Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

"Take this," said Maze, holding out a zippered tote bag.
Rory eyed it skeptically.

"Don't give me the sulk-eye. If I can handle the king of Hell when he's in a mood, don't think for a second that you scare me."

Rory snatched the canvas strap and slung it tight over her shoulder, pointedly not looking at Maze, into the bag, or toward the elevator.

Maze folded her arms. Eve gave her a knowing look and shook her head. "You don't have to go, you know," she said. "Your dad is more than capable of checking on Hell without you. He went by himself the first two times."

Rory shrugged.

"They're just …awful!" she burst out. "First, Lucifer decides not to go back to Hell full time, which basically means he was cool with wiping me from existence—"

"She's back to calling him 'Lucifer,'" Maze noted.

"Now he's just …so into this," she snapped. "You know where he is right now?"

"With your mom at her ultrasound," Eve filled in.

"With my mom at her ultrasound," Rory shuddered. "It was one thing when I found out Trixie got game night, but they're ignoring me for …me. It's too weird."

"Wait until you get born," Eve said with a smile that only made Rory glower harder.

Maze rolled her eyes. "None of us know why you didn't disappear when Lucifer decided to put his money where his nads were and help Chloe raise you, but he'll be back any second and—"

The elevator doors slid open and Lucifer practically bounced down the stairs. "Aurora!" he said like the eponymous sunrise. "Come look at this," he said, waving a sheet of black plastic. "Chloe's doctor says you have wonderful bone structure. I said I could have told him that, but then your mum tried to slap me. Hang on!" he trotted toward the kitchenette in the company of no one but his inability to read the room. Eve and Maze exchanged a glance while the sound of rummaging and at least one springing noise.

"Maze? My refrigerator isn't magnetic is it?"

"Nope," Maze called back. "We went for wood inlay. Reclaimed mahogany. You traded two internships at Southeby's for it."

"That's what I get for good taste, I suppose." He held up the ultrasound. "I'll just have to have it framed. Maybe the Getty can part with a mounting." He gave a quick laugh. "Given that—"

"Please do not finish that joke," Rory called back.

"If you insist, but it was a good one." He set the ultrasound down on the bar and strutted toward them, where he gave Rory a quick look up and down. "Ready to head out?"

"I tried to tell her to wear something practical," said Eve. "Hell isn't exactly anyone's first choice for a getaway."

"Nah," Maze nodded, twanging one of the spikes on Rory's wrists. "She'll do fine." Lucifer, still wrapped up in the events of the day, didn't notice the smirk she aimed at the back of his head. "Just remember, the king is the land."

"Huh?"

"You heard me, Pinky. The king is the land."

"Don't call me Pinky," Rory dulled back.

"Well you're certainly not the brain."

Lucifer loosed his wings with a whoosh that made Rory hold Maze's tote bag tighter. "Ready to head out, darling?" he asked. "Pop down, save a few souls, pop back up before doors open downstairs." He brightened. "Maybe while we're down there, we'll churn up a few ideas about how to explain you to the Urchin. I know your mum's been noodling about that."

Rory's sigh could have registered five points on the Richter scale, but she spread her wings with a roll of her shoulders.

"You sure you don't want to come, Mazikeen? I know a few demons who'd do well to remember your blade."

She shook her head. "Nah. Have fun with take your daughter to damnation day."

Rory pinched the bridge of her nose. "Let's get this over with."

"That's the spirit!"

Eve picked up the transparency and held it up to the light. "What I wouldn't have given for one of these back in my day. Would've been nice to know that Kalmana was going to come out feet first. Almost gave Adam a heart attack."

Chapter Text

Reality had more wind resistance than air. Air was only made of molecules after all. Rory squinted against the sting as the atmosphere, such as it was, whipped away moisture, oxygen, nitrogen, the busy dancing of electron clouds separating proton from proton.

Her feet hit solid ground. Even without benefit of matter, Hell managed dust, gravel and ashes just fine.

"Decent enough landing, Darling," Lucifer said, still smiling disgustingly.

"I have been here before," she reminded him, settling Maze's tote bag on her shoulder as she tucked her wings away. Lucifer followed suit, leaning back to press one hand against one jagged side of the canyon. He even seemed to be happy about that of all things.

"You'd think the wind would wear them smooth. There's enough crap in it," Rory commented.

"These are new," Lucifer told her, leaning back to gauge the height. "Died this morning at the latest. Time flows differently here in Dad's basement, but even with that, these souls are still chewing on their own rough edges."

Rory would never in a million years admit it, but Hell was …Hell. The very fact of the place seemed to suck all hope, all happiness out of her mind, driving her thoughts to dark places. The only time she'd truly been able to think clearly was when she'd had both buttcheeks in the infernal captain's chair, and even then, clearly didn't mean the same as when she was on the mortal plane.

…or, at least, that's how it worked the first time.

"Are you doing that?" she asked.

"I may have regained some of my control of the underworld, yes," he said. "Decided to take the edge off a little when your mother took her jaunt downstairs. So—" he clapped his hands together. "Check up on demonkind or jump right into it?"

She adjusted the tote bag again. "Like I said, let's get it over with."

"All right." He gestured to the canyons around them, studded with rattling doors.

"You didn't have one already picked out?" she asked. "Or …we're not going oldest first?"

"That would be Abel, Eve's son. A lot of those early humans knew me personally, or your aunts and uncles. What they don't know is English. At least in this neighborhood, we have a roughly eighteen percent chance of striking anglosphere." His left eyebrow twitched, just barely, and he steepled his fingers together, "Unless you inherited my gift with languages of course. I don't believe you ever said. You never said whether your 'no spoilers' rule was still in effect given your non-disappearance…"

Rory ignored the blatant fish for a concession. "That one," she said, pointing up and to the left.

Lucifer shaded his eyes—why? There was no sun down here?

"That one?"

Rory shrugged. "Yeah, why not?" She shifted her feet. "You said I could pick."

"Fine, fine," he said. "I see the demonic chisel crew hasn't cut any handholds yet, so it'll be just us and the Climbers in there."

"The climbers?" Rory asked, but Lucifer was already wings out and three flaps up. She sighed in disgust and followed.

By the time she reached the middle of the cliff wall, Lucifer had the door open and one foot inside. He reached out to her with one hand, as if she needed help with a simple landing.

From the ground, the door had looked green, like a Hobbit hole door in those movies that Auntie Ella went to watch at festivals. Close up, what had looked like a shiny metal doorknob was really just a big zipper tab. And the door itself was a big patch of camo-colored …what was that stuff? Rory moved her body sideways to avoid her father's hand and slipped into the loop ahead of him.

She felt Lucifer's feet hit the slightly squishy ground and the door shut behind them with a suctioning whoosh that somehow felt worse than nails on a chalkboard.

"Oh no," muttered Rory as she looked around.

"There's no accounting for taste," Lucifer agreed.

On reflex, Rory waved her hand in front of her face as a black speck flew into it. The air smelled of ashes, but banal wood and lighter fuel rather than the discarded firmament of the universe. Her feet squished against pine needle sod saturated with rainwater that was already seeping into her boots. "Ugh," she muttered. From beyond the treeline, she could hear the distorted sound of small children crying and fighting at maximum shrillness.

Lucifer turned around and flicked the door with one finger. It boomed exactly like what it looked like—the entrance to a four-man nylon tent. "It ought to work for our return trip," he said, rubbing his chin, "but once we send this soul to my brother's albeit neophyte embrace, it'll probably look like something else." He turned around, surveying the campsite, "High-end nylon, luxury vehicle, gas-powered generator… It seems our dear deceased was a full-on glamper."

Rory coughed, wiping her hand against her trousers. "What's a glamper?"

"Something that sounds like it's died out by your era," Lucifer answered. "When I went on vacation to get away from it all, I made a point of not bringing 'it all' with me."

Rory swiped her hands against her arms, feeling like she was scraping away something invisible. "So where's our dead guy?"

"I suggest we follow the whimpering," Lucifer nodded his chin over Rory's shoulder.

She turned around, blinking hard—more black things—and managed not to jump.

"That's a human she asked?" pointing at the dully twitching pile of dead leaves and bungee cords.

"What's left of one, yes. Hello there…" Lucifer's gaze went distant for a moment. "William. Lucifer Morningstar, Lord of Hell. Would you care to tell my daughter and me just why you feel the need to spend eternity on the universe's worst camping trip?"

The patient made a decent impression of the Muppets' Swedish Chef.

"Oh for heck's sake," muttered Rory. She ducked her hands near where she guessed the human's head would be and started pulling away the leaves. A bright blue bungee overstretched and snapped, and she had to duck back to avoid getting hit in the face.

"I wouldn't—" Lucifer started, but a glare put a stop to it.

Soon, a head with close-cut dark hair poked out of the mess at roughly the right location. Rory noticed his mouth was held shut with what looked like fishing wire. She flipped the spikes around her wrist and cut the tess with quick, precise plucks.

"I didn't know those were functional," Lucifer noted.

"Hot Topic got serious after Jojo Siwa took it over," she answered. The she looked over her shoulder with a smirk. "Or am I bluffing?"

The human spat something onto the ground, something with way, way too many legs.

"Bll… dhh…" he managed.

"That's it, take a moment," said Lucifer. "William, do you know why you're here?" Rory slipped her hands down her arms again, pushing away the tickling feeling.

"Bllllddddhhh…"

"Bulldozer?" Lucifer mused. Then he snapped his fingers. "You bulldozed this set of woods, did you? Knocked down trees for the crime of making oxygen for your fellow mortals? Or perhaps you did some shady dealing to pluck control of the property away from its rightful owners so you could put up a mini-mall? Or was it just exacerbating your species' utter pistoning of your planet?"

A black speck landed on the man's cheek. Then another. One landed on Rory's arm and she swatted it away.

"Puhh baggg…"

There was a humming sound that seemed to come from the air itself.

"Put it back?" Lucifer shrugged. "Well I suppose replanting the area might—"

"No! Puhd it baggg!" the human used his newly freed mouth to grab at the leaves Rory had cleared away, flipping them with his lower lip and ducking his head to get them on top. "Put dem back. Put them back… Tha bludd…"

"All right, I think I'm missing something," admitted Lucifer.

"Uh oh," said Rory as the buzzing got louder.

The human ducked his head down into the leaves. "Nooooooooooooooooooooooo!"

The trees shook as a cloud of ravening blackflies zoomed into the clearing making a beeline for—making two beelines, actually.

"NOOOOOOOOOO THHHRRHK HHHRKK HRKKK!" William choked as the demonic arthropods dove for every speck of exposed skin plus his ears and nostrils. "Ptui! Ptui! PPfffafsndsnnnkkk…" he tried to spit out the biters on his lips and mouth. There was a thick sound, like a nail shoved through taut plastic, as each stylet punched through skin, and then a slurping, minuscule but multiplied, and a dull, satisfied chant of "Blood! Blood!"

Except not all of them had gone for William.

"Get them off! Get them off!" Rory shrieked.

"Hey, this is a live one!" called a tiny voice.

"A human, still on the bone!"

"Real blood!"

"BLOOOOD!"

Lucifer rolled up one sleeve. "All right, miscreants. I command you to—"

"I said GET OFF!!" Rory shouted, wings and fists bursting toward the rock sky as her voice reverberated off the rock walls in a blinding flash of red-white light.
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"UUuhhuUUhHUuHhuhhh…" one of the demon's wings twitched as it lay six-legs-up on the turf.

"…but I thought we were supposed to drink the blood…"

"I'm so full…"

"For the fifth time, you are forbidden to torture or attack my daughter!" snapped Lucifer.

"But Lord Morningstar, we didn't know!" buzzed another fly.

"It was on the agenda at my last Hell-wide conclave!" Lucifer snarled.

"…what?" the third demon asked as Rory scratched at another bite.

"It's true, Chtotch. Borovis had a clipboard and everything."

"You have to pay attention when you're at the meetings, Chtotch!"

"…tasted fucking good, though…"

"Will he be erased from existence if I step on him?" asked Rory as Chtotch started to writhe and shriek.

Lucifer shrugged. "I'm sorry, Darling. I should have realized your combination of divinity and humanity might have a strange effect on the less calculating of demonkind."

"It itches…" the human wailed.

"We can return to Earth immediately," he said.

"No," said Rory, gesturing toward the human, whose lawn chair had fallen over, scattering the dead leaves he'd used to hide from his tormenters. "No, after all that, I wanna find out what this guy's deal is." She squeezed her eyes shut and then rubbed her face against the rough canvas of Maze's tote bag. On a whim, she pulled open the zipper and stuck her hand inside.

William whimpered and cracked one swollen eye. "It itches so bad!"

Lucifer rolled his eyes. "I'm afraid that unless the most fearsome demon ever to stride the corridors of Hell packed a bottle of calomine lotion—"

"She did," Rory said, pulling out a dull pink bottle with a dull red head.

Lucifer stared at the bottle. Rory stared at the bottle. Then they stared at each other.

Rory knelt in the moss—which immediately soaked her trousers through the knees—and pushed William's chair upright. She dapped some calomine on a leaf and started tapping it onto the bites on Wililam's face and neck.

"Well, loser?" she asked. "You gonna tell me how you ended up bungee-corded to a chair and left for the bloodsuckers?" she looked down at the rest of William, which was decidedly open to the breeze. "In what looks like half a sea monkey costume?"

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"All right, William, your loop is about to reset itself," Lucifer warned. "And maybe this time, make sure no one's inside the other football team's mascot suit before you dump it riverside in a Zika zone."

"Mmm… 'kay…" William managed through his bite-bulging lips.

"Keep practicing. And I'll be back to check on you sooo…eventually," Lucifer said.

"Still not into lying?" Rory asked.

"Linda tells me I'll have to get very creative about reasons why little girls should eat their vegetables, the fate of the family goldfish, and whether or not a second-grade poetry assignment is 'good,' but for the time being, no I'm not," Lucifer responded. "Or you could just tell me what worked on you."

Rory snorted.

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"Daniel once warned me that it's bad luck to say it before the camping trip's over, but…" Lucifer unzipped the tent flap and motioned Rory through. "…at least it didn't rain," he said as they landed on the ashy ground below.

"Yeah," Rory said, scratching at another bite as she put away her wings. "On the subject, are all Hell loops that …sunny?"

"Some are. Why do you ask?" he frowned. "Now that I think of it, most camping loops do tend more toward at least a drizzle."

She shrugged. "It's only that… it felt like the weather had been crappy and only just stopped."

"Perhaps," Lucifer answered. "It's not unusual for the demons to change things up. They do get bored."

"And hungry," Rory growled, but the welts seemed to be closing up. But Maze's words echoed in her mind.

The king is the land…

Chapter Text

"I, Borovis the Perfidious, tormenter of the damned, hereby swear my malfeasance—"

"Allegiance!" hissed a skinny demon with a third eyeslit above his left ear.

Borovis turned, tapping one three-cloven hoof against the rock flakes. "Don't tell me what to say, Crevos!"

"Okay, but 'malfeasance' isn't allegiance. It's a sauce humans put on those little black water things."

"That's marinade, you nostril worm!" said a pale, squat-bodied creature. While Crevos might be boasting one extra eye, Shirime was fairly covered: Currently, there was a big insectoid compound eye on one side of his head, and a bright blue one halfway up his neck, still partially covered in membranes.

"Don't call me a nostril worm, Shirime! I'm just trying to keep Borovis from embarrassing himself!"

"You can't keep Borovis from embarrassing himself! Mother Lilith made him too full of fumes! If they don't come out, he'll explode like Hevvid did that time."

The bristles on Borovis' bare chest puffed up. "I was swearing solemn oaths before Mother Lilith puked either one of you out her wrong end!"

"Why you…" Crevos opened his jaw up to show all three rows of teeth and clamped down on Borovis' arm. Borovis quickly whipped a finger into his ear and yanked hard, but Crevos countered by whipping a skinny third arm out from under his shirt and pulling Borovis' fur. He lost his balance, and his hoofed foot kicked out, nailing Shirime in one frog-pupiled peeper. He snarled and jumped in. For something with that many vulnerable spots, Shirime was putting in a surprisingly good showing

"Do we ...break it up?" Rory asked out of the corner of her mouth as the demons still lined up to pledge their dubious loyalty started to form clumps.

Lucifer sighed. He'd changed for the occasion, swapping the suit and loafers for hell-wrought ceremonial armor and a spiked iron circlet. Rory's outfit …had not needed adjustment.

"Believe it or not, violent stupidity is a local tradition."

"Are they all like this?"

"No, sad to say. There are plenty that let their blades do the talking. Had to unravel quite the treatise or two to maintain my dominance here. Hell itself may be under my control, but its denizens sometimes need a little reminding."

With that, Lucifer stood up, wings out, the equivalent of a teacher clapping her hands, if the students were thousands of years old and knew the locations of human arteries better than their times tables.

"All right, let's skip to the important bits, shall we? Demons of Hell, this is my daughter, and while I am not always well pleased, you lot are all forbidden to attack or torture her."

"Why?" called a voice.

"Shut up, you idiot!"

"The part where she's my daughter didn't do it for you, Behe?"

"Well, that guy we don't talk about spawned you, Lord Morningstar, aaaaaand there was that whole thing that the First Lilim did when they got here, and..."

"And what happened to them?"

Behe looked at Lucifer, then at the others, then gulped. "Your daughter. Don't attack her. Yes, my lord!"

"What if she issues a challenge, Your Punitiveness?" piped another voice.

"She won't," said Lucifer.

"I might," said Rory.

He rolled his eyes, "I recommend backing down."

"I dunno. I think I can take them," Rory said, giving him a sly look.

"That's not what this is about," Lucifer lowered his voice with the vibe of someone covering a mic. "They're trying to get me to give them permission. That way, any of these mismatched mayhemites could go after you first and then claim you started it. It's a manipulation tactic some of the weaker ones use, especially when they've just been put in their place."

Rory stared back at him.

"What?"

"You missed your calling, Dad. You could have taught kindergarten."

Chapter Text

"You can't blame this younger generation of demons, Your Spawnlyness," Borovis said as waddled between the canyons. "Waddled" being a kind word. His barrel-body warped sideways, bearing half again as many ribs on one side as the other. The flaps of his sowlike ears slapped against his cheeks with each step.

"Don't call me that," Rory glowered.

