Author's note: Ta daaaa! Thanks for all the continued reviews! Some of you are truly silver tongued devils with your flattery (not that I mind). This is getting more into the mystery of things, and what's going on. I'm trying to keep this shorter than my last attempt at a one shot ::cough:: already at 100k words ::cough::. Anyway, let me know how you feel about the turn in the story! ALSO - heads up: there is swearing in this, so if that bothers you...skim.


A week had gone by. A solid twice damned seven days. A hundred and sixty-eight hours. Ten thousand and eighty minutes. Six hundred and four thousand eight hundred seconds.

Lucifer tapped his fingers against the countertop of the bar, playing with his coin as he made it spin in the air.

Seven days, and neither he, Maze, or Amenadiel found a single, solitary trace of his wings. Not one feather. Not one whisper.

His shoulders ached from the memory of them, constantly – and the longer they were gone, the more he felt them. Like a phantom pain of a missing limb. Even before they were stolen, Lucifer had always been painfully aware of just how light he'd felt without them. Despite what his brothers accused him of, he hadn't kept them as a way out of his current lifestyle. He had no intentions of going back to Hell, either as its King or as its slave.

He had no idea what destroying them would do. Something God had created, something older than life itself – their destruction was nothing to be taken lightly.

If he was honest, which he prided himself on, Lucifer really hadn't wanted to slap his Father in the face quite that hard. Middle finger to the sky would do just as well to convey the point. The last time he had upset his Father even half as much resulted in a very, very long fall.

And if he was truly honest…Lucifer had kept them because whenever he felt truly alone, when the ache from his wings and the emptiness in his heart couldn't be alleviated by all the sex, drugs or denial in the world, he would sit and stare at them, remembering what it was like to once have a Father who loved him, and a family that he loved in return.

And how it had felt when they had turned on him. Cast him out. Made him into the monster that haunted people in the night and mothers warned their children about. Once the most loved in all of Heaven to the most hated creature in creation.

Lucifer spun the coin wildly towards the mirrored backing of the bar, shattering the glass into a thousand spider webbed pieces.

He didn't even have the distraction of Detective Decker's case at the moment. No new bodies, no proof it was something supernatural or occult related, and it regrettably was beginning to appear that Detective Douche was right – crazy people with no other purpose than to confuse the police seemed the most likely culprits.

He hadn't opened the club for two nights in a row – and if he didn't open for a third, his customers would flock elsewhere for their debauchery. A rebellion he could ill afford at the moment.

But he couldn't stand to be around people – not right now. He was restless, and angry, and bored, and he needed to get out.

"Maze, open the club. Keep our guests happy," he said, and vanished to his car. When he'd first arrived in Los Angeles, he'd debated getting a car at all. After all, he could still appear and disappear to wherever he wanted whenever he felt like it. The added bother of a vehicle seemed just that – an unnecessary nuisance.

And then he got behind the wheel of a '61 Corvette and finally understood why people liked them so much. Without his wings, this was as close as he was going to get to flying.

Maze often teased he should have gone with the Lamborghini – after all, one of their models was named after him.

Something in the '61 Vette spoke to him, and he liked the fact that it was a convertible – even if he was almost too tall to put the top up.

As he pulled onto the street, he paid little attention to where he was going and simply drove. Minutes, hours, it didn't matter. LA traffic was hardly conducive to a soul-cleansing drive, and he found himself cursing more people in fewer minutes than he had since his arrival in Los Angeles.

As he waited at a stop light, he dropped his head back against the seat, closing his eyes as he rolled his shoulders, trying to alleviate the growing phantom pain. His shoulders ached. He felt naked, and not in the good way, and he could feel his temper starting to fray.

"Get out of the car!"

Un-bloody -believable.

"Yo, man, get outta the fucking car!"

Lucifer opened his eyes, rolling them as he did so.

A young kid – really, everyone was young compared to him – hand one hand on his steering wheel and the other with a gun, pointed on its side toward his head. At that angle, if the kid fired, the recoil from the gun would knock his elbow into the corner of the windshield, probably hard enough to slice the nerves. The shell casing would eject into his face, quite probably his eye, temporarily blinding him. Really, killing him would be a mercy.

Lucifer glanced skyward. "Really, Father? These are your favorite creations?" he grumbled.

"I said, get out of the fucking car, old man!" the kid shouted, spittle flying and landing on Lucifer's lapel.

He clenched his hands on the wheel, counting to ten, before he looked up at the kid, and smiled brilliantly. "Do you believe in Hell?"

The kid looked like something short circuited in his brain.

"The unbearable lightness of being? The afterlife?" Lucifer prompted.

