I wake up filled with lightning. As if my body reached some regeneration point and exploded past it. The ache in my thigh is distant, barely there. I get out of bed in a hurry, ready to leave. This is the only part of the Keep I actively like, though even its extravagant silky textures and brocade goth vibe have started to wear on me.
But it’s been my sanctuary. No longer, it seems.
Father is still here, sitting in the velvet corner chair. That shouldn’t stop me; it does. I sink back down.
“You’re awake,” Father says, a more obvious opening salvo than his usual.
“After you knocked me out,” I say. “I apologize, Father, but I have to get going. How long do we have left?”
He doesn’t move. “Long enough, perhaps. It’s still the second day.”
So I haven’t lost that much time, haven’t abandoned Callie for too long.
“Good.” I stand and head for my walk-in closet across the room. The bandage wrapped around my thigh is the only stitch I have on. Good thing I’ve never been shy about bodies. No one in Hell is.
The sweet, hot way Callie flushes when either of us is missing articles of clothing and I look at her, just look, flashes through my head and I have to banish it. I may not be shy about bodies, but knowing Father is here is enough to chill any amorous longings. She must be furious with me for vanishing and not sending word. Maybe Porsoth managed to communicate with her. I can hope.
I hope she cares. That she didn’t feel secret relief when I tumbled out of her world. I should have told her—how I felt, what I wanted—and damn any shame in confessing to such weakness. I trust her. More than I trust myself. It’s time to come as clean as someone with a heart as dirty as mine can.
My favorite leather jacket hangs in its place of pride, the lone item on its rack. I asked Mother to enchant it to always return home. I pick a black T-shirt from a row of freshly laundered ones in the same shade.
Father clears his throat. “I need a word.”
I don’t turn around, but riffle for some pants. “And I need to get back out there.”
“Sit,” Father says.
I don’t know if there’s a hidden command in it. I tell myself there is to prevent a surge of shame as I walk back to the bed and do so.
“Only one of you can be my heir,” he says, peering down his long nose at me. His eyes are a cold burn, measuring.
I shake my head, intending to clear it. Not a thing I’ve ever wanted or needed to do.
“I’m aware that I’m the heir.” Is that what all this is? Being punished for not being happy to do my duty in this dark place, for wanting the light Callie brings? It’s so hypocritical. “It’s not as if Mother wasn’t a human, at least starting out. I know what I am.”
His head tilts. “No,” he says. “I don’t think you do.”
I’m impatient and irritated enough that I snap. “As much as I’d love to sit here and pretend to be impressed by your verbal traps, if you could get to the point, it’d be wonderful.”
“Your brother tried to kill you, didn’t he?” Lucifer asks.
I still. My brother.
“A guardian hit me with an arrow—” Although Sean pushed me off the wall.
My brain avoids circling back to the word as long as it can. The implication.
Which isn’t long enough.
Brother. Father is saying Sean is my brother. I have a brother.
“Half-brother, I should say.” Father squints and I admit he’s the most engaged I’ve seen him in ages. He’s enjoying this. “He didn’t tell you.”
Sean is my half-brother and he knows.
“He didn’t tell me much of anything, except that I’m an inspiration to him.” Me and Callie. Father can’t know what he means to do with the Grail.
I want to confess it. Anything to wipe that smug look off his face.
Something stops me. “That’s why you set up this whole farce.”
“I set it up to remind you where you belong. You are meant to be the heir, and you must put that above all.”
No thanks. “You’re in good health, at the height of your powers…”
Father rises, tall and immovable. “Beside the point. I desire time away, and I require your commitment.”
Of course he does. And what Father wants, he gets.
“I’m going to pretend this is a hallucination.” I climb to my feet, the insistent beat of my heart in time with the dull throb returning in my thigh. “And go back to what I’m doing. None of this is about you.”
“Everything is about me.” Father brings his hands together with a thunderclap boom. “For as long as I say it is.”
I imagine myself as Callie in my dreams, walking, running, turning my back. But I’m not as brave as Callie.
“What more do you want from me?” I extend my hands, as if I’m pleading for an answer.
Attention, seemingly. Father relaxes a hair and strolls around my suite. “Did you know he snuck in here? Wanted to see what he’d been missing, I suppose. He’d known who he was for years. We met once, when he was seventeen, and I told him what I expected of him. I hadn’t seen him since. But he came here, and let himself be tortured. He pretended to be one of them, a human. I only found out he was here by happenstance.” Father lifts his hands out in a mimicry of mine, but he’s asking a grand question, Can you believe it?
“That must’ve stung,” I say.
“Yes. That my other son—the good son—abandoned the original task he’d been given and then allowed himself to be demeaned. Like he was in control of his destiny.”
I wonder what task Father gave him, but I’m not about to ask. “And not you.”
“And not me.” Father thinks I’m agreeing with him. He thinks I’m similarly disgusted by Sean’s rejecting him.
