“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 orbit 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
Nothing 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 tex-ture, 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.