Chapter 123 Home
She didn’t sleep.
She had tried, somewhere around the second hour, lying on top of the covers with her eyes closed and her mind refusing to cooperate, running through every possible version of what was happening underground in a facility two hours from the palace.
She gave up after twenty minutes and went back to the window and stayed there.
The courtyard below was empty and dark and stayed that way.
She made tea at some point, not because she wanted it but because doing something with her hands helped, and she sat with the cup going cold between her palms and watched the window and thought about Sera counting heartbeats in a cell with no light and thought about Belphegor carrying that thought for weeks and thought about Armageddon’s voice in Lucian’s scrying, too smooth, too even, the voice of something that had learned to sound like a person without understanding what a person was.
She thought about the last time she had seen Sera properly, before everything collapsed.
The morning of the Devil’s death, they had eaten breakfast together and Sera had complained about the bread being too dense and Lilith had told her she was being difficult and Sera had thrown a piece of it at her and they had both laughed and then Morpheus had appeared from somewhere and stolen the piece off the floor and that had made them laugh harder.
That was the last ordinary morning.
She pressed the heel of her hand against her sternum and breathed.
The sky outside the window began to change color around the fourth hour, the demon realm’s particular version of pre-dawn, a deep blue at the edges of the dark that didn’t look like any blue she had seen in the human realm.
She watched it spread and thought about how many times Sera had stood beside her at a window in this palace and commented on the sky, always curious, always finding something to notice, always refusing to let the strangeness of this place stop her from being interested in it.
That was who Sera was. Interested.
Even in a cell with no light she had been counting, finding something to track, refusing to let the dark have the whole of her.
She was so deep inside her own thoughts that she almost missed the sound.
The gate.
She was at the window before she had consciously decided to move, pressing close to the glass, and in the pale pre-dawn light she could see them crossing the courtyard, five figures moving with the particular gait of people at the end of a long night, and in the middle of them, held against a chest she would have recognized anywhere, a sixth figure, small and still and carried with a care that made her throat close immediately.
She didn’t remember leaving her room.
She was in the corridor and then on the stairs and then through the ground floor and the side door and into the courtyard and the cold of the pre-dawn air hit her face and she was crossing the courtyard toward them before any of them had seen her coming.
Belphegor saw her first.
He stopped walking and the others stopped around him and she reached them and her eyes went straight to Sera and stayed there.
She looked terrible.
That was the plain truth of it and there was no softening it. She was thin in a way that didn’t suit her, her face angular and pale, her clothes the same ones she had been wearing the day Malachi took her, weeks old now, and she was unconscious against Belphegor’s chest with her head dropped against his shoulder and her breathing shallow and even.
But she was breathing.
Lilith reached out and touched her face with both hands, just held her face between her palms the way you held something you had been afraid you would never touch again, and she felt Sera’s skin warm under her fingers and real and present and here, and something inside her chest that had been locked tight for weeks broke open all at once and she couldn’t stop it.
She didn’t try.
She pressed her forehead against Sera’s and stood there with her eyes closed and her hands on her best friend’s face and she cried properly, not the careful controlled tears of someone managing themselves in a corridor, but the real kind, the kind that came from somewhere deep and had been waiting for a long time and was not going to be managed.
Nobody said anything.
Asmodeus put his hand on her shoulder briefly and then took it away. Azrael stood close enough that she could feel his presence without touching her, giving her the space of the moment without leaving it entirely. Belphegor held Sera steady and let Lilith have as long as she needed.
After a while she straightened up and wiped her face with the back of her hand and looked at Belphegor.
“Her room,” she said. Her voice was not entirely steady but it was functional. “Take her to her room. I want a healer there before the sun is up.”
“Already sent for,” Lucian said quietly, from somewhere behind her.
She looked at Sera’s face one more time, the closed eyes and the thin cheeks and the slow even breathing, and she felt everything she had been carrying for weeks rearrange itself around the simple fact of her being here, alive and real and home.
“Thank you,” she said, and she said it to all of them, to the courtyard and the pre-dawn sky and the five of them who had walked into an underground facility in the dark and walked back out with what mattered most.
Belphegor carried Sera inside and Lilith walked beside him the whole way, her hand resting lightly on Sera’s arm, not gripping, just present, just making sure, all the way up the stairs and through the corridor and into the room that had been waiting empty for weeks, and she didn’t let go until Sera was in the bed and the healer had arrived and the work of bringing her back properly could finally begin.