Chloe had just enough time to register the bullets headed straight for her and Lucifer moving towards her, before everything changed in an instant. Between one second and the next everyone in the room had moved.
Now Lucifer and Amenadiel were well across the room in opposite directions, but that was nothing compared to watching over a dozen grown men fall to the ground at the exact same time. Half of them were in the fetal position, holding their groins while the other half had fallen to the ground already unconscious. The bullets she'd felt so certain had been about to hit her, were nowhere in sight.
"It's quite elegant the way they all fall at once like that," Lucifer said with a sigh of enjoyment. "Really fun to watch."
"What just happened?" Chloe asked.
"Sorry Detective," Lucifer said, turning to her. "But Amenadiel had to freeze time again to save you and I from becoming riddled with lead."
"Right," she said slowly. "Okay, so that keeps happening then?"
"Yes, though hopefully not any more unless there are guns involved," Lucifer said pointedly to his brother. Chloe had a feeling this was part of a conversion she'd missed.
"She was helpful," Amenadiel grumbled. "There, is that what you want me to say?"
"For starters," Lucifer replied.
"Guys!" Chloe called. "Malcolm is here to steal money and disappear. We have to focus."
"Yes, right you are, Detective," Lucifer said. "We should split up. Cover more ground."
"Yes, good idea," Chloe said. She assumed this meant all three of them would go their own way, but just as Amenadiel was breaking off to go left, Lucifer followed her going right.
"I thought you said split up?" Chloe reminded him.
"Oh I did," Lucifer said. "But I think us bleeders should probably stick together."
Chloe didn't have anything to say to that. She'd already come to accept that there were things about Lucifer she would never understand, especially when it came to his motivations.
They hadn't gone that far when she heard a scuffle. Chloe turned around quickly and saw Malcolm. He was running along a metal staircase a ways ahead.
"Oi!" Lucifer called out. "You, stop!"
Of course, this just made Malcolm run faster. Why did the Devil have to be such an idiot?
"Don't worry, Detective," Lucifer said, his eyes fixed on his prey. "He won't get far."
When Chloe saw what the scuffle had been about she could hardly believe her eyes. Lucifer's brother was lying on the ground with a knife in his stomach. She had just seen Amenadiel take five rounds from a shotgun like it was nothing. Even if she'd never seen him freeze time, at this point she'd seen more than enough proof of it. As far as Chloe was concerned Amenadiel was far more powerful than Lucifer, yet he'd been stopped by a human.
"Lucifer," Chloe called out to him. When Lucifer turned around and saw his brother, Chloe could see the battle in his eyes. The Devil was torn. He wanted to hunt down Malcolm, but he also cared about his brother.
"Bloody hell," Lucifer said, giving up the chase to be at his brother's side. "There you go, spoiling my fun again."
"No you have to catch him," Amenadiel said. "Leave me. Go!"
"Who will I fight with then, hmm?" Lucifer said. "Besides I don't know what you are complaining about. It's just a flesh wound."
Chloe could tell from Lucifer's voice that it was far more than that. The invincible angel was dying. It wasn't until Chloe remembered something Lucifer had told her the first time she'd seen him bleed that she realized why.
"This is one of those special demon blades, isn't it?" Chloe asked.
"Brought straight from hell by Maze herself, yes," Lucifer replied.
The first thing she wanted to know is where Malcolm could have gotten such a blade. They certainly weren't common. The last time she'd seen this blade Maze had left it at Lucifer's penthouse with instructions that Lucifer and Amenadiel kill each other. Had Malcolm been to Lucifer's penthouse? This was a problem for later, Chloe reminded herself as she focused on what was going on.
"Stay here with him," Chloe told Lucifer. "I'm going after Malcolm."
"But you can't!" Lucifer told her, even more desperation in his voice now. "Malcolm's dangerous."
"That's why I have this," Chloe said, holding up her firearm. "Take care of your brother."
With that she got up and ran after Malcolm. The only thing Chloe could do for Amenadiel was call an ambulance, and she sensed that human medicine wouldn't cut it for a guy like that. Chloe would help the way she knew how, like a cop.
So she ran, taking the stairs two at a time. She'd seen the general direction Malcolm had been headed when he'd been running away from Lucifer. She knew where he was headed next.
Finally, Chloe spotted him. Without missing a beat, she fired her gun, trying to injure him. Chloe would have called out to him, but she knew it was pointless. Malcolm was in too deep to listen to reason. Asking him to surrender was just another way of giving up her location. Chloe wasn't even sure if he was still human. That was why she needed to stop him.
When Malcolm dropped the bag he was holding, Chloe took advantage of the situation and began firing her gun around the bag to prevent him from getting it. Chloe felt sure it was his get away cash. She couldn't let him escape with it, or they'd never catch him. It took one of her bullets grazing his arm for Malcolm to give up the cash and run for it.
