Demon полностью

“I know this seems like a myth to you. Ancient history at best. But can you imagine, Clay, that all of this”—she gestured around the chamber—“stemmed from them, the original two?”

I assumed what she meant by “this” were the vestiges of an elaborate culture. Otherwise, for all practical purposes, this room was a cult tribute to death.

“After that,” she said, “we waited. Even as the man began his life with the woman, feeding her and lying down with her, we waited to see what they would do, sure there would be more. But El was finished. And there was nothing for us.”

She leaned over the sarcophagus of a princess, turning her ear to it as though to listen for tapping on the inside. “I wonder, sometimes, what it must be like to die.”

I turned away.

“Oh, don’t.” She was at my side again, her arm twining through mine.

“I want to know what this has to do with me.”

“If you don’t understand the beginning, the rest will mean nothing to you, and we’ll have wasted our time. And neither of us can afford that.” She picked a piece of lint off my sweater.

A few other patrons drifted through the mummy room as I remarked again to myself at the lack of traffic. I wouldn’t have minded more; a shallow part of me felt gratified to be seen like this with such an obviously beautiful woman on my arm. And another part of me remembered that this was no woman, no human, at all.

Wheels, skidding on pavement . . . blonde hair and blood . . .

“You picked the perfect place for me to tell you all of this. Here, among your artifacts that have managed to outlast millennia of humans like you. Can you grasp what I’ve told you? That I watched the first rising of the sun, strolled the best beaches on earth before human feet soiled the sand?”

Her head tilted toward my shoulder. “I know,” she said with a sigh. “I’m giving away my age.”

HER VOICE DROPPED TO a conspiratorial whisper. “Lucifer claimed it was spite.” She might have been any woman gossiping to a friend. Across the room, a man in his twenties tried not to openly stare at her. He mostly failed.

“It was spite, he said, that El communed with these new creatures as though they were more than walking mud, as though they could ever be worthy of anything. He knew then what we hardly dared believe: that El had created a new favorite. I have a present for you, Clay.”

I was startled by the sudden sound of my own name. “You do?” I frowned. “What is it?”

“You’ll see.” Her lips curled up, catlike.

I didn’t like that smile.

She tightened her arms around mine, hugging it to her. “Now Lucifer addressed the Legion: ‘What is to stop us from becoming their kings? Their gods? What else could we possibly be to these new creatures? Let us walk in the garden as he does. Let us be as gods to them and exercise our influence over them and turn them away from this fellowship with Elohim, as we have turned away.’”

We paused before a statue of the falcon-headed Horus. I hesitated and then marveled at her implication. Did I imagine it, or had she winked at it? I shuddered. She nuzzled my shoulder, her eyes on the statue. My head was spinning.

“Lucifer became obsessed with the humans. I didn’t know what to make of his fixation. I had never seen him like this. Even in the throes of his failed ascent, he had never been so intent, driven by such singularity of purpose. He studied them. He lost interest in the new world. He forgot us and even ceased to taunt El. The whole world had shrunk to this one thing: the humans.” She leaned away, her arm never leaving mine, to inspect a burial mask with vacant eyes and dark, curling hair, to trace its shape on the Plexiglas.

“He prowled the garden, inspecting for himself the handiwork of El like the jealous critic who judges the craftsmanship of the master, turning the work slowly between his hands, searching for the slightest weakness.” Her finger squeaked down the front of the display case. “And who, after long days and years of searching, finds it at last.”

For the last ten minutes or so there had been a new flow of visitors circulating through the room, coming in and out of the entrances on adjacent sides of the gallery. And so I paid no particular attention to the couple that entered the room just then until I felt, rather than saw, one of them falter. I glanced up just as Lucian twined both arms around mine once more.

Aubrey.

I HAD DREADED AND anticipated this day. Would it be at Old Beijing on a weekend? On the pedestrian mall outside Macy’s, or coming out of Peet’s? Would I look up in the T station to see her waiting across the track . . . or would it happen at all?