22. Chapter 22

He held her all through the night, his excruciatingly mortal Detective, lending her his strength when her own wavered holding a silent vigil as the hours passed.

Chloe’s agony was palpable to him, it rang though the air like a gong, deep and thrumming as her soul writhed in pain, drowning in grief and misery. It hurt – and oh how strange this sensation called pain still was – that he could do nothing more for her.

His word was given.

There was no greater oath he could make. It was absolute a way no mortal could comprehend. It wasn’t a joke when he said his word was his bond.

Lucifer had sworn on his very Name, and all the others that came under the aegis of The Devil, that he would save the child - and so he would. One plus one equals two. Chloe may not like his plan, she may never forgive him for the things he was about to do but he no longer cared.

Her disgust, he could live with, her pain, he could not.

#

“Will you stay with me today?” Chloe asked softly, eyes glassy with some form of numbed horror and shock as Lucifer plied her with a hot toddy when the lightening sky became impossible to ignore and she’d stumbled to the kitchen.

Lucifer grimaced as he looked at her grey face, her rat’s nest of hair and bloodshot eyes. Magnanimously, he decided not to mention any of it. She was having a bad enough day as it was.

“I can not. My oath to you requires my presence elsewhere today. I can send Mazikeen?”

He tagged on the latter hesitatingly. He’d prefer to be with the Detective – but duty. He’d never broken his word in his life and he wouldn’t start now. Not even for her. Besides, she’d find more comfort in the presence of her infuriating spawn than she would in holding his hand – eugh, emotions – whilst the offspring was sold like chattel.

Cheap chattel at that, which was just plain tasteless.

“No. Leave Mazikeen doing whatever it is that she’s doing. I’ll be fine on my own.”

The Douche would be there too, but Lucifer was pleased that she no longer counted that creature’s presence as an asset. He also knew she was lying through her teeth, but he would let her have her delusions. Her hair was fine, she was fine, it was all fine.

She looked so miserable though, and the newspaper in front of her was not helping – it’s bold headline proclaiming DAY OF RECKONING with Beatrice’s picture below it, as well as a column of statistics about chances of survival and the FBI’s current deplorable success rate.

Lucifer sat down next to her and placed a hand on her shoulder, wishing he could do something. Wage an endless war against an omniscient enemy? Done. Free a soul from Hell? Easy! Comfort a grieving mother? Not so much.

So he did what he did best.

“You know it’s not really the Day of Reckoning, don’t you? I’d know if it was, and believe me it wouldn’t be nearly this quiet if the Hosts of Heaven had descended. Between you and me, they are loud. All those horns, and the singing, Detective, the endless singing, not to mention the righteous speeches. You could hear them from a mile away.”

She snorted, finally putting the paper down and focusing on her drink. She sighed after the first sip, which meant she’d finally noticed what he’d pressed into her hands, but she drank it anyway. Lucifer nodded approvingly. Tea with alcohol – the perfect start to any day, but especially today.

It was also the last day that she’d ever take anything from him so unquestioningly again, but he firmly took the thought by the neck and wrung it out like a wet towel. What was done, was done.

“I’ve never broken my word, Detective. Not once since the whole Let There Be Light era. By tonight, Beatrice will be back in your arms. This I swear.”

It was a sign of how distracted his Detective was that she didn’t notice how the world reacted to his vow. How reality bent under the force of his edict, colours brightening echoed by a faint trumpeting of horns.

She laughed, a tiny little broken noise that made him flinch, wings rustling uneasily behind him. A cloud immediately passed over the sun, darkening the earth for a second.

“I know. It’s only because I believe in you that I can walk into that station today.”

She had faith in him.

Lucifer sat, too stunned to move as he felt her belief, a warm living pulse of power woven of love and hope and genuine faith. There was grief in it too, and desperation, but right then a mortal woman believed in Lucifer.

“Oh, Detective.”

###

Johnson was immediately suspicious when simply releasing Amenadiel’s photo to make the rounds netted them a location within a few hours.

They hadn’t taken a step forward without three steps back for the entire case, and now their person of interest was just sitting in a bar?

Mind you, Malcolm had been doing something similar. Perhaps there was something about this case that drove men mad.

He sighed, his headache returning with a vengeance. A simple photo and they had him. This whole time, the tried and true methods had failed again and again, The Collector evading them all and now this.

“It could still be a trap,” Michaels said warily as he stepped out of the car, eyeing the bar – a former church of all places – warily. “Is it weird that I’d prefer a trap?”

Johnson snorted. At least he wasn’t the only one becoming superstitious. When they all got fired for this disaster of an investigation perhaps they could become ghost-hunters. Heck maybe they’d rate their own TV show.

The local cops had surrounded the building for all the good it would do. The bar had exactly one back entrance down a dead-end alley.

“How do you want to play this?” Price asked quietly.

“Calmly, we don’t want a scene right now. I suggest one of us just walks in the front door. Amenadiel isn’t known for carrying guns.”

“You think he’s going to be rational? Hand himself in?”

“I think it’s better than even odds,” Johnson replied calmly. “There’s nowhere else to go, and he’s smart enough to know that we’ve got nothing on him right now.”

“We’ve got all the-

“Nothing we can use in court. Unless you want to swear in front of a judge that the nice hacker told you who to arrest.”

