Demon Marked

is worse? Lucifer knows it’s not. Especially to someone like Michael. The pain is fun for Lucifer, but it doesn’t really hurt Michael. It doesn’t get to the heart of him. So he’d wait until Michael’s eyes healed, and then he’d drag up humans from the Pit. Now imagine your favorite torture, then imagine it a thousand times worse, and then imagine it being done to those human souls. That is what Michael’s watching right now. And once they’re down there, it doesn’t matter so much that they’re murderers, that they are the shit of humanity. Down there, they are only people, they’re in agony, pointless agony, because they aren’t burning so they don’t give Lucifer power and they won’t find release, and Michael can’t help them. ”
    Taylor stared at her. Yes. That helplessness would hurt him more than any pain. But, of all people, Lilith knew that? Lilith, who never had a word for Michael that wasn’t dripping with sarcasm or disdain for the “golden boy.”
    “I thought you hated him,” she said.
    Lilith’s eyes narrowed on her. “Fuck you, Taylor.” Her focus shifted to Khavi. “And fuck you, too. Why didn’t you warn him?”
    “I did. Before he made his sacrifice, I told him exactly what it would mean.”
    “Then why the fuck can’t you see how we get him out?”
    “I cannot see what I do not already—”
    “Oh, fuck you again.”
    The grigori tilted her head. “No, I do not see fucking in our future.”
    Khavi vanished. Lilith shook her head, met Taylor’s eyes.
    “You, my office.” She looked around at the gathered Guardians. “All of you. Every spare moment, I want you at the archives in Caelum, in the libraries wherever you can find one, searching for any damn little thing that would help get Michael out of there. So move your asses now, or I’ll have Sir Pup come bite them off.”
    Taylor loved her a little bit right then. She followed Castleford and Lilith back to the office, grateful that Sir Pup stayed behind in the central hub to carry out Lilith’s threat. Once inside, Lilith ripped her hands through her hair and sat heavily in her chair.
    “Fuck.”
    Castleford smiled a little and sat on the edge of her desk, crossing his arms over his massive chest. Without the glasses he typically wore, he looked less like the scholar and more like the warrior—an eight-hundred-year-old warrior who, even though he was human again now, could still see the truth in a person’s answers as clearly as if he read them. Luckily, whenever Taylor lied in front of him, he usually didn’t call her on it.
    “‘Fuck’ again? Now you’re just teasing me, Lily.”
    Lilith glared at him, but even Taylor could see that he’d just pushed Lilith out of her temper. With a sigh, she picked up a file from her desk and tossed it to Taylor.
    “We found St. Croix’s demon.”
    Taylor opened the file to a picture from airport security in New York. Crap resolution, but clear enough to identify them both. “What name did she use?”
    “She went through as Rachel Boyle. Straight on through. She was flagged as missing, not dead—but she’s obviously not missing anymore, is she? She’s never been charged with anything, and she’s a citizen, so they basically just said, ‘Come on in.’ Idiots.”
    “Why would a demon use an airport at all?” Taylor wondered.
    “Maybe she’s trying to convince St. Croix that she’s human,” Lilith said. “But I don’t think so. He wouldn’t fall for that, and she’s got symbols all over her. So maybe he didn’t trust her not to drop him.”
    Castleford frowned. “Boyle. The same as the double murders Taylor was looking at?”
    “The same,” Taylor confirmed. “We saw her tonight. She wore the markings then, too, but St. Croix called her Ash.”
    “So St. Croix went to Duluth?” He exchanged a glance with Lilith. “ With the demon who was pretending to be Rachel’s ghost?”
    Lilith shook her head. “That makes no sense. No sense at all.”
    They’d only heard the beginning of it. “Let me tell you the rest,” Taylor said.
    She relayed the meeting with St. Croix outside of the sheriff’s office, the burst of grief that had led them to the snow-covered field, Nicholas’s defense of the demon.
    “This is the crazy part, and I’m not really clear on it, because as soon as I saw her, Michael jumped in and began steering the boat,” Taylor told them. “And he was . . . angry. Not at the demon, but that kind of anger that comes from