Page 17 of Each Their Own Devil (Our Lady of Fire #3)

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THE FIRST COUNCIL

“All alliances are but sand upon the threshold; they hold until the tide of ambition washes them away.” — The Book of Open Doors , Book VII: The Return to the Threshold

Lately, fire had been a comfort. When the flames engulfed her, Aleja almost let her body relax, until she remembered that this wasn’t one of the palace rooms full of marble statues she could simply dust down later. A lot of people she cared about were in this room, and she could keep them alive for at least a few more days if she didn’t panic.

“Even if you kill the First, your troubles won’t be over,” said the woman who looked like her but with serpentine red eyes.

Aleja’s fire crackled around her. She was vaguely aware of her audience, watching what must have seemed like a one-sided conversation. “I ate a fig from the damn Tree of Knowledge. What was the point of that if you won’t tell me what I need to know?”

“Fine, Lady of Wrath. Many, many, many, many, many years ago, the first Knowing One—Lilith—was recruited from the humans, as all Knowing Ones have been since. Lilith was clever. The Second would have had no less for his protégé. And when she had access to the tree during the war, she ate, and she ate, and she ate, gathering as much knowledge as she could. She realized that the Astraelis were not her only enemy.”

“What do you mean?”

“The First and the Second should have shut their eyes and slept forever the moment they had given away life and will for all to share freely. Once the First and the Second had minds and desires of their own, it was inevitable that they would become as selfish as all creatures. It was inevitable that power would corrupt. There was just nothing anyone could do about it, until this, the First Council, was formed.”

“The First Council?” Aleja echoed.

But it was already too late for an answer.

Aleja exploded, which was unfortunate.

She was vaguely aware of people scrambling away from her, one of them wearing an enormous, winged mask. The smell of burnt hair filled the air before Aleja could rein herself in, hoping the burning embarrassment in her cheeks would be hidden by the overall sense of burning in the room. Luckily, both the Dark Saints and the Astraelis were hardy. Only Violet, peeking out from behind a chair in the corner of the room, looked genuinely rattled by the inferno.

Nicolas was at her side before her flames fully disappeared, waving them away with a swarm of shadows that tingled coolly against her skin. “Aleja?”

“I’m all right. I…”

“Take a deep breath. Then tell me what you need.”

Aleja squirmed in his grip to pinch the bridge of her nose. “Is there any chance you can send Garm to fetch blue Gatorade from the human world?”

“Garm, do as the Dark Saint of Wrath says!” Nicolas ordered, before Aleja could say it was a joke, dammit. Then she realized, yes, she could actually use a blue Gatorade right now. If Garm managed to acquire one without committing murder, she’d forgive petty theft.

The hellhound disappeared into the shadows, leaving one less thing between her and the faces staring her down from behind the room’s most fireproof objects. With the marble statues, now streaked with soot, Aleja’s audience seemed much larger than it was.

“Wrath?” Nicolas’s voice pulled her back.

“I think I need to sit down.”

Though her eyes were half-closed, she still sensed the uneasy shifting in the room. There was a reason they had held this meeting in a random gallery. No Astraelis had ever been allowed in the Otherlander war room, let alone the Messenger herself. But what she wanted now was the comfortable chair she usually occupied there—the one with its soft leather upholstery—if she was about to tell everyone she loved that they were all about to die.

Or maybe not , said a little voice that was utterly and entirely her own. After all, you know where the First is hiding.

In the end, she realized, many wars could have been averted if only the leaders of the respective armies were so tired, humiliated, and starving that they were willing to share a few bites of cheese and wine in silence in a dusty room that held too many of one side’s secrets.

Aleja wasn’t quite sure when Val had joined them, but he was here now, huddling in the corner beneath his incomplete mask, his bandaged arm cradled against his chest.

No one had said outright that they were waiting for Aleja to speak, but it was obvious all the same. Even Nicolas, seated in his usual chair with an untouched goblet before him, had his silver eyes locked on her face. For the first time in many months, it was uncomfortable for Aleja to be the sole focus of the Knowing One’s attention, considering that nothing she was about to say would be well-received, even by her husband.

