Page 59 of When Monsters Fight
She’d withheld the truth, but she was still our only hope. What could we do but agree to?—
“I’m sorry.” Jilyana snatched the relic from me and stepped closer to Lucifer.
“Jilyana, what are you doing?” Asbeel demanded.
Her eyes were misty, but her jaw was set. “I don’t have a choice. They have her. They have her, and I need to save her.”
“What? Who?”
She grabbed Lucifer’s arm, and the world behind her tore open, bleeding amber light that blinded us for a moment.
When it died, both Lucifer and Jilyana were gone.
And with them, the relics.
“What just happened?” Kokabel demanded. “What the fuck just happened?”
“Jilyana betrayed us,” Asbeel said, his voice flat. “She lied to us. She was…” His voice cracked with emotion.
I closed my eyes for a beat.Focus. Do not lose your shit. Think. “The Dominion planned this. They must have let her go. They knew we were after the relics. They sent her to retrieve them.”
“And to find Lucifer,” Gabriel said. “Erelim was right. It was Lucifer they were searching for.”
And they’d used Jilyana to do their dirty work. She’dsaid she had to save someone. “I think they must have leverage on Jilyana.”
“That doesn’t make it right,” Asbeel said.
“No, it doesn’t, but I don’t think shewantedto betray us.” The woman I’d come to know the past few days wasn’t a traitor. “I don’t understand how she got Lucifer out of here.”
“The Dominion have access to a power called the Word,” Gabriel said. “It was something employed by the higher echelon. A way to extract celestial soldiers from danger. Some of us were given the power of a word. When uttered, it would pull us from wherever we were to a safe zone.”
“So Jilyana has taken Lucifer and the relics straight to the Golden City?”
“No,” Gabriel said. “I think they’ve taken her to their secret stronghold. They’ll lock her down, lock away the relics.”
“We have to stop them. We have to break her out.”
“The location should be on the flash drive I gave to Bastian,” Gabriel said.
“We can’t do anything if we’re stuck in Gehenna,” Kabiel growled. “The portal we came through is gone. And even if we find one, could we even use it without a relic?”
But something that Lucifer had said rang in my mind. “Lucifer said she couldn’t leave here. Not without being whole, which meant having the relic power back inside her body, right?”
“Right…”
“And she said once that was done, she’d use her sword to open a doorway back to our world.”
“Where are you going with this?” Kabiel asked.
“What if the part of her that allows her to create doorways, any doorways, lies in the specific power of the Morningstar? Think about it. The Morningstar kept thefabric of worlds intact. It allowed us to walk through the conjunction, and its fracture caused doorways to open so…what if all we need to make a doorway is a connection to that power?”
“Which you still have!” Gabriel’s chest heaved with pride. “Genius. It could work. Try it. Use the sword.”
“Wait!” Kabiel grabbed my wrist before I could touch the sword. “What if it hurts you?”
“What if it doesn’t? At this point, we’ve got to take the risk.”
“Agreed,” Gabriel said. “But I believe you’re right, Rue. I believe this is our way out.”