Chloe waited to make sure he was really gone, before collecting the bag and confirming that it was indeed full of cash. Throwing it over her shoulder, Chloe went back to see how Lucifer and Amenadiel were doing, but when she arrived both the angel's were gone. The only proof she saw that they'd even been there was the smallest traces of blood where Amenadiel had been lying.
Chloe decided angel's could take care of themselves. She needed to get this bag back to the precinct. It was evidence, and it was time she checked in anyway. The problem was that Lucifer had probably taken his car to get Amenadiel home, leaving her without a ride.
Chloe chuckled. This was probably fair given the amount of times she'd driven off leaving him stranded, and no one had been stabbed in those scenarios.
Getting out her phone Chloe called for backup. Then she called Dan to get him up to date on Malcolm's movements.
"He won't get far, without his get away cash," Chloe told Dan over the phone, completing her retelling of everything she'd found out. That is everything while leaving out the angel immune to bullets who then got stabbed with a magic knife.
"We have bigger problems," Dan told her.
"Oh really?" Chloe said. "What could possibly be bigger than a crazy satan loving dirty cop on the loose, hmm?"
"Remember that preacher who broke through the crime scene tape to accuse Lucifer of murder?" Dan asked.
"Yeah," Chloe said. "What about him?"
"Well he's been murdered," Dan said. "His body was found at Lux, along with the murder weapon. It's actually been there a while."
"Did you see Malcolm at the scene?" Chloe asked.
"Yeah he was here for a bit," Dan said. "He asked me where Lucifer was."
"And I think he stole a knife," Chloe replied.
"Ok-ay," Dan replied slowly. "Anyway the important part is that this is the same preacher who was harassing Lucifer when we found the first body and then he turns up dead at Lucifer's club."
"If you are about to suggest this was Lucifer too I'm-"
"Relax," Dan replied. When he continued it was in a more serious tone. "I know it wasn't Lucifer. You were right. Malcolm is behind everything. I recognized the gun found near the preacher's body. It's the one I gave Malcolm."
"Good," Chloe said, sharply. "Though I still wouldn't call that a bigger problem, rather more of the same problem."
"It feels bigger to me!" Dan replied. "I thought you were just having one of your crazy hunches before, but now… " He paused, then continued. "What I still don't get is how you figured it out with so little to go on?" His voice was somewhere between impressed and disbelieving.
"You wouldn't believe me if I told you," Chloe answered. "But nevermind that. Where's my backup? I need to get this bag to evidence"
"It should be there any minute," Dan told her.
Dan wouldn't let Chloe hang up the phone until her backup arrived. Once they were there, she spent what was probably too long and felt rather like a waste of time repeating herself to the officers that showed up. Even with her damning evidence and Dan backing her play, no one wanted to believe Malcolm was dirty. In the end, his being on the run was probably what really sold the story.
Unlike when Lucifer drove, the car ride back to the precinct was uneventful. Chloe handed the bag over to someone from evidence and was about to go check on Lucifer when the devil appeared standing beside her desk.
"Glad to see you're okay," Lucifer said the moment he saw her. "I went back to the warehouse but you were gone."
"Yeah I had a cop car pick me up," Chloe explained. "How is your brother?"
"He's at Lux with Maze," Lucifer said. "She thinks she can fix him, but I-"
"Are you sure he shouldn't be in a hospital?" Chloe asked, even if she felt certain somehow that is was a dumb question.
"It would take something divine to heal him," Lucifer explained.
"So you left him with a demon?" Chloe asked, perplexed. "Isn't that like the opposite of divine?"
"She sounded pretty sure when she said she had it handled," Lucifer replied.
"You trust her," Chloe observed. "Interesting."
"Did you catch Malcolm?" Lucifer asked, clearly uncomfortable talking about his relationship with Maze. Chloe couldn't help but wonder what exactly that relationship was. Lucifer had been so upset when she'd betrayed him to Amenadiel, but now it seemed that he cared deeply for both Maze and his brother, despite them both betraying him. That was a lot of compassion for a normal person to show, and much more than she'd expected of the devil.
"He escaped, but we have his get-away cash," Chloe explained. "He isn't going anywhere anytime soon. Also it seemed before he went looking for money he killed someone else, the preacher, and dumped the body at Lux."
"He did what!?" Lucifer said, clearly outraged. "At my club."
"Exactly," Chloe explained. "He was trying to frame you. What he doesn't know is that you've been with me almost all day, and definitely when the preacher was killed. We got the time of death from the forensics team."
"Right. Well that's good then," Lucifer said. "I'd rather not have you arrest me for muder, if it's all the same to you."
