Chapter Twenty
Tears flowed freely down Chloe's face as she waited for the end. She scrubbed them away even as more poured out. Her arms were tight around Lucifer's limp form, as if the strength of her grip alone could keep him in this world. She wouldn't let go, even after he died. She wouldn't let Bethany destroy him. Chloe would defend his body. She'd give him time to come back.
How long had it taken Lucifer to return after Malcolm shot him in the warehouse? Thirty seconds? A minute, maybe? It would probably take Bethany at least that long to get here from wherever she was. By the time the kidnapper arrived, Lucifer might be alive and well and ready to deliver some much-deserved punishment.
Of course, that was assuming his Father allowed him to come back. It was also assuming Lucifer wouldn't get trapped inside his own personal Hell downstairs, as he once had. There was no certainty in either of those assumptions. His return relied on a lot of big, fat "ifs."
And even if he did make it back, Bethany might just shoot him on sight. With Chloe nearby, Bethany could easily kill Lucifer again. And again. And again. She'd promised to do just that if they didn't solve the case in time. And with three hours left on the clock, they weren't even close. Didn't even have the information necessary to solve it.
A fresh wave of despair swelled inside Chloe's chest. She stroked Lucifer's wet hair, hoping that however far away he was right now, he could still somehow feel it. Feel her.
Down on her lap, Lucifer made a weak choking noise. A small trickle of blood leaked from the corner of his mouth. Chloe's hand shook as she reached under the mask with a gauze pad and wiped the blood away, as she had done the previous three times.
Chloe's cousin, Lana, had died in a swimming pool when they were six. Chloe remembered arriving at the house with her mom, ready to pick up Lana for an audition because the role called for sisters, and Penelope had always said Chloe and Lana looked enough alike to be twins.
Not wanting to wait for someone to answer the doorbell, Chloe had run around to the back door, by the pool area, eager to see what her cousin was wearing to the try-out. Instead, Chloe saw Lana's dad, soaking wet and sobbing as he knelt beside the pool, pumping his arms on the chest of a little girl with blue skin and a pink sundress.
Reddish foam flowed from the girl's mouth every time Lana's dad pressed down on her. Chloe just stared at the strange scene until Penelope came trotting around the corner. At the sight of what was happening, Chloe's mother screamed and shielded her daughter's eyes with one hand while calling 9-1-1 with the other. The one time Penelope Decker was actually an adult.
Chloe didn't understand, at the time, what her mother was protecting her from. She didn't even realize until later that the blue person was Lana. For months after the funeral, Chloe obsessed over what it must feel like to die that way. To be trapped down deep in the cold blue and not be able to get out, the warm sun too far away to touch. To try to breathe, and get a lungful of water instead. To scream for help and have no sound come out.
Lucifer tried to take his next breath, but no air would come. His chest rose and fell ineffectually. The blue around his mouth darkened to the exact shade of Lana's limp body. More blood spilled from his lips and streamed to the bottom edge of the oxygen mask. Far too much to wipe away with a gauze pad.
Chloe's heart pounded. This was it. It was happening. He was dying right now. Right in her arms.
She panted, suddenly frantic with the need to move, to get up, to get away. She couldn't do this. She couldn't watch his whole body turn cold and blue like Lana's. She couldn't just sit here and watch him drown in a room full of air—
Chloe gasped as a sudden memory slammed into her, as violently real as if it were happening right here, right now. She could smell the stale coffee of the precinct, could feel the hardness of the interrogation room chair digging into her lower back. She could see the dim light glimmering eerily in the eyes of the dying woman sitting across from her.
"You still think I did it, don't you?" the woman asked in her raspy, frail voice, barely audible over the hiss of the oxygen canula in her nose.
Chloe didn't bother to deny it. She'd always thought the woman's oxygen tank alibi was crap. The suspect could've gotten another tank somewhere, or refilled hers somehow.
Now, sitting here alone with the woman, looking straight into those icy blue eyes, Chloe's entire being hummed with the knowledge that this person could easily be a killer.
The suspect's next words confirmed it:
"I could have, you know."
Chloe nodded encouragingly. "Everyone would understand why you did. Mr. Horton was criminally negligent. He allowed you and numerous other employees to work in unsafe conditions."
