All I knew for sure was that he was out-maneuvering me by a long shot.
“What do you remember about your parents?”
“Nothing.” I frowned, then shook my head. “I saw a something, in a dream, but I don’t think it was real. I saw a woman rocking a baby, and she called it my name. She told it the spirits couldn’t hurt it.”
“So your mother knew what you were? What you could do?”
“Maybe. Or maybe she just abandoned me like everyone else, and I just want to believe she cared at one point. Abandonment issues can play one hell of a trick on the psyche.”
“And your father?”
I shrugged. If Lucifer wanted information, he was barking up the wrong hell-tree. I knew less about my parents than I did about myself.
“I heard Lilith is your daughter,” I said.
He nodded before going to the bar to pour himself another drink. “Yes. I have many children, but she was the first.”
“And how do you measure up as a daddy-o?”
He paused, as if he’d never considered the question before. “Lilith was different. My other children were created, how should I say—the more traditional way. Lilith was not born but made, much like Adam.”
I thought back to what little I had heard about such stories. “She was Adam’s first wife?”
Lucifer nodded before taking his seat again. “Yes. As a means of balance, Adam was made by”—he hesitated, as if unsure how to phrase the next part—“you would think of him as God. Reality is always more complicated. A compromise was decided that between Adam, forged by him, and Lilith, forged by me, we would have a mix of influence. However, our children were much as we are, stubborn and difficult. Adam wished to dominate, and Lilith wished for freedom. They were incompatible.”
“So then the whole ‘Eve from Adam’s rib’ thing happened?”
Lucifer nodded. “Lilith was set aside for her failure, and God created Eve from Adam, a more biddable female for him. Of course, you women showed him, didn’t you? I don’t think anyone expected quite so much in the way of bite from you.”
The joke didn’t land as I thought about the woman I’d seen, about Lilith, about how lonely that life had to have been. To be created for a single purpose and to fail in it?
“So she was just cast out?”
Lucifer took another drink, a slow one as if he didn’t care for the subject. “She has always yearned for freedom, has always loathed control. She was made sterile, so she could never carry on her line since she rejected what was laid out for her, but she has always been exceedingly smart. It was Lilith who created the first vampire.”
“I thought she was sterile?”
“She is. She could never bear children or create life on her own, so instead took dead bodies and breathed a semblance of life into them. She created the first vampire, and it was God’s anger over it that forced them into the darkness. She didn’t create all immortals, but they all have a certain amount of credit to her, because it was her work with vampires that sparked many of them into existence by that defiance. They are the children she was denied.”
“So why don’t I know that? Why haven’t I heard that before?”
“Because she also believed that freedom was the most important gift any could give another. She didn’t believe in raising or taking any part in their lives because she saw that as a sort of control. I think she finds solace in their presence whether or not she has a connection with them personally.”
I blew out a slow breath, the story harder and harder to follow as the ambrosia lessened my focus. “And your other kids?”
“Many have positions of power here in the afterlife. Some have chosen to live on earth. Some are mortal, some immortal. Many take after whatever their mother was and thus live the life she had. Countless I don’t even know about.”
“Father of the year, huh?”
“Live as long as I have, bury as many offspring as I have and you will realize that they matter little.” He caught my chin, turning my head as he stared into my eyes. “You’re ready.”
“You care to tell me for what?”
Lucifer went to the door and spoke to someone outside. Afterward, another person followed him back in.
The man was dressed in a simple pair of jeans and a shirt, making him completely out of place. “This is her?”
Lucifer nodded.
“How deep should I go?”
“As far as you have to. I need to know if I’m right.”
And boy did that sound like something I was not going to enjoy with these two…
Chapter Twenty-One
The man who sat on the table in front of me had a thick red beard and bright blue eyes. He took my chin and stared into my eyes in a way that made me lean in, as if drawn to sink deeper into his gaze.
It felt like sliding into a warm bath, as if something pulled me down and surrounded me.
I could feel him inside my head, his metaphorical fingers slipping along the edges of my brain, not painful but not comfortable either.
“What are you?” he asked as if to himself.
Still, I answered. “I don’t know.”
His eyes narrowed—not out of anger but as if concentrating—and I cried out at a sudden pain in my head, as if that gentle stroke had become a jab.
As soon as it happened, it eased though didn’t disappear entirely. Flashes came to me, moments of my life. Different foster homes, the Christmas I spent at a friend’s house, one of my only real Christmases, the times I spent in Gran’s shop. They were tiny moments of my life, the good and the bad, and he sifted through each of them as if looking for something specific.
“How much
