But then something happened. The higher we flew, the closer we approached the summit of the mount of God, the more a sense of inevitability crept over me. It crawled like plague over my body, settled like ache in my bones. I told myself that I was simply in unfamiliar territory; only Lucifer himself had ascended so high, to stand in the throne room of the Almighty.
But no, it was more than that. Something was wrong. I felt naked, even in glory.
Now, with the corporate thrum of our wings loud in my ears, I noticed strange things: seraphim regarded me jealously. One of them even pulled at my hands to wrest them from the throne. I knew what he was doing, and I was filled with rage. That seraph would seek higher favor with Lucifer by assuming my better hold on the throne! It didn’t matter that he was my superior—this was the anarchy of ambition, and I felt no loyalty to rank order. I hated him, and though somehow certain I had never before raised a hand against anyone, I tore at his wing, ripping it.
He clawed at me, face contorted with rage, fingers biting like talons until I let go with a howl, unable to match him. But I was insane with anger and pursued him, clinging to his feet, pulling at him, wanting him to fall. I cursed him with new and foreign words. Unholy words. And now the others around us were clamoring, too, each determined to find favor above his fellow with this new god, jealous of those closest to him, resentment plain in their eyes. Revolt, glorious to us before, had sprung full-grown and hideous from our hearts. Our fervor, our ambition, careened into violence. And the higher we ascended, the worse it became, until there wasn’t an angel without menace on his face, no seraph without pride in his better strength, no archangel without possession in his eyes.
We had found a new order, appointed our god, and brought chaos to the world.
The stars wouldn’t abide it. Before we could ascend beyond the second heaven, the sky flashed. I felt anger again, but it wasn’t mine. This anger was righteous, so different from that chaos permeating our knot of rebels. The Host was upon us. I recognized faces I had once loved. In the dream I knew them. And I was struck by their pure, sanctified power. They outnumbered us, and for the first time I felt the force of their strength—a strength I had once been a part of. I saw the hands of kin raised against me, and I feared for myself.
And then I feared even more because I had never before been afraid.
The throne fell from our hands and dropped through the tangle of our arms and wings and heads, plummeting away, a radiant speck in a blackening sea. I watched for a horrified moment, the bellow of Lucifer loud in my ears, as the golden throne grew smaller and smaller until it was gone, fallen back to Eden.
And in the dream I was so familiar with early Eden that I could picture the throne there, shattered in glorious shambles among the shining stones of forgotten harmony, the physical wreck of our plan. But no—when I looked, Eden, that land of brightness, had gone dark. I could see no mote of light there at all. Careening from those heights, fleeing for the lower heavens away from the hands of the Host arrayed before the third heaven, I realized that the only source of light at all was Lucifer. Where were the bright stones of that garden, the great refracted brilliance of our prince, even from this distance?
I had never seen the earth from so far away, had never looked down on it like this. Even so, I knew something was horribly wrong. And then I saw black engulfing the shadowed land, covering it like ink, rising up over it and creeping across the earth until it had seemingly digested it whole, the garden drowned by a sea of pitch.
My world had gone as dark as a planet covered by a shroud, the black cloak of what we had done blotting out everything else.
Lucifer veered away from the onslaught of the angels, and I woke as the rebels, having nowhere else to go, took after him. I saw him, through the loosening fibers of sleep, leading them away: a bright light trailing stars, a comet and its sparkling tail.
IN THE SPACE OF a night, the ambition for heaven and darkness of Eden had become more real to me than my own home, than the tangled sheets of my bed. The face of that seraph was more horrific than any terror conceived of my own mind. I smelled the brine of sweat, felt its grime on my arms. Never had I experienced emotion in such terrible, pure form. Not even in the torture of facing an unfaithful spouse.
Perhaps this was his revenge for my walking out of the tea shop. If it was, I had no way to confront him, no knowledge—if I had ever had any—of when I would encounter him again.
The next morning, as I sat at my desk, erratic script emerging from my pen, I was seized by a thought. Opening my laptop, I turned it on and pulled up my schedule.
10:30 p.m.: L.
12:00 a.m.: L.
And again, in blocks between 1:00 a.m. until 4:00 a.m.:
L.
L.
L.
6
Bodies flowed around me in Park Street Station like water around a stone. Some regarded me with passing curiosity. Some of them looked me directly in the eye. I stared back, half fearful that I would find recognition in their eyes, half afraid that I would not.
I’m going crazy.
A woman in her fifties paused to assess me. “Are you lost, hon?” she asked with frank kindness. “Do you need some help?”
Is that you, Lucian, you devil? I sought the dark glint behind her eyes—that hint of shadow—but jerked away when she might have touched my sleeve. She shook her head and left me there, even as my attention landed on a man in a trench coat. Was he wearing an expensive watch? Or there—that young mother with the curly haired toddler. Or the tourist studying the T map. . . or that woman with the circles under her eyes. Her hands were cracked. Perhaps she worked as a maid in one of the inns off Newbury Street. She looked tired and worn. Was she ever visited by demons?
I eventually became aware of a young man studying me from several feet away. The faint hint of a moustache dirtied his lip. He was as pale as a computer junkie; he had that fueled-by-Fritos-and-Red-Bull look about him. A brown, stubby ponytail spurted from the back of his head, half-obscured by the rumpled collar of his long, open jacket. It hung loosely on his shoulders, oversized on his thin frame. Skinny, dressed straight from a thrift shop, he should have looked like a charity case, but he managed to come off grunge-band cool, his unflappability as much a part of his ensemble as his faded Animals Taste Good T-shirt. I had been intimidated by that brand of tattered-jeans confidence in others when I was his age. As he dragged an appraising look up and down over me like a store checkout scanner, I found that the feeling carried over into adulthood. I suddenly felt grossly inadequate—not to mention pretentious—in my Eddie Bauer jacket and loafers.
“Are we going to stand here all day?” he asked.
I searched for a witty comeback, but I hadn’t had one when Jake Salter had picked on me in high school, and I didn’t have one now. I followed him up the stairs, onto Tremont.
“And you needn’t worry any more about Jake.” His speech and the slight, strange accent were at weird odds with his human mundane. “He died a few years ago.”
I had been on the verge of railing at him for hijacking my dreams but faltered at this news.
“I didn’t know.” The Jake Salters of the world still seemed untouchable to me, their flannel shirts and army boots armor against a society in which the greatest peril was a white-collar eventuality.
The demon shrugged. “Why would you?”
“How?” I envisioned a drug overdose, alcohol poisoning, a motorcycle crash. A knife fight.