The woman gave a creaky laugh. "'Unsafe conditions'? He gave me cancer. He killed me."
"So you returned the favor?"
The suspect shook her head. "No. I would have. I wanted to. But I never would've shot him in the head like that."
"No?" Chloe asked. "Why not?"
The woman's pale lips parted in a feral smile. "Too quick. Too painless. He deserved so much more."
"What did he deserve, Sarah?"
The suspect's eyes went flat. Like a shark's. "To drown."
Chloe frowned.
"Where do you sleep?" the woman asked.
"At home," Chloe answered, at a loss as to where this was going.
"Yes, but where?"
"In my room, in my bed."
Sarah's eyes flared with a strange light. "Do you know where I sleep?"
Chloe shook her head hesitantly.
"In a chair, in the living room. I can't sleep in my bed anymore. Do you know why?"
Again, Chloe shook her head, her breath caught in the intensity of those blue eyes.
"Because every time I lie down in bed, I start to drown." Sarah gestured at her chest. "Turns out the fluid in my lungs doesn't like that horizontal position. It shifts, and suddenly I go from barely being able to breathe, to not being able to at all. So I have to sleep sitting up. In a chair. Every fucking night." Her fist clenched on the tabletop, translucent skin stretching to show bony white knuckles and blue-green veins. "Horton did that to me. He did that to so many of us. You don't know how many times I've sat wheezing and coughing in my chair at night, fantasizing about creeping into his bedroom, in the dark, and pressing a pillow down over his face.
"He'd wake up, start to struggle, and I would press down even harder. Just so he'd feel it. That pain of dying slowly, inch by inch. That blind terror of trying to breathe, again and again, and knowing it wasn't going to happen. That's what he deserved—to suffocate in a room full of air. If I had killed him, that's how I would've done it."
The suspect looked up at Chloe, meeting the detective's eyes unflinchingly. Sarah smirked at the arrested look on Chloe's face. "Still think I blew his brains out?"
Chloe snapped back to the here and now like a deep-sea diver, bursting to the surface. More recent memories flashed through her like lightning: Lucifer's refusal to use the cot. The tiny shudders he gave whenever he looked at it. His insistence that it was simply too uncomfortable. She'd just assumed he was talking about the mattress. But maybe it had nothing to do with that. Maybe he couldn't lie down because whenever he tried he couldn't breathe.
Maybe it wasn't the seizure that had made him get worse, but the change in positions.
Chloe abandoned her rhythmic stroking of his hair and grabbed him roughly under the armpits, attempting to haul him into a more upright position.
"Come on," she grunted, "you have to sit up."
It was no use. He was dead weight, made even heavier by his sodden clothing. She was nowhere near strong enough to lift him. At least not from this angle. Chloe crawled out from under his torso and scrambled to her feet, intending to lift from above, but at the last minute she had an even better idea.
She ran over to the cot, dragged it up beside Lucifer, then kicked the bed's metal legs so they collapsed. With the cot now flat on the ground like a stretcher, Chloe pulled the oxygen mask off her partner's face and rolled him over onto the mattress. He lay there like a rag doll, limbs splayed, dark blood running from his mouth and nose.
She tore her eyes from the gruesome sight and raced to the bench, which she'd pulled out of the way during his seizure. She hauled it up behind the cot, as close as she could while still giving herself room to stand between the two.
Then, Chloe grabbed the top of the cot's metal frame and heaved upward, making the bed fold at its middle hinges. Turning it from a cot into a chair. At the same time she dragged backwards, pulling the cot toward the bench in an awful shriek of metal on concrete.
When her legs were pinned between the upper part of the cot and the bench seat, Chloe crawled up onto the bench and kept on pulling, her arms trembling, her abdominal muscles searing, until the cot's top half was securely propped against the bench and Lucifer's upper body was as perpendicular to the floor as she could possibly get it.
Breathing hard, she rushed to retrieve the oxygen mask. Chloe's feet splashed through the puddle on the floor as she plucked the mask from the center of the water, wiped it off on her damp shirt, and carried it to Lucifer.
His face was a mess of blood and water and floor-dirt. Chloe grabbed his soaked jacket, which had slid off when she'd rolled him, and used a sleeve to mop off his mouth and nose before gently securing the mask back in place.
