Chapter 17
After some time had passed — Satan, of course, returned to the church.
The devil traded his torn clothing for a new dark cassock and had to hunt for a scalp, peeling it off a poor man’s head in the dead of night.
To sate his hunger, he had found the rotting pieces of a goat discarded outside a butcher’s shop, crouched over the ground, ate it.
Many have depicted him with goat eyes throughout history.
He had seen just about every statue of himself, painting, sketch, from the greats and those who will be forgotten after death alike.
Few times had he been beautiful. Some of this is by his own design; his perfect lips had shaped lies by the ears of emperors, kings, chiefs, and popes, whispers that he had burnt up in the fall, lost all the beauty of an angel.
It was true to an extent. His face was a disguise.
He was a lie. Beside every translator, every scribe, he had been a lie, every life.
A million lives Satan had led all throughout history, in every place, in every kind of body.
From one end of the world to another, he had been running.
Chasing a thread until it brought him here.
He returned to the church, of course he did. He had no other life ready for him to take, and he had unfinished business here, a killing to do. And Tadeo was nowhere to be found.
Satan arrived at the rectory at in dead of night with hair in a different style than before, glow beginning to seep through his false-brown contacts.
His exhausted gaze bled down onto his body, wavering in place, wrestling to stay up.
But this could have been an act, one of a tired priest. The devil is a liar; he may lie so much that he no longer knows the truth.
“ángel,” someone called, many called. Standing in the room were several nuns, two other women, a tall man, one of the migrants that’d been in the vehicle when the soldiers attacked, with his daughter on his hip.
“ángel!” Unlike all those who stood, the other priest, Tono, was slumped in a chair, looking nothing like a middle-aged man and more like a terrified little boy, his face crinkled as aluminum foil in deep worry.
“Where have you been?” asked one of the nuns. “What happened? Have you heard all that—?”
“Was it God,” said the priest Tono quietly, “that guided you this time, as well?” His face had paled a shade, and now Satan noticed that there was a blanket draped over his lap, failing to conceal a white cast on his left foot, propped up over a short stool.
But his eyes gleamed with a sadness and a hope, a dual grief and joy.
“ángel,” he called, “you saved the lives of these two.” The migrant man, stepping toward Satan with his sniffling daughter.
“You might have saved mine too. Thank you.” ‘Whatever it is you are,’ the good priest thought, ‘thank you.’
“Thank you,” said the migrant man in question, taking the hand of the devil, squeezing, and then bringing it to press to his own forehead.
“I haven’t been able to sleep since. I owe you my life.
Whatever you shot at, it distracted the soldiers” — Satan had intended that, yes — “and you saved me and my daughter.” When was the last time Satan had saved a life? He was a monster of collateral damage.
“Whatever it was you shot at,” the good priest said now, “when it fell into the river, I thought I saw the shape of wings in the water ripples. What could it have been? I heard the name ‘Michael’ in my mind.”
“Michael,” Satan echoed, “would not do something so terrible, would he? If it were the saint Michael in the sky that I shot at, he would have been watching innocent people die without acting. Our saint wouldn’t be so cowardly… would he?”
A silence hung over all those in the room, for some seconds, before the good priest, quietly, said, “There’s going to be a Mass early tomorrow.
I would like to lead it. Please, ángel, be there with me.
” When his voice shook, he added, “I need to sleep. You should sleep too. You’re right— You’re right that it couldn’t have been Michael. ”
They regarded him with suspicion — the nuns — but Satan went to bed, wondering how long he’d have here.
He’d exposed himself to the angels; he should leave this place for good.
But he’d watched Michael’s blood dribble onto the river.
The rivers would turn red with blood, Revelation warned.
The water had remained blue, green, and yet it was difficult not to fear that it was all darkening into a crimson shade now, every second he faced away from it.
The next day, he decided to take confession in the church.
So much of priesthood was boring — multiple long services a day, paperwork, planning the masses for the holidays and weddings and fifteenth birthdays, and then the added labor of processing migrants in the shelter, transporting, organizing identification, calling authorities, receiving the occasional threatening call — but the confessions were quite fun.
