Demon

There were things I needed to know. Would I kill for meaning? No. Would I accept that my informant, teacher —whatever he was to me—was a party to murder?

I got in the car.

“You were tracking her,” I said.

“I only provided her location.”

“Why?”

“It wasn’t my mission.”

“Then whose mission was it?”

A muscle in his jaw tightened. The hand on the steering wheel looked better suited to fixing a sink or punching someone than driving a car. I tried to reconcile them with the slender fingers of the redhead, with the fastidiousness of the man in the cafe picking at the lint on his trousers. I couldn’t—until he glanced into the rearview mirror and I saw the murky shadow behind his eyes.

“Think about who you’re talking to and remember that we have our own chains of command. Our ranks and hierarchies. Must I remind you that I answer to an order, that I am, as you say, ‘low man on the totem pole’?”

“You say it like you’re in a war.”

“We are!” And then, more quietly, “We are.”

We drove in silence along the Charles. In the middle of the river, a crew team skimmed along the water like an insect skating on the surface of a pond.

“It seems somehow too cliche for you, killing innocent people.” I had found a follow-up mention in the next day’s paper: Sarah Marshall, a native of Michigan, was 35. She is survived by her husband and infant son. The rest of the story had been about placement of the crosswalks on Arlington.

“No one is innocent, Clay.”

“Am I going to end up smattered on someone’s windshield?” I saw again the blood in the crackled glass—blood and blonde hair.

“I told you; you’re very important to me right now. Besides, they’re not concerned about you.”

“They who?”

“The Legion.”

I hesitated before asking, “Why not?”

“Because you pose no threat.”

“And that blonde runner did?”

“I promise you’ll understand soon.”

I sat back against the leather seat and waited, but he made no effort to explain. “Where are we going?”

“I want to show you something,” he said, speeding down Memorial Drive.

I gazed out at the aluminum sky, the lusterless yolk of sun. Lucian’s account had left off with the creation of that very body, with the coming and going of a day.

The demon nodded as though I had spoken. “After that, El drew back the darkness covering Eden like a dusty cloth from forgotten furniture. It had been formless since the rebellion, a watery wasteland. Now he separated those waters, lifting a canopy of them into the sky. And then he parted the deep, raising Eden up from beneath the water.

“Lucifer began to take interest in that planet for the first time since the great stones toppled like Titans into the murky ocean. My heart quickened. I knew what Lucifer must think: that El had seen the merit of a second god. And maybe even now he restored the earth for us—no, made it into a new and better thing. We would be happy there again. Our star would ascend after all, even if we never entered the throne room of Elohim ourselves. I didn’t care about any of that anymore. All that mattered was the relief flooding my taut immortal veins. El was going to take us back.”

“But how could he? You said—”

“I know. And if I had thought about it at the time, I would have known it was impossible. He could no sooner welcome us back than he could change his own character—righteous, perfect. And we, as we had become—we were changed. No, that’s a pallid euphemism for the truth, which was this: We were ruined. More ruined than the wasted earth mere days—an age—before. Still, we hovered nearby, hopeful, waiting to see what would become of it. And Lucifer stood stoic witness, waiting to see what El would create for him. The earth, after all, was his.”

He was quiet for several minutes before he said softly, “It was tremendous. It surpassed imagination. We had seen Lucifer’s garden. We knew what we expected, though there really was no reason for El to reproduce it. And he didn’t; this was an entirely different work, this new Eden. Earth and water, deep and mountain. We watched, despite ourselves, fascinated with what El might do next, trying with our vast minds to anticipate the impossible. But even we couldn’t predict the green things that sprang up from the earth. You have to understand the revelation of this great wash of green.”

“It was a novelty to you,” I said, almost to myself.

“Of course! This was no rock garden but a rich and lush new world, teeming with life! Who could have fathomed such delicate complexity? It awed us. And for another reason, too: All those strange green things had within them the power to create, to reproduce, each of them manufacturing miniature versions of themselves. Imagine!”

It had never occurred to me what a bizarre concept reproduction might seem to a race of finite number.

“I was enthralled by the veins on the back of leaves, by the seeds growing inside fruit and pod,” he said, lifting his hands from the wheel as though to hold—as he must have held—each leaf between his fingers, each pod, broken apart to reveal the seeds within. “The sticky pollen on the stamens. It was bizarre. It was awesome. This