“You have a rogue demon?” Cass asked.
Luce shrugged again. “I could, of course, dispose of such demons. It certainly isn’t beyond me to do so. But where one will fall, another will rise up with similar ideas. It is the nature of things. So sometimes they must be… permitted, so to speak, to carry out their nefarious plans. Those plans will, of course, fail,and then everyone will see how foolish it all was, and no one else will try something similar. Like a parent, sometimes I must let my children make mistakes in order to learn from them.” Luce’s voice turned hard then. “And sometimes I must let a child make mistakes to teach all the others an important lesson.”
Cass thought that over, getting a little more pissed with each passing moment.
“So you’re telling me that you let some demon remove all the souls from Erebus to teach him, or others like him, that it can’t be done? But itwasdone! And it caused Kushiel pain!” Cass seethed.
Luce turned around and looked at him then. “Ah, but is that all it did?”
Cass waspissed. “You played god with Kushiel’s feelings to teach some demon a lesson when you could have stopped it! What the hell did it accomplish?”
Luce only looked at him and smirked, which made Cass want to get up and smack him. And he wasn’t a violent man.
“It brought you two together,” Luce finally answered.
At that, Cass’s anger deflated a bit. Still…
“Surely there were other ways to bring us together?” Cass asked. “Ways that didn’t cause Kushiel such pain?”
Luce grimaced a bit at that, and for the first time Cass saw something resembling regret on the devil’s face. “Kushiel does not deserve to suffer. He does a job that no angel or demon could do, and he has suffered for millennia doing it. He deserves peace and happiness, but his job gives him suffering, and he would carry it out no matter what the cost.”
Cass pondered that. He knew Luce was talking around the issue, and he wasn’t sure what the devil was getting at. “Are you saying that even with a soulmate, Kushiel will have to suffer torment for his job?”
Luce shrugged a bit. “Souls that are far enough along deserve redemption. Kushiel provides that in the only way he has ever known, which is at great personal cost.”
“Does that mean there’s another way?” Cass asked. Was that what Luce was hinting at?
Unfortunately the devil only shrugged again. So apparently if there was another way, the devil wasn’t filling them in. It was enough to make Cass angry again.
“You can’t help us anymore than that? You allowed someone to cause Kushiel great pain, and it’s not like all those lost souls are suddenly redeemed—they’re ghosts, and they’re in worse shape than they were when they were here. How is that helpful?” Cass demanded.
“When there is a wound, sometimes it must be purged. Which is better, to cut it open every day, letting a tiny bit drain, only to have it seal up so the process must be repeated the next day? Is it better to do that over and over and over again, small hurts every day, or is it not better to slice it open and drain it completely all at once? An agony, perhaps, but then it is done and over, and the wound can heal properly,” Luce commented.
“Yes, but the wound hasn’t been healed. The souls are still lost,” Cass insisted. He understood Luce’s analogy, but it didn’t apply here.
“Are they, though?” Luce asked.
“Of course they are! They aren’t redeemed or whatever. Kushiel would drain himself, filling each one with his light in order to redeem them. What happens when he finds the rest of them? It’ll be reopening the wound over and over and over,” Cass protested.
Luce leaned forward, suddenly very serious. “Are they lost, though, Cassius? Or are they not now ghosts, something that is withinyourrealm to understand? They have left hell; they are not lost souls on Erebus. They are ghosts on the mortal plane. Isthat notyourdepartment? Is it notyourjob to help ghosts? And amazingly, you are now mated to an angel whoalsohelps souls become whole.”
Cass leaned back, thinking hard. Finally he muttered, “You’re saying there’s another way to make them whole again. There’s something that I can do, or something that Kushiel and I can do together, to make them whole and redeem them.”
Luce sat back, steepling his fingers together and smiling again. “There is much at stake here,” the devil said, gesturing with one of his hands to the cracks in the wall. “You two shall set this to rights, though. We have faith in you both.”
“Who is ‘we’?” Cass asked, perhaps a little late with that question.
Luce only smiled more broadly. “Now then, since I called you as an oracle, you must serve as a communicator for the gods to another realm. That is, after all, the rule. Since Kushiel is an angel, and I am technically not of his realm, being a communicator to him counts. Any more questions before we commence?” Luce asked.
Cass had plenty of questions, but he knew he wouldn’t get answers, so he just shook his head. He really didn’t love this part of things.
“Very well then,” Luce replied, and the devil smiled gleefully before diving straight into Cass’s body.
Chapter 20
Kushiel
Kushiel was pulled from sleep violently, and it took him only a second to understand why. Cass was wrapped in his arms, just as he had been when they’d dozed off, but Kushiel knew, with absolute certainty, that Cass was no longer there.
