Chapter 3 - Demonic PoV

            Finsternis stared at Lucia. He had been wrong about her. He had seen her as just another nephalim, inexplicably female, too weak to do what must be done. Oh, Lucia had looked glorious flying out of a shattered window, scarlet curls fluttering like the flowers on a flame tree, crimson eyes wide. He’d always found the red demons, coloured like fires that actually burned, to be the most attractive, and Finsternis had to admit he was still fighting an urge to bury his fingers in Lucia’s hair, to do things that would make her eyes go wide.

            But she was too human, too damaged by savages who thought nothing of eating their young’s souls. Finsternis didn’t hate humans, he disdained them. No demon would let another starve or freeze or suffer, not for one moment. Purple demons did not hate orange demons- or reds or yellows or blues or greens, for that matter. Male demons did not see females as lesser. Humans were even more vile than they accused demons of being.

Lucia was another Judas, Finsternis had assumed, to be manipulated into doing what was necessary because he lacked the courage to do it himself. Now he wished for another Judas, because this was worse.

            Save the Horsemen from their appointed fates? This was madness. They were soldiers in a war and Lucia wanted to have a nice chat with the enemy’s greatest weapons. It was like feeling pity for a nuclear bomb. The Grand General’s children were always beyond frustrating, but Lucia was in a class by herself.

            And there she was all narrow-eyed, clenched jaw challenge, ready to fight Finsternis but not the Horsemen. There was something indefinably demon about her, but only an angel’s child could be this stubbornly stupid.

            The demonry in general accepted the angels in their midst, arrogantly striding about in pockets of space among the rainbow clusters of demons. Finsternis, however, hated the angels, hated their frosty perfection, their overweening pride. Allied angels were a necessity, nothing more, to be tolerated as they looked down their perfect noses at everything not them.

            The Grand General was the worst of the lot, arrogant pervert that he was. He and his ilk used human women, not for pleasure, but to thumb their noses at the creator. It would be one thing for Finsternis to bite into soft, pale skin . . .

            Finsternis shook his head. Being alone, separated from the demonry didn’t usually affect him this way, not so quickly anyway. Surely that was the problem, the way his thoughts kept wrapping around to a nephalim. Lucifer’s crazy daughter, no less. Finsternis was chosen for these missions because he could go months or even years out of Hell without collapsing into a limp rag of loneliness. Finsternis was an oddity, even for a purple.

            He bit back a sigh. This was not going to be quick. He had spent two years protecting and manipulating Judas. If Finsternis was falling lonely already, he wouldn’t make it two months.

            “Fine. We will try it your way. It will not work, but we will try it.” Lucia’s jaw unclenched, her eyes opened. “But, we must do some things my way, as well.”

            “What?” She crossed her arms and regarded him sternly.

            “I am not walking the Earth to find the Horsemen. You are going to persuade a rich human to give you money,” Finsternis did understand her aversion to stealing, at least from the poor, “and persuade whomever you have to in order to get us on a plane. Agreed?”

            She rolled her eyes, but assented. “Fine. It’s .  . .” She looked at the human, who was playing with the iPad again.

            He looked up. “8:20. And you don’t need a plane. At least not for Famine. Look, Santalvo’s based in White Plains. That’s about two hours by car.”

            As wildly irritating as the true believer’s presence was- Finsternis felt like he was wearing clothes made of barbed needles- he was turning out to be quite useful. Of course, that was life with the Grand General’s children. They turned chance on its side. The people had attributed such events to the presence of the Messiah, but it was Judas who caused a stack of falling bricks to land spelling out יהוה.

            Admirably, Lucia did not dither once she made a decision. She picked up her things, stuffed her iPad in her bag and stood up. “C’mon, Finsternis, we have a dark alley to hide in.”

            Finsternis stood up immediately. Hiding in shadows meant soft, cool, sweet-smelling skin pressed up against- He bit down on his tongue, hard, his fangs biting deeply. Any time he let his thoughts wander, it seemed, they would wander right under Lucia’s dress. He needed to get himself under control. If any demon knew what he was thinking, he would never live down the shame. A nephalim!

            Lucia was holding a keyring with a single key on it out to the human. “Take it. I need access to the internet, or I’d give you the iPad. But this is for my apartment. 1351 Cedar Ave, apartment 5. It’s paid up for another three weeks, with water, gas and electric. I can’t go back, you may as well enjoy it.”

            The human smiled for a moment, the sadly shook his head. “If I leave here for three weeks, it’ll be somebody else’s place and I’ll have to find another squat,” he explained.

            “Oh.” Lucia looked so dejected at not being able to help the man, Finsternis acted without thinking. He spread out his arms, pulled Hell’s Infinite Inferno into himself, just a tiny fraction, but more than most demons could handle.

