Chapter 2
Lucia woke up to a beautiful sunrise, the clouds a celebration of orange and pink, the birds singing, and despite the chill in the air, she wasn’t cold. In fact, whatever she was lying on was delightfully warm, though not soft at all.
“Good morning, Lucia.” She jumped up and looked down at Finsternis, lying in the grass wearing a black button down shirt missing one sleeve. He didn’t seem at all uncomfortable laying on cold, wet grass, and the loss of one sleeve seemed a bold fashion statement.
“What are you?”
He rose to kneeling in front of her leg to check the wound. “A demon, of course. What else would I be?” Finsternis removed the makeshift bandage, one sleeve of his button down tied around his t-shirt, and poked at Lucia’s thigh.
She yelped, then realized it didn’t hurt. She looked at her thigh and saw that all that remained of what had been a deep gash at least two inches wide was a thin, pink line. “Satan wasn’t kidding.”
“Certainly not. Lucifer has no sense of humor.” Finsternis stood up and held the bloody t-shirt and sleeve in his outstretched hands. With no fanfare at all, they burst into purple flames and burnt to ash in the space of a few heartbeats. He brushed off his hands and looked at her expectantly.
“That was amazing!” Lucia clapped her hands together. That was exactly what she wanted to be able to do.
Finsternis gave her a quizzical look. “That? A newborn could do that.”
“A newborn? I though demons were fallen ang-“ The forsythia next to her burst into purple flame. Even less than a foot away, the flames were without heat, though they were consuming the bush somehow. “Stop that. I’m sorry, I was raised human. I was human until last night. If I make a mistake, correct me, don’t try to set me on fire!”
Finsternis looked abashed and the flames disappeared as suddenly as they had erupted. “I apologize.”
Something about the way he said it, the look in his eyes, made Lucia realize that she had accidentally hit on the truth. “You really were trying to set me on fire! And you failed?”
He ran a hand through his hair. In the gloaming light, Lucia could see that his hair was a very dark purple, not black. “I forgot about nephalim. It has been a long time since I have been around one.”
“Forgot what about us?”
“You are beyond difficult, you cannot hold your tongues and you are virtually immune to the abilities of demons and angels.”
Ignoring the rather unflattering description, Lucia focused on the last bit of information. “That’s good, right? Being immune to angels, I mean.”
Finsternis shrugged. “You aren’t immune to the agents of Yhwh and that is what’s after us.”
“So why am I immune to angels and demons? I mean, I’m half angel myself, apparently.”
“Heaven and Hell are not on the same,” he paused, “English isn’t the best language for this discussion, you know. Heaven and Hell are not in the same universe as this place.” He gestured about him. “They are . . . subuniverses, I suppose, created by Yhwh. Heaven is His place to live and observe and Hell is a consequence. We ca-“
“Consequence? Hell is a consequence?” Lucia wasn’t sure she’d heard right. It was too early and she needed coffee. She picked up her bag and purse, then looked at her pants. They were covered in dried blood. She couldn’t walk into the Krispy Kreme like this. “Turn around, please.”
Finsternis looked around, surprised. “Why? What do you sense?”
“Nothing, I’m just not providing a striptease for free.” Lucia pointed to her pants and waved the dress in her hand. It was probably too cold for it at the beginning of May, but the soft cotton sundress, with its pretty flower print and floaty skirt was her favorite article of clothing.
Finsternis turned around. “To answer your question, Yhwh created Heaven and angels, in indirectly Hell and demons, and was responsible for man, but is not the creator of the universe. That existed before. The universe has one guiding principle: everything has its opposite. Up quarks have down quarks, electrons have protons, matter has antimatter.
“A being of sufficient power can create what he wishes to his own specifications using the intrinsic forces of this universe-“
“I’m done and I need coffee.” Lucia picked up her bags, paused. “I’m sorry for being so rude. I have idea what’s wrong with me.”
Finsternis chuckled. “For one thing, you’re nephalim, for another, it takes a good deal of energy to heal like that. You must be starving. Which way?”
