As he rounded the bend of the front counter, I fully expected that he might not return. To my surprise, he came back a moment later with a small pot of water. He refilled my cup before pouring a drop into his own—all the cup would allow, as he had never drunk any of it.
I looked at my teacup.
“Go on”—he gestured at it—“I want to watch you enjoy it.”
“As though you haven’t seen people do this for centuries.”
“Millennia. But I’ll never tire of it. I like to wonder what it must be to take pleasure in something so short-lived.”
I took a sip. “Let me ask you something.”
“Of course.” He reseated himself with a magnanimous tilt of his head.
“It’s obvious you haven’t liked telling me this part of your”—I fumbled for a moment—“background. So why do it?”
I had a strange sense then—the same one I used to have as a boy when I ran up the basement steps, chased by shadows—that coalesced into this thought: Are his compatriots here? Would they approve of his coming to me like this?
“Are you with him now?” I said, on impulse.
“What, this minute?”
I nodded.
He gave me a queer look. “Are you serious? Oh, you are. No, of course not. Like you—and like him—I can be in only one place at a time. Really, you watch too much television.” He glanced at his watch, seeming to weigh the time.
A surge of anxiety streaked toward my heart. But the demon, normally so well tuned to my discomfort, seemed to be in conference with his own thoughts. Finally, he crossed his arms. “When people talk about this story, they make it so idiotic: ‘Lucifer was proud; he wanted to be like God. When he rebelled, a third of the angels followed him.’ I’ve heard all the stories—yes, even in your churches. But you have to understand: We were all proud. And Lucifer, he was the governor of the mount of God. So how natural and right it seemed that when he held out his hands like a liege accepting fealty, we gave it.
“For a moment—whatever that can be without the boundaries of time—we forgot El. And I heard Lucifer’s thoughts then as clearly as if he had exercised his voice, raised up his fist, and shouted. And why shouldn’t you praise me? Why not bow down? Am I not your perfect prince, with strength a thousand times a thousand of you, with beauty a thousand times greater, with power beyond measure? Watch now! I will go up to heaven. I will raise my throne beyond the stars of El. I will sit upon the sacred mountain. I will ascend above the clouds of glory. I will make myself like the Most High!”
His gaze had left me again, and I knew that a part of him was back in that place, in Eden then. There was a curl to his lips, but the smile was not congenial.
“A moment, an eternity, earlier, I would have known it for blasphemy. For damning ambition, independent of heaven. I would have known! But in that instant his logic was perfect. How could anything less come from such a creature? In the shadow of Elohim, he seemed worthy to do it. He seemed like a god. His glamour was so great, I wanted him to be God.”
Lucian picked up the tea ball and stabbed it into his cup, sloshing water into the saucer.
“How could he not? The assumption was—unspoken, of course, but put forth in suggestive and sultry thought—that those of us who followed him would be something greater as well. He would be a god, and we would become like him.
“The bulk of the Host stood stunned at the discordant thunder of this break. Still, I bowed to him, as did many others like me. And with that, the fate of a legion was set in motion. Time, not yet created, had begun its phantom tick for us alone. Not that we knew it then; we were caught up. We rushed the throne of Lucifer in all its shining estate there in Eden. It was the seat of a government outgrown, and we rose up, ready for our new order. And we seized the throne, determined to move it. I can remember the feel of it in my hands still. Can you understand, Clay? No, of course you can’t!”
Before I realized what he meant to do, he grabbed my hand, his skin tingling against my palm. I started, but, as in the bookstore, his grip tightened. I couldn’t pull away.
“The gold of it was hot, burning glory—Lucifer’s. It branded me the moment I touched it”—he squeezed my hand tighter—“melding flesh with metal like skin melting on an iron. But instead of letting go, I clasped it tighter, reveling in the white-hot burning of my flesh, the happy cost of my metamorphosis.”
