Chapter 116 The Man Who Tasted Everything
She was almost at her room when she heard him.
Not his voice. Beelzebub’s laugh, which was a different thing entirely, a sound that started somewhere deep in his chest and took its time getting out, the kind of laugh that made the air around it feel larger. It was coming from the dining hall two corridors over and it was the most genuinely cheerful sound she had heard in the palace since before the Devil died.
She stopped walking.
She had been meaning to find Beelzebub for days. Through everything, Belphegor and Mammon and Cain and Lucian coming to her, Beelzebub had remained on the edges of her thinking, the one she kept pushing to the next day because she wasn’t sure how to approach him. He wasn’t like the others. He didn’t move through the palace with agendas or arguments. He showed up, disappeared for days, showed up again, and seemed genuinely unbothered by the war happening around him in a way that was either carelessness or something nobody else in the palace understood.
She turned around and followed the laugh.
The dining hall was empty except for him.
He was sitting somewhere in the middle of the long table, sideways in his chair with one leg over the armrest, eating from a plate that someone had prepared for a much later hour. He was enormous in the way Beelzebub always was, not just physically but in the way his presence spread through a room without him trying. His dark hair was loose and when he looked up and saw her his expression was genuinely pleased.
“Lilith,” he said, like she was exactly the person he had been hoping to see.
“Beelzebub,” she said.
“Sit down.” He waved at the chair across from him with the easy authority of someone hosting in a space that wasn’t technically theirs. “Are you hungry?”
She started to say no and then realized she actually was hungry.
She sat down.
A plate appeared in front of her before she had fully settled, bread and something warm that smelled better than anything she had encountered in the palace recently, and she ate without making it a discussion.
He watched her with the satisfied expression of someone who had correctly read a situation and acted on it, and for a while neither of them said anything and it was not uncomfortable the way silences with most of the brothers were uncomfortable. Beelzebub had a quality of stillness beneath all the largeness of him, a patience that didn’t ask anything of the people around it.
“You’ve been busy,” he said eventually.
“Yes.”
“Belphegor, Mammon, Cain.” He ticked them off without particular emphasis, like he was listing things he had observed with mild interest. “Lucian came to you. Asmodeus was already yours before any of it started.” He reached for his cup. “You’ve been methodical about it.”
“You knew what I was doing.”
“Of course I knew.” He said it without any edge, just simple fact. “This palace has never been good at keeping things quiet. Somebody’s steward always talks.” He looked at her over the rim of his cup. “You didn’t come to me.”
“I’m here now,” she said.
“You are,” he agreed. “Later than the others.”
She put down her bread and looked at him directly.
“I didn’t know how to approach you. The others I could read. I knew what they needed to hear and what they were afraid of and what would make them listen. With you I wasn’t sure.”
He smiled at that, slow and genuine.
“That’s the most honest thing anyone has said to me in weeks.”
“I try not to waste honesty.”
“Good policy.” He set down his cup and looked at her with an attention that was different from what she usually got from him, more focused, less ambient. “Ask me what you came to ask.”
“I want you to support the binding,” she said. “I want all seven kingdoms united through me before Armageddon reaches us and I want to walk into that chamber with every brother committed and I need you to be one of them.”
“And why should I be?”
“Because seven kingdoms fighting separately against what’s coming will lose,” she said. “Not because each kingdom isn’t strong enough on its own. Because Armageddon has spent decades studying the gaps between you. He knows where the borders are and he knows how long it takes for one kingdom to reach another and he knows that by the time six of you understand what he’s done to the seventh it will already be too late.”
She held his gaze.
“The binding closes those gaps. Not by taking anything from any of you. By connecting you through something he can’t study or map or prepare for, because it hasn’t existed before.”
Beelzebub listened to all of this with his elbow on the table and his chin resting on his hand, his dark eyes on her face, unhurried.
“You know what my sin is,” he said when she finished.
“Gluttony,” she said.
“People think that means I eat too much.” He gestured vaguely at the plate in front of him, acknowledging the evidence. “And I do eat too much, that’s fair. But gluttony isn’t really about food. It’s about consumption. About wanting more of everything, more experience, more sensation, more life than any single person is supposed to have.”
He paused.
“I have lived a very long time, Lilith, and in that time I have tasted most of what there is to taste and I have found that the things worth having are almost never the things that look worth having from the outside.”
She waited, because she could feel him arriving at something.
“Your binding,” he said. “On the surface it looks like strategy. Unite the kingdoms, close the gaps, defeat the enemy. Practical. Sensible.”
He tilted his head.
“But what it actually is, underneath all of that, is something that has never existed. A Seraph holding seven demon kingdoms inside herself simultaneously, not as a ruler holds subjects, but as a living connection between things that have always been separate.”
He looked at her with something that was close to wonder, quiet and genuine.
“That is not strategy. That is something extraordinary. And I have not encountered something genuinely extraordinary in a very long time.”
The dining hall was quiet around them.
“Is that a yes,” Lilith said.
“It’s a yes,” he said, and he smiled again, that slow wide smile that made the room feel larger. “I have one condition.”
“Of course you do.”
“When this is over,” he said, “when the binding is done and Armageddon is dealt with and the kingdoms are at peace, I want a meal. A proper one. All of us at this table, every brother, you, Sera when she’s back where she belongs, and nobody arguing about succession or prophecy or anything else for at least two hours.”
He said it simply, like it was the most reasonable thing in the world.
“I want one meal where we are just people sitting together. That’s all.”
Lilith looked at him for a moment.
“That’s your condition,” she said.
“That’s my condition.”
“Done,” she said.
He raised his cup toward her and she picked up hers and they touched them together over the remains of a meal that hadn’t been planned, in an empty dining hall in the middle of the afternoon, and outside the palace the brother war continued its noise and Armageddon moved somewhere beyond the border getting ready for something none of them could fully see yet, and in here there was just this, two people and a table and a condition that had nothing to do with politics and everything to do with what came after.
She finished eating before she left, because he had been right about the food.