Lucifer's Odyssey

Lucifer’s Odyssey

  The Primal Patterns Series: Book 1

  Rex Jameson

  Copyright 2011-2017 by Rex Jameson

  All rights reserved.

  Sixth Edition (2017)

  ISBN (Electronic): 978-0-9839351-0-0

  ISBN (Paperback): 978-0-9839351-7-9

  This book is a work of fiction. Incidents, names, characters, and places are products of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblances to actual locales, events or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  Cover illustration by Christopher Steininger

  Edited by Derek Prior

  To find out when Rex Jameson has a new release, sign up for his email newsletter at https://rex-jameson.com/new-releases-email-list/.

  Table of Contents

  Title

  Dedication

  Back Cover

  Author’s Note

  Prologue

  Chapter 1. An Earthly Imprisonment

  Chapter 2. The Interrogation

  Chapter 3. The Heist

  Chapter 4. The High Council

  Chapter 5. The Lottery Winners

  Chapter 6. From One Prison to Another

  Chapter 7. Courting the Council

  Chapter 8. The Making of Enemies

  Chapter 9. The Executions

  Chapter 10. Parting Gifts

  Chapter 11. The Lesser of Three Evils

  Chapter 12. The Goblin Realm

  Chapter 13. The Certamen

  Chapter 14. Game Changers

  Chapter 15. The Coronation

  Chapter 16. Returning to Order

  Chapter 17. Meeting with Jehovah

  Chapter 18. Waking the Wizard

  Chapter 19. Wedding Preparations

  Chapter 20. The Mad Scientist

  Chapter 21. The Battle at Bulger’s Pass

  Chapter 22. The Chaos Primal

  Chapter 23. Meeting the Architect

  Chapter 24. The Crown Prince Returns

  Chapter 25. Bonus: Horace’s First Lesson

  Acknowledgements

  About Rex Jameson

  Other Works by the Author

  To my great uncle. You may no longer be with us, but you will be remembered by all who knew you. You had that effect.

  Back Cover

  Imagine a war between angels and demons that extends across our universe. Now, think bigger. Imagine that the fight between Lucifer and Jehovah extends across not only our universe but also involves two more ancient universes filled with demons and elves.

  The Lucifer’s Fall trilogy of the Primal Patterns series is the story of the most celebrated demon warrior and king in history, and the birth of a moral and intellectual renaissance in the Chaos Universe. The first book, “Lucifer’s Odyssey”, traces the demon prince Lucifer from his imprisonment by Jehovah on Earth to the betrayal of his parents in Chaos and a shaky alliance with the Elven people. Filled with irreverent humor and fast paced action, Lucifer’s Odyssey beckons you to take a journey through space and time into a story where elven technology meets the ruthlessness of the demon race and the potential of Jehovah’s great creations.

  “Lucifer’s Odyssey” is the first book of the Lucifer’s Fall trilogy, and book one in the Primal Patterns series.

  Author’s Note

  Because this series presents Jehovah, Lucifer, angels and demons in a non-canonical way, I wanted to very quickly discuss some of the more jarring deviations and explain why these changes were made. This will hopefully make the transitions more comfortable for you, the reader.

  The Primal Patterns series evolved out of a love of philosophy, history and of various types of fiction by heroes of mine like Plato, Zelazny and Vinge. Out of sciences like quantum mechanics, which are so much more thoroughly bizarre than these tomes. It sprang forth from eternal questions regarding why certain parts of historical and religious canon might differ so wildly from what we’ve perceived through sciences like geology, physics, and the study of time and space since humanity’s first narratives were written. It also came from a desire to describe how those old stories and these new understandings might coexist.

  The Primal Patterns series will not always be about Lucifer and Jehovah, but for this first trilogy, it does include them as central characters. Before we begin, I think it is best to seed your brain with some simple truths, as far as this book is concerned. Jehovah is the Old Testament. Gaea is the New. Lucifer is the past that Jehovah seeks to leave behind and put asunder.

