Sighing, she pushed up onto her knees and gestured for Gethel to return to the sofa. The female shuffled over, shooting glares at Revenant, but she kept her mouth shut. Good, because everything that came out of it was unpleasant. Even when she wasn’t being crude and downright scary, she sounded like she wanted to be. Like she was mentally inserting things like, “in your blood,” and “while you scream,” into each sentence.

Once Gethel was seated, all prim and proper in that filthy, stinking gown, Blas rummaged through the jump bag for a blood draw kit, cursing when she realized she’d left the portable ultrasound machine at the clinic. Without it to show the position of the fetus, she couldn’t collect stem cells.

Unless her damned X-ray vision decided to finally come back online.

She gave it a try, her body buzzing and her eyes throbbing as she focused, but aside from a high-def flicker of Gethel’s subcutaneous blood vessels, nothing happened. Not visually, anyway. The scar on Blaspheme’s wrist burned as she strained, as if it were an overheating hard drive.

Dammit! Didn’t it figure that the gift she used most in her profession would be one of the first to fail?

“I’m going to get some blood samples,” she said, giving up before someone wondered why she was sitting there staring blankly at Gethel’s belly. “While I’m doing that, why don’t you finish telling me what’s going on with this pregnancy.”

Gethel shot a glance at Revenant, as if seeking permission to speak. At his stiff nod, she said, “Satan hired a sorcerer to cast a spell to grow Lucifer quickly. That’s why he’s so large now, but his growth has stopped. He was supposed to be born fully grown.”

Blaspheme froze as she tied the rubber tourniquet around Gethel’s biceps. “That… that would kill you.”

“Worth it,” she said dreamily. “But then the archangels fucked it all up. They tried to swap the child in Limos’s womb with the child in mine. Limos would have been the one torn apart by Lucifer’s birth, but they would have been able to slaughter him the moment he burst from her body. The only upside to that would have been that I would give birth to Limos’s child.” She grinned, flashing nasty sharp teeth. “It would have tasted… lovely.”

Blas jabbed the needle into Gethel’s vein with more force than was necessary. The fallen angel was the sickest, most twisted monster she’d ever met. And Blaspheme treated monsters every day.

As blood began to fill the vial, she glanced over at Revenant, who watched with cold detachment. Guess he was still pissed.

“Did you know about this?” she asked him.

Revenant propped his booted foot on the pillar behind him. “Do you remember when Limos was brought to the hospital a few weeks ago? When Eidolon believed her baby was dead?”

She couldn’t forget. It wasn’t every day a Horseman of the Apocalypse was brought into the ER. “That was the day I met you.”

The tiniest smile flickered at the corner of his mouth. “Yes, it was.”

Obviously, he remembered asking her to give him a blow job in the hallway. If you answer my question, I’ll let you suck my cock.

Okay, so he hadn’t so much as asked as he’d offered up his dick like it was an Oscar statue or some shit that would be an honor to hold.

He’d let her suck his cock.

Let her.

She growled as she detached the filled vial. “You’re such an ass.”

He waggled his brows, and so much for him being pissed. The guy changed moods like the wind changed direction during a storm.

“So anyway,” he continued, as if this were an epic adventure story and he were the deep-voiced narrator, “that day, some archangels took Limos’s child and tried to remotely swap it with Gethel’s. They failed, but their efforts interfered with the sorcerer’s spell and stopped Lucifer from being born full grown. Whatever they did also fucked up Gethel. Well, that and the fact that Reaver nearly killed her, and archangels sliced her wings off. Now she’s deranged, she looks like something a hellhound dragged in, and Lucifer is twice the size he should be.”

Blas suspected that Gethel had always been deranged, but she kept that to herself as she withdrew the needle from Gethel’s arm. The tiny puncture sealed instantly. “So what, exactly, do you want me to do?”

“Satan wants to make sure nothing is wrong with Lucifer.”

“And I want to survive the birth.” Gethel bared her teeth at Blaspheme. “Fix it.”

“Weren’t you the one who didn’t mind him being born full grown?”

“That’s different. If he’s born an infant, he’ll need a mother.”

Blaspheme blinked in surprise. She’d have pegged Gethel as the type of mother that left her kid in the car while she partied and picked up men in a bar. “Why did the archangels’ efforts fail?”

Revenant chimed in. “Because I bound Limos’s womb so it couldn’t support any child but her own.”

Gethel ran her tongue over her lips in a raunchy display. “Revenant is such a good little minion of evil.”

Yes, apparently he was. He said he hated Gethel, said he could kill her, but he’d saved Lucifer’s life. No matter what, she had to remember that he was working for Satan, and he wasn’t a good guy.

As if you’ve been a model citizen. No, she hadn’t been. She’d been conceived in sin, and within moments of her birth, she’d been bathed in a double evil: the blood of a demon, a False Angel taken as an unwilling sacrifice. But she’d long ago chosen a life path that would honor her father… and the female her mother used to be. Blaspheme might have been born of evil, but she refused to let it define her.