The tingling in my hand turned to pain. His palm seemed inhumanly hot. And then I felt it: a rush of power, thudding through my veins like adrenaline. The drum of my heart roared in my ears, faster—faster. In another minute I was sure I would have a heart attack.
Or be able to run a marathon.
I heard the demon from a distance now: “I, too, would become something more than the mere angel I was. And this would be my transfiguration. This searing was not pain but alchemy!”
The track lighting, the flyers on the wall, the bins full of exotic teas, faded into the periphery of my awareness. Once, back in college, when I had torn a groin muscle while running hurdles, simple shock and the rush of blood to the injury had caused me to nearly black out. I felt the same way now except that I was not nauseous, and my vision had not narrowed to a tunnel. In fact, it had expanded, pushing reality to the fringes of my consciousness like curtains sliding into the wings of a stage.
Now came a distant rustle. It grew in volume into the beating of a thousand wings, as though I had entered an aviary ten miles wide, crowded with giant, winged creatures, the bodies too dense above and around me for me to see anything but intermittent shards of light. Voices deafened my ears, galvanized my heart.
Lucian’s voice came to me: “Our fervor intoxicated me. We would have another god, one who walked among us, granted favors—one of our spirit kind risen to the third heaven, where he was permitted but never resided. And we, the interlopers, would rise up with him and set up his throne there. We would come into the presence of our new god, walk upright and proud at his side.”
With demon-induced vision I felt, more than saw, a singular form, his span gigantic over the din. He did not blot out the light as he should have but against all logic seemed to intensify it. And now I realized that the giant form radiated its own brilliance down onto the horde like mirrors reflecting the sun.
Lo, the light of Lucifer!
I was elated, high on a rush different from that of any recreational substance I had ever dabbled in at college. No designer drug, no hit of pure cocaine, could begin to compete with it.
And then the hand clasping mine let go.
I snapped like a retracting cord—back to the table, to myself—with a jolt that made me gasp. I sucked air into my lungs like a swimmer surfacing from near-fatal depths. The electric lights in the tea shop seemed as severe as lights in an operating room, and I felt pinned by an abnormal gravity to the hard chair beneath me, my limbs as stiff as they would have been after days in traction. I felt the inexplicable urge to cry; I was too aware of my human shell, the conflated emotions—human and otherworldly—roiling in my gut.
Across from me, Lucian dredged the tea ball through his cup.
“What—what was that?” I demanded when I knew I wouldn’t vomit on the table.
“A memory. History. What once was,” he said, waving his hand.
In the frame of my pathetic human shell, I could still feel the elation, see the body emanating light like spots in my eyes after a flash. I was out of sorts. Dismantled. The urge to weep became contempt. I felt toyed with. As though I had been slipped a drug without my permission—one that had taken me to a state that my human condition could never support or ever hope to reach again except through him.
“I do apologize. I needed you to understand, to know what my kinship with him meant.”
That’s what it was, that intoxication. I shuddered. If what he said was true, I had just experienced communion with the devil. I pushed up from the table, sturdier on my legs than I expected.
Lucian spread his hands. “Oh, come now.”
I picked up my jacket and walked resolutely out the door.
On the street I wondered if I was being foolish—if, like a lover ending an argument in a huff, I should turn around and go back. What if this was the end? Maybe I would be rid of him, of this entire thing.
That thought brought me no relief. In fact, it only brought panic. If this was the end, it would close the portal to something, some greater context, containing answers to questions I had not known to ask. Worst of all, I would never know what this had to do with me—a question that had begun to eat at me. Would I wander around half cooked after this, knowing there was something more, the access to which I had thrown away? And would I be haunted by his words—the words that cycled through my mind at night until I wrote them down simply to rid myself of them—indefinitely?
I returned to the tea shop, unsure what I meant to do or say. But the back table was empty, one of the girls from the counter already gathering the cups, the pot of water, the discarded tea balls, onto a tray.
As I left again, his words pursued me in his absence, a specter at my back whispering visions of heaven, of the devil, in my ear.