My heart beat at my ribs like a cudgel. I flashed back to the office I had left an hour ago, to my hesitation on the street—and the fact that even as I entered the T station I had not known for certain where I was headed. Had she been following me? I didn’t recognize her from the myriad faces I had studied on the train.

I found myself staring at the copper-haired woman, trying to reconcile what I heard and saw, what I knew to be possible and had formerly thought impossible. I felt fear like a pickax in my gut. “This can’t be real. How can this be real?”

“This is real. So calm down and listen to me.”

“I can’t calm down! This can’t be real. No! I refuse to accept it. Who put you up to this? Was it Richard? He has my wife—what more does he want?” I was trembling, my mind splattered in too many directions at once: Richard, Aubrey, the Mediterranean stranger, the dark presence—and now I felt it, as I had in the cafe—cloaked in the flawless skin before me. “Tell me why you’re doing this!”

She muttered in a language I didn’t recognize. Suddenly she lunged forward, copper coils splayed over her shoulder, the color at odds with the burgundy of her coat. The effect struck me for an insane moment as one of fire.

She grabbed my hand. “I told you,” she said, as though I were unintelligent or a child, or both. “To tell you my story.”

Warmth spread like something injected directly into my bloodstream, creeping up my arm to my shoulder. I tried to pull away, but as in the cafe three nights ago, the demon’s grip brooked no argument. The warmth spread into my chest. My heart rate slackened. It was still too fast—I don’t think any power could have quelled it in that moment—but even as I thought this, I felt my anxiety, the alarm, the intensity of my fear, smooth out into something more placid. As alert as ever, but at least within my control.

“I don’t have time for your breakdown, Clay. There are things I need you to know, and at the rate you’re going, you’re going to give yourself a heart attack, and then you won’t be any good to either one of us.” Her voice was as smooth as a hypnotist’s, and I thought again of my theory that this was, in fact, a hoax, that it was merely the power of suggestion working its way through my muscles and veins that even now had relaxed back into the chair.

Then I remembered that for suggestion to work, the subject had to be willing.

My gaze dropped to the table, to her hand, holding mine. Ten minutes ago I had considered the possibility of this very circumstance. Now that it had come to pass, though not in any way I might have imagined, something inside me splintered. With the same kind of spontaneous recall with which I had remembered Aubrey and the travel guides, I returned to that night in our apartment when, long after she was asleep, I crept out of bed, careful not to uncover her. And I saw again the e-mail on her account from Richard, a man I didn’t know, saying that he loved her, that he would be thinking of her tomorrow as she told me she was leaving, and that he would be waiting up for her with warm arms afterward. And I knew that night that nothing would ever be the same again.

I knew the same thing now.

Were it not for the unnatural tranquility that had probably saved me a public scene here in the bookstore coffee bar, I might have been overcome by the uncontrollable urge to shout like a madman, to lash out at her with a fist, or even to bury my head in my arms and weep.

But I did none of these things. And the woman—the demon—nodded as though satisfied and let go of my fingers. The calm ebbed, but only slightly, when our contact was broken.

“Your body simply needs some time to adjust to what your mind now knows. Meanwhile, no, Richard did not send me. He could no sooner send me than he could call down rocks from heaven. I am here of my own volition, and I have much to tell you.”

“Am I going to hell?” I asked, ashamed at the smallness of my voice. “Is that why you’re here?”

She sighed and rubbed the back of her neck, rolling her head slightly, in an all-too-human way. “I don’t know the answer to that right now.”

No comfort there. And while my visceral self had returned to seminormalcy, my mind was as frenetic as before, in ways that would have been impossible had my calm been the result of any conventional means like a drug. I was desperately trying to remember what, if anything, I had learned about demons in eighth-grade confirmation class.

Something, like a shiny bit of pottery mired in the mud of a shipwreck, caught the eye of memory: Father of Lies.

“If you’re a demon, why should I believe anything you say?”

She nodded, making no apparent effort to pass it off. “You raise a very good point. So let’s get this issue of credibility out of the way right now. I won’t waste my time telling you I’m not a liar because that, in itself, would be a lie. But I tell you, lying to you now will not serve my purpose.”

“What purpose is that? And why should I care or listen to anything you say?”

Finally an interesting question!” the demon said with what nearly sounded like relief. “The first answer is that I want to set the record straight. To shatter a few myths about my kind. The second answer is this: because it is a story unlike any other. I believe you’ll find it to be of personal interest.”

“Why, because I’m a seeker?” I didn’t hold back the bitterness.

“Because my story is ultimately about you.”

Something in me recoiled. “I don’t see how that’s possible.”

She folded her arms on the edge of the table. “When you were growing up, you honestly believed in the morals of stories, in the integrity of comic-book heroes, of Batman on television, didn’t you? And it had a greater impact on you than having morality drummed into your psyche by a church telling you to please an angry and distant god. You were good on principle. And yet here you are, without a wife or kids, or the success that being good was supposed to win you. Am I right? I know I am. And so you’re on a quest for new meaning because the alternative is only this: that goodness has won you nothing but pain. And you’re not willing to accept that.”

“No.”

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