I

“I was quite young when Jesus knocked on our door.

“I remember that it was a nice spring, a bit warm for that time of the year but otherwise excellent. The day was a prime example, with a shining sun and growing grass and happy people and whatever else accompanies a good spring. The Second Coming didn’t really change that; afterwards, many people complained that the Bible had obviously been overstating all that was to come.

“The Bible was written by men. That is, it was written by writers, and I think I can speak for the vast majority of us when I say that hyperbole is our stock in trade. It was a very quiet affair, excepting the fact that the better part of the known world disappeared overnight. All in all, though, nothing terrible.

“My parents stared in something like abject terror as Jesus walked in. He looked young, untouched by the life he had apparently lived as a human being. For my part, I was quite young, as I said, and I didn’t know who he was. I just remember thinking that he was dressed oddly, and wondering how he got those awful holes in his hands and feet.

“‘Why are you here?’ my father asked in his deep, booming voice. It was the voice a father should have, the comforting and stolid kind. ‘We don’t take stock in your particular faith.’

“Jesus smiled, beatifically. ‘I know what faith you take stock in,’ he assured them. ‘But the little one here hasn’t got much stock in any faith right now, and so I thought I would ask him if he’d like to make a last-minute decision.’

“Obviously my parents didn’t take kindly to this. My mother cried something about his being a messiah and not an abductor, words I didn’t understand at that point. I merely thought, in the sort of way that someone quite young does, that he was a nice person.

“‘Do you want to come with me?’ he asked.

“‘Where will we be going?’ I asked him.

“‘Heaven. It is a wonderful place, where nobody will ever hurt you or make fun of you, and where you will be happy and live forever with me and my Father.’

“‘That sounds nice. Will Mommy and Daddy be coming?’

“‘I’m afraid not. As they said, they don’t take stock in my particular faith.’

“‘You seem like a nice person, but Mommy and Daddy told me never to go anywhere with strangers if they weren’t coming too, so I have to say no. Thank you, though.’

“Jesus gave that beatific, untouchable smile again. ‘I understand. You are a good little boy, and I wish you could have come with me. Goodbye.’ He nodded to my parents, stepped back outside, and closed the door behind him.

“After that, my mother cried and held me and told me she was so thankful that I had listened to her and my father. They didn’t want to lose me, after all.”

Peter sighs and shakes his head. He sits across from me in our carriage, which is pulled by a pair of undead horses as it makes its way through the winding, bumpy streets of the city. “Listen to yourself. You talk like a narrator.”

My eyes crease a bit. “What do you mean?”

“You talk as though you were writing out that entire exchange on the page of a book. Are you doing that on purpose?”

I shrug. “Maybe. I am a writer, after all.”

“Of course. But I’ve been partnered with other writers before. Dangerous people you are, and sometimes a bit odd in the head, but none of the others ever talked like you do. Do you narrate your own life?”

“Sometimes, for lack of other people to talk to.” I pause and add, “The problem is that it’s an unreliable narration.”

Peter frowns at me and taps a hoof on the floor of the carriage. He has the head of a goat, so the very human expression is strange on his face. Then again, satyrs have feelings, too. “What do you mean?”

I laugh. “I thought you’d been partnered with other writers before. You’re not familiar with so basic a term?”

“No, I’m not. Explain it to me.”

“Essentially, there are many ways to narrate a story. Third-person omniscient is probably the most common. The narrator is a disembodied voice, as it were, observing everything all the relevant characters say and do and oftentimes their inner, private thoughts, detailing to us as readers their motivations and feelings. That is a reliable narrator, because what it says is always true. First-person narrations are not as common; they are a character within the story narrating it to us, and oftentimes these narrations are unreliable, because the character is not omniscient and cannot know everything. A third-person omniscient narrator could note that a character missed a vital clue during its investigation of a crime; if that same character were narrating the story, it would have no clue of what it had missed.”

“So narrating your own life is by definition unreliable because you can never know everything that you’re doing right and wrong.”

“True enough.” I adjust my necktie and my gloves as I feel the carriage begin to slow. “Odd that you should tell me I talk like a narrator, though.”

“All I asked you is whether or not you were alive for the Second Coming. You were the one who told me an entire tale, with a dramatic opening line and everything.”

“I have to keep in shape, after all.”

The carriage grinds to a halt and we get out. The horses look at us with glowing red eyes and stamp their hooves; Peter stamps one of his own back and gives an animalistic grin. I pull a pair of coins from my pouch and give them to the driver. “Why undead horses?” I ask.

The driver looks at me as though I have two heads, which is to say that he looks at me thinking that I’m not from around here. “You don’t have to feed ‘em,” he says, “and they don’t shit all over the place.”

“Economical. Keep the change, please.”

“Will do, sir.” He gives the reins a flick and the carriage is gone, leaving my new partner and me standing in front of a church of the religion of the One God.

“Now,” I say to Peter, “as a writer, the next question I should ask you is this: what was your motivation for asking me if I was alive or not for the Second Coming?”

Peter shifts from one hoof to the other and fiddles with his coat’s buttons before replying. “I wanted to know if you had ever met Jesus. As a Pagan creature, he obviously didn’t pay me a visit and I was curious about him. He might have a role to play in this case, too.”

“Not likely,” I say, starting up the stairs. “Now that he’s come back to Earth and taken the faithful with him to Heaven and sent the unfaithful to Hell, he has no more interest in this material plane. At least, that’s the general interpretation.”

“If the general interpretation were to be believed,” Peter reminds me, “we both would be in Hell right now.”

“Who’s to say we’re not?” I reply. “Compared to Heaven, that wonderful place of everlasting joy and comfort, isn’t this place Hell? Why expend additional effort sending us all to a place that, on a relative scale, can’t be that much worse than where we are?”

I reach the doors of the church and barely hear Peter mutter “writers” under his breath behind me. It’s not that the satyr doesn’t like me, it’s just that as a detective he prefers cases where all the motives are aboveboard and not supernatural – somewhat ironic, considering his origin. Suppose that a woman kills a man and another woman; Peter would like it to turn out that she was killing, for revenge, her husband and the woman he had been seeing behind her back.