For a moment, she was jealous of Violet, who sat by Val in the corner. Aleja almost missed the days when the only person she had to worry about was herself—a scared kid with dark red hair, whose family only ever talked to her out of necessity, assuming the devil would one day take her as the last sacrifice to fulfill her great-great-grandfather’s bargain.

“I know where the First is,” Aleja said. “But it’s not going to be easy to get to her, even if we weren’t going to have to face mutineers along the way. She is surrounded by Authorities who are rallying to protect her.”

“I can help with that,” Violet said softly from the corner.

“There are too many,” Aleja told her, momentarily forgetting that she was supposed to be plotting how to destroy her once best friend.

“All I have to do is draw them away. I can control them, Al. Let me help.”

The Messenger drummed her fingers on her knee. “You’ve proven you can control two at once, Violet. If what the Lady of Wrath is saying is true, then we can expect an army of hundreds. They will not be so easily swayed, and by now, the entire hive mind is familiar with your abilities. If we launch an attack, their first priority will be taking you out. Their next will be eliminating your High General.” The Messenger nodded toward Taddeas. “They’ll want revenge for the two he killed; all the Authorities feel great pain when one of them dies. They will have seen the Dark Saint of Greed through the eyes of their fallen comrades.”

When Aleja glanced at Taddeas, his jaw was set. “If they’re coming after me, then they’re not coming after my soldiers. I can live with that.”

“No one has mentioned yet that this plan involves getting the Otherlander and Astraelis armies to fight together,” Orla said. “Whoever here feels confident enough to negotiate that truce, please raise your hand.”

There was a long silence before Amicia placed her elbows on the table and dropped her chin into her hands. Her bandages were gone, but a pale pink swath of skin on her forearm had yet to fully heal. “My devotees might be convinced to lay aside their differences, considering the stakes. If I talk to them, they might be able to sway others.”

Nicolas nodded slightly. “Do it, Amicia. Val, how long will you need to get the First to assume a physical form?”

“These theories are untested, mind you. Maybe she’ll do us a favor and get so angry that she’ll manifest to kill us all.” Val sighed and adjusted the lower half of his mask, trying to flare out the bottom to compensate for the missing feathers. “But the magic should take no more than ten minutes. This, of course, assumes I’m still alive when we reach her and that the Third is by my side. After the ritual, all we need to do is have him whisk her through his realm and into oblivion.”

“Wait. This whole plan hinges on the Third’s cooperation? Can I remind you that the Astraelis trapped him? He wants no part of this,” Orla snapped.

“He’ll do it.” Again, came Violet’s quiet voice from the corner. “I talked to him a lot while I was in the Astraelis realm. He loved a human woman once. I think he would have let the world crumble if only it meant she could have spent another day with him. And even in his pain, he knows that if this universe ends, it will be like she never existed. I think he’s helping in his own way. If he truly wanted the Avaddon to come, he would have said nothing and let us squabble until the world exploded.”

Maybe Violet didn’t notice the way Bonnie was looking at her from across the room, but Aleja did. It was a complicated expression, and Aleja knew she couldn’t parse it, even if she tried; she had spent her own long months unable to understand her dueling feelings for Nicolas.

“Then we need to get to work,” Nicolas said. His wings spread slightly, forming a black backdrop behind him. “Taddeas, Orla, Aleja—you’re to stay back with me and the Messenger to discuss strategy. Amicia and Bonnie, start recruitment efforts. Convince our soldiers that it’s in their best interest to put aside their differences and march with the Astraelis for now. Merit and Val, you get to work on the logistics. We should be ready to set out in a matter of days.”

“What should I do?” Violet asked, shifting uncomfortably in her chair.

