Demon

“But those words spoken over the Passover table sounded with the hollow echo of a vault, sealing for eternity. As the first words of your creation had been full and pregnant, these rang now with the harsh sentence of exclusion, finality, and damnation.”

“Maybe the forgiveness was for you, too.”

He laughed, and this time the sound was low like thunder tumbling beyond the horizon.

“You are so blind, Clay.”

For a long moment we stared at one another, and I felt the gulf between us as I had never felt it before, as one breed considers the other, and his own mortality with it, knowing that he will be surpassed and survived by the other, that the other has unwittingly succeeded him.

“With sickened sense I saw it all,” he said softly, his expression expansive, eyes slightly widened. “They were going to kill him. It didn’t matter that he was innocent. It didn’t matter that his trial wasn’t even legal. It was a fiasco, politics and government being the twin playgrounds of Satan. It didn’t even matter that he was God. It was an appalling thought, the created killing the Creator. It went against every natural law.”

The tinge to his voice was not sympathy or horror but a strange brand of wonder.

“But Satan was out of control. The danger ran off his back like so much rainwater on slick and well-oiled feathers. El would not bend to the temptation of his flesh. Well then, let him suffer in it! More, the God-man would suffer by the hands of the people he insisted on submitting to, these miserable clay creatures that he loved so dearly—and he would suffer greatly. Our prince rose up with a glamour to blot out the sun and roared, Let him see how they love him in return!”

“Are you saying you didn’t want that, too?”

“Oh, I did. But this was error, this was folly. I saw too clearly the God-man’s refusal of temptation, the immaculate life, saw in him the image of the Passover lamb. I raised my arms, my voice, took to wing, frantic for it to stop. I understood what was happening, and it had to stop—abruptly, violently, by any means, any force. But there was no one to hear me in the roar of voices both human and angelic. Lucifer and all my blind sibling minions were mad, frenzied as berserkers before a battle, intent on hauling this Jesus to the cross like a child before a runaway train.” He rubbed his forehead. “I saw it,” he said faintly. “I saw it coming. But I was only one being. I could do nothing.”

“You didn’t want to kill him,” I said, incredulous.

“Oh”—and now his lips glistened—“a part of me wanted him laid open, flayed apart, rent in ways that humans were not meant to suffer and survive. And I reveled in the sight of his suffering. I wanted it, I lusted for it. But even then I knew it for seduction. And as I saw the blood running from his back and his arms and down his legs and into the ground . . . ”

It was unsettling, seeing him like this. He was normally so cocksure, so arrogant. “What? What was it?”

He pressed the heel of his hand into his forehead. “I wished I had no foresight. For the first time in my life, ignorance would have been a mercy to me. Then I might have enjoyed our triumph, the sweetness of that moment.” He rubbed his brows, pinched the bridge of his nose. “But El bore it all. As he had borne the ruin of Eden and the faithlessness of the humans before, with the same suffering with which he had wept down the skies onto the mud race he loved, he bore it. It was awful to me, the submission of Elohim to the murderous hands of his creatures.”

“I don’t understand.”

“The spilling of blood—it was the spilling of blood.” His voice cracked.

“Why do you keep saying that? What was it about the blood?”

“Idiot!” He was on his feet, walking away so that I stared after him—as did others in the cafe, heads snapping up from their companions and laptops. I started to rise, but he came striding back, shoved his weight into the chair and leaned over the table until it creaked and threatened to tip. His hair was disheveled, his skullcap missing. He wiped a hand over his beard and blurted, “Passover! The Passover lamb!” He was beyond himself, and I searched for something to say to calm him down. The man at the cafe counter was tense, and I knew we were on the verge of being told to leave.

“Death had come to every firstborn in Egypt—animal, king, slave—except in the homes of those Israelites who had painted the blood of perfect lambs on their doors. Death passed over those doors. Now here it was, running down the legs and arms of that God-man, the blood like that of those perfect lambs, their veins drained into basins, that vital, crimson reparation, the blood of atonement, once smeared on the doorframes of the Passover . . . now etched on the heart of man.”

I had heard the phrase “Lamb of God” in hymns. I had heard the Jesus freaks saying he died for their sins. I had never understood what they meant.

Until now.

“I howled a banshee cry, but it was too late. They did the unspeakable. They hauled him off to a public execution. In my ears and all around me was the motley fervor of Legion. And Satan had eyes for nothing but the son—that part of Elohim that had formed the cosmos and reshaped the terra and, most importantly, refused him— broken, as wretched as a human can be before a mortal body cries out, too broken to hold its own spirit.”

I remembered the broken body of the jogger, cracked beyond life.

“‘It is done,’ he said. And I thought, Yes. It is. And the hourglass that had come into existence for me on that first day when time was created, that had signaled the measure of time until an unknown and inevitable end, was jolted, a wealth of sand—precious grains of limited time—tumbling through that channel, gone forever. I felt I could gather the crumbs of my future in one palm.”

I saw now the rugged, multidial watch on his wrist, time in all its measurements, time measured and captured, no farther than arm’s length. Time, owned and on occasion even stopped in the mechanism of that fine chronograph.

“Yes. Now you understand. And there it is.” The watch was frozen, the second hand in mid-stutter, unmoving.

“As he died, I felt it—his departure, though I had become accustomed to the sense of him here, moving about the earth as flesh, and I had become numbed to it, too. The effect was that while I did not feel with acute awareness his presence here, I felt acutely the moment he departed. Felt it more deeply than the mortals who fell