***
Lucifer opened his eyes as sunlight hit his face, but he had trouble focusing on anything in the room. His head swam, and he wanted to go back to sleep, but a small voice in his mind told him not to. He needed to wake up, but he couldn’t remember why. He struggled to sit up, but the three women covering most of his body held him firmly in place with their combined weight.
Rosaline’s members responded to his stirring by rubbing their naked bodies against him, as they had done every day for the past month. He watched as they kissed each other, and then moved across his body with their lips and tongues. Something was wrong, though. His skin was numb, his vision was cloudy, and he couldn’t think straight.
“What is going on?” he asked.
One of Rosaline’s singuli mounted him, and she guided him inside of her. She rocked back and forth, but didn’t answer him. She just smiled and kissed his chest, as did the other singuli, but he couldn’t enjoy what was going on. His sensations were off.
He was reminded of the opium dens back on Earth, right down to the casual sex and feeling of oblivion. His head crashed back to the pillow in what seemed like slow motion, and he laughed as sounds echoed slightly, and his skin tingled all over. She continued to massage him as they finished together and the prickling feeling suddenly became acute. He shook his head to clear what he could of the mental fog.
“Rosaline … what time is it?”
“Why do you ask?”
“Am I not supposed to be somewhere today?”
“You haven’t had much reason to leave before.”
Lucifer sat up and extricated himself from the three women’s grasps. “Where is Sariel?”
Her lips parted and she smiled mischievously. “Now we’re talking.”
“Maybe he’ll know what’s going on.”
She pouted. “He left a couple of hours ago.”
“Well, where did he go?”
“The Coliseum, I’m sure.”
The Coliseum. Was there a Certamen today? Maybe he was supposed to compete. They hadn’t asked him to since he had beaten their ten champions. Maybe they only wanted Sariel to participate so it would be fairer.
He slapped his hands to his forehead and pressed his fists against his eye sockets. There was something important going on at the stadium. Maybe he should ask Elandril. His hands dropped to the comforter as the recognition came to him. Today was an important day.
“The coronation!” he yelled. “What have you done?”
Rosaline bounced up and down on the bed. “Can we not go again for a while?”
Lucifer got up too quickly and fell into the nightstand. “What the hell did you give me?”
“An over-the-counter sleeping agent,” she said. “Stop being such a baby.”
“I’m supposed to be at Elandril’s coronation.”
“No, you’re not,” Rosaline said.
Lucifer spun around and fell into the oaken dresser, causing the large, heavy, attached mirror to topple onto him before crashing to the floor. “Where is my suit?”
“At the drycleaners. You wore it to dinner last night, and it got a bit soiled after what my members did under the table. Remember?”
He rubbed his temples as he leaned back against the dresser and tried to avoid the shards of glass. “Well, I need it now. I need you to take me to these cleaners.”
“They’re closed,” her red-headed singulus said. “Everything is closed during the coronation.”
“How could you do this to me?”
She folded her arms under her perky breasts. “The only thing that could keep me away from the King’s coronation would be an executive order, Luke.”
“Elandril doesn’t want me there?”
“Now you’re getting it.”
“He thinks I’ll ruin it?”
“I am not the King’s ambassador. He just told me to make sure you were delayed.”
“What time is it?” he said, reaching for the clock on the nightstand. “Eleven o’clock? What time is the coronation?”
“Noon.”
“Archimedes’ ass!” Lucifer said. “I need to get dressed. What do you have in your wardrobe?”
“I have a sexy little red number that I think you would love,” Rosaline laughed. “Or we could just stay in and you could practice taking it off with your teeth.”
Lucifer bumped into the door on his way out of the bedroom and ran naked down the hall. “Where are your men’s clothes?”
He burst into the Atrium and stopped cold. Five elves rose from their chairs and bowed to him. They were old men, gray-haired, manicured, and well-dressed.
“Lucifer, I presume.” One of them strode forward and offered his hand while smirking. “You are the spitting image of your father. I mean, right down to the … um … feet.”
“Thank you?”
Rosaline’s singuli poured into the room, and the three naked women moved immediately to the old man. “Lantomine, you never call!”
“Yes, and my wife most certainly appreciates that,” the man noted drily.
“Tell her that she should join us for dinner some time,” the two singuli said as they bounced playfully up and down while the redhead traced an arm around his shoulders.
Lucifer bowed to Lantomine but didn’t make any attempt at covering himself. He was too busy looking at a rack behind the old men. “Is that a suit?”
“Yes, it is.”
“May I?” Lucifer asked.
“By all means,” the five men said in unison. “It is yours, after all.”
Lucifer grinned as he approached the red-pinstriped, three-piece suit. It was beautiful. Eight holes in the back and black as night.