"Those of us who trained under Baal and the First and Second Lilim are better acquainted with humans' true fears than young mucklings. Before Lord Morningstar banned demonic possession, there was all sorts of opportunity to learn." He turned around. "Did you know that if you turn a fresh human head more than halfway around, the neckbones break? Just flops around like a tapeworm after that. Not like an owl at all." He gave a smile that the probably thought looked ingratiating, "Would you happen to know," he said with exaggerated pronunciation, "who's on the short list?"

"Short list," Rory repeated.

"Back to possession!" Borovis said, black eyes going bright. "First, the human Kinley tells us Lord Morningstar needs help, so Dromos and Squee go up to save him."

Rory raised an eyebrow.

"Then Mazikeen calls upon the elect to battle with angels on that green fighting pit!" his chest puffed up and out again, making a noise like a broken accordion.

Lucifer rounded a corner ahead of them, one arm still pointing across the way at the door to their next patient.

"Oh, so you were in that fight with Michael and all the angels took sides about who'd replace the original God?" Rory asked Borovis.

Lucifer's eyes went wide.

Borovis scratched his bristles. "The Mazikeen said Lord Morningstar would allow it, so up we went. What's this about a—"

Lucifer grabbed Borovis by the scruff of the scruff. "I believe I told you to show my daughter where to find the halls of Perdition while I handled that little spat between Cedon and Kppfrit, Borovis."

Borovis made another shrilling sound.

"Well duty's done then. Away with you!"

Rory's eyebrow furrowed. "Lucifer, he didn't do anything—"

"Don't let the leaking and general incompetence fool you," Lucifer told her. "Demons like Borovis are more than capable of causing problems if you hand them the tools." He came in close, dropping his voice. "From their perspective, they've spent millions of years torturing humans, either the guilty in their loops or the everyone before I stopped them jumping bones up on Earth, and I've only just now changed course. The demons fear me because they need to," he said.

She turned around, expecting to watch Borovis go. But for all she'd have sworn she'd heard the clack of hoofed feet against the rock flakes, there was the edge of his hand, just the side of his face as he peered around the canyon wall. The ear that had seemed a limp and nerveless flap of flesh was perked and attentive. For a split second, she saw a gleam in his eye, of intellect, a calculation as brittle and cutting as the rock flakes that crunched under her feet.

"But they've always feared Father more," he finished.

Chapter Text

"I'm not angry, Darling. Demon wrangling is a separate skill."

"I wasn't worried about you being angry."

"Honestly, I'd hoped to have the new demonic dynamic going by now, but demons do have minds of their own. Barely."

"Yeah…" Rory trailed off as they stopped in front of a door with an old-fashioned ceramic knob. "So Amenadiel says he heard," she looked over her shoulder to where Borovis had gone.

"'Ceiling cat'?" Lucifer suggested.

"Capital G," Rory talked over him.

"Been reading Trixie's Percy Jackson collection?" he asked with a raised eyebrow. "It could work, I suppose. Most demons can't read." He pulled the door shut behind them and Rory squinted in Hell's artificial sunlight. It was like a parody of Earth. The light was the exact kind to give someone a headache. The cut grass somehow smelled exactly like cut grass but felt like rot and oil instead of summer and freedom.

"Is that a gazebo?" she asked, pointing at a chalky white structure that looked like it could give you a splinter from fifty feet away.

"Our next patient is Lenore, mother of the bride," he said, pointing to a woman with streaks of gray running through her high, conical hairdo and streaks of meanness running down her bulldog face. Her arms were crossed over her nylon dress. "Seems she feels guilty for making a mess of her daughter's big day."

Rory raised an eyebrow. "You picked this one?"

"I'm not trying to make a point, Rory. It was her or an axe murderer in Montana."

"And you picked this one?" Rory repeated.

He rolled his eyes. "Now, remember, everyone here other than Lenore is a demon." He squinted in the glare. "Yes, I believe that's Kpfrit in the wedding gown. I consulted with Linda before we popped down here, and she said that any effort we make to get Lenore to change her habits could benefit her in the long run. I realize this isn't your first choice of—"

"That's fine. I always wanted to bust up a wedding."

"Oh," Lucifer said. "Well let's get on then."

"Hey," Lenore scowled as Lucifer and Rory got closer. "Don't you know ya can't wear black to a wedding?" she nodded at Rory's outfit. "What are you, some kind of clown?"

"Just because my dawdah's marrying the first good-for-nothing bum who asked. You one of his loser friends from the city?" she waved a hand in a near-raspberry pfffffft gesture.

Rory squinted over at the line of groomsmen. They were the kind of fine, upstanding males that made her feel lucky to be a lesbian. They mostly looked the same in their tacky rented finery. A mullet here, a receding hairline there. One of them scratched under one arm like a parody of a zoo ape. The one sporting the fresh wedding band looked like a pile of lumps poured into a child's mold. Rory almost wanted to wince in sympathy with the bride each time he touched her arm, but the demon playing Lenore's daughter Annabell fawned over every belch and nose-scratch he made, as if she were bound to him with invisible strings.

On Rory's left, Lenore had somehow gotten herself a chair, and a cheap wineglass full of something that bubbled and had at least four flies in it. It smelled like vinegar to match her scowl. "Look at her, wearing white."

"Don't people do that at weddings?" Rory asked.

Lucifer watched but didn't comment. One of the groomsmen, a best man with a garish orange tie, got up and opened his mouth to give a speech, only to stare and gawk as Lenore went on.

"No! Not if they go round in the back seat of cars before they're married!" Lenore snapped. "I said to the lady in the shop, 'Don't give her white. She can wear beige!'" Lenore shook her head. "There oughtta' be a law. Her wearing white is an insult to every honest girl!"

"What, seriously?" Rory asked. "What difference does it make?"

"Oh what, because they're married now? Well, they wasn't married then!" Lenore got to her feet, holding up her wineglass in some parody of a toast, and Rory realized she was witnessing Lenore's sin.

"Mama, please!" the demon impersonating Lenore's daughter had done a good job of tears in her eyes. Rory couldn't tell if the real Annabell had worn huge false eyelashes with globs of goopy blue eyeshadow, but the one in Lenore's punishment loop did.

"Beige wouldna been too good for you," she called out. "It wasn't too good for your cousin, and she's been with her Manny nine years! She didn't have to go and be a disgrace."

Lucifer waved to Rory, motioning for her to interrupt.

"Oh, this is it?" Rory asked. She turned to Lenore. "Well, uh. Maybe you should sit down and …drink less?" she winced. "Can we switch the mother of the bride to coffee?" she said, waving to a demon with a coffee carafe.

"I'll say my piece!" she sanpped.

"Beige?" murmured one of the older women in the crowd. "Oh, I told you this trash was no good, Eddie!"

"Where did I go wrong!" Lenore's voice timbred over the crowd. "My girl having to marry this bum!"

"Ma!"

"Don't you call my nephew a bum, you walleyed crone!"

The groom's aunt grabbed Lenore by the ear and yanked, knocking half her beehive out of place. Lenore doubled up her fist and punched. The demon wailed convincingly as teeth went flying.

The wedding party devolved into a brawl. The bride stood in the middle and wept as a slice of cake piroetted through the air and landed on the bustle of her gown.

"Well it's not white now!" someone called out.

Rory blinked hard as the loop reset.

"This is a short one," Lucifer noted. "Some Hell loops last months."

"What do we do now?" Rory asked.

"Anything we can to change things up and get Lenore to confront her guilt. I suspect it may involve us knocking down a pillar of purity culture, so I'd call that a win win."

Rory's face took on a sly look. "Anything?" she asked, slipping one hand into Maze's tote.

Chapter Text

Rory rummaged in the tote bag. Lenore was back out on the lawn, this time giving the stinkeye to Annabel's new mother-in-law.

"Most souls spend their loops on painful moments," Lucifer mused, watching Lenore stalk off toward the buffet. "Lee and Linda's late ex-husband kept returning to the moment of their deaths—with considerable fun and or malfeasance on the way there."

"Linda. Husband. Way over there," Rory repeated as she pulled out a small tube and a spider's nest of neon and wound metal.

"Why did Mazikeen give you bungee cords?"

"Lenore's problem is that she always says something to ruin Annabel's wedding, right?"

"Wedding reception, but you seem to have the gist of it."

Rory held up the bungees.

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"You untie me this minute, you degenerate hussy! I got a right to speak my mind!" Lenore snarled, kicking her high-heeled feet as she struggled against the heavy-duty elastic affixing her to the folding chair like a calligraphic "reserved" sign. She narrowed her eyes. "Why I bet a you'll have to wear every color of the rainbow to your wedding!" she smiled smugly.

"She probably would wear a rainbow, but that means something different now," Lucifer quipped. "That's right, Rory. We never talked about whether you're seeing anyone. Do I have to wait forty years to meet them or have you been together for a while?"

"We are so not going there," said Rory. "Now…" she leaned back and looked at Lenore. "If you don't go within earshot, you can't ruin the wedding.

"Can't ruin something that's a ruin anyway. I only want what's best for Annabel, and here she goes taking up with that bum!"

"Maybe she loves him," Rory said, crouching down to Lenore's eye level.

Lenore huffed.

"Can't you respect her free will?" Rory asked, pointedly drawing out the words. "Even though there's almost no chance she'll disappear from reality if you don't?"

Lucifer cocked an eyebrow. "What's this now?"

Lenore reached her neck out and started chewing on the cords. Her teeth, standard-issue human a moment earlier, made quick work of the first bungee, which snapped and went flying over Rory's shoulder.

Rory pointed at Lenore, "I thought she was the human."

"She is. I should have warned you," Lucifer said. "After some time down here, a few of the humans start to figure out that they left those pesky laws of physics on the mortal coil. A lot of what happens in here is down to Lenore's will," he said.

The second bungee cord flipped into the air at maximum stretch. It whipped across the space into the pavilion. Lenore raised her head in a shout of bulldog triumph.

"Ow!"

"Spencer! Oh, Momma, you're embarrassing me!"

The loop reset. This time, Rory pulled up a layer of lawn and buried Lenore up to her neck, Sod Guardian style. She ripped it up, stalked over to the wedding party, and dumped a bowl of potato salad all over the groom.

Rory fashioned a pair of makeshift handcuffs from the leg of a folding chair and a Correlle ware soup tureen. Lenore flipped it around and beaned the best man.

Next, Rory used the tube of superglue to touch up Lenore's lip gloss. The loop may have been set before interpretive dancing really blew up, but Lenore managed.

"She is just not going to not make a scene," Rory said, wiping her forehead with the back of one hand.

"True, but if the real Annabel inherited her mother's hip mobility, then she and her real husband had a very satisfying wedding night."

"Bah!" Lenore snorted from her newly reset place on the folding chair. "They didn't wait for their wedding night. And there she is, wearing white as if nothing happened!"

"Yes, and why should your daughter's sartorial blankness upset you so much, Lenore?"

Lenore looked from Lucifer to Rory and back as if hearing that they didn't know what gasoline was for.

"You only wear white if your first time is going to be your wedding night, not if you already, gave your flower."

"Ugh," Lucifer winced just as Rory said, "Never say that again."

"But I repeat, why should you care?" Lucifer asked.

"Because the whole neighborhood knows she was making more than time in the backseat of that old Ford. If she wears white, it's an insult to every woman who earned her wedding day. They might—" Lenore clammed up.

"Is this it?" Rory murmured.

"Could be," Lucifer answered. "And, are you perhaps suspecting people might find out a little secret of your own?"

The loop shifted, showing a field well after sunset, and a car of a decidedly earlier make, with a wide, inviting back seat.

"No!" Lenore said shrilly.

"Oh no?" asked Rory.

"Weren't faking a few things on our own wedding day, were we Lenore?" asked Lucifer.

Lenore turned bright read and started shaking her head back and forth.

"Oh, I think we've found it," Lucifer said. "She's not feeling guilty about her daugher's lack of groinly inexperience. She's guilty about her own."

Lenore got up from the folding chair. She stalked over to the 1929 Edsel and gave it a hard whack that sent it vibrating on its limited shocks. "The two of you knock it off in there, you hear?" she shouted.

The car's occupants, a younger Lenore with an unspecified paramour—or rather two demons in the guise—rose up from the backseat, faces a mix of surprise and confusion.

"You," Lenore pointed at her younger self. "You can do so much better than him, you know! Don't marry the first man who makes you make that squeaky noise—"

Rory and Lucifer winced at the same time.

"—get on a bus! Go to the city! See the world!"

The demon playing young Lenore looked at Lucifer. "Do I…"

"Feel free to hop a Greyhound, Kchlee," he said.

The next second, Kschlee got out of the Edsel, somehow with a suitcase in hand. "I'm going to Californicate!"

"California!" Lenore corrected.

"California!" said Kchlee.

Lucifer leaned back, swiping his hands together as if to knock dust off. "So this is the source of your true guilt, Lenore? You never gave yourself a real chance?"

Lenore shrugged. "I guess."

Lucifer gave Lenore a quick speech about practicing as the loop reset. He turned to Rory. "Lenore's been stuck at a tacky sixties wedding for thousands of years," he said. "I realize you didn't choose to remain in this time, but hopefully the two of us can have a bit of a bond sesh by setting her free."

"So the idea is that she wouldn't ruin her daughter's wedding," Rory mused, "if she didn't get married and she never existed in the first place?"

Lucifer blinked.

"Oh dear."

Chapter Text

"We just barge into their loops, give them a few pointers, and then leave? Whoop, have a nice eternity?" asked Rory.

"We can stay longer if you want to," Lucifer said, shutting (but not locking) Lenore's door behind them, "but I guarantee, steering the newly damned to the exit generally takes more than one trip. Lee kept dodging his door. And I had no idea what was going on with Daniel."

"Didn't the, uh," Rory's voice dropped, "guy say Daniel left right after he talked to Little T?"

Lucifer turned around. "I'm sorry, who?"

"Trixie. I'm used to calling her 'T,' but she's so little. Meatball pigtails and everything."

"No, I quite got that bit from context. 'The guy'?"

"You know the," Rory gulped as if forcing the word down. "Person."

"Rory, do you have trouble saying 'Vincent LeMec'?"

"He almost killed us both, all right?" Rory told him. She felt as rustling underneath her shoulders like her wings wanted to come out. "And since Mom was there too and, as you can't seem to stop reminding everyone, she was already pregnant with me, he could've killed me twice, which meant I wouldn't've existed at all." Rory's jaw rippled. "Which you are weirdly okay with."

Lucifer was quiet for a moment. There was a light sound of ash settling on the ground.

"Would you like a hug?" he asked.

"No," scowled Rory. "Maybe. I don't know!"

"Aurora, I am not okay with you not existing. I'll grant it was a rocky start, but I'm very glad you're here." He looked around at the ash-filled canyon. "Well not necessarily here, but I think you take my meaning. But I believe we have more immediate concerns. I'd like you to try to say his name."

"Is this some psych trick you learned off Linda?"

"No, I'm afraid I learned it here. Humor me."

Lucifer closed his eyes and there was a dull pulse through the ground and atmosphere around them. It reminded Rory of water, but she recognized it as Lucifer exerting his will on Hell. "How about now?"

Rory opened her mouth. Nothing.

Hell rippled again. "Try just a description. Any word to do with him. It can be 'French' or 'mercenary' or—"

"'Dead,'" Rory managed. "Does that count? Why does it matter?"

"One more time," he said, an odd vibration in his voice.

"'Vine,' 'cent,' 'lay,'" Rory managed. "Okay, that's weird."

Lucifer stepped closer, pulling back Rory's eyelid as if this were a celestial check up exam. "Rory, do you feel something pulling you in any direction? Does any one door feel like it's calling you? Do you hear any off-key piano music? Can you smell lead paint?!"

"What? No!" Rory said, pushing him away. "Not …really."

Lucifer's wings came out with a rustling snap. "We're headed back to Los Angeles. Now."

"Hey!" Rory grabbed his arm. "What's going on?"

"What's going on is that humans in Hell avoid talking about their guilt. There's never been a half-celestial being before you except for Charlie, and Amenadiel and Linda were hardly going to haul him down with the Pack 'n' Play. You're half human and you apparently have some guilt to work through. That has something to do with a completely undeserving violent Frenchman for some reason."

"Lucifer, I have zero guilt about LeMec going to the patisserie in the not-sky," Rory answered. "There. Said his name. I'm fine."

Lucifer's feathers rustled. "All right, I know I already said this, but stay with me for the entirety of our time here in Hell. No running off, no matter what happens." He took a breath. "If you need to go to the Little Angel's Room—"

"Dad!"

"Fine. Fine," he tucked his wings away.

They started walking toward their next loop.

"You know what a Pack n' Play is," Rory noted.

Lucifer rubbed a hand over his forehead. "Amenadiel gave me all the books he read before Charlie was born. I've seen my future, and it's plastic, interlocking, and inexplicably sticky."

Chapter Text

Rory broke into a half-jog to catch up. "I think something's following us," she murmured.

"We're in Hell, Darling, something's always following us," Lucifer called cheerily over her shoulder. "Pay it no mind!" His voice dropped low. "Fairly sure that's Borovis ." Then again at a normal volume. "Our next loop is over that way." And low. "It's because he heard what you said about my father." Up again. "Ah, here we are!" and low. "He doesn't know his hooves make noise against the rock." Lucifer slapped his palm against the wrought-iron fence latch of a nearby door, "The human in this loop is named Hamish." And low, "Because he's an idiot."

Rory blinked, brow furrowing hard.

Lucifer motioned to Rory with his free hand, then pulled hard on a brushed stainless steel handle just to his right. Rory's eyebrows shot up into her hairline, but she followed Lucifer into the loop.

"What was that all about?" Rory asked, blinking hard as her eyes adjusted to artificial outdoor light, this time, a noonday winter sun off gleaming powder snow. In the distance, a ski instructor barked orders at a trio of first timers.

Lucifer peered out into the canyons and then shut the door behind them. "Right now, Borovis is fifteen stories over Manhattan on the high steel. Not a good place to be if you just ate questionably preserved corned beef for lunch, as Hamish has been reminding himself for the past hundred-odd years." He looked over at the skiers. "That's Albert Masterson," he said. "Don't let the loop fool you. He died at the ripe old age of sixty-two, but his guilt keeps taking him back to the time he shoved snow up his little sister's nose and then blamed her for a three-snowboarder pileup."

"He came to Hell for that?"

"That and he beat and killed a callgirl back in '01," Lucifer said. "Rather amiable young lady, as I recall. 'Betha' to her clients. She had this way of getting her legs all the way behind—"

"That's okay," Rory held up a hand. "I get it. Now, what's with pig guy? And I'm guessing the demon's don't know about…" she rolled her eyes upwards.

