Watching it happen, Michael held his sword and thought, ‘Goodbye, Satan.Burn.For everything you’ve done.’He didn’t react, didn’t even move, when the devil thrashed, managed to pull some of his body above the gash in the ground and reach out.Fire stretching over the pavement, toward Michael.The prince didn’t move, met Satan’s terrified face.The devil’s fingertips touched Michael’s armor — his chest, over his heart.
‘Michael—’ Satan’s voice, but in the chief prince’s head, and Michael’s breath hitched in a cold, furious terror.‘Michael.’Shuddering, the archangel saw another face in his mind, suddenly.God.‘Eden.’Petals crushed beneath a naked body, darkened by blood.A bed of flowers.‘The Lord’s hands.’And pain, a terrible pain.‘I never told you.I never told you that you were right.This is all because of you.’Dying, the devil finally confessed.‘He told me that I was made for Him and made for this.’This?‘Do you know now?’A twist of his stomach, and Michael did see it.‘Do you understand now?’It hurt.‘I thought I’d die.’
Satan was jerked back, and the sensations stopped, but the ghost of them lingered on Michael, in his body, in his core.God, the Father.His hands.His jealousy.He had seen love among angels, then tried to correct it, using Lucifer’s body.Violently now, the Leviathan wrenched the devil back, and silent now, the serpent dragged Satan back into the ravine.‘It was my fault.’The Lord had told the truth.‘It was my love that caused this, every second of this.’But not his love alone.The punishment for love; God’s punishment for love.
And, in unison, the demons screamed for their ruler.Baal abandoned his horse again, tried to fly down in time, though there wasn’t anything he could do.Worst of all, the crack was trembling, starting to close around Satan.
Finally, Michael moved — numbly, hearing nothing but the dull thumps of his own heart.He beat his wings, threw himself forward, and yelled out in anguish, suddenly.In confusion.Lifting his sword, he reached the Leviathan to slice, hard, strongly, beneath its head.Screeching, the serpent revolted but refused to release Satan from its hold.Its skull folded forward, away from the rest of its body, in death, black blood gushing out, but the head fell with the devil, the gash in the Earth closing around them both.
The chief prince, cold, shaking.‘Lucifer?’
CHAPTER44
In Hell, Tadeo saw Christ, arms spread but not lifted enough to hang from a cross — instead, as if he’d just stepped down and was still finding his balance.His face was as it was in every painting that Tadeo had ever seen, but he was far more beautiful, almost angelic.He blazed even among all the hellfire that embraced his body, that almost seemed an extension of it, of him.The Son of God.Though Tadeo could no longer feel the scorch of the flames, he felt a sudden new pain, a churning ache in whatever was left of his heart and a sense of familiarity.It was the same as he’d felt when he saw Joana dead, his uncle dead, Dante dead, his father dead.Like he’d known Jesus’ crucifixion not as a Messiah’s sacrifice but as the murder of an old friend.
Careful, the anti-Christ set a foot down onto the same flames that were embracing him, and then he began to trek forward, step by step.He shouldn’t be able to move — he was in a sea of fire — and yet he did.Tadeo approached the glorious Son of God with many years’ worth of questions trailing down his back like broken wings on a fallen angel.None of them were reaching his mouth now, however much he remembered them in perfect clarity.What were Jesus’ last words?What did he eat?Did he really walk on water?Did he turn bread into meat?Did his followers taste the golden flavor of blood when he handed them wine?
The face of Jesus, however, looked less brilliant each second.His mouth began to sag, as did his eyes, then his very skin.The shine on him seemed too red, and his limbs seemed too long.His torso was too thin, and his clothing faded as if burning away.An ugliness bloomed.Grotesqueness tore apart the face of Christ until it appeared he was screaming and that his body was pulled in every direction, every organ of his stretched until they ripped.His blood spilled out in pulses, like he were a mangled heart.And his monstrosity itself, all that incarnated agony, dribbled down; he could have been a wilted flower, doubled over.Finally, Tadeo saw that there were more limbs on him than a human must have: two pairs of wings, as well as more heads than a human ever carried — four total.
Though the anti-Christ opened his mouth first, it was the decaying Satan who spoke.“You remind me,” his voice was a whispered rasp, “of a man from Nazareth.They told me he was born in Bethlehem, in a manger, because there was no room for his mother and father in the inn.When he was young, they wrote, he performed miracles, and he taught his rabbis.When I heard that he claimed himself to be the Son of God, I sought him out, and I asked him to prove to me that he could do what it was written the Messiah would do.He didn’t.I asked him to step down from the crucifix, but he didn’t.Did he resurrect?I can’t say.But whether he was a Messiah — that I can tell you.”Satan’s horrifically burned, disfigured body shifted.“Whether he died a Son of God or not, I think we have made him one.Christ is a Messiah only for as long as we believe him to be.”
