Chapter 2: A Room Full of Ducks
The car he sends is a black limousine with a hood ornament shaped like a coiled serpent, and the driver is an imp who doesn't say a word the whole way up the hill. The palace sits at the top of the Pride Ring like someone set a wedding cake on fire and decided they liked it. Towers, arches, red glass windows, an apple carved into every surface that would hold still long enough.
He meets you at the door himself. No servants. He's taken off the hat, which is unsettling, like seeing a cat without its whiskers. His blond hair is mussed, as if he's been running his hands through it.
"You came," he says.
"You sent a car. It seemed rude not to get in."
"I made dinner."
"You cook?"
"I've had a great deal of time on my hands." He offers his arm. You take it. Under the white sleeve, the muscle is hard and warm. "Don't get excited. It's mostly apples."
It is mostly apples. Apple-glazed pork, apple and fennel salad, an apple tart with a lattice crust so perfect you suspect a miracle was involved. The dining table could seat forty. He has set two places at one end, close together, with a single red candle between them, and he watches you take your first bite like a man watching a jury come back.
"Well?"
You chew. You swallow. You promised.
"It's good," you say. "Really good. The pork's a little dry."
He clutches his chest. "Betrayal."
"You told me not to lie."
"I did, didn't I." He's grinning. He doesn't eat much himself. He spends most of dinner asking you questions. Where you were from. What the Buick looked like. What you sold, and how, and to whom. You tell him about the tonics and the copper bracelets and the Holy Water from the River Jordan you filled from a garden hose in Tulsa. You tell him about the man who came back a year later, not to get his money back but to buy more, because he'd stopped drinking and was certain the tonic did it.
"Did it?" Lucifer asks.
"No. He did. He just needed something to believe in that wasn't himself." You turn your wine glass by the stem. "Most people do. That's the whole business. You sell them a reason to do the thing they already wanted to do."
He's quiet for a while after that. The candle burns down. Somewhere far off in the palace, a clock chimes in a key you've never heard.
"Can I show you something?" he asks.
The workshop is at the top of the eastern tower, and it is full of ducks.
Hundreds of them. Thousands. On shelves floor to ceiling, in glass cases, in a great heap in one corner like treasure in a dragon's hoard. Ducks in tiny suits. Ducks with wings. Ducks painted like every overlord in Hell, and one painted to look like an angel with a spear that has been glued, very deliberately, upside down in a jar.
"Adam," Lucifer says, following your gaze. "Petty, I know."
In the centre of the room there's a long workbench under a lamp, with paints and brushes and a half-finished duck that has long dark hair and a crown.
You don't have to ask who it is. He reaches past you and turns it face down.
"Seven years," he says, without looking at you. "She went up to Earth to spread the word and she didn't come back. I kept thinking she'd get bored. She always got bored. And then one day I looked up and I'd been sitting in this room for a year and I hadn't seen my daughter in months and the only thing I'd made was ducks." He laughs. It isn't a good laugh. "I'm the oldest rebel in creation. I said no to God. And I couldn't figure out how to get out of a chair."
You don't say anything. There isn't anything to say, and he'd know if you tried.
So you do what you'd do for any man at the end of the line, who'd bought every cure and found every one was coloured water. You step in close and put your hand flat against his chest, over the white waistcoat, and feel his heart there. It's going fast. Faster than yours.
"I'm not a cure," you tell him. "I'm a liar from Oklahoma who died in a motel bathtub. I'm not going to fix you."
"I know," he says, very quietly.
"But I'm here. And I'm not scared of you." You slide your hand up, to the collar, to the warm skin of his throat. "And I'd very much like you to kiss me."
He looks at you like you've handed him something precious and breakable.
"Are you sure?"
"Your Majesty," you say, "I have been sure since you drank the cough syrup."
He kisses you.
It's careful at first, almost formal, a courtly thing, his gloved hand cupping your jaw. Then you make a small impatient sound against his mouth and pull him in by the collar and the care goes somewhere else. He kisses like he talks, all in, no halfway, his tongue sliding against yours, tasting of apples and wine and something underneath that's older than the world. His hand moves to the back of your neck. The other finds your hip and pulls you flush against him, and you feel the shape of him through his trousers, already hard, and he groans into your mouth like he's surprised by it.
"Off," you manage, tugging at his gloves. "These. Off."
He pulls one free with his teeth, watching you the whole time, and you nearly come apart right there in a room full of rubber ducks. His bare hand is warm. Warmer than a human hand should be. It slides up under the hem of your blouse and spreads across your back, and his thumb traces the line of your spine, and you arch into him without meaning to.
"Tell me," he says against your throat. "Tell me what you want. I want to hear you say it."
