I hold my hands up expectantly, waiting for an answer.
Kai gives me an incredulous look.
Jude looks like he’s just ready to throttle me, per the usual.
Ezekiel and Gage just stare at me like half my head is full of gibberish and they’re waiting on the other half to start working.
“What happened?” Ezekiel growls, biting the words out.
Huffing, I roll my eyes. “Clearly I didn’t attempt to kill the Devil. I decided that may have been too ambitious when I’m so new to discovering who I am.”
They all relax a little, and Ezekiel pinches the bridge of his nose.
“Do you have any fucking idea how worried we’ve been? And we couldn’t do a damn thing about it,” Gage snaps.
“I’m killing Lamar,” Jude growls.
“Lamar really had no alternative. Apparently I can command him.”
They just continue doing that death-stare thingy.
“This is good news. Commanding Lamar could be a huge help,” I say happily, but clear my throat and mask my smile when that earns me even scarier expressions.
I turn to face Ezekiel, the more reasonable one of the four, according to my journal…
Shit. I forgot the journals in that room when I was concentrating on fighting the Devil. Not that I could have taken them, since I can’t zap around with such things.
“A move had to be made. Lucifer thought I had my memories, and he was waiting—”
“Thought you had your memories?” Gage cuts in, a fiercely unhappy look on his face. “As in now he knows the fucking truth?” he adds.
“Someone please tell me what to say to make you see it my way,” I say as I turn back around.
My breath leaves in a rush when I find Jude inches from me and towering over me as he grips one of my hips and pins me against the door. His gaze rakes over my face in equal parts hunger and fury, though the latter of the two is slightly dominant.
“You don’t get to make those kinds of decisions on your own,” he grinds out.
That…actually confuses me. “Why not? You four make decisions on your own quite often. I’m a real girl now. Surely you’re not actually clinging to some archaic sense of misogyny at a critical time like this.”
Cursing, he turns and runs a hand through his hair before pointing at Kai. “You fucking deal with her,” he gripes.
I giggle a little at Jude’s accidental joke.
“Aaaaaand she’s laughing,” Gage says on a frustrated breath, also running a hand through his hair as he turns and walks away.
“It was just the choice of words,” I try to explain. “Deal with her.”
“What’s so funny about that?” Kai groans.
“I guess it’s only funny since I’m the Devil’s daughter and you want to deal with me after I just made a deal with the Devil,” I say with a shrug before going phantom and zapping myself back to the kitchen.
Five…
Four…
Three…
Tw—
One second earlier than I predicted, I hear something crash to the ground, something else shatter, and four angry Horsemen shouting very not nice words about me.
“I’m going to fucking kill her myself, damn it!”
“For fuck’s sake, she’s going to drive us all insane!”
“When I get my hands on her…”
“We need to find a way to chain her to the fucking house!”
Sheesh. They act like they like me, but I think they’ve just missed threatening me.
Idly, I realize the slice from the Devil’s blade on my hip is long healed. I’m not even sure how long the wound was there, which is far different than my last experience with a blade.
“What the fucking hell?” Ezekiel roars, storming into the kitchen with the rest of the furious quad.
“So you really did find the motherfucking Devil?” Jude snaps.
“Of course I found him. He was actually waiting for me, because clearly that entire meeting was inevitable at some point,” I say, trying to sound as dispassionate as possible in hopes of staving off some of their nuclear anger.
“I really didn’t expect so much hostility,” I lie, peering at them with wide, innocent doe eyes.
Yeah, it totally doesn’t work.
In romance books, the girl gets away with everything while the guys dote on her and affectionately stroke her hair. So not fair. Fiction is starting to annoy me with all its misleading inaccuracies.
“What the hell happened? And start from the part where you had Lamar send us away while you decided—on your own—to go face the Devil without a plan, a weapon, or even a fucking clue,” Jude growls.