Not that I like the idea of death, but if it’s going to happen, I would prefer that she killed the man and woman in sacrifice to an ancient and dark god. It’s so much more interesting to follow up which god and why than figure out how long her husband had been seeing the other woman. And that is why I’m a writer and not a detective, and that is why I only get sent on cases like this one.

The scene inside the church is horrific. It is a large church, with many rows of wooden pews leading up to the elevated altar. Behind the altar is a huge representation of Jesus nailed to the crucifix. Hung by the neck with rope from the crucifix are six members of the cult, three to each arm of the cross.

I look at the scene and my lip curls. “What a terrible likeness. They got the nose all wrong.”

Surrounding the scene are about half a dozen police officers in dark blue uniforms, billy clubs hanging from their belts, and dispersed throughout the rest of the church are several more. They look at us, immediately recognizing who we are, and allow us to come closer to conduct our examination.

Peter sighs and clops over past the altar to examine the lowest-hanging of the victims, a young woman that couldn’t have been older than sixteen or seventeen when she died. “Obviously killed before she was hung from the crucifix,” he says after a moment’s inspection. “The neck is broken, but not by the noose. You’ll note that there’s no sign of excessive or violent chafing; the ropes were hung here and the victims placed into them.”

I immediately look at the altar. It is covered in ceremonial golden vessels and objects that make little sense to me. “Could they have been killed on the altar?” I ask.

“Is that relevant?”

“Of course it’s relevant. You say they were killed before they were hung there. Whoever did this is either trying to ridicule the religion of the One God or they are of the faith and they are taking it a step too far.”

“The church is opened every Sunday for services and then closed until the next Sunday,” a sergeant amongst the policemen tells me, reptilian eyes flashing beneath his helmet. “Nobody save a designated caretaker is allowed in on the other days of the week. The murders could have been done here, very easily.” A forked, pink tongue shoots out of his mouth for a moment, tasting the air.

Peter takes a look at the altar. “Not likely they were killed on this,” he says. “Today is Thursday. There’s at least four days’ worth of dust on this altar.” He picks up one of the golden vessels and shows the dustless spot it left in the white cloth. “See?”

“Could they have been killed on Sunday after the final service and then left here?” I ask.

Peter shakes his head. “They’re all in the midst of rigor mortis. When that wears off we’ll know approximately how long ago the murders were committed, but I can tell you that if they were killed on Sunday they would be limp by now.”

I shake my head. “So they were all killed within the past three days, brought here, and hung by their necks from the crucifix. Do we know who they are?”

“Only three of them,” the sergeant says. “All of the ones we’ve identified are followers of the One God, however.” His scaly face twists with derision as he practically spits the last two words.

“Obviously the killer has something against the religion, then,” Peter says.

“Or he may be trying to advance himself in its favor through the wrong means,” I remind him. “Both are possible. A third possibility is that this was all done just to make us think those two things, and the killer has entirely different intentions.”

Peter shakes his head, ears twitching, and looks at the crucifix. “You’re making this too complicated.”

“Think about it,” I urge him. “The followers of the One God are the most widely derided fools on the entire face of the Earth. They only care for themselves because nobody else will care for them, seeing as how their religion is a sham. There is a very long list of people who would like nothing better than to see the cult eradicated – what better way to cover one’s true motive than to make it appear as though one has a grudge against it?”

“But the three we’ve identified are followers of the One God,” Peter reminds me, “and I’ll bet you my fourth stomach that the other three, once we figure out who they are, will be of the faith as well.”

I snort. “‘Of the faith’ is a funny term to use. Still, I’m not convinced. Maybe we’re looking at someone who just likes to kill people and is using this as a convenient excuse.”

Peter gives a short, growling mew, the satyr equivalent of an angry snarl. “Writers. Why didn’t they just partner me with an atheist for this case and be done with it? I would be hearing more substantial things from one of them!”

“I’m here,” I remind Peter, “to examine all the impossible, insane approaches that a good detective like yourself would never even consider. I specialize in the absurd and the unnatural because the reasonable and the normal bore me. It’s simply your bad luck that these people ended up hung from a crucifix in a church; if they’d been found piled dead in an alley you’d never have met me.”

“The better for it!” Peter says fiercely. I look away, returning my gaze to the crucifix, and I feel the regret in him, resounding in the silence after his proclamation, one delivered in a rush and in irritation.

I look at the corpses and think, and something strikes me. It’s the irony of the situation.

“Bodies misplaced in a church of a misplaced faith,” I finally conclude. “This is definitely symbolic.”

Peter looks at me and cocks his head to the side, shame coloring his eyes a bit. “On what?”

“This religion is laughable because of its origins,” I explain. “It’s very large group of people who regret having taken stock in a different faith when Jesus arrived. They think that if they place their faith in him they will get a second chance at Heaven, the ultimate paradise – or at least, one of the ultimate paradises. What’s ironic is that their ‘faith,’ or ‘belief without reason,’ is founded entirely upon a rational base. They saw it and only now do they believe in it.”

“And?”

“They forsook their previous faiths and placed their belief in an empty shell of a religion. They think they’re faithful; they’re really, from a standpoint of true faith, dead. These killings are symbolic of that.”

Peter says, “So you were wrong about the third case. Someone using this as an excuse.”

“That was only a theory, but I don’t think it’s applicable any more. This makes the most sense. Think about the symbolism here. People left behind, trying to find their way into the arms of Jesus. These, of all of the followers of the religion, are closest – if only they could come back to life and climb the ropes they’re hung from, they’d be the closest anyone can ever get at this point.”

“Writers,” Peter breathes. He says it in an entirely different fashion now than he did before. “Supposing you’re right, who do you think a likely culprit would be?”

“Someone who hates to see the old faith perverted in this way,” I reply. “Why anyone like that would exist, though, I don’t know. All of them would be in Heaven already.”

Peter shakes his head. “At least we have something to go off of. Whoever is behind this, though… I would hate to meet him.”

I turn and start to stride out of the church, my part of the analysis finished. Peter will collaborate with the policemen on the material side of things, figuring out who the rest of the victims are, precisely when they were killed and how in each case, where the rope might have come from, and so forth.

“Wait a moment,” Peter calls. I stop and look at him. “I’m sorry,” he says. “I’ve never had much faith in writers.”

“That’s good. I’m not interested in becoming a god.”

