Chapter 145 The Last Seraph
She walked toward him and he watched her come.
Armageddon did not move toward her. He stood with his hands at his sides and his silver eyes on her face and waited with the patience of something that had been waiting for a very long time.
She stopped ten feet from him.
Up close he was worse than he had been from a distance. The wrongness of him was more present, more specific. She looked at him and thought about Sera in a cell counting heartbeats in the dark and thought about the Devil bleeding out on a throne room floor and thought about everything this thing in front of her had cost and she felt none of what she was feeling leave her face.
“You bound them,” he said. “All seven. I felt it when it happened.” A pause. “I have been watching this palace for a very long time. I watched your parents make their bargain. I watched you arrive. I watched them dismiss you and disbelieve you and refuse to see what you were.” He looked at her. “You are more than I gave you credit for.”
“You killed their father,” she said. “You took Sera. You sent your armies here.” She looked at him steadily. “And you still lost.”
“I haven’t lost yet.”
“No,” she said. “Not yet.”
She came at him.
She came at him the way Zara had built her to come at things, sword first, reading him the way she had spent three days learning to read opponents, and the first exchange was fast and close and his hand caught her blade the way it had caught Cain’s and she had been ready for that and she let the sword go and the Seraph power came out of her other hand and hit him at close range and he went back.
Not too far but not too close either.
He looked at where the light had hit him and something shifted in his face for the first time since he had stepped off the rise.
She pressed forward.
She hit him again, and again, and he came back at her with something that lifted her off her feet and she hit the ground hard and lay there for a second with the breath gone from her body and the grey sky above her and the noise of the soldiers somewhere behind her.
She got up.
He watched her get up and she came back at him and he hit her again and she went down again and she heard the soldiers watching make a sound and she got up again and she came back again and this time she felt the marks on her wrist go warm.
All seven at once.
She looked down at her wrist and the marks were bright and she looked at the battlefield around her and the brothers were moving.
Azrael was on his feet.
He was bleeding and one arm was hanging wrong and he was on his feet and he looked at her across the battlefield and walked toward her and when he reached her he took his place beside her and raised his sword and the light came up in his blade, dim compared to what it had been before the fight but real, still real, and he looked at Armageddon and said nothing.
Cain got up next.
She pushed herself off the ground with both arms and stood on legs that were not entirely steady and the fire came up around her blade, lower than before but present, and she walked to where Lilith was standing and took her place on the other side.
Lucian came to his feet slowly and the shimmer came back around him, thin but functional, and he walked forward and stood with them.
Mammon stood. Asmodeus stood. Both of them were broken in different ways, standing, and both were coming to stand in the line forming around Lilith on the empty battlefield.
Beelzebub got up last among the standing ones, enormous and damaged, and he walked to the line and took his place and looked at Armageddon with the particular expression of someone who had made a decision and was not reconsidering it.
Belphegor could not stand.
He had taken the worst of it and his legs were not working and he knew it and he did not pretend otherwise. He pushed himself up onto one knee on the battlefield and raised his sword from that position and the shadow came up around him, thin and low but real, and he looked at Armageddon from one knee and did not look away.
Seven of them. Broken and bleeding and some of them barely upright, but seven of them, in a line around Lilith on the empty battlefield.
Armageddon looked at them.
For the first time, something moved through his expression that was not patience and not certainty, something that had no name on a face like his because his face had not been built to carry it, but it was there.
Lilith felt the marks on her wrist warm and steady and she looked at the brothers around her and she reached out both hands.
Azrael took one.
Cain took the other and they broke down the line they took each other’s hands, all seven of them, broken and standing and kneeling, connected through her and through each other and through the binding that had been built for exactly this moment, and the power moved through all of them and into Lilith and the Seraph power took it all and held it and what came out of her was not white and it was not gold, it was all seven colors at once, all seven kingdoms at once, and it moved toward Armageddon across the empty ground between them.
He pushed back against it.
She felt him pushing back, the force of what he was pressing against the force of what she was, and she held her ground and felt the brothers holding through her and she thought about her mother in the vision and about Sera counting in the dark and about the Devil’s last words and about a throne covered in black cloth for decades and she pushed with everything the binding had made her.
The light closed around him.
He fought it until there was nowhere left to go and then it was over, quietly and completely, the light closing and Armageddon gone from the battlefield as if he had never stood on it, and the light faded and the battlefield was still and cold and empty.
Lilith stood in the middle of it.
The brothers’ hands fell away from hers and she felt them around her, all seven of them, broken and exhausted and alive, and the silence stretched out across the battlefield and held for one long moment and then the soldiers of the seven kingdoms broke it and the sound rose above the palace walls and kept rising and did not stop.
She stood in the middle of all of it and looked at the rise where Armageddon had stood.
Empty.
She looked at Azrael beside her. He was looking at her with everything he felt on his face and she looked back at him and felt the morning around them and felt it over, genuinely over, and she reached up and touched the necklace at her throat, her name in the gold, warm from her skin.
She looked at the brothers around her, all seven of them, and felt the binding warm and steady in her chest and felt the Seraph power quiet underneath it and felt something that sat between relief and grief and gratitude and exhaustion, all of it at once, all of it was real.
It was done.
She sat down on the battlefield in the middle of all the noise and put her face in her hands and let it dwell that it was finally over.