“We modeled it after your father’s preferences,” Lantomine said. “Black silk with red trimming and stripes. Conservative white with silver cufflinks.”
“I love it.”
“Well, try it on.”
Lucifer pulled on the pants first and then asked the men to help him with the buttons and wings, but Rosaline’s naked members volunteered instead.
“Oh, Mommy like.”
“I am thrilled that you approve,” Lantomine said. He flanked Lucifer in the mirror to watch them at their work, but when Rosaline began unbuttoning Lucifer’s pants and rubbing on him, the tailor coughed delicately into a hand before leaving them alone.
Lucifer marveled at the way the suit hugged his features and extended his wings as he checked his profile for proper alignment with the eight apertures. As he was modeling, he noticed movement behind his reflection and turned around as a white-clad woman darted across the rooftops beside the atrium.
“Has the Chaos delegation arrived yet?” Lucifer asked as he pushed aside Rosaline’s roaming hands and fastened his last cufflinks.
“The Ambassador arrived hours ago,” Lantomine said. “But my other singuli are telling me that Chaos diplomats are still arriving at the stadium.”
Lucifer ran to the windows and pushed the rotating pane. “Then there is no more time to waste.”
“I have reserved an automated taxi for you, sir,” the tailor said. “It is very fast.”
“I’ll need something quicker,” Lucifer said as he leapt through the window and punched his wings into the street below, “if I want to catch that assassin.”
“Good luck!” Rosaline called after him.
He launched himself down the street, sending mortar and bricks flying alongside him as he frantically searched the rooftops for his target. He didn’t see any wings. Maybe she was a lesser demon. Lesser demons, he could certainly catch.
He looked atop the buildings for traces of Chaos eddies—telltale signs of the quick travel of demons through a hostile pattern—but she appeared to be masking them somehow. Or maybe that didn’t apply anymore since the elves had altered their primal pattern. He turned around briefly to check his own trail and laughed at the huge wake of eddies he left behind him. Nope. Definitely no change there.
He pushed himself atop a nearby high rise
and leapfrogged from building to building. It wasn’t until he launched himself hundreds of feet above the local buildings that he realized he had passed her. She apparently took a left long ago, toward the Coliseum.
“I guess I should have thought of that,” he mumbled to himself. “Of course, she would be heading to the coronation.”
He increased his speed as he neared the roof of a brick warehouse where she had paused, apparently still unaware that she was being followed. In her white headgear, robe, and rugged attire, she cut a sharp contrast against the brown-and-red brick as she stooped low to watch the streets below. He tried to summon his long zinanbar blades but then remembered surrendering them to Elandril at the championship Certamen. His only hope was to take her by surprise, but a Chaos assassin was a notoriously hard target to catch unaware, and he still hadn’t worked out what he was going to do once he caught her.
Everything looked good on his approach, right up to the point where he could smell her sweat. When he came within an arm’s reach, she twisted her body and moved underneath his trajectory, then pushed herself into Lucifer, causing him to roll in midair with her knee firmly planted in his abdomen. His speed carried them over several buildings, and he looked at her exposed green eyes as he braced himself for the impact of their landing.
It was not comfortable.
She flipped herself behind him, seconds before impact, and rolled off of him, leaving him to fend for himself against a brick chimney. To cap off his humiliation, the assassin jumped on top of him and unsheathed her zinanbar daggers to point menacingly at his crotch and chest.
“Do you know who I am, assassin?” Lucifer asked.
“Yes,” a familiar voice laughed to Lucifer’s left.
Sariel sat at the edge of the roof, eyeing the same scene the assassin had been looking at and smiling at his brother. “I see you’ve met Anne, then.”
Even with the headgear shrouding all but her eyes, Lucifer could tell she was smiling. He realized there was no way to get out of this with his dignity intact.
Lucifer sighed and allowed his head to fall back to the rooftop. “What are you up to, Sariel?”
“Did you seriously intend to wrestle with an assassin?” Sariel asked, not willing to let this drop, seeing as how a female assassin was still on top of one of the most powerful warlords in all of Chaos, threatening his manhood with zinanbar daggers.
“I don’t have my blades at the moment,” Lucifer said, shrugging.
“It’s a wonder you’ve survived this long,” Sariel said, nodding his disapproval and shaking some hair out of his eyes.
“In my defense,” Lucifer said, “I’m used to ordering assassins to do my bidding—not trying to stop them.”
Anne giggled but didn’t move from her position on top of Lucifer. “Do you see them, Sariel?” she asked, still looking directly at Lucifer.
“Several,” Sariel said. “At least three of them. I’m guessing most of them are already in the Coliseum.”
“What are you looking for?” Lucifer asked, exasperated at once again being left out of the picture.