Chloe could sense the emotion hiding under his humor, though she couldn't quite get enough insight to figure out the cause of it. Lucifer didn't want people to think he was capable of murder. He'd said as much to Malcolm, but Chloe sensed it was more than that.
"So, what now, Detective?" Lucifer asked.
"Now, we put his face everywhere," Chloe said. "Now we trap him. Without this money, he can't get new IDs. He's stuck. He'll go to ground."
"What if he just gets more cash?" Lucifer asked.
"Not a lot of places you can get 100k all at once in cash," Chloe explained. "He'll be desperate, and that's when criminals make mistakes. That's when we catch them."
Her phone rang. Chloe checked the caller ID. It was Trixie. Giving her daughter a cell phone had been more a security decision than a parenting one, but Chloe was still glad she'd made it. Trixie wouldn't call in the middle of the school day if there wasn't a problem and mommy couldn't fix the problem if she didn't know about it.
Taking a few steps away, Chloe picked up the call.
"Everything okay?" Chloe asked, expecting to hear her daughter's voice.
"Hello Decker," Malcolm's voice replied. "How's the precinct? Yeah that's right I still have a few buddies at the station. You have something of mine and I'm guessing by now you've figured out I have something of yours."
Malcolm went silent and for a moment, Chloe heard Trixie's scared little voice greeting her.
"What do you want, Malcolm?" Chloe asked, when Trixie's voice faded away and Malcolm's returned.
Chloe's heart was pounding. Her whole body, flooded with fear. It was all she could do to keep herself from screaming.
"Hurts doesn't it," Malcolm said. "When someone takes something valuable from you."
"You want your money," Chloe stated.
"Bulls eye," Malcolm said. "Now if you talk to the cops or bring in Lucifer, she dies. If anything even slightly feels off she dies. Get it?"
"I get it," Chloe said in a small voice. After that Malcolm gave her an address and hung up.
Without considering any other options, because saving her daughter was the only thing that mattered, Chloe went to check the bag out of evidence.
She was out of the building and just feet from her car when the Devil caught up with her. He just appeared suddenly standing between her and her car.
"Going somewhere without me?" Lucifer asked.
"I don't have time to explain," Chloe told him. "Something came up."
"Something that requires quite a bit of cash and keeping me in the dark, huh?" Lucifer said. "Now what could that be? Unless that phone call earlier wasn't as innocuous as you make it seem." Then he gave her that piercing gaze of his that felt like he was trying to read her mind.
"Malcolm has Trixie," Chloe said, surrendering. She knew Lucifer wasn't going to let this go. "I give him his money and he lets her go."
"Because Malcolm is such a man of his word," Lucifer said.
"There is no other choice," Chloe told him. "I know how badly this could go down, but she's my daughter. I don't expect you to understand."
"But I do understand, Detective," Lucifer said in a surprisingly kind voice. "That's why I'm coming with you."
"If Malcolm sees you he'll kill her," Chloe said. "He knows who you are, what you can do. Of course, he doesn't want you to come."
"Oh, so the plan is getting the both of you killed then is it?" Lucifer argued.
"Trixie is all that matters," Chloe snapped back. "I won't give him the money until she's safe."
"What about your safety?" Lucifer asked.
"Doesn't matter," Chloe replied.
"It matters quite a bit to me-" Lucifer began, but Chloe cut him off.
"I don't have time to argue with you, Lucifer," she said. "I know exactly how bad this can go, but I'm still going. Promise me you'll let me go alone."
"Fine," Lucifer said. "You have my word."
Chloe was actually a little surprised he gave in so easily, but she didn't have time to dwell on it. Lucifer stepped aside. Chloe got into her car and drove to the address where her daughter was being held by a murderer.
To all those who are asking about Maze and Chloe, don't worry it's coming! I just couldn't really picture it happening in the season 1 finale what with Chloe and Lucifer never getting separated by the frame job. Once season 2 starts I have all the plans for that to get going! Just you wait. ^_^
Sneak Peek Chapter 21
"Give me the gun, Malcolm," Lucifer said. He was running out of stalling ideas. He hadn't really had a plan before rushing in here.
"I'm not afraid of you," Malcolm replied. "All you are doing is getting yourself killed. And just to buy your precious detective some time. It's disappointing really. The Devil running around after a human. It's pathetic. I can't believe I ever looked up to you."
"You have it all wrong," Lucifer said. "I've only come here to ask you a question." He really was running out of stalling ideas. Hopefully, Chloe had more. "What is it that you desire?"
His hope of her brilliant plan was crushed when Chloe appeared walking towards them from Lucifer's right with her hands up. Lucifer wished she'd thought of a better idea. All this did was put her in danger again which was very thing he was trying to prevent.