"I'll thank you for not saying it, and they do not," he said. "There was an infernal newsletter for a while, but you may remember paper is flammable, and the volcano can be difficult to predict." Lucifer breathed out slowly, "Borovis may find himself outclassed by nearby bivalves in the brains department and by spider monkeys in hygiene, but he has survived in Hell a long time. He's a weaker demon, physically speaking. A weaker demon can get power in two ways: practice fighting and torture so hard that your skill and finesse make up for your lack of strength—"

"I'm guessing Maze went that route."

"—or collect something that other demons want."

"Borovis collects information," Rory guessed.

"Got a nose for it, as they say," he said, drawing the outline of Borovis' tapir-like snout in the air. "I expect he'll keep sniffing around until he has some idea of what happened."

"But the Demons are going to find out about Amenadiel sooner or later," said Rory.

"And if it's 'later,' then Hell's new way of operating may have reached equilibrium. This place is built for stagnation. That's not the worst when you're trying to foster stability."

"You say he collects information. What then? Does he tell everyone?"

"Not exactly. He trades it. For favors, for items, for duty shifts in the loops he prefers. As information brokers go, Borovis has come to command a premium."

"So if someone bought information from Borovis, they'd probably believe it?" Rory asked.

Lucifer tipped his head to the side. "Where are you going with this?"

"I know you don't lie, but how do you feel about a little disinformation?"
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There was a faint squeaking sound of a door opening, then a thick scrunch of snow being compressed under hooves. Rory didn't turn around. Instead, she squinted her eyes against the too-bright image of a human currently being shoved down the bunny slope by a surly ski instructor.

"He beat her up and killed her?" she asked.

"Yes. It seems Albert spent his career working for DHL. Bertha made a few comments about his own package that he took rather personally."

Rory took a deep breath, weighing things. "I want to say let him rot, but…"

"Everyone deserves help or no one days," said Lucifer.

The two of them scrunched over to Albert. For a split second, the demon impersonating Albert's sister made eye contact with something behind them.

Albert appeared to be eight or nine years old, and his snow pants looked uncomfortably damp. Rory sat down next to him in the snow and started asking about the ski slope. It took what might have been an hour or much longer. Lucifer eventually figured out that the ski slope reminded him of the metaphorical ski slopes he'd enjoy in Bertha's company. Rory mentioned something about two versions of the same thing working in tandem.
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In the next loop, Rory talked to a frazzled third grade teacher about how maybe he could see why chucking a student's inhaler into the school trash compactor might not be the hottest idea. After all, there was a new God running the universe.

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A bread fraudster in Tudor England turned out to be on the edge of Rory's language skills, but eventually the idea that charging his customers for rotten dough might have had some consequences got through to Enri.

After all, the old God and the new were both in agreement…

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Crevos dropped two shards of metal onto the ground. "Hell-forged steel," he said. "Enough to make a knife."

Borovis snorted.

"A little one!" Crevos protested. "Borovis, didn't you tell me that if you can't gouge out an eye with just six inches, then it's not the equipment, it's how you're using it?"

"I didn't mean six inches of knife, you frass brain," said Borovis. "What else you got?"

"I'll throw in half a cat," said Shirime.

"Which half?" asked Borovis.

"The good fat half!" Shirime said, pulling a fluffy tail from nowhere.

Borovis licked his lips. "Give it here!" His mouth foamed.

Shirime quickly handed the cat half to the taller Crevos, who held it behind his back with his thinnest arm. "Tell!"

Borovis leaned forward, dropping his voice to a whisper. "Our Lord's brother has become the same manner of thing as their sire. He sits the throne. He commands the angels!"

Shirime pulled in a gasp.

Crevos covered his mouth with his second left hand. "You don't mean…"

Borovis nodded sagely. "There are two Gods now! Father and son work to overmine demonkind. That is why Lord Lucifer is purging Hell of the unworthy among our tenants."

Crevos scratched the bare skullbone behind his eye. "Are you sure that's what he's doing? Because I'm pretty sure that those two humans who got out of here ended up in—" Borovis smacked Crevos across the temple.

Shirime picked at the skin covering a new eye, grabbing a membrane between two claws and pulling. He winced as the blood started to flow. "You think that's why the Spawn is here? Is Lord Lucifer raising her to be his Amnio-dull?"

"You think so?" asked Crevos. He sat back on his heels. "Only one thing to do then," he said.

"Choose sides, and fight a civil war until one of them wins?"

"Choose sides. Civil war. One wins."

Chapter Text

"Do you want to take the lead on this one?" Lucifer asked. He'd changed back into his regular suit and pocket square, the sort of devil you met at the crossroads to ask for talent at playing the blues. He adjusted his cufflinks as he eyed the interior of the loop.

Damned thing was full of goats. Billy goats. Nanny goats. Goats twice life size with glowing red eyes. Goats the size of tarantulas that could walk straight up fenceposts. One of them was eating a yoga mat near the center of the open-gabled walkway. A gibbering figure, presumably the tenant, was perched on top of a rickety folding table jumping back each time an ornery ruminant got near her.

"You just don't want to get dirty, don't you?" Rory asked.

"We won't be able to shower until we return to L.A. and you'll find that dry cleaning here is bigger on the dry than it is on the cleaning." He eyed one black-horned beast that was busily making it clear that it had two business ends.

"Whatever," said Rory. "Can't be worse than that petting zoo I used to go to."

Lucifer turned in place, one eyebrow going up.

Rory sighed, grabbing a nanny by her stubby horns and shoving her out of the way as she all but waded toward the folding table. "Yeah, so Linda and Mom took me to a petting zoo once, the big one in San Diego. I don't remember 'cause I was a baby. But apparently, when Charlie went, he picked up one of the fluffy little chicken chicks or maybe it was a duckling—"

"Incoming!" Lucifer interrupted, pointing.

Rory looked up to where three eight-legged ungulates were descending from the ceiling, spider-style. She ducked to the side and swatted them out of the way.

"Did he bring it back to life or something along those lines?" Lucifer asked. "Temeluch became a bit known for that one."

"No…" said Rory. "He just …made it dance."

Lucifer paused. "You don't mean he grabbed one wing in each hand and…"

"Less like an ordinary two year old with no sense of other beings' personal space," Rory hauled herself up onto the raised dais that had the table, the human, and currently two wooly wethers the size of toy poodles. "More like a snake charmer."

"Are you telling me my nephew reinvented the funky chicken?"

Rory rubbed one hand over her eyes, then stopped and looked at her palm, then wiped her hand on the seat of her trousers.

"You can have my pocket square when you get back over here."

"Mom said the baby chicken started to sing like it was a bluebird in a Disney movie. Linda says it was just making peeping noises. But back then Amenadiel was just gaga over anything that showed Charlie's angelic side and Linda was all about Amenadiel shouldn't be disappointed even if the only feathers on his body were that dumb haircut he had in middle school."

Rory crawled up onto the table where the tenant—a middle aged woman in a yoga instructor's uniform—was trying to pull free of a spider-goat that had dropped down the back of her shirt.

"Uh, hi," Rory said. "So I guess I'm here to help you or something."

"What's going on?!" the woman shrieked. "What is this place?!"

"You seriously don't know this is Hell?" Rory snapped.

"Oh." The tenant looked down at one of the spider-goats, which had just grown mandibles and was starting to gnaw away at the table like a termite.

"Yeah. I guess that tracks."

"Ask her if she knows why she's here!" Lucifer called out from near the door.

"Do you want to do this?" Rory snapped back. She turned to the tenant. "Anyway…"

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"I must say that's a new one. Before the twentieth century, we didn't see many humans feel that guilty over animal cruelty."

"There was also the part where she shoved her business partner into an arroyo," Rory pointed out.

"One sin at a time, Darling," Lucifer said. Then he frowned. "Wait," said Lucifer. "You said the story was about you going to the petting zoo. So Charlie made the little fertilized omelettes sing and dance. What happened when they gave you one?"

Rory scratched the back of your head. "Remember, I was like a year and a half old."

"Yes, the exact kind of pre-verbal protobeing I'm going to be raising in a few months. Do tell."

"Mom tells me …I tried to eat it."

"The chicken?"

"Linda thinks I got confused when someone said it was made of chicken," she said. "Hey, to a kid, words mean what they mean! But yeah, I had its head in my mouth like Ozzie Osborne."

"Not down here, if you can believe that."

Chapter Text

"Early medieval Scandinavians are hard to do because they spent their mortal lives believing in fate," said Lucifer.

"That's bad?" asked Rory, skeptically eying a fjordside village.

"It means getting them to think of their free will as the key to getting out of here is an uphill battle." Lucifer nodded toward the village. "Speaking of which…" He nodded toward a figure running up the hill toward him, metal fastenings in his wool tunic coming loose as he clunked along.

Rory frowned, watching Crevos' appearance fade back and forth from hellion to homesteader and back. Auntie Maze could change her face so that her bones showed or didn't show. Rory hadn't realized it was a real skill before.

"The tenant is doing the thing, Lord Morningstar!" Crevos said, his third eye blinking out from his thick, Nordic head of hair as he spoke. Crevos turned to Rory. "Your Offspringjesty."

"Just Rory," she said.

Crevos' mouth closed tight over all three rows of teeth and he looked at Lucifer.

Lucifer sighed. "Keep trying until you hit a title my daughter can tolerate." He slapped a clipboard into Crevos' hands. "Keep track."

They started down the hill. The frost seemed to stick in Rory's mouth, and for some reason it tasted like rotten pig fat.

"And you said some of the older humans speak English?" Rory asked. Lucifer had sworn Sigurd was intelligible except for a couple vowels.

"That's right, Lady of Questionizing," said Crevos, tapping at the skin over his eye until it resembled an ugly chunk of scar tissue. "Us demons teach them!" He rubbed his face and it soon resembled a thickly braided beard. He kicked out his legs with each step, and they looked and sounded like booted feet.

"That's..." Rory tipped her head to the side "That's actually..."

"Don't give them too much credit," Lucifer murmured.

"You see, Diminudevil," preened Crevos. "Humans are foolish creatures, spawned by Adam on his second-choice dam. Some of them start leaking just because they think another human is yelling at them. Do it in words they don't know and they crack like a finger bone!" He nodded happily. "I was torturing this Philistine who felt guilty about cutting off his commanding officer's head—" Crevos shook his head. "He didn't even get the guy's job and his shiny things and stuff," he said. "Who's stupid enough to kill the next demon up and then not take his posting?"

Crevos scratched his beard, ruining the effect by using his stick-thin third arm to do it. "What's the word for a king's daughter again?" he asked as his clothes morphed into Viking gear.

"Don't call me 'princess,'" said Rory.

"As you command, Your Infernal Offspringity. So this one time, in a Hell loop," he went on as Rory pinched the bridge of her nose, "Behe and I were torturing this Philistine and nothing was working. Not even, you know," Crevos moved his two left hands in a twisting motion while whistling a "FWEEP" sound through his teeth.

"I ...can't imagine that not having an effect," Rory answered.

"Right?" Crevos went on. "But then I realize, we've only been yelling at him in Philistine. I'd just been disassembling a Chinese guy right before that—easy one. But I get confused and I yell at the guy using stuff I learned from the Ming army. Philistine could tell they were orders, but he couldn't tell what they were. He got so confused he put his own spear through his foot!" Crevos gave a snorting laugh, as he tugged on his clothes until they looked like full Viking gear. "Let me tell you, there's cutting off a foreskin and then cutting off a foreskin when he's trying to figure out what's happening."

Rory blinked. "Uh... I wouldn't say I have much to do with foreskins."

"Oh, it's not hard. You just grab the round part like this, make sure the knife is nice and dull, give it a good twist—"

"That's enough, Crevos!"

"Yes, Lord Morningstar!" Crevos paused and pointed at Rory. "Hey, couldn't we just call her—"

"'Lady Morningstar' sounds like a failed Avril Lavigne album," said Rory.

Crevos got to his feet, brushing off his leine tunic. He looked at their clothes. "Aren't you going to…"

"We'll go like this," Lucifer interrupted.

Crevos nodded, thinking hard. "Memo to self. Her Spawnliness cannot do illusions."

"You said that bit out loud again, Crevos," said Lucifer.

Crevos jumped. "Dammit! I mean no I didn't! I mean please don't kill me, Lord Morningstar!"

Lucifer looked at Rory. "If they're not plotting, they're probably broken."

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They walked into the village to the ting-ting sound of a hammer striking metal and then being set down. By the time they got to the workshop not far from the well, the blacksmith had finished quenching the horseshoes and had picked up another creation.

"So what're we dealing with?" Rory rubbed her hand together. "Is our human feeling guilty about sacking Lindisfarne?"

"What's a Lindisfarne?" asked Crevos.

"Grand theft longship?" she tried again.

"Not exactly…"

Gresil, decked out in full History Channel drag, pointed a thick finger at the blacksmith. "And you're sure this is high-grade steel and not that brittle dogshit you sold to Sven?"

"Yup," the blacksmith's moustache bobbed with the nod.

Rory looked at Crevos. "That's it?"

He shrugged with all three arms.

"That can be all it takes," Lucifer said. "It seems Sigurd here is a sensitive soul."

"Wait." Rory held up both hands. "Is this one of those times when he acts like he's guilty about something little so he doesn't have to face the real issue?"

"Ooh! 'The Issue'!" Crevos jotted something down on the clipboard.

Lucifer tipped his head to the side.

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The scene changed. The sticking overcast and echoes of the Hell-imagined fjord gave way to a blazing copper-dome sky and oven-baked heat, the clash and screams of a pitched battle in which Sigurd's customer and a full military troupe of other Vikings fought gold-helmeted warriors half-again their height.

"Ah," Lucifer held up a finger. "Sigurd didn't actually go with Erik to fight as a mercenary for the Byzantine Empire. This is his imagining of what happened."

"Zack Snyder is such an inspiration!" Crevos said appreciatively.

"Erik" hefted the short sword he'd bought from Sigurd—which now looked less like expertly braited bog steel and more like a tin knife that could hardly fillet a fish. He swung it against the embossed breastplate of a howling Persian and it bent like a child's toy.

"Nooooooo!" cried Erik. Then he lifted his wooden shield to block a blow from his enemy's spear. It struck the metal boss head-on and warped. "Nooooooooo!" he cried again. The Persian stuck a sword through his guts, which burbled as they fell out onto the cracked earth. "Nooooooo!"

Sigurd, somehow watching the battle, gasped.

"SIGURD, THIS IS ALL YOUR FAULT!" called Erik.

"Yeah, we're going to die among the Greeks because Sigurd sucks!" shouted another Viking, waving a broken sword as he fell beneath the imagined Eastern onslaught.

"Why did fate send us a metalworker who couldn't find his own butt if the instructions were written on the heel?"

"Behe's got to work on that one," commented Lucifer.

"Sigurd sucks!" called another Viking.

"SIGURD SUUUUUUUUUUUCKS!" came a chorus of voices, interspersed with groans, battle cries, and puking as the fantom Sigurd covered his face with his hands and blubbed.

Rory nodded. "So… if we change the outcome of the battle, Sigurd doesn't feel guilty?"

"We could try it," Lucifer said. "But Sigurd's guilt comes from his actions. Perhaps we could go back further and get him to reconsider skimping on the steelwork."

Rory shot him a look. "Oh, I think we've had enough of going back and erasing things."

Crevos was still scribbling on the clipboard. "How are we feeling about 'Princess Stabby'?"

Rory grabbed the clipboard and smacked Crevos over the head with it.

"Ow!"

"Try to be patient with him, Darling. The demons probably should call you by some title or other. The more they respect you, the closer you are to safe down here."

"Can't I just kick their butts until they do that?"

"Oh," Crevos piped up. "Mother Lilith spawned us on whichever beasts of the night were handy. Some of us don't have butts, Your Feistyhood!"

Rory snorted, then turned to Lucifer. "Nice to know you had a good reason to bring me down here, Dad."

"Well thank you, Darling, I—" Lucifer stopped, picking up on her sarcasm. "Wait, you mean you think it's something other than us spending time together healing the damned."

"When Replacement Me shows up in this timeline and gets her little pampered butt down here for the first time, the demons have to know not to pluck her like a Thanksgiving turkey." Rory gave a bitter smile. "Way to take the future into your own hands. You're father of the freaking year."

"Rory—!" Lucifer called out as Rory's wings snapped to full span and she launched herself toward the battle.

Chapter Text

"Her unstoppable pinkness!!" Crevos jibbered as the backflush from Rory's wings knocked him on his freshly reconstituted butt. He shook his head, braids waggling as he righted himself.

"No, no, no, Rory you are not invincible down here," Lucifer called out, freeing his own wings to follow her.

The air wasn't real, but the intent was. Lucifer imagined the updraft, and he coasted into the battle, where Rory, unarmed and unarmored, was landing, kick-first, into a mass of clashing steel—some of which was Hell-forged and fully capable of laying out a fully angelic opponent, let alone a half human one.

Rory knocked the first fighter on his back, arms and legs flailing in an insectoid imitation of a Persian warrior. Rory snarled as if she were ready to lay into the Byzantine-era army of Sigurd's guilt with nothing but her teeth and nails. Just was Lucifer was cursing himself for not giving her a weapon, she reached into Maze's tote bag and pulled out a spiked mace straight out of Tolkien's nightmares. Rory lashed out backwards with her left wing and sent another warrior spewing chunky arterial blood as she laid into another. She was bellowing something he couldn't make out as she lay

Lucifer's knives had materialized in his hands, but he hesitated. He couldn't help but admire the sight of his daughter in motion. Each angel was perfect, for certain values of the term. Seeing Remi or Temeluch or even Amenadiel in combat was more moving than an opera (not that Lucifer would ever admit it), but Rory had this streak of unpredictability that could only come from eighty generations of random genetic dice-throws that was all Chloe. It was like the difference between watching an ocean wave and a landslide. You never knew what was hidden in the Earth.

Then there was the risk that she'd permanently hash a hellion. The supply of demons was vast but finite. Lillith wasn't making any more of them, after all. The denizens of Hell reenacted death and destruction all the time but not usually in the company of a half-angel with razor wings and anger issues.

Lucifer gathered his will to intervene, but somehow the last of Perdition's Persians was on his back, gleaming armor dented and stained with bubbling globs of blood that would leave any slasher film special effects designer in need of a change of underpants.

"Look," Rory barked at Sigurd, gesturing with Maze's mace. "They didn't all die 'cause of you."