He nods and hesitates for a moment before he asks his last question, of the deep philosophical tone that comes at profound moments in one’s life. “What kind of person, I wonder, would kill six people for the symbolism?”

“Simple,” I reply. “You know the story of Doubting Thomas?”

“From the Bible? He was a man who refused to believe in the resurrection of Jesus until he saw him in person and felt the holes in the man’s hands and feet, yes?”

“Precisely. The person we are looking for, were they an apostle, would have killed him.”

---

II

At the moment, I’m between jobs. Writers are employed by the authorities to investigate cases like the one I’m currently working on, yes, but our main passion has always been and always will be the craft itself. I just finished another one of my novels and sent it off to the usual people, and now I don’t know what I’m going to write about next.

There’s little point in asking my muse to hurry it up, because she’s very whimsical and capricious. I see her maybe once or twice a week; the rest of the time, she’s off partying with other writers’ muses. It’s not necessarily a bad setup, but it makes writing steadily a bit difficult if I don’t know what I want to do.

It’s late, and the last place I’m expecting to run into her is my usual place, a bar in the less-reputable section of the city that serves a stiff drink and isn’t selective about its clientele. We writers may be highly valued in society, but high society does not value us, and it’s difficult to go anywhere in the better parts of the city, so when I want a quick drink I come here.

I nod to the gargoyle standing guard at the entrance to the bar. He blinks at me, slowly, stone lids grinding down over obsidian eyes, and then holds out a massive, clawed hand made of granite. I fish into my pocket and pull out a small stone: chalcedony. The gargoyle takes it from me and examines it, then pops it into his mouth and chews experimentally.

“Good,” he rumbles. “Real chalcedony. Other people try to fake it.”

“I’m not,” I tell him, “other people.”

“Yes. Go on in.”

The gargoyle and I have something of an agreement. I give him little gargoyle delicacies, and if something happens on the inside that will require me to go outside, he’ll lend me a helping, half-ton hand. Not that I’m incapable of handling myself in a fight, but there are some who come to this bar that I would have no feasible chance against.

I walk into the smoky room and immediately spot a group of such folk: midians. For obvious reasons they only come out at night. They clothe themselves in dark robes for the males and dresses for the females, so that the only part of their bodies showing are their hands and heads. There are four of them, talking about something with humor registering in their sky-blue eyes. One of them, a female, laughs, and showcases her imposing set of fangs.

She notices me looking at her and smiles. It’s not a pleasant smile, but instead the kind of smile one wears when one looks at one’s dinner. I look away and move up to the bar.

“Evening,” the wisp behind the bar tells me. “The usual?”

“Of course,” I say, putting a coin down on the wood. The wisp extends a ghostly tendril and picks it up, turns it over, then pulls it into its semi-incorporeal form, where the coin disappears with a small pop. “How’s business?”

“Good, as you can see. Had a couple followers of that One God crap in here the other night, started getting all preachy. I had the gargoyle throw them out. Other than that, nothing exciting. Tell me, though, mister writer, is that who I think it is in the corner booth there?”

I look in the general direction the wisp indicates with another tendril and see, to my surprise, my muse, talking to a very large young man.

“That’s my muse,” I say.

“The girl? I was talking about her date. Isn’t that Thor?”

“I’ve never met him. Maybe I’ll go ask.”

The wisp finishes mixing my usual and hands it to me. “Good luck with that. I wouldn’t get between him and her, if you know what I mean.”

I take a sip of the green liquid in my glass and feel it burn as it goes down. Good stuff. Feeling a bit more confident than I was two seconds ago, I saunter over to the corner booth and slide in next to my muse. The conversation abruptly halts and both she and the man that would be Thor look at me, surprised.

“Who the hell are you?” the young man asks with a voice like thunder. Definitely Thor. What a major deity is doing in a downtown bar like this, I have no idea.

“This is my writer,” my muse quickly says. “Didn’t expect to see him here, though.”

“I could say precisely the same thing about you,” I tell her. “You’d think there would be better places you could go to make small talk with a god.”

She colors nicely, evident on her pale skin. “This isn’t what it looks like. I passed him on the street and asked if we could get a drink together. I’m not really that interested.”

“So nice to hear,” Thor rumbled. “I was afraid you were making something out of this that it’s not.”

My muse looks at him, aghast. “What? But you –”

“I just remembered that I actually have an engagement in about twenty minutes,” Thor says. “Thank you for the company, miss. It has been entertaining.” He nods at me before slipping out of the booth and leaving.

“Your poor luck, I suppose,” I say, taking another sip of my usual.

My muse looks at me with anger in her brown eyes. “I was just getting to know him! How do you expect me to provide you with any kind of material if you don’t let me do my work? That stroke of inspiration in the church today took quite a bit out of my reserves.”

“If I recall correctly, I came up with that on my own,” I tell her, somewhat more harshly than is absolutely necessary. “You didn’t have anything to do with it.”

She gives me a petulant stare, lips pouting. “I would have if you’d let me.”

“What I need you for is my work. I can take care of investigating cases by myself, it’s nowhere near as difficult.”

“What if I wanted to help with investigating cases? What if I found that interesting?”

I give her a scandalized look. “When you could be out doing what muses do best? Why would you want to come and look at corpses with me? I thought you hated my company and that you think as writers go I’m incredibly boring.”

“Your poor luck, I suppose,” she retorts, flinging my words back at me. “Maybe God just didn’t feel like trying when he sculpted your personality.”

“Don’t talk to me about God. I’ve spent enough time in a church already.”

“This is stupid. I’m going to a different bar, let me out.”

I don’t move. She gives me an ineffectual shove and realizes I’m not going to budge, then falls silent and stares at the worn and pitted tabletop. Being a muse must be terrible; all one has to do is go out and live the life one wants to live and share one’s experiences with one’s writer, but when it comes to matters where one’s will and one’s writer’s will conflict, the writer always wins out.

That is why, in some places, muses are better known as thralls.

I take another sip of my drink and let it burn its way down, then ask, “You’re really, genuinely interested in taking a look at this case with me?”

She stops staring at the tabletop and nods. “I’m curious.”

“All right. I’m scheduled to head down to the police station at noon tomorrow to talk with Peter.” I don’t bother telling her who Peter is; she already knows. “If you promise to be on your best behavior, I’ll let you come with me.”