Then, she just stood there, her leg muscles trembling as she waited, her lungs not daring to breathe.
"Come on," she mumbled, watching Lucifer's chest for any sign of movement.
No more blood trickled out from his mouth and nose, but his lips were as blue as ever, and his ribcage remained completely still.
"Come on," Chloe repeated, louder.
Still nothing. Her hands tightened into fists.
"Lucifer, BREATHE!" she roared, her voice thundering through the whole warehouse as she stamped her foot in the puddle.
Lucifer's chest hitched slightly. Chloe blinked, not sure if she'd imagined the tiny flutter. His lips parted and he drew in a small gasp of air. Definitely not imagined. He coughed weakly, then drew in another, slightly deeper, breath.
Little by little, the blue color receded from his lips as his lungs settled into a delicate rhythm. Up, down. Up, down. Like a newly-hatched Monarch, drying its wings. The slightest breeze liable to blow it away.
Chloe's gaze raced over the warehouse walls, searching for any sign of movement, any hint of the dark, winged thing she thought she'd seen a short while ago. But the shadows were still now. Just ordinary darkness, splashed across concrete and iron. Nothing more.
Her eyes jumped back to Lucifer, his face still deathly pale, but no longer blue, intangible relief softening his unconscious features, erasing some of the lines from his forehead.
Chloe stood frozen, scarcely breathing herself. Afraid even the slightest movement or sound might shatter this newfound, fragile stability. Afraid the whole scene would break apart into a thousand ripples if she took even one step. In this feverish haze of a nightmare, the one good thing to happen just didn't seem real.
A feather of doubt swished across Chloe's mind, stimulating all the wrong neurons.
What if it wasn't real? She hadn't slept in oh-so-many hours. Now that the adrenaline rush was leaving her system, her eyelids could barely hold themselves up. How could she be sure she was even really awake right now? Wasn't it more likely that she'd simply cried herself to sleep while she was down on the floor, cradling Lucifer in her arms?
What if this, him still being here, was just a cruel dream? Any second now, she might wake to find him lying in her lap, cold and stiff, having died alone while she was busy snoozing.
She shook her head against the awful thought. No. It wasn't possible. She was awake right now. She was sure of it.
Cold doubt pressed against her, finding cracks in her resolve and trickling in. A gleam of metal caught her eye at the top edge of Lucifer's cot. A sharp bit of wire, sticking out from the mesh supporting the mattress. Chloe shakily walked over to it, her footsteps sending silvery swirls swimming across the puddle's surface.
Mouth tightening into a grim line, she thrust her open palm against the wire's needle tip. The bolt of pain made her gasp. Chloe pulled her hand back, her eyes blinking and wide, her body startled by the assault even though her mind had been prepared. She stared down at her palm. Deep red blood blossomed from the puncture wound, like a miniature rose blooming to life in her hand.
Chloe closed her fingers on the sight, pain now throbbing up her arm. She looked down at Lucifer. He was still here. Still breathing. Still real. Chloe looked at her hand again.
Great, she thought. Now I need a Tetanus shot.
A tremulous laugh bubbled up out of her, giddy and slightly hysterical-sounding. Chloe was suddenly very aware of the overheated blood trapped in her cheeks, the shuddering ache of her biceps and abs, the quivery, gelatinous feeling in her knees, like they might give out at any second. In wobbly, ungraceful movements, she climbed onto the propped-up cot beside Lucifer.
Relief coated her exhausted muscles as she settled in on the lumpy mattress next to her partner. Chloe's lower lip trembled, and she bit down on it. Hard. Not yet, she told herself, scooching over and arranging Lucifer's splayed limbs in a way that at least appeared comfortable.
The corners of her eyes prickled with a familiar heat. Chloe ignored the sensation as she straightened Lucifer's damp vest and smoothed down his hair. The image before her wavered, and Chloe blinked furiously. Not yet. She carefully tucked her body tight against Lucifer's, entwining her fingers with his cold ones, laying her other hand across his chest, so she could feel every breath, even if she wouldn't be able to hear them.
Then, and only then, did she finally give herself permission to release the burning sob trapped at the back of her throat.
In the cold silence of the warehouse, Chloe buried her face in Lucifer's shoulder, closed her eyes, and let herself go.