Demon

She folded her hands on the table and smiled. “Oh, I wanted to see it! After all, it had to be a Herculean job, being a savior; it didn’t seem possible for one man. And we began to speculate among ourselves which of his favorites El would raise up. Perhaps he’d be a man of breeding and education. A leader of men. A great general—a soldier, in the very least. A conqueror. But Lucifer . . .” She shook her head so faintly and so repeatedly that it seemed to wag on her neck like a doll’s. “He wasn’t interested in trying to outguess El. He wanted a preemptive strike. So he raised up a Jewish king, a man ruthless enough to tolerate no threat to his own power. And he, too, watched for this Messiah. This King of the Jews.”

“This guy in Bethlehem.”

“Worse. A carpenter’s kid born of a teenage pregnancy.” She covered her eyes with her hand and shook her head. “It was so ridiculous we wondered if the report was wrong. But no, the scout had seen the girl with Gabriel.” She half spat the name, and I wondered, for the first time, what kind of history must exist between siblings, comrades, who have experienced eternity and parted to opposite sides in the conflict that ended it.

“El was making a clay child in the womb of some ordinary girl with a boring name. Not a queen, this mother of the new king. Not even a princess or woman of stature. An unremarkable virgin—and not even the best-looking girl I’d ever seen—pledged to marry some carpenter or another in some insignificant town. Suffice it to say, it didn’t look promising.” I felt now a strange tension in her, in the stooped back and the milky gaze, a tautness at odds with the withering body. “I thought Lucifer would laugh himself silly, would find this insanely funny. It became the brunt of our jokes. Really, El had gone too far with this one. He was making a buffoon of himself.”

“He didn’t laugh, did he?” Never once had the demon portrayed Lucifer as anything other than brilliant.

“No.” She rubbed and then picked at an age spot on her hand. “He stood off, alone, silent. I had never seen him like this before. As he stared with fixed eyes, his hauteur slipped from his shoulders like a robe. And as the reason finally became clear, we realized El’s plan was far more extravagant and unimaginable than anything we could have fathomed.”

I felt the faintest aftershock of that rush of energy, the echo of that deafening roar.

“And as I huddled on the periphery of that night, I saw a shot of light, heard the heralding Host. The pulse of the world fell silent, one sound only filling the void where that deafening announcement had been: the first wail of a newborn human.”

The babe. I had heard it.

She lowered her head to clutch at a soft tuft of white hair. “Had I blood, it would have frozen in my veins, for I recognized the voice in that human cry. And the knowledge of it rushed upon me all at once: Elohim, Creator Almighty, had sent that part of himself, the very part that had provided the light of that first and re-created Eden, the part that had spoken the words for the forming of the cosmos before my inception and for my own creation, had planted himself in the womb of an insignificant girl. He had arrived now in person.”

Inside my sweater, the hair on my arms stood out from my skin.

“Do you understand? Flesh! He had taken on flesh. Not flesh in feel and appearance as I have done, or Lucifer might do, as members of the Host have done since the early days, but true flesh! The sentence of humanity. Why? Why!” Her arms jerked like a puppet’s, and I saw pieces of her white hair sticking to her fingers, matted to them like blood on a windshield. “I racked my brain. I writhed with it. Why would El go to such lengths for these creatures—go so far as to demean himself by becoming one of them? I burned with it.

“And I could only hazard a guess about how Lucifer felt—the best-created, most favored of El—abandoned by his great benefactor, his God-King having turned his back on him for the sake of a race of clay people. How it must feel to watch these insane lengths El was willing to go to prove his love for their terminal souls!” Drops of white spittle came out of her mouth as she spoke, clinging in sticky strings to the corner of her lip, her chin.

“It came to me then with the howling force of a freight train: He had never loved us so much. And then: He had never loved even Lucifer so much! Had he ever made even the slightest concession for any of us, let alone the shining cherub? But there seemed to be no end to what he would do for the humans. But here, now, was the thing:”—she raised her finger, albino strands falling from it—“If El mended the rift between the humans and himself in this sordid love affair, what would become of Lucifer? Of us?” She held out her hands. “Of me?”