Who’s there? I thought, lacing up my boots and standing.
Silence followed.
I stopped halfway to the door. He could tear down my simplistic block and come in at any time, so I wasn’t sure what game he was playing. But then—
That accursed joke is the only one I remember from the Brink. Madman?
The grin wouldn’t stay suppressed. Madman who?
Madman feet…open the door. No, that’s not right.
I tore down the magic. Given the doors hadn’t been fixed, there Lucifer stood, in the same white button-up and jeans as always, black hair slicked back and power brimming within his velvet-brown eyes.
“Fail,” I said, laughing. “It’s Madam. Knock, knock, who’s there? Madam. Madam who? Ma-damn foot is caught in the door, open up!”
“Ah, yes.” He laughed. “My mistake.”
Cahal came to the doorway of his room and Lucifer’s smile slipped, the sparkle in his eyes dimming. Something vicious and wild churned in them instead.
The moment passed in a blink, and he was back to looking at me, his lips pulling up at the corners. “So. You decided to renovate.” He looked up and around, taking in the ruined doors. He tensed in a way I understood. “May I?” he asked, but I was already clearing out of the way.
He crossed the space to where he could view the gaping hole where the other doors had been, covered by my haphazard illusion.
“Not great work.” He winked at me.
“No. I wasn’t trying very hard.”
“Hmm.” He looked upward, at the gaping hole and indigo blue beyond. “The stars disappeared last night.”
“Yeah. My bad. I wanted to breathe air, and the stars got in the way.”
“Pesky things.” If he was mad, or even annoyed, he didn’t show it. His head stayed tilted, and his eyes roamed the harsh hole. Finally, he lowered his face to look at me. “Should we repair it? Or leave it?”
My eyebrows ticked up, and a glow warmed my middle. I was just about to ask, “You aren’t mad?” like any kid would, ever. Like I’d asked my mother several times growing up, when she was doing her best to teach me and my train left the rails. It hadn’t been like that with Darius, though, when he’d helped me with my ice magic. With him, I’d apologized, as an equal.
That thought made me hyperaware that everything in me recognized this guy in front of me as a parent figure, not just a mentor. It was…disconcerting. I never thought I’d think of him that way.
I certainly didn’t want to give him the power of knowing that. Not until I had more power of my own.
Trust me to get into a screwed-up situation. It seemed to be my lot in life.
“Repair it, I think,” I said, double-checking to make sure my thoughts remained mine alone.
He nodded, looking back up at it. “It’s rough. The lines, I mean. The shape is…off.”
“My goal was to get beyond it, not create a masterpiece out of it.”
“Within destruction, there is always an opportunity for a masterpiece.” He put up his hands, fingers together. A blast of hellfire streamed from each, through the center of the hole. He then moved his hands apart, the streams hitting the edges of the hole before traveling in a circle. Halfway through, he stopped. “I didn’t even ask—did you want a circle or an oval? I can cut at an angle.”
“Oval. Why go for the expected?”
He looked at me a beat too long, something I couldn’t identify moving within his gaze. He went back to the ceiling. “Yes.” He started again, and then paused. “Ye-es.”
In a rush of movement, he ceased the hellfire, slapped his hands together, lowered them a little, and blasted out again, the fire now sweeping up the sides of the tower, just below the cut-off top.
“The unexpected,” he shouted over the noise of grinding stone as he spread his hands apart wider and moved them through the air. He cut perfect waves into the ceiling, rolling berms, as though by a machine and not his steady hand. “The rush of power. The rage. Within it, the beauty. That is hellfire.”
The small hairs stood up on my arms. Electricity lit my body.
“Catch it, or we’ll be crushed,” he said.
Dust rained down. Parts of the already-ruined ceiling broke off, hurtling right for his head.
I caught the debris without thinking.
“I could’ve just killed you,” I shouted over the din as more of the building fell. I lifted my other hand, wanting the visual so I didn’t mess up.
“No, I would’ve killed me. You would’ve just placidly watched my death.”
He ceased the hellfire as the last of the cut was made. I shoved the detached area upward, now hovering in the sky. “Do you want me to drop it, or lower it, or…?”
He stepped back from the center of the room. “Lower it to where?”
“The ground? I don’t know. Where else would I put it?”