on earth like him. And this made Job irresistible to Lucifer, who meant to show El that even the best among the clay people hadn’t the faithfulness to show loyalty in the face of adversity. It’s one thing to love a god who protects you, showers you with wealth and all the worldly things that seem to matter so much in the short space of a lifetime. It’s another thing to love him when those things disappear.
“Now I’m going to tell you something. In all our work we go where we wish; Lucifer does what he will. But a barricade had been erected around Job, an unbreakable bulwark of protection. The Host were thick upon him, and we couldn’t touch him—until the day that El dispersed the hedge around him, and we were free to do what we would.”
There was an ominous sound to the lilt of her voice, and though I knew she spoke of the past, I was reluctant to hear what she said next.
“We spent the wealth, attacked his livestock, killed the servants. And then we targeted his children. I came in as a storm and Belial as a great wind, and the house they were in collapsed and killed them all. We reduced one of the richest, most noteworthy men in the world to nothing in the space of a single day.”
“In a day?” I echoed with morbid wonder.
“A day. And the next day Lucifer took his health. Simple, decisive measures with one outcome in mind: for Job to curse El. But he wouldn’t do it. Suffice it to say, Lucifer’s still sore about it.” She leaned forward, resting her elbows on her knees, fiddling still with the band of her watch. “Mind you, a single failure every now and then still keeps our success rate well over the 99.9 percent mark. Not quite perfect”— her smile was crooked—“but in my humble opinion perfection is overrated. And Job was a freak.”
“There was no one else exceptional enough for Lucifer to test himself against?”
“There would be, but he hadn’t come along yet. In the meantime, we grew bored, toyed halfheartedly, and shook our heads at El’s long-suffering. At times I wondered what would happen to us, but that uncomfortable sense, that inevitability in my immortal bones, had by then dulled to the phantom ache of a severed limb.
“When I felt it, I distracted myself by thinking instead about the mud people and what would happen to them. There was talk of judgment after death, and though the details seemed obtuse, this made sense. Surely El must eventually deal with them; this could not go on forever. He would reach an end to his patience. He would, I was certain, see the constancy of human failure—the only consistent thing about them—and destroy them all yet, for they grew worse, not better.”
She was pulling at the watch now in a way I found strange and distracting. And then I noticed with alarm that she was not toying or fiddling with the watch at all but digging her nails into the skin of her forearm above it so that it rose up in red welts and had even begun, in one place, to bleed.
Something about the sight of that struck me as particularly destructive—more so than if a human had done it—so that I instantly wanted, needed, to get away from her. I felt unable to breathe in the confined space of the car and got quickly to my feet as the train pulled into the station.
“Go to your party, Clay,” she called after me. “Go to your party, Clay!”
There was something about the way she shouted my name that propelled me out the door, the skin on my back pricking as though it expected a knife thrust. I felt her eyes on me even after I hurried up the path to the street and the train receded toward Riverside.
Standing on the curb, I was glad for the chill, the sound of voices, the idling cars waiting on commuters. Despite the fact that I would not have had this latest portion to add to my account had I stayed in my apartment, I thought I never should have left.
As I searched for Phil’s gray Honda, I was disturbed, unable to push from my mind the image of her clawing at her skin as though it were a growth, a leech to be pulled away. And now, with that image in my mind, I must make conversation over mini-quiches, crab claws,