The Fallen Sequence (164 page)

Her mind knew it was Great Deceiver’s first great lie—but her heart felt something different, in part because she knew Lucifer had come to believe his lie. It had a secret, spreading power, like a flood nobody saw.

She couldn’t help it: She softened. Lucifer’s eyes bore the same tenderness that Daniel’s did when he looked at
her. She felt her eyes begin to return this tenderness to Lucifer.

He
still
loved her—and every moment that he didn’t have her hurt him deeply. That was why he’d spent the past nine days with a shadow of her soul, why he’d sought to reset the entire universe to have her back.

“Oh, Lucifer,” she said. “I’m sorry.”

“You see?” He laughed. “You
are
afraid of me. You’re afraid of what I make you feel. You don’t want to remember—”

“No, it’s not—”

From a hidden sheath behind his back, Lucifer produced a long silver starshot. He rolled it between his fingers, humming a tune Luce recognized. She shivered. It was the hymn he’d written, pairing the two of them together.
Lucinda, his Evening Light
.

She watched the starshot gleam. “What are you doing?”

“
You
loved me. You were mine. Those of us who understand eternity know what true love means. Love never dies. That’s why I know that when we hit the ground, when everything starts over, you will make the right choice. You will choose me instead of him, and we will rule together. We will be together”—he looked up at her—“or else—”

Then Lucifer came at her with the starshot.

“Yes!” Luce shouted. “I loved you once!”

He froze, the dull deadly weapon poised above her breast, her earlier soul dangling from the crook of his arm.

“But it was longer ago than you recall,” she said. “You appreciate eternity, but you don’t appreciate how in a moment eternity can change. I did not love you when we fell.”

“Lies.” He lowered the starshot closer. “You’ve loved me more recently than you think. Even just last week, in your Announcers, thinking you loved another—we were wonderful together. Remember nesting in the passion fruit tree in Tahiti? We had earlier moments, too. I expect you’ve been remembering those.” He stepped away from her, studied her reaction.

“I taught you everything you think you know about love! We were supposed to rule together. You promised to follow me. You deceived
me
.” His eyes pleaded with her, conflagrations of pain and rage. “Imagine how lonely it was, in a Hell of my own making, stranded at the altar, the greatest fool of all time, enduring seven thousand years of agony.”

“Stop,” she whispered. “You have to stop loving me. Because I stopped loving you.”

“Because of
Daniel Grigori
, who isn’t a tenth of the angel I am, even at my worst? It’s ridiculous! You know that I have always been more radiant, more talented. You were there when I invented love. I made it out of nothing,
out of mere … 
adoration
!” Lucifer frowned as he said the word, as if it made him nauseated.

“And you don’t even know the half. Without you, I went on to invent evil, the other end of the spectrum, the necessary balance. I inspired Dante! Milton! You should see the underworld. I took the Throne’s ideas and improved them. You can do whatever you want! You’ve missed out on
everything
.”

“I missed nothing.”

“Oh, darling”—he reached for her, his soft hand caressing her cheek—“surely you can’t believe that. I could give you the greatest kingdom never known—we work hard, then we party. Even the Throne offered you the benefits of eternal peace! And what have you chosen? Daniel. What has that haircut ever done?”

Luce brushed his hand away. “He has captured my heart. He loves me for who I am, not what I can bring to him.”

He smirked. “You always were a sucker for acknowledgment. Baby, that’s your Achilles’ heel.”

She glanced at the glowing, still souls around them, millions of them, stretching thousands of miles into the distance, accidental eavesdroppers on the truth about the universe’s first romantic love.

“I thought that what I felt for you was right,” Luce said. “I loved you until it hurt me, until our love was consumed by your pride and rage. The thing you called
love
made me disappear. So I had to stop loving you.” She paused. “Our adoration never diminished the Throne, but your love diminished me. I never meant to hurt you. I only meant to stop you from hurting me.”

“Then stop hurting me!” he pleaded, stretching out arms that Luce remembered encircling her, feeling like home. “You can learn to love me again. It is the only way to stop my pain. Choose me now, again, for always.”

“No,” she said. “It’s really over, Lucifer.” She motioned toward the other angels falling around them. “It was over before any of this even happened. I never promised to rule with you outside of Heaven. You projected that dream onto me, like I was another one of your blank slates. You will accomplish nothing by dropping
this
Lucinda to Earth. She will not return your love.”

“She might.” He gazed down at the angel in his arms. He tried to kiss her, but the light surrounding Lucinda’s falling self blocked his lips from touching her skin.

“I am sorry for the pain I caused you,” Luce said. “I was … young. I got … swept up. I played with fire. I shouldn’t have. Please, Lucifer. Let us go.”

“Oh.” He nuzzled his face into the body in his arms. “I ache.”

“You will ache less if you accept that what we shared is in the past. Things are not the way they were. If you love me, you must find it in your soul to let me go on as I must.”

Lucifer took a long look at Luce. His expression darkened, then turned quizzical, as if he was considering an idea. He looked away for a moment, blinked, and when he looked at Luce again, she thought he could see her as she truly was: the angel who’d become a girl, who’d lived through millennia, who’d grown more and more certain of her destiny, who had found her way back to becoming an angel once again. “You … deserve more,” Lucifer whispered.

“More than Daniel?” Luce shook her head. “I don’t want anything more than him.”

“I mean you deserve more than all this suffering. I’m not blind to what you’ve been through. I’ve been watching. At times, your pain has caused me a kind of joy. I mean, you know me.” Lucifer smiled sadly. “But even my brand of joy is always edged with guilt. If I could do away with guilt, you’d
really
see something big.”

“Free me from my suffering. Stop the Fall, Lucifer. It is within your power.”

