Chapter 146 After
The noise from the soldiers was still going when Lilith finally took her hands away from her face.
The battlefield around her was quiet in the way battlefields got quiet after everything was done, not peaceful, just empty, the particular stillness of a place that had held something enormous and was now just ground again.
The sky above was grey and cold and entirely ordinary and she sat in the middle of it and breathed.
Cain sat down a few feet away.
She didn’t say anything. She just sat with her arms on her knees and her head dropped forward and she was bleeding from her side and her shoulder and she wasn’t looking at either of it.
Lilith looked at her and Cain looked back and for once neither of them had anything to perform.
“Your side,” Lilith said.
“I know.”
“It needs looking at.”
“Give me a minute.”
Lilith gave her the minute.
Azrael lowered himself to the ground on her other side, slowly, the arm that wasn’t working held against his body, and he sat beside her and said nothing and she leaned against him and he let her and they sat like that while the healers came out from the palace line and moved through the brothers one by one.
Across the battlefield she could see Lucian sitting with his back against the wall with his eyes closed.
Mammon standing with a deep cut along his jaw that he was ignoring.
Asmodeus flat on his back on the ground looking at the sky with his arms spread wide, waving the healers toward the others first.
Beelzebub sitting cooperatively while someone worked on his ribs, quiet in a way that was its own kind of alarming.
Belphegor sitting against the defensive line with his sword across his knees and his eyes on the palace gate.
She knew what he was watching for before she saw it.
Sera came through the gate running.
She had stayed inside because she had promised and she had kept it through all of it, through the sounds of the battle and the silence after and the noise that came after the silence, and now it was over and she came through the gate and her eyes found Lilith on the ground and she crossed the battlefield without stopping and dropped down in front of her and put both hands on her face.
She looked at her for a long moment.
“You’re here,” she said.
“I’m here,” Lilith said.
Sera pulled her forward and held her and Lilith held her back, properly, the way you held someone you had been afraid of losing and hadn’t lost, and they stayed like that while the morning settled around them and the healers moved and the soldiers began to stand down and the battlefield became something you could look at without it looking back.
When Sera finally pulled back her eyes were wet and she pressed her lips together and looked around at all of it, the brothers and the healers and the empty rise, and she took a long slow breath.
“It’s over,” she said.
“It’s over,” Lilith said.
Sera looked at her one more time and then looked past her to where Belphegor was sitting against the defensive line, and she stood up and went to him without a word, and Lilith watched her sit down beside him and watched him look at her the way he had been looking at the gate for the past ten minutes and felt something in her chest ease.
Azrael’s hand found hers on the ground between them.
She looked at their hands and then looked at him and he was looking at her with everything on his face and she looked back at him and felt the morning and the battlefield and the marks on her wrist and the quiet in her chest where the Seraph power had settled and she felt it all at once, the relief and the exhaustion and the grief and the gratitude, all of it together, all of it real.
She thought about her parents.
The deal they had made before she was born.
The life they had taken from her before she ever had it.
She had spent months grieving that life and sitting here now she felt the grief of it differently.
It wasn’t smaller, it was just settled.
Like something that had found the right place inside her and stopped moving.
She reached up with her free hand and touched the necklace at her throat.
Warm from her skin.
She squeezed Azrael’s hand and he squeezed back.
“We won,” she said.
He looked at her and the corner of his mouth moved.
“We won,” he said.