            The fire filled Finsternis, surpassed him, consumed him. As always, it was a struggle to remember what he wanted, that he wanted anything at all besides the pleasure and the pain, the fundamental force itself.

            Wresting control, he passed the flames around and about the true believer, enjoying the human’s abject terror, then wound the flames- now the puce and ashen colours of the human’s soul- over the entrances to the factory. After every door and window was wreathed in flames the colour of a broken heart, Finsternis let go, allowed the inferno to snap back to Hell, the passage leaving him bereft and snappish.

            “What was that?” asked Lucia, wide-eyed. The human just stared and shivered.

            “A barrier. No human but this one can enter this place now. An angel or a demon could,” he squinted at the residue, visible only to him, “with difficulty, but your friend here can spend three weeks bathing and sleeping on a bed and no one will steal his ‘squat’.”

            Lucia smiled in the human way, then quickly pulled her lips straight, an unexpected gesture that surprised Finsternis, but not nearly as much as her quick, light hug. Shame. He’d work on feeling it just as soon as the feel of her skin wore off.

            They left the factory and Finsternis sighed with relief. Away from the true believer, the irritation subsided and he felt more himself, more in control. The shadows of the alley pulled him in. Lucia had called it an ability, but his relationship with shadows was an affinity. Demons were beings of darkness as angels were beings of light. Finsternis didn’t do anything at all when he entered shadows, the shadows themselves were drawn to him, sought him out, pulled him in. As long as Lucia was close enough to him, the shadows welcomed her, too.

            He stood as close as he could to Lucia without touching her. It was like trying to keep apart a magnet and iron filings. Nephalim, he reminded himself. Nephalim, Lucifer’s daughter, full, red lips she had a habit of biting when thinking . . .

            “He’s here,” whispered Lucia as a steel grey Mercedes pulled up.

            “Who?”

            “My boss. All those early mornings, work lunches and late nights unpaid, he owes me. This does not qualify as stealing.”

            A pleasant looking man in his mid 60s got out of the car. A thin grey combover failed to cover the crown of his head, a small potbelly strained his faded blue oxford shirt, and downturned blue eyes peered warily from behind thick tortoiseshell glasses.

            To a human, Gil Landry would have appeared to be a kindly grandfather, not the face of evil, but Finsternis saw with more than his eyes. To Finsternis, Gil was eaten through by greed and callousness, twisted by the feeling that somewhere someone was getting something that Gil could have, should have, had.

            “Hey, Gil!” Lucia strode from the shadows.

            “Oh, hello, Lucia. How are-“

            Lucia cut him off. “You’re fucking giving me five thousand dollars and your car.”

            Being half angel, the color of Lucia’s soul was hidden from Finsternis, but he could see it when she persuaded someone. At the same moment Gil’s face went curiously slack the sickly greens and yellows of his soul went the same brilliant red as Lucia’s eyes and hair, shot through with gold. It was, without a doubt, the oddest color for a half angel, but Finsternis had never seen a female nephalim before, either.

            Gil handed her his car keys, then paused. “Write me a fucking check for $5,000, Gil.”

            Finsternis could have told Lucia it was not necessary to use obscenities while persuading, but it was amusing to listen to her pronounce obscenities with such precision in that soft, high voice.

            Gil handed her the check and walked into the building without a backwards glance. Lucia turned to Finsternis. “I’m hoping you know how to drive?”

            Finsternis rolled his eyes. Satan’s children were never the most practical of weapons. “Since the Model T, Little Light.” He took the keys.

End Chapter 2, pp 24-27

“He is a bastard, ain’t He, the good Lord?” said Joe. “Proved it enough to me these last ten years. Can you turn the light back on? Little weird, just your demon eyes, all red and purple, in the dark.”

Lilac fire roared in the firepit, casting bleak light that abruptly ended outside of the circle of couches. “Has there ever been a human born that knew when to quit?” asked Finsternis irritably.

“If I knew when to quit, I’d’a killed myself ten years ago. I ain’t exactly livin’ the dream here, ya know,” replied Joe calmly, retaking his  seat on the velvet loveseat. He gestured at the iPad. “iPad?”

“Yeah. If you want to check your email or something, go ahead.” Lucia sat on a couch the exact colour of Pepto-Bismol and patted the seat next to her, scratching at her right calf with the other hand. Finsternis rolled his eyes, but sat next to her, jumped a little when she took his hand in hers. She rubbed at her left shoulder ineffectively, unable to reach the itch.

“Thanks. The library’s a bitch about the 30 minute rule. Well, if you look like me, anyway.” He picked up the iPad. “So, what’d I do  to deserve a couple of demons in my humble abode?”

