Devil's Bargain (10 page)

That's when it hit her, the most ridiculous bits of prophecy suddenly illuminated by an unintentional turn of phrase.
She felt like laughing and crying and knew that either would give her away and ruin her chances of saving the only things that mattered to her.

“Lilli.” Aaron's insistent voice dragged her attention back to him. “You know I'm right. You can't trust him. He's the Lord of Deception. You don't think they gave him that title because he's got a talent for acting, do you?”

“I'm not lying about this,” Samael pressed. “Kill him and there will be no apocalypse. Is that the kind of offer you're really willing to pass up?”

Lilli shook her head, unable to completely suppress her smile or her tears. She guessed her eyes were glistening as she drew her misericorde from its sheath and held it aloft, the blade catching the light of the candles and sending it bouncing around the circle.

Aaron reached out his hand toward her, his eyes full, not of fear, but of concern. “Lilli, you have to ignore him. You know he's not being honest. If you were to kill me, what's to stop him from reneging on his promise? Who would be able to hold him to it?”

Samael glared at Aaron. “I do not take having my honor impugned lightly, magus,” he growled. “I would watch my tongue if I were you.”

“You're a devil,” Aaron snapped. “The only honor you have is the kind that suits you in any given moment. Lilli is too smart to fall for your lies.”

His faith in her made Lilli struggle even harder not to cry. She gripped the hilt of her knife in suddenly damp fingers and stepped forward to press her fingers to his lips.

“Sh,” she urged, replacing her touch with the brush of her lips, then repeating the gesture helplessly. “It's okay. You don't have to worry about me.”

“Oh, spare me the touching display.” Samael's voice grew louder, angrier, but Lilli ignored it. She was not about
to let him intrude on the last moment she would ever have with Aaron. She didn't care what the devil had to say. “Get it over with already. You've fucked him; now
kill him!
”

Aaron gripped her upper arms, not as if he were trying to restrain her, but as if he needed to touch her, to feel her beneath his hands again. His palms rubbed at her skin as if to warm and soothe.

“Ignore him,” he repeated. “He has nothing to say that you need to hear.”

She nodded. She wished she could tell him something that would reassure him, but her throat had closed up against the welling tears, and speech was impossible. Instead, she stepped even closer, until every rise and fall of his chest brought the fabric of his shirt into contact with hers. She wrapped her free hand around his neck and pulled him close, pressing her forehead against his shoulder until her tears soaked through the fabric of both his shirts.

His arms went around her and he cuddled her against him, ignoring the cold steel of the knife she held poised between them as he soothed her with words and touches. “Sh, it's okay, sweetheart. It's okay. You don't need to cry.” He slid a finger under her chin and tilted her face up until their eyes met. He smiled down into hers. “Don't cry, Lilli. Everything is going to be fine. I know you're not going to kill me.”

Swallowing hard, Lilli licked her lips and managed one final smile before she brushed her lips against his mouth. With skin pressed against skin, she savored the last taste of him and drew him in until his breath become her breath.

“Lilli,” he repeated, “I know you're not going to kill me.”

“You're right,” she whispered brokenly just before she turned the knife and drove it high between her own ribs and deep into her heart.

 

Aaron felt her body sag against him and tightened his arms automatically. He couldn't manage to wrap his mind around
what she had done. While the devil urged her to kill him to save the world, she had chosen to kill herself and condemned him instead to a lifetime without her. He had never guessed she could be so cruel.

In the very instant the knife struck home, the devil behind them let out a howl of fury and threw himself against the side of the circle that imprisoned him, but Lilli's magic held strong. Samael gathered himself for another attack, but before he could launch it, Aaron watched in disbelief as the frantic movement of energy that had presaged his arrival began again in reverse, moving from explosive brightness to a pinprick of light and back to the swirling vortex of energy the magus had witnessed before. This time, however, the energy seemed to suck Samael in, sweeping him up into the funnel cloud and carrying him away until not even the echo of his raging cries of protest lingered inside the summoning circle.

