“What?” Layla demanded, sidestepping Roth.
“Yes, he’s a Fallen,” I chimed in. “And yes, he still has a whole lot of heavenly fire in him, but he’s still Zayne.”
“Impossible,” Roth bit out.
“I’m standing in front of you, so I don’t know how you think that’s impossible,” Zayne responded. “But to make a long story short, I was restored, given back my Glory. They let me Fall and keep my grace to help fight Gabriel.”
“They let you?” Disbelief filled Roth’s tone. “A restored angel Fall and keep the grace when the only other being that equals that monumental bad life choice is—”
An intense burst of white light streaked across the sky, startling me. I looked up, flinching as another bolt of light ripped through the darkness, slamming down to the ground not too far from where we stood. A boom of thunder rattled my very bones and then the sky erupted in lightning. I jerked back, heart leaping.
“We’re going to have to finish this conversation later,” Roth said.
Dozens of lightning strikes hit the ground, the impact a continuous roar of thunder. Static charged the air, raising the tiny hairs all over my body.
Zayne was suddenly beside me as another thick crack of lightning hit a nearby tree. The oak split straight down the middle and then went up in flames.
Thunder roared through the skies, and the ground...the ground rolled, knocking me off balance. Zayne caught me by the waist, holding me as steady as he could while the earth seemed to quake to its very core. There wasn’t even time to really feel fear or to wonder if standing in a field surrounded by trees was a good place to be in the middle of an earthquake. Everything stopped as quickly as it started. The lightning. The thunder. The earthquake.
Heart thumping, I glanced up at Zayne. “Um...”
Twin bright lights appeared behind us, funneling through the darkness. A creepy, crawling sensation shimmied over my skin as Zayne and I turned to where his Impala was parked. The headlights were now on. So was the interior light.
“That’s odd,” Zayne commented.
A second later, the radio kicked on, volume near eardrum-bursting levels as it rapidly changed channels like someone was in there spinning the dials.
Except no one, not even a really bored ghost, was in that car. It was empty of the living and the dead.
“That’s really odd,” I said.
“What in the Hell?” Zayne murmured.
The radio stopped spinning channels, and the sound...the sound of a guitar riff drifted out from inside the Impala. It was a song. A vaguely familiar one. A scratchy male voice sang, “‘I’m on my way to the promised land...’”
My brows knitted as I started mouthing the words. The chorus picked up in a very recognizable lyric. “Is that...?”
“‘Highway to Hell’?” Zayne finished for me as he looked over his shoulder. “Please tell me he doesn’t have his own entrance song?”
Before Zayne’s question could be answered, the ground by the burning tree erupted. A geyser of dirt and flames spewed hundreds of feet into the air.
I turned slowly, head tilting to the side as I stared into the mass of churning flames and dirt. There were shadows in there, a darkness that took shape, and even with my poor vision I could make out massive wings and horns—wings the length of two Impalas and horns the size of a person.
“He’s heeeeeerrrre,” Cayman’s voice echoed eerily through the phone Zayne held as AC/DC sang “Highway to Hell.”
My mouth dried.
The thing inside the fire stretched toward us. It was a monster made of rippling flames—a type of demon I’d never seen before. Its mouth gaped open in a deafening roar, spitting fire into the sky and across the ground. The heat blew back our clothing and hair.
Dear God, was Lucifer a giant?
Probably shouldn’t be asking God that question, but how in the Hell were we supposed to work with and hide something like that?
Man, this was a bad idea.
The fire monster stretched its arms as it tossed its head back in a fiery laugh.
A very bad idea.
The flames flared brightly and then evaporated. A small breath parted my lips as the fire monster thing shrank down until it was just under seven feet tall.
Definitely a more manageable fire monster size, but still, fire monster.
The grass sparked and then smoldered with each step the creature took as it stalked forward.
“Um,” I repeated, forcing myself to stand still and keep my grace locked down.
“It’s okay,” Roth assured us. “He just likes to make an entrance.”
“Understatement of the year,” Zayne murmured.
Just when I was about to ask if the fire thing was permanent, the flames faded, revealing skin—skin that surprisingly carried the same kind of glow Zayne’s did, but brighter. It did the same thing my father’s did, an ever-changing kaleidoscope of pinks and browns before settling on a tawny hue that seemed neither white nor brown. As the glow receded, the first thing I noticed was that his features were clear to me—well, as clear as they could be in the moonlight, but definitely more visible than Roth’s or Layla’s. The second thing I noticed was how much he looked like my father, even his eyes. They were a vibrant, unnatural shade of blue, and the wings were the same—something else that surprised me even though I knew that Lucifer had retained his wings after his Fall and his grace. I just hadn’t expected them to be so white and pristine, because he was, after all, freaking Lucifer. They were as large as my father’s, stretching at least ten feet. The sculpted jaw and cheekbones were the same. The prominent brow and straight nose nearly identical. The fair, shoulder-length hair also similar. They could be brothers, and it struck me then that Michael and Lucifer were brothers, as were Raphael, Gabriel and all the rest.