AllFreeNovel
Share Us
“No, but I hope it gives you perspective. Maybe a little understanding. We aren’t your enemies, Lucifer—look at us. Angels and demons standing together in Heaven, in the place you were thrown into for your crimes. Together, we have all chosen to forgive you.”
“Your forgiveness implies guilt on my part.”
“Don’t you have any? Not for rebelling against God, but for what you’ve done to us. We’re all you have, Lucifer. She’s gone, and She’s never coming back. You can choose to spend the rest of your mortal existence in here, by yourself, locked away from anyone and everyone who could ever possibly care about you. Or you can take one final, good action.”
Lucifer’s eyes narrowed. “One good action,” he said. “And what’s that meant to be?”
“Undo the damage you’ve done. Fix the machines. Help Azrael.”
“That’s three actions.”
“You’re really splitting hairs, right now?”
His jaw tightened, lips pressing together. “Even if I wanted to,” he said, “I can’t do all of those things.”
“You can’t?”
“You said it yourself—I’m mortal now. Plus, your little cherub friend sapped so much of my juice it’ll take a minute for me to recover, if I ever get it all back.”
“There is a way,” said Micah. “It’s quite simple, really.”
“Oh?” asked Lucifer. “Enlighten me.”
Micah shrugged. “There are more than enough of us here to accomplish all of those tasks if we pooled our resources and did them together.”
“Then you don’t need me, so why don’t you just leave?”
“But we do need you. Your Light, your power, it’s the last true godlike power left. You won’t be able to use it from here, but we… we’d be able to use it out there.”
“I’m not sure I’m catching your meaning.”
“We could’ve taken your power from you already… I’m asking you to give it to us willingly.”
“You want me to give you my power? And then, what… I’d die?”
Micah’s head moved from side to side. “If we’d taken it from you, yes, you would’ve died. But if you give it to us… you would become us. You would truly live on forever, long after we’re gone. We would carry you with us to the end of time, or until some other God gains favor over the race of mortals and we fade away into the halls of memory like so many other deities have before us.”
“And you’re okay with that? Fading away and becoming stardust?”
“From stardust we came, to stardust we shall return. But together we have a fighting chance to fix some of the damage we’ve caused. Help us, Lucifer. Be the angel you were made to be.”
“Help…” croaked Azrael, “us…”
She hadn’t moved. Her face was still pressed against Abaddon’s chest, her hair covering the worst of the damage done to her skull, but she was alive.
“You wanted to win,” said Abaddon. “This is how you win.”
Lucifer’s lips pressed together again, he turned his head to the side, and stared at the cavern wall. He then looked down at me again, at all of us, smacked his lips and said, “What the hell… it beats rotting down here.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
Earth.
Sometime later.
Or maybe this was before? One of the things that I’d had the most trouble with since the fall was keeping track of time. It had a habit of stretching and contracting faster than I could keep up with, and after everything that had just happened—well—it felt like we’d just gone back in time, at least a short way.
Standing on Helena’s battlements, staring across the ocean, it all felt a little different now than it did the last time I was here. There was something about the colors, or maybe it was the freshness of the air. Everything seemed… new, like I was witnessing the birth of something instead of its death.
