Page 123 of The Death Wish

She mattered not.

Very little mattered but reaching the mouth of the beast, finding those hanging folds of fibrous mass that acted as strange teeth.

With each step he took on spongy flesh, the simurgh beat its wings, a powerful brush that seemed to inflate Vassago larger. Returning him to his true vastness.

The Cultivation readied to play its part. Now the Berserker Prince would do the same.

CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR

FOR Afrail creature Seraphiel held significant weight. Lucifer struggled as he moved him from the ballroom, where he had collapsed beneath the chandelier of bone flowers, with an obsidian mirror clutched tight in his grip. Lucifer could not loosen it when he gathered up the angel; Seraphiel snarling like a rapid dog until he desisted. The ground and walls trembled, as though a great storm churned beyond the windows. One blow had been violent enough to rattle all the chandeliers in the ballroom. But he knew it was no natural storm.

Lucifer leaned heavily upon his walking cane, whilst trying to keep the angel upright and moving, in a palace that seemed set to shake itself apart.

‘Jacquetta!’ Lucifer bellowed, not for the first time. ‘Blast you. Come and guide me.’

Seraphiel was a muttering imbecile, and Michael held the Sanctuary’s Ferryman hostage.

This was not a fortuitous day.

And this damned labyrinth of a palace bamboozled him. He wished to return Seraphiel to the bedroom he’d been found in, the same bed Lucifer had been relegated to–at the angel’s insistence–after his blood was taken for the Cultivation. But he was damned if he could recall which hallway led there. So far he’d only discovered sitting rooms with no settees, a diningroom with lavishly cushioned chairs, and another bloody music room; the piano covered in a sheet of delicate golden lace. None of the rooms, save perhaps for the dining room where he might have laid the angel out on the table, had anything remotely suitable for reclining the failing Seraph.

Glassware rattled in buffets and ever-present ferns shivered in their pots, as yet another blow struck.

‘Coming, your majesty!’

At long last, Jacquetta appeared, running down the length of yet another corridor that seemed to have no end. Lucifer longed for his simpler confines in the Arcadian Siltron Ranges, his tower of retreat, with a handful of rooms, beautiful for their plainness. Seraphiel had always pushed for elaborate redecoration, but grandeur made Lucifer’s head ache.

‘Where have you been?’ Lucifer glowered. ‘Where are his grace’s rooms? He must be in his bed.’

‘This way, your majesty.’

He did not like the haunted look on the Child’s face; she knew things he was not going to enjoy hearing.

‘Quickly,’ he hissed.

The angel found some strength and tried to wriggle from Lucifer’s gathered embrace. ‘No time…Luci…he will ruin it all.’

‘Stay still, blast you, or you’ll put us both on our arses.’

Lucifer was dizzy, among many other things. The blood Seraphiel had taken from him to repair and fortify the Cultivation was not regenerating. He was drained and was not filling. He’d hardly expected to feel sprightly after such a taxing undertaking being performed upon his beleaguered, dying body, but he’d never had a day in his long life where he did not feel strong.

This was the first.

Still, there had been no alternative. The angel had needed divine magick for the repair. Lucifer was the perfect poisonedchalice; struck by Michael’s halo, and diseased with the Primordial Flame.

Jacquetta moved them down the corridor, throwing many harried glances over her shoulder. Lucifer suspected she wished to tell them to hurry the blazes up, but would never dare.

His stomach churned, and if not for the cane, he doubted he’d be on his feet, but he could hardly have draped Seraphiel across his knees and wheeled about in that confounded chair. The cane had been a hurried and fortuitous find in Seraphiel’s bedchamber. One very unlike the angel to own. But then, the Seraph had not been himself for a long time.

‘This one. It is closer than his chambers, and he favours this room. There is no bed, but a settee to lie his grace upon.’

Lucifer glared at her back, but chose not to admonish her for suggesting Lord Enoch’s Highest Angel should be settled on a mere settee.

Lucifer dragged the still-protesting angel into the room.

A library. Bookshelves covered all the walls, save for the one where a well-set fire crackled in the hearth of a dark wood mantle. Books everywhere he looked, floor to high ceiling. Lucifer relaxed in his struggle with the angel, staring open-mouthed. Jacquetta moved in to take the weight of Seraphiel from him.

Lucifer drank the room in; embellished spines, thick tomes with glorious calligraphy naming them, a gilded ladder on wheels to move about and reach the top of those impossibly tall shelves, overstuffed armchairs one could sink into for days.