"You. Everything." You're fumbling with the buttons of his waistcoat. There are too many. Whoever invented waistcoats should be in Hell. Possibly is. "Bedroom. Now. Or this bench, I genuinely don't care."
"Not the bench," Lucifer says, a little breathless, a little wicked. "I've waited seven years. You deserve better than turpentine."
The world folds. There's a flash of red, a lurch like missing a step in the dark, and then you're standing in a bedroom with a vast canopied bed, black sheets, red silk, and a window that looks out over the whole burning sprawl of Pentagram City. He is still kissing you. He didn't stop for the teleport.
You undress each other like it's a race neither of you wants to win. His waistcoat. Your blouse. His shirt, which turns out to have been hiding a body that is slim and pale and much stronger than the suit suggested, lean muscle and a fine dusting of gold hair low on his stomach. Your skirt. His trousers. Then he lays you back on the black sheets and kneels over you and just looks, his red eyes moving over every inch of you, and the look is so hungry and so reverent at the same time that you feel it like a hand.
"You're beautiful," he says.
"You're stalling."
"I'm savouring. There's a difference." He bends and kisses the hollow of your throat, then your collarbone, then lower, his mouth hot and slow on your breast, his tongue circling your nipple until it's hard and aching and you're pulling at his hair. He hums against your skin. "Patience. Isn't that a virtue? I wouldn't know. Never tried it."
He works his way down your body like a man reading scripture. Your ribs. Your stomach. The crease of your hip, where he lingers until you're squirming. When he finally settles between your thighs and puts his mouth on you, you cry out loud enough that you're sure the imp driver hears it at the bottom of the hill, and you don't care, you don't care at all.
He's good at this. Of course he's good at this. He's had since the dawn of time to learn the secrets of everything, and he licks into you with long, slow, devoted strokes, then flicks his tongue over your clit until your hips buck, and holds you down with one warm hand flat on your stomach, and lets you ride his mouth. When you look down he's watching you, gold and red, and the look in his eyes is pure pleasure, as if this is the thing he wanted, not anything for himself, just this, just you coming apart.
You come with your hand fisted in the black sheets and his name breaking in your throat. He doesn't stop until you're shaking and pushing at his head, and then he crawls up over you with his mouth wet and a look on his face like he's just invented something.
"Again?" he asks.
"Inside me," you say. "Please. Now. I want you."
Something flares in his eyes. Behind him, shadows unfold. You realise, half-dazed, that they're wings: six of them, enormous and white, filling the canopy of the bed, the feathers trembling. He looks startled, almost embarrassed. "Sorry. They do that. When I'm..."
"Leave them," you breathe, and reach up to touch the nearest feather. It's softer than anything you've ever felt. He shudders all over.
He sinks into you slowly, inch by inch, watching your face the whole time, and the stretch of him is so good it steals your breath. When he's seated fully he stops, his forehead pressed to yours, his whole body trembling with the effort of holding still.
"All right?" he whispers.
"Move," you tell him. "Lucifer. Move."
He moves.
Slow, at first, deep, his hips rolling against yours, and every stroke drags a sound out of you that you didn't know you could make. Then faster, when you wrap your legs around his waist and dig your heels into his back and demand it. His wings curl around you both until there's nothing in the world but white feathers and red candlelight and him, the heat of him, the slick sound of your bodies, his voice in your ear saying your name like it's a prayer he's been waiting eons for someone to answer.
You come again with him buried deep inside you, clenching around him, and it pulls him over the edge after you. He cries out against your neck, raw and unguarded, and his wings beat once, hard enough to blow out every candle in the room.
In the dark afterward, he doesn't let go. He curls around you, wings and all, his face pressed into your hair, and you lie there listening to the slow fall of his breathing and the distant crackle of the city burning below.
"Was that," you ask, when you can talk, "the cure?"
He laughs into your shoulder, warm and low. "I think I'm going to need a lot more doses."
You wake to grey morning light and the sound of a television.
Lucifer is sitting on the edge of the bed in a red silk robe, very still, watching the screen that has unfolded from the wall. On it, Vox's face fills the frame, blue and smiling and broadcasting on every channel in Hell. Behind him there's a photograph: the black limousine at the palace door, last night, and a woman getting out of it.
You.
"Breaking news, folks!" Vox crows. "The King of Hell has a secret sweetheart! Who is the mystery sinner? Where did she come from? And how much would you pay to find out?" The camera zooms in. "VoxTek is offering a reward of ten thousand souls for her name and address. Call now! Operators are standing by!"
Lucifer doesn't turn around. When he speaks, his voice is very calm, which is how you know he's furious.
"Get dressed, darling," he says. "I think someone in Hell has just made a very large mistake."