Unforgiven (32 page)

“No.”

His answer was so clean, like the slice of the sharpest knife, that Lilith doubled over in pain. She gasped and rubbed her eyes—and when she drew her hands away…

The cave was gone, the sunset gone. Cam was gone.

Lilith was in a dismal shack, leaning against the wall. She recognized the unmade bed, the wooden bucket full of rancid water and days-old dirty dishes in the corner. Flies the size of hummingbirds swarmed streaks of lard on the plates. Everything was familiar, though she didn't know why.

“I told you to clean the dishes,” a woman's voice said in a slow drawl. “Ain't gon' tell you again.”

Somehow, Lilith knew that on the other side of this wall, a metal wire had been strung between two nails. She knew that she could play that wire, could make it sound like a fine instrument of many strings. She yearned to be outside with it, to feel the sting of copper on her calloused fingers.

“I told you, you can't play that dumb wire until you clean the dishes,” the woman said, picking up a knife. “I've had it with that wire.”

“No, please!” Lilith shrieked as she raced outside after the woman.

Lilith wasn't fast enough, and the woman carelessly cut the wire in two. Lilith fell to her knees and wept.

She closed her eyes again, and when she opened them, she was straddling a horse bounding across a frozen road in a hilly countryside. She grasped the reins, holding on for her life. Her breath fogged before her, and her skin blazed, and she knew that she was dying from a fever. She was a gypsy, sick and starving, dressed in rags, expected to sing love songs in exchange for crumbs.

She blinked again, and again, and each time Lilith remembered another hellish experience. She was always a struggling musician, miserable and doomed. There was Opera Lilith, sleeping in an alley behind the theater. Orchestra Lilith, tormented by a cruel conductor. Troubadour Lilith, starving in a medieval city. In every existence, worse than her poverty, the loneliness, and the abuse was the rage darkening her heart. In every existence, she loathed the world she inhabited. She wanted revenge.

Come back to me,
she'd begged Cam.

No.

“Why!” She shouted the question she'd been too hopeless to ask every other day of her life until now. “Why?”

“Because”—a deafening hiss filled her ears—“we made a deal.”

“What deal?” she asked.

Lilith opened her eyes. She was back onstage in Crossroads. The audience was motionless, terrified. It was as if time had stopped. The Four Horsemen were gone, and in their place Luc was standing in the middle of the stage.

“Lilith!” she heard Cam scream. He rushed toward her, but Luc held him back and beckoned to Lilith to step toward him.

She looked around at all of the frozen faces in the audience. “What's happening?”

“Here,” Luc said into the microphone. She stepped toward him, and he handed her a glass ball—a snow globe. “The missing piece.”

Lilith held it up. Inside was a miniature cliff jutting out over a tumultuous ocean. A tiny figurine—a girl in a white wedding gown—stood at the cliff's edge. The ground beneath Lilith swayed, and then she
was
the girl in white, inside the snow globe. She scrambled backward, away from the edge. She could smell the churning ocean, and beyond it she could see the glass encasing everything.

“Take a good, hard look at your future, Lilith,” a voice behind her said.

She turned to see Luc, reclining on a rock.

“Without Cam,” he said, “what do you have to live for?”

“Nothing.”

He nodded at the water. “Then it's time.”

Luc looked the same as he did in Crossroads, but Lilith understood that he was more. The boy before her was the devil, and he'd made her an offer she'd been too lovesick to refuse.

“I brought you to him,” he said, “and you did your best. But Cam didn't want you, did he?”

“No,” she said miserably.

“You must hold up your end of our agreement.”

“I'm scared,” she said. “What happens after—”

“Leave that to me.”

She gazed into the sea and knew she had no choice.

She didn't jump so much as lean forward—into the air, and then into the water. She let it take her. When the waves crashed over her, Lilith didn't try to rise above them. What was there left to try for? Her heart was heavy, like an anvil, and she sank.