“Apparently, I can move around whole and find my way around the illusions of the royal section, and—”
“You went in whole?” Ezekiel asks me, staring at me like I’m an idiot, while also seeming to get randomly queasy as he pales slightly and sags to a chair.
“It was the only way to get there,” I say on a sigh. “And Lucifer can’t hear me in my phantom form. Lamar seemed confident in the fact Daddy didn’t want me dead, so I concocted another plan,” I add, making it sound much more thought-out than it truly was.
I’m not sure why I went in so damn determined I could handle that.
“What the hell happened?” Jude insists, just as the timer goes off. “What did Lucifer say?”
Putting as much gravel in my voice as possible, I answer, “He said, ‘Paca, I am your father.’”
For a small moment, it’s like hearing crickets at the Apollo after an awesomely unappreciated joke.
“I’m going to fucking kill her,” Jude says seriously to Gage, as Ezekiel groans and scrubs a hand over his face.
Surely that deserves at least a little laugh.
“What did he really say?” Kai insists, not sounding as annoyed with me as the others do.
My outfit changes to the sexy devil costume, then I turn whole and pull the hot tray out of the oven with my bare hand. Turning back around, I give them a very grave look.
“He said, ‘Welcome to the dark side, Paca. We have cookies.’” I’m nailing that gravelly tone thing today.
I fight really hard to keep a straight face, as they all stare at me blankly.
Jude finally pushes off, turns on his heel, and stalks out, yelling behind him, “I can’t handle her right now. Someone else make her stop being ridiculous so I can effectively yell at her some more!”
I just grin at them.
“How the hell did you time that?” Kai asks me, gesturing to the cookies and barely resisting the clear urge he has to grin.
“If I’d skipped the sadly underappreciated Darth Vader joke that no one with a sense of humor could have passed up, it might have had more impact, since that’s when the timer went off,” I point out as I put the cookies down and start eating them. “Aside from that misstep in timing and the confusing tones, this has been mostly predictable,” I go on around a chocolate-chip mouthful.
Kai snags a cookie, regarding me with a humored gaze as he eats it.
“Don’t encourage her, you dick,” Gage snaps at Kai, shoving at his shoulder.
Now that their tempers have substantially cooled, I finally tell them the important parts. “You have access to the underworld and its power boosts or whatever. You’re also guaranteed safe passage while you’re down there. You have the right to come and go as you please, and you can take as many books as you need.”
Gage snorts derisively.
“What’d you give him in return?” Jude asks as he comes back in, apparently never fully leaving.
“Nothing really,” I say with a shrug. “I just promised not to kill him while he abides by the rules.”
Four suspicious eyes narrow on me. It’s like they genuinely question my badassness.
“He really does know I have no memories,” I finally concede, knowing there’s a distinct lack of badassness compared to what I evidently used to be.
As they erupt into more yelling and chastisement, I notice some more of my journals have magically appeared. I suppose Lamar is useful, if he’s the delivery boy.
Taking the journals, I grab a cookie and start walking away, knowing they’ll follow, since they’re ready to throttle me again.
“And he really went for this deal when he knew you couldn’t remember?” Ezekiel snaps.
“Not until I bested him in a fencing match. I think I’ve now overcome my fear of swords,” I tell them absently as I sit down and open my journal.
The journal’s words are still there, and they swirl around in their various languages. I flip idly through the pages, thankful for their moment of stunned silence when I find a passage that fluidly translates itself to English.
You’ll need answers to the puzzle you’ve laid. To seek such, refer to all things from your favorite decade.
Oh, great. I’m a rhyming riddler in here, it seems. Makes me wonder if Lucifer read me grimmer versions of Dr. Seuss when I was in my early years of becoming a manifested being.
Just freaking fantastic.
Sighing, I look up to find all of them staring at me like I’ve sprouted a second head.
“You bested Lucifer in fencing?” Jude asks skeptically.
“Considering how many times I’ve managed to save your lives based on sheer intuition alone, the surprise in your tone is actually a little insulting,” I point out.