Chapter 2, pp 20-23

Another demon’s grin crinkled the skin around his eyes as he turned to walk down the alley opposite the direction Andy had gone. They came out on Vine Street at the old Star Factory. A sign promised storage units in the near future, but the future was ten years coming so far.

“We could wait in there,” Finsternis suggested.

“In there? There are spiders in there, I know it.”

Finsternis stopped and stared at her. “Spiders? You are the daughter of the Grand General himself and you are afraid of spiders?”

Lucia stared right back at him. “Yes. Yes, I am.”

Finsternis sighed. “Where are we going then?”

“Down by the river-“ across from the mission with the big “Jesus Saves” sign. Lucia groaned. Everywhere and everyone was a danger to her now. Places that once promised safety couldn’t be more dangerous. “We are not fucking going into the spider factory.”

This time she got Finsternis’ low chuckle, somehow delivered without  showing any teeth. “What was that?”

“Oh, right, that wouldn’t work on you. Fine, let’s find a way in.” They walked around to the side facing the river before they found a broken window missing a board. “Would it have worked on Andy?” Lucia asked as Finsternis crawled through.

“Hmmm?” A purple flare of light lit up the window. Lucia stuck her head in to see a small ball of purple light hovering over Finsternis’ head, lighting a circle twenty feet around him, casting odd, attenuated shadows in all the wrong directions. Lucia blinked away sudden dizziness.

He gestured to her and she clambered through the window. Broken glass crunched under her sandals. They were on the factory floor and huge metal shapes reared up out of the darkness like monuments to some forgotten religion, a broken, capitalist Stonehenge, perhaps. Lucia didn’t know what had been produced at the Star Factory, it had been closed by the time she moved to Scranton, and what she could see of the rusting machinery by demonfire was no help at all.

She could see the cobwebs, though, massive gobs of them, stretching dozens of feet in places. How big were the spiders in here, how numerous? She shivered and stepped closer to Finsternis.

“Would it have worked on Andy?” Lucia asked again, desperate to hear Finsternis’ voice.

He walked deeper into the factory, away from windows that would display the unnatural light. Lucia shuffled carefully after him, afraid of shoving her exposed toes into a web or a pile of glass.

“Yes, your powers of persuasion would work against the average true believer, but they would be aware of it and remember it, and you, later. It would not work against agents of Yhwh or the truly devoted.” He paused. “Stay away from Catholic priests, Little Light. The Ritual of Exorcism wouldn’t banish you, but it would . . . contain you.”

They came to the innermost point of the factory floor and stopped. A firepit had been constructed here and moldering couches and loveseats surrounded it. It didn’t surprise Lucia that people lived here, homelessness was a serious problem in Scranton that had only gotten worse since the economy collapsed. She only hoped they didn’t come back in the next two hours. Homeowners called the police when they found trespassers in their homes, the homeless tended to get immediately violent. Lucia couldn’t blame them, but she didn’t want to choose between being hurt and hurting a desperate squatter.

“Exorcisms work?” Lucia was surprised. Clearly, demons had no need or ability to possess humans, they had their own bodies. In fact, she thought that maybe her own powers of persuasion explained possession stories. The ones that weren’t explained by mental illness or epilepsy, that is.

Finsternis shrugged and sat down on an orange and avocado plaid couch. Lucia sat across from him on a burgundy velvet loveseat very much like the one that sat, unused, for over fifty years in her grandmother’s living room. The velvet on this loveseat was rubbed bare and covered in stains and burn marks, but once it had been a fine piece of furniture, no doubt much loved by a young married couple just starting their climb up the ladder of the American Dream. Lucia stroked one arm of the chair gently and wondered what had happened that it had ended up as part of a homeless encampment in a decaying, abandoned factory.

The demon fire floated delicately to land in the firepit where it immediately began imitating real fire. The misplaced, attenuated shadows danced merrily, leaving Lucia nauseated.

“Well, if properly performed by a qualified exorcist, yes, an exorcism can banish a demon from this plane. I am told it is quite painful.” Finsternis’ eyes glowed in the eerie light.

Lucia considered this. She was now playing by a completely new set of rules in a world she hadn’t known existed, and she’d rather learn the rules in advance rather than by being caught up in them or killed by them. She didn’t think Finsternis was being deliberately difficult, it just didn’t seem to occur to him everything Lucia didn’t know. “Doesn’t an exorcism include Psalms?”

Finsternis shrugged.

Lucia pulled her iPad from her bag and turned it on. She’d won it in an online giveaway, and gladly paid the $15 per month for 3G access, and she was never happier about that than she was today. She tilted the screen at Finsternis. “It does, see? Psalm 53. So why didn’t Psalms work for Andy?”

Finsternis made an offended noise. “Is Andy a qualified exorcist to put any power into a translation of a translation of the original Hebrew? What do humans expect?”

Lucia glared at him. “Humans don’t have the benefit of knowing what the truth is. We muddle along, confused and lonely, and around every corner is another con man who will tell you the one and only truly true truth, different from all the other truly true truths and if you don’t get it right, you’ll burn forever in Hell.”

Silence stretched between them, mocked them from the odd, half-formed shadows of the demon’s unnatural fire.

“There are no fires that consume in Hell,” Finsternis said softly. “And no damned souls, either. Children laugh and play in the eternal twilight, all the children Yhwh wants to destroy.”