Delighted, my muse flings her arms around me and gives me a kiss on the cheek. “I promise.”

With a sigh I get up out of the booth and motion to the door. “Shall we walk?”

“Sounds good to me.”

My cheek tingles a bit, and ideas flash through my head. Some less principled writers rape their muses, to extract as many ideas from them as possible in the shortest amount of time. I find the practice to be disgusting and inhumane, something that only fools and the untalented do in desperation. It ruins their muses forever, and muses are living creatures too, after all.

Besides, even if she is my muse, I doubt my current interest would take kindly to it if I had any kind of sexual relationship with her. Monogamy is something of a rule amongst the dryads.

---

III

“We’ve confirmed that all six of the dead were indeed members of the faith,” Peter says to me. “In all likelihood they were killed in the early hours of yesterday morning – their rigor mortis has just barely begun to wear off. They were attacked and had their necks snapped from behind, giving them no chance to put up any resistance. Then they were taken to that church and hung from the crucifix.”

I nod and lean back in my chair, thinking. The police station is bustling about Peter and myself, with suspects being brought in for unrelated crimes and people lodging grievances. My muse sits in a chair behind me, almost my shadow. “All at once?”

Peter gives a snort. “Anything large enough to carry six bodies at once would not have been able to so easily sneak in and out of a church.”

“But they were all killed at the same time, more or less. That suggests that they were all brought to the church in one go.”

“Not necessarily. They could have been killed on the same night, yes, but brought there over the course of a good while.”

“That presents a difficult scenario,” I remind Peter. “Either he killed all of them at once, or very close together, and then took them one or two at a time to the church while leaving the other bodies wherever they happened to fall, which is an enormous risk, or…” I trail off, an idea striking me.

Peter recognizes the look on my face and glances at my muse. She wears a broad smile and I cluck at her. “I would have arrived at that eventually. Save your inspiration for my more important work.”

“I think solving a multiple homicide is more important work than writing!” Peter protests.

“It all depends upon your priorities,” I tell him. “But let’s not get into a debate about that. Rather, what if these people were not killed over the course of the evening or very close together or anything like that? What if they –” and at this my eyes glitter and I smile triumphantly – “all entered that church of their own accord?”

Peter hisses and mutters a satyr curse. “That makes a frightening amount of sense. But under what circumstances…?”

“They were summoned there, or called there, these six people. Probably by somebody they all knew, or were at least acquaintances with. That person would be our culprit.”

“You don’t think it could just be an unlucky coincidence for that they were in the church when the murderer happened by?”

“No, I think not,” I tell him. “They were called there, to be sacrificed.”

“But to what god?”

“The god of the original faith. Not this new, Doubting Thomas variety of the faith, but the first one.”

Peter frowns. “As you said, though, that god will no longer have any interest in the material plane, what with his purpose and grand design having been carried out. If I recall correctly, too, he was not the sort of god to want human sacrifices. He preferred animals.”

“His followers sacrificed plenty of humans in his name, even if they did it with a sword on a battlefield instead of a knife on an altar. Ancient history, but it left deep scars, or so I understand.”

Thinking for a moment longer, Peter nods and says, “I’ll report this to the chief and recommend we follow this sacrifices angle up. Good work.”

I nod modestly, then motion at my muse and say, “I found her in a bar last night with a very old god whose faith has seen a bit of resurgence after the Second Coming. Talk about sacrifices.”

“Which god?” Peter asks my muse.

“Thor,” she says, her voice very small. She is normally an expansive and almost boorish personality, but only when not around others with me.

Peter gives her another look as though seeing her for the first time. “What were you doing in a bar with the God of Thunder?”

“Trying to get invited into his bed,” I reply for her. “Seems he just wanted company for a drink, though.”

“And you say the idea of the murderer finding six people in a church is too coincidental? To find Thor with someone you know in a bar you frequent, when he could be anywhere that he has followers…”

“Astronomical,” I say, “yes. It’s what we writers like to call ‘plot device.’ It keeps the story moving.”

“This isn’t a story,” Peter says to me. “Six very real people are dead, killed by a zealot of a religion that’s long gone if your theory is accurate. You shouldn’t treat it as trivial.”

“It’s only trivial if the writer is a fool and doesn’t know how to weave all the events of his story together into one cohesive pattern. Everything is important for some reason or another. Every little scene has its purpose within the greater context of the story. It’s just sad that life doesn’t operate that way.”

“If life did work like a story,” Peter says, “we wouldn’t need writers. It’s because we want something from you that you exist.”

My muse starts at this, and I know it hits especially close to home for her. I shrug at Peter. “This is how things work, not just for writers. If nobody ever got murdered or robbed we wouldn’t need police. If people got murdered and robbed but it was all open and not hard to figure out we wouldn’t need detectives. If all the cases that need solving were ones that detectives can easily handle, writers would have one less function and a lot more of us would be unemployed. The down-to-earth, materialistic nature of the detective doesn’t mix well with the whimsical, variegated nature of the writer.”

The satyr taps a hoof against the floor. “I wonder if, against that logic, there was ever a writer-detective.”

“There was, once,” I say, rising to leave and motioning for my muse to do so as well.

“Who was he?”

I smile, briefly. “An English gentleman named Sherlock Holmes. He was a fictional character.”

My muse and I see ourselves out of the police station, the clip-clop of Peter’s hooves as he goes to report to the chief fading away behind us.

---

IV

The sun is starting to sink towards the curve of the horizon. I can see it through the window of my sitting-room, which has had the floor cleared for the activity within. My house is large enough, not exactly spacious, but I live well.

Oak tells me that she can’t do this any longer.

I gaze at her in confusion, my sword leveled in case this is some kind of ploy, hoping that it is but knowing that it isn’t. The smallsword is heavy in my hand – this is a real weapon, not some fencing toy that they give children who are learning to duel. The pen may be mightier than the sword, but I can kill you much more effectively with the latter than the former, and so I make a point of being in top form with the smallsword.