"Mmmhuh?" the smith looked up. Erik was still on the ground, leaking in several places but fully conscious. Sigurd blinked at each of his other customers. The figures milled about looking a bit confused, Lucifer noted. That happened with demonkind didn't have anyone to tell them what to do.

"This is your imagination of what happened," said Rory. "And even in here, there's a lot going on. Your crappy weapons might be part of the reason these guys all bit it, but there's no way they're the only one."

Sigurd blinked at her, nudging someone's severed arm with his foot.

"Hey," Rory pointed out, "maybe someone told you the battle was your fault, but they were really covering for whatever dork-ass commanding officer thought that charging a bunch of ten-foot-tall armor dudes on foot was a good idea."

"You're right!" said Sigurd, brightening. "That was a stupid battle strategy!" He turned to the still-prone Erik. "I don't suck! Maybe you suck!"

"Yeah! Maybe you suck!" Rory added cheerfully.

"Yeah! …I did totally charge him full price for that thing, though," said Sigurd.

"Hang on," Rory said as Lucifer walked up beside her. "You really did sell him a fake sword."

"Oh no, it was a real sword. I just started out with low-quality steel. Half the time people can't tell the difference anyway."

"So you …actually did do the thing that got you sent down here?"

Sigurd nodded. "I guess. I mean, I thought Hel was going to be a lot colder. It's really hot here," he finished, looking up at the Constantinople sun.

"The loop is resetting," Lucifer warned as the world around them seemed to shake.

A moment later, they were back at the center of the Viking village.

"All right, Sigurd," Lucifer said encouragingly as Gresil walked toward them, newly reconstituted as Erik. "Another loop, another chance to get things right. What are we going to do different?"

Gresil pointed a thick finger at Sigurd. "You're sure this is high-grade steel and not that brittle dogshit you sold to Sven?"

Sigurd looked at Rory, who gave him a slow nod.

"It absolutely is that brittle dogshit I sold to Sven."

"Well the—what?" Erik asked, staring.

"It's the exact same steel I sold to Sven. Dork-ass loser even paid full price for it. And he took it on campaign to England and came back with a buttload of plunder. You saying you can't do better than freaking Sven? Now do you want it or not?"

"I, uh…" Gresil stared at Lucifer, who nodded slowly.

"Yes, please?" Gresil tried.

Sigurd quoted a price, and Gresil paid and took the blade away.

"That's…" Lucifer mused. "Not how I'd have handled it."

Rory shrugged. "Is it working."

"Time will tell," said Lucifer as Crevos finally caught up to them. He waved the clipboard.

Crevos had managed to sit up on his butt and was scribbling on the clipboard, "'Her Infernal Pinkness.' 'She of the Stabbing Feathers.' 'Slicer of Femurs.' 'Causer of Involuntary Ammonia Secretions'…'"

Chapter Text

The wind began to howl. Rory and Lucifer had flown to a rock ledge that would have had a view of the canyons below if the ash weren't so thick. As it was, the atmosphere made unsettling patterns below them. Lucifer had compared it to the bubbling of a bacterial aerator at a sewage treatment plant, but he knew better than to say it out loud while his carbon-based offspring was trying to eat.

Rory unwrapped the plastic and pulled the paper towel away. "Did Mom ...make us sandwiches?"

Lucifer leaned over her shoulder. The bread wasn't toasted and the jelly had leaked out the sides, but it was otherwise a reasonably competent approximation of PB&J.

"Those look like the ones she made for the Urchin when I first met them," he said. Before Trixie's school had banned peanut butter and Trixie had banned her mother's attempt at food preparation. "Did Future Chloe not make you lunch?"

Rory shook her head. "She was busy." At Lucifer's stare, she answered, "Mom said that when she had time to spend on me, she wanted to spend it with me." The silence echoed off the edge of Rory's words like the cliff that dangled under their feet: Had Lieutenant and then Captain Decker actually spent that time with her daughters?

And would whatever good she'd done still happen if she did?

Rory picked up the sandwich to take a bite. "Ah!" Lucifer held out a hand. She frowned but handed the sandwich over. He pulled it open.

A weevil, twice life size with fifteen too many legs, rolled dramatically, making squelching noises far louder than his size suggested.

"Is that you, Nerdal?"

The weeveling increased in pitch.

"Are you aware that my daughter and I are not the spiritual essence of deceased humans and do in fact have bodies still equipped with all the grindy bits? Teeth, stomach acid, all the things Hlokk is currently using on the Nixon cabinet?"

Nerdal got quiet.

"Do you still want to be in the sandwich, Nerdal?"

The weevil wriggled to the edge of the bread and swandived off into the ashfall.

"Good decision!" Lucifer called off the edge of the cliff as Nerdal's voice Dopplerred into the gloom.

Lucifer drew open the edge of Rory's bag. "Anyone else?" he asked.

There was a light scratching sound as two deformed beetles, one rat with an litter of eyeballs on its back, and a surprisingly colorful velvet worm scrambled over the edge and dropped away.

"I'm not hungry any more," said Rory.

Lucifer shrugged. "Suit yourself," and took a bite of the sandwich. It tasted like store-brand peanut butter with a whiff of Chloe's moisturizer. All the times he'd tried to introduce that woman to gourmet, but she said the cheap stuff tasted better. Too many years of budgeting with Daniel. Chloe only rarely told him any details of her marriage, even the day-to-day mechanics (he'd overheard Linda warning her not to compare him to her previous co-procreant), but he suspected she'd almost enjoyed making the pennies stretch.

Rory pointed off into the gloom. "Is that the throne?"

Lucifer followed her line of sight and nodded.

"Looks different from this angle."

Rory picked up the sandwich, seemingly to eat it after all, and took a bite. Hell had stomachaches but not satisfaction the same way it had solitude but not privacy. True to the setting, the jelly spilled out onto her hands. She frowned and rummaged in the lunch bag. Giving up, she unzipped Maze's tote.

"What have you—"

Rory pulled out a paper napkin. "Huh," she said.

"In the campsite loop, it gives you calomine lotion. In the Viking loop, it gives you a mace."

"Both things that Maze might have thought of," Rory finished. She held up the napkin. It had a little rainbow stamped on it. Hell was currently warping its smiley face into a gaggled rictus, and the text had rearranged to "HANG IN THERE BADLY," but it was definitely a paper napkin.

Lucifer frowned and looked at the tote bag. Rory seemed to give it little mind. She wiped her hands and then pitched the napkin over the side, where it fluttered off into the abyss.

Lucifer raised an eyebrow.

"Is there an ordinance against littering?" Rory asked.

"No, but I don't want Nerdal to eat the jam off that thing. You think sugar rush is bad in Los Angeles?"

Chapter Text

Rory hauled Maze's bag up onto her shoulder as she trudged through the canyon behind Lucifer. This was a deeper section, in sea level terms (if any of the seas on this plane had been level), and the rock rose up on both sides, the rattling of the doors echoing in the claustrophobic space. Lucifer focused on his connection to Hell. He was rusty, almost as rusty as before his initial return after dispatching Kinley. It wasn't just the length of his stay on Earth—nearly a decade there and longer here. He'd have to ask Linda, but if self-actualizing could make his wings grow back or go batty, maybe they could make the part of his soul that had once ruled these corridors with a will of iron find itself going anemic. Lucifer tried to feel the space ahead of them, sense the ground like the surface of a drum, but he couldn't tell if the feeling ahead of him was the presence of minor demons or just the general numbness he'd noticed after his eight-year absence. But something was different now...

"So..." Rory trailed off.

He looked over his shoulder. Eric Masterson's loop was through the scenic route. The choice had been deliberate. Linda had recommended some kind of activity, like long walks, where two people could either have conversations or maintain a silence without being too awkward. She'd explained that this was why fathers took their sons fishing. Not that he'd know firsthand.

"How did he, you know, make this place?" she asked.

And when people decided to talk, they didn't always talk about the problem.

"I wasn't first line on the creation of Hell the way I was with stars," Lucifer started. They'd been strange times... He forced a smile. He didn't like to think about Samael.

"My aunts and uncles didn't tell me much," said Rory. "After a while, I stopped asking."

"I can see why they wouldn't," Lucifer answered. He took a few more steps. "Dad was beginning to become distant by then. I think the fact of Hell existing upset them."

Hell had begun as a state of being, any place that was out of God's sight and subject to his rejection a cold spot in the space of the universe that could just as well have been warmed evenly. But the Lord had given the fabric depth and complexity through the forces of gravity and electromagnetics and intent. With angelkind merely no longer being at the absolute center, the question of why someplace worse even needed to exist raised questions in beings that were used to certainty.

It wasn't the fall as depicted by Milton. It wasn't the sixteen days' plummet of Hephaestus between Olympus and Tartarus. The fact of God's absolute rejection had been enough. His anger had been enough to burn his flesh raw. Or at least, Lucifer had thought it had been his anger.

He looked over his shoulder again. Rory's hand moved as if to swat a fly, but it was probably just the paranoia of this place making her skin crawl.

"Your Aunt Temeluch thought it was a threat. If anyone whined about him creating life on Earth, boom. Down you go." He'd heard that she'd changed her tune once an angel had actually had to take up residence. He took a few more steps. "Amenadiel and Uriel were certain Dad had some bigger plan, that this was like digging a hole before planting a tree." As if existence were some perfectly sculpted suburban back yard, trees in perfect trim, all green but no wildness.

"What did you think?" asked Rory.

"Back then?" Lucifer asked. He wondered if she was playing him. He knew she was mad at him. She knew that made him crave her approval, so she asked the questions she thought she couldn't get away with otherwise. "Back then I thought it was a trash heap, a place to throw things that had failed or disappointed him. Or talked back. After I'd been here for a while, taken enough trips up to Earth, I started to think humans needed to know they could be punished or else it would be a nonstop slaughterfest." None of the music, the good times, the friendly faces... Sin was sin, but a world without a moment to breathe was a world where Brittneys didn't feel safe enough to dance sans wardrobe, not that he'd be sharing that with Rory just yet.

"And now?"

Now, as in after Dad's message to Amenadiel, after Lee's and Daniel's change of address.

Never mind his decidedly not sky-high progress since then.

His hand made contact with their next door. "Now, I think we have a patient to see."

Even if seeing was as far as it got.

Chapter Text

Rory gave him the stinkeye and started to pull the door open.

Just then, there was a sense of movement and malice, far off to the right. Lucifer grabbed Rory by the shoulder and pulled her to the side just as a presence made of sharpness and ambition barreled into the space where she had been. The ragged screen door of the tenant's childhood cracked and slammed shut, glazing itself solid as it did.

A serpent the size of a wild boar rounded and turned on them, six yellow eyes bracing with intelligence. It braced its undersea cable of a body against the sides of the canyon and lunged again for Rory's side, mouth gaping with rows of yellow-white teeth. Lucifer couldn't see from this angle, but he knew the inside of its mouth was studded with a thousand tiny hands in place of papillae. It tasted by touch. Rory ducked out of the way, ending up on the other side of the corridor.

"Are we under attack?!" squeaked Rory.

"It was bound to happen sooner or later," he called back.

"You couldn't have given me a heads up?!"

"'Hell is full of demons' is a heads up!"

Lucifer focused. Inferna-bugs were one thing, but how had something this big gotten under his guard? He'd deliberately avoided the overland plains, the places where Maze's skill dispatching "anything with horns" and "anything with wings" had saved his still-burned rear end more times than he would ever admit. Something about the thought bothered him. Across the way, Rory's mouth set in determination.

A split second later, he realized what she was thinking.

"Wait, don't—!"

But Rory had already unsheathed her wings. On reflex, they flashed out to their full span. Or tried to.

"Gyah!"

The razor edges of half Rory's primaries had caught in the cracked rock on either side, penetrating just far enough for gravity to pull her fast. Lucifer knew from his years down here (and a fair few incidents with Michael and Amenadiel up there) that yanking out your own feathers to get loose was harder than it looked.

"I'm stuck! I'm stuck!"

"Quiet," Lucifer said like a crocodile sliding into the water.

On Earth, asking for help sometimes brought help. Not here. Not ever here.

Lucifer flicked his knives into his hands. The Hell-serpent had slipped away, tucking its jet-scaled body down one of the crags or even into a door. But which one?

"Get me out!" hissed Rory.

Lucifer took his eyes off the passages long enough to see Maze's tote bag was still trapped around Rory's shoulder. Helping Rory would mean turning his back on the passageways, on danger.

That had surely been the plan.

The narrow rock chasm had been a good place for an ambush because it neutralized the advantage of anything with wings, and "anything but wings" very much included the Lord of Hell and the Purple Pummeler. There wasn't enough space down here to get any lift. But while Lucifer and aerially inclined denizens of the pit might get a few bumps and bruises, that was the extent of it. Couldn't fly only meant couldn't fly.

Lucifer's wings were soft. Their threat, down here, came from the glow of the divine (which, he could admit, had been rather muted since their batwingification and return, more of a layered grayness. Chloe said it made him look distinguished, but Maze had laughed when she'd said it, so he figured the dear Detective had been being diplomatic. Lucifer thought it made him look like an L.A. pigeon that had eaten too many used plastic wrappers. What they couldn't do, white or gray, was get him stuck in the igneous.

"Come out," Lucifer said. He didn't shout, but his voice echoed, bounced across the rock like a ricochet. It was a display, a threat, a promise. An animal roared to show its size and the power of its untiring lungs. Lucifer spoke to show his control over Hell.

There was a skittering sound. The serpent hadn't come alone. It had brought a friend. With legs.

"Come out," he commanded again. It hadn't been English this time and probably hadn't been the first. The claw-to-rock sound doubled into a snuffling, a growling. Something about that nagged at him. It was important. Was it that—

"I need to get down," Rory's voice was low but intense.

Lucifer turned his head over his shoulder and caught an unexpected fear on his daughter's face. Sure, being stuck wasn't fun and there were probably at least four demons waiting to pluck them both like chickens, but her arms were free and—

Pluck.

Lucifer flashed back to tenth and Swanson. To Le Mec. Rory didn't just need to get down now. She needed to get down, now.

He sized up the situation in half a second and made for her left wing. Shit, they were really stuck in there. Lucifer listened again.

The best way to get her out would be to grasp each feather, one by one, and pull at just the right angle for minimal damage. If this was a test of his control over the hellscape, it was one of the ones with five proctors, overhead cameras and a rectal probe on the way in. He made eye contact with Rory, trying to speak with his eyes. But she was either too upset or just didn't know what he was going for. She didn't brace herself and she yelled again when he struck his fist against the rock wall, making it ring like iron against an anvil before some of the cracked rock crumbled. But she pulled on her wing and managed to get most of the feathers free. Lucifer struck it again, realizing belatedly that it was also an alarm bell for any demon with a grudge against the king or even something eager to chomp and run.

It was one thing to remember that Crevos and Borovis and Shirime weren't as bumbling as they looked. It was another to get attacked by a full-blown monstrosity that was way more Shyamalan than Stooges. And something else was wrong.

"Dad—" she started.

"Put something metal in your hands, Rory," he answered, willing himself not to be distracted by the D-word.

The handles of his blades bit into his palms as the canyons filled with the sound of scales scraping against rock—from all directions.

"Where did it go?" Rory asked. She'd moved on to her right wing and had it half free. She could probably still slash with her left, but her range would be limited. And then there was…

"Rory," he said, voice like a plumb weight, straight down with no deviation. "You are not to treat this creature like Maze or even like the demons who attended her wedding. If it shows itself in anything but retreat, strike to kill."

"But it doesn't have a soul. If it dies, it'll just—"

"It knows that."

The sound of reptilian movement surged on the last syllable of his sentence, coming from behind Rory's field of view. Lucifer ducked under her exposed wing and raised his right-hand dagger just in time. He saw a flash of white throat and black scales, of sixteen bright blue specks.

He'd trained on swords, in the beginning. He'd practiced with Amenadiel, with Michael, taught Uriel and Temeluch. But he'd been someone else then. Down here, short range, close and personal. The demon did have legs, three of them without a single toe, tiny and near useless against its large body. Two of them wheeled, moving uselessly against its own armor and the edge of his wrist as he slit straight through the hide to its body cavity. The bellowing hiss cut off sharply when he reached its throat.

"I thought it had yellow eyes," said Rory.

Lucifer looked at the demon's vestigial limbs. Claws. He'd heard claws.

Snakes didn't have claws.

"There are two of them," Lucifer said, turning so his back was toward Rory. "At least." He felt Maze's absence. She'd have read his body language, known to turn away so that they covered the whole area. There was a sound of canvas and the whir of a zipper, and Lucifer looked over his shoulder to see what Rory had plucked from the bag of tricks this time.

She held it out for him to see. He raised an eyebrow.

"They'll know what that is, you know," he said.

"Will that make any difference?" she said.

"Probably not. Fire 'er up!"

Lucifer stepped over the corpse of the first demon, which was shuddering as if it weighed even more than before he'd turned it into salty mud with sticks in.

"You there," Lucifer called in the language of the pit, and the voice seemed to come from the canyon itself. "Attack or submit," he shouted. The words had taken on their meaning among demons during the first phase of his reign. Father had made the throne so only a celestial could sit it, but he'd had to slash through half the horde to get there. Attack or submit did not mean mercy. It meant the fight had gone too far for backing down or for cutting off the loser's finger and walking away. Submission meant maiming severe enough to count as transformation.

The creatures of Earth's darkest deeps, the ones no scientist had spotted or sketched, that no submersible had yet worried, Lilith had found them. Lilith had tamed them. There were no beasts of the night quite like the ones of the abyssal plane when the currents seeped slowly between the continental shelves. Somehow, they had inspired or sired some of her children.

He should have taught her combat. He should have drilled her for three weeks before letting her set one boot on this plane. As it was, he could only look in her direction and hiss in English. "Get up the wall."

She frowned, "What?"

"Don't argue with me now. Just do it!" However she interpreted him, it would be close enough.

"I don't—fine." She shoved Maze's bag and its most recent gift under one arm and shimmied partway up the canyon wall, flushing her wings for balance.

"Come out," he snarled.

Creatures of the earthly abyss knew stillness. Food drifted down to them so scarcely that conserving energy was life itself. But this was no life. Lilith, Hell, or something else had robbed it of all stillness, all peace.

Clawed limbs like that of a prehistoric crab scraped against the rock as a being that seemed to be all mouth snapped out from Lucifer's left. It should have been too big to fit through the canyons, to move that fast. Lucifer remembered seeing it eons ago, remembered that it could squeeze and collapse, fit through any space larger than its intermeshing bones. About the only thing solid about it were its jaw muscles.

