Page 349 of The Spider Queen
“Yes!” Adrenaline zinged through my veins and I gripped the knife harder.
Jax darted and weaved, and for once, luck seemed to be on our side, because no demon fire blasted us, no rough fist knocked us out of the air.
“I can’t get closer,” he said as he flew in circles five feet over Cyclops’s face. Jax angled his body to one side so we wouldn’t be hit by a gargoyle’s broken wing, which was hurtling through the air, detached from its body.
“Drop me!”
Without any hesitation, Jax let me go. I fell onto a massive, fleshy cheek. Cyclops attempted to swat me away, but he was too busy fending off Jax and other dive-bombing gargoyles.
I scaled up the bridge of his nose and looked at my reflection in the white pearl. I didn’t think—with both hands, I drove the knife underneath Cyclops’s eye.
He scream was a sonic boom and my ears started to bleed.
The grapefruit-sized white pearl released from the socket with a loudpop.It was bloody and slick, and when I tried to grasp it, it slipped from my fingers. I dove off Cyclops’s face and launched myself at the pearl. I caught it when I was mid-air and pressed it to my chest as I dropped to the ground. My teeth rattled in my skull and my vision danced.
“Stella!” Lucifer bellowed.
I peered up at the fallen angel, the beast, the Prince of Darkness. I kept my eyes on his as I pressed the pearl to the gold bangle at my wrist. The bracelet moaned and vibrated and then split open in the center and widened enough to swallow the pearl, which disappeared into glimmering gold.
The sky darkened, but this time it wasn’t from the swarm of gargoyles. Storm clouds unleashed rain, thunder, and lightning. Static in the air teased my windswept hair and I felt my skin prick with electricity flowing through my body.
A yell of triumph ripped through my throat as my essence, the part of it bound and held by Lucifer, snapped back inside of me. I stumbled when it slammed home.
My gaze was locked on Lucifer’s. Even though I was victorious, I couldn’t stop the dimming of my smile as betrayal and sadness blazed in his eyes.
He leaned his head back and bellowed to the heavens. Then with a flap of his bat-like wings he was airborne, and then he was gone.
“What do you want to do with him?” Jax asked, coming to stand by my side, jarring me back to the moment.
I reluctantly took my eyes off the empty sky and looked at Cyclops who was now the one who was bound. His wound where I’d torn the pearl from his skin had stopped bleeding and was already scabbing over.
It made me sick, thinking about what I’d had to do to get it, but then again, if Cyclops had had his way, I’d be somewhere in the bottom of his belly.
“I don’t know,” I said. A gargoyle approached me, holding out Aloysius’s blade. I smiled gratefully and stuck it back in its sheath.
Truthfully, I wasn’t just sick over what I’d done to Cyclops. The sorrow in Lucifer’s eyes had nearly brought me to my knees.
But how could he have ever thought I’d choose him? Not after what he’d done, not after promising Cyclops and his brothers could have free reign over Earth.
“Stella?” Jax prodded.
Gargoyles stood guard and kept Cyclops in line. His mouth wasn’t gagged and whenever he felt the need to grumble and shout and spew hateful words, the gargoyles had no problem subduing him with their stone fists.
Bloodthirsty bunch.
“Why are you asking me what to do with him?” I looked at Jax, eyebrow raised.
“Because you’re the Commander in Chief.”
“Excuse me?”
He gestured to the other gargoyles. “I asked a few of them to come. My close friends. But theyallcame. You have an army of gargoyles at your back, Stella. We will do your bidding.”
I blinked. “But—but—why?”
Jax’s eyes were the color of ash. “We are the damned, and we haven’t believed in anything for a very long time. You”—he paused, searching for his words—“didn’t judge me. For my past. For the terrible things I’d done. We have all done terrible things.”
“What is legend and what is history?” I asked. “Isn’t it all a game of telephone?”
