Lucifer stared through the bars at his mother’s head while Sariel grabbed his shoulder and leaned against the cage.
“What just happened?” Sariel asked.
But Lucifer couldn’t answer. He sank to his knees inside his prison. He felt alone and hollow, even with his uncle and brother beside him. Thankfully, everyone else in the courtyard was in just as much shock.
“Deflector?” people continued to ask.
“We don’t have a lot of time, boys,” Batarel said. “So, I will be quick. If there was a time that you should leave Alurabum, now is that time. Public blunders by a new administration are generally met by overcompensating in ruthlessness to maintain a semblance of authority and order.”
Lucifer looked up at Eranos, who was standing on a golden balcony looking down at him.
Batarel pushed Lucifer but didn't break him from his stare.
“I’ve gotten assurances that as long as magic is not used here, the Council will consider any escape attempt to be purely a Courts affair.”
Eranos moved his hand to the railing. He was unabashedly eyeing the Kadingir clan members. Lucifer looked away from the new king and instead watched as a child picked up his father’s head. The demon boy offered it to an older demon but the man pushed it back.
“Put it down, son,” he told the boy.
Put it down, son, Lucifer thought. He imagined his father’s head telling him the same thing. Put it down. Put the rebellion down. Put this new king down.
“Lucifer,” Batarel said, punching him in the arm. “Do you understand?”
Lucifer’s eyes moved back to the balcony. This demon was going to die.
“I don’t do magic, Uncle. So there’s nothing to worry about.”
“I know. I’m talking about you getting out of here. Do you think you can do that?”
But another voice boomed above them all. Eranos was now speaking directly to the Crown Prince.
“General Lucifer,” he said. “No son should ever watch his father and mother die violently in front of him. And nothing I can say now will fully heal your wounds …”
“Watch him,” Batarel whispered. “He’s as slippery as an eel …”
“But you know this enemy better than most. He is your cousin, and from his attacks on us here, I know he is both ruthless and cunning. We need someone equally as ruthless and cunning to lead our men and women into battle. We need a Grand Commander. I want that person to be you.”
The silence was so intense that insects walking across stones startled demons like thunderclaps.
“I will stand by you in whatever you decide to do,” Batarel continued to whisper, “but remember, nothing about this demon is what it seems. He is dangerous, he is a liar, and he is not your friend. And this is not the first king he has killed.”
“What are you talking about?” Lucifer asked.
“King Veldin, during the Goblin War.”
Lucifer recalled meeting the King during a visit with Sariel and Elandril at Primelven University, after Sariel and Elandril had been kicked out of Chaos University for rampant test copying. Veldin was a very quiet and highly revered man in Arnessa, the Goblin Realm capital. Lucifer never saw him again—alive or dead. After the assassination, the goblins recovered the body and hid him from the victorious demons. Lucifer was always thankful for that. When wingless lesser demons in a mob get hold of a major politician, there is no limit to what they will do with the corpses.
“Elandril’s father?”
Batarel nodded. “Eranos was the assassin. He volunteered—requested the assignment before we were even at war. He had a hand in starting that whole mess.”
“No evidence against him, though, I take it?”
Batarel looked directly at Sariel. “There are orbs in the Council Library that can prove it. Section eight I believe.”
Sariel nodded back, and Lucifer bowed slightly toward Eranos.
Put it down, his father’s voice echoed in his mind.
Lucifer straightened himself within his cage and felt Sariel slowly release the bindings on his wings. He tried to keep his tendrils from flailing about. Eranos couldn’t suspect anything.
“You are correct that Jehovah is cunning,” Lucifer said. “And I have every right to hate him and lead armies against him for corrupting my twin brother and attacking our primal pattern with his cosmic death ray. But Jehovah is not the biggest threat to our universe. Enemies fester within our realm, and hollow us out as we go about our daily business. They deprive us of our allies. They murder those that would serve us. They kill us with their words just as surely as any magical super-weapon ever could.”
Eranos gripped the banister in front of him tighter, and Lucifer dropped his wings lower until they reached the ground. He pushed gently against the stone slab to prepare his strike and watched the smaller platform change color and texture in response. He’d have to be quick. He could already see the palace guard mobilizing.
“I believe you manufactured this fracture in my clan. You created an enemy for yourself in the form of my cousin—one you thought you could control, but he has proven far more capable than you ever imagined. But Jehovah is nothing compared to the mortal enemy that you have birthed this day. For you have made an eternal foe out of me in that pool of blood under my mother and father, and I will devote the rest of my life to seeing you meet your own violent end!”
Lucifer’s wings punched through the rocks below him as they lifted his cage to balcony level while others shot into the castle walls and launched him like a missile toward the King. He heard Eranos scream seconds before impact, but the awkwardness of the cage spun him out-of-control, and he quickly lost track of his nemesis.
The cage ripped through the railing and the balcony floor as Lucifer hurtled across the courtyard. He tried to correct his trajectory, but his tendrils hit nothing of substance and did little to soften his noisy impact into the castle wall.
“Guards!” Kimah screamed. “Guards!”
Lucifer wiped blood out of his eyes, and looked up in time to see the King fall from the balcony. Eranos was unconscious. His wings weren’t even out, and he hit the ground hard. Not hard enough to kill him—greater demons were tougher than that, but at least the bastard would feel it later.
Lucifer fumbled around with his chains and checked himself for the source of the blood, but it wasn’t him. A teenager near the cage pointed out the arm stuck between the bars. Eranos’s arm. Lucifer yanked it free and raised it high.
“Today, I take the first piece of this imposter with me. Look to the direction of the deflector for Jehovah, you dog, but you will not know which direction I will hit you from. You may wake in the middle of the night, and I’ll be there—holding your other arm in front of you.”
Hundreds of guards closed in on him. Their swords were out, but they timidly approached. Lucifer dug his wings into the ground once more and launched his cage into the heavens. Faster and faster he rose as his wings dug furiously and violently into Alurabum’s delicate buildings. Behind him, the entirety of the palace guard was in close pursuit.