He jerked away in time to miss most of the strike. The demon wheeled, slashing backward at Aurora with its tail, while rounding on him again. He dodged, feinting with one blade and then the other. He looked up at Aurora, hoping she'd understand what he wanted her to do. He had almost no room to maneuver in the tight space, but each time the creature lunged, it moved further left, and further, and…

"Now!" he called.

Aurora let go of the canyon wall, swinging her weapon in a wide arc.

"And it's Aurora Morningstar with the steel chair!" Lucifer called out.

The creature made a choking noise, stunned.

"What now? Do we—"

Lucifer leaped toward the demon and took his knife to one eye, to the other. It had no throat to speak of, so he sunk his blade through the back of its head, where it might be hiding its brain. Sure enough, the beast began to tremble and twitch. He twisted the knife again.

It could expand and contract, like a pufferfish, he remembered. It could get in and out of small spaces like a mouse. But unlike both those animals, it had an intelligence. It knew how to play dead.

He looked at the yellowed snake demon. Its body was already turning waxen, collapsing in on itself like rot. (Nothing could rot here. Rotting meant microbial life, eventual renewal.)

Lucifer reversed his grip on his knife and slit the skin next to the spine, then gripped flesh in both hands.

"What are you—You don't have to do that!" Rory protested.

"Yes I do," he answered without looking at her.

He flipped his other knife and held it out to her, grip-first.

She shook her head, still staring at the being that had fully intended to kill her horribly.

"Fine," he said, turning back to the beast. "It's all right." They had an eternity to get this right. Sooner or later, Rory would kill a demon, and it didn't matter if it wasn't today. Lucifer peeled back skin and muscle, managing not to gag at the smell. The Urchin had once complained about the sting of formaldehyde in her biology class, the day they'd dissected preserved frogs. They'd been shipped specially prepared, with latex pumped into their vessels to replace the blood, she'd said. Blue and red.

Today, Rory was getting an education.

"I only pithed it," he said quietly, once he'd revealed enough of the spine to know. He stepped back and cut another slit down the beast's side. The brain was a wash. It was easier to find the heart. The heart had to move to work. "There…" he murmured to himself. He wiped the blades against his trousers and stuffed it back in their scabbards.

He took the beast's heart in his hands. It might have made a noise. Not too quickly, he squeezed, feeling the blackened, clawlike nails puncture as the contents oozed. The demon's body had seemed still already, but now it was truly dead, nothing but mud, nothing but sand, nothing but thickened saltwater in an unusual shape.

He wasn't surprised that he'd taken on his devil form. Or upset.

"We go. Now," he said to Aurora. "We are being watched."

Her expression was hard to read. He beckoned for her to follow and turned right, a longer way to what would have been their destination, a quicker way out of the canyons. He heard her bootsteps behind him. The moment the space was wide enough, he spread his wings and took flight. He heard her flight muscles behind him.

He alit on a near crag—not the nearest; something might have been waiting there—and looked at his hands. Red, but that was to be expected. He focused on his body, his manifestation, and he felt his human shape return. His hands were still covered in gore and he'd ruined his manicure, but he wasn't trapped in guilt, at least.

Rory landed next to him.

"It had to die, Aurora. That's how it is."

"It doesn't need to be."

The ash blew between them.

"Maybe I'll manage to change that. Maybe we will. But it hasn't happened yet."

"I thought you were becoming the healer of Hell," she said. "It's what Mom called you." There was a funny twist to her lip. When had Future Chloe said that to Aurora? When she asked her mother if being the Devil's daughter made her evil?

"Perhaps I'm not yet," he said. True change could be slow. Doctor Linda said so, at least.

"I don't know what to think," said Rory. "I know it attacked us first, but…" She looked at him. "Aren't you more powerful than a demon? Than two demons? Like way, way more powerful?"

Lucifer blinked. That was not the kind of disturbed he'd expected Rory to be. "Not to the point where they don't pose a threat, Rory. I'm not Superman!"

"Right…" Rory said.

"We can go home," he offered. "We can cut it short. It's no trouble."

"No, uh…" she shifted her grip on Maze's bag. Whether she'd put the chair back or left it, he didn't know. "Just…" she looked at him. "So the way you are in L.A. The music and the hedonism and the dumb jokes and all that—it's an act?"

"No," he protested. He loved music. Though which "dumb" jokes she meant eluded him. His jokes were excellent.

"It feels like watching you gut a giant anglerfish demon was the realest thing I've ever seen from you," she said.

"It's all real, Rory," he promised her. He felt his feathers literally ruffle. "I'm allowed to have layers, after all."

"Right…" she said, staring out into the gloom. "Layers. Right."

He exhaled. "If we're not going back to Los Angeles straightaway, then I know a patient who is waiting for us," he said.

Rory nodded, tucking the bag back under her arm.

Before they took off, he thought he heard her murmur to herself:

"The king is the land."

Chapter Text

"I hope that didn't upset you too much, Darling," Lucifer said as held open the door to the next tenant's loop.

His grin was back. To Rory, it looked like plaster over a gap in a load-bearing wall. He was faking it. Maybe he always had been.

"Nah, I get nearly hellmurdered all the time," she said as she ducked past him. "The future has been a real shit show ever since Trump's fifth term in office."

"Don't you dare joke about that," said Lucifer, dropping the door. It clanged behind them and disappeared.

"What the…" Rory trailed off, looking up at a blaring set of unforgiving stage lights.

"We seem to be backstage somewhere." His eyes went distant. "The tenant is Maricelle Foley, or at least that's her real name. Died at age eighty-three. I believe she did spend some time as an actress."

The area was completely deserted. The stage seemed set for a four-camera late-twentieth-century sitcom, couch, windows, stairs behind. But the curtains looked as if they'd just stopped moving, as if someone had just been here.

"But because human beings self-actualize in Hell," Rory said as she hefted Maze's tote bag, "she could be literally anyone or anything in here." She nudged at the director's chair, as if expecting it to start speaking.

Lucifer frowned. "No they—" he stopped. "Oh."

"You never noticed that?" Rory asked, looking over her shoulder.

"That the humans didn't always look the way they would have at the moment of their deaths? Yes, I noticed that," Lucifer commented.

"But you didn't think of it as the same thing we do," Rory followed.

"'We,'" Lucifer repeated. "Didn't inherit the fixed-form gene from the Deckers?"

"Quit trying to find out which angel powers I have in the future," Rory told him. "It's not even going to be my future anyway, what with you erasing me out of existence."

"Rory, I don't—" Lucifer stopped. "I don't know how to convince you that that's not what I want."

"You make sure it doesn't happen," Rory said, stepping past the edge of the couch into the perfectly poised spotlight. "You stay here. You leave Mom and me alone. You let me live my life."

"By treating you worse than Father ever treated me?"

"Ha! That means this is still all about you. I want to exist. I do not think that I suck."

"I don't think you suck either!"

"CUT!" boomed a voice.

Lucifer and Rory both looked around, her in frustration, him trying to preserve the lord of Hell's dignity.

"It's one thing if you want to do warm-up exercises by going off-script," came a female voice from nowhere, "but this is a family sitcom. Watch the language!"

"What's that?" Rory murmured.

"Not sure," said Lucifer.

"I don't see any demons around."

"I don't see any anyone around. That does not mean we are not being watched."

"Of course we're not being watched!" snapped the voice. Rory narrowed her eyes and saw the fabric back of the director's chair move. "We have the lowest ratings in our time slot, yes below the fishing show where they never catch anything. Now cater to those lowest common denominators!"

Lucifer rubbed his chin. "This is where we figure out whether the voice is our tenant, and—"

"And what her goddamned deal is?"

"Selfdamned but yes." Lucifer frowned. "This reminds me of an episode of Supernatural that I watched with Mazikeen," said Lucifer. "It's a television program about two brothers who—"

"I know what Supernatural is. It was in after-school reruns during my latchkey days. I'm just surprised you put up with it."

"Pellegrino didn't quite get my swagger, but at least he had something like presence. I mean Rodney Dangerfield? At least Devil's Advocate cast Pacino."

"Places, everyone," called the voice.

"What do we do?" muttered Rory.

"I have a hellish feeling that's our tenant, see her or not."

"I repeat: What do we do?"

"This is the scene in which Deena, having ruined her sister's prom gown, must confess to Gregory that it wasn't the dog after all. Action!" called the voice.

Lucifer breathed in and turned toward Rory, "So, Deena, I understand that—"

"I am not playing along with this," said Rory.

"Too cheesy?"

"Too close to home. See, T's prom dress did have a completely accidental run-in with Charlie's paint set..."

"Let me guess. It was an accidental run-in that was completely accidental?"

"Oh, give me a break," said Rory.

"Cut! That was terrible!"

"What else do you know about this human?" asked Rory.

Lucifer sighed. "Maricelle!" he called out. "Lord of Hell and… and Title Pending are here to talk to you. You seem to have been cooling your heels since the second Bush administration. Care to take five and come out for a chat?"

There was a rustling sound near the director's chair.

"No!" she called back.

Rory made a rolling motion with her hand, "Can't you use any…"

Lucifer frowned in confusion. "Any what?"

"Any …hell powers?"

"What, like infernal Lojack? She's a human soul, not a lost Lexus," he looked around. "Besides, in a way, this entire loop is Maricelle." Across the room, there was the sound of a camera spinning into activity. "Finding where she decided to put her face isn't necessarily going to help us much."

"Yeah, but you sometimes …know things. You knew Sigurd hadn't really been to Persia or whatever."

Lucifer raised an eyebrow. "You thought that was magic? Darling, I'd talked to him."

"Enough to get their whole life stories?"

Lucifer gave a shrugging nod.

Rory's face hardened. "Okay, how have you been pushing me?"

"What?"

"When you 'let' me pick the loop, you always know everything about the human in it. How did you know which ones I'd go for? What are you up to?"

"I don't, and nothing," said Lucifer, pulling back in confusion. "At least nothing you don't know about. I want us to spend some time together, maybe help some humans while I'm at it. That's it."

"Then how do you already know everything about the human?!" she demanded.

"I told you—I talked to them!"

"But how did you know which ones to talk to?"

"I talked to all of them," Lucifer answered.

"You can't have—"

"I was down here a long time, Aurora," Lucifer explained, the implications of what she was saying finally coming together in his head. "I remember everyone I've ever tortured," he said. "Billions of them, over nearly that many years."

There was still a shadow on her face.

Lucifer touched both her arms.

"Rory, I'd thought my father trapped me down here for all eternity. It was a long time before my wings healed enough for me to take my first trip up to Earth, and your uncle Amenadiel gave me such a drubbing that it was nearly that long again before my second. Demonkind has its amusements—" he stopped, and Rory realized he was thinking of Mazikeen and her sisters. "—but they're not much for conversation. With proper respect to Billy Joel, the sinners are much more fun."

"How can you hold that much in your head?" she asked quietly.

"I don't know," he answered.

Rory looked away, thinking hard.

"CUT!" barked a voice. "Ugh, it will have to do."

"Excuse me?" Lucifer called back.

"Send it to editing. At least it's not sweeps week."

The stage lights went out.

"...did we just help?" asked Rory.

"I have no idea," said Lucifer.

Chapter Text

"But are you glad you went at least?" Maze's voice was tinny and distorted.

Rory adjusted the phone against her ear. "Maybe a tiny bit."

"Told you," said Maze. "Torturing humans has its perks. Lucifer take you to the guy who likes to be twisted in half yet?"

"Uh, we're not torturing them any more—" Rory said, craning her neck to see what Lucifer was doing.

"Right. Right. I keep forgetting."

"—and since when was torturing about doing what they liked?"

"Oho, knowing what they like helps! Once you're back up here, I could tell you stories… But what have you been doing?"

"So there was this one loop full of weird goats. And there was this one old Viking dude."

Rory imagined Maze nodding. "Hell's full of old Viking dudes. 'But Valhalla mye mye mye,' she mocked. That was usually right before I'd shove a drinking horn up their—"

"Whoa!" Rory ducked back as Lucifer wheeled by, both hands firmly clasped on the horns of a bull in full Pamplona rampage.

"This is no way to work through your feelings of inadequacy, Emilio!" he called out.

"Anyway," said Rory, watching the infernal crowd part. "I wanted to ask you something…"

"Shoot, kid," came Maze's voice.

"What happens to demons when they die?"

There was a quiet moment. "Where's this coming from?"

"Lucifer killed two demons," Rory kept the shiver out of her voice but not off her skin. "Their bodies got all… Well, what happens to them? Really?"

"Demons don't have souls," said Maze. "It's why we live in the moment."

"But then, shouldn't you, you know, not kill them? Because they're …not there any more?"

"This is a weird way to confront mortality."

Rory watched the bull flip Lucifer in the air. She winced has he landed hard on its back. "I guess."

"What else happened?"

"The two demons tried to corner us in one of the canyons, and I—" Rory shivered again at the memory of being stuck in the rocks. How could Hell give her a flashback to an experience on Earth that had been worse. "It was bad." But it had been kind of …knowing her father cared enough about her to put himself in danger. His hands had been gentle on her feathers. She'd never had that. Oh, her mom or one of her mom's friends had picked her up when she'd fallen or patted her on the back—sometimes it had even been Maze—but he'd never been the one.

It felt good. A tiny bit.

"I mean what else are you doing down in Hell?" asked the voice on the phone. "Did he take you to see the prisoner?"

"The—oh, you mean Michael? No." She watched Lucifer kick a demon in a matador's outfit out of the way of the bull's hooves. Clearly Emilio had his metaphors mixed.

"It's just Linda once told me that Lucifer had never killed anything before Uriel, but the way he talked about it, it sounds like he's killed lots of demons."

"Sure. Probably more than anything else in the universe." Maze's voice had a strange darkness. "But what's this about Uriel?"

"Oh, I guess you don't know about that. Lucifer killed his brother Uriel a while back. Before that whole big fight with the angels. A separate thing."

"Lucifer killed Uriel? Would you say he feels guilty about that?" asked Maze.

"I guess. Look, ask Linda if you need someone to fill you in. She's the one who told me when I was like ten or so." Linda had also never missed a chance to tell her that Lucifer loved her after all, but at least she hadn't been as simpering as Chloe.

Lucifer had landed on his feet and seemed to be speaking to the bull, which was scratching its chin with one foreleg. Lucifer waved and started to walk toward her.

"Hang on, I think things are calming down over there. Talk to you later, Maze. And say hi to my mom for me."

"Okay. I can do that. What's her name?"

Rory stopped. "Huh?"

"Tell me your mother's name," said the voice on the phone.

Lucifer's smile dropped as he got closer.

"Are you okay, Maze?" asked Rory. "You break into my dad's LSD again?"

"And who's your dad?" asked the voice on the line.

Lucifer snatched the phone out of Rory's hands. "Who is this?" he demanded.

"It's Maze," said Rory.

"It's not," said Lucifer. Then back into the phone. "Tell me your name now, and I will deal with your punishment myself," he said into the phone. "Hold back, and I will allow the Mazikeen to take her revenge on you for impersonating her to her charge."

There was a crackle and a hiss.

Rory's phone caught fire.

Chapter Text

The demon squirmed and writhed, turning itself in knots like a hagfish.

"The twisty game's not going to help you this time, Chorft," said Lucifer, wings flapping powerfully as he nearly hovered hundreds of feet above ground level. "I lose my grip, and you splatter."

"Nahhh faawwlwwlwlt!"

"Oh? Playing non-verbal are we? You were able-voiced enough when you pretended to be the Mazikeen."

"Naaaaah! Nnananwanwaanaa!"

"It looks pretty scared," Rory said, as quietly as she could manage given the ash-laden wind and the fact that they were both in an angelic holding pattern.

"Then he's not nearly scared enough!" Lucifer said, pulling his pinky finger free as if he were noveau-riche at high tea. He gave Chorft a good shake. His pale, tubelike body shivered in fear, cold, or both.

"Dad," Rory said under her breath.

"He's faking it, Rory," Lucifer explained. "He knows you're an angel, and he thinks that means you're as gullible as my brothers and sisters. You wouldn't believe what he and his kind got up to when Amenadiel ruled Hell."

There was a faint snuffing sound against Lucifer's fingers, "Hnuf, hnuf, hnuf…" Rory first thought it was some form of cowering in fear, but it also sounded like—

"See? Can't help laughing," said Lucifer. "Well, you can laugh all the way down. Kschlee and Vull will have a wonderful time licking you off the doorjambs. Or perhaps I'll have the prisoner gather you up." He shook his fingers almost as if he were trying to get something sticky off of them.

"Naaaaahhaha! …llll tahhk. Llll taaaaaahk!!"

"That's more like it!"

"Pummme dooooohhn?"

"If you insist," Lucifer peeled another finger free.

"Naaahahahahahe Laaaahad Luccifaaah, naaaaah!"

"Dad, stop messing with it."

Lucifer seemed to know exactly where he was going and swerved off through the air currents to a ledge on one of the towers. Rory alit next to him and looked around. This place had a view of the throne but probably wasn't visible to anything that couldn't fly. If she understood the air currents right, then it was real flight that was needed; things that glided on updrafts wouldn't do it. There was barely two feet between the edge and the upward face, which veered outward. She tried to find a handhold, just for balance, but the rock was smooth. Next to this spot, the ledge where they'd eaten lunch was practically homey.

"I'll tell you something you need to know to survive down here, Rory," he said. Chorft, sensing freedom from the immediate prospect of being dropped from a great height, had renewed his wriggling and seemed to be secreting something slippery. "You might as well stop that. There is no way to climb down from here. I carry you or you fall."

Rory could get a better look at Chorft now. He was barely the size of a Chihuahua, but stretched like a tube. His mouth had jaws, barely, and rows of teeth. His tongues were different shapes. One forked and whipping—the one he'd been using to talk to her father—and another was a nearly human half-oval—the one he'd used to imitate Maze. She didn't see any eyes.

"He's fawning," Lucifer pointed out. "He's afraid, but he's pretending to be a different kind of afraid. Amenadiel fell for on at least two separate occasions. Honestly, I'm almost glad he's the one who got the om—" Lucifer stopped, not willing to lie, even now. Glad he got the omniscience, Rory finished in her head. He turned back to Chorft.

"Start with what. Then with why. Then with who. Understand?" Lucifer demanded.

Chorft closed his mouth and the oval tongue licked what suddenly seemed to be lips. The piteous meebling stopped. Rory jumped at the rich basso voice that came from the impossibly small body.

