods, but his gaze is unfocused, like he’s thinking of something else. “Sometimes things change.”
But the fundamental law of Pandemonium is stasis. Nothing changes. “
How
?” I say. “How is that possible?”
“I’m in love,” he tells me, so calmly and so simply that at first, I don’t grasp the meaning. “Her name’s Elizabeth and she’s smart and beautiful, and she understands me. She’s one of the Lost Ones, and she knows exactly what it’s like to be half-human.”