I burn with an envy of such intensity it surprises me.
“It can’t stand,” Father continues. “Others will find out he exists and that he’s out of control. I don’t understand him. He’s too unpredictable. I am restless and want to travel. It is time for you to get serious about your position. One day you can find yourself a nice human or ten—or better yet, a harem of demons who’ll suit without complaints.”
He wants me to run Hell. To be fully committed to being his standard-bearer. Simply because he wants to take a vacation and Sean has done a better job than me of communicating the level of “don’t care to.” I’m supposed to be the rebellious son. I’m supposed to be the only son.
“You understand what I’m offering you,” Father says. “Control. Power.”
Those have never been things that attracted me. “And Callie?”
“You must know she’s too good for you … This business of saving damned souls is the antithesis of who you’re meant to be.”
He’s right. I do know all that. But I don’t care, though I should. Or, rather, I care only as far as it might chase her away.
“You’ll never be powerful with her shackling you to humanity. Now is the time to grow up. To assume your birthright. You will bring Sean back, humiliating him, and then he will not be an issue any longer. I will be well pleased,” Father says. “You have always been my favorite, son.”
There’s a first time for everything, I want to say. No, I want to say.
I say nothing. Nothing at all. Not one word.
Something inside me wants to bask in being his favorite, in him saying it, even if it’s a lie.
He must take my lack of response as an obedient silence. He grins at me. A smile to make angels weep, and that has. It’s my sorrow he wants. My acceptance.
I have a brother.
His hand lands on my shoulder again.
That’s when Callie shoves through the door to my bed chamber and takes me in, naked on the side of the bed but for the bandage, and my father beside me with his hand on me. She’s a furious mess in motion, her hair a tangle of waves. She tosses a thick cloak onto the floor as she advances on us.
“If you’re not healing him or something, get out,” she says to Father.
My heart seems to swell to an ungainly size. I expect it to be visible from every corner of the universe. I couldn’t like or love her more.
Father does his best sinister menace. “I’m considered more of a virus than a cure.”
Callie should shrink under that tone and his gaze. She should turn and leave. I’m suddenly afraid she will. But she inserts herself between us, knocking his hand off my shoulder in the process. She gives me a searching look.
“You’re okay,” she says. “You’re okay.”
“Mostly…” I like being fussed over.
“I wasn’t finished,” Father says.
“Yes, you were, you were just leaving,” Callie says, her field-green eyes only for me. She strokes a tentative hand down my cheek and I lean into the touch.
Beside us, Father hesitates and, then, to my great disbelief, he does what she says. “Remember what I told you. Remember who you are,” he says, but after that he leaves us, a click of the doors shutting behind him.
Callie seemingly needs to make sure I’m truly whole. Her hand leaves my cheek and joins the other on my chest, skimming over my body. My breathing quickens. There’s so much to tell her.
I open my mouth. She starts talking before I get a word out.
“You should have sent word. Somehow. We’ve been here for ages and Porsoth wouldn’t let us come in, but I snuck away and your mother helped—”
Her hands are still tracing over my torso and I wonder how she got to Lilith and here and I know it must be an ingenious story, because this is my Callie. I have so many things to say to her—mainly that I have a half-brother and it’s Sean. That my father has set us against one another and expects this to motivate me to assume my full rank. But there’s something far more urgent than any of that.
“I love you,” I say before I can think better of it.
She stops talking.
I might as well be not only naked, but transparent. My heart sits on a scale while I wait to see if it weighs enough.
Callie stares at me.
I regret saying the words. A moment of weakness. “It’s all right—”
“Don’t,” she says. “Don’t take it back. Luke, I thought you might be … When you disappeared and then I was mortal again. I thought you would send word if you were okay, but you didn’t.”
“I wanted to—”
She presses a finger to my lips. “Shh, I’m not finished. I feel like I lived a whole life without you, just getting here. Not knowing what I’d find. If you were … If you’d been … I’ve never been that scared. I never want to feel that way again.”
She lifts her other hand and cradles my face, gazing at me like I’m a miracle. “You can’t know how good it is to see you. That you’re here in front of me. You can’t know how much it would have broken me if you were…”
“I’m fine.” I put my hands over hers. “I promise. I’m sorry I worried you. About what I—”
“I have another idea,” she says.
The words should make me quake at this point, but they don’t. Purely due to the heat in her eyes as she says them.
“Don’t keep me in suspense. Please.”
She pushes her hair behind an ear with one hand and I note that it’s bright red. “I’ve been thinking about how we were sort of arguing before and while I definitely think you need to start telling me things—” I don’t stop her to point out that I just told her a pretty enormous, life-changing thing. “—I want to cross the intimacy Rubicon. I’m ready.”
“The intimacy Rubicon?” I echo, not sure what that means.
