“I’ll do it,” she said. “I’ll seek out Fade. But you must swear you won’t let anything happen to Jesse. Swear you’ll bring my brother back safe.”

There was no artifice in Grace’s eyes now, no cunning. Only desperation.

“I swear,” Lucie whispered, and took off at a run.

Lilith. The First of All Demons, the mother of warlocks. She was beautiful as a work of art might be beautiful, her face a study in sculpture and symmetry, her hair a cloud that moved of its own accord despite the lack of wind. Cordelia recognized her now from her portrait in the Hell Ruelle, the woman with the serpent’s body twined around a tree.

“Of course I am here,” she said. Her gaze had flicked over James and Cordelia and rested now on Belial. “When you cast me from my realm, Prince of Hell, I came to this world. Beliya’al, liar, ruin-lover, I could not believe you would have broken the trust of millennia—would have tried to take from me the land granted to me by Heaven itself.”

“Heaven,” Belial sneered. “Heaven has no place in Edom, and no use for you, Lilitu.”

“I wandered the voids between the worlds,” Lilith said. “And how the infernal realms were abuzz with the news that Belial had been brought low by his grandson, who could see the shadow realms. How the lower demons chattered that you had been wounded, truly wounded, by the blade Cortana. I realized then that your obsession with this world was an obsession with your own bloodline. That you had managed to sire grandchildren who combine your blood with the blood of Nephilim—and you would never leave that alone.”

“Spoken like the barren creature you are,” sneered Belial. “Your loins bring forth only monsters, thus you must batten on my offspring, Lady of Owls?”

Lilith curled her lip. “So what has prevented you from seizing your grandson and forcing him to your will? Cortana. You fear Cortana like you fear nothing and no one else. It bears within it a feather of the archangel Michael, who cast you down into the Pit. And the bearer of Cortana is the bride of your grandson. This world is rich in irony indeed.”

Belial spat. “Scorn me as you will, Lilith; you cannot touch me. You swore the oath, and Hell’s Oath binds you. You cannot harm a Prince of Hell.”

James and Cordelia exchanged quizzical looks. Cordelia could not help but recall what Lilith herself, disguised as Magnus, had said at the Shadow Market: that Princes of Hell were engaged in battles with angels themselves, crossing and crisscrossing the chessboard of the universe, obeying and breaking rules no mortal could hope to understand.

“Indeed, I cannot harm you,” said Lilith. “But my paladin can.”