“I suggest you hide , Violet Timmons,” Nicolas answered. “The Otherlanders may be coaxed into working with the Astraelis out of necessity, but they’ll have a harder time accepting a traitor back with open arms. If you truly want to help us, then don’t give anyone a reason to try to stab you in the neck before we can march on the Astraelis realm.”

“I can do something!” Violet said, slapping her hands against her thighs.

Bonnie addressed Violet directly for the first time. “If you truly want to help, then keep talking to the Third. Remind him why our lives are precious.”

“Okay,” Violet said in a half whisper that Aleja only understood from the shape of her lips as they moved.

“I’m scared, Nic.”

“Me too,” Nicolas said. Aleja could barely remember what she had said to prompt his response.

The gray streak by his left temple was invisible now, dampened by the bath they had shared. Aleja could hardly recall the act itself; only the incense-like scent of the soap lingering on her skin proved it had happened at all.

Her mind had been elsewhere—back in the Astraelis realm, perhaps, or lost in the strange inner world she had discovered after eating the violet fig. The red fig still sat tucked in her satchel, but it was not alone. The immortality-granting fruit that Louisa had bargained away remained inside its little golden box.

Violet had looked so sick at the war table. Her voice—which had always been high, bright, and filled with enthusiasm—had trembled with every word. A stubborn part of Aleja reminded her that she shouldn’t feel bad for Violet’s suffering. Yet that same part still remembered obsessively listening to every true crime podcast about her disappearance, as if a few students in their early twenties, recording in a rented basement, might have noticed something that Aleja herself had missed.

“You’re exhausted. Come here.”

“I’m not sure if I can even—” Sex had always been a strange, perfunctory thing in Aleja’s life before she met Nicolas. She’d enjoyed it when it was good, but she hadn’t craved it enough to go out of her way to find a partner when she was so busy with school. Then, the Knowing One had come along and she had finally understood what it meant to crave the touch of their hands against her skin so brutally that it hurt.

But she was so tired now that she swayed on her feet. If the Messenger decided to betray them all and storm the palace, Aleja wasn’t sure that she would be able to muster the will to try to stop her.

“That’s not what I was asking, dove. Lay on your stomach.”

Aleja didn’t so much climb onto the bed as collapse into it, and a moment later, Nicolas’s warm hands were on her back, kneading into her muscles. “This is going to make me fall asleep,” she muttered into the sheets.

“Then sleep,” he said.

“We should talk strategy.”

“We’ve already talked strategy. From this point on, we’ll adapt to whatever happens next. But, if this goes wrong, then we’re going to have to choose a last memory. I want mine to be of my wife in our bed.”

He pressed down between her shoulders, and it dragged an involuntary moan out of her. The heat of his hands made her muscles feel soft and pliant beneath him, and despite her exhaustion, she felt a wetness gathering between her legs.

Aleja, who was excellent at not letting things rest, almost opened her mouth to say something—about the First Tree, about the fig, about the fact that they were going to attempt to kill what amounted to a god in the next few days. But, just this once, she stayed quiet. Nicolas was right. If the world was about to end, then all they had was this.

Above them, their slashed-through portrait watched from across time, and Aleja quietly decided that if they came out on the other side of this alive, she would eat the red fig. She would give Nicolas his wife back, fully and wholly.

He made a sound of protest when she squirmed beneath him, rolling onto her back. “I meant what I said. We really don’t have to?—”

Aleja reached around his neck and pulled him closer, until they touched from forehead to toe. Nicolas did not close his eyes, and the intensity of looking into their brightness was almost painful. His kissed the side of her mouth firmly, tasting of vanilla and woodsmoke. When she felt his heart beating beneath his sternum, the sensation brought a great, nameless emotion moving through her, like a stampede of the monsters they were so adept at creating together.

When she reached between his legs and guided him into her, he did not protest again; she could feel the way his muscles strained as he forced himself to move in a slow, controlled rhythm. She almost begged him to let himself go, tilting her hips up to grind into his thrusts, but as the pleasure built, she timed her breaths to his motions, and it felt like she was under the ocean, rocked back and forth by the endless and eternal movements of the tides.