  And Sariel? He is Loki. He is the imp on our shoulder. And much of his personality is based on characters from our past in a privileged, strained relationship like Phillipe I and his brother Louis XIII once had, but taken to an immortal extreme.

  In this sixth edition, I have added a bonus chapter that helps describe what the primal patterns are. If you get confused, skipping to there may be helpful. I hope you enjoy the series.

  Prologue

  On Loss and Temptation

  King Ostat had been so distraught and hungry for retribution after the death of his son Michael that he had sent his best—his heir apparent—to make sure the killer was brought to justice. Lucifer had been only too willing to go—volunteered for it, in fact. And after 200,000 years and a trillion light years of traveling through vortexes and flinging himself from planets, asteroids and moons, the heretic who had killed Michael was finally within reach.

  Lucifer was one of 25,000 greater demons taking this trip—a mission drafted by the Council of Wizards and ratified by his father the King. He had only brought along his best men—his personal legion—to ensure vengeance would be swift and final. And with the victory so guaranteed, his mind had naturally moved on to the task of ensuring that no one like Jehovah would ever rise to such treachery again.

  The Council of Wizards would disapprove of him returning to Chaos and burning down the Chaos Library, but he was certain his father would understand. The Library was the source of the corruption that twisted Jehovah and his cadre of Intellectuals—the label the Council had given the crew of researchers who had backed the plot to kill Michael and corrupt nature with another primal pattern. The Library had taught Jehovah about the patterns, and to Lucifer, it was obvious why no demon should ever be tempted with such knowledge again. But before the Library could be burned to the ground, he still had to kill Jehovah.

  Because of his status as Crown Prince, Lucifer was leader of the expedition, but his deeply-scarred uncle Batarel had dominion over the wizarding corps—a small, independent group of greater demons who had been trained to harness the other-worldly powers available to them through the Chaos primal pattern, the projector of his universe. Because Lucifer was royalty and expressly forbidden by the Council of Wizards to learn most types of magic—even the rudimentary communication channels that his uncle and brother Sariel sometimes talked about—the primal had always been a dangerous enigma to him. His fear of the primals was not entirely unjustified. History was littered with legends of creatures that had destroyed solar systems after they had become too drunk with knowledge of magic, and these tales were the source of the fear that brought the Council to power in the first place.

  When it came to pattern magic, Lucifer really only knew how to deflect it with his wings—extensions of his soul from the primal pattern that hardened as they met the harsh conditions of the projected universes. These powerful soul tendrils were also the main locomotion mechanisms that enabled his men—the greater demons—to travel so quickly through the cosmos. While he traveled through asteroid-less pockets, the wings streamed behind him like the tail of a crimson comet. In the deep cold of space, the surfaces cracked and spread like lava through a volcanic fissure, but in the primal, he imagined his soul as ethereal—
like the goblin forgewrights who bathed in the swirling plasma of distant stars as they crafted the fine zinanbar armor that each demon wielded against other immortals.

  A series of tendrils thrust into his periphery. These wing maneuvers were choreographed by the Signal Corps—the communications department of the Chaos mobile infantry. Each wing color and fixed position represented a character in the military lexicon, and like all Chaos officers, he had been trained how to interpret the signals during his basic training. He had never mastered the color-changing himself—his temperament was too volatile to keep his wings in stasis—but he could certainly understand the messages from the demon behind him.

  Target ahead, the signal officer messaged. Please advise.

  He smiled as the blue-and-green dot came into view, shimmering from the light of a local sun. He turned his body toward the pursuing legion, admiring the 25,000 comets behind him—each promising doom to Jehovah and the new pattern that Batarel and the Council swore was waiting for them down on Earth. The pattern would supposedly be taken care of a couple hundred thousand years later when the black holes arrived. His legion’s job would be to ensure that Jehovah and his Intellectuals were dealt with before they could divert the apocalypse. In short, all Lucifer had to do was kill his cousin and the Intellectuals.