She grimaced. It hadn’t really needed to be said; they all knew the score. The best they could hope for was to blindside Amenadiel with suspicion and Mr White’s CCTV footage – let him draw his own conclusions – the usual spiel.

Maybe it would work, maybe it wouldn’t. At least they’d really given it their all. Johnson did not envy his replacement. They’d have one hell of a mess to sort out.

He tried not to think like that. If he gave Beatrice Decker up as lost, she would be. He was the one in charge of finding her – if he gave up she was as good as dead.

But the clock was ticking.

He holstered his weapon and walked into the bar, Michaels on his heels.

Amenadiel turned him head to look at them – and Johnson almost took a step back.

The eyes.

He’d seen all sorts throughout his life; career assassins, grieving mothers, exploited children, gangbangers, the wrongfully imprisoned and veterans back from a war they couldn’t speak of, but he’d never seen eyes like that before.

They fell upon him like a grand piano. Age, he thought. Yes, those were old eyes, far older than Amenadiel’s youthful appearance warranted – not that they’d found a birth certificate. Unfathomable too – it was like staring into the void between stars, there was nothing to be read there. No emotion and no soul.

After a moment of profound silence, Amenadiel spoke.

‘This is my punishment then, Father.” He flicked his gaze upwards, and Johnson felt that unnatural weight vanish. He took his first breath since they’d locked gazes and let it out shakily, counting to five.

“It’s Agent, actually, not Father,” he affected a dry tone but feared it came out as more of a rasp.

Amenadiel gave not a single shit.

“Why?” he asked the ceiling.

It was a mark of the sort of year that Johnson was having that he waited politely to see if the ceiling would reply.

“I obeyed,” Amenadiel pronounced, setting the glass down on the bar. “I obeyed,” he told no one, quiet and lost.

“Obeyed who?” Michaels seized the opportunity, but Amenadiel didn’t say another word, not even when Johnson read him his rights and put him under arrest. The man was already defeated, pliant and apathetic under his hand as they led him out of the bar and into the back of a squad car.

“Was it just me,” Michaels murmured later, “or was that really fucking odd?”

“I was expecting the ceiling to talk back,” Johnson confessed. “Yes. It was odd.”

“There’s something wrong with his eyes,” Michaels carried on faintly. “They didn’t look… it was just weird. Gave me the shivers.”

Human, Johnson silently filled in the blank. They hadn’t seemed human.

#

The interrogation went terribly.

Amenadiel sat on his little metal chair with his hands folded neatly on his lap and stared at nothing, completely silent.

Michaels slammed his hands onto the desk. “You’re in for it now, mate. Kidnapping? A paedophile ring? You think you’re ever going to see daylight again? Huh? Huh! Answer me, ingrate. Don’t have the words to defend yourself? I’m not fucking surprised!”

If Johnson thought Amenadiel wasn’t even hearing Michaels right now, he’d be relieved. That blankness was just creepy. But it was all too clear that Amenadiel heard every word – he just didn’t care.

He hated dealing with the broken ones.

“We can protect you from the Castello family,” Michaels promised soothingly, coming around to sit across from Amenadiel, leaning forward, intent. “What does he have on you? Blackmail? Debt? Do you think we care about any of that when we can get the whole family in one swoop? The FBI will make a deal, Amenadiel, but you have to give me something to give to them. You need to prove that you’re going to cooperate. A bit of give and take, you feel me?”

Nothing.

“There’s a little girl out there man. She’s scared and alone. Look at her!” Michael held the picture to Amenadiel’s apathetic gaze. “What could a child have done to deserve this? Nothing. I know it, and you know it. Do the right thing!”

Nothing.

“You know what happens to guys like you in prison?”

And on, and on, and on. No matter what Michaels tried, Amenadiel was silent. He double-teamed him with Price. They did good cop bad cop. They threatened, cajoled, blackmailed and bribed. They tried the company man. The friend. The us against them.

The clock ticked on.

Michaels tried to make him angry. He tried appealing to his better nature. He insulted his pride. He bamboozled him, pressing the hard-sell whilst withholding even so much as a glass of water.

Amenadiel was clearly a professional.

“I have an idea,” Price ventured softly, three hours in to the most frustrating interrogation of Johnson’s career.

“Yes,” he prodded after a few moments.

“It’s a bit unorthodox.”

Johnson snorted gesturing to Mr White’s report sitting prominently on the table, now glorified with two and a half pen’s worth of highlighter ink and the full rainbow of sticky labels. They’d passed unorthodox some time ago.

“Well Amenadiel and Mr Morningstar are brothers.”

Grunt.

“They both carry religious names. It’s not a wild guess to say that religion is important to that family. Sin and guilt were probably fed to them with their bread and butter. If we were to tap into that, I think we’d see results.”

“And you have a plan for that, do you?”

“Let Amenadiel meet Detective Decker. Bring her in for his questioning, or just stick them in a room together. They know each other through Mr Morningstar. If Amenadiel were to come face to face with the consequences of his actions – it could trigger that old guilt factor.”

“She’d rip his eyes out before letting him say a word.”

“She’s shown remarkable composure throughout this ordeal and she’s capable of seeing the bigger picture. I think it’s worth a shot, and at this point sir…”

They both glanced through the one-way mirror where Michaels was now attempting to make Amenadiel angry by not-so-thinly-veiled racism.

Johnson agreed immediately. They had little left to lose.