Chapter 200: The Plan to take Draca down

Seraphel

Luceriel raised an eyebrow.

"Last time, you froze time to stop a single strike and it nearly killed you. You were holding the entire world still by yourself, with a broken core, for four or five seconds." I tapped the map. "You are not going to do that tonight. Tonight you freeze him. Only him. One target. Pazuzu feeds you through the bond, and you hold Draca still for as long as you are able while the rest of us take his anchors apart."

Luceriel was quiet for a moment.

"How long do you believe I could hold a single target?" he asked Pazuzu.

"With my vitality behind you and a core that is no longer eating itself alive?" Pazuzu considered. "Two minutes. Perhaps three, if you stop being stubborn about accepting what I give you."

"I am never stubborn about anything."

"Husband."

"Do not."

"Two to three minutes," I said, before Luceriel could kill him in front of everyone. "That is how long we have to bring down three lords."

"Three," Lumiel repeated. "In three minutes."

"In three minutes."

The room went quiet again while everyone did the arithmetic, and I watched it land on each of them one at a time.

"Then we do not fight them one against one," Azriel said slowly, and I could hear him turning it over as he spoke. "We pair off. Two of us to each lord. Three pairs, three lords."

"And the remaining four lords?"

"Held off," Malachi said from the doorway, speaking for the first time all evening. "They will not be killed, only delayed. Prince Sariel and I will use our shadows against two of them, and if there is anyone else willing to stand with us, then—"

"I will stand with you," Tobias said.

"Nobody asked the god of Elysium," Sariel started.

"Actually, I did ask him," Uriel said mildly, and Sariel shut his mouth in what looked like genuine surprise.

After that, we worked it out over the next hour.

Uriel and Taizel would take the first lord, with the aqueduct water to drown the borrowed body and Taizel to devour whatever crawled out of the wreckage.

Lumiel would take the second, which produced a truly remarkable argument about who would be leading whom, resolved only when Luceriel threatened to assign the pair of them to Raizel instead. Azriel and Anomas would take the third.

Malachi and Sariel would hold two more of them blind with their shadows, with Tobias standing beside them. Raizel and Thamiel would cover the terraces themselves, keeping the fireballs off anyone who still needed to breathe. And the barrier would be raised and held by Raizel, Thamiel, and Anomas together, reinforced by Pazuzu’s own power, so that anyone who could not withstand the pressure of the rift would have somewhere to strike from.

Solmira and Elios would reinforce Luceriel’s hold on Draca with divine energy, which nobody was happy about, and which everybody accepted anyway.

And then there was Anabelle.

"I want her," Lumiel said.

"Lumiel—"

"I want the one wearing her face." He did not raise his voice. He had not raised it once all evening, which was somehow worse. "I am not asking any of you to like it. I am telling you what I intend to do."

Nobody argued. I think none of us had the heart for it.

"Which leaves Seraphel," Luceriel said.

"On the terrace," I said. "In the open. Where he can see me."

Azriel’s hand tightened around mine.

"Behind three layers of wards," Pazuzu added smoothly, "two of which will be mine, and with the shadows of the Prince of Envy within arm’s reach the entire time. You will be bait, little vessel, but you will be extremely well-defended bait."

"That is the worst sentence anyone has spoken tonight," Azriel said.

"I have a considerably worse one, if you would like to hear it."

"I would not."

"When the lords begin falling," I went on, "Draca will feel every one of them go. He will panic. And when he panics, he will stop being careful with Kaevian’s body, and it will start coming apart on its own." I looked up at Pazuzu. "And then?"

"And then he has nowhere left to go." Pazuzu’s voice had gone flat and strange. "A soul without a vessel and without anchors is simply loose in the open. Solmira and Elios seal him there, exactly as Castiel did. It will not kill him. Nothing any of us can do tonight will kill him."

"Then what is the point of any of this?" Sariel demanded.

"The point," Pazuzu said, "is another few centuries. It is the only thing anyone has ever managed to take from him, and it was enough for your entire generation to be born."

Nobody had an answer to that.

I did, though. I had the answer, and it sat in my chest like a stone I had swallowed and could not cough back up.

There was a version of tonight where Draca died permanently. I had found it in an appendix I had skipped for two years, and I had read it eleven times over in a dormitory in a world none of these people would ever see.

Castiel’s light could end him, but only if it was given rather than thrown, and giving it meant pouring out everything the holder had in one moment, holding nothing back at all. It had cost Castiel his life the first time, and it would cost me mine.

I looked at Azriel, at the way he was still watching me as though he expected me to vanish the moment he blinked, and I did not say a single word about any of it.

This was not the time for that conversation. Tonight we dealt with the Demon King. Everything else could wait.

"We move to the terraces in one hour," Luceriel said, rising from his chair. "Rest until then. Eat something. That is not a suggestion."

The room began to empty.

I stayed where I was, both hands flat against the map, staring down at the small inked outline of the eastern terraces, memorizing it, trying to hold every piece of the plan in my head at once so that nothing could slip loose.

"You are doing it again," Azriel said quietly beside me.

"Doing what?"

"Carrying something alone." He turned me gently by the shoulders until I had no choice but to look at him. "You have been doing it since the moment you opened your eyes in that council hall. Whatever it is, I would much rather you told me."

For one second, I almost did.

"Ask me again after we win," I said.

He did not look satisfied. He did not press me either. He simply drew me in against his chest and held on, and over his shoulder, through the open doorway, I could see the eastern sky already beginning to lighten.

It was not dawn.

Draca was here.