As he readied himself for it, he gelled his stolen hair and spent a few minutes applying several layers of sparkling pink lip gloss over his plump mouth.
Satan, after this, finally went into the small church building, planning not to bother pretending to bow for the altar today as he crossed past the pews.
Then, Satan stopped, the echo of his steps on the tile too loud.
He’d just reached the center of the church and was facing the altar, the hanging Jesus Christ, the sunny monstrance holding the Eucharist. No one sat at the frontmost seats, and as he turned, the devil saw that all the other pews were empty as well.
He couldn’t recall a time the church had been this desolate.
The tall double doors of the entrance were shut, a wooden panel barring the interior side.
Only then did Satan’s breath tangle with his tongue.
He had never seen the doors locked, and the other priest, the good priest, was in no shape to do it himself, and he never would — always insisting the church should be open to anyone — the locals, the migrants, even the criminals.
He still believed in the criminals. Anyone can be forgiven, according to him, according to God.
For centuries, Satan had heard this sentiment and asked: why should anyone want God’s forgiveness?
What made His forgiveness so special? The Lord is but a narcissist — because what good does it do to apologize to a distant God instead of those you’ve harmed?
Why move to absolve yourself instead of making amends?
This is pure narcissism, too, on the part of the sinner.
The devil would know; he is the mother of vanity.
A sprinkle of dust fell before Satan, onto his mop of dark hair, and a creak sounded on the ceiling.
He tilted his face upward, and his lips parted, but he had less than a second to react, to reach into the pocket of his cassock and grip his revolver.
As fast as sunlight, a silver gauntlet of a hand grappled his throat, then great wings the color of the Earth stuck to propel both Satan and his captor toward the altar.
The edge of it crashed against the devil’s spine before the angel pinned his head down against the marble, fingers digging into his neck, shy of crushing it by just a pinch.
Teeth clenching and baring themselves like he were an animal — the devil found a bulk of armor holding him down, a helmet with slits over where the eyes should be perfectly obscuring a face. “Angel,” the devil gritted out.
“Where is the anti-Christ?” demanded the angel, and Satan could not laugh, so he wheezed. “Where,” said the chief prince again, sternly, angrier, “have you hidden him?”
“I can’t remember the last time I saw you. Was it when the Son of God bled to death?”
“I’m not here to talk with you.”
“You never talk to me anymore.”
“Tell me where he is.”
“Do you talk to anyone? I hear that you don’t. You speak in God’s voice. You are the angel of God. Do you remember what it feels like to speak for yourself?” Then, Satan grinned wildly. “Why were you over the bridge?”
“If you don’t answer me with your next words, I’ll set your head atop a spear. The rest of your damned body will fall into the lake of fire. You will be tormented for the rest of eternity in the flames, devil.”
“Hell is my home,” said Satan, snickering, serpentine.
“The fires can’t hurt me anymore, Michael.
” His hand trailed, slowly. “And when Heaven falls, maybe you’ll all learn how much better it feels to burn.
” The monstrance’s base was cold around his fingers as he took it, and it was heavy as Satan lifted it over his head, brought it down onto Michael’s helmet.
No piercing of the silver armor — but the gold shattered, the glass-embraced Eucharist, round and the size of a palm, cracking in half and falling, made the saint shift backward.
However, Michael didn’t let go, his grip deadly, unrelenting.
“Fucker,” the devil hissed, smashing at Michael’s helmet a second time, each piece of the gorgeous ornament that had so tenderly cradled God’s body clanking to the floor.
“Tell me,” grunted Michael, “where he is.”
“You’re a faggot. You’re a sinner. You’ll go to Hell to be tortured no matter how much you kneel for your precious little God.
You remember, don’t you? I was granted Hell because of you.
” Another wheezing laugh. “Because you failed your Father. Because you could not resist me. God’s chief prince couldn’t keep his hands to himself.
He couldn’t help but touch the devil and rut on him like a bitch in heat. ”
“Don’t try to provoke me,” said Michael; he must’ve prepared for Satan to jab at his wounds. “Tell me where the anti-Christ is.”
“You will never find him.”
“I will destroy him as I will you. God will be victorious over evil.”