He tucked it inside his jacket. I couldn’t help wondering what would become of that number—and the woman it belonged to.
“All right, you want to get to the end of the book.”
The skin on my arms prickled.
There’s a monster.
I suddenly wondered if I might have done better to stay home. I needed sleep. Television. A movie. I needed to focus on something normal—nothing, in other words—like any other anesthetized human for once. But I knew I wouldn’t trade being here for sleep or time in front of a television I had not turned on for more than a month.
Lucian settled into his chair as though getting down to business and lifted his coffee cup. I gave him a quizzical look.
“First, a toast.”
“To what?” I was almost afraid to know.
“To you, Clay. They’re going to love your story,” he said. “You’ll have a contract within three months—not to mention a nice little advance.”
Something lurched inside me, scrabbling at his words like pennies on the ground. I wanted to believe him. How I wanted to believe him! “You said you’re not omniscient.” But I lifted my coffee cup. He clinked it, sloshing coffee over the edges of both our rims.
“I’m not. But as you know, I play the percentages. And I would bet money on it.”
I took a tentative sip, trying not to think about it, but it was too late; my heart had started a desperate little dance.
I had to admit I could use the money. Moving my books and sparse belongings to Cambridge and trying to replace the furniture I had given to Aubrey had not done wonders for my checkbook. I supposed I had Lucian to thank for providing me other matters to focus on than the minimalist décor of my apartment that Mrs. Russo had so generously called “Spartan.”
“Speaking of which, you should look into some of those last-minute vacation specials.”
“I can’t afford it.”
“Put it on your credit card. You deserve it. You can finish the story on the beach.”
I dropped my head, slid my hands over my hair. The beach. I couldn’t remember the last time I had seen a beach or taken a vacation.
“Meanwhile, if we have a book to write, we’d better get to it. Now then . . .” He scrubbed the back of his head.
“The Messiah was born,” I said slowly, not wanting to remember the look of that withered face again, contorted in that terrible smile.
“Of course,” he said, leaning forward in the chair, elbows on his knees, hands clasped loosely together, “by the time of that horrible, eerie night, Lucifer had made tempting the faithful and bringing them before El like so many unruly children his life’s work. Not that it brought Lucifer much joy.”
“It’s what he wanted, wasn’t it?”
“He seemed less and less satisfied by it, his tolerance and appetite had grown so great. So what else was there for Lucifer—for us—to do except dwell on our less-favored status, to watch our own dwindling hope sinking deeper and deeper beneath the surface of a black bog, out of reach? Actually, the more we dared to hope for El’s renewed favor, the more we felt compelled to show these humans for the disappointments they were. And the more we carried out the commission of Lucifer—now Satan—the more out of favor we fell.”
“Talk about diminishing returns.”
“Exactly. And eventually, I suppose, the less we cared. By then the means had become an end in itself—a way of life, a purpose.
“This had already been the case with Satan for some time, but then he had always been a creature of mission, a dark visionary. And now his vision ignited a new and unholy fire in us as well. I found myself less melancholy and more wholly focused on a new trade: no more to glorify Creator Elohim—never that again—but to degrade and despoil all his favored people in ways unknown before. Now there was true pleasure. Don’t recoil like that.”
“I didn’t,” I lied.
“It’s not as though you’ve never wandered a step—and then ten more, each one easier than the last—down a path you had never thought yourself capable of taking. Did you ever once think you’d spend every night of almost four months drunk? That you’d wake up after a three-day binge to realize you were practically broke and still alone?”
I looked away. It was not a memory I wanted to recall, the weeks of drinking, the mad sobbing on my kitchen floor. A retaliatory one-night stand. Or two.
“But I’m not here to judge you. I’m only making a point.”
I retreated into my cup, realizing I had forgotten the bread pudding. It was cold now, a sodden, lopsided heap.
“Lucifer is a creature of method. Since his first failed attempt to raise his throne and then that business of Job, he had grown allergic to failure. Even in the garden of the first man and woman, he devoted long years to observing the humans, studying behaviors, weighing their tendencies, watching them like exotic creatures in their habitat. He is the master of risk reduction. Never impulsive, his plans ferment a long time in the darkness of his heart. The Great Inventor meditates at length on his craft, always the innovator. It is the reason he so rarely fails.
“Now at last was a venture worthy of him. It set him on edge so that he craved it to the exclusion of everything else. He was insanely preoccupied, shut up like a scientist in his laboratory, a beast pacing behind the arena gate.”
I thought I might know something about that kind of preoccupation. “And what was that challenge?”
“The spirit of the Almighty. God himself in the clay body of a man. Elohim come to earth.”
I felt my forehead wrinkle. “So you really mean it when you say he was God. Literally God and man.” I was aware of my dubious tone. I had always placed Jesus in the echelon reserved for Gandhi, Buddha, Martin Luther King Jr. But they were all mortal men.
The look on the demon’s face perplexed me. His lips were parted, turned up in just the hint of a smile. I felt he was somehow waiting on me, poised to see what I might say next.
Nikki, our waitress, stepped in, breaking the taut wire between us. I looked away as she refreshed my cup, cleaned up the coffee spilled from our toast. I was glad for the reprieve, unsure what had just happened between us.
When she left, he sat forward again, steepled his fingers. “Clay, what I tell you, I need you to hear. If you can’t believe it, then consider it a part of the story, and I’ll be content with that. I would be very content with that, in fact.” His smile was a quirk on just one side of his mouth.
Of course. It only matters that it is part of the story.
“Right now you need to know that this God-man was too big a prize for Lucifer. Too tempting, shall we say.” He laughed, and the dimple on his cheek squinted. I waited out the laughter as I had on other occasions. When it suddenly and disconcertingly stopped, he considered his hands, turning them over this way and that, as though he had not taken the time to examine them until now. “To thwart the son is to thwart the will of Elohim. This was too precious a goal for Lucifer to stand idly by. Too vital to Lucifer’s state of mind. It was to be the summation of his life’s work.”
“You’re saying he meant to tempt God.”
“Yes.”
“Isn’t that impossible?”
“Not entirely.” He looked and sounded, to all appearances, like the young scholar. He might have been a seminary student, ruddy cheeked and idealistic. “The clay body was the crux of it. No man, no soul in a clay body has ever been immune to temptation. In fact, every clay person since the first one had succumbed to temptation at some time or another, had experienced moral failure by El’s standards at some point in his or her life. But here, suddenly, was the unfathomable combination: the perfection of El in a fallible mud body. Perfection and weakness fused together.”
“Do you ever see anything redeeming in humans?”
He seemed on the verge of saying something then rerouted his response at the last instant. “It’s the nature of the vessel, Clay: cracked. Something that, once ruined, should have been thrown from the potter’s wheel to the refuse pile long ago. And what better way to prove it than to humiliate El with his own failure as one of them? He had chosen to become one of you. He chose the terms. If he wanted to fight with one hand tied behind his back, well then . . .” He shrugged.