Demon

I blamed her, yanked the covers back from the bed where she was sleeping. I yelled at her and called her a whore. But as furious as I was with her, I was angry with myself, incredulous that years of proving reliable, of doing the right thing—of being a good man—had amounted only to this: that I would never be able to do and be those things she required.

I rubbed my forehead, the back of my neck. At Copley Station I pulled the wine back onto my lap to make room for a woman with several bags. She had a long, gray ponytail that reminded me of my college anthropology professor, a sprightly woman in her fifties who routinely came to class in her dressage boots, smelling of horse sweat and leather.

My seatmate gave me a slight smile, and I half expected her to address me by name, to begin talking about clay men and Lucifer’s personal vendetta against them. But she got up at the next stop, and I watched her go, thinking of the dressage boots that had carried from the classroom into my fantasy life, regardless of our thirty-year age difference.

A rough-hewn Asian woman in an army jacket smirked at me from across the car.

“She does bring to mind Professor Deptula.”

My heart twitched inside my chest as she came to sit in the seat where the woman with the gray hair had been. Her face was round, the kind of face a Korean friend of mine used to call a “pumpkin.” Her hair spiked in soft black tufts from her head, providing the angles and interesting dimension that her face did not. No fewer than four 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.”

Job? I was only vaguely familiar with the story, and more for literary reasons than biblical ones.

“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 Café. At Vittorio’s. At the distraction I felt at the sight of her in the bookstore, the smooth skin of her décolleté and the ankh stroking it.

“During that time Lucifer—brazen, beautiful as ever, brilliant with the light that was still him—became obsessed with the man Job.”

“Why?”