Page 1 of When Monsters Fight
Chapter 1
RUE
The last thing I expected when I fell asleep was to dream walk into Gehenna and meet a battle-worn woman claiming to be Lucifer. Lucifer, as in the devil from our old human texts. Lucifer, who was meant to be evil personified, but this woman, although brash and cranky, didn’t exude evilness. And if she was real, if this place was real, then it meant… “Is this Hell?”
She made a sound of exasperation as if my question was an irritant. “Hell is one of its many names, and it’s hardly important now. I must determine what has happened. If God didn’t send you, then how can you be here?”
God? She thoughtGodsent me, which meant she didn’t know. “God is long gone.”
Her eyes flew wide for a moment before narrowing and taking her mouth into a thin line. “Of course he is, but if you’re here, then you are a part of the plan, whether you realize it or not.” She lifted her chin, looking down her nose at me. “Tell me everything you know. Now.”
My pulse raced, my gut telling me that she was the piece of the puzzle we were missing, and if I could lay everything I knew on the table, she’d help me make sense of it.
But where to start? Deep breath. “Over twenty years ago, the Morningstar fractured.” I filled her in on the fall of the celestials, the monsters coming out of Gehenna, the watchers, the Golden City, our search for the relic pieces, and finally on Shem…my Shem, and his valiant sacrifice. “If I can find the final piece, then I can put everything to rights.” I looked about the room. “Something brought me here. To you. Which means you’re important in this. Can you help me? I need to finish what Shem started.”
“This Shem…he fractured the relic?”
“Yes, but he was under the influence of?—”
“Yes…yes, I understand.” Her gaze flit from side to side. “But you say that Michael ended him?”
A lump formed in my throat. “Yes.”
She muttered something under her breath that I didn’t catch before nodding as if to herself. “I told him not to trust the Dominion. I warned him. He was always too benevolent for his own good. He should have kept me by his side. Allowed me to protect him. He would never have simply left. No. We had a plan, and he would have honored his word to me.” She seemed to drift off into her own thoughts.
“What plan?”
She blinked sharply. “There’s no time for that now. If you want to stop the Dominion, you must bring me the relic pieces you have.”
“What? Why?”
She smiled humorlessly. “Hehad a nickname for me, inspired by the intensity of my unique power. The way it shone…He called me his Morningstar.”
My breath caught. “What are you saying?”
“You know what I’m saying, child. The Morningstar belongs to me. It’s a part of my soul kept safe by him. He used it to maintain the balance between the worlds he created. A way for him to keep a piece of me close.” A wry smile painted her lips for a moment. “But it’s time for me to reclaim it and become whole.”
God used part of her soul to create the relic? “I don’t have all the pieces, and even if I did, I’m not sure I should bring them to you. If the relic maintains the boundaries between our worlds, then what will happen if you absorb it?”
“The balance will be restored.I can promise you that much. You will have your world back, and the celestials will be forced to come back to heaven.”
There was no deception in her tone. “You can do that?”
“Once restored I can. I swear it to you. It is not possible for me to speak an untruth.”
Like the watchers…They hated lies. Did that come from her? From the Morningstar because it was built from her power? It must be.
I believed her words. I believed her with every fiber of my being. “Okay. But I need to find the final piece first.”
Cold fire bloomed in her eyes. “A star fell over two decades ago. I felt its impact and longed to go to it. But I’m limited on how far I can travel through Gehenna. This world is made up of nine planes, and I can only move through four of them. The star is in the fifth.”
“You think this star is a piece of the relic?”
“I didn’t think of it at the time, but now, after all you’ve revealed, I believe that it must be. Now that I know what’s happened, the strange behavior of the creatures in the inner three planes makes sense. This world is fragmenting,seeping out through the fractures caused by the Morningstar’s destruction.”
She crossed the room and stopped a foot away from me. This close, she not only towered over me, but seemed…larger, as if she’d been compacted into this skin—raw power begging to be released. Power that now licked at my skin.
“The chosen watcher has fallen,” she said, her tone thrumming with a reverence that made my chest ache. “It is now up to you to complete his quest. You must find the entrance to Gehenna, travel to this central plane, and set me free. It’s the only way to save not only your world, but many more.”