"Just get out-"

"Of the fucking car, I heard you." Lucifer looked up at the still red light, and made an executive decision. "I'm going to do you the best favor of your life, kid."

He grabbed the kid's hand on the wheel, pinning it there with bone fracturing force.

"I'm going to give you something to believe in."

And he floored the 'Vette into oncoming traffic, dragging the kid with him. Tires screeched as he gunned the engine and cars swerved to avoid him. Lucifer barely heard it over the sound of the kid screaming.

"I know all about wanting the cheap thrills," Lucifer shouted calmly. He only raised his voice to be heard above the roar of the engine and the kid. He wasn't angry. He was annoyed.

He yanked the wheel to the right, almost dislocating the kid's arm.

"It's not worth it!"

He floored it down the wrong way of a one way, weaving in and out of traffic with supernatural ease. He could hear the kid kicking at the side of the car.

"Watch the paint, would you? This is a classic," Lucifer scolded. He wrenched the wheel in the other direction, and was mildly impressed that running the kid into a few plastic trash bins didn't kill him. "You see, I know all about teenaged rebellion!"

The kid's voice ratcheted up another octave, and Lucifer marveled at his lung capacity. The kid should take up free diving with a set of lungs like that.

"But you have to be willing to commit! You have to be prepared to die for your belief that the risk is worth the reward!" Lucifer glanced down at the young man who was clinging like an octopus to the side of his car, shrieking like the Devil himself was after him. "Are you prepared to make that sacrifice?"

He let go of the wheel just long enough to throw the 'Vette into the next gear before pushing the pedal all the way to the floor.

"God, no!" the kid screamed, seeing the wall of the building they were racing towards at seventy miles an hour.

"He never answers!" Lucifer growled.

At the last possible moment, Lucifer wrenched the wheel hard, hitting the emergency brake and slamming his feet on the clutch and the floor brake, spinning hard and coming to a rest mere centimeters from crushing the kid between the car and the brick wall of the abandoned warehouse.

He let go of the kid's arm, and he dropped to the ground, breathless from screaming at the top of his lungs for several city blocks.

"Oh, you're fine," Lucifer snapped irritably. "Now get lost, and if I ever see you again, I won't be so merciful."

The kid didn't need to be told twice – and Lucifer felt his respect for the kid rise a notch when he managed to get his feet underneath him and bolt back down the street in a surprisingly coordinated sprint.

He chuckled. He sometimes missed this. It was cathartic.

He almost missed the smell of copper and iron, amongst the reek of trash and rotting garbage and urine of the alleyway.

Almost. But he'd spent millions of years with that smell. He could taste it in the air, feel the oppressive metallic after bite on his skin. There was blood here.

A lot of it.

There was a brief moment when he considered simply driving away. The dead were of no concern to him, not anymore.

But the Devil was nothing if not curious, and he cautiously left the 'Vette, parked in its near suicidally close proximity to the wall of the building.

Lucifer stepped into the shadows of the building, stepping over crumpled garbage and sweat soaked used mattresses strewn across the floor. He'd spent eons amongst human filth, and the smell here was almost over powering even to him.

It took longer than he would've liked for his eyes to adjust to the darkness, and he allowed them to morph to their true form. No one was here to see the red and black horizontally slitted eyes. The room brightened considerably, not unlike night vision goggles for a human – except he could see in color.

The smell bothered him more than one would expect because by the time people got to Hell, they were no longer a rotting corpse. They were simply Souls, with no mortal meat suit to speak of, and Souls never imagined themselves as dead flesh. All the smells Lucifer was used to were associated with the damage inflicted on living tissue, because that was how Souls imagined themselves.

Lucifer pulled out his phone, and dialed Detective Decker from memory.

It was a moment before she picked up, and he was worried it would go straight to voicemail.

"Lucifer, this had better be good. Do you have any idea what time-"

"I found another one," he said, skipping any pleasantries.

*(*(*(*(*

Lucifer had sat and waited for the police, patiently puffing on a cigarette only because he had nothing better to do and because there was a certain sense of unease about this corpse.

In less than half an hour, the crime scene was swarming with other people, bright flood lights and multiple uniformed individuals that Lucifer mostly ignored. He stayed away from the body. He wasn't the best at analyzing feelings, especially not of his own, but there was something…wronghere. A heavy weight seemed to settle in his chest, making feel like he couldn't quite breathe deeply enough.

The body was different this time. Instead of upside down and his arteries slashed to ribbons, he was right side up on an upside down cross, and instead of frenzied, angry slashes that nearly severed limbs, his blood had been carefully drained, though the investigators couldn't tell for sure how just yet. No question what happened to blood again – it was all over the scene.

Different symbols though. Less experimenting. They were all Enochian now.

