earrings dotted her earlobe. She was all cargo pants, leather, and camouflage, attractive in a rough-hewn way that refused to chase the classic Asian beauty she could never have achieved at any rate.
Her presence startled me—not for the fact that it came unannounced but because she had been sitting across from me for two stops before she made herself known. Had Lucian observed me, lurking in plain sight on other occasions? But at least one demon must always have been there for their swarming network to have such ready knowledge of my actions throughout my life. And while I knew this fact in theory, I found the reality of it unsettling.
“I didn’t see anything on my calendar.”
“I thought I’d drop by.”
Yes, unsettling.
“And what if I had stayed at home?” Every day upon opening my door or stepping from my apartment building, I wondered if someone I did not recognize would be standing there with a too-familiar smile.
Lucian fell back in the seat, expelled a sigh, then raked a hand through her hair, making it stand up straighter than before. The thick strap of a leather watch was bound around her wrist. “Well, that might have presented a problem.”
I didn’t like the sound of that. “Why?”
“I don’t care for your place.”
This admission stunned me. “Why?”
“It has a fair amount of, shall we say, spiritual static. Let’s keep it at that.”
I felt a wash of relief, followed quickly by a flash of anger. How long had I felt as vulnerable as if I lived in a fishbowl?
“What do you mean, ‘spiritual static’?”
“Clay, I didn’t come to discuss your apartment’s feng shui. I need to address an issue.” There was warning in her voice, seeming to imply that if I pressed her, she might get up at the next stop, leaving me with no answers but silence.
That thought frightened me most of all. “What issue?”
“This debacle of Job.”
“Listen. Lucifer’s days of proving his own worthiness and superiority were gone. He was beyond that, delighting only in El’s disappointment, which had become a motivation all its own. To that end, he became fixated on pointing out human shortcomings, even predicting them in advance like a billiard player calling a shot. Lucifer loved this particular game. And the more El favored the human, the more tempting the human—and the game—was to him. He derived great enjoyment from the infidelities of El’s favorites and in pointing out their failures. For these acts Lucifer first received the name Satan—‘Accuser.’”
As she said this, the fingers of her one hand enclosed the wrist of the other, seeming to check that the leather band of her watch was securely fastened. One of the earrings dangled against the corner of her jaw: a silver knife.
“Now understand that like your scientists with their mice in their mazes, we knew well the predicted outcome, the percentages, the overwhelming empirical evidence. We have, after all, been there since the beginning and understand something of human proclivities.”
I thought of the night he waited for me at the Bosnian Cafe. At Vittorio’s. At the distraction I felt at the sight of her in the bookstore, the smooth skin of her decollete and the ankh stroking it.
“During that time Lucifer—brazen, beautiful as ever, brilliant with the light that was still
“Why?”
“Because El said there was no one on earth like him. And this made Job irresistible to Lucifer, who meant to show El that even the best among the clay people hadn’t the faithfulness to show loyalty in the face of adversity. It’s one thing to love a god who protects you, showers you with wealth and all the worldly things that seem to matter so much in the short space of a lifetime. It’s another thing to love him when those things disappear.
“Now I’m going to tell you something. In all our work we go where we wish; Lucifer does what he will. But a barricade had been erected around Job, an unbreakable bulwark of protection. The Host were thick upon him, and we couldn’t touch him—until the day that El dispersed the hedge around him, and we were free to do what we would.”
There was an ominous sound to the lilt of her voice, and though I knew she spoke of the past, I was reluctant to hear what she said next.
“We spent the wealth, attacked his livestock, killed the servants. And then we targeted his children. I came in as a storm and Belial as a great wind, and the house they were in collapsed and killed them all. We reduced one of the richest, most noteworthy men in the world to nothing in the space of a single day.”
“In a day?” I echoed with morbid wonder.
“A day. And the next day Lucifer took his health. Simple, decisive measures with one outcome in mind: for Job to curse El. But he wouldn’t do it. Suffice it to say, Lucifer’s still sore about it.” She leaned forward, resting her elbows on her knees, fiddling still with the band of her watch. “Mind you, a single failure every now and then still keeps our success rate well over the 99.9 percent mark. Not quite perfect”— her smile was crooked—“but in my humble opinion perfection is overrated. And Job was a freak.”
“There was no one else exceptional enough for Lucifer to test himself against?”
“There would be, but he hadn’t come along yet. In the meantime, we grew bored, toyed halfheartedly, and shook our heads at El’s long-suffering. At times I wondered what would happen to us, but that uncomfortable sense, that inevitability in my immortal bones, had by then dulled to the phantom ache of a severed limb.