  All ahead, six of his tentacle-like wings signaled while two others propelled him faster with debris from an asteroid belt. Capture all immortals, and wait for me.

  His uncle Batarel ejected a few bursts of raw energy from the primal to bring him alongside and nodded at Lucifer through a frosty sheen. Sariel joined Lucifer from the other side, but spent more pattern energy warming his body than locomotion. Sariel was always horsing around. He made a big show of his lack of effort with a series of lazy backstrokes, while Lucifer worked his wings fiercely against asteroids and debris in order to keep the same pace.

  Sariel had always been a royal pain and Queen Olivia’s favorite—perhaps the only reason the Council had allowed a demon in the line of succession to enter the Council of Wizards in the first place. King Ostat had to sign a very strict, binding contract for Batarel to take in the wily prince and only as an assassin apprentice with marginal magical clearance. Sariel had always taken a particular glee when knowing something that Lucifer did not, and pattern magic had been his ultimate triumph—restricted knowledge that Sariel was only too happy to rub in Lucifer’s face.

  Lucifer cleared his mind of his brother’s mischief as he rocketed into Earth’s atmosphere, his tendrils flared out and stretched down to the surface, leaving miniature craters everywhere the flexible, spade-like wing endings impacted the ground.

  Jehovah was not hard to find. His bright white wings arched into a retracted, relaxed position behind him, and a series of six similarly clad individuals surrounded him in a lush oasis on one of the greener continents.

  Lucifer was always the first to land and last to leave a mission, and his brother and uncle respectfully backed off of their approach to ensure he would do so again. He slammed into the ground, scattering mud and grass around his impact crater. Behind him, a cacophony of rapid booms jarred his red-and-black armor—which Lucifer felt was a nice effect. He did not have to turn around to know that 25,000 demons glared at Jehovah with the same menace and anger that he did.

  The white-bearded and long-haired Jehovah kept his arms crossed into the sleeves of his cotton-like robe, non-plussed by the new, malevolent arrivals. His bulbous, gnarled nose sniffed at the air around him before sneering somewhat with a quick, sidelong glance to Lucifer.

  “Lucifer,” he said, nodding as he continued to walk past him, surveying nearby plants and smiling. “Oh, how the mighty have fallen!”

  Jehovah’s wife Gaea and five excommunicated wizards stopped abruptly, each eying Lucifer and keeping their distance from him. The brown-haired, fair-skinned Gaea gave her husband a somewhat disappointed look, but the others chuckled at his words.

  Lucifer’s jaw clenched. His brother’s murderer was so close that he could smell the killer’s sweat. “You and your Intellectuals have been convicted of crimes against the royal family.”

  “On what charges and on whose authority?”

  “You have been found guilty of the murder of Michael Kadingir, my twin brother, and you know damned well whose authority. The Courts of Chaos and the Council of Wizards declared—”

  “We recognize no such authority,” Jehovah said calmly.

  A series of muffled insults spread throughout Lucifer’s legion. “Traitor,” some of them whispered. “Heretic.”

  “Be quiet,” Lucifer said, holding up his hand and gritting his teeth as he stepped closer to Jehovah. The Chaos oracles had shown him and his father the moment that Jehovah had pierced Michael’s chest with a six-foot zinanbar blade, and the image was still burned into his memory. It overlaid the jungle around him, and he found himself breathing quickly and shallowly—his heart beating like a war drum. Lucifer summoned his blade from its nook inside the ether—the only pattern magic he or anyone outside of the Council were allowed to learn—and dragged its blade tip through the wet earth.

  “This is not what you think—” Gaea said, her eyes flitting between Jehovah and Lucifer.

  It was Jehovah’s turn to hold his hand up for silence, and Gaea obeyed.

  “So, you’ve come here, to my seat of power to try to kill me,” he said.

  “There is no try,” Lucifer said.