He staggered toward her. His eyes filled with tears. The devil shook his head. “Tell me how a guy, with a decent job, loses a—”

“ENOUGH!”

The voice brought everything to a halt. The rotation of the sun, the inner consciousness of three hundred and eighteen million angels, even the velocity of the plummeting Fall itself
simply stopped
.

It was the voice that had created the universe: layered and rich, as if millions of versions of it spoke in unison.

Enough
.

The Throne’s command ripped through Luce. It consumed her. Light flooded her vision, obscuring Lucifer, her falling self, the whole world with brightness. Her soul buzzed with unspeakable electricity as a weight fell from her, zipped into the distance.

The Fall.

It was gone. Luce had been thrust out of it with a single word and a jolt that made her feel inside out. She was moving across a great void, toward an unknown destination, faster than the speed of light multiplied by the speed of sound.

She was moving at Godspeed.

NINETEEN

LUCINDA’S PRICE

N
othing but white.

Luce sensed she and Lucifer had returned to Troy, but she couldn’t be sure. The world was too bright, ivory on fire. It blazed in total silence.

At first the light was everything. It was white hot, blinding.

Then, slowly, it began to fade.

The scene before Luce sharpened: The lessening light allowed the field, the slender cypress trees, the goats
grazing on blond straw, the angels around her to come into focus. This light’s brilliance seemed to have a texture, like feathers brushing her skin. Its power made her humble and afraid.

It faded further, seemed to shrink, condensing as it drew in on itself. Everything dimmed, lost its color as the light pulled away. It gathered into a brilliant sphere, a tiny glowing orb, brightest at its core, hovering ten feet from the ground. It pulsed and flickered as its rays took shape. They stretched, glittering like pulled sugar, into a head, a torso, legs, arms. Hands.

A nose.

A mouth.

Until the light became a person.

A woman.

The Throne in human form.

Long before, Luce had been a favorite of the Throne—she knew that now, knew it in the fabric of her soul—yet Luce had never really
known
the Throne at all. No being was capable of that kind of knowledge.

It was the way of things, the nature of divinity. To describe her was to reduce her. So here, now, even though she looked very much like a queen in a flowing white robe, the Throne was still the Throne—which meant that she was
everything
. Luce couldn’t stop staring.

She was staggeringly beautiful, her hair spun silver
and gold. Her eyes, blue like a crystal ocean, exuded the power to see everything, everywhere. As the Throne gazed across the Trojan plains, Luce thought she recognized a flash of her own face in God’s expression—determined, the way Luce Price’s jaw clenched when she’d made up her mind. She’d seen it in her reflection a thousand times before.

And when God’s face shifted to take in the audience before her, her expression changed into something else. It looked like Daniel’s devotion; it captured that particular light in his eyes. Now, in the slack, open way she held her hands, Luce recognized her mother’s selflessness—and now she saw the proud smile that belonged only to Penn.

Except Luce saw now that it
didn’t
belong to Penn. Every fleeting trace of life found its origin in the force standing before Luce. She could see how the whole world—mortals and angels alike—had been created in the Throne’s mercurial image.

An ivory chair appeared at one edge of the plain. The chair was made of an otherworldly substance Luce knew she had seen before: the same material as in the silver staff with the curled spiral tip that the Throne held in her left hand.

When the Throne took her seat, Annabelle, Arriane, and Francesca rushed to come before her, falling on their knees in adoration. The Throne’s smile shone down on
them, casting rainbows of light on their wings. The angels hummed together in harmonious delight.

Arriane raised her glowing face, beating her wings to rise to address the Throne. Her voice burst out in glorious song. “Gabbe’s gone.”

“Yes,” the Throne hummed back, though of course the Throne already knew this. It was a ritual of commiseration rather than a sharing of information. Luce remembered that this was the purpose for which the Throne had created speech and song; it was meant to be another way of feeling, another wing to brush up against your friend’s.

Then Arriane’s and Annabelle’s feet skimmed the ground and they fluttered up above the Throne. They hovered there, facing Luce and the rest of their friends, gazing adoringly at their Creator. Their formation looked strange—somehow incomplete—until Luce realized something:

The ledges.

Arriane and Annabelle were taking their old places as Archangels. In Heaven’s Meadow, the rippled silver ledges had once formed an arch over the head of the Throne. They were back where they belonged: Arriane just to the right of the Throne’s shoulders, and Annabelle only inches off the ground near the Throne’s right hand.

Bright gaps shone in the space around the Throne.
Luce remembered which ledge Cam used to fly to, which was Roland’s, and which one belonged to Daniel. She caught flashes of Molly’s place before the Throne, and Steven’s, too—though they were not Archangels, but angels who adored happily from the Meadow.

At last, she saw Lucifer’s and her places, their matching silver ledges on the Throne’s left side. Her wings tingled. It was all so clear.

The other fallen angels—Roland, Cam, Steven, Daniel, and Lucifer—did not step forward to adore the Throne. Luce felt torn. Adoring the Throne came naturally; it was what Lucinda was made for. But somehow she couldn’t move. The Throne looked neither disappointed nor surprised.

“Where is the Fall, Lucifer?” The voice made Luce want to fall on her knees and pray.

“Only God can tell,” Lucifer growled. “It doesn’t matter. Perhaps I didn’t want it after all.”

The Throne twirled her silver staff in her hands, worrying a muddy recess into the soil where its end met the earth. A vine of silver-white lilies sprang up, lashing in a spiral around the staff. The Throne didn’t seem to notice; she fixed her blue eyes on Lucifer until his blue eyes twitched up to lock with hers.

“I believe the first two statements,” the Throne said, “and soon you will be convinced of the last. My indulgence has very famous limits.”