Then she was at the bottom, in the filtered light, alone. Black water filled her nose and mouth, her stomach, her lungs.

Her soul.

Back onstage, Lilith faced Cam.

She could sense Jean Rah, Luis, and the other performers from the battle, all gathered around them. The audience was dumbstruck, waiting to see what Lilith would do. But she could focus only on Cam. There was a wild look in his eyes.

“What did you see?”

“I saw…
you.
” Her voice trembled. “And…”

It hit Lilith then that the rumors going around Trumbull about the girl Cam had driven to suicide had been true. “The girl who killed herself,” she said, her voice echoing across the Colosseum, “was me.”

“Oh, Lilith,” Cam said, shutting his eyes.

“I took my life because I loved you,” she said as the facts of her past began to resurface, “and you—”

“I loved you, too,” he said. “I still—”

“No. I begged you. I bared my soul to you. And you told me ‘no.' ”

Cam winced. “I was trying to spare you.”

“But you couldn't. I'd already made a deal.” She turned and pointed a single, shaking finger at Luc. “With him.”

The skin around Cam's eyes tightened. “I didn't know—”

“I was certain that if I could just find you, I could win you back.”

Cam closed his eyes. “I was a fool.”

“But I was wrong,” Lilith said. “What I just saw…those other lives I've lived…”

Cam nodded. “Other Hells.”

Other
Hells? Lilith froze. Did he mean—

This life,
her
life, was not actually a life at all?

All the horrors she'd been forced to suffer, she had suffered because of Cam. Because long ago he had tricked her into falling in love with him. And she'd been stupid enough to fall into the same trap again.

Suddenly, Lilith was so furious she could barely stand.

“This whole time, I've been in Hell?” She stepped away from Cam, out of the spotlight and into darkness. “Because of
you.
”

Five Minutes

C
am stood onstage before Lilith, beneath the twirling lights from the disco ball, feeling the gaze of a thousand teenagers, and above them, the eyes of a million demons waiting in the sky.

He reached toward Lilith. “There's still hope.”

She stepped away. “
You're
the reason I've suffered so much.
You're
the reason I've been so angry and sad.
You're
the reason I hate my life.” Her eyes filled with tears.

She was right. It
was
Cam's fault. He'd rejected Lilith because he'd been too afraid to tell her the truth.

“I'm so stupid. I thought you showing up in Crossroads was the best thing that ever happened to me, but it was the worst thing happening to me all over again.”

“Please,” Cam begged. He held out his hands to her, but was shocked by what he saw: his fingers were gnarled, his nails thick and yellow. “You don't understand—”

“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.

Cam leapt into the air, spreading his poor, feeble wings. All he needed to do was close the distance between himself and Lilith. She shrieked and scrambled backward, toward Lucifer and away from the expanding crater.

Cam landed at her feet. The end was coming. He would lose. He had not convinced her to love him again, so there was only one thing left to do.

He fell to his knees before the devil and raised his hands in supplication. “Take me.”

Lucifer smirked. “We shall be very busy.”

Cam shook his head. “Not as your second in command.”

Lucifer roared. “Our deal was clear.”

“This is a
new
deal,” Cam said, rising to shield Lilith as the stage shook beneath their feet and the lip of the crater approached his boots. It was nearly midnight. This was his last chance. “I stay down here in exile. I take her place in Hell, as your subject. And you set her free.”

“No!” Lilith shouted. She grabbed Cam by his jacket collar. “Why would you do that—sacrifice yourself for me?”

“I'd do anything for you.” Cam reached for her hand, amazed when she didn't pull away.

The crowd's screams grew deafening as the crater made by Cam's tear reached into the audience, swallowing students by the dozen. But Cam couldn't see them: The air had grown thick with smoke, and everything was cloudy and chaotic.

His heart raced. He had to hurry. “I'll do whatever you want, go wherever you want me to go, suffer any punishment you want me to,” he said to Lucifer. “Only free Lilith from this Hell.”