  “You have been forced into ignorance by the Council. They send you, a million-year-old boy, into my new pattern. Why do you think they would do that? You’re a pawn in another’s game. You don’t know what you’re getting yourself into.”

  “I know exactly why they sent me here. I volunteered. You killed my brother.”

  “Hardly,” Jehovah said, bending over to smell a flower that he had probably cultivated and evolved over many thousands or even millions of years. “He’s moved on to something better. He doesn’t have to live under the shadow of his father anymore. He doesn’t have to worry about being told what to read, who to talk to, and the artificial limits that he must abide by. I haven’t killed him. I’ve set him free.”

  “You dare speak of my brother like this?” Lucifer growled. “You have the gall to speak of his life as if it was so meager and trite that he no longer deserved to experience it?”

  “Of course not,” Jehovah said. “He deserved better. Tell me, in your oracle visions, was Michael kneeling before me? Prostrate and waiting for my blade?”

  “You brainwashed him,” Lucifer said, gripping his blade and hoping that the gray-haired monster would simply look at him for long enough to watch the sword pierce his chest. “You’re out of your mind.”

  “I’m not the one who’s lost my mind,” Jehovah said, still refusing Lucifer the whites of his eyes. “You were born lost. You let the Council dictate every aspect of your life. You let them tell you what to learn and who to associate with.” Jehovah looked at his wife Gaea. “Ostat must not have found you a bride that would solidify his power, or you’d be married right now.”

  “You dare speak of my parents after what you’ve done to them?” Lucifer grunted and huffed as he took a step toward his brother’s killer.

  “Lucifer, hold on,” Batarel said, grabbing Lucifer’s shoulder. “This is too easy.”

  But Lucifer saw red. The image of Michael sliding down Jehovah’s sword in the oracle’s viewing orb was too real in his mind. He felt himself tearing up, and he refused to cry in front of his men. He shrugged his uncle’s hand from his shoulder and marched quickly and fiercely toward Jehovah, who now turned fully toward him.

  Jehovah’s arms spread wide, and he grinned—not unlike a madman. Lucifer’s long, black sword plunged into his cousin’s stomach, and despite the pain, Jehovah stared back at him.

  “You fool,” Gaea said. “You don’t know what you’ve done!”

  “Kill the others,” Lucifer said as he pulled the sword upward, watching Jehovah’s face as the life dr
ained out of him.

  Behind him, he heard the sound of metal slicing through fabric, meat, and crunching bone. Not one of the Intellectuals cried out. The only sounds were gasps and wheezes as they pressed their hands against their leaking innards.

  Jehovah’s eyes spent a few seconds taking in the gore to his left before the lifeless body slid down Lucifer’s sword, exactly like Michael had several hundred thousand years ago but on Jehovah’s. Lucifer wondered if Michael could see him now—if he knew the lengths his brother had gone to secure his vengeance.

  “Batarel,” Lucifer said. “Are there any other immortals on this planet?”

  “No,” his heavily scarred uncle said, searching around with more than just his eyes. “Not that I can detect.”

  Some of the demons started to fan out into the jungle to look for signs of other immortals. Others were probably searching for food—a luxury for an immortal and one that was certainly well-deserved for his men and their families, the ones who had come along. Lucifer returned the smiles of men and women who now bit into the fresh fruits that the lush vegetation provided them.

  Just as Lucifer was about to address his legion, a shimmer—much like a magical shield that the wizards might use—bubbled around his location and then quickly extended into the sky. He watched it until it merged with the blue atmosphere high above. His agitated wing tendrils danced around him, expecting a fight.

  “What was that?” Lucifer asked.

  “I have no idea,” his uncle replied.

  Lucifer looked at his brother Sariel.

  “Seriously?” Sariel asked. “You think I would know when he doesn’t?”

  Lucifer’s smile had long vanished. His instincts told him that he and his men were in danger.

  “Round everyone up,” Lucifer said. “We’re leaving.”

