Chapter 106 Twenty with no cake
“You’re twenty today,” Asmodeus said, dropping onto the window ledge of her room without invitation, dangling one leg over the edge like he had nowhere better to be. “And you haven’t smiled once. I’ve been counting.”
Lilith didn’t look up from the book she wasn’t reading. “Go away.”
“See, people keep saying that to me and I never do, so you’d think they’d stop trying.” He plucked an orange from the fruit bowl on her table, tossed it once, caught it. “Cain broke three of Mammon’s windows this morning. Mammon has locked himself in his treasury and is apparently conducting a thorough inventory of every coin he owns. Lucian is writing letters to no one. Azrael has called two formal court sessions before noon.” He paused. “It’s a busy palace.”
“A palace at war with itself.”
“Yes, well. That too.”
She finally looked at him. He looked the same as always, beautiful and careless, but there was something careful in his gold eyes today. Something he was working to hide behind the performance of indifference.
“She’d have made me a cake,” Lilith said. “Sera. She’d have found butter and flour from somewhere and made a terrible cake and sung badly and made me laugh anyway.”
Asmodeus was quiet for a moment. That was how she knew it was serious. He was never quiet.
“We’ll find her,” he said.
“Everyone keeps saying that.” Lilith closed the book. “It’s been a month. Lucian’s spells hit walls. Mammon’s contacts know nothing. Azrael’s scouts come back empty. A month, Asmodeus.”
“Armageddon is good at hiding.”
“Armageddon is getting ready to attack us. Hiding Sera is just a game to him.” She stood, moving to the window beside him, looking out over the palace gardens below. Belphegor had planted something new near the moonvine tree, she noticed. Small white flowers that hadn’t been there last week. She didn’t ask what they were. She already knew.
The gardens looked peaceful. The palace above them was not.
From somewhere in the east wing came the sound of something shattering. She didn’t flinch anymore. She’d stopped flinching around day four.
“Cain is going to burn something important eventually,” she said.
“She burned Mammon’s drapes last Thursday. He’s filed a formal grievance.”
“With who? There’s no one to file it with. That’s the entire problem.”
Asmodeus hopped down from the ledge. For once he didn’t sprawl across her furniture or rifle through her things. He just stood there, and the carefulness in his eyes had shifted into something older, something that didn’t fit his face quite right.
“Azrael called another session this afternoon,” he said. “He’s going to formally declare.”
Lilith turned. “He said he’d wait.”
“He said a lot of things.” Asmodeus spread his hands. “He’s scared, Lilith. The High Council threatened twice more this week. The southern territories are making noise about alliance shifts. He’s doing what he knows how to do, which is lead, even when no one has agreed to follow him.”
“And the others?”
“Cain will burn the session room before she lets him declare. Lucian is circling, waiting to see who gets enough support before he commits to anything. Mammon has done the political math three different ways and hates all the answers. Beelzebub is eating his feelings, which at current pace may have actual geographic consequences.” He paused. “Belphegor hasn’t come out of the east gardens since sunrise.”
She looked back at the white flowers.
“And you?” she asked.
“Me.” He smiled, and it was almost his real smile. “I’m here, wishing a terrible, stubborn, fascinating woman a happy birthday, because someone should.”
She didn’t cry. She had decided, somewhere around the third week, that crying took energy she needed for other things. But she felt it move through her the way grief did when it had nowhere to go, a pressure behind the sternum, a heaviness at the back of the throat.
“I had a plan,” she said quietly. “After the vision, after I declared, I thought, this is the hard part. The hard part was saying it. The rest would come.”
“Plans rarely survive contact with this family.”
“I need the binding to work. Not just because of the prophecy, not just because my mother showed me, but because it is the only way to win against what’s coming. Armageddon doesn’t care which brother sits on that throne. He’ll tear through all of them the same. The only advantage we have is seven kingdoms acting as one.” She turned from the window. “And they’re too busy breaking each other’s windows to see it.”
Asmodeus leaned against the wall, arms crossed, watching her with an expression she couldn’t fully name.
“Say something,” she told him.
“I’m thinking.”
“That’s genuinely alarming.”
“What you need,” he said slowly, “is not to convince all seven of them at once. You tried that in the throne room. It became theater. What you need is one, and then another, and then another. You know how to do that. You spent six weeks learning exactly that in our kingdoms.”
“Azrael won’t listen to me right now.”
“No. Azrael is performing certainty because he has no idea what to do and admitting that would undo him.” Asmodeus pushed off the wall. “But Belphegor is sitting in a garden grieving two people at once. And he believed you before any of us did.”
She had already thought of Belphegor. She had been thinking of him all morning and not letting herself go down because she didn’t know what to say and she had learned, in the last month, that showing up without the right words sometimes made things worse.
“You think I should go to him,” she said.
“I think it’s your birthday and you’re alone in a room with a book you haven’t read, and the person you most want to be with right now is being held somewhere you can’t reach, and doing nothing is going to eat you alive.” He reached over and took her hand briefly, squeezed it once with something that was almost brotherly, and then let go. “Go to Belphegor. Not to strategize. Just go.”
She found him kneeling in the dirt beside the moonvine tree, pressing something small into the soil with the careful attention he gave to everything. The white flowers grew in a loose ring around the base of the trunk. Up close she could see they were not native to the demon realm. They were soft and round-petaled, the kind of thing that grew in human gardens.
He heard her coming, because he always heard things coming, but he didn’t turn.
She sat beside him in the dirt without being invited, and he didn’t object.
For a while neither of them said anything. The moonvine shifted above them in a wind she couldn’t feel.
“Human flowers,” she finally said.
“She mentioned once that she missed white flowers.” His voice was even, careful, the way voices got when they were doing a great deal of work. “She said the demon realm had beautiful things but nothing that looked ordinary. She missed ordinary.”
Lilith pressed her lips together and looked at the small ring of blooms.
“We’re going to find her,” she said. Not the way the others said it, a reassurance shaped to end a conversation. She said it the way she made decisions, the way she had stood in the throne room and declared herself a Seraph and not a possession. “I don’t know how yet. But we are.”
Belphegor sat back on his heels and looked at her with his quiet, patient eyes.
“I know,” he said.
“I need your help.”
“I know that too.”
Above them the moonvine moved, and the white flowers held steady in the dark soil, and somewhere inside the palace something shattered again, the sound of a kingdom learning the hard way what it cost to fall apart.
Lilith was twenty years old today.
Sera was gone.
The brothers were burning what their father had built.
She stayed in the dirt beside Belphegor until the sun moved, and she did not waste the time.