As he spoke, he noticed a change in Lilith's expression. Her features softened, and her eyes grew wide. Even when the walls around them stretched and twisted and started to cave in, Lilith didn't take her eyes off Cam.

“You
have
changed,” Lilith said. “You have given me so much these past two weeks.”

“I should have given you more.” Cam reached for her, trying to find her hands through the thick, dark smoke.

“I'm not going to let you take my place here in Hell,” Lilith said. “Wherever you are is where I want to be.”

A well of tears fell from Cam's eyes, streaming down his cheeks and burning away the world around them. He couldn't have stopped them if he'd tried. “I love you, Lilith.”

“I love you, Cam.”

He embraced her as the crater grew and the stage disintegrated beneath them. Shrieks erupted from the audience as the thick walls of the new Colosseum shuddered and collapsed.

“What's happening?” Lilith gasped.

“Hold on to me,” he said, gripping her tightly.

“Mom!” Lilith screamed in horror, gazing in the direction where the audience had been, though by then it was impossible to see her family, to see anything more than a few inches away. Her lungs filled with smoke, and she began to cough. “Bruce!”

Cam had no words for her loss. How could he explain that everyone Lilith knew was one of the devil's pawns, that her freedom came at the price of losing them? He cupped her head and held her close.

“No!” she screamed and wept against his chest.

The Colosseum and the school beside it disappeared behind great plumes of smoke, the structures curling like burning paper. Moments later, everything around Cam and Lilith had been consumed. The world became a heap of ash that fluttered, then blew away.

The parking lot, the school, the desolate stand of carob trees marking the entrance to Rattlesnake Creek, the roads leading nowhere, the night sky that had inspired so many songs—all of it was on fire. The flames in the hills had closed in, encircling Cam and Lilith. The flames of Hell.

He focused on holding her tightly, shielding her from the sight and from the demons who flew overhead in a frenzied mass of golden wings.

A flash of silver entered Cam's vision. Arriane swooped before him, her glamorous iridescent wings as bright as starlight.

“Arriane!” Cam called out. “I thought you'd gone.”

“Abandon you in the final moments?” Arriane said. “Never.”

“Glorious,” Lilith whispered at the sight of Arriane's wings. “You're an angel.”

“At your service.” Arriane grinned and bowed. “Cambriel, you pulled it off. With a little help.” She nudged Lilith. “You guys smoked it.”

Cam held Lilith closer. “I let you go in Canaan. It was my biggest mistake, bigger than joining Lucifer's ranks. Losing your love is my only regret.”

“And finding your love is my redemption,” Lilith said. She touched his chest, his face. “I don't care what you look like. You're beautiful to me
.
”

“Touching,” Lucifer said, swooping above them, flames licking the backs of his wings. “Touching nonsense.”

Cam shouted up at Lucifer. “We fulfilled your terms! She loves me. I love her. We have earned our freedom.”

The devil was silent, and Cam noticed something strange: his wings looked thin, almost translucent. Through their fibers, Cam could see the twisting flames behind him.

“Lucifer,” he hollered. “Let us go.”

Lucifer threw his head back as his wings curled and singed at the edges. The devil's form grew paper-thin, caving in upon itself. His claws flexed toward Cam one moment, then curled and disintegrated the next. His mouth opened, and the wretched sound of mirthless laughter made Cam and Lilith wince.

Soon, his body shrank and faded, until he was nothing more than an infinitesimal black hole in the center of the ring of fire.

“Is he gone?” Lilith asked.

Cam stared at the sky in disbelief. “For now,” he said.

Then an unholy din came from above. Lilith covered her ears. Cam looked up at a charge of demons, a stampede of fallen angels, black as the soul of midnight, rocketing through the sky. They headed for where the devil had just been, led by Roland's mottled black-and-gold wings. Cam had never seen such wild heedlessness as appeared on Roland's face.