"Fine. When I saw the purple angel use a vocal device, I entered it through the radiant energy—"

"You put that cell tower back up? I swear, no matter how many times I smash that thing…"

"—and attempted to extract information. Lord Lucifer, you only said we couldn't torture or attack the daughter. You did not say we could not ask her to tell us things."

"A pesky permutation, but still."

"We want to know why it has changed." A tiny, sticklick limb extended in Rory's direction and she realized that he was pointing at her. "The center of things. It has moved since that one sat the throne."

"Does he mean …capital A?"

"Could be," said Lucifer. He turned back to Chorft. "That is no secret, Chorft. I told you, Hell will change. Hell must change. We are doing things differently now."

"Lord Morningstar, you have had many whims. Many changes. But this time…" the pale body shuddered, undulating like a snake that had swallowed something that kept trying to climb back up. "The loops turn. They have been our purpose, our delight, our torment since Mother Lilith sent us to your service. Cycles. Nothing ends. It is our immortality."

Lucifer looked at Rory and shook his head, but whether he didn't like what Chorft was saying or meant to contradict it, she couldn't tell. Mazikeen had never said that the loops made demons immortal.

"You allow the springs to wind down. You wind them down. Some say you mean to doom us. Replace Mother Lilith's spawn with your own." He pointed at Rory again.

"Lies are in no short supply in Hell," Lucifer said. "Who told you this, Chorft?"

The tongue licked the lips again. The deep voice pulsed in a laugh.

"One who could promise better. One who could promise a return, backwards into what we know."

"I will have you say it, Chorft."

"The prisoner told me, Lord Morningstar. Michael of Hell."

Chapter Text

"I'm not going home yet," said Rory.

"This morning you didn't want to come at all!" protested Lucifer as he strode across the artificial sunlight of another human's loop. "I deprived Michael of his wings and put him on Hellish KP duty before you made your time jump. The longer it takes for him to figure out I even have a daughter, the better."

"It sounds like the demons already told him about me," Rory pointed out.

"Which means he knows he got it from demons, which means he doesn't know what to believe about what he heard. The longer he stays confused, the better—now if I'm not sending you home, then we have some work to do."

The loop showed a sunlit green, a gently domed hill and a rather classic rack with one demon in an executioner's hood prodding at one butt-naked human. Off the top of her head, Rory guessed it had something to do with fear of nudity and regular old fear.

Rory folded her arms. "Do the loops really keep the demons from dying?"

"No," Lucifer said firmly as they walked toward the patient and his handler. "That's a superstition." His eyes went left. "I think."

"You think," Rory repeated, "because demons don't matter to you."

Lucifer exhaled. "Rory, before you declare me too judgmental, remember that I have spent more time with demons than any other being in existence, including their mother. If I judge them, it is because I know them. Demons have their place in the universe, and I've admired their ability to live in the moment." He breathed out, "But that very freedom from consequences was part of the old Hell. No souls meant they could perform any torture, commit any sin to punish humankind. If there is something that determines a being's worth, it is their soul. It's practically what the word means."

"So we're doing this whole Healer of Hell bit and the idea is to send all the humans up to heaven, and then demonkind just dies?"

"Wait," said the human. "We can get to heaven? I thought you couldn't get there from here."

"Wait, we're gonna die?" said the demon.

"No!" said Lucifer. "Also yes."

The human and demon looked at each other. "Which one?" "Do you mean him or me?" they said at the same time.

"All the demons would be gone? Demon-free universe?" asked Rory.

"It isn't as if it would be that great of a loss," said Lucifer.

Rory's mouth gaped open. "Maze is a demon!"

"Maze is different! Maze has a soul! That's the definition of what makes something not a loss."

"Maze did what now?" asked the demon.

"What's this maze?" asked the human.

Lucifer snarled in frustration and snapped his wings open, eyes blaring red-white. "Shut up and tell me how you damned yourself!"

"Lilith sent me here like the others!" and the human said "Tax fraud! Tax fraud!"

Lucifer stepped back. "Really? Tax fraud?"

The demon smacked the human in the head. "No, Lord Morningstar. He's a compulsive liar."

"Is that what you feel guilty about?"

"Nah. I killed a buncha hookers. Buried 'em under a hill just like this one."

The demon smacked him again.

The human sighed. "I mean I cheated my brother out of his share of our parents' farmland," the human nodded his chin and chained hands at the hillside around him, "sold the whole place to a developer and now it's some kind of potato chip factory or whatever. If I hadn't, someone else would have!"

Lucifer raised his eyebrow at the demon.

"Far as I can tell that's true, Lord Morningstar." He tooled his leather-gloved fingers together. "Um, about the me dying thing?"

"Human suffering is not the source of your immortality, Tsirp," Lucifer told the demon. "Even if every single one of these creatures disappeared from this plane—" he pointed at the human who was muttering something about being a major league baseball player and published author. "—it would affect you not at all."

"But then who'd we torture? Each other?"

"You could if you wanted to," said Rory. "Or maybe not torture."

"But…" The demon pointed at the human. "He wouldn't be here any more. Pauly would be somewhere else?"

"On a nickname basis? What happened to professionalism?"

"You've had me with him a long time, Lord Morningstar!" protested Tsirp. "I rack him until he splits in half, and then we start over."

"Interesting. I wonder if that's some echo of his failure to split the family wealth with his brother."

"Oh!" Pauly perked up. "Except for the time when you pulled my arms and legs off and let me wiggle down the hill."

"I forgot about that!" said Tsirp. "That was so weird!"

"Sometimes he gets bored," Pauly explained to Lucifer.

"Pauly has this thing. It's called a magga, majja…" he looked at the human.

"'Imagination,'" Pauly finished.

"Lucifer?" Rory said quietly.

Lucifer turned toward her.

The loop suddenly seemed transparent. He could still see the hill and the grass and the drops of blood on every blade of it, but it seemed insubstantial as glass. There was the essence of Hell, and there was Rory. Something about the architecture of the plane had lined up perfectly so that he could see through it, as if all Hell were some ancient tomb, and Rory was the one day when sunlight could go straight through it.

It was uncannily like hearing Father's voice.

Despite himself, Lucifer knew her next question would be important.

"Can I …can I cover this one?"

Lucifer was quiet. "Say again?" he said, barely above a whisper.

"I want this loop," she pushed her lips together. "May I please? Dad."

Lucifer looked at the human and then at Tsirp. "They are yours, Aurora," he answered.

There was a sensation of something slipping away, reins as thin as threads leaving his hands. Something subtle enough to be nothing seemed to move, deep at the center of what had never been earth.

"Would you untie him, please?" Rory said to Tsirp.

"But… the rack needs the ties to work."

"I know."

"Do as she says," Lucifer said slowly.

Uncertainly, as if he had never done it before, Tsirp undid one leather clasp and then another. Pauly slid out onto the grass on legs that couldn't hold him up.

"Now you," Rory said, grabbing Pauly's shoulders and pushing him into a sitting position. "Think hard. This loop is part of you. Make anything that isn't a rack. It could be a ping pong table or a couch cushion or a—"

Rory noticed a fat, disk-like shape, in thick plastic and primary colors under the rack, as if it had always been there.

"What's that?" she asked.

"Simon," said Pauly, his head lying absolutely limp against his shoulder. "A Simon."

"Before your time," Lucifer told Rory. "Think of it as an early video game."

Pauly licked his lips. "I got one for Christmas one year." His fingers flexed, but he couldn't lift his arm. "My gramma told me to share it with Tommy, but I didn't want him touching it. He was that age where everything in his hands was sticky. I caught him playing it once… I hit him."

"And you feel more guilty about that than about—" Lucifer stopped at Rory's glare. "Not my loop. Do continue."

Rory pointed at Tsirp. "Teach him to play. And when you get tired of that, do anything else that's not torture."

"But I…" Tsirp looked at Rory, then at Lucifer. "I don't—I don't know how to—" his bottom lip quavered. "My Lord! Tell her she can't! I don't know how! I don't know how!"

"Pauly's going to teach you," Rory said.

"Right?" said Pauly, looking from Rory to Tsirp and back. "Right."

"You'll …you'll lie to me about the rules!"

"You can tell," Pauly pointed out. "You can always tell. Remember?"

Tsirp took two steps toward Lucifer and reached out with one hand. Lucifer took half a step back, but Tsirp still got to him. His human disguise was falling away. Tsirp had two long bird legs like a crane, but covered in thorns. His arms were two plucked wings studded with tiny, useless feathers, each ending in a single crooked finger. Pauly's eyes widened but he didn't say anything. One of those fingers wrapped around Lucifer's hand. "Don't make me," he whispered.

Lucifer looked at Rory, then schooled the disgust from his face. He moved to hold Tsirp's finger in both hands. "Tsirp of Perdition, you will do as my daughter says."

"You're going to be brave, Terp," said Rory.

"'Tsirp,'" Pauly and Tsirp said at the same time. Tsirp flinched and looked at Lucifer, but Lucifer didn't hit him. Tsirp walked back to the rack and stared at Pauly, who was still boneless. Suddenly back in the shape of a meaty medieval human with a scowling face, he grabbed both Pauly's shoulders and shoved him against one of the feet of the apparatus. Pauly leaned, nearly upright. Then Tsirp, still scowling, broke off part of the leather strap and put it behind Pauly's neck to support his head.

Rory put her hand on Lucifer's arm and motioned for them to back away toward the door.

Gingerly, as if the ground would break, Tsirp sat opposite the round device. "Do as we were ordered, human scum!" he said, voice shaking in terror. "Teach me the Simon or know Hell's revenge!"

Pauly took a breath. "First—"

Rory gasped. "Wait!" she ran halfway toward them, rummaging in Maze's tote bag.

Lucifer frowned.

Rory's hand came free of the zipper and she pressed a package of D batteries and a nine-volt into Pauly's hand. "And some spares," she said, dipping into the bag again. Without looking.

As Rory walked back toward Lucifer, he watched Pauly turn the plastic disk upside down and show Tsirp how to put the power source in.

"Do I get to know what that was about?" Lucifer asked.

"I saw this old movie called Batteries Not Included and I asked Tee what the title meant."

"I think you know that's not what I meant."

"Those two have known each other for thousands of years," Rory whispered. "Pauly's feelings about Terp are mixed together with his feelings about his brother. He loves him."

Lucifer nodded. "So by playing nicely with Tsirp, he may work through his guilt for wronging Tommy," he mused. "Very clever, Aurora."

"Lucifer," Rory insisted, nodding back up the hill.

"What?"

"Look at him. Really look at him!"

Rory hadn't said which "him" she meant, so he looked at both. "Care to enlighten me?" And on some level, Hell seemed to line up with itself again.

"You don't see it? The …thing?" she pointed.

"I'm going to bet that I do not," Lucifer answered.

"This isn't about Pauly," Rory hissed. She looked away. "I can see it and you can't. How come I can see it and you can't?" She was breathing hard.

"All right, as much as I love our bickering," Lucifer winced, "which is another thing I'll have to bring up with Linda, can you cut to the chase and tell me what I'm missing here?"

"Tserp has a …it's not exactly a soul. It's a—"

Lucifer's hands were over her mouth before he realized he'd moved. He blinked for a full minute, his own mouth opening and shutting.

"Not another word," he whispered. "Not here."

Chapter Text

"I can't speak French," Rory muttered up at the arched ceiling as Lucifer pulled the rococo-style door shut behind them. "What is this, the Louvre?"

"The Met in New York, actually. But the tenant is of the gallic persuasion, yes."

Across the way, a middle-aged woman muttered to herself in Provençal, choking back hysterical tears. In her hands, she held a wide sketchbook, but the paintings around her swirled into snarling faces every time she looked up at them, and every line of her pencil twisted into a swearword the second she looked away.

"What..?"

"Her boyfriend brought her here to propose, or so she thought. Picked here to tell her he was leaving her for her sister because he thought she wouldn't make a scene."

"Gonna guess he thought wrong?" asked Rory.

"Immeasurably. She got his blood all over a small Monet, was banned from the museum for life." He turned back to her. "Now, this being one of the few places in Hell where lowered voices do not automatically attract attention…" Lucifer looked around. Every security guard, every other visitor pretending to appreciate the art or actually staring judgmentally at the tenant, was a demon in disguise. "Try and tell me what you saw without saying anything too …insurrection-y."

Rory looked at Maze's tote bag. "I might be able to do better." She rummaged around and pulled out a sketchbook like the tenant's—and a box of colored pencils. She pulled out a blue one and ran it back and forth across a plain white page until it resembled a whirlwind. Then she grabbed a green and added some hatch marks. Then a purple, and she added thick blobs, which she edged in black.

Rory held it up and pointed.

"What am I looking at?" asked Lucifer.

"You know," Rory said.

"I'm going to guess the L.A. public schools did not reinvigorate their art program during your childhood. What is that supposed to be?"

"It's…" Rory's voice dropped and she tipped her temple in the direction of the quietly weeping human. "It's her. Except really."

Lucifer looked away, then back again, not sure what he was hearing.

"Did you just draw her… her S-word?"

Rory nodded. "When they're still alive, it fits inside them like a…" she stuck the sketchpad under her armpit and put the heels of her two hands together, almost like the heart sign, but with her fingers sticking out. "The blue is the thoughts, the green is the—you've never seen it this way before?"

Lucifer shook his head, blinking at the revelation. "Not among my gifts," he said quietly. Ray-ray and Iofiel had sometimes mentioned seeing the mortals' inner nature. He'd thought they were being poetic.

Father had put him in charge of humans' punishment and redemption, and he hadn't given Lucifer this ability?

Rory grabbed another fistful of pencils and sketched something else next to it, yellow with touches of orange, more blue, more white. "That's what most angels look like," she said. "I'm gonna skip Charlie." Lucifer didn't ask if Rory had ever tried to see herself.

Then she put the sketchbook down on the visitors' bench, turned the blue pencil on its end and sliced it into the page. Instead of a whirl, it was a zigzag, a lightning bolt, hard and sharp. "I'm leaving out the rest of the color, but that's Maze. Like, if a human is smooth like a river rock, then she's a rock that's still all spiky. And not a rock. Like if rocks had cousins, or at least that's how I thought about it when I was in kindergarten."

Lucifer ran both sets of fingers through his hair. He'd supposed Maze's soul wouldn't be exactly the same as Chloe's or Eve's, but it seemed Rory had known the whole time, had just grown up with such things as a given.

And she was figuring out for the first time just how special she was.

In the back of his mind, the tiniest voice spoke: And you risk erasing her. If she goes, this knowledge disappears.

Lucifer regarded Rory's drawing quietly.

"And our friend taking the Simon lessons?"

"Different," Rory whispered. "It's not a—" Lucifer gave her a warning look and she didn't say the word. Rory breathed out. "It's more like …a place where an s-word could go. You know how if there's going to be a puddle, there has to be a dip in the ground? Like that. He wasn't flat." She looked around again, and pointed at an imitation New Yorker. "Or like how a Tiffany ring has those spikes on it to hold the rock?"

Lucifer rubbed his hand over his mouth and chin, thinking hard. "Rory…" he said at least. "You seemed awfully …emphatic for just a scrape into the ground or a couple of metal wires."

"They're metaphors, Lucifer. It's not really wires," she said.

Lucifer looked back at her, thinking quietly. Around them, the paint inside the picture frames swirled. Out of the corner of your eye, it could be a Monet or an El Greco, but try to look directly at it, the way to had to to let art really speak to you, and it would blur until it was some headache-inducing hack piece. But that was Hell.

Lucifer looked directly at Rory.

"What I'm about to ask you is very, very important. I need you to be sure."

Rory nodded. "Okay."

"Was Tsirp the only one?"

Chapter Text

They stepped through another door and—sat.

"Oh," said Rory, turning around in the front seat of what seemed to be a late-model sedan.

"It stands to reason," said Lucifer, twisting from his place behind the driver. "Americans spend scads of time in their cars—especially in L.A. Sooner or later we were going to find a Hell loop contained in one. At least we have access to four very obvious—"

The interior door handles melted into their respective armrests.

"Ah," said Lucifer. He brightened. "There's always the windshield! And those razor tips of yours might manage to give this thing a moon roof."

"Yeah, about that," said Rory, looking straight ahead. "Can't help but notice we're on a freeway of some kind…"

A freeway full of obstacles, fallen rocks, orange cones, and oncoming traffic, Lucifer noted. Truly commuter hell.

"…and…"

"And what? Rory, I think we can give up the pretense. If we do the human some good while we're in here, fine, but mainly, we needed a private place to talk about your little revelation."

"Do you see the human, Dad?" Rory snapped.

She called me 'Dad,' Lucifer thought with no small amount of pride. His second thought was that if Rory was agitated, then she was speaking on reflex, which meant that she thought of him as "Dad" on a fundamental level, possibly because of her childhood full of Chloe telling her stories about him, possibly because of the several weeks of actual parenting he'd managed to fit in between saving Daniel, getting Amenadiel over his celestial yips, attempting to prevent his own demise, and fundamentally altering the order of the universe, and that she had to stop and think to call him anything else.

His third thought, however, was something closer to, Oh shit, she's right.

"There's no one in the frikkin' driver's seat!" said Rory. Nonetheless, the gas pedal depressed itself and the engine gave a malevolent VWOOOOOOM!!

"This is no time for 'Jesus, take the wheel!'" hissed Rory.

"Not the least because he never learned to drive!" Lucifer paused. "Decent enough sailor, though."

"Focus!" said Rory.

"Fine!" said Lucifer. "I'll just—"

"No I mean it's a—" Rory grabbed the steering wheel and pulled hard as a Ford Focus jumped the barrier and hurtled straight for them. Rory let go of the wheel just in time for the car to barrel into a little old lady in a walker—inexplicably doddering in the middle of an eight-lane highway. She slammed straight into the hood of the car and was catapulted skyward.

"Oooooooooooooooooooooo!" she howled.

"Shit!" said Rory. "I can't reach the brake!" She looked out the windshield to see a band of Boy Scouts, complete with cute puppy mascot, strolling onto the highway two miles ahead.

"Hang on, are we in a Tesla?" Lucifer wondered aloud.

"Don't really see how that matters now!" said Rory. She scrabbled at her seat belt as if she meant to switch seats. "Just help me get this thing off."

"No, I mean if we're in a Hell loop about a late-model self-driving car that vehicularly murders half of SoCal in a bizarre reenactment of Saints Row II—"

There was a thumping noise from behind them.

"Yup. The human's tied up in the trunk," said Lucifer. "So much for a semi-soundproof place to have a chat."