  “Tell them to drop the food,” Batarel said, eyes still focused into the heavens. “We need to get out of here.”

  “I thought you said you had no idea what it was.”

  “I don’t,” Batarel said, surveying the sky again before looking over the bodies. “That’s what has me worried. I told you it didn’t make sense for Jehovah to go so quietly. This smells like a trap.”

  “Form up,” Lucifer commanded as he extended his wings hundreds of feet into the air to mimic his words.

  Orderly retreat. Target Chaos.

  The greater demons of Lucifer’s legion formed into tight groups by squad and a giant rectangle of demons and armor took shape in front of him. The wizarding corps instead encircled Batarel. Lucifer’s personal bodyguard regiment, headed by Colonel Azazel and Lieutenant-Colonel Beelzebub, cast worried looks at each other as they took their places in a circle around the Crown Prince.

  “Everything OK, boss?” Azazel asked.

  “We’ll find out soon enough,” Lucifer said.

  His wings bent into an eight-way fork above him—the universal sign for Begin.

  The wizarding corps around Batarel and Sariel blinked out of existence, leaving his uncle and brother to wait alongside Lucifer—as was the custom. The other 25,000 demons outside of Lucifer’s bodyguard regiment punched their wings into the damp earth, flinging mud, water spray, and plants across the sky. They launched in perfect formation, and Lucifer grinned as he watched them rocket through the clouds. He had spent nearly a million years with these men and their wives and children. He knew each of their names. He had been to many of their weddings and parties.

  He was proud of them—proud of their perfect formations and the way they followed him anywhere, even into the unknown. They were the best. He had made sure of it by adding his own blood and sweat into the personal training of each demon.

  He dug his own wings into the ground, and his bodyguard regiment followed suit. He looked up into the sky and prepared himself to push off the strange world—this Earth that would be destroyed in the blink of a cosmic eye.

  A fireball and sonic boom from high above knocked him out of his contemplation.

  “What the—“

  Tens of fireballs erupted around the first one. Then hundreds. Then thousands.

  “Batarel, what—”

  “Stay on the ground,” Batarel screamed, toppling some of the men near him into the dirt. “Abort your launches!”

  Lucifer’s arms gave out and his knees went numb. He fell over, still watching his men clawing at air with their wings to try to stop their ascent as large multi-colored snakes fell past them. He knew what the string-like things were. He had seen wizards fry enough demons in battles throughout Chaos and the Goblin Realm to know what happened when pure energy from a primal pattern hit the softer tissues of a demon’s body.

  “No,” he whispered. “This isn’t happening.”

  Sariel’s hand found Lucifer’s shoulder.

  “Killing Jehovah must have done something,” Sariel said. “That shimmer must have polluted the world somehow.”

  “How do we get out of here?” Lucifer asked, wiping tears from his eyes as he imagined the faces of his friends amid their violent, fiery deaths in the atmosphere.

  “I’m not sure,” Batarel said.

  “Can you contact your wizarding corps?” Lucifer asked, sniffing and forcing the hallucinations out of his mind as his training and discipline returned to him. He did not have time to lament—not yet. Those who remained alive still depended on him. “Did they make it?”

  “I’m waiting for them to contact me,” Batarel replied. “I have no idea what forming a channel across this barrier would do to me. I might be opening a low-pressure area to the same raw magic that just destroyed our legion.”

  Lucifer swallowed hard as the words sunk in. Destroyed. Legion.

  A rustling in a nearby bush broke Lucifer from his melancholy. He gripped his sword and leapt to his feet and wing-spades. His bodyguards came to attention and fanned around him with swords drawn. Batarel and Sariel raised magical shields around themselves. Faced with the unknown and machinations of a pattern magic genius, Lucifer found himself jealous of his brother Sariel’s knowledge once again.

  “Who goes there?” he yelled. “Show yourself.”

  But no one came forth. He pushed through his bodyguard circle and drew his six-foot zinanbar sword to shoulder level, poised for a killer strike.

