She had given two weeks notice, a weirdly human gesture, but a practical one. After all, he would need to hire a new bartender and it only seemed fair. A small voice asked her why she still cared about fairness. It was the right thing to do, but up to this point of her long existence, she had been wholly unacquainted with that concept. She wasn't sure why it mattered now, except that it was the last thing she would do for him out of free will, the very last, and the impersonal nature of it appealed to her. Give notice and walk away, nothing more than the click of her high-heeled boots fading into the night until the sound was gone. She wondered if he would be listening, if he would even register the impact of his most loyal subject leaving. Unlikely. He was too busy these days with his latest distraction.
It wasn't another woman who had come between them, although that was the easy answer. Maze wouldn't have cared about a woman. There' had been many such women, human, inconsequential creatures. They'd shared them as casually as they'd share a dessert. They meant nothing and had never had the power to affect her relationship with Lucifer.
No. It wasn't the woman. It was the switch that had flipped in him when Delilah died. Some lingering essence of humanity had sparked within him and he'd wanted to balance the scales, to exact vengeance for a human death. She laughed to herself, rueful. Maybe it was in his DNA; after all, he had been come into being as an angel.
The detective was merely a conduit for him. She reflected the person he had decided he would now be, a mirror reflecting only the image he wanted to see of himself. Ironically, she didn't believe the truth about his identity even though he'd repeatedly revealed it to her. She saw what she wanted to see, as most human women did, and it meshed perfectly with his need to be seen that way. The detective needed to see him that way or she could not care; it was how they were hard-wired, for a reason. Lucifer's father had learned early in his little experiment that he could not count on them to do the right thing, to follow directions. That had been made abundantly clear in Eden. So, he'd had to install some tendencies and compulsions that made them easier to manipulate and an innate desire to believe in their own goodness was one of the most effective in that regard.
Lucifer wasn't supposed to have that compulsion, however, and it made no sense that it had come upon him at such a late date, like an elderly human who has forgotten his own name. Maze was tired of wondering why such a thing had happened. She had no one to ask. The only one who likely knew the answer was he who pulled the puppet strings…Lucifer's father. And to quote an overused but accurate line, it would be a cold day in Hell when she asked him. Demons were servants; created to do the dirty work the angels wanted done, but didn't want their fingerprints on, as it were. They had been created and banished to do their work in Hell, where the screams of their victims could not disturb the cotton-candy world above, a world in which the humans were told that if they did the right things and believed, they would not suffer. The greatest lie ever told.
She had been called the Queen of Hell, but she knew she was never Lucifer's equal. She was merely the most powerful of the demons; Servant Queen was more like it. Maze was nothing if not intelligent and she had always known her true position, but she had never minded it before. She existed to serve him and was happy to do so; she was strong, but he was stronger; she respected him, desired him, admired him, took her power from her association from him, and their partnership was the driving force powering her through eternity. They both lusted first and foremost after power and they'd reveled in that, exercised it daily, fed off of it…there was nothing in life that was as satisfying as knowing you were at the very top of the heap and occasionally reminding those who dared to nip at your ankles what a grievous mistake they'd made. She didn't need to be the one in charge when he was the Lord of Hell and so very, very good at his job.
Until he wasn't. Until he walked away, and she followed him…because what else could she do? Maze had taken a vow to protect him and that meant following where he led, for all eternity. And the sojourn on Earth had not been bad at all, a nice vacation, really, until he changed.
The one constant in life was change; that was as true for immortals as it was for humans. For millennia, she'd seen change primarily through the eyes of the souls unlucky enough to be brought to her for punishment. She leaned off the world above through their eyes, heard of the flaws of men and the breakdown of society. None of the humans handled change well. Every generation convinced the newest one would destroy it all, but they never did. And she'd given them much more important things to worry about.
Now she recognized that she'd fallen into a pathetically human trap. She had believed he would never change. Maze had never foreseen, never considered the possibility that the day would come when he mutated, dissolved into a creature she did not recognize. One who wore his skin and spoke with his voice yet was an imposter. Had to be, because she could not reconcile what she saw now with the magnificent being she'd spent an eternity with. The one who would come in and watch her torture a lost soul and applaud her creativity. The one who orchestrated everything from wars to plagues, who used their belief in his father to manipulate them into committing atrocities, who played the humans against each other mercilessly…chess pieces on a board. She had accompanied him everywhere, through thousands of lands and thousands of years, absolutely loyal, a power in her own right yet illuminated and magnified by her proximity to him, the Lord of Darkness.
And now the Lord of Darkness was off somewhere without her, grinning foolishly at that insipid human as they chased after some low-end criminal, not even someone really evil. Maze could see it, of course. It was her job to watch him and she could not do so without the divine gift of being able to see him anywhere, a gift that had recently introduced her to the level of suffering she'd doled out gleefully for years. Maze would have happily chosen the rack over watching Lucifer play at humanity.
And then there was the nagging issue of her own feelings. She hadn't thought she had any, hadn't thought she could have them, thought of herself as programmed with a limited repertoire of urges and drives and of course undying loyalty to her master. But she wasn't in the habit of deluding herself; Lucifer deciding to check out of their shared life together cut deep. She missed him physically, frustrated to discover no one else, no combination of humans or immortals had the power to satisfy her as he did. Maze was torn between wanting him back in her bed, plotting mayhem when they stopped to take a breath, and being so disappointed and disillusioned at his current incarnation that she just wanted to run from him before he destroyed the memory of how unimaginably great they had been.
She knew he didn't understand. He thought she was merely tired of tending the bar. He wasn't paying enough attention to her to see it was any deeper than that and that fact alone told her this move was the right one. She would still be linked to him of course; their bond could never be broken, and she would be at his side in an instant if needed to protect him. Maze could never stop seeing him, feeling him, or knowing what he was doing. She could only separate herself physically from him so that she did not have to look at the shell of what he once had been, an animated reminder of what she had lost.
Hell's greatest torturer had become the most tortured of them all.