Aaron could have cared less if the circle had suddenly filled with dancing monkeys. Lilli had sacrificed herself for him and now she hung pale and lifeless in his arms. He felt as if the world itself had ceased to spin.

Numb with shock and disbelief, Aaron shifted his grip on the woman he'd first met only hours before and brought her into his lap as he sank to the cement floor. A thin trickle of blood seeped out from around the dagger blade and spilled into his hand, staining his skin an obscene liquid crimson. He felt it cooling rapidly in the open air and thought vaguely that here was the proof of the futility of blood sacrifice. Blood was only precious as long as it flowed inside the body of someone you cared about. Otherwise, it had about as much intrinsic value as tap water.

The first stab of grief hit him with the force of a freight train. If he'd still been standing, he knew his knees would have buckled beneath him. As it was, he doubled over in agony, feeling as if he'd just taken a mule kick right to the
kidneys. His heart and stomach clenched in unison and the only thought in his head was that after thirty-five years, he had finally found the woman he loved, and now he would be expected to live the rest of his life without her. He didn't believe it was possible.

What he was thinking in that moment, he didn't know. He acted purely on instinct, which was likely what did it, because if he'd stopped to think, he'd have decided that what he attempted was impossible. Not even the most powerful sorcerer on Earth could bring life back to the dead. Death was the one finality in the universe, and spells that reanimated flesh could never restore the soul that had existed in the living being. So when Aaron placed his palm over the still-bleeding heart of the woman he loved and poured every ounce of energy he had and every ounce of the energy they had raised together into that tiny, cold muscle, he knew somewhere in the back of his mind that his magic was bound to prove useless.

Bending toward her, Aaron rested his forehead against Lilli's silken hair and tried to remember how to breathe. More than his heart felt broken. He felt as if everything inside him had fractured, leaving a million tiny, jagged pieces behind, allowing the tears to seep out from between them.

The first of them fell on her hair and glistened against the dark, shiny strands. Another followed close behind, then another and another until he was weeping for the first time in his adult life.

Maybe the experience confused him so much that when he felt the first tiny movement, he wrote it off as something he had done. He had shifted or jostled her somehow and that was why it felt almost like her fingers had twitched against his leg.

But then he felt a second twitch, and fear and hope began to war inside him.

“Lilli?” he ventured, and his voice was hoarse and soft with grief and doubt.

The soft moan that answered him was the sweetest sound he'd ever heard.

Well, maybe the second sweetest, after the sound of her distinctly cranky voice saying, “Christ, do you think you can pull the knife out for me before it gets welded in place?”

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Lilli felt as if she'd not only been stabbed in the heart by a lethally sharp assassin's knife—which Aaron quickly removed, praise be—but as if said assassin had then hog-tied her, strapped her down in the middle of the African savannah, and allowed herds of zebra, musk ox, and elephants to stampede across her body. Repeatedly. Too bad she knew she had only herself to blame.

“Lilli!” Aaron's voice held a wealth of emotion, but it overflowed with hope and excitement as he shook her like a pair of dice and called her name repeatedly. “Lilli! You're alive? You're alive! Are you all right? Are you okay? What happened? God, baby, you scared me to death!”

Clenching her teeth mostly kept them from rattling around inside her head, but she would have preferred not to have to put in the effort. “If you don't stop shaking me,” she hissed through clenched teeth, “I am going to start having serious doubts about this relationship.”

Immediately, the shaking ceased and Aaron's arms wrapped around her, cradling her against his chest while he rained kisses down upon her face.

“God, Lilli, I thought you were dead,” he groaned, his body shaking as he said the words. “I thought I'd lost you.
Come on, sweetheart, open your eyes and look at me. Let me see you in there, baby, please. I thought you were dead.”

Lilli sighed and took a minute to gather her strength before she could manage to drag her eyelids up and fix her gaze on his. “I'm pretty sure I was, but don't worry about it. I'm feeling better now.”

