I sheathed my ebonite dagger and picked my way around the bodies to hug Belial’s cheek, rubbing my face against his soft fur. “I’m sure I’ll be called worse things, and I’m sure you’ll flatten them for it.”
“IF THEY EVEN LOOK AT YOU WRONG, I WILL EAT THEM.”
“That’s disgusting.” I kissed the broad plane on top of his nose. “I have to kiss that mouth.”
A tall shape stepped around Belial and I jerked back, but forced myself to calm down and stay put. My mate wouldn’t have allowed any unseen stragglers to survive.
Instead, I was greeted with a surprising sight: Adranos, the new Prince of Treachery. His black horns gleamed like the obsidian of Dis under the crimson sun, matching the same velvet black of his hair and leathery wings.
“Lady Wrath,” he said, inclining his head. I made myself give him a shallow bow; he was, after all, a Prince now.
A Prince in the exact same boat as Tascius, now that I thought of it. Two Nephilim with very different bloodlines, finding themselves forced into new roles because of that blood.
I hadn’t given Adranos so much as a thought since the fateful day Satan had escaped.
He nudged one of the Sin Eaters with the toe of his boot. “I’ve been tracking my father’s loyalists. These ones got away from me.”
“They’re a slippery sort,” I agreed. And now they were extremely dead. That’s what they got for threatening me with rape.
Adranos glanced at me with his warm almond eyes, and then away. He didn’t seem to like direct eye contact for long. “Have you found any sign of your friend?” he asked. “I mean, your succubus friend. The girl like the moon.”
I stared at him for a moment, my heart contracting. The girl like the moon. Even Vyra, with her dislike of men, might’ve melted a little bit over that.
And it was kind of him to think of her. He didn’t know her name or who she was, but he’d cared enough to ask.
“I think we have. We’ve got a good idea of where to look now.”
Adranos nodded again, his lips set in a flat line. “That’s good. I hope you find her.” He paused, looking over the other corpses. “I talked to Leviathan. The assassin was another one of mine. I apologize for that.”
I rested on Belial’s snout, keeping one hand curled into the thick mane near his cheek. “There’s nothing to apologize for. You’re made a Prince under… um… extraordinary circumstances.”
It felt odd to be so close to apologizing to him, for giving my condolences that he’d needed to slaughter his own father.
But I had the distinct impression that like killing Gabriel, killing Mammon hadn’t exactly been a source of disappointment. Adranos’s entire life had been predicated on being the son of Treachery; he’d as much as said at the meeting of the Princes that he expected no one to trust him because of it.
In my humble opinion, he was worth every bit of it. He hadn’t failed us when we’d needed him, and he couldn’t control every demon in the Circle. He’d have to weed them out just like we were going to weed the deposed king.
“You want help bringing them back?” I asked, wanting to make some sort of peace offering, but of course the only offering I could think of would be gory work. “You could make a nice warning sign out of the leftover pieces.”
Something that might’ve been a smile touched his face, there and gone in an instant. “No. Let the wastelands have them.”
I went and gathered Capheira from the top of a dune, where she’d taken shelter from the fight, and led her back to Belial. Tiredness was finally starting to eat at me after a whole day under the endless sun.
I didn’t turn to look back at the bodies. The desert could have them.
And no one would ever think of them again.
17
Lucifer
I woke up elbow-deep in a corpse.
It wasn’t like surfacing from a deep sleep. One moment I was gone, and the next moment I blinked, and my consciousness surfaced with a gasp.
My hands were warm, painted up to my biceps with slowly congealing blood. The scent of copper and ashes filled the air, so thick and choking that not even the slight breeze could wash it away.
I looked up from my grisly task, still gasping for breath like I’d been drowning, the absence of pain a total shock to my nerve endings.