Demon

“I saw Lucifer leading you away, but I didn’t see where he took you.”

The demon tromped alongside me, his pasty skin and black boots a decided 180 after the stylish redhead, the dignified black man. “We assumed he would lead us to a place of our own. A place of his making—as though he had truly become, in that short time, a god. As though he cared for us and would recreate that garden and walk in it among us. But he led us nowhere.” He looked up toward the tops of the trees, their branches like the sparse scalps of aging men.

“There was no other place to go. We hovered on the edge of the earth in fear—fear and silence. And I longed for Eden, settling even then beneath those murky waters, the beautiful facets of the gems within it reflecting nothing but darkness. I was sick for it, would have given anything—if I had had anything to give—to have it all back as it was.”

I remembered the day Aubrey left our apartment.

“But here was the most terrible thing: El went down to Eden and laid himself out over the waters, there to brood in trembling sorrow. And it infused me, this sorrow. It saturated my being. Beside me, seraphim huddled with long faces. Some of them wept. I had never seen such tears before—dark, remorseful, bereft of joy. There was only sadness and dread, that terrible sense that had I been a god, I would have set it all back. I would have erased everything, returned it all to the way it had been.”

“Why couldn’t you?” I said. “For that matter, why couldn’t God?”

The kid gave a jolt of laughter that sounded slightly hysterical, and then his lips curled back from his teeth, and spittle flew out with his words. “I’ll tell you why: Because we were damned! Oh, not that I knew it then—how could I? There was no precedent for any of it. Wrong had never existed. Lucifer had to manufacture that first aberration himself. Until then, there had been one law dictated by the sole fact of our creation: Worship the creator. And now, as surely as Lucifer’s throne had broken into a thousand splinters, we had violated that order.”

“I thought Adam was the original sinner.”

“You humans always like to think of yourselves as the first at everything.”

I ignored his open sneer. “What if you had apologized?”

“Apologized.” He spit onto the edge of the path. “Let me tell you something: Apologies are a funny thing. Half the time they’re insincere. And even when they aren’t, there’s nothing a person can do to undo whatever he did. Oops, I ran over your cat. So sorry. Meanwhile, the cat’s dead, entrails oozing out of its mouth. Now I can buy you a new cat, but it hasn’t changed anything except that I now have an opportunity to run over your new cat as well. If Aubrey had apologized, would it have made it all better?”

I didn’t answer that.

“Besides, even though we knew we had committed some thing, we had no idea how irrevocable our actions were. Not yet. So there was only remorse—black, clinging like tar, eating like acid.

“Meanwhile, there was the shaking of El’s spirit like the keening of a banshee, as though the whole world had died. And I suppose it had. It was unbearable, that sound—a pain without end or even the hope of death to escape it. I could not watch, was unable to stand the sight of that spirit hovering over the darkness, though I couldn’t block out the sound of it.

“But this was the most terrible thing of all: El had turned away.” He tried to tuck a rogue strand of hair behind his ear. When it wouldn’t stay put but teased along the edge of his cheek, he yanked it out with a savage pull. I stared as the patch along the side of his temple sprouted angry red dots against the white of his scalp.

“I didn’t know why.” He seemed not to notice the deviance of his own actions as he flicked the hair off his fingers. “I didn’t understand that we had opened an unbridgeable chasm between us. All I knew was that he couldn’t stand to look at us. Oh, but to know that everything is wrong with the universe, and to know that you had a part in that irrevocable drama, is just about too much for any mind to take. I had lived always for the moment—that was, after all, all there had been—and now I could see no end to it. Regret ate at me like a ravenous worm. Had I been human, I would have gone insane.”

Are you sure you didn’t? I remembered his strange laughter but said only, “Obviously it did end.”

He shrugged. “Eventually. And I might have spent only an epoch like that. But it felt like an eternity.”

We walked in silence. What did one say to something like that—I’m sorry?

I had almost forgotten who I was talking to.

The demon pointed down the hill. “Look! The Frog Pond. When winter sets in, we should go ice skating there.”

DESPITE MY LIMITED KNOWLEDGE of Lucifer, I couldn’t picture him—her, it, whatever the devil was—sitting idle after that. When I asked Lucian about it, he shook his youthful head.

“He kept to himself and wouldn’t even look at Eden. He was like a child who abandons a toy after he’s broken it. What was Eden to him now? Even if it had still been perfect, it might as well have been ruined; he had set his eyes on heaven. As for us, we no more existed to him than Eden did in those days . . . those nights. It was all one night to me, those hours like years, as Lucifer raised his head to heaven and narrowed his eyes at God.”

The demon squinted at the sun. “We huddled on the fringes of Lucifer’s light—all the rest of the world was darkness but for him—never venturing any closer for fear of his anger or any farther away for fear of the darkness. And all the while there was that terrible, shuddering spirit of El.

“Meanwhile, Lucifer grew bolder by the day. He blasted El with sharp, serrated words. I thought for sure the Host would come for us, that El would send us away or worse, scatter us like salt over a field.”

“Did you think he would obliterate you?”

The kid shrugged. “I had no concept of death, though I will say I expected something terrible. And I even thought by then that I might welcome it. But El was absorbed by grief, which only seemed to incense Lucifer.”

“Why wasn’t he afraid? He had been the favorite; he had the most to lose.”

“Exactly. El had never ignored the voice of his favorite before. And as his silence continued, Lucifer grew more venomous. I had never seen this kind of resentment. The violence of our uprising seemed like children’s quarrels by