Oak is the dryad with whom I have been having a rather interesting relationship for the past few months. Her name, for the oak tree, is the only unattractive thing about her. She has lovely green eyes set in a regal face. An extremely fine layer of fur covers her skin, which is the color of earth and soil, and her skin covers muscles that are as hard as granite. She is physically in the peak of fitness, and is not as slender or frail as most of her dryad kin; she is powerful but lean, strong but not bulky. As with all dryads, she does not wear clothing, and is naked except for the buckler she wears on her left arm to complement the smallsword she wields.

We met in a fencing club. Both of us had, by coincidence, decided to take a tour of the place, and both of us had come to the same conclusion: namely, that it was a playground for the idiots in the aristocracy who think being able to twirl a rapier makes them an expert duelist. I have been in many swordfights in my life, and none of them ever obeyed an arbitrary set of rules.

Ever since we met, we have tested one another – at bladepoint, at dinner, at shows, in bed. It has not been an easy match. We are both good with a sword, and we both make excellent dinner, and we both enjoy a good show, and I don’t blush to say that we are both good in bed, but there are basic differences there that make things difficult. She finds me hard to understand, never sure what my motive for a particular action could be, while I find her too simplistic, only looking to derive whatever pleasure she can from life. The dryads have no written alphabet, so writing is uninteresting to her, and I have little standing with trees, for obvious reasons. So far it has worked because of our mutual interests, but even our interests are for different reasons.

That being said, the reason I gaze at her in confusion is not because I haven’t been expecting this for some time now, but instead why she should bring this up in the middle of a fight.

“I’m not surprised,” I say, catching a thrust of hers on my sword and directing it away, then forcing her back with a quick jab that she easily catches on her buckler. “To tell you the truth, I’ve been waiting for you to say that, but I don’t see why you would pick now to do it.”

Oak steps back a pace and works at her left shoulder, which I managed to score earlier during the fight. It was a small cut, and dryads heal quite quickly, so the wound is almost entirely gone. I have a small cut on my abdomen, right through my shirt, and another just below my right eye. We are very good, and we could altogether avoid injuring one another quite easily, but what then would be the point of a duel?

So far, that is the only sentiment of mine that Oak has actually agreed with without any persuasion.

“I’m actually leaving tonight,” she says. “It’s been too long since I’ve seen my grove, and I’m becoming homesick despite my best efforts. I find my thoughts turning there more and more often.”

“Really,” I say, stepping in to press the attack. “I thought you made a point of coming to the city and learning human warfare to separate yourself from your kin.”

“The seed doesn’t fall far from the tree,” she says to me, parrying my thrust and trying for a quick bash with her buckler.

I twist under the blow and manage to slip past her defenses, scoring a neat mark on her right thigh. Her blood is the color of sap, and a tiny pinprick oozes out of the small wound. “If this is what you want, I understand.”

She retaliates with a quick jab to my arm that just barely pierces my skin. “I’m glad. I was afraid you were going to be hurt.”

“I think it’s a little late for that,” I say with a small smile, looking at the spot of crimson appearing on my sleeve and lowering my sword. She rolls her eyes and lowers her sword as well. “I had no illusions from the beginning – this was a relationship of convenience, not of permanence. I just hope it wasn’t too difficult for you to tolerate me.”

Oak purses her lips. “At times,” she says, a bit of mischief in her eyes. “But on the whole, no. I may come back someday, but it’s doubtful.”

“Mm.”

She cocks her head and says, “Can I ask you a question?”

“You just did,” I tell her.

“Don’t be coy.”

“Of course you can ask me a question.”

“Why do you do what you do? I left my grove and my kind to come here because I wanted to cultivate myself as an individual. Is that why you write?”

I smile and return my smallsword to its sheath, which has been leaning against the far wall. “Partly. A writer writes to be read, after all, and anyone who reads what I write recognizes that I wrote it. But this reminds me of a conversation I had with my new partner down at the police station. He’s convinced that life doesn’t work like a story, and I’m a tad inclined to agree with him. Not everyone can be the protagonist, after all. But it would be nice if life did indeed work that way, and being a writer allows me to more easily spot the cracks in causality, where life stops working as it should and becomes like the plot of a bad romance or starts going to the tune of pentameter. It lets me say to myself, ‘Perhaps?’ And I’m wrong every time, of course, but it makes it easier to doubt and pretend.”

Oak returns my smile and sheathes her own sword, pulling the buckler off of her arm as well. “You really are strange. You never have a simple reason for anything.”

“If I did,” I tell her, not expecting her to understand what I’m saying, “I would be one-dimensional.”

She shakes her head patronizingly, and I know I was right in not expecting her to know what I’m talking about. “We have time before I go. Shall we say goodbye in the old way?”

I raise an eyebrow and spread my hands. “If the old way involves any sort of dryad ritual, I’m afraid I’ve no trees or flowers for us to use.”

Oak shakes her head in that patronizing manner again and pulls me to her, covering my mouth with hers. She has a peculiar taste, sharp and reminding me somewhat of the smell of wood. Her nipples are even darker than the rest of her body and I can easily feel them through the thin material of my shirt. I wrap my left arm around her waist and stroke her spine with my free hand before letting her maneuver me out of my sitting-room and towards my bedroom.

There is a loud rap at my door and both of us start and withdraw from each other’s mouths. “I’m sorry,” I tell her. “Give me a minute.” Oak nods and disappears into my bedroom, and I can hear the sounds of her pulling back the covers of my bed.

I open my door and find myself two inches away from the end of Peter’s snout. Behind him is the carriage that we rode in yesterday, undead horses and all.

“Yes?” I ask.

“We’ve just found six more followers of the One God,” Peter tells me. “They were all killed in the same fashion as the ones in the last church, except these are more recent and they are in a smaller church on the east side of the city.”

“They’re dead, so I take it that they aren’t going anywhere,” I say. “If you don’t mind, then, I’ll join you in about half an hour. I have some business to conclude before we set out.”

Peter visibly bristles, the fur on his face rippling. “This needs immediate attention! You can’t delay police business for your own personal affairs, whatever they might be!”

I give the satyr a wall-eyed stare and tell him, in exacting words, “I am not a policeman or a detective. I am a writer. ‘I am a merry wanderer of the night.’ I work on my own timetable.”

If satyrs could turn red with anger, Peter certainly would be. “This is inexcusable!” he roars.

“I’m rather essential to the investigation and you have no choice but to wait for me,” I tell him. “Get over it.”