"Lucifer?" Chloe asked quietly.

He didn't turn away from the body, but he at least acknowledged her. "Hmm?"

"You okay?"

He most certainly was not okay, but he didn't want to try and explain it to her. It wasn't the body or the death or the sheer gruesomeness to the scene that set his teeth on edge. Death never bothered him. It was his domain, and he'd done much worse on his own then humans could come up with as Samael. It was the strange darkness that seemed to radiate from the scene. An inky blackness that practically roiled and writhed in the shadows, just out of reach of the flood lights, and he was surprised none of the humans seemed to notice. It was pervasive, seeming to seep into his very skin even from where he sat several yards away.

He shook himself, stamping out his mostly ignored cigarette on the ground as he smiled up at the Detective. "Fine. How can I help you?"

"Can you read these symbols? There's a couple that look the same as the last scene, but there's a couple new ones." She paused, and he could feel her questioning gaze even before she said anything. "You sure you're okay? You look a little pale."

"I'm fine," he repeated, and just to prove it, sauntered over to the body, carefully stepping over the sigils on the ground.

Instead of the alpha and omega symbol this time, there was a rectangular design, except like someone had pinched it in the middle. On either end, there were two separate designs – to the left, there was an 'X' along one short end of the pinched box, and on the other a simple strike through diagonal. It was drawn in blood along the floor, same as the previous design, and the Enochian script ran around the outside of the box.

More interesting than the designs on the floor was the one carved into the young victim's chest. It was neat and precise, cut obviously with a fine, sharp blade. One long line that traced the length of his sternum, a sideways diamond in the middle, and an arrow pointing down on the top and an arrow pointing up on the bottom.

"Any ideas?" Dan asked. He stood at the edge of the sigils, almost shoulder to shoulder with Chloe and looking just as tired.

Lucifer kept forgetting humans needed sleep.

"The design on the chest is a spiritual attainment binding rune," he said. "But it's supposed to be used as a way for someone to find religion."

"Well, I guess someone found it for him," Dan said, and Lucifer reluctantly (and silently) agreed.

"It's meant more for people who have lost their way," Lucifer explained. "Like a crisis of faith, and they're trying to find a spiritual path. Here, it's like they were trying to bind him spiritually."

"What the hell does that mean?" Dan asked.

"That someone needs to learn how to do close interpretation readings," Lucifer muttered under his breath. Louder, he said, "it means someone doesn't know what they're doing, and they're trying to force a meaning on to something that they don't understand." He glanced down at the strange box shape. "I think they meant the attainment to be more like stealing."

"And the others?" Chloe asked, before Dan could say anything else. "The new Enochian letters?"

Lucifer glanced to the outside ring of script that circled wide around the pinched box. "They're not letters, they're words. Enochian is a symbol based language when written down…think of it like how you would read Japanese. To you, they're pictures as a written word, but to someone who can actually read the language, they have an actual sentence to them."

"Then what do they say?" Dan asked.

Lucifer took a step towards the outside circle, but drew up short as if he'd walked into an invisible wall. It felt like he'd walked into an invisible wall.

He held his hand out, and found he couldn't stick his hand any further than the edge of the box. He pushed harder, trying not to make it obvious, but he couldn't move past the barrier.

"Detective, could you come here for a moment?" he asked, trying to keep the edge of panic out of his voice.

"What for?"

"I need to see something. Come here…please," he added belatedly.

Surprisingly, it wasn't Chloe who stepped forwards, but Dan, and he walked easily enough into the box.

"What?" he asked, crossing his arms.

"Step back. Two steps," Lucifer ordered, and watched as Dan once again crossed the threshold of the box.

"Are we giving dance lessons now, Morningstar?" Dan asked irritably. "What are you doing?"

Lucifer forced a smile, and chuckled nervously. "Well, I know what this symbol is now," he said, indicating the box. "An actual binding sigil. One that regrettably works." He put his hand up to invisible wall and pushed against it. There wasn't any visible reaction – no crackling energy like some science fiction force field, just his inability to go any further. "I can't cross it."

Chloe frowned, and he could just see her trying to work this into her version of his story.

Good luck explaining how binding wards actually work in your little theory, Detective, he thought snidely.

"You walked across them easily enough to get in there," Dan pointed out. "Sure it's not mind over matter?"

Lucifer pounded on the invisible wall, realizing it made him look like he was pretending to be a mime. His hand made no noise, because there was nothing tangible to hit. It simply stopped midair in the exact same spot, every time. "Pretty sure," he growled.

"Lucifer, so help me, if this is you just playing a trick…" Chloe said, stepping forwards.