“Nothing,” snapped Finsternis. Joe looked up at Finsternis curiously, then returned his attention to the iPad.

Lucia glared at Finsternis, unable to figure out what was the matter with him. He’d been polite and talkative with her, now he appeared to have given up blinking altogether and his voice retained an otherworldly tone. What was his problem with Joe? She scratched at her arm. Frustratingly, the itch was under the skin, too deep to reach, like a wool sweater under her skin. “You’re much more sensitive to true believers than I am, aren’t you? Sitting here must be driving you crazy.”

“Yes. He is dangerous, even if you refuse to see it.” The flames in the firepit flared and deepened. Lucia had to wonder what Hell looked like, filled with demons whose every mood affected the fires. Were all the flames purple, or did different demons produce different colours? If it were the case that colours were unique to individuals, then Hell would be the most beautiful place she could imagine.

“All you feel is belief in Yhwh, right?”

“Hey, when I open up the Twitter app it goes right to this LuciaDarkness person. Is there a way to switch it to mine?” Joe asked.

“Oh, yeah, just go to Twitter from the internet app, Safari, and sign in from there. The Twitter app is set up for mine,” Lucia explained.

“The homeless guy is on Twitter,” said Finsternis.

Lucia shrugged. “Who isn’t? Anyway, all you feel is belief in Yhwh, right? I mean, you don’t feel how they feel about Yhwh, do you?”

Finsternis opened his mouth to speak, shut it and shook his head slightly. “I am not a mind reader, no, but what difference would it make how he feels about Yhwh? He believes, truly believes, isn’t that enough?”

Lucia turned to Joe. “Hey, Joe, how’s the good Lord been treating you?”

Joe handed Lucia her iPad and pulled a bottle out from under the layers of clothing. Lucia thought it might be Irish Rose, which was one step below drinking paint thinner. He opened the bottle, sucked down alcohol for a few seconds, only stopping when he gagged. “The good Lord? He killed my wife and my daughter. Car accident. My wife was taking McKayla to daycare and she hit a patch of ice, couldn’t stop the car, and then, well,” he shook the bottle, sending oily amber liquid sloshing. “Do I really need to tell you the rest?”

Murders were virtually unheard of in Scranton, so tragic accidents were heavily reported. Lucia remembered when Joe’s wife and daughter died, the picture of a mangled white Honda Civic covering most of the front page. She remembered the pictures of Joe, who, despite his heavily lined face and grey beard, couldn’t possibly be over forty, holding back tears at the funeral.

“He believes, Finsternis, but he has no more love for Yhwh than you do,” explained Lucia.

“What are you two doing here, anyway?” asked Joe. He took another drink.

“He’s a demon. I’m the daughter of Satan. I need to stop the Apocalypse from happening and he’s helping me out with that.”

“Oh.” Joe considered that for a moment, then guzzled the rest of the alcohol. “How are you going to do that from here?”

Lucia looked at Finsternis. “How are we going to do that, Finsternis?”

Finsternis shifted uncomfortably. “Well, you need to stop the Horsemen and the Messiah. That will stop the Apocalypse.”

“The Messiah? How am I supposed to stop Jesus?”

“Oh, it’s not Jesus this time, it’s someone else. Besides, Judas was able to stop Jesus, and he was no more powerful than you. Although he was not afraid of spiders,” Finsternis explained.

“That makes no sense,” said Joe. “Jesus was God. Although I could buy Judas as the son of Satan.”

“No, it does make sense. Jesus wasn’t officially raised to the status of divine until the Council of Nicea, approximately 300 years after his crucifixion.” Lucia looked at Finsternis, who nodded in agreement.

“What?” Joe asked, clearly struggling through an alcohol haze.

“The messiah is a Jewish concept that does not require divinity. The prophesied messiah is a man, nothing more. The early converts to Christianity, all of whom were Jewish, had no problem accepting Jesus, the man, as the messiah. However, the general population at the time, in that part of world, worshipped the Roman pantheon of gods. These gods frequently had children by humans, children who were part god and had, well, superpowers.

“The pagans at the time were unimpressed by a human messiah, so, in order to make Jesus more attractive to the pagans, the Council of Nicea rejected all the gospels and writings that showed Jesus as a man, in favor of gospels that presented Jesus as divine.” Lucia paused. Joe was staring at her blankly. “Didn’t you ever wonder why only four of the twelve apostles wrote about Jesus? I mean, he was the son of god, the other eight didn’t have anything to say about that?”

“Huh, I never thought about that,” replied Joe.

“1,700 years since the Council of Nicea, most people don’t. Everyone seems to think the Bible was delivered straight from Heaven by Archangels. That’s not true. There were many writings about Jesus in the 300 years after his death, including the gospels of all 12 apostles, and many of them were contradictory. The Council of Nicea was formed to create one authoritative book concerning one agreed-upon narrative: that Jesus was God made man,” explained Lucia.

