Demon

“You want me to have more time?” I spun to face him. “Then you read the sophomoric thrillers, the Lovely Bones copycats, the Sex and the City rip-offs and Joyce Carol Oates wannabes in the pile on my desk. That would give me more time.” I waved the empty green grocery basket, both relieved and angry to see him. There had been nothing on my calendar to prepare me for his appearance. Could I not be allowed even this semblance of a mundane life, a moment to mourn the closing of my chapter with Aubrey?

Apparently not.

Our little table in the co-op café reminded me of the brown, two-person one I had willingly shared with a gorgeous redheaded demon at the bookstore. I stabbed into the pink flesh of wild salmon, speared limp stalks of broccolini.

Lucian leaned into the curved back of his chair, stretched his legs out to the side of our table, and silently watched me.

You’d better start talking, I wanted to say, because I told Helen I’d get as much of the manuscript as I had to her before I left for vacation.

But I ate in sullen silence, having given up altogether on trying to complete a synopsis. The story wasn’t finished, I told Helen, and I had no idea yet how it would end. “I just don’t know where my characters are going to take me right now.” It was one of those writer’s claims I had always treated with derision, always contending that writers were in control of their characters, even if only subconsciously. I still believed this, though I had come to wonder if there were indeed other writers in my position, influenced by forces they could neither publicly own nor predict.

At any rate, Helen thought whatever I had might be enough for them to make a decision. They would look at it after the offices reopened in January, while I was sunburning on the beaches of Cabo during the day and holed up with my laptop at night.

Meanwhile, the attention I’d focused on when and where Lucian might show up and on writing the account was giving way to my growing fixation on how the account would end and whether our strange relationship would end with it. Would he disappear from my life once his precious story was published?

The thought brought me no peace.

Lucian locked his fingers behind his head and looked up at the ceiling. “Lucifer failed.” He sighed. “I was confused. Nothing about this made sense to me, and my lack of answers only unsettled me more.”

I knew that feeling. “What were you unsettled about?”

“Everything.” He shook his head, the boyish curls brushing against the thick cords of his neck. “This God-man, this aspect of the Almighty in the body of a mortal, this Messiah, went about his business in exceedingly unsavory conditions. I mean, he hung out with whores and extortionists. I was flummoxed. Having gone to the trouble of becoming human, why not choose better company? Why not announce it with fanfare? A little panache? Hades. Why not awe the masses? This was the creator of the universe, after all.” He threw his arms up.

“What did it matter to you?” I scooped couscous onto my fork.

“It galled me, the way people treated him—not because I wanted to see him welcomed or worshipped, certainly, but for the sheer fact of who I knew him to be.”

Like so much of Lucian’s account, it was something I had not thought about. The story of Christ was such a cultural fixture, such a central theme throughout history that I had never dwelled on these details.

“He had more coming. I simply didn’t see it yet.” He lowered his chin, studied the zipper dangling from the neck of his polar fleece. “He performed a few miracles at least. It was something. Still, I came away disappointed, waiting for more. This was Elohim, the Alpha and Omega!”

“More, such as?”

“A mass-healing. Something.” He lifted his head and rubbed his goatee, his mouth slack. “Even your televangelists purport to do that much. But this was El. He could have reshaped the earth, restored Eden, shown even a portion of that terrible power that had spoken the green and wild earth into existence. He could have restored the humans to their original state. Hadn’t he come to save them, after all? They were uninspiring creatures to begin with, but at least he could have done that much.”

“Why do you think he didn’t?”

Lucian’s face went blank, “He seemed more interested in restoring individuals. I didn’t understand it. Why mend one vessel when the rest are cracking all around you? Why mend one when the rest don’t even like you?” He laughed. “But it got stranger: The priests of El himself called him a blasphemer and claimed he derived his powers from us.”

I wondered where I had missed all of this, growing up. How pale, how superficial and ritualistic, had been my early experience with the church and their packaged God.