“You know,” she says, flushing, “sex.”
“Oh. Ohhh.” I’m definitely down for that. “Why are your ears red?”
“Because I grew up in a Puritanical society? Probably? Shut up. The Rubicon is a river in Italy—when Julius Caesar crossed it, that was a point of no return. It started a war, but I don’t mean war here, I mean…”
Shut up is not close to I love you. But she’s babbling and that means she’s nervous. And she clearly went through a great deal to get here. Her relief that I’m all right is palpable, and that’s a good sign. I force myself to forget the pang of disappointment and warm up to the intimacy Rubicon idea. It doesn’t take long once I remember what she means.
Callie is giving me a hint of a frown now, as if I’ve rejected her, so I get as close as possible to her and my body responds as it always does to the reality of her. I breathe against her neck, the floral hint of her shampoo and the vanilla note in the perfume she dabs onto her pulse point. Vanilla is anything but boring when it combines with Callie Johnson’s chemistry.
I press my lips there and feel blood rush to all the places it should rush to. I hardly feel the ache in my thigh. She releases a breathy sigh.
“This river we’re crossing, what’s on the other side?” I raise my head and murmur it against her lips. Not my best warm-up talk, but I’m on board the boat now.
Callie presses her palm to my bare chest and my heart and skin ache at the pressure. “I didn’t say it.” She rolls her eyes and I’m lost. I have no idea what’s happening, except that I belong to her.
“I started talking and I forgot to say it. Luke…”
I go still.
“I love you too,” she says. “Obviously.”
My heart cracks open. It parts like a sea or this Italian river she’s so fond of and encloses us both.
Callie loves me too. Obviously.
I feel fully awake. Alive. “You do?”
“Yes, I love you. I was going to tell you on our date. All this was supposed to happen on our date.”
“Our date,” I say with a cough. “The date that will live in infamy.”
Callie tilts her heads to one side. “I like where it’s going at the moment.”
“Me too.” She loves me. Is it truly possible? Does she know what it means? So many things have happened. I start, “I need to tell you something—”
“Later.” She plasters herself against me and brings her lips to mine. Our kiss is a fever and we are on fire together. I’ll banish anyone who opens that bedroom door to the most painful circle of Hell immediately.
We collapse together back on the bed with her on top, and I find the bottom of Callie’s T-shirt. Our lips part and she raises her arms to let me pull it over her head. She doesn’t get shy or climb under the covers or place a hand to hide from me. She lets me glory in the sight of her trust.
“Damn me forever,” I say.
She grins at me and I can tell she likes this. She preens a bit, head at an angle, and I would drink the Rubicon daily if this is what it gets me. Her absolute pleasure in being seen is the sexiest thing I can imagine.
I raise a hand and skim my way to her breast and rub a thumb softly over her nipple. She moans and rocks her hips against me.
My sharp intake of breath sends her bolt upright. “Your thigh,” she says. “You’re wounded. Should we wait?”
I don’t care if I lose the use of every limb but one, I want to say. “I’m feeling better by the second,” I say instead and before she can protest I cradle her waist with my hands and flip her over so she’s beneath me.
I feast on her perfect hand-sized breasts and when she squirms beneath me, ready, as I’m ready, I lower to feast on the warm heat of her.
“Luke…” she says, and moans again. “You should let me…”
“No,” I say with a smile and see her looking down to meet my eyes. I love making her moan and scream in this way. She tastes like Callie. And if she touches me right now, we’re not going to make it across the river.
Once she finishes, I kiss my way back up her body and it’s her turn to toss me over—which I don’t protest. She climbs back on top of me and opens her mouth and I can see a slight hesitation. She’s about to ask something. Anticipating her request, I materialize a condom in my fingers and she plucks it from my hand.
“You read my mind,” she says. “Metaphorically.”
“All my best moves are metaphorical,” I say.
“What does that mean?” She gives an amused tiny fake frown and for some people maybe this would be a disruption of our lovemaking—we are in love—but for me it is a reminder of what we’re like, of the intimacy we already share.
“I’ll show you,” I say and give her a filthy grin I know she loves.
She tears open the condom packet and I die as she smooths it over my cock and then I die again and am reborn when she sinks slowly onto me. The slow doesn’t last long. In agreement, we speed things up, the sweaty slide of skin and our panting breaths and noises that can only be made when you forget yourself and anything but the moment.
I love you I love you is the rhythm of my thrusts and it’s not cheesy at all when she says, “Now, Luke, now,” and I come harder than any person ever before in creation.
We breathe in the aftermath, nestled together, and my heart beats stronger on the other side of the Rubicon. No matter how different our worlds, no matter the obstacles we face, no matter what Father wants: We belong together.
I will never own this woman. Callie is not mine. I’m hers.
And I will do anything it takes to keep it that way, even help my brother find the Holy Grail and put my father’s kingdom out of business.