“I thought I understood you,” the satyr mutters.

“‘And, as I am an honest Puck, if we have unearned luck now to ‘scape the serpent’s tongue, we will make amends ere long; else the Puck a liar call; so, good night unto you all.’”

Then I shut the door in his face.

---

V

An hour later, half an hour for me to conclude my affairs with Oak and half an hour to get to the church from my home, I am looking at six bodies, each strung up by a rope and tied three to an arm of the crucifix in a church of the followers of the One God.

Peter is still deeply resentful; “ere long” is apparently an entirely subjective term. We spent the carriage-ride here in silence, and he deferred to the sergeant on hand, this time an extremely heavyset man who I suspect must have some troll ancestry, when it came time to brief me on the details of the case.

“‘S far as we can tell, they was all done ‘round the same time,” the sergeant says to me in a deep, provincial drawl. “All stiff as a board, they are. Looks like it weren’t the rope what kilt ‘em, either. They was done beforehand.”

“Just like last time,” I observe. “Are we still operating on my assumption that these people were called here by someone they knew, Peter?”

The satyr makes a quiet, inarticulate mewling noise that I assume is the equivalent of a grudging, affirmative grunt.

“I’m not sure we should,” I tell him. “It just became rather less plausible – unless these people all are family members or friends of the last six deceased, it’s highly unlikely that they would all know the same single person.”

“Unless,” a new voice interrupts, “there’s more than one perpetrator.”

“Young woman, this is place is off-limits!” one of the policemen stationed at the entrance to the church protests as my muse walks right past him as though he doesn’t exist. “Stop!”

“She’s my muse,” I say. “I told her she could accompany me on this investigation. You can trust her.”

Peter looks at me, then at my muse, and shakes his head. “Writers,” he mutters.

“Well?” my muse asks.

“That’s unlikely,” I say. “Two killers with the same capacity to bring followers of this religion to churches when they are officially closed and then kill and hang all of them? Until we’re given reason to believe that we’re dealing with two or more people, I think we should simply go under the assumption that we have a single culprit.”

“This is unlike you,” Peter says, his slitted eyes flashing. “You, as you made so clear to me, are a writer. Shouldn’t you be embracing the idea of there being more than one of these mysterious killers? Doesn’t the prospect engage you?”

“Being a writer does not preclude having common sense,” I snap. “And, if you really want to argue this point, a single villain with power over the dispensable sheep of a plot is more intimidating and easier to portray than a group.”

“These people are not disposable sheep!” Peter thunders.

“You really don’t understand this, do you? A writer works by pretending it’s all a story and he is the detective charged with figuring out the mystery. Everything eventually becomes clear to the protagonist.”

“This is nonsense!”

“Clearly,” my muse says to Peter, “you have no concept of the suspension of disbelief.”

Dead silence lies heavily in the air after that until I turn to the sergeant, an idea striking me. A glance at my muse shows that she is frowning furiously at Peter and not the source of my inspiration, which is fine with me. “Who was it that reported having found these bodies?” I ask.

The sergeant pauses for a moment and thinks, the gears in his massive head clearly turning. “Some fellow who does cleaning ‘n the like. Takes care o’ the church while it’s closed.”

“Does he live in the church or does he come here from his home?”

“I dunno. ‘E gave his name to be –” he strains to wrap his mouth around an unfamiliar word – “Ah-ha-shwer-shus.”

I am, understandably, incredulous. “Ahasuerus, the Wandering Jew? Serving as a caretaker for a church of the One God, and after the Second Coming, no less? He should be dead and gone by now!”

“I dunno about this Jew fellow,” the sergeant says, “but honest as the nose on my face ‘e gave his name to be that.”

“I don’t know about your nose’s honesty, and I definitely don’t know about this man’s. Find out where he lives and then Peter and I will go and investigate a bit further.”

The sergeant nods, bristling a bit about my comment on his nose, and heads over to the door. I take a moment to massage my temples and think. “What’s today?”

“Friday,” Peter tells me.

“We have the rest of today and tomorrow to figure out precisely who this killer is,” I say. “I think he may disappear entirely on the Sabbath.”

“Why?”

I give Peter a small smile. “Call it protagonist’s intuition.” The satyr runs a finger down his snout and sighs, his race’s equivalent of palming one’s forehead.

My muse laughs.

---

VI

Now it is Saturday, just after midnight. After a stunning initial display of ineptitude from the police, Peter and I took over the investigation. It took a while to locate precisely where this man calling himself Ahasuerus makes his home. It involved questioning quite a few clergymen of the religion that give services at that particular church, and all of them reported the same thing, that they did not know the identity of the caretaker that maintains the church while it is locked up for the week.

The last clergyman we talked to had a young son who serves as an altar boy, who said that he has seen a man going in and out of the church during the week while he is on his way to school. We managed to extract a description from the boy, a minimal one at best but enough to establish with the clergyman that the man in question is an adept of the faith and is definitely not named Ahasuerus.

He is named Thomas.

Peter, my muse and I are sitting in the carriage drawn by undead horses, moving at top speed to where this man is supposed to live. I keep the window open, watching the streets rush by as we ride.

“Do you think he’s dead?” Peter asks me. He has gotten over the previous day’s incident with Oak, which was quickly forgotten as we set out on the dreary path of the detective work he so adores – one clear-cut goal, one place that we must find and a name we must put to a face. It also helped that I let him take charge of that, information-gathering not being my strong point.

“Probably,” I reply. “Think about it. For the culprit to report his own murders in the guise of this man, he will have to have some ability to change his shape. It is much easier for a changeling to mimic another being if they can perform a close study of their features. The easiest way for it to do that is to kill the subject. And the subject’s name? Thomas. The irony is unmistakable.”

“You don’t think we could be dealing with a deity, do you?”

I shake my head. “You know that we have no jurisdiction when it comes to deities. They do what they like, so long as it involves their own followers. Those same followers and their belief, and oftentimes their blood, can guarantee that much.”

Peter looks at his hooves and clops one introspectively against the floor of the carriage. “Suppose that we are dealing with a mundane changeling, then. Why would he go to the trouble of killing this Thomas and impersonating his shape to report the murders, only to change the man’s name to Ahasuerus, which is rather less common a name than Thomas? It seems like a flaw in his plan.”

