“For the first time, I understand everything. I believed in our love, and you didn’t, but I was the one who paid the ultimate price.” She looked out over the walls of the Colosseum, where it opened up to the sky. Flames rose in the distance, licking the night. “Why did you come back? To taunt me? To delight in my suffering?” She flung her arms out, tears streaming down her face. “Are you satisfied?”
“I came because I love you.” Cam’s voice trembled. “I thought you were dead. I never knew you were in Hell. As soon as I learned, I came for you.” His eyes began to burn. “I made a deal with Lucifer, and I’ve spent these past fifteen days falling in love with you all over again, hoping you could fall in love with me again, too.”
“So that was the bet.” Lilith looked at Cam with disgust. “You haven’t changed at all. You’re just as selfish as ever.”
“She’s right,” a voice boomed from everywhere as a hot wind swirled across the stage. Cam spun around to find Luc stripped of his youthful mortal guise. The true Lucifer stood in his place, chest heaving, eyes red with evil. With each breath, Lucifer’s body swelled; he grew larger and larger until he dwarfed the stage and eclipsed the moon.
The audience screamed and tried to flee, only to find that every exit had been locked and bolted. Some students tried scaling the walls, others huddled together, crying. Every effort, Cam knew, was futile in the face of the devil.
Lucifer’s fingers sharpened into razor claws the size of butchers’ knives. Reptilian black scales coated his body, and his features were jagged and devoid of mercy. He tipped his head back, closed his eyes, and released his tarnished green-gold wings.
“Lucifer,” Lilith gasped in recognition.
“Yes, Lilith,” Lucifer bellowed, his voice slithering into every crevice in Crossroads. “I am the maker of your misery.”
The other student performers were long gone; they were now trembling somewhere in the audience, leaving the stage empty of everyone but Cam, Lilith, and Lucifer, and, he now realized, Jean and Luis. His two bandmates stood back, watching from the edge of the stage, their shoulders touching, their faces pale and horrified. Cam wished there was something he could do to console them, but he knew the horrors of the evening were only going to get worse.
The stars pulsed and swelled as Lucifer’s legion of demons flew closer, growing discernible in the darkness, streaming in through the glassy firmament, swirling darkly, directly over Lilith.
“Even now,” Lucifer said, “Cam lies to you, withholding his true nature from you. Behold!”
The devil pointed at Cam and suddenly an insuppressible urge came over him. His shoulders felt as if they were engulfed in flames as Lucifer forced open Cam’s wings. They unfurled with a sound like tearing vinyl. For all eternity, Cam had known only the glorious beauty of his wings. Tonight, he looked back and gasped.
They were hideous, leathery, limp, and charred, like the wings of the lowest demons in hell. He felt the bones inside his body twisting painfully, his skin pulling and tightening. He screamed, then looked at his hands—which had now turned into scaly claws.
He touched his face, his chest, and knew his transformation was complete. Not even Lilith would be able to deny his monstrous appearance—
And suddenly, Cam was glad of that. He would hide nothing from her, ever again.
“Long ago,” he said, feeling tears in the corners of his eyes, “I was afraid you wouldn’t love me if you knew who I really was.”
She studied his aging demon’s face, his decrepit body, his repulsive wings. “You never even gave me the chance to love the real you,” she said. “You didn’t trust that I might have accepted you.”
“You’re right—”
“I loved you, Cam. I wanted to marry you, and that meant every part of you, the good and the bad, the known and the unknown.”
“I wanted to marry you, too. But I couldn’t do it in the temple as you wished—”
“Screw the temple,” Lilith said. “Who cares about that?”
“You did,” he said. “It mattered to you, but I dismissed it so that I wouldn’t have to tell you what I am. I tried to make it your fault, but I was the one who backed out of our marriage.”
She stared at him, her expression strained with hurt.
“I knew you could never forgive me,” he said, “so I ran away. I thought I had lost you for good. But then I found this second chance, and I came here to redeem myself. This time with you has shown me that my love for you is bigger than my fear. My love for you is bigger than anything I know.”
A tear rolled down his cheek. He closed his eyes. He had so much more to say and so little time for it to matter.
Lilith shrieked.
Something acrid singed Cam’s nose, and he remembered what had happened in the library the last time he had cried. He wiped his cheeks, but it was too late. Beneath his feet he saw the hole his tear had made when it hit the stage. Black smoke billowed from it. Acid ate away at the stage, forming a crater that yawned and stretched until it spread like a canyon between Cam and Lilith.
“Say goodbye, Lilith,” Lucifer said with a sneer.