Lucia pointed toward the rising sun, then paused. “Yeah, it must be-“ she walked around to the other side of the yard, “right here. Oh, look- the doughnuts are hot! Hurry!”
“Is that good?”
“What, hot glazed doughnuts? That’s a reason to live.”
They stepped inside and Lucia stopped abruptly, Finsternis bumping into her. “Shit!” she hissed. “We have to go!”
“Why?” He was sniffing at the air, a smile spreading across his face. It was quite delightful, but Lucia didn’t give in to her suddenly discovered hunger.
“Hello? You’re purple, I’m red? You’ve noticed this, right?” She glanced at the cashier, who smiled politely.
Finsternis chuckled again, and turned her toward the counter. “Humans see what they expect to see. We’re a nice looking pair of humans, nothing more.”
Lucia walked to the counter. At this time of day, the wave of delivery drivers was gone and the office workers weren’t awake yet. There were only a few people eating at tables and reading papers or phones.
“What would you like this morning?” asked the cashier, giving no evidence that she noticed Finsternis’ purple eyes or missing sleeve or Lucia’s red eyes and pointed ears, though those were probably hidden in her newly long, thick curls.
“Can I have a dozen hot doughnuts?” Lucia had to swallow away the sudden watering of her mouth. “And a large coffee, leave room for lots of milk, please.” She turned to Finsternis. “What would you like?”
The cashier did a double take at that.
“Oh, it’s my turn to buy for the office,” Lucia explained.
“Oh, of course,” said the cashier.
“I’ll have the same,” said Finsternis. “I may as well do something nice for the office, too, right?”
“Okay, two dozen hot doughnuts, two large coffees, plenty of room for cream. That’ll be-”
“You don’t have to leave room for cream in mine, Kristi,” interrupted Finsternis, proving that he could read English, “I take mine black.”
“Of course you do,” murmured Lucia. “How much was that?”
Kristi was staring at Finsternis with naked lust, something Lucia found enraging for some reason. “How much?” she asked sharply.
“Oh, uh, $19.06.”
Lucia handed over her last $20, grateful it was payday. While they waited for their doughnuts, she pulled out her cell phone and called the office. “Doris? Yeah, it’s Lucia. Can I pick up my check now? I have an appointment at lunch, so I need to put it into the ATM before work. If that’s all right with you, that is. Okay, I should be there around-“ she checked the clock on the wall “seven. Yeah, I’ll call when I get there.”
Kristi came back with their doughnuts and coffees and Finsternis followed Lucia to the coffee prep station. He watched with amusement as she turned her coffee beige with milk and poured eight sugars in after it. “You don’t really like coffee, do you?”
“Yeah, yeah, yeah, coffee purists unite. Over there okay?” she pointed at a table near the door, away from the others.
“As long as we can eat this, I do not care, my dear.”
They sat at the table and dug into the hot, fluffy doughnuts covered in hot, dripping glaze. After his first bite, Finsternis’ eyes went wide, then rolled back in pure pleasure. Lucia was too busy letting hot doughnut melt on her tongue to pay much attention. She much preferred Dunkin Donuts for coffee, especially iced coffee, her favorite, but Krispy Kreme’s hot glazed doughnuts were the best doughnuts ever made. Fancy fillings and icings were meaningless next to the hot, sweet fluffiness of a fresh-from-the-fryer glazed doughnut.
What finally brought Lucia back was reaching down for another doughnut and her hand hitting the bottom of the box instead. She looked at it, mystified. She didn’t just eat twelve doughnuts in- she checked the clock- three minutes, did she? She looked across the table to find Finsternis looking at her sadly. “They are all gone.”
“Wow. Yeah, they are. Well, we still have our coffees and places to go, so let’s get there.” She picked up her coffee, closed the empty box and picked it up, along with her bags. Finsternis copied her and followed.
“Where are we going?”
“I just spent my last twenty. I need to go to my work and pick up my check from Doris. She gets in at like five am and leaves at ten. I told her I’m busy at lunch and I need to get my check early and put it into the ATM. I guess she’s in a good mood, because she actually said yes,” Lucia explained. “Then we have to find some place to hide until nine, when we can go to the pawn shop and I can cash it.”