“No, this is definitely purposeful,” I say. “Can’t you feel it, Peter? We’ve arrived at that border between the real and the unreal, where life stops making sense and becomes almost narratable. Think about the history of the Wandering Jew. He taunted Christ on the cross and was sentenced to forever wander the earth until the Second Coming. That Second Coming has already happened, and I’m sure that the original Wandering Jew is, at this point, dust. The perpetrator knows that using the name would raise immediate suspicion once clear heads with no troll ancestry were put in charge. He wants us to come to this man’s home.”

“What about,” my muse asks, “the man who reported the first murders?” It is the first time she has spoken since we got into the carriage. True to her word, she has let me do my work without her interfering, only speaking whenever an idea occurs to her.

I look at Peter. “I didn’t think about that. Who was it?”

“No connection to be found there, else I would have mentioned it to you before,” Peter assures me. “It was a member of the religion who had left a watch of his in the First Church, the fool, and hadn’t remembered until that evening.”

“But,” my muse says, “I’m sure that if he hadn’t reported the murder when he did, someone else would have died and been replaced in order to summon the police to the scene of the crime.”

“Probably,” I say. “This bears further investigation, but for now –”

The sound of the carriage grinding to a halt interrupts me. Peter and I both throw open the doors and start to get out.

My muse motions as if to follow us and I say, “No. I want you to stay here.”

She glares at me. “I’m not helpless!”

“I never said you were. I simply don’t know what kind of situation we might be getting into. I’d rather you stay here and make sure we have an escape route than have you come with us.”

She knows this talk about securing an escape route is complete hogwash, but she nods and sits back down in the carriage, pouting. I sigh and draw my smallsword, watching as Peter pulls a pair of long daggers from his belt, one silver, one steel. “Ready for anything, aren’t we?”

Peter shrugs. “It never hurts to be prepared.”

The house of Thomas is a dark and decrepit little thing that sits on a street corner. Peter and I move to the front door, and my satyr partner prepares to kick it in. I motion for him to wait and try the handle to the door.

It swings open easily, and Peter gives me a somewhat affronted look. “How…?”

“I told you the perpetrator wants us here. He would leave the door unlocked. After all, there’s something in here we need to see.”

It is very dark, and it seems that Thomas did not invest in either candles or lamps. Peter sheathes his steel dagger and holds aloft his silver one, murmuring something in his peculiar, mewling native tongue. The silver slowly begins to glow, illuminating the room around us.

The scene the silver glow reveals to us is, in a word, horrifying. I draw back involuntarily and nearly drop my smallsword. “Odin’s beard!”

“Such language,” Peter drawls, not half as disturbed as me. That is the one advantage, in my mind, to being a detective: what I can imagine, he sees, on a regular basis.

Thomas, or at least a man matching the boy’s description of Thomas, is sitting in an armchair by an empty hearth. He has been laid open from groin to throat, and his innards have spilled out of his corpse.

His heart is missing from his ribcage.

Behind me, I hear a choking noise. I whirl, ready, and almost stab my muse when I see her standing in the doorway, not inside the house so as to obey my orders but close enough that she can see inside. She has her hand over her mouth and is desperately trying not to wretch.

I give a small sigh and sheathe my smallsword. “This is why I told you to stay in the carriage.”

“That’s awful,” she manages. “Why… why would they take his heart?”

Peter shakes his head. “A cannibal, perhaps. More likely just sheer cruelty.”

“No,” I say, “that’s not it.”

Both Peter and my muse, obviously curious, look to me to explain. I shift from one foot to the other and say, “I spent a night with a midian, once.” Looking at my muse, I add, “She was in the bar the other night when I found you.”

“The one that was looking at you on your way out?”

“Mm. Midians make rather interesting pillow talk, as it happens. She told me that she was impressed with me, and that if I wanted she would tell me precisely why they value blood so much.”

“And what did she say?” Peter presses me.

“Blood is the currency of all life. We all make it, we all need it, we all die without it. It is the silver and gold standard of will itself. The sucking and taking of blood is, for the midians, a binding contract, sure as if you signed a piece of paper with the blood from pricking your finger. That is also why gods value the sacrifice of living things, because of the blood. It is the transference of power to them, a power more potent than even the most concentrated belief of the zealot can lend them. The heart is symbolic of all this, and we all know the importance of symbols.”

“So the perpetrator took this man’s heart as a sacrifice to his god?” Peter asks me.

Inspiration strikes, and this time it is definitely the work of my muse; in the dim light, I can even see the faint glow of her eyes, as though there were firelight dancing in them where there is no flame. “No, he took it to show us that he understands this idea of blood and sacrifice as well as we do, and to show that the twelve people he has killed so far are not sacrifices.”

Peter blinks. “They’re not?”

“No, they’re not. They have had their necks snapped and then they have been hung from rope so perfectly that there was not even any chafing.” I motion at the late Thomas and ask, “At what point during all of this, Peter, did they bleed?”

---

VII

Saturday is wonderful because it is my official day off. I sleep until ten or eleven in the morning, stroll about town to gather inspiration and breakfast, and then usually work on whatever project I am engaged with at the time until dinner. The problem, as I mentioned before, is that I am currently between jobs, and I have nothing new to write about.

My muse helps, in her own way, of course, but ultimately I have to decide what it is I want to write about and how, and for the moment I’m entirely out of ideas. I would expect this case to stir some passion to write in me, as most things tend to do, but the case is stirring passion to solve it in me, which is quite the opposite of what these things usually do. Most of the time, I only have to make a few deductions for any given case to get the police rolling enough to solve it themselves, but this one has proven, so far, to be frustratingly opaque.

No, “frustrating” is not the word. “Enticing” is a much better one. This case has proven, so far, to be enticingly opaque. It has succeeded in holding my admittedly easily-diverted interest, and I am approaching the level of hell-bent in my desire to see it cracked.

That is why, after I get back to my home at two in the morning, I only sleep until six, then rise and make my way out into the city. I am technically not on duty, but then again, I am technically never on duty unless the police call for me, and this is just the day on which they aren’t allowed to do that unless a case represents a direct threat to the government.