Tadeo, quietly, said, “You’re a liar, Satan.”
Satan, lowly, gutturally, answered, “You’re the bastard of a liar.”
“Parents raise their children; you’re not my parent.”Tadeo wondered how he might look like now — if as terrifying as the devil or as the human man he’d been on the surface before being dragged down to Hell or as the young girl he’d been when he died.“I have a father, and he died because of the horrible, horrible world.And I have a mother, who is waiting for me.”
The devil replied, “You were damned.You will burn here forever.”
“When humans burn,” Tadeo answered, shakier, “all the nerves of pain in us eventually wither, and we’re left feeling nothing.And I think that’s happened to me.I fell, and I screamed, and I screamed,” ‘crying and begging and kicking and choking on the boiling blood in my throat,’ “until I couldn’t feel it anymore.Even if that hadn’t happened yet, there is no pain you can’t accustom to.And no matter how much it hurts, I’ll return to Earth.”
“The wicked Earth that killed everything you ever loved?”
“I can’t,” Tadeo snapped now, “argue with you about why I won’t destroy the world, despite what it’s done to me.There’s no reason to it, no logic.An argument won’t do justice to it.But I have known happiness despite, and I have seen kindness, and I don’tcareif it isn’t everywhere I look.I don’tcareif all the good in the world only remains in the love that Iknowis there between me and my family who remain, between me and those I’ve lost.I don’t care if the good in the world is nothing but a warmth in my chest.For the sake of one, I wouldn’t kill a billion.I can’t do it.It’s not the right thing to do.”
“Right according to who?”
“Tome!”Tadeo shouted.“To me!”
Satan snarled now: “It’s my world!It’s my wickedness!The world is all wickedness, and I know because it’s mine.Because you didn’t obey me, you have made everything worse.”‘Obey?’Tadeo couldn’t remember when Satan ever gave him an order that needed to be obeyed.“You will be destroyed forever when God reaches to crush you.And I will have to pick up the pieces of this rotten world.I will have to make it all right again.Because of you.Because of you!”His voice pitched higher, thinner.“I must return.I will mend it all.They will all listen to me.They must.If they don’t, I will make them.”
“You’re a stupid fallen angel,” Tadeo grunted.“Don’t you realize it?You’re not a God, devil.A God doesn’t get cast down to Hell.”
“I know now why God punishes His children.I understand now.”
“You know nothing,” said Tadeo.“Look around you!We’ve lost!”He saw the devil’s horrible faces flare.“But we’re not dead, or destroyed.I’ll return to Earth, and if it’s true that you can help it, then I’ll take you with me.I don’t care if you’re the devil or if I’m your child.Even if I hate you more than anything—” He gasped for a breath of the fire, but it felt like nothing.“If you will only tell me the truth?—”
“In Rome, you were born.”Satan shifted again, but his body was too mangled to read his emotions well, and his voice was hollow.“The first anti-Christ, I’ve always said, was the Emperor Nero.He committed atrocities, and I stood hidden behind him.Because I was jealous of God and His child, I coupled with the emperor, and we had you, the Beast part of you.Nero died to madness, and I tried to raise our child, but though it was as beautiful as me, it began to morph into a monster that attacked the servants and the slaves.When a prophecy reached me of a Beast and of an anti-Christ, I held my child down and burned it until it was ash.To save this world of mine, I did it — even if it killed a part of me inside as well.But a few decades passed, then I heard of a monster, and I realized I would have to murder my child that was born again, that would continue to resurrect.
“I spent the next two thousand years chasing down every anti-Christ with a Beast inside, and I tempted them by making them believe I wanted to end the world alongside them.Once I had their trust, I would burn them.It’s slow.There must be… so much trust.Or else I would have killed them all much easier.I would have killed you.But here you are.”Satan tilted his enormous, disgusting head.“Not an emperor, not a king, in this life.You are not special; you’re not the first to hesitate, and you’re not the first to come from destitution.But you’re the first to try to save the Earth, instead.Why?”
Tadeo blinked once, then a few more times.“I don’t believe you.”‘I wanted to end the world, too,’ he almost said.‘I rose from the dead with so much rage that I was almost blinded by vengeance.’But a girl had appeared to him in an alleyway, pressed a gun to his back, told him he had a responsibility.
“Don’t believe me, then,” said Satan.“I don’t need your faith.”
“You need my faith more than anything,” said Tadeo.“Or else you wouldn’t talk to me.”He allowed his eyes to shut just so that he wouldn’t have to stare at the devil’s body anymore.“What happened to your beauty?”
“This is what I am beneath it, ever since I fell from Heaven.”