By the time they came together, she was almost certain that their hearts were beating in rhythm too.

“I have a present for you,” Aleja said flatly. It hadn’t been hard to find Violet after their last meeting, when Bonnie had urged her to speak with the Third. The tarp was back over his cage. Aleja ignored the tight frowns of the Astraelis guards; if they wanted refuge in the Hiding Place, they’d have to get used to seeing a Dark Saint every now and then.

“Is it a knife in my throat?” Violet asked without bothering to get up from where she was seated cross-legged in the grass, picking at a few weeds that had managed to grow from the ground Aleja had scorched during her weeks training with Taddeas. “Don’t bother. Several people are already eager to give me one.”

“A girl can never have too many.”

“In this case, I think we’ll have to disagree.”

Violet looked down too quickly to catch Aleja rolling her eyes—a damn shame. “Here. This fig was gifted by the Astraelis to the family of one of the women your ex-doctor tried to lure to his village. Luckily for Louisa, the Knowing One got to her first. She gave him this in a bargain.”

Violet turned her face up again, her green eyes narrowing. A yellow tint clouded her irises. “It’s not from the First Tree, is it?”

“No. Louisa’s family were members of a cult devoted to the Astraelis. The fig was a gift for them—immortality gained through a few bites of fruit in exchange for servitude.”

Aleja waited for Violet’s reaction. She was a good actress, but Aleja had always felt that Violet was as afraid of being seen as she was of being unseen, maintaining a careful balance. She had presented one face to her thousands of followers, another to her friends, and—Aleja had once believed—a secret final one to her.

“Servitude?” Violet asked.

“I didn’t get much of an explanation. But two points here: you’re dying, and you’re dying.”

“Have you researched this in any way?”

“No, of course not. I’ve been busy.”

Violet rolled her eyes, but even this seemed strenuous enough to make her shoulders sag. “I don’t feel excited about being the Messenger’s kind-of prisoner forever.”

“You figure it out, Violet. Can’t you see that… I’m trying to save your fucking life, okay?” Aleja snapped. “And, two weeks ago, I really wanted to kill you.”

“It’s a peace offering?” Violet asked quietly.

“Take the fig and do what you will with it. If you want to die, then die. It’s out of my hands now.”

When Violet finally made it to her feet, Aleja was struck by how frail her hips and shoulders looked—angled in strange ways that didn’t seem to support walking without losing balance. “You would have done the same,” Violet spat. “It’s only a matter of timing that they hate me and not you?—”

“Half of them do hate me, Vi. You could have told me what you were doing,” Aleja said in a harsh whisper. The Third, privy to their conversation, flicked his tail against the iron bars.

“You wouldn’t have believed me,” Violet said.

“You don’t know that.”

“I do. It was right after the second Trial, when we were forced to betray each other. I was a brand-new person in the Hiding Place, not even a Dark Saint, and suddenly I was going to propose working with the enemy? So I did what I did, and I don’t regret it. If there’s a chance I saved your life, or Bonnie’s, then it will have been worth it. Thanks for the fig, Al. I’ll think about eating it. You can go, if you want.”

“I—” Aleja began. “I miss you.”

She found it was true. Before her Trials, she hadn’t known what it was like to both love and hate someone so deeply that it froze her between helping and hurting them. “But I’m still mad at you,” she continued. “And it’s a kind of mad I’m not sure I can move on from. If you had taken me aside and explained, you know I would have talked to the Knowing One on your behalf. And you know he would have listened to me.”

“I was scared, Al?—”

Aleja raised a hand, palm up. “I’ve said all I have to say. You were my best friend. So, please, eat the damn fig, and if you don’t like the consequences, you can deal with them after we avert the apocalypse.”

“This is a peace offering, isn’t it?” Violet asked.

“Why would an immortality-granting fig at the cost of servitude to my greatest enemy be a peace offering?” Aleja lied.