Chapter 3: Forgetting Draught
You decide, somewhere between the palace and the hotel, that you are not going to be rescued.
It's not pride. All right, it's a little pride. Mostly it's that you've watched Lucifer's hands while he listened to Vox, the way the fingers curled, the way the room got warmer by a few degrees, and you understand that if anyone lays a hand on you, the King of Hell will take apart a city block to get it back. People will die. Again. Some of them will deserve it. Most of them will be imps who work the switchboard at VoxTek and needed the overtime.
So when Charlie's car drops you at the hotel and you see the two Vee-branded drones circling the roof, and the moth-winged goon in sunglasses loitering by the front steps pretending to read a newspaper upside down, you don't run inside and hide.
You walk right up to him.
"Hi," you say. "You're looking for me."
He lowers the paper. He has four arms and an earpiece, and he looks deeply confused that his target has come to him. "Uh. Maybe."
"You're working for Vox. Ten thousand souls for my name and address." You lean in conspiratorially. "Here's the thing. You know who I am. You've got my face. You could call it in right now and get the ten thousand."
"Yeah, that's the plan."
"And then what? Vox uses me to get at the King. The King finds out who made the call." You let that sit. "Your name's on the tip line, buddy. Your voice is on a recording. VoxTek keeps everything. That's their whole thing. How long do you think it takes Lucifer Morningstar to listen to one tape?"
The goon swallows.
"Now," you say, and take a small brown bottle out of your coat pocket, "this. This is Doctor Bellweather's Forgetting Draught. Distilled from the waters of the River Lethe. One sip and you forget the last twelve hours. You go back to Vox and say you never found me. The King never hears your name. Everybody lives."
He looks at the bottle. It's the last of your Redemption Tonic, with a new label stuck over it in the cab ten minutes ago. It's still cough syrup and rum and wintergreen.
"Does it work?" he asks, hoarse.
You look him dead in his four eyes.
"Absolutely," you say.
He drinks it. He walks away down the street with a vague, peaceful look, holding his upside-down newspaper, and you go inside on legs that don't entirely belong to you and sit down on the lobby couch very fast.
Husk is behind the bar. He pours you a whiskey without being asked and slides it across.
"That," he says, "was the dumbest thing I ever saw. And I used to gamble with Alastor."
"Did it work?"
"Lady, you're breathing, ain't you?"
"Darling," says a voice that crackles like a gramophone, and the whole room tilts a little toward red, "it worked beautifully."
Alastor is leaning against the end of the bar, smiling, which he always is. His microphone staff glows faintly. Static hisses around the edges of the room like rain on a tin roof.
"You know," the Radio Demon says, "I've seen a great many people try to manipulate a Vee goon. Usually they offer him souls. You offered him a bottle of nothing and a frightening bedtime story. Delicious."
"Thanks," you say. "Please don't eat me."
"Oh, I wouldn't dream of it." His smile widens until it's frankly anatomically concerning. "His Majesty would be terribly cross. And then I'd have to be terribly cross back, and the hotel's only just been rebuilt."
The temperature in the lobby goes up ten degrees.
Lucifer doesn't come through the door. He arrives the way a storm arrives, all at once, a sheet of red light that leaves scorch marks on the carpet. He is not small anymore. He is tall, taller than the doorframe, horns curling up from his golden hair and a long serpent's tail lashing behind him, six wings flared and burning at the edges. His eyes are no longer gold and red. They are only red, the whole of them, like coals.
"Where," he says, in a voice that rattles every glass behind the bar, "is he."
"Gone," you say. "Walked off. Very relaxed."
The red eyes find you. Something flickers in them.
"I handled it," you say. "I'm fine. Sit down before you set the curtains on fire. Charlie just bought those."
For a long moment he just stares at you. The wings slowly settle. The horns sink back into his hair. The tail is the last thing to go, curling once around your ankle as if checking you're real before it vanishes. And then he's just Lucifer again, short and pale and pink-cheeked, standing in the scorched middle of the lobby with his hands shaking.
"You walked up to him," he says. "Charlie told me. She called me from the car. You walked up to a Vee goon on the steps."
"He was going to call it in anyway."
"He could have taken you."
"He didn't."
"He could have..." His voice cracks. He looks at Alastor, and at Husk, and then at you, and he says, very quietly, "Can we please do this somewhere that isn't next to the Radio Demon?"
Alastor tips an invisible hat. "Don't mind me. I'm simply a fixture."
