Lucifer's Rebellion (Lucifer Fanfic-Complete)

Chapter 5: O Lucifer, Star of the Morning

Samael's screams. They ripped through his mind. Abruptly, as if yanked by a rope, Lucifer came back to himself. But the world still rang with those terrified, tortured cries, for they were tearing out his throat, endless, endless, endless screams. He found himself kneeling atop the L.A. beach's jagged black boulder, his hands—grotesque hands, the skin too red, too thick, too shiny, patches of it raised like fire-crackled continents—making frantic swipes over the rock's streaks of red quartz. As if to wipe away his blood.

As if to wipe away his Fall.

Lucifer grabbed his flask from his suit jacket pocket, drained it. But all he tasted was his own bile. He lifted his arm and smashed the flask down, smashed it down, smashed it to smithereens against the Not-the-Rock-of-Justice-Tempered. He sprang to his feet and shook his fist at the Sky.

I know why I want, you Bastard. I've figured it out, haven't I? You created me to help the humans fulfill their desires. But how could I know what You even meant me to do if I didn't truly understand "want," if I didn't truly feel it? Was I only supposed to want just a little, just enough to serve your Grand Plan? But somehow, things spun out of your control? Or did You willingly give up that control—a bit of Chaos is needed for Creation, isn't it? But I went too far—

He leapt down from Not-Rock and roared a Devil Roar at God.

I am your Divine Mistake! And You punished me for it!

The cliffs thumped with his Roar, echoed it, re-echoed it, until the cliffs burst into one great Sea-and-Sky-and-Heaven-engulfing Devil Howl, sounding and resounding, a Howl to rival the Vortex's, to throw the Vortex back at Him, to shake Him to His ineffable bones, to rive Him from His Creation and cast Him into Dark. Lucifer snatched up the one-ton Not-the-Rock-of-Justice-Tempered and slung it into Earth's sea. It splashed down a mile out. The surf roiled and seethed.

Thunder rolled across the skies like drumsticks beating against a distant war drum.

Listening, are You? Strike me down! Finish me! Surely You know what I've decided to do, you Omniscient Bully. Or haven't You the balls to end me?

Lucifer touched his hands one to the other, and then he touched them to his face, to the ugliness there, to the clefts and ridges and deformities cursed on him by Dad. He closed his eyes and drew upon his Power, a Power of which he did not know the source, but likely Hell, where all doomed souls suffered loops of deception after deception after deception. In an instant, as if he'd been doused with a miraculous skin spray, his fingertips caught on the supple firmness of healthy skin, on the rough scruff of beard, on the visage of his self before his Fall: Dad's most beautiful Angel.

His demon approached.

"Mazikeen. Get out your demon blades."

She grazed his sleeve with her fingers. Slim fingers. Graceful fingers. Fingers capable of wielding infernal implements of torture with the efficiency of a cold-blooded assassin. And yet, she'd paled several shades, like a frightened ghost.

"Lucifer, what are you—?"

He whirled on her. Deep, guttural gusts of sound erupted from him. "I command you!"

The Lilim syllables descended into cavernous, Hellish reverberations, ten times more powerful than his Roar. The vocables smacked into the cliffs, and sandstone chunks the size of sixty-ton meteorites sheared off. Chunks thwacked down all around them, either missing them by yards and bounding away along the shore or plummeting straight into the ocean, huge exclamation points of spray rocketing into the sky. Mazikeen fell to her knees and cowered, her arms covering her head. As if the raining rubble—or he—might strike her.