"Whatever! How do we stop the car?"

"We don't. Whoever's back there has got to." Lucifer turned around. "WHAT DO YOU FEEL GUILTY ABOUT?" he called toward the trunk. He turned back to Rory. "All I know is that it isn't Elon. I had Dromos and Shirime on call to notify me as soon as he gets down here, and there hasn't been a peep." He sighed. "ARE YOU IN THE TRUNK BECAUSE YOU FELT POWERLESS TO STOP THE DESTRUCTION? OR MAYBE IS IT BECAUSE YOU'RE PRETENDING YOU WERE POWERLESS?"

There was an unintelligible but definitely confused response.

There was a sound of a puppy yipping and a definite crunch.

"Snuffly, noooooooooooooooooooo!!" called a boyish voice.

"COME ON, WHOEVER YOU ARE," Lucifer shouted. "ACCEPT YOUR POWER AND TAKE CONTROL. They do that sometimes," Lucifer explained. "They pretend their sin is really one thing when it's truly something else. Facing the truth means taking real responsibility."

"Oh," said Rory as she manhandled the steering wheel to avoid the den leader. "Kind of like how you don't want to take responsibility for deleting me out of the universe?"

"Rory, that's not what's happening."

"You'd rather have Little Miss Hasn't Disappointed You Yet, so what's it matter if I'm gone?"

"Rory, I don't want you to be gone," said Lucifer, flinching as debris from a lemonade stand battered into the car's roof. "I'd be happy if you never disappeared. I've been looking forward to having two daughters!"

"Whoa!" Rory jumped back against the passenger window as a chubby Asian-American man in a work shirt appeared in the driver's seat.

"You're right," said the human. "I designed this hunk of junk. I've got to take control!" He jammed his foot down on the accelerator. "I AM TODD! FEEL MY WRATH, HIGHWAY-INDUSTRIAL COMPLEX!"

Rory blinked, looking back at Lucifer.

"Well we'd need a bigger apartment, but we were going to need that anyway, what with you, me, your mother, and the Urchin." Of course, there's was the option of buying the apartment on the same floor and converting to duplex, murder be damned, but who wanted to do renovation with a newborn?

"Are you …nesting?" Rory asked.

"Who me? No!" His very downiest feathers falling out whenever he was over Chloe's place was a complete coincidence.

"YIELD TO TODD! YIELD TO TODD!"

"Oh please," said Rory just as Lucifer called "Come on! We're trying to have a discussion here."

Chapter Text

"Is that the best one you could find?" Rory asked, narrowing her eyes against the dust. "She's going to be pissed."

Lucifer shot his daughter a look and plopped the demon down on his feet. "I think I did fairly well for a last-minute request at this time of the unmeasurable eternity."

"You hear that, Shirime? I'm fairly well!" piped the demon Crevos, his skinny third arm pointing to a squat creature covered in eyes in various states of sloughing.

"If by that you mean you've been cooked too much," snuffled Shirime.

"Careful or I'll let her use you instead," snapped Lucifer. His face was smeared with ash from the long flight. "And we could just pop back to Earth, you know."

"Millions of years would pass down here while we were gone!" Rory protested. "I need to talk to Maze before that happens, and my phone turned out to be a wormbeast in disguise."

"More like thousands, but I see your point."

"Stand still," Rory said to Crevos as she pulled a literally garden-variety stick out of her bag and began drawing a circle around him in the dirt.

Lucifer narrowed his eyes at the circle Rory had sketched in the ash, "Alastair Crowley and company stumbled upon a right answer now and again, but I'm at a bit of a loss for where you learned real in-Hell summoning runes."

"Mom forgot to sign me up for camp one summer," Rory said. "I had two weeks hanging out with Auntie Maze before she realized and packed me off to some dipshit music school in Madera County."

Rory spread her fingers into claws and bark-yelled the invocation. The ash exploded outward as Crevos made a meeping sound.

"WHO DARES—Pinky? Is that you? Lucifer? Am I home?" Crevos' head turned left and right. "Why does Shirime look—aw you did a summoning?" Crevos' two larger hands patted down his face and body. "Who is this? Lucifer, you'd better the hell not have put me in Squee!"

"It's not Squee, Mazikeen. No need to throw a fit."

"That's the Mazikeen?" Shirime pointed and let out a shrill laugh. "Not so sleek and willful now, Mazikeen of the Lilim!" He let out a rippling laugh. "Oh, I could probably slip your knife now." He hopped from one foot to the other, cackling as Maze swiped Crevos' arms at the invisible barrier over the rune circle.

"Can't get me now! Can't get me now!"

Crevos' three eyes narrowed. "Pinky?"

"Yeah?"

"Favor number sixteen."

"Got it." Rory smacked Shirime up the back of the head so that he fell facefirst in the ash.

"Owwww!"

"You'll keep a respectful tongue in your head or I'll call in favor number twelve!" snapped Maze. "Speaking of calling," she looked from Lucifer to Rory and back. "What gives? If you need to talk to me, why not fly back to Earth?"

"That's what I said!"

"M—Mazikeen…" Shirime choked a laugh. "Once a great beauty of Perdition… Now instead of those lissome limbs and pearly jawbone, you're a three-tongued, leech-headed—"

Rory smacked him again. "That one was free."

"Throw him in here."

"What?"

"I can't leave the summoning circle. Not without either disappearing back to Earth or getting stuck in here—I've seen both things happen and I am not going there. Spending eternity as—" She lifted one arm and sniffed under it. "—Crevos' roommate isn't my idea of fun. Throw Shirime in here."

Rory hefted the small demon's round body.

"What? No! Purple Pummeler, I beg you, NO!"

Rory heaved Shirime over whatever invisible barrier hovered over the runes and he landed on the ground by Maze's feet with a loud splat.

"I think I broke an eye!" he whined.

"You're about to break more than that, and I don't need my own hands to do it!"

Shirime grabbed the skinniest of Crevos' legs, gnawing and biting hard. Maze tried to pick him up by the ankle but Crevos' skinny arms weren't up to the task.

"I don't need my blades to deal with you, miscreant!" she snarled.

Rory dropped her voice, "Did Creevos—"

"'Crevos,'" said Lucifer.

"Did Creevos agree to this of his own free will?"

Lucifer shrugged to the side. "It's debatable whether demons have free will. They're capable of thinking, when they can be persuaded to, but for the most part, they follow their desires."

Rory frowned, "You make them do things they don't want to do."

"One of their desires is not to be dismembered and thrown to the slagbeasts by a Heaven's least wanted angel," he pointed out.

All three of Crevos' eyes narrowed as Maze sized up Shirime's squishy body and jabbed two fingers hard into the soft spot behind his deltoid.

"Ow! Ow! Ow! OWWWwwwww! I submit, my lady! I submit!" he whined.

Maze kicked him in the side and made a face as a cephalopod-sized eye burst and leaked vitreous humor onto Crevos' toe.

"Now," she said, all three hands managing to find a hip. "Why did you bother zapping me across dimensions?" She turned to Lucifer. "And this guy was the best you can do? Kpfrit at least has an ass! I have my dignity to maintain."

"Kpfrit doesn't have any jaws, Mazikeen. We needed you to be able to talk. And as to why we went for the infernal version of driveway chalk, things may be afoot here that are better managed without a thousand-year time jump."

"Wait a second." Rory frowned. "Have you guys done this before? Summoned a demon back to Hell?"

"You've been down here long enough to know how boring it can get," said Mazikeen. "We've done just about anything you can do." She started to count on Crevos' finger. "Opening portals for sending demons up to Earth in their own bodies. Sending demonic spirits up to Earth to possess human bodies with no humans in them. Sending demonic spirits up to Earth to possess human bodies that still had humans in them. What with the time dilation, sometimes you need somebody back right now, but unless a sinner died right in front of them, there's no way to know where they are." She snorted, "This one time, Corvella crawled up there out of a human grave—so her body is in ancient Phoenicia—and we drag her back into the body of this absolute dreg, but before we can tell her to come back, Squee demon-possesses her body. And he wouldn't give it back for like—" Maze's face fell. "Wow. That story is not as funny as I remember it being."

Rory and Lucifer exchanged a look. Is it her S-word? Lucifer seemed to ask.

You're only making faces. You don't have to say S-word, Rory glowered. "And yeah, I think so," Rory muttered. She looked at Maze, "And we did the summoning because it turns out my phone was really a wormy dude with three tongues who was trying to milk me for information."

Maze folded Crevos' arms. "Skleral, Chorft, or Lamentation?"

"Chorft," said Lucifer.

"You splatter him this time?"

Lucifer sighed.

"So, Pinky. This place playing its tricks on you yet?"

"It feels different from last time, yeah," she said.

"Probably because I've sat the throne since. Hell is recognizing me as its ruler."

Maze kicked Shirime in the stomach and he gave an "oof!"

"Mazikeen, during the previous phase of my reign, was there any speculation about what the loops were for? The ambush in the canyons of perfidy is the sort of thing I've dealt with before, but widespread idea-mongering among the rank and file? That's new."

"There were rumors," Maze said. "You could have asked anyone."

"There is asking and then there is knowing," Lucifer said. "It's lies on top of lies down here."

"First, there's the boring explanation: The one that's true," Maze said. "The loops are so that all the humans that God didn't want can be tortured forever."

"Which may not be as true as we thought," Lucifer noted. "Go on."

Mazikeen ran down a list. "Then there are the explanations that aren't true. Demons have more conspiracy theories than OAN. My favorite was the idea that there was really no such thing as humans or Earth, that they were some kind of flickering illusion that was never really there." She shorted. "That was mostly the demons who never figured out which end of the knife goes into the other guy."

"Then there was the one that said if you squeeze a human just right, it appears in Mother Lillith's womb and eventually rejoins us as a new demon. Those were mostly dregs like this guy," she gestured to Crevos. "Didn't want to accept that 'beasts of the night' didn't always mean the majestic lion."

"I have always suspected tube worm with that one," Lucifer acknowledged.

"Did anyone say that the loops were keeping demonkind alive?" Rory asked.

Mazikeen looked at Lucifer, "They do what?"

"They don't," Lucifer told her, "but someone's spreading rumors that the human agony turns the wheels on your bodies' permanence. Rory and I visited a half-dozen loops." He gave Maze the rundown on the demons they'd questioned. They had all heard that the loops were where demons farmed the energy that saved their bodies from decay, and they'd heard it recently, but no one could trace the rumor to its source.

"They're beginning to think I'm releasing the humans as some kind of plot to exterminate demonkind. I need to know whether it really is Michael. You've never heard that one before?"

"No, never," Maze said. "Like I said, some of the ideas got way out there, but it's new since—wait…" Crevos' three eyes ducked off to the side. "No…

"No?" asked Rory.

Maze exhaled, "That breath of energy you sometimes get from a sinner. You ever feel it?"

"Breath? I was usually more concerned with the odor."

Maze shook her head. "No… Sometimes, not every time, but if the sinner was really special, and if I had my knife keen and they'd make that high sound…" she exhaled. "Sometimes I'd feel like something was flowing out of them and into me, something powerful and special and unique," she smiled. "And it made me feel new. It also looked like it made them feel like crap, so there was that too."

"Interesting," Lucifer murmured.

"I thought it was just me," Maze said.

"You always did take especial pride in your work."

Rory rubbed her chin. "You know how ancient Europeans thought bleeding could make people feel better?"

"Yes, some of the people who espoused that technique are down here, in fact."

"Well that's the thing, it does make some people feel better. Cutting like that makes the body release natural painkillers. They literally feel better."

"But it doesn't heal them."

"No, it makes things worse. But the idea that the bloodletters were right was coming from somewhere. It wasn't only the placebo effect."

"Where are you going with this?"

"If some demons feel reenergized from torturing humans, then that kind of backs up the idea that humans are the source of their immortality, even if it's wrong," Rory said. She swallowed. "That means…"

"Whoever came up with this lie took the time to study his audience, and he's being smart about it."

Rory nodded. "Are there any demons down here who would do that?"

Lucifer exhaled. "A few. Demons mostly live for the moment, but Maze can tell you we put down uprisings that required centuries of planning. The really clever ones know not to let on that they can string two letters together to form words."

"D K," said Maze. She returned Lucifer and Rory's blank looks.

"Decay," she said again. "Decay doesn't happen in Hell."

"What?" Rory asked. "This place stinks halfway up to the Silver City."

"But not of decay," Lucifer noted. "There are no living things here. No earthworms, no mushrooms, no bacteria. Decay is a living process. It only happens on earth."

"Same thing with farms," Mazikeen said. "Demons don't need to eat. We like to, especially if we can make sure it won't dig its way out of our stomachs like an eel, but we don't need fuel to keep going. And we can get injuries that don't heal, but we don't rot like zombies."

"So…" Rory trailed off.

"So whoever decided to tell demons that story didn't know that adding those details wouldn't make it more convincing," Lucifer filled in.

"Someone new to Hell," Maze added.

"Michael."

Chapter Text

"I thought we were going after Michael," said Rory.

"I will deal with Michael after you return to Earth," Lucifer said. "Since you've made it clear that's not going to be this very moment…" he trailed off and opened the door. "Oh my," he said.

"I thought you'd already talked to every dead human down here."

"Talked to, yes," Lucifer said, tipping his head to the side. "But I think Melissa may have gone a bit down the rabbit hole since we spoke last."

The loop's interior hellscape showed a barren expanse of jagged, windswept rock, like the alpine zone in a mountain range, minus the summits, lichen, vegetated slopes, and soul-renewing vistas. Fifty yards away, a mammoth-sized creature with a gigantic shaggy head lumbered between the cairns. Watery brown fluid seeped from its skin. It reminded Lucifer of a documentary about elephants he'd watched on his phone one time Chloe and Daniel had made him wait in the car. In addition to trumpeting and feeling vibrations in the ground, they also communicated by urinating.

"Are you sure that's not a demon?" Rory asked.

"You tell me," Lucifer said meaningfully.

Rory's brow wrinkled before she realized what he was asking. "I can see it," she said quietly. "She has one. A human one." She narrowed her eyes against the bright imitation sunlight. "You know what her head reminds me of?" Rory said.

Lucifer looked back at Melissa. "Do I want to?"

"Where the Wild Things Are. It's a children's book my Maurice Sendak."

"Oh, is that what those things are supposed to look like?" Lucifer asked doubtfully. "Back in the eighties, I had a paramour who had a bit of a fetish for the pink one. She may have showed me the book. I gather it's the sort of artsy creation that adults wish children liked."

"Pretty much," Rory agreed. "When I was a kid, it was an Australian show called Bluey."

Lucifer rubbed his chin. "I don't believe I've heard of that one yet. Almost every children's property shows up in parental nightmares sooner or later. There was this one truly repulsive purple approximation of a Tyrannosaurus rex." He shuddered. "Let's get started then," Lucifer picked up one Versace-shod foot and began to pick his way across the rocks. Rory cleared her throat. "What?" he asked.

Two dark purple wings appeared at her shoulders.

"Oh. Right."

Lucifer would have said it hardly seemed worth it for that distance, but a closer look at the patient's feet—and the blood trail on the rocks behind her—suggested that being hard to walk might be the point of the landscape.

He'd had five flightless years on Earth between having Maze cut his wings and watching them grow back. And more than one Brittney had thought "hiking" made good foreplay. He'd been game, especially once he'd realized just how many secluded copses there were along that trail. But there was what people in Los Angeles thought of as hiking and then there was this place—and Rory was already off.

Up close, the human looked blobbering and gelatinous on one side. Lucifer wasn't sure if the translucent flesh was pulsing over a rib cage or deformed blood vessels. Knowing Hell, it would somehow manage to be both.

"I'm going to guess 'Melissa' didn't look like this the last time you saw her," Rory managed.

Lucifer shook his head. "I doubt she was at her best, but still very much two arms two legs. Hello again, Melissa!" he called out. "It's me, the Devil! We met after you died."

Rory touched her ear. "You don't need to shout," she said. "She's self-actualized, not deaf. Wait, is she?"

"Possibly. I don't see any ears. Hell tends to rely on humans' fears and insecurities, and many of them are quite terrified of blindness. Not to mention that some of them are deaf when they're still upstairs."

"Uh, hiiiiii?" Rory tried waving in front of the creature's head.

Melissa kept moving slowly across the rock field. Her thick body had many pairs of fleshy legs, like a giant caterpillar, and they seeped pinkish fluid where they'd been cut.

"Care to tell us where you're going on this…" Lucifer looked up. "Oddly clear-skyed day. That is really blue. Not a cloud."

"Hey!" Rory tapped her hand against his side and nodded toward the human.

Melissa had stopped moving across the rockscape, slowing down and turning in their direction. Her body reared back, showing that one of her front legs ended in an impossibly wide moose hoof, cracked to the quick on one side. The other had the matted black fur of a black bear.

"What's her sin?" Rory asked.

"I didn't spend much time with Melissa after she passed. I believe it was right before I left on my vacation to Los Angeles. Judging by the terrain, perhaps something to do with mountain habitats?" He turned to Melissa. "You weren't an environmental lawyer, perhaps? Like the lady in The Big Chill? Just because your clients are 'only raping the earth' doesn't mean you can't feel any guilt, eh?"

"Believe it or not, we're here to help!" Rory explained, her booted feet shifting backwards as Melissa drew closer. Her body rearedup more, allowing Lucifer to see something vaguely reminiscent of a human head, a fluid-soaked mop of what had once been a fashionable nineties business cut, two pigmented areas that might still be functional eyes. And a mouth. Yes, that was definitely a mouth. "Lucifer, tell her!"

"Pardon?"

"She's alone in here! If there were demons in here with her before, there aren't any now. What if no one told her about the regime change?"

"Right!" Lucifer turned to the now-looming Melissa. "It turns out you don't have to stay here forever, Melissa. If you work through your sins, you can escape to the Silver City. Meet up with some old friends. Frankly, you look like you could use a spa day."

"But we have to figure out why you're here first!" Rory added. Melissa was much closer now, the rocks under her weight tipping and clashing against each other with audible thunks. "Dad, I don't think she's listening." Rory gulped. "Any idea why a human would…" she waved her arms up and down at Melissa.

"Go utterly Kafka? Not specifically."

"And can a human…" Rory inched further away as Melissa's bear-handed arm lifted from the rocks and reached forward, even as her mouth gaped in a jagged, insectoid moan. "I know on Earth they can't do shit to us, but—"

"But if they happen to be a completely spiritual being attacking us with the power of their soul instead of a bunch of puny molecules?" Lucifer asked. "You know, I think I've gotten so good at controlling the situation that I never really noticed."

