Page 92 of Wicked Believer

God’s pride at what He had made.

His own emotion bleeding out from His pores while He made love to Lilith—which Azmodeus takes care to narrate inveryexplicit detail—resulting in the birth of God and Lilith’s first and eldest son.

Lucifer. Sammael. The Lightbringer.

God’s own pride in His creation embodied.

According to Azmodeus, each one of the Originals played a key role in God’s own genesis and creation story. The pride He felt at what He’d created. How slothfully He rested when it was all said and done. His envy at man’s innocence. The gluttony and greed He felt hoarding the Tree of Life and its knowledge for only Himself, and the wrath that was ignited in Him when Eve betrayed His first and only command.

When Lucifer tempted her into seizing her own freedom, into gaining knowledge of everything.

I hang on Azmodeus’s every word, listening in a total rapturous awe that I don’t have to fake, the temperature in my body rising at eachunexpected turn of the story. Azmodeus’s descriptions of the Garden of Eden, in particular, are sospecific, so detailed and vivid, that all at once I find myself feeling homesick again.

For a place I’ve never been.

But my heart seems to know it intimately.

Its truths. Its secrets. Its histories.

I glance at my hands like I might be able to see some of God’s redemption inside me, or maybe even Eve’s apple in my palm, but all I feel there is Lucifer’s darkness, the powers he accidentally transferred to me stirring inside me, and yet ...

Iknowthis is the right choice. The right path.

I can feel it thrumming inside me.

Faith.

In God and His plan for me.

When Azmodeus and I have finally made our way through the full exhibit, nearly two hours have passed. It flew by in a blink, but my impression of Azmodeus, of the exhibition, of the story he curated for me, is a lasting one.

Like all the Originals, Azmodeus is more than the sin humanity gives him credit for.

He’s God’s desire for Lilith embodied.

When we reach the last painting, Azmodeus falls quiet, the painting’s narrative taking a dark and menacing turn. A two-paneled diptych. A Van Eyck.

The Last Judgment, the placard reads.

How the story ends.

I swallow thickly, the reminder of everything that’s at stake rushing back to me. “Do you ... do you think that’s why He let you all out?” I ask. “You and the other Originals?”

Azmodeus seems to get the subtext of what I’m actually asking, and his expression darkens, making him look more serious than I’ve ever seen him. “I don’t know, lovey,” he admits. “None of us do.”

I turn back to the painting. Death. Destruction.

A dropping sensation churns my stomach, and I feel temporarily nauseated, my palms turning cold. I have to do whatever it takes to make certain that doesn’t happen.

No price is too high to pay.

Whatever it is, Lucifer has the kind of cash to pay it tenfold.

ButIneed to have the strength.

For both our sakes.

“There’s something else I want to show you.” Azmodeus takes my hand again, but this time it feels intimate in a different way.