Demon

comparison.”

Children’s quarrels? The horrible face of the seraph in my dream hovered before me.

“Lucifer ranted and stalked. And we trailed him like ermine on the train of a king. Then, just when I thought he had forgotten us, El broke his silence.”

We were nearing Charles Street. What happened next was something I would replay over and over in my mind for weeks. A woman jogger was running toward us. She was all blonde hair and black running pants, a hot pink iPod strapped to her arm. I thought with some irony that this was the extent of my social life of late: appreciation of women going the other way.

Assuming, of course, that they were not demons in bookstores.

Just as she was about to pass us, Lucian tripped, his hand grabbing at my shoulder as he practically fell into the woman’s path. It was such a queer incident; I had never seen him anything other than fully composed. The startled jogger, for her part, managed to skirt him just in time to avoid a collision that might have kneecapped her, and Lucian escaped the fall, thanks to his pulling at my shoulder which nearly took me down with him. As I stumbled, shoving the demon’s hand away, I saw alarm and confusion on the woman’s face. But, as we more or less righted ourselves, she seemed to decide that Lucian was neither an attacker nor injured, and she ran on.

Lucian stared after her with slatted eyes. He murmured something under his breath.

“What was that about?” I demanded. It was bad enough that he looked like a punk. Did he have to act like one, too?

“You wanted her.”

It was close enough to the truth to shut me up.

I would come back again and again to this interchange, would remember that narrowed look on Lucian’s face for weeks and months to come.

OUTSIDE THE GATE OF the Garden, a bearded man played an electric guitar. It was plugged into an amp, and now I realized the source of the music we had heard from the Commons softball field. As we crossed Charles Street, I asked, “What kind of special curse does one reserve for someone who has ruined everything?”

“We’re talking about Lucifer, not Aubrey. And El didn’t curse Lucifer.” He pulled a cigarette out of his coat pocket.

It was bizarre, seeing him light up. It was the first time I had actually seen him ingest anything.

“He didn’t strike us down, either.”

“So what did he do?”

“He drew breath.” He exhaled a stream of smoke that drifted before and then over us, diffusing like ectoplasm. “And with that inaugural sound we, with keen immortal perception, knew that something was about to happen. Something different.”

“How could you tell?”

“How can I explain this?” He kicked a Dunkin’ Donuts cup, an escapee from a nearby trash bin. “It was a pregnant sound. Expectant, like a hesitation on the verge of speech. It vibrated throughout the universe like the tight pulse of a tuning fork.” He flicked his fingers, sending a ripple of invisible energy into the air and a spatter of ash toward the ground.

We veered down a small path toward roped-off flowerbeds and domed shrubs. I thought back to my nightmare, to the vision of the newly fallen drifting away, fading into the residue of sleep. I didn’t know what happened next. I had to know. I was jonesing, pure and simple. I stopped. “Show me.”

His brows rose, as though he were waiting for a punch line.

“Show me,” I said again.

He pulled the cigarette from between his lips and flicked it away. “I will never understand humans,” he said and then grabbed me by the upper arm.

My experience the night before had been birthed into the warm vessel of sleep. But this was an electrifying jolt, like the first chug of a roller coaster on a track. Just as I felt I had reached the apex of that first hill, the universe unfurled before me, as though I were standing in the narrow part of a funnel looking out toward the opening of everything. I was aware of the vastness of it, the infinite amplifications of space before me, the stars. And I knew, somehow, that each of them had a name known to El.

There was Eden. When I dreamed it—no, when I saw it—the darkness had been a moving thing, a living tar creeping across the rocks and flashing stones. It was as black now as a shroud, vacant as an eye in a corpse’s head. I heard a sound like a sob and recognized my own voice. Eden, infused with sorrow, stood ruined, a monument of grief covered by a dark and terrible presence trembling on the water.

The spirit of El himself.

I pulled away, unable to endure another moment of it, and doubled over on the lawn, sucking breath.

“Did you hear it? The keening?” the demon asked from above me.

“I didn’t hear anything.”

“Human ears,” he said, the way a debutante might dismiss a bottle blonde.

“What did I miss?”

“Didn’t you see the shifting over the water?”

I shook my head.

“Did you see anything?”

“Dark Eden. And space.”