Now Lucia had her answer. Finsternis had no love for Lucifer, he seemed to resent the Grand General, in fact, and he varied between amused and annoyed when it came to Lucia, so she had wondered why he was helping her at all. Demon children laughing and playing hadn’t occurred to her at all, but it was a reason Lucia trusted. She had never felt much of a connection to another human being, for now obvious reasons, but children deserved her best effort at stopping the Apocalypse. She’d read Revelation and she couldn’t think of a single child who deserved to live through that, human or demon.

“The angels don’t have children, do they?” she asked.

Finsternis shook his head. “No, they do not. Yhwh makes the angels, each one more perfect than the last. What Lucifer and the others do, with humans, is considered an abomination by the angels, a perversion like a human-“ he paused “engaging in relations with a dog.”

Lucia thought about it for a moment. Lucifer hadn’t looked much different from her at all, not so much that that analogy seemed apt. “So what does that make me?”

Finsternis’ lips twisted. “A sick joke that ought to die.” He reached out a hand to her, then withdrew it. “No demon would see it that way. For one thing, you are not responsible for your existence.”

“Oh, that makes me feel better. I’m just the universe’s rape baby to be pitied and talked about behind her back, but don’t let the children play with her, she might be contagious!” All her life, that had been the story. Churches were eager to hear her mother’s “inspiring pro-life story”, eager to see the child that her mother had so bravely birthed, and completely unwilling to allow their children to play with her, as if being the child of a rape were some sort of contagious disease their own children might catch.

“Little Light-“

Lucia stood up and walked to the edge of the ring of couches so Finsternis couldn’t see the tears in her eyes. No matter how hard she tried to pretend it didn’t bother her, a lifetime of rejection, of being on the outside looking in, of being an object lesson rather than a person had left its mark on her. “Don’t “little light” me! I will do my best to save Hell’s children, though what the fuck that will be, I have no idea, but don’t lie to me and don’t patronize me.”

“I am not-“

“Hey! Who are you? Get out of my-“

Lucia turned to face whoever had interrupted them, but before she could get more than a quick look, enough to see a deeply lined face, an untrimmed grey beard and far more layers than were necessary on a warm morning in May, Finsternis had leaped over the firepit and the couches in one fluid movement to land between her and the intruder, whose last sentence ended in a strangled yelp of surprise. Finsternis reached toward him, hands wreathed in lavender fire, and Lucia yelled.

“Stop!”

Demon and human froze and looked at her with matching expressions of surprise. “We’re in your home, aren’t we?” Lucia asked.

The man nodded, dark eyes wide, and stepped back from Finsternis. “What are you?”

At that, Lucia and Finsternis shared a glance, and Finsternis bared his teeth. A true believer, it seemed, just come from breakfast at the soup kitchen.

“You wouldn’t believe me if I told you,” said Lucia. She had enough trouble believing it herself. She gestured at Finsternis. He raised one eyebrow. Put out your hands, she mouthed. He shook his head.

The man responded with a sarcastic laugh. “Lady, you have no idea what I’d believe.” He walked around Finsternis, several feet out his reach, and sat down on the velvet loveseat. “Well, sit down. I’m Joe, by the way.” He noticed the iPad on the cushion next to him, reached out to touch it, then withdrew his hand and tucked it into his sleeve.

Lucia sat down opposite Joe on the orange and avocado couch. They both looked at Finsternis, teeth still bared, hands still wreathed in unnatural flames. “I’m Lucia, this is Finsternis. Finsternis, quit being rude and sit down.”

“Are you out of your mind, Lucia? He can see us for what we are. He is a true believer and a danger to us both- and to all the little children you claim to care so much for.” Angry, Finsternis’ voice took on an eerie, multitoned quality that left Joe visibly shaking.

“Stop it right now. I am not killing some poor homeless man for the great crime of seeing us,” responded Lucia, matching Finsternis’ glare with all the Daughter of the Grand General she could muster, hoping to distract him from the obvious, that she had no way of stopping him if he was determined to kill Joe.

Lavender fire darkened to a deep, royal purple and spread up Finsternis’ arms. “There is a price to be paid for winning, Nephalim, it must be paid again and again and it is always paid in blood. That is the game as Yhwh created it, we are merely players.”

“Then we won’t win,” Lucia said calmly. She couldn’t explain it, but it was as if Finsternis were pulling her anger from her, and the more enraged he became, the calmer she became in turn.

“What?!” Black flames exploded up and down Finsternis’ frame, leaving him an avatar of fire, only his violet eyes recognizable. He pointed at Joe and Lucia leaped between them, watching with little interest as nearly black fire stopped inches away from her to pour off in either direction, scorching the couches.

“I will not sacrifice all the Egyptian firstborns to prove my might, order the Amekelite children bashed against rocks or kill all the world to destroy a few nephalim who didn’t ask to be born. I will not do it. I will not become Yhwh. And if becoming Yhwh is the only way to win, then I will lose.” Lucia held his gaze, ignoring the fire, the trembling man behind her, everything except Finsternis’s amethyst eyes. The flames faded to lavender and retreated to his hands, though his fangs remained bared. “Finsternis, has playing the game by Yhwh’s rules ever worked before? For anyone?”

Finsternis closed his eyes and sighed, the flames winking out, all of them, plunging the factory into darkness, save for his eyes, glowing in the gloom.