Rory's wings flared, ready to catch the nonexistant wind as Melissa reached out and laid a paw on her sleeve, like an elderly matron leaning on a butler's arm. Rory might have made a peeping sound.

Melissa's head twisted. Then there was a bubbling sound on her back and two large blobs extended from behind where Lucifer guessed her shoulders were. Before his eyes, they stretched and bent into a dull approximation of a pair of angelic wings.

"That's right. I remember now!" Lucifer held up a finger and pointed. "You're a people pleaser! Always imitating what's going on around you!" His grin fell. "Oh, and I had Kpfrit and Schlee in here during your first two thousand years, didn't I?"

"Let me guess," Rory said, swiping slime off her shirt. "They'd fit right in at an Alien: Colonization convention?"

Melissa's spiritual body made another blurping sound as her bulk contracted and separated into two distinct sections behind.

"Clearly she hasn't had legs in a while. Bad case of Little Mermaid syndrome."

The cuts from the sharp rocks began to leak red, vertebrate blood instead of hemolymph. Knees formed, and Melissa began to sit back on haunches she probably hadn't had for a century. Lucifer saw the skin over her eyepatches had separated into lids that blinked passably as she eyed Rory up and down.

"Wonderful!" he said. "Now that you've gotten yourself fixed up, we'd like to talk to you about your experiences on the mortal plane."

Melissa's skin—no, not her skin—seemed to darken and harden. Soon she was wearing a leather jacket with spiked bracelets.

"Is she …copying my clothes?" Rory asked.

The light brown business cut shortened to a twenty-first century bob, glossy black. The features shrunk to a delicate nose and flashing dark eyes. The flaps of gelatinous flesh on Melissa's back stretched and dried. And turned purple.

"Oh hell no!" Rory said, stepping forward.

"It's a little rude," Lucifer said to Melissa.

Melissa moved her new feet, boots and all, and grinned widely as the rocks failed to draw blood. The wings on her back flapped, and she lifted a few inches from the ground.

"Melissa, don't misunderstand, self-actualizing your spiritual form does not mean you've escaped your Hell loop. Hell will try to trick you into making the same mistakes as before!"

But Melissa was a quick study, or at least quick enough. Her wings flapped two, three times, and she gained enough lift to change direction, rising above the rockscape into the empty air.

"But there's nowhere to go," Lucifer said to Rory. "We didn't even find out what her sin was."

"You think maybe identity theft?!"

Chapter Text

"Don't you think we should be doing something?"

"Confronting Michael?" Lucifer asked as they landed on the barely-there outcrop that allowed access to the next loop. The door was made of wood, clearly from a timbered house, held by a latch string rather than a knob or knocker. "Trust me, Rory, that would not work the way you think it would. My brother, in addition to being an absolute knob, is every bit the master manipulator he claimed me to be." Lucifer's lip curled. "And I didn't notice until his plans were thousands of years long. Earth years, not here years.

"If he's spreading rumors among the demons…"

"Then I might have to deal with another uprising. That makes how many? I lost count sometime before the Bronze Age Collapse."

"Without Maze here to help you!"

Lucifer stopped. He closed his mouth around the empty space.

"Yeah, grew up with Auntie Maze telling me all the old war stories, and she has no idea of what counts as age-appropriate violence. She might not realize that you only foiled the Perfidious Coup because she was having sex with Polecat and Calumny at the same time, but I put the pieces together when I was thirteen."

Lucifer exhaled as he pulled the door open. "Mazikeen is the truest friend I have ever had the privilege to know," he allowed, "but even if Ptolekat had succeeded, I could have come back from that eventuall—hello."

"Oh," Rory blinked at their surroundings. Thick artificial moonlight cast menacing shadows of the scattered trees against a thick layer of sticking snow as mountains jutted up against the stars. In the middle distance, a thin howl cut the air.

"Rory, I realize this is not your first time in Hell," said Lucifer, looking out at the scene around them, "much of this must seem very new to you. But while humans are capable of originality…"

The first howl was answered by another.

"…many of them do keep coming back to the classics."

"What do we do?" Rory asked, a little too quickly.

Lucifer blinked, taking in the flush in her cheeks, the pace of her breath.

"We remember that we're not descended from arboreal prey animals whose successors spent thousands of years of prehistory tending farms and herds at the mercy of the Eurasian gray wolf," Lucifer said. Then he stopped. "Oh, wait…"

Rory glared back, but the pulse in her neck was going a little quickly.

"Not on both sides, at least."

In this distance, a human voice cried out in what might have been early Chinese. The howls grew louder, and the ground began to shake with footfalls far heavier than any earthbound canid.

"Rory," Lucifer said, holding out a hand. "The demons currently impersonating Stephenie Meyer characters have spent thousands of years learning to strike fear into the hearts of humans, but they are under orders not to harm you."

"So were the mosquito guys."

"Do you want to go home?" he asked. "Because that was my first choice anyway!"

"Oh hell no!"

Lucifer took a preparatory breath, "Rory, If we're doing this, I need you to keep a few things in mind. First, this is the first one of these you've been to. Some Most of the Hell loops have to do with guilt, usually with some desire mixed in. You've seen that."

Rory nodded. "Yeah, Todd felt guilty about his inventions, but he also seemed pretty proud of them, and there was that whole part about doing better than his mom's church friend's son Ambrose—"

"Well this loop isn't like that. This is terror. Demons have been around almost as long as humans have, and, however limited many of them may be intellectually, they've studied them. I was the one whacking them with the ruler if they didn't, mind you. They became very, very good at tapping into human fear."

In the distance, Lucifer could hear the sounds of paws hitting wet snow, clawed and light, pulling heavy bodies that were all teeth and malice. Real wolves hunted because it was their nature. This was the human imagination of a wolf, bigger, badder, and huffed up on rage.

"I'm almost sorry to say that a lot of the demons would ask for loops like this one, Plum assignments that I could use to keep them in line." Enough of the demons had been bred off earthly predators for the chase to have an appeal. Even demons who had no fangs in their family trees could stil want to have things that other demons desired. One of the things that had gone wrong during his vacation was that the order had gotten messed up. Bigger, stronger demons had pushed the weaker ones out of the positions that they'd earned under Lucifer's system. Hell wasn't all chaos or all order. It had needed balance, even then.

Rory nodded, pulling in her lower lip in that determined way that he could swear she must have learned off Trixie.

The sounds of pounding feet, the screams, the howling all grew closer.

"This is a humanhumans can't fly. Get out of the way, Rory!"

Rory looked over her shoulder and froze. Lucifer reached out, but she recovered on her own. Wings out, she was up into the trees before he needed to say another word.

The pack barreled by underneath them, the human feeling helplessly, shedding tears and less savory fluids against the howls as Lucifer pretended not to notice his daughter narrowly avoiding a heart attack.

"See, real wolves would have either lost him or caught him by now," Lucifer pointed out. "That's part of the torture. He keeps thinking he's almost gotten away, and then they catch him up. His brow furrowed. "Was that my idea? I think that might have been my idea."

"Whatever. What do we do now?"

He jerked his head. "We follow them."

Lucifer took to wing and Rory followed. The imitation night was clear of ash, at least, somehow without being clean. The air was cold without being crisp or sharp. The stars created glare without glory. But still, he was flying wingbeat for wingbeat with another angel. He hadn't done that since… A time or two with Jophiel over the centuries. A time or two, fighting with Remi or Amenadiel. Mostly?

Lucifer pushed away his early memories, himself and Michael, armed with spears, one at Amenadiel's left hand and one at his right, fear and desire twin weapons against the enemies of Creation.

These were his own demons running before him. He could call the chase to an end if he wished.

Loops like this could last forever, he remembered. Or they could end and reset. Real lions and wolves bit the jugular, made sure the prey was done twitching before they dug in. But real lions and wolves had to worry about hooves and horns. This human had lost every last bone, tooth, and fingernail when he'd died, and it seems he didn't have Melissa's penchant for growing new ones.

The human fell to his knees in the snow, a thin layer of sticky nothing that didn't muffle the cut of the rocks. Lucifer landed on a stout branch. From the ground, the forest would look oppressive, but infernal stagecraft worked with angles, and none of the higher branches jabbed his eyes or got in his way. Rory landed nearby, hands on an icy trunk for balance.

"I've visited this man before," Lucifer said, "long ago. But he never drew my special attention." Rory was quiet but seemed to understand. He'd tortured this man, then delegated his treatment. He hadn't been back here since the change in Hell's purpose. "I don't already know what he feels guilty about," Lucifer explained. Behind him, the first wolf darted in with a mock lunge, just snapping the edge of the human's inner arm. Blood flowed against the snow.

Rory's boots hit the snow cleanly, and the demons—not wolves now, just wearing their skins—halted immediately. Quiet as an owl, Lucifer shifted position, making eye contact from over her shoulder.

You will remember my commands, he glared out. No one will lay hand, nor tooth, nor claw, nor any other part they wish to keep attached.

The human was crouched on the ground, gasping. Rory nudged him with her boot. "Hey," she said.

The human made a vocal noise.

"Hey," she said. "So what're you in for? What did you do?"

The human blinked, looking up at her, vivid purple-red against the starkness of the moonlit clouts. At the edge of the clearing, one of the wolves paced back and forth. The human watched them with dull, dehydrated eyes. Lucifer looked at the snow, remembered skiing with Maze. Cold enough to sting the skin, but it would never quench thirst like the real thing.

"I said what did you do to get yourself into this mess?" asked Rory. "You give off kind of a paper pusher vibe. Did you throw the dude in the next cubicle to the wolves? Let him take the rap for something?"

The human blinked and then said something in a language that was almost but not entirely intelligible with Kaifeng Chinese.

"Ooooh…" Rory trailed off. "Might need a hand with this one. Or an ear."

Lucifer beat his wings once and landed on the ground opposite the tenant. "He is asking if you're here to save him," Lucifer said. "And, if so, why do the beasts of the night obey you."

Rory looked at the lupine demons and back. "You think they'd obey me? You see me making them do tricks?" While Lucifer translated, the demons made muttering sounds, like office workers called into a last-minute meeting with no agenda and no idea what the boss is up to.

"They have more dignity than that," Rory finished, "but in a way we are here to save you."

The human started speaking rapidly, pointing at the wolf pack and then in the opposite direction.

Lucifer was shaking his head as he told Rory what the patient was saying.

"No, no," Rory answered. "See, the wolves aren't the real problem. They're acting out a reflection of your life. They're your mirror."

Lucifer translated but then cleared his throat. "Mirrors were a luxury good, Darling. Our friend here was a farmer."

Rory tried again. "These wolves are your sins. They take this form because something you did makes you feel like you're being chased or eaten alive or—"

The human looked from Lucifer to Rory and back and then said something else.

"Oh," Lucifer said.

"Well?"

"He locked his brother outside at night, and they found his half-eaten body surrounded by wolves the next day."

"So, you …threw someone to the wolves."

The human answered, nodding his head.

"It's not a metaphor," said Rory. A beat.

Behind them, one of the wolves made a half-barking sound.

"No, Pferrit, I think we'll need a few with this one. Tell the unspeakable horrors in wolves' clothing to take five."

Pferrit slunk off into the trees, tossing his shaggy head for the others to follow.

"I heard that, Schlee!" snapped Lucifer. One of the wolves hurried off a little faster.

"Did your brother hit you or something?" Rory asked.

The human buried his face in his hands, suddenly weeping.

Rory took a deep breath. "Were you a little kid? Was it winter and you were running out of food?"

Lucifer pressed his lips together, but he translated. The human kept weeping, shaking his head.

"Rory, not all of the humans down here are misunderstood not-so-bad people," Lucifer explained. "Some of them did terrible things with no justification." He took a breath. "We could stay and talk to this man for hours. If I remember my meeting with him correctly—"

Rory's eyebrows went up, just a little.

"—then while he did live in a lawless time, full of banditry and famine, there wasn't any type of norm or excuse. It's not like Spartans leaving their newborns on the hillside because that was what they and their grandparents had been doing for generations. He just killed him."

Rory crouched down in front of the human and lifted his face so she could see him. "Do you want to tell us why you did it?" Lucifer translated.

The human looked at Rory and Lucifer and shook his head.

"Is this—" Rory waved at the forest in the direction the demon-wolves had gone. "—what you think you deserve?"

The human swallowed. He seemed to think clearly for the first time, consideration and reaction that were fueled by something other than the memory of adrenaline. His face hardened, his expression going formal, his eyes like stones as he looked up at Rory with something like hatred. He rose to his feet. Farmer or not, he had the air of a high official, the kind of man who could outlast emperors. He said something in halting but absolute tones.

Lucifer's wings flared. So did his eyes.

"Tell me what he said," Rory said.

"'Who are you to judge me?'" Lucifer repeated. "That's not a rhetorical question, you know," he said. Then he shifted into the human's own tongue. Rory could hear the words "Lucifer Morningstar," "Aurora," and a word that she was somehow sure meant "Time." Then what was definitely a question.

The human jutted his chin in the air and began to speak. Still glaring, Lucifer raised a hand and snapped his fingers. The wolves began to howl, and the clarity drained away from the human's face. "Time for us to leave," he said to Rory.

"What?" she asked, but she followed him through the snow.

Lucifer clamped his jaw shut, trying to hold in his anger for once.

"What if we brought his brother here to talk to him?" Rory asked. "He might be down here too. Abel's here, Eve told me. He must have been down here for a thousand years. His brother might forgive him."

Lucifer seethed, looking for the door. He hardly noticed the water on his shoes and ankles as all the snow in the loop melted and the winter gave way to a thick, afflicting heat. The snow had never felt clean or refreshing, but the human would think it had. He'd miss it.

"Todd too responsibility, and we saw his loop change. This guy could too."

Lucifer put his hand on the door, pulling it open to see Hell's ash-aired, comfortless reality on the other side. It looked like relief.

"What if—"

"Rory," Lucifer said, looking her in the eye. She looked back and he could see her. He could see her. For all that her human instincts made the hair on her neck rise when she heard the wolves howling, she was an angel, as much an angel as Azrael or Zoraphon or Samael, once upon a time.

She could feel compassion, even when it broke her heart.

"He does not want our help," he said.

Chapter Text

"He is not broken!" Rory called out.

"I didn't say he was broken," Lucifer answered. He rubbed his fingers together. The ash felt …different. Grittier and somehow soft in the middle. Strange.

On some impulse, he pulled out his pocket square and let the ash hit the surface.

"We can't leave him like that!" Rory was saying.

"We can," Lucifer told her. "He isn't ready to be helped, Rory." He watched the ash pile up on the cloth. Then he folded it carefully as a furoshiki over a bento box and put it back in his pocket.

"So what? You come back in a thousand years and he tells you off again?"

"That's the idea. I can only be in one place at a time. I could be seeing to another patient. I could be on Earth seeing to my other duties."

Rory thrashed both her arms, clearly upset. Lucifer let her get it out. Up until now, she'd been magic. She'd been a catalyst for change, just like her mother. The humans—not to mention some of the demons—had all reacted to her presence, positively or otherwise, but none had remained unchanged.

"So by staying on Earth with mom and me, these people are suffering more?"

Lucifer opened his mouth. No lying.

"Yes."

"How am I supposed to live with that?"

Lucifer exhaled, suddenly wanting to sit down. "I wasn't planning on telling you right away. I figured I'd ask Linda when. Maybe by then I'll have found a good way to say it."

"No, that's how Little Miss Not-Me lives with that. How am I supposed to live with that?"

"I don't know yet," Lucifer said. "I've wondered if being a good father will make me better for my patients, or if abandoning my responsibilities to my family would make me worse, but the truth is that's all I've got so far."

Rory rubbed ash off her face with the back of her hand.

"You're seeing this place for yourself, Aurora. You've taken the risks and shown up for the work. I can give you that. You have to give yourself that. I wouldn't have known what was happening with Tsirp if not for you." He took a breath. "Frankly, if you need a break from the loops, I could stand to take a walk and find out if you can spot any more. Were there any in the receiving line when I had them make their oaths? Shirime? Crevos?"

Rory shook her head. "If we're not going to stop Michael, can you at least tell me what you're doing about him?" she asked. "When I came down here before, he more or less had the run of the place."

That was a generous way to put being assigned to clean the second circle with a toothbrush.

"I saw him from the back," Rory said. "Did you cut his wings or did Amenadiel?"

"I did," Lucifer said, nodding toward a break in the canyons as Rory fell into step beside him. "I had just won the nomination—the battle that Mazikeen told you about. After the fight in the arena, I cut Michael's wings," said Lucifer. "Plan A was for him to live among humans like Amenadiel and I had, but…"

But he would have roamed the Earth, making new plans and undermining things. Hell had been built to contain evil, and Earth had proven itself sensitive to corruption.

"The truth is I felt he deserved Hell. For Daniel and Remiel mostly, but I suppose he deserves it for everyone he hurt. I guess you could say Amenadiel ratified my decision after he took top job, or at least he hasn't asked for Michael to be moved."

"Yeah, but," Rory trotted a bit to keep up. "How do you keep him from self-actualizing? Do you have to be on the throne for it?"

Lucifer frowned. "I don't stop him from self-actualizing," he said.

"Then why didn't his wings just grow back?"

"Mine didn't, not for years," Lucifer said. "After Father banished me, my wings stayed as they were for thousands of years. When I had Maze cut them off, they stayed off for nearly five years."

"But you self-actualized them back."

Even though his wings weren't out, Lucifer felt his feathers ruffle. "I'd just prevented another war in heaven, or so I thought." He hadn't felt guilty about the first, at least not enough for a loop to appear, the way it had after he'd killed Uriel. Maybe that was why the actualization had taken place the way it had, wings appearing again and again.

It made more sense than what Daniel had thought after he'd filled him in on the details in one check-in during his millennia in Hell:

"You'd just decided to tell Chloe the truth, Lucifer. But when you showed Linda your face, you say she went catatonic and didn't talk to you for weeks. You think maybe you didn't want Chloe to react like that? You think maybe you wanted to show her something that got better press?"

"Damned Daniel…"

"Huh?" said Rory.

"What?"

Rory shook her head. "So Michael's wings won't grow back because he feels guilty?"

"Maybe. Just because we had the same face doesn't mean we have the same brain behind it," Lucifer pointed out. He gazed into middle distance and quietly pointed at a figure taking shape behind the ash, crouched, arms moving rhythmically as he rubbed a brush on the ground.

"So it could be anything."

"Or nothing."