Your room at the hotel is small, with a narrow bed and a window that looks out at a brick wall, and Lucifer stands in the middle of it like he has never seen anything so tiny. You close the door. He turns around.
"I was so scared," he says.
He says it like a confession. Like it costs him. And you understand that it does; that the most powerful being in Hell hasn't let himself be scared of losing anything in seven years, because there wasn't anything left to lose.
"I know," you say.
"I don't want a cure." He takes a step toward you. "I thought I did. I thought you'd be a tonic. One hour a day and I'd feel better and I could go back to the ducks. But it isn't like that. When you're not here, I'm not tired. I'm worse than tired. I'm thinking about where you are. And this morning, watching that broadcast, I thought: if anyone touches her I'll burn the whole Pride Ring down to bedrock and I won't even be sorry." He stops in front of you. "That isn't a cure. That's the disease. I think it might be... I think I've fallen again. Isn't that ridiculous? I've done it once already. You'd think I'd have learned."
You put your hands on his face. His cheeks are warm under your palms, those absurd pink spots.
"I sold fake miracles my whole life," you say. "I never believed in a single one. Then a sad man in a hat drank my cough syrup and laughed, and I haven't been able to stop thinking about it since." You swallow. "I'm not lying. I promised you I wouldn't. I've fallen too. It's terrible. I want my money back."
He makes a sound that's half laugh and half something else, and then he's kissing you, and this time it isn't careful at all.
You end up on the narrow bed because there's nowhere else to end up. It creaks alarmingly under the both of you. He laughs into your mouth and you laugh back, pulling his jacket off his shoulders, and he says, "I could take us to the palace," and you say, "Don't you dare," because you want him here, in your room, in your life, not up on a hill in a wedding cake.
There's no slow worship this time. You're both too wound up for it. He strips you with impatient hands and you tear at his shirt until a button flies off and pings against the brick-wall window. He sucks a mark into the side of your neck, hot and possessive, and you arch up against him and grind against his thigh and say his name in a voice that makes him swear in a language that hasn't been spoken since before Eden.
"Tell me you want this," he says, rough, his fingers sliding between your legs and finding you already wet. "I need to hear it."
"I want this. I want you. I want you every day, every night, I want..." You lose the sentence when he curls his fingers inside you. "Lucifer. Please."
He pushes into you in one long stroke, and you both stop breathing at the same time. Then you roll your hips and he groans and starts to move, hard and deep, the cheap bed frame knocking against the wall in a rhythm the whole floor can probably hear. You don't care. You wrap yourself around him and hold on. His wings come out again, not on purpose; they fill the tiny room wall to wall, knocking the lamp over, sending your stack of hand-lettered labels flying like confetti.
"Look at me," he says. "Please. Look at me."
You look. His eyes are gold and red and wide open, nothing hidden in them, no cover at all. He's not the King of Hell right now. He's not a fallen angel. He's a man who's been alone a long time, and isn't anymore.
You come looking right at him, his name on your lips, and he follows you with his face pressed to your throat and one hand laced tight in yours against the pillow.
Later, when the lamp's been righted and the labels mostly gathered up, he lies on his back on your too-small bed with his feet hanging off the end and you sprawled across his chest. One white wing is still out, draped over you like a blanket.
"Move into the palace," he says.
"No."
"Why not?"
"Because I'd never leave and you'd never leave and in a year Charlie would find us under a heap of ducks." You trace a circle on his chest. "Come stay here. Properly. Your daughter built a place for people who want to be better. Be a resident."
He's quiet for a long moment.
"She'd like that," he says finally, and his voice is thick.
"I know."
"You'll still sell me tonic?"
"I'm retiring. I'm told I've found a better line of work." You prop your chin on his chest. "Professional cure."
He laughs, the real laugh, the cork-out-of-a-bottle one, and you feel it all the way through him.
Static crackles in the corner of the room.
You both freeze. The little radio on your nightstand, which you are absolutely certain was unplugged, has switched itself on. A jaunty piano tune from another century plays for a moment, then fades, and the voice that comes through is warm and smooth and smiling.
"Congratulations, lovebirds," says Alastor. "Truly. I'm touched. But I do think you ought to know that Vox wasn't the only one watching last night." A pause, a crackle of laughter from an audience that doesn't exist. "Every overlord in Hell now knows exactly where the King keeps his heart. And Your Majesty... she sleeps in a room with a very flimsy lock."