Page 71 of The Morning Star
“Fine.” He sucked down the beer and turned to leave.
“Wait.” I reached out and grabbed his arm, taking a brief second to admire the firm biceps under my hand. “You heard our conversation earlier. You heard what we’re up against. Everything is at stake here—your brothers and sister, the other angels, the humans. Help us. Help us win this thing. Help me win this thing.”
“It’s not my problem.”
“I know it’s not your problem,” I snapped. “I’m just trying to get some advice here. You were the Iblis for billions of fucking years. Mentor me, or some fucking shit like that.”
“You’re not like me, as you so eloquently said in that meeting,” he drawled. Then he took a few steps into my dining room before halting and turning to face me. “I don’t know why everyone decided to follow me. It’s not like I had some special mojo or threatened to kill them or anything. They just did. I felt it, felt the connection with every one of them, felt my circle of Aaru as if it were a part of my being. It just worked. I’ve got nothing for you, no advice or anything.”
“I’m an imp. The sword chose an imp. Maybe I’m just supposed to be impish. Maybe that’s how I rule.”
Samael walked toward the door, then stopped and turned again. “That sword’s not everything you think it is. It’s a tool. It’s no more than a focus in human magic. It’s sentient because it carries a part of me, just as Michael’s carries a part of him, but at the end of the day it’s just a tool. It’s not an oracle to guide your actions. It’s not some kingmaker. You could carry that damned thing around the rest of your life and not be the Iblis. The sword doesn’t make you the Iblis.”
“Then what does?”
He shrugged. “Fuck if I know.” He turned and took a step toward the door.
I hurried after him, feeling an incredible frustration. We’d failed in our last battle against ten thousand. This next one was the biggie, and I was about to rush in on a suicide mission. An imp with a sword.
“Oh. Here.” He turned around and a huge bag materialized in his hands. He shoved it at me, and as I took it I nearly fell to the floor with the weight. “This was a stupid hobby. These things weigh a fuck-ton. What was I thinking?”
He spun about and left as I dropped the sack on the ground with a grunt. It clinked with a familiar sound. Coins. Opening the top of the bag I peered in to see flattened and mangled copper pennies, imprinted with touristy shit from different cities. I’d thought he was just making a handful of these, one or two from each place. Instead he seemed to have thousands of them.
“Pretty money!” Lux appeared next to the bag, his wings outstretched as he dug in with both hands, holding the coins up then delighting in the noise as he dropped them back into the sack.
Good grief, this was a stupid hobby. And what the fuck was I supposed to do with them? I guess maybe they would be worth something at a scrap metal place. Were pennies pure copper? I took one out of the bag and sent my personal energy into it, feeling out the structure and makeup of the coin.
Fuck. Stupid things were mostly zinc. I doubted they’d even want them at the metal place. Maybe I could just bury them out back or something.
“Oooh, Mistress! Are we going to throw those into the pool and wish on them?” Snip walked over from the door and bent down to examine the coins.
“Money,” Lux informed him. “Special money.”
The Low dug a hand into the bag and pulled a few out in his palm. “Look, these are from Seattle. There must be tens of thousands of them in that bag. That’s a lot of wishes.”
“You’re not throwing them in my pool.”
I could totally see these things screwing up my filter, or getting stuck in the vacuum and burning out the motor. I didn’t like the way Snip was eyeing them, but it wasn’t like I cared if he stole them or not. Although I doubt he would. Fucking bag weighed close to two hundred pounds by my estimate.
“Just leave them here,” I told him. “I’ll deal with them once I get back from the battle.”
Snip stood up, his expression grim. “There are about thirty Lows who are too injured to fight, Mistress. They are claiming that they are fit, and that they want to fight by your side, but if they go they will surely die.”
We would all surely die. But there was no sense in my being the reason injured Lows got slaughtered on the battlefield.
“Tell them I’ve ordered them to stay and protect Nyalla and Lux. Then go gather the rest of my household, because it’s time for us to go.”
Time for us to go. And time for me to face this imposter, whether he was Luziel or not, and kill him.
Chapter 23
“Mistress?”
Snip’s voice jolted me out of my daze and I shook my head, tearing my gaze from the pile of sand at my feet that lay next to the battered corporeal forms of two angels. I felt every demon that died, whether by my hand or not. And although I couldn’t sense their deaths, every time I came upon an angel that had lost its life, it shook me to the core.
For every dead angel I saw, there were three demon deaths I felt. It wasn’t enough. The imposter’s army was pushing us back, small units breaking through but instead of dispersing and vanishing into the continent to continue with terrorist-style attacks, they were doubling back, hitting us from behind. They were flanking us, hemming us in as we’d tried to do to them. And we didn’t have a backup to turn the tide.
“Mistress?”