“Assassins,” Sariel said as he continued to scan the streets.
Lucifer looked at Sariel and then at Anne. “Which assassins?”
“The Royal ones,” Sariel said. “The Council ones. I’m not sure there is a difference anymore.”
“So, Eranos intends to kill Elandril here?” Lucifer asked. “What exactly is that going to accomplish? He’s not even one person.”
“Eranos doesn’t know that yet,” Sariel said. “And neither does Lord Phillip, the acting ambassador from the Council—their chief assassin.”
Anne appeared to be slightly confused. “Wait, you mean the Goblin Realm is using multiple decoys to hide the real king?”
“No,” Lucifer said, laughing and accidentally brushing against one of Anne’s daggers, causing him to squint in anger at her. After realizing that she may have just done that on purpose because he wasn’t answering her question, he tried a different tact. “I mean Elandril is a distributed being. Goblin society is not what it used to be.”
“Anne, get off of my brother before I brain you,” Sariel said.
“Oh, please,” Anne replied. “I’m certain he’s enjoying it.”
Her eyes ventured downward suggestively.
“I just left a whorehouse. That’s not your doing.”
“Rosaline would absolutely disown you if she heard you calling it a whorehouse,” Sariel warned. “That’s like versatile minus infinite.”
“I suppose she would,” Lucifer said as he brushed aside the daggers and stood up.
“Who is Rosaline?” an aged, raspy voice croaked from nearby.
Lucifer turned to see his uncle Batarel, who was now looking across the shifting mob with his student Sariel.
“Both of you are in on this?” Lucifer asked. “What the hell are you two up to? Can you just give me a small nugget of information here? You’re killing me.”
“Nothing official, that’s for certain,” Batarel said. “The Council of Wizards has been corrupted. Eranos has them completely under his thumb.”
Lucifer stood up, brushing off pieces of the chimney that he and Anne had recently destroyed. “I hear you have been doing a lot of unofficial things.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
Lucifer looked at Anne significantly. “We’ll talk about it later.”
“What do you know?” Batarel asked.
“I know that you have your own cult here in the Elven Realm.”
“The Elven Realm?” Anne asked. “And who has a cult?”
“What are you getting at, Lucifer?” the old wizard asked.
Lucifer spread his arms and waved to the city around him. He pointed at the mass transit rail system that was delivering thousands of elves to the stadium. He struggled for words to describe his sense of amazement at the gigantic metal skyscrapers standing next to brick-and-wood homes and trees. Children conjuring magic freely and making their own impromptu, unnatural blue fireworks in celebration of their king.
“This is all worth fighting for,” Lucifer said.
“I know,” Batarel said, looking hesitantly at Sariel, then Anne, and finally back to Lucifer.
Lucifer nodded back in understanding. Yes, he would know. He was the first family member to really stand up for the Elven Realm. The first one to shake off his racism and save a pattern. Lucifer should have done the same for his friend. Better late than never.
“It’s time I was on the right side for once,” Lucifer said. “I’m going in there to defend Elandril.”
“I think you underestimate the new king,” Batarel said. “I know the Council does. Whatever they are going to throw at him, he’ll be ready for it.”
“That’s irrelevant,” Lucifer said, joining them to watch the assassins entering the Coliseum. “I owe Elandril more than that. He deserves a show of support—the kind that he never got from me during the Great War. We are not just some exiled family branch; we are scions of our clan, and the rightful heirs to the throne. Today, we start acting like it.”
Lucifer’s rage focused into his wings, and their shade of red shifted to maroon. Recklessness coursed through him, and Sariel began to teeter back and forth.
“I will go with you,” Sariel said, purple wings flaring around him, supporting himself on the rooftop. He didn’t look at Batarel, who was shaking his head. Instead, he looked at Anne, who was moving toward the brothers.
“Anne,” Batarel said. “I forbid it. Absolutely not.”
“I’m sorry, father,” Anne replied. “But I think you’re a little out of your jurisdiction on that order.”
“Don’t do this to me, Anne. I have no intention of losing you now.”
Anne twirled her daggers before sheathing them at her sides. “Then don’t.”
She turned to Lucifer. “No hand or weapon in this universe will touch you as long as I am near you, lest it pierce my body to do so.”
Ba
tarel muttered viciously to himself. “God damned young people!”
“The jig is up, old friend,” Sariel said. “Whose side will you find yourself on this time?”
Batarel looked at them, defeat clearly etched across his face. “I will make sure you are protected from Ambassador Phillip.”
“Protect him from me,” Lucifer snarled.
Batarel lifted himself up on purple wings to join them. “Shall we go to the Coliseum, then?”
“Well, that’s where my swords are,” Lucifer said, drawing a giggle from Sariel. “It only makes sense.”