42. Lucifer (D1.5)

__ Doug finally stopped crying and rested his hands on Maggie's shoulders. What she had said, what she told him he had to do - to save Ardy - to save everyone - was too much to comprehend. But, then again, this whole day was too much to comprehend.
__ "I'll try," he nodded.
__ "You have to do more than try, Mr. Testerbird," Maggie said doubtfully. "If you don't do it, so many people will suffer at the end."
__ Doug took a couple stumbling steps backward and turned, his head tilted back toward the black sky. More tears threatened to come, but he was dry. All he could do was sniff and shudder.
__ "It's so much to ask."
__ He looked at the little girl. "That's what I was just thinking."
__ She smiled and rolled her eyes as if to say, "Duh."
__ He nodded and rolled his eyes. "Yeah. Right."
__ "You can do this," she prompted.
__ Doug clapped his palms against his sides. "Oh. I can do this? I can hand over a sweet little girl to the devil himself?"
__ She nodded. He could tell she would be able to tell him how all of it will play out, but a higher power, a super secret something between God and the child prohibited that.
__ Because it's all on my faith, Doug figured.
__ Maggie, reading those thoughts, nodded again. Her smile carried the glint of a happy tear in one corner of her eye.
__ "This is crazy."
__ "We have to go now," Maggie said with the seriousness of a guard shouting, "Dead man walkin'!"
__ And that's exactly how Doug felt when he swallowed that lump and held his hand out to take Maggie's. He smiled sourly but surely, "Okay. Let's go."


__ The devil stood over R. Lee Munson's body, fuming.
__ He wished he had the power to urinate - or at least spit - on the corpse, but he was in the form of a corpse himself. All he could do was clack his dry teeth and gurgle angrily.
__ Munson's last two words before the devil took him damaged him, stabbed him. "Forgive you."
__ "How could he? He was mine." Lucifer, as The Fallen Angel was once known, looked to the alterlings standing about obediently but uselessly. "I promised him an eternal pardon!"
__ The alterlings didn't have to answer. Whenever he was angry at himself for becoming angry with God, Lucifer always spoke all the parts of the dialog.
__ "Oh, sure, he's got Jehovah pulling his soul strings now - the Greater Pardon. The pardon I never got!" Whirling around, Lucifer extended the bony fingers of Clye Morrow's animated corpse and put them through the shadowy neck of an alterling. The creature cried out in a wet gulping yelp before exploding into a cloud of soot.
__ The other alterlings didn't shrink away. Instead, they came closer - slowly - to their master's will.
__ "He only said that so He would take him back! He was mine!" Another alterling collapsed at Lucifer's vengeful touch. Then another. A fourth. "Damn him!"
__ Then the brittle, battered, decaying and ripe-smelling body of Clye Morrow locked its limbs and jolted to attention. The rictus grin cracked and snapped, peeling back to reveal a fresh new glistening pink tongue.
__ The brittle fingernails snicked off and fluttered to the floor. Rotted skin and clothes peeled off the body like a reptilian shed revealing the smooth lines and tanned muscles of a perfect being beneath.
__ In Lucifer's frustration, he sucked himself into the earth's surface from the darkest reaches of The Pit. He needed his own strength, the eons of power and bloodlust, and centuries - the eternity - of pent up anger and regret, vengeance and fury.
__ Enough was enough. Let Him send his son back. He didn't fall to my temptations. Let's see how he falls to my revenge.
__ And if I can't take His son, I will take His sons and all of the earth.
__ Lucifer's rage subsided when the last of the alterlings had fallen and the last strip of dead skin had fallen from the corpse. Now he stood in the ruined church, in his personal glory, a specimen of perfect wingless angel. Lucifer's skin was bronzed and rippled with the muscles of a soldier. The tight curls around the crown of his head reflected copper in the flickering candlelight. His jaw was stern and square, his eyes blue but piercing with coldness.
__ He twitched his angular nose toward the side door where Michael - his former comrade - had sent the mortal forgiver. Here two more alterlings rose up and faced him.
__ In a calm voice, the lyrical sing-song voice of an angel, edged only slightly from the Fall, Lucifer instructed, "There is another coming. The resurrector. I must armor myself for the coming storm. You must keep him from my sight until the Son proclaims himself with the first of the seven signs."
__ The alterlings bowed their shadowy bodies and turned to leave.
__ "But leave him untouched," Lucifer commanded. "I want back the power God took from me. I want to drink it from his soul when all else lies in ruin."
__ The two shadows departed and left the devil to prepare his long awaited attack.
__ The drift of snow through the opened door of the church carried with it the fine sent of ash. Lucifer closed his eyes and drank it in. It was the smell of the first moments of war.