“There was a Gospel of Judas?” asked Joe.

“Supposedly. It’s not like the Council carefully filed away the texts they rejected,” Lucia said. She turned to Finsternis, who looked somewhat less murderous, and asked, “So, we have to stop the Messiah, but what about the Horsemen? Are they humans, too?”

“Yes, Pestilence, War and Famine are. Likely they do not even know what they are yet. They may never know. They are guided into place by Yhwh’s plan, herded like cattle for the slaughter. Famine will spread starvation, Disease will spread plague, War will spread violence without meaning to or knowing why. We must stop them.”

“What about Death?”

“Death is-“ Finsternis muttered something incomprehensible, a mixture of a hyena’s bark and a wolverine’s growl. “A problem for later.”

“So, the first three Horsemen could be anyone, anywhere?” Lucia sagged back against the filthy couch. 6,500,000,000 people on the planet and she was looking for three of them. She’d thought it would be impossible if the Horsemen were famous people, world leaders perhaps. Three random humans unaware of their role in the Apocalypse was just as bad. At least famous people would be easy to find. Hard to kill, but easy to find. Now, she was faced with finding three Joes in all the world without any place to start.

“Famine, huh? What about those Santalmo people?” asked Joe.

Lucia sat up. “The genetically modified food company!”

“Why would you suspect a food company of creating Famine?” asked Finsternis.

“Santalmo engineers its seed to germinate only once. With normal produce, like corn, a farmer can reserve a certain amount of the harvest to plant the next year. Produce grown from Santalmo seed won’t grow again next year. You have to keep buying seed from Santalmo year after year.

“Santalmo says that cross pollination isn’t possible, but there are rumors that in places like Mexico, poor countries, the cross pollination happens anyway, though, and farmers who reserved some of their harvest to plant again next year end up growing nothing at all,” explained Lucia.

“That’s gotta be Famine,” agreed Joe.

“I’ve got it!” exclaimed Lucia.

“What?” asked Finsternis and Joe together.

“I’m willing to believe the executives in charge of Santalmo are greedy bastards willing to starve people who can’t pay for more seed year after year, but I don’t believe the researchers employed by Santalmo area,” she said.

“Why not? Scientists ain’t saints. Look at that one guy, the Nazi doctor, um, mangle, mongol?” interrupted Joe.

“Mengele. Josef Mengele. Sure, but look at Oppenheimer.”

“Who?” asked Joe.

“He worked on the Manhattan Project, creating the atomic bomb during World War II. He was shocked and appalled by what his research ended up being used for. A lot of the Manhattan Project researchers were. The project was spread across forty different facilities. Very few people knew what the end goal was. They just worked on their little piece of the puzzle, happy to be aiding the war effort. After the bombs were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Oppenheimer became a crusader against atomic weapons. It destroyed his career. I bet Famine is another Oppenheimer. After all, the purpose of genetically modified food is to make disease resistant crops that produce more food, not to starve poor people” asserted Lucia.

“Then why make the plants die after one generation?” asked Finsternis.

“My guess is an abundance of caution. They weren’t positive the genetically modified plants were safe, so they didn’t want them spreading into other people’s fields. They obviously didn’t anticipate the cross pollinization. So you see, I don’t have to kill anyone at all!”

Lucia beamed at him and Finsternis spat something that sounded like a flock of penguins torturing a herd of cats and dropped his head into his heads.

Joe rubbed at his ears and asked, “Isn’t that a good thing?”

Lucia shrugged. She’d thought so. Convincing the Horsemen to give up what was making them Horsemen, to stop the blind march to Hiroshima was a lot better than murdering them from her point of view. They were no more to blame for being Horsemen than she was for being a nephalim. Finsternis’ shoulders began to shake.

“Finsternis? Finsternis, what’s the matter?” For all Lucia knew, demons did this five times a day, every day, or he was dying. “Did I say something?”

Finsternis threw back his head and roared with laughter. The fire flared a rich blend of fuschia and violet.

“What’s so damn funny?”

“You . . . you are worse than Judas. And he loved the Messiah! Can you imagine, the son of Yhwh’s greatest enemy, born only to defeat Him, the best of friends with Yhwh’s champion? And you, you are worse! You seek to win a war without harming a hair on anyone’s head.”

“And you seek to bring about peace through slaughter! Which one of us is truly ridiculous?” Lucia shot back. “Hey, I have an idea, let’s get Pestilence to make Superebolaswineaids and kill everyone on the planet. After all, if everyone’s dead, the apocalypse has nowhere to go!”

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.