“Of me.” Cam swallowed.
“I work with the material I’m given. It’s not my fault you betrayed her.” Lucifer let out a laugh that made Cam’s eardrums pulse. “Want to know my favorite twist in Lilith’s current Hell? No weekends! School every day of the year. Can you imagine?” Lucifer lifted a snow globe into the air, then let it fall to the ground and shatter. “As far as she’s concerned, she’s a typically gloomy teenager, suffering through a typically gloomy high school experience.”
“Why Lilith?” Cam asked. “Do you craft everyone’s Hell this way?”
Lucifer smiled. “The dull ones make their own dull hells, fire and brimstone and all that crap. They need no help from me. But Lilith—she’s special. Not that I have to tell you that.”
“What about the people suffering with her? Those kids at her school, her family—”
“Pawns,” Lucifer said. “Brought here from Purgatory to play a bit part in someone else’s story—which is a hell of another sort.”
“I don’t get it,” Cam said. “You’ve made her existence utterly miserable—”
“Oh, I can’t take all the credit,” Lucifer said. “You helped!”
Cam ignored the guilt he felt lest it choke him. “But you’ve allowed her one thing she dearly loves. Why do you let her play music?”
“Existence is never so miserable as when you have a taste of something beautiful,” Lucifer said. “It serves to remind you of everything you can never have.”
Everything you can never have.
Luce and Daniel had shaken something loose in Cam, something he thought was lost for good: his ability to love. The realization that such a thing was possible for him, that he might have a second chance, had made him yearn to see Lilith.
Now that he had, now that he knew she was here…
He had to do something.
“I need to see her again,” Cam said. “That was too short—”
“I’ve done you enough favors,” Lucifer said with a snarl. “I showed you what eternity is like for her. I didn’t have to do even that.”
Cam scanned the endless snow globes. “I can’t believe you hid all this from me.”
“I didn’t hide her; you didn’t care,” Lucifer said. “You were always too busy. Luce and Daniel, the popular crowd at Sword and Cross, all that jazz. But now…well, would you like to see some of Lilith’s previous Hells? It’ll be fun.”
Without waiting for an answer, Lucifer put his palm on the back of Cam’s head and pushed it at one of the snow globes. Cam squeezed his eyes shut, bracing for his face to smash into the glass—
Instead:
He stood with Lucifer beside a vast river delta. Torrential rain poured from the sky. People ran from a row of huts, clutching belongings, panic on their faces as the river swelled against its banks. Across the river, a girl with a sad, calm expression walked slowly, carrying a sitar, in stark contrast to the chaos around her. Though she looked nothing like the Lilith he had loved in Canaan or the girl he had just met in Crossroads, Cam recognized her instantly.
She was walking toward the surging river.
“Ah, Lilith,” Lucifer said with a sigh. “She really knows when to pack it in.”
She sat in the mud on the riverbank and began to play. Her hands flew over the long-necked instrument, producing sad, sonorous music.
“A blues for drowning,” Lucifer said with a hint of admiration.
“No—it’s a blues for the moments before drowning,” Cam said. “Big difference.”
Then the river was over its banks, over Lilith and her sitar, over the houses, over the heads of all the fleeing people, over Cam and Lucifer.
Seconds later, Cam and Lucifer stood on a mountain bluff. Wisps of fog curled like fingers around the pine trees.
“This is one of my favorites,” Lucifer said.
Mournful banjo music sounded behind them. They turned and saw seven rail-thin children sitting on the porch of a sagging log cabin. They were barefoot, and their stomachs were bloated. A girl with strawberry-blond hair held the banjo in her lap, her fingers moving over the strings.
“I’m not going to stand here and watch Lilith play along to her starvation,” Cam said.
“It’s not so bad—it’s just like going to sleep,” Lucifer said.
The smallest boy now appeared to be doing just that. One of his sisters laid her head on his shoulder and followed suit. Then Lilith stopped playing and closed her eyes.
“That’s enough,” Cam said.
He thought about the Lilith he’d just encountered at Rattlesnake Creek. All this past suffering, the imprint of all these deaths, was in her somewhere, but she had no conscious memory of it. Just like Luce.