Unforgiven Read Online Free Page B

Lucifer?”
    Lilith had been one of the most virtuous people Cam had ever known. He couldn’t fathom how she could ever have become one of Lucifer’s subjects.
    “You know I can’t betray a confidence.” Lucifer smiled and set the plastic tray down in front of Cam. On it was a tiny snow globe with a golden base.
    “What is this?” he asked. Dark gray ash filled the snow globe. It fell ceaselessly, magically, nearly obscuring the tiny lyre floating inside.
    “See for yourself,” Lucifer said. “Turn it over.”
    He turned the globe upside down and found a little golden knob at its base. He wound it and let the lyre’s music wash over him. It was the same melody he’d been humming since he flew away from Troy: Lilith’s song. That was how he thought of it.
    He closed his eyes and was back on the riverbank in Canaan, three millennia ago, listening to her play.
    This cheap music-box version was more piercing than Cam could have anticipated. His fingers tensed around the globe. Then—
    Pop.
    The snow globe shattered. The music dwindled as blood trickled down Cam’s palm.
    Lucifer tossed him a reeking gray dishrag and gestured for him to clean up the mess. “Lucky for you I have so many.” He nodded at the table behind Cam. “Go ahead, try another. Each one’s a little different!”
    Cam set down the shards of the first snow globe, wiped his hands, and watched the cuts in his palms heal. Then he turned and looked again at the food court: in the center of each of the once-empty orange tables was a snow globe atop a brown plastic tray. The number of tables in the food court had grown—there was now a sea of them, stretching into the dim distance.
    Cam reached for the globe on the table behind him.
    “Gently,” Lucifer said.
    Inside this globe was a tiny violin. Cam turned the knob and heard a different version of the same bittersweet song.
    The third globe contained a miniature cello.
    Lucifer sat down and kicked his feet up as Cam moved around the food court, winding each snow globe into music. There were sitars, harps, violas. Lap steel guitars, balalaikas, mandolins—each one playing an ode to Lilith’s broken heart. “These globes…,” Cam said slowly. “They represent all the different Hells you’ve trapped her in.”
    “And every time she dies in one of them,” Lucifer said, “she ends up back here
,
where she is reminded anew of your betrayal.” He stood and paced the aisles between tables, taking in his creations with pride. “And then, to keep things interesting, I banish her to a new Hell crafted especially for her.” Lucifer grinned, exposing rows of razor-sharp teeth. “I really can’t say what’s worse—the endless Hells I subject her to again and again, or having to come back here and remember how much she hates you. But that’s what keeps her going—her anger and her hatred.”
    “Of me.” Cam swallowed.
    “I work with the material I’m given. It’s not my fault you betrayed her.” Lucifer let out a laugh that made Cam’s eardrums pulse. “Want to know my favorite twist in Lilith’s current Hell? No weekends! School every day of the year. Can you imagine?” Lucifer lifted a snow globe into the air, then let it fall to the ground and shatter. “As far as she’s concerned, she’s a typically gloomy teenager, suffering through a typically gloomy high school experience.”
    “Why Lilith?” Cam asked. “Do you craft everyone’s Hell this way?”
    Lucifer smiled. “The dull ones make their own dull hells, fire and brimstone and all that crap. They need no help from me. But Lilith—she’s special. Not that I have to tell you that.”
    “What about the people suffering with her? Those kids at her school, her family—”
    “Pawns,” Lucifer said. “Brought here from Purgatory to play a bit part in someone else’s story—which is a hell of another sort.”
    “I don’t get it,” Cam said. “You’ve made her existence utterly miserable—”
    “Oh, I can’t