“Fuck,” Anil says, rearing out of his chair. “Fuckity fuck.” He fumbles around in his pockets and gets out a convenience-store packet of incense sticks, rips it open, takes all dozen sticks into one fist. With his other hand he pulls out his lighter, gets it going, lights the end of all the sticks at once. He gets down on his knees, closes his eyes and begins to murmur hurriedly, waving the sticks in the air, making tight little loops of fragrant smoke.
“What are you doing?” Billy asks.
Anil snaps his eyes open, looks sharply at Billy. “What does it look like I’m doing, nimrod? I’m praying.”
And behind him, one by one, all 777 LEDs on the God detector begin to light up.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN. DEUS EX MACHINA
THE ADVERSARY THE PROTECTOR OF COWS • TREATIES AND PEACES • BAD EXAMPLES • 16,000 WIVES • NON SERVIAM • THE DEVIL AT THIRTY • SQUANDERED EFFORT • THE DEAL • FOREVER TOGETHER • IDEAS
Barry loses consciousness and slumps to the floor, and the double doors swing open, revealing Lucifer, standing there, in his bloodied shirt, grinning widely. For one horrifying moment Billy can see through him, can see how the version of Lucifer that looks human is really just the tip, the tiniest tip, of something larger, infinitely large, really. Billy looks into Lucifer’s face and it is like looking through a window into an endless abyss, an inferno as broad as the universe. Except worse than an abyss, and worse than an inferno, because it has a mind. It is intelligent, diabolically intelligent, capable of scheming, strategizing, plotting. Capable of being an opponent, the opponent of anything, the opponent of a god. Billy looks at Lucifer and he sees the Adversary. And he finally understands what it means, to have sworn himself to that, and he wills himself to break free of his vow, in the way that you try to will yourself to wake up from a nightmare, but he can’t, he can’t wake up, he can’t break free, and the horror of this causes him to nearly lose his mind right then and there.
But something stops him. Some presence in the room. Something stabilizing, balancing, calming. Lucifer looks over Billy’s shoulder and his grin dissolves, replaced by recognition. An unmistakably contemptuous variety of recognition.
Billy turns. Behind him stands a dark-skinned Indian man, slender, young, maybe eighteen at best. He wears a keen blue suit, with a sharp yellow silk tie, and in his hands he holds a very fine briefcase. He’s incredibly handsome in sort of an androgynous way, a way that seems familiar to Billy somehow, as though he recognizes this man from a movie, or as though some facet of the man’s face can be found somewhere in every movie ever made, even movies that are nothing but footage of water.
The man steps out into the center of the room. “Lucifer,” he says, in a voice that is light and boyish but betrays no trace of immaturity.
Lucifer responds by forcing a polite smile, the kind of smile that reveals that a smile can be achieved by just tensing particular zones of your face. “Krishna,” he says. “The Protector of Cows.”
No way. No fucking way. Billy turns to look at the God detector. Its display seethes with evolving mandalic patterns.
Anil still sits in front of it, staring at Krishna in a stupor of disbelief: his jaw hangs open, the incense droops in his slackened fist. Fragrant smoke merges with the thin, acrid smell of frying circuitry.
Laurent looks from the machine to Krishna to Lucifer and back again, and finally, with nothing to say for once, he drops his ass into a chair.
Denver has her camera out and she leaves Billy’s side in order to maneuver for a better angle.
Billy can’t immediately see where his dad is.
“Long time no see,” Lucifer says. “What brings you here?”
“I received a request for intercession,” Krishna says, gesturing at Anil.
“A request for intercession?” Lucifer repeats, incredulously.
“But — I mean — you must get, what, millions of those a day.”
“True,” Krishna says, pronouncing the word with great precision. “But is it not apparent that the circumstances unfolding here today are unique?”
“Well, sure, but,” Lucifer says. “When you really think about it, couldn’t you say that all circumstances are unique?”
Krishna blinks, once, very slowly.
Lucifer says, “Okay, so, you’re telling me that that one’s yours?” Lucifer waves a hand to indicate Anil. “That’s fine. I’m not here for that one. I’m here for the other one.” He turns to address Billy. “Billy Ridgeway. Have you fulfilled your objective?”
“I have,” Billy says.
“Are you ready to depart with me, to return to Hell?”
“I am,” Billy says.
Keith Ridgeway gives a roar and springs out of whatever nook he’d been crouching in. He lunges at Lucifer with a ceramic blade in his hand. Lucifer turns, though, and snaps his fingers, and Keith vanishes in a spume of white flame. Dad, Billy thinks, with a jolt.
“He’s fine,” Lucifer says, quickly.
“What did you do to him?” Billy says, with mounting horror.
“I sent him home,” Lucifer says. “Ohio. Don’t worry. I have no interest in harming your father. I’m not inherently vengeful, you know.” He looks pointedly at Krishna, as if this utterance is a move in some long argument the two of them have been having. “But now. It is time.”
“Wait one moment, please,” Krishna says.
“What,” Lucifer says. “This has nothing to do with you.”
“Ah, but there you are incorrect,” Krishna says. He calmly approaches a metal table cluttered with Right-Hand Path crap, and, with a single fluid arc of his arm, a graceful motion, like the most sublime gesture in a modern dance piece about office life, he sweeps it clear, sending paper cups and reams of printouts to the floor. “If this situation did not fall under the scope of my dharma I would have no ability to hold you here, as it would not be rightful. And yet we can see that here you are held. Are you not?”
“I am,” says Lucifer, tetchily. “Although I fail to see why.”
Krishna places the briefcase on the table and pops its clasps. The report echoes off the room’s destroyed tile. Lucifer winces at the sound.
“Your actions are in violation of a long-standing agreement,” Krishna says.
“Nonsense,” Lucifer says.
From his case, Krishna produces a document festooned with official-looking seals and at least one strip of crimson ribbon. He proffers it toward Lucifer, who makes no gesture toward accepting it. “Need I remind you, Lucifer, of the protocols established by the Treaty of Sectarian Nonaggression?”
“You don’t need to remind me,” Lucifer says, “of the protocols of the Treaty of Sectarian Nonaggression.”
“I would hope that I would not,” Krishna says, “as you assented to them on October 25, 1965, and you assented to an earlier yet functionally identical version of them on October 24, 1648, in the form of—”
“The Peace of Pantheons,” Lucifer says, wearily. “Believe me, I remember.”
“Nevertheless,” Krishna says, “perhaps it would be worth taking the time to review their principles, which explicitly prohibit any god, demigod, angel, archangel, demon, or devil from deliberately harming or threatening to harm human adherents of any member faith. Therefore, when you endangered Anil Mallick with hellfire—”