She saw his fear and nearly felt overwhelmed, but then the fear faded and was replaced by relief and joy that left her truly humbled. If she had planned to entertain any doubts about whether he felt as strongly about her as she did about him, they disappeared immediately in the light of those emotions. No one in her life had ever looked at her like that, as if the world would no longer exist if she left it. It kind of frightened her to think she could be that important to someone, but then she realized that was how important Aaron felt to her, and the fear melted under an onslaught of tenderness.

“What happened?” he demanded, shifting her in his lap so that she could meet his gaze without craning her neck. His hands moved over her almost compulsively, as if he needed to touch her to reassure himself that he wasn't imagining her with him. “I saw you stab yourself. I saw you die. What happened?” He paused and glared down at her, his eyes narrowing. “No, wait. Scratch that. First you're going to tell me why you did it, then we can discuss what happened. Lilli, you killed yourself! What the hell were you thinking?”

Lilli sighed. “It hit me when you were trying to convince me not to listen to Samael. You said something about the prophecy being fulfilled in one fell swoop and I realized that it was possible. Not to fulfill the apocalypse prophecy, but to thwart it and to fulfill the valiant knight prophecy all at the same time.”

“Explain.”

She shifted, feeling strength slowly beginning to return
to her body. At this rate, she might just be able to get up and walk up the stairs to the kitchen by Christmas.

“When I read the valiant knight prophecy, I got hung up on the idea that you were the knight,” she explained. “It seemed to make so much sense that it would be talking about you and your family, especially given your uncle's role in all this. I had no reason to look at it any other way. But then Samael kept urging me to kill you and I knew I couldn't do that. Not only could I never bring myself to hurt you, but there was a small part of me that feared you might be right and he was trying to turn you into the second sacrifice for the apocalypse. And that's when you brought up the fell swoop.”

Lilli paused for breath and sighed with relief when she realized that the pain in her side had lessened to a dull throb as the wound knit itself back together. She didn't have to look at it to know that was what was happening; she could feel it. Plus, she knew she'd be dying again if a wound that serious stayed open.

“It was like a bolt of inspiration,” she continued. “All at once, I remembered what you said about the way to avert the apocalypse being for a righteous demon to spill human and devil blood in one blow and I realized that I was the only person in this situation who could do that. My blood is both human and devil, because of my parents, and while I'm not going to claim to be a saint or anything, I thought there was a pretty good chance that I could qualify as a ‘righteous child of Hell.' I mean, I try not to hurt anyone who doesn't deserve it.”

Aaron squeezed her gently. “Oh, so I deserved to have my heart broken, did I?”

Lilli stilled and watched him intently. “Did I break your heart?”

He nodded. “But you're doing a pretty good job of putting it back together now, so I suppose I'll be able to forgive you.”

She felt happiness warm her like an internal sun and let him see it in her beaming grin. “I appreciate that.” There was a short pause while she tried to remember what she'd been saying. “Oh, yeah. Anyway, when I realized that I could fulfill all the requirements for averting the apocalypse, I started to think that maybe the valiant knight in the dragon prophecy wasn't you after all. Maybe it was me.”

Aaron looked stunned for a moment, then his expression turned thoughtful as he mulled that over. “You have a brilliant mind?”

“No, you do. And I got the book from you, in between falling ass-over-elbows in love with you. I think you just have to look at the words from a different perspective.”

“I think you should forget my question. Your mind is
definitely
brilliant.”

Lilli grinned. “So then it just seemed to make sense. If I paid the appropriate price, I might die, but Samael would be banished. And even if I was wrong about the valiant knight prophecy, my sacrifice could still prevent the apocalypse. It seemed worth it to me.”

“Well, next time ask me before you decide on that kind of thing.” His voice was fierce as he issued the order. “You might have thought it was worth it, but it was a hell of a lot higher than the price I was willing to pay. I'm crazy-assed in love with you, no matter how long we've known each other. That means that the idea of living the rest of my life without you, believing that you killed yourself to avoid having to kill me, is
not
on the list of noble gestures that I can afford.”