Aaron—and his uncle, too, Lilli suspected—had looked at the problem from the wrong angle. Each of them had believed that the most powerful prophecy in the book was the one with the greatest potential impact on humanity, but Lilli knew Samael and she knew that he would always view the world through the lens of his own selfishness. To Samael, the question wasn’t how would a prophecy affect the world, it was how would a prophecy affect
Samael had never cared about the apocalypse, at least not in the way Aaron and his uncle had assumed. Sure, he wanted to go to war with humanity and wreak havoc and destruction on the mortal plane just as much as any devil, but Lilli would be willing to bet the plans he had supposedly set in motion were a long way from completion. She would bet that he was more than willing to be patient. All that had mattered to Samael had been getting the book back before Aaron realized that the prophecies on the dragon page placed the devil’s downfall squarely in his hands.
It was the same reason why the devil had murdered Alistair—because the prophecies said that someone from Aaron’s family would be the one to destroy Samael’s power. Aaron was a smart man. As long as the codex remained in his hands, Lilli knew that chances were he would put two and two together and decide to take care of the devil once and for all.
But all of those worries would disappear, Lilli knew, if Aaron were dead.
And Samael wanted her to kill him.
“He must have been a pretty good lay,” the devil drawled, yanking her attention back to him, “otherwise it wouldn’t be such a hard decision. You can kill him, or I can lay waste to all of mankind.” He held his hands up like scales and pretended to balance them. “Hm, yes, I can see where that would be a tough call.”
Lilli turned her head and looked at Aaron. He was frowning, his brow furrowed, but the hazel eyes watching her were steady and unafraid.
“You do realize he’s up to something, don’t you?” he asked. “He’s trying to trick you. My uncle could count as the first sacrifice. If he gets you to kill me, that’s number two. One more and he’s won. Game over. The prophecy is fulfilled in one fell swoop, the world is ended, and oops, bad time to be human, I guess.”
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
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?”
THIRTEEN
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.