"What kind of a trick would this be?" Lucifer demanded. He hit the barrier once more for emphasis. "What point is there to pretend like I'm trapped inside a blood seal?"

"How about you constantly trying to get me to believe you're The Lucifer?" Chloe pointed out.

Lucifer sighed in exasperation. "Fine, fine, fair point. But I'm not. You told me to stop doing that in public, and I'm really, honestly trying to do that." He gestured at the seal. "But circumstances don't allow me at the moment."

"Okay, fine. If you're trapped inside that seal, then how do we get you out?" Chloe asked. He could tell she had exactly no belief in his inability to cross the threshold. She thought he was just being belligerent, and normally, she would be right.

"Just break the seal – draw your foot or something through the line and I should be free to go," he said.

"That's destroying evidence, Lucifer. I'm not doing that. Stop messing around, and just step over it."

"I wish I could, but I can't so just draw the damn line," Lucifer snapped, starting to lose his temper. This box was entirely too small to stay in, and the gnawing idea that someone knew perfectly damn well what this sigil was and what it would do was setting his vindictive nature on edge. He would not be confined.

"Lucifer," Chloe said in exasperation. And before he could protest, she grabbed him by his elbow and pulled him forwards.

He braced for impact, turning his head to the side so he wouldn't break his nose on the barrier, but instead he stumbled through it, like trying to pull himself through quicksand.

"See?" Chloe said confidently. "It's just a drawing. Are you done playing around?"

Lucifer stared at her in muted shock. "How did you do that?" he finally managed, stepping as far away from the binding rune as he could.

"You're not that heavy," Chloe said. "And I work out."

No, that wasn't it. It couldn't be it. He'd been stuck – completely unable to pass through the barrier until Chloe pulled him through. Did she break it without breaking the seal? He honestly had no desire to set foot back in the box to find out. Perhaps she was sent by his Father, or Amenadiel…but if that was the case, she would know it. She wouldn't keep playing dumb, the Heavenly Host had no talent for it.

She really didn't believe. There was no doubt in her mind that he was as human as everyone else. There was nothing different about him other than his fantastical belief that he was the Fallen One – something she disregarded as a delusion, and nothing more. Everyone he had ever met since arriving on Earth…they may not have completely accepted who he claimed to be, but they all had their doubts. Even Delilah. They could lie to themselves, they could even lie to him. But somewhere deep down and far buried was the niggling doubt that perhaps Lucifer Morningstar of Lux really was the Devil.

Perhaps that was all that was needed to break the sigil. Believing it had no power thus gave it no power.

He hated to think what that meant for him.

"Now that you're done playing make believe," Dan prompted, gesturing towards the Enochian words. "Feel like translating?"

Lucifer shot him a less than favorable scowl, but the detective ignored him. Sighing melodramatically, Lucifer stepped around the sigil, not willing to walk between them and risk another trap. The more he read, the more concerned he became, and apparently it showed.

"What?" Chloe asked, looking down and then back at him. "What's it say?"

"It's not gibberish this time," Lucifer said quietly. "They've learned. Solamen miseris socios habuisse doloris," he read aloud, indicating the lettering to the top of the circle of words. "And damnatio memoriae." He pointed to the bottom set of symbols.

"Is that Latin?" Chloe asked. "Why would they translate it from Latin into Enochian?"

"Latin translates easier because it's what was first used to translate Enochian – it's what people spoke at the time," Lucifer explained.

"So what does it say in English?" Dan demanded.

"It is a comfort to the unfortunate to have had companions in woe," he translated. "You would say 'misery loves company' nowadays. And the bottom half is a literal translation of 'condemnation of memory'- generally used to brand Roman emperors as traitors and used to wipe them from history."

Dan gave a low whistle. "Well, damn. Someone was upset with this guy."

Lucifer shook his head. "He's not the one they're referencing. He's simply a part of the message."

"Then who's it for?" Dan asked.

Lucifer didn't answer.

But Chloe did.

"The message is for you, isn't it?" she asked quietly. Sympathetically. Kindly. He shuddered involuntarily. "What does it mean? Who sent it?"

And he didn't have an answer.


Soooo...what do you think? Did I make Lucifer sound like Lucifer? I NEVER REALIZED JUST HOW MUCH OF HIS CHARACTER WAS HIS PHYSICAL EXPRESSION AND NOT SPOKEN WORD! Holy LIUP()*(&*U^RYIIU(*P)& does that make it hard to write on paper! That suddenly switch of being laughing and having a good time to "I'll kill you and everyone you ever loved" in an instant is reeeeally hard to write down. So please, please let me know if Lucifer sounds like...well, Lucifer. Thank you all for the favorites and alerts and the lovely, lovely reviews!