  “Come out. We have you surrounded.”

  A grunt and a frightened squeal came from the bush. It sounded like a demon.

  He rounded on Batarel. “I thought you said there weren’t any other immortals here.”

  “There aren’t,” he said.

  “How do you know?”

  “I can’t sense a zipline anywhere.”

  A pair of brown eyes peered at Lucifer from voids in the bush, and a long-haired female stood up. The musculature looked demon, but she had no wings.

  “By the Gods!” Lucifer said. “Jehovah’s bred lesser demons!”

  “I don’t think she’s one of us,” Batarel said as the ebony-skinned woman hid behind the bushes again.

  Lucifer searched the nearby area for a peace offering. He sent a tendril into a nearby tree and wrapped one of his wing-spades around a spherical, thick-armored fruit. He snapped it from the tree and moved it slowly toward the woman. She broke a branch from the bush and prodded his crimson wing with it.

  “I’m not going to hurt you,” he said, snaking the wing through the grass and offering the fruit to her a few feet from the bush she hid in. He smiled as she continued to poke at it.

  She licked her lips and cautiously left the safety of her refuge.

  “She’s stark naked!” Sariel said. “Do you think she has the same parts?”

  The woman recoiled from his loudness and began to retreat into the vegetation.

  Lucifer put a finger over his mouth and shot Sariel a warning look. “You’re such a git!”

  “It’s an academic question!” Sariel said, appealing to his mentor, but Batarel and Lucifer both ignored him.

  “Can you talk?” Lucifer asked. “Did Jehovah teach
you to speak?”

  The woman cautiously peered out of the bushes. He waited for her, but she did not reply.

  Lucifer took a step toward her and then another. She cocked her head as she picked up the odd fruit and pressed it to her chest.

  “If we can’t make channels,” Sariel said, “then how are we going to get out of here before the apocalypse hits?”

  Batarel shrugged and squinted at the dark clouds far above them—the ones that kept raining darkened remnants of demon wings back to Earth. “Even if I figure out a magical way—a transport or something—we’d still have to find a normal way for Lucifer and his bodyguards to get out of here safely.”

  Lucifer shook his head as Batarel confirmed his suspicions. If it came down to a decision between him, the Crown Prince, dying or Batarel being forced to break the Council laws, his uncle would choose him dying. It was a sobering thought.

  “How did the goblins do it?” Lucifer asked, inching closer to the woman as she grabbed a sharp rock and pierced the thick shell of the fruit he had given her. He gave Batarel a meaningful look.

  Batarel raised his hands. “The goblins were never trapped in an unknown atmosphere that had just vaporized 25,000 of their men.”

  “That’s not what I meant, Uncle. Goblins don’t have wings. When they travel through space, they use technology.”

  “Lucifer,” Sariel said, “we don’t have goblin tech.”

  Lucifer sighed and pointed at the woman, who was methodically prying the rigid shell from the fruit with the sharpened rock. “But we do have her.”

  “What’s she got to do with anything?” Sariel asked. “Are you trying to tell me that she’s a goblin? I spent a lot of time in Arnessa, brother. I had the opportunity to study goblin female anatomy quite intimately. She’s not—”

  “Get your head out of the gutter for five minutes,” Lucifer said. He continued to point at her and smiled encouragingly as she finished opening the fruit and bit into it. “We don’t have goblin tech, but we probably don’t need anything that advanced to punch through the magical shield up there.”

  “I can’t even be sure it’s pattern magic we’re dealing with,” Batarel said, “Even if the entire High Council were sitting here right now, they would be just as dumbfounded as I am. Whatever these creatures are capable of, it might never be good enough.”

  Lucifer slammed a wing into the ground between him and his brother and uncle. “What would you have me do?”

  The woman retreated farther into the bush.

  “I’m sorry,” Lucifer said, removing his wing from the crater he had made and watching her eyes follow the spade-end as it danced around naturally like the tail of one of the larger cats he could see roaming in the thicker brush. “I lost my temper. I mean you no harm.”