“You don’t like banks?”
They passed the trash can outside and Lucia stuffed her box inside, followed by Finsternis. “I went to Liberty College for two years. It was the only college my mother would let me go to. Every year, I had to fill out all this paperwork for grants and such. Mostly, my mother did it all and had me sign everything when she was done.” Lucia sipped her coffee. “I should have wondered why she was being so nice.
“By that time, without me to drag along, my mother’s speaking career had dried up. She was a nasty, bitter woman who couldn’t be bothered to be nice to the little people, and by then, the little people had moved up and were the big people. The money was gone, so she got a bunch of student loans in my name and never told me about them. I tried to dispute it all, but I did sign the forms. Anyway, I had a bank account, but the loan companies froze the accounts. So no banks for me.”
Finsternis nodded. “What speaking career did your mother have?”
“Oh, your boss raped her, or so she says,” Lucia replied. It didn’t happen so much now that she was older, but growing up, everyone knew her as “the rape baby”. There was no getting away from it, her mother told anyone who would listen- and pay for the privilege. She had written two bestsellers on the subject of Lucia’s conception. She had learned to bring it up before anyone else did, to act like it didn’t matter to her, though it did. Other children could say that their fathers were pastors or cooks or car salesmen, while hers was a rapist, nothing more. Though Lucia had long suspected that Tanny Harris had passed off a forbidden premarital adventure as a rape, she certainly hadn’t been up to arguing the point as a child, and as an adult, she knew there was no purpose in arguing. She was the rape baby and her mother was the saint who raised her instead of having an abortion.
“He’s not my boss,” Finsternis growled.
“So why are you-“
“Hey, you need a ride?” A black Honda Civic had pulled up next to them, the only occupant a man in his late 30s in a white Budweiser t-shirt that had seen better days and jeans. Aviator glasses covered his eyes, a straggly beard half of his face, and shaggy brown hair drooped over the glasses.
Normally, Lucia wouldn’t even consider such an offer. He might as well have a neon sign flashing “RAPIST” over his car, but today she was a nephalim in the company of a demon.
“Sure, we could use a ride. You going downtown?”
The driver looked over and started, seeming to notice Finsternis for the first time. “Uh, yeah, I didn’t mean both of you . . .”
Lucia had had enough. Last night and now this? “You know what? Fuck you. Just give us a ride downtown and shut the fuck up about it.”
“Okay.” Lucia stared at him. It was hard to tell with the glasses and the beard, but his face had a curiously slack quality to it all of a sudden.
“Get in the car, little Light, unless you actually want to walk there,” advised Finsternis, opening the rear door.
“Um, yeah, sure.”
“Where to?” asked the driver, his voice oddly hollow.
“The library on North Washington,” replied Lucia, watching the driver carefully. He seemed to be in some sort of trance, though his driving was unaffected. His breathing was that of a man deeply asleep, but his quick reaction to being cut off by a white pickup truck proved that he was quite awake. Lucia turned to see if Finsternis knew what was wrong with the man, but he put one elegant finger in front of his lips. His fingernails were the same colour as his hair, a purple so dark it looked black when not in direct sunlight.
Lucia wondered what other people- humans- saw when they looked at Finsternis. The cashier at Krispy Kreme had clearly seen only a handsome man. Finsternis was handsome, in a sly sort of way, when he wasn’t displaying a jaw full of fangs. Even with his mouth closed, he was obviously not human to Lucia, and it was hard to imagine what everyone else was seeing when they looked at him. Finsternis’ face was a touch too symmetrical, his skin too perfect, his eyes a little too large, his cheekbones a little too high. Any one feature, on its own, could have belonged to a human, but together they screamed, “I am not human” and Lucia found it hard to believe nobody else could hear it.
HOW DID I NOT KNOW ABOUT THIS?!?!?!?
ReplyDeletebtw - i am hook. please write more/faster :D
Nice. Your writing reminds me of Tanya Huff's—and that's a good thing!
ReplyDelete