Page 119 of The Cruelest Chaos

Lucifer laughs somewhere to my right as I push to my feet, stretching out my legs. “You get it,” he tells Atlas. “If you can find the damn thing.”

“I’m scoping this place out,” Cain says quietly. And then I hear his footsteps as he walks away from us, into, presumably, more darkness.

Someone grabs my wrist and I flinch. “What the fuck?” I hiss, but Lucifer laughs and I smell the cigarettes he smoked before we got picked up at his house as he pushes something into my hand.

“What’s this?” Although I’m pretty damn sure I already know. I pinch the thin rectangle between my fingers.

“Funny, man,” is all he says, and then he starts handing out the folded index cards to everyone, save for Cain, who is gone.

Atlas sighs. “Why do they always give the acid to you?” He sounds a little put out.

Lucifer laughs. “Because they know I’m the only one that respects psychedelics.”

I roll my eyes, unseen in the dark.Whatever.“I’m going to find some light in this place.” I take a few steps in the dark, one hand held out to keep me from running into something. Or someone.

“Good luck with that,” Ezra mutters. “Atlas, where the fuck are you?”

Atlas sounds relieved someone agreed to hold his damn hand when he says, “Over here,” and the two of them move toward one another in the dark.

“Luce?” I call as my hand hits something solid, rough, and misshapen. This is definitely a cave, then.

“Yeah?” Lucifer sounds far away.

“You coming or you staying?”

He’s quiet a minute, and I wonder how often he’s thought about Sid since we left her. I wonder how she’s doing. How Ella’s doing.

Where Ria is.

“Staying.”

I don’t say anything, just nod in the dark.

“We’re going this way,” Ezra says, opposite me. I don’t know wherethis wayis, but okay.

I keep going, running my hand over the rough surface. There aren’t any mountains in the piedmont region of North Carolina, so I’m not so sure this is a fucking cave at all. If it is, it can’t be very big. What’s it carved into? The side of a fucking hill?

I’ve got the folded index card Lucifer gave me in my back pocket and I think about not using what’s inside. I don’t technicallyhaveto. There are no hard and fast rules here. Unlike Sacrificium, the ritual is the time spent without food, alone, secluded.

The lessons learned don’t come from chanting archaic phrases and kneeling at an altar. They come from what meditation is supposed to teach people: how to look inside and not run the fuck away. This is just a more extreme form of meditation.

And like all good extremes, drugs are a jumping off point.

I walk for what feels like forever, but in the endless darkness, five fucking minutes could feel like forever. All this time away from Ella…it feels like forever, too.

I start to think that maybe I’ve been wrong; about Lucifer locking Sid away because he’s a controlling dick. About her unhappiness at her new life being entirely his fault. It isn’t really his fault at all.

It’s the 6’s, sure, but he’s paranoid because he loves her. He doesn’t want anything to happen to her. That’s an excuse all tormentors give in regard to their victim, but it doesn’t really make it any less valid.

Or maybe that’s just what I want to believe, because I’m feeling insanely overprotective of Ella Christian right now and I want to get out of this fucking cave and run home to her.

Fuck her mom. Fuck Connor. Fuck The Ark. She doesn’t need that shit. Connor is, objectively speaking, probably a nice guy. But Ella doesn’t need a nice guy.

She needs someone like me.

A month has passed since I gave her most of my secrets, and she’s still here, isn’t she? She needs me and I need her.

A month, and no more calls to Father Tomas. A month, and she’s not scared of me even though I’ve given her every possible reason to be.