Chapter 192: I came back from the Future

Seraphel

"Kaevian?" Azriel’s eyes widened in shock. "He is coming in that concubine’s body?"

I nodded. "I was just as shocked as you are, when I saw it."

"Another will be wearing a woman with dark curling hair. Lumiel, she was yours. Anabelle."

Lumiel did not move. He did not even breathe, as far as I could tell. His eyes had gone wide enough to show exactly how badly the name had struck him.

"You will see her face and you will want to hesitate," I said. "Do not. It is not her. It was never going to be her."

"How do you know this?" Sariel’s voice had lost every trace of mockery. "How do you know her name?"

I had been ready for that question, and I still did not have a good answer for it.

How was I supposed to explain that I had seen it inside a domain my own grief had built for me?

"I saw it," I said. "That is all I can tell you for now."

Pazuzu tilted his head slightly. I could feel him studying me, and I understood exactly what he was doing. He was trying to work out what I was hiding.

"There is more," I pushed on, before anyone could press me further. "The lords are not generals. They are anchors. Draca’s soul is spread across all seven of them, because a borrowed body cannot hold something that size on its own. Kill one and he weakens. Kill two and the whole structure starts coming apart." I looked at Pazuzu directly now. "And his vessel is already failing. He will fight through that serpent of his rather than strike at you directly, because the body cannot take the strain. That is the opening."

For a long moment, Pazuzu simply stared at me. Then, slowly, he began to smile.

"Well," he said. "That is considerably more than my own intelligence gathered in two centuries of looking."

"Then you believe him?" Uriel demanded.

"I believe no human invents a thing like anchors while lying unconscious on a floor," Pazuzu said, his violet eyes still fixed on my face. "Whatever else is happening here, that part of it is true. I would stake a great deal on it, because I have already seen a piece of it myself."

Luceriel exhaled slowly and pressed two fingers against his temple. "Then we prepare. We fortify Verolona, we—"

"That will not be enough." I cut him off, and every head in the room turned toward me. "I watched it fail. I watched all of you scattered and fighting separately while he picked you apart one at a time. Luceriel held time still on his own and nearly died doing it. And I know you are planning to banish Pazuzu from this kingdom, so do not. We will need him."

I saw Luceriel flinch at that. He actually flinched, and I did not stop talking.

"Azriel took a bolt of divine lightning through the back of his skull, because by the end he was the only one left standing between Draca and me."

Azriel’s hand found the small of my back.

"You watched," Sariel repeated slowly. "You keep using that word."

I ignored him. I had one thing left to say, and I was going to say it before somebody backed me into a corner I could not talk my way out of.

"Luceriel." I turned to face him fully. "Marry him."

The silence that followed was the loudest thing in the room.

"I beg your pardon?" Luceriel said.

"Marry Pazuzu. I know he has already asked you, and yes, you should accept, and you should do it before Draca arrives." I held his gaze, and it took everything I had not to look away from it.

"Your bond is incomplete. That is why his power cannot reach you properly, and that is why you burned yourself down to nothing holding time still alone. If the two of you are bound completely, he can carry that weight alongside you. You will not have to spend your own life buying the rest of us a few seconds."

"You are suggesting," Luceriel said, each word arriving separately, "that I bind myself permanently to a demon prince. An insufferable demon prince, at that."

"Yes."

"Absolutely not."

"Luceriel—"

"I said no." His voice rose for the first time. "I will not be maneuvered into a marriage by a human who has existed for a fraction of the time I have, on the strength of a dream he cannot even prove took place."

"Then your visions will destroy you," I said.

That stopped him.

"I watched it happen," I said, and my voice finally broke around the word. "You bled from your eyes until you could not stand, and you still tried to save me. Your legs gave out beneath you and you went down in the dirt and you could not get back up again, and you were still trying. You were lying on the ground calling my name, telling me not to go, and I went anyway, and I could not save a single one of you." I scrubbed a hand across my face.

"I am not maneuvering you into anything. I am telling you what it looks like when pride is the last thing a person has left to hold onto."

Nobody said a word.

Pazuzu’s expression had changed entirely. Whatever amusement he had been wearing was gone now, replaced by something quieter and considerably more dangerous.

"Seraphel," he said softly.

"What?"

"You are not telling us everything."

I did not answer him.

"No," he said, and took a single step toward me. "I do not mean the details. I mean that you have described a battle not one of us has fought, named a woman four centuries dead, and just told my dear mate exactly how his own visions will fail him." His head tilted. "So tell me. How did you watch any of it?"

I let out a long breath before I answered him.

"I came back from the future."