  “Look,” Lucifer said, turning back to Batarel as the woman reached toward his wing. “When the apocalypse gets here, the black holes will siphon away parts of this planet the moment it hits that outer asteroid belt, right?”

  Batarel shrugged. “They’re fast movers and will disrupt the solar system long before they get here. As for when the atmosphere will be sucked into the event horizon of one or more of them? I’m not sure, but we’re talking one hour at the most.”

  “Worst case,” Lucifer continued, “we wait for that atmosphere to get sucked into space and we make a run for it. I’ve watched these things before from afar. After the atmosphere is gone, we use what rubble we can from this rock to spring free of the coming event horizons. We get out of here, and we make our way back home.”

  “It might work,” Sariel said, looking at his uncle, who nodded again. “It’s a small window of opportunity, but it seems possible. We’ll certainly have time to run the calculations.”

  “In the meantime,” Lucifer said, looking at the woman as she tore into the soft flesh of the fruit, “we train these creatures.”

  “Train them how?”

  “However you can. Teach them whatever you know.”

  Sariel grinned and rocked on the balls of his feet—obviously toying with his brother. Lucifer frowned at him.

  “What?” Sariel asked with obvious mirth. “I’m no engineer, and I’m certainly not teaching her pattern magic. The Council would kill me! I’m only good at a couple other things: breaking hearts and stabbing them—and I’d rather not teach her how to do the latter.”

  “She’d need zinanbar to kill you,” Batarel said, leveling a gaze at his student. “Or a deeper understanding of the primal patterns, and as long as you keep your mouth shut and your sword in your pants, she and her descendants will have neither.”

  “Sariel,” Lucifer said, trying to control his temper but looking at his brother very directly. “I just watched my legion die right in front of me. Every single one of their deaths is my fault. I’m not in the mood for your shit. Now is not the time.”

  “You have your way of handling things,” Sariel said. “I have mine.”

  Lucifer held a finger up. Then another. His brother knew what would happen if he made it to five.

  Sariel opened his mouth to say something else but thought better of it. He waved and walked into the tree line.

  “We teach them,” Lucifer said, “and advise them. We do whatever it takes to get them to a technology level where they can punch us through Jehovah’s magic and into space. Once I get near that moon and into an asteroid belt, I’m on my way back home.”

  “Understood,” Batarel said.

  “Azazel and Beelzebub,” Lucifer called, “I need you and the other guards to search the area for more of these creatures. She must have a mate around here somewhere.”

  The demons saluted and ordered the rest of the men into the surrounding jungle. Everyone seemed eager to get to work doing something other than watching the wings of friends and loved ones falling from the sky. As the remainder of his legion disappeared into the foliage, Lucifer turned back to the woman. He placed a hand on his sternum and approached her very slowly.

  “Lucifer,” he said firmly, pointing to his face and tapping himself on the chest. “My name is Lucifer.”

  She tried the word several times, and Lucifer patiently repeated it until she mouthed the words correctly. He was as happy as she was to see her get it right. He picked another fruit from the tree and approached her slowly with the apple-like reward nestled snuggly in the spade-end of his wing. He offered it to her and smiled cordially, welcoming her forward.

  “Eve,” she said, tapping her own naked chest and taking the fruit and caressing the cracked, glowing exterior of Lucifer’s wing. “Eve.”

  He spoke her name, and she grinned and nodded reassuringly—his own personal alien tutor. It was the second time today that someone had taught him something, and even though he had watched Jehovah die, he felt like the lesson plan was not quite finished. Jehovah was still out there, watching him, and probably hating him for not perishing in the atmosphere like the rest of his men.

  The thought made him feel better.

  “Good,” he said, smiling at Eve. Perhaps Jehovah had underestimated the Crown Prince almost as much as Lucifer had underestimated him. “It’s a start.”