After a bit of consideration, I head out to the home of the great spiritual leader of the followers of the One God, Father White. The man makes a very comfortable living, perhaps even approaching blatant decadence, in a better part of town. Obviously his soul is not the only thing reaping the rewards of his position.

I stride right up to the huge, ornately carved, wooden double-doors of his mansion home and rap sharply three times. A few seconds later, the door I rapped on opens a bit and I see the face of a butler. “Yes?” he asks.

“I am here to see Father White,” I tell him. “He will be expecting me. Please show me to him.”

The butler gives me a well-practiced frown. “The Father did not inform me that he was expecting guests today.”

“Fortunately, I am merely one guest and not a plurality. Let me in, please.”

That earns me an angry scowl and the butler tries to close the door in my face. I get a foot in, quite literally, and then give him an uppercut to the chin for his troubles. He goes down like a sack of especially glass-jawed potatoes.

“Maybe this is why nobody likes to host writers,” I murmur ironically to myself as I drag him into what looks to be a broom closet. I quickly pull the black tailcoat he wears off of his prostrate form and throw it over myself; any kind of close inspection will reveal precisely who I am, but if someone sees me from behind from down a long hallway I shouldn’t attract any suspicion. I thumb my nose at the man before stepping out of the broom closet, affecting an appropriately stiff posture, and shutting the door behind me.

Father White’s mansion is excessively large, especially for a single occupant. The staff live here, of course, but they hardly count, being housed in either the basement or in small, stout little brick buildings behind the mansion itself. Only the butler actually merits a room inside the mansion proper, and then only so he can promptly come to Father White if his bell should be rung.

For my part, I head up the sweeping staircase in the front room and ascend to the second floor, then start looking for the biggest, most opulent bedroom, which will obviously belong to the priest. Several times I see the rest of the staff passing by, in which case I duck into the nearest room and wait for them to pass or simply turn around and start walking back in the direction from whence I came if they are going perpendicularly to me.

At one point I have to duck into what seems to be Father White’s study. I feel a pang of envy when I see the shelves and shelves of books, the opulent armchairs, the finely carved mahogany desk at the end of the room. My envy lessens somewhat when, giving the shelves a once-over, I see that more than half the books are nothing but empty covers, designed to merely give the impression of a book. It disappears entirely when I see that the rest are either various copies of the Bible, apocryphal texts related to the Bible, or – in one instance – the Kama Sutra. I eye this last with a smile, not terribly surprised to find this in a priest’s study.

There are no further interruptions in my search, and I soon locate the priest’s bedroom. It is at least seven-thirty by now, but knowing my own sleeping habits on this day, I knock and call, “Father White?” My query elicits no response that I can hear, and I try again, louder. “Father White? Are you in there? I need to talk to you.”

Still nothing. I try the handle to the door and find that it turns without resistance, so I open the door a crack and peer inside.

It is a very large bedroom, with multiple armoires and several wardrobes surrounding an enormous and very sumptuous bed. Directly next to the bed is a small nightstand that could also pass for a desk, though there is no chair to accompany it, which is curious. Morning sunlight streams through white curtains covering the windows behind the bed. There is a small opening in the wall to the left of the bed, which I easily identify as a dumbwaiter, and then a doorway in the adjacent wall that I assume leads to the lavatory. The room itself is entirely devoid of life.

I step inside and shut the door behind me. I peer into the doorway to the lavatory and see nothing but darkness, meaning that the curtains in there are drawn; if the priest were taking a bath or seeing to some other matter of hygiene he would doubtless not be doing it in the dark. However, just because I cannot see into the room does not mean that the person inside cannot see me, and there is suddenly a muffled noise of exclamation, followed by what sounds remotely like a cry for help.

I walk into the washroom and pull the curtains back, illuminating a sunken tub, a large wall-sized mirror opposite me, another doorway leading to the toilet, and a naked young woman tied with ripped strips of cloth to the chair that was missing from the nightstand next to the bed in the other room. She looks to be about sixteen or seventeen, with mousy brown hair, large brown eyes, and a body that is not quite mature. She has had several handkerchiefs stuffed in her mouth and secured with another strip of cloth to keep her silent.

My lip curls a bit at Father White’s tastes, and I move to undo the girl’s gag. She spits out the handkerchiefs and says, “Thank God! He said it could take until the afternoon for someone to find me!”

“Who did?” I ask. “The priest?”

“Yes, the bastard. Tied me to this chair and left me here and didn’t even pay me.”

“You’re a whore?”

“That’s such an ugly term. I prefer ‘prostitute.’”

“‘What’s in a name?’” I ask her, crouching and working at the cloth keeping her hands tied to the chair. “‘That which we call a rose, by any other name would smell as sweet.’”

She wriggles a bit as her bonds start to loosen. “What is that supposed to mean?”

“It means you’re a whore whether you call yourself that or not,” I tell her blithely. “I didn’t realize Father White’s religion allowed him such debauchery.”

“It doesn’t,” she says, a bit snippily, “but that doesn’t stop him.”

I free her hands and, as an afterthought, spit contemptuously into the tub before moving onto her feet. “Truly a man of God. Why did he leave you restrained here like this?”

“I have no idea,” she says, rubbing at her wrists to restore the circulation. “All I know is that he approached me early last night, offered me a good deal of money for my company, three times what I’d normally charge, and brought me back here. Then, maybe an hour before midnight, another man came in. He told Father White that he did well in ‘following the divine will’ or something like that. I asked who he was, and that was when he told the priest to keep me here so I couldn’t tell anyone that I’d seen him. He tied me to this chair, gagged me, told me I would probably be found this afternoon, and left. That was hours and hours ago. I really have to use the bathroom.”

“Fortuitous that I happened by,” I observe. “The butler that I… persuaded to let me come in here didn’t tell me that the priest was out when I asked to see him, just that he wasn’t expecting any visitors. I’m sure that he, and the rest of the staff, are convinced that the priest is still in his bed, sleeping off a night of drunken carousing.”

“How did you get him to let you in, and why do you have his coat?”

“He had a glass jaw.”

“Oh.” I free her feet and she tentatively stands up, wincing as the blood rushes back into her legs. “Thank you.”

“Use the lavatory and then cover yourself,” I tell her. “And then I have a few more questions.”

She walks, limping a bit due to the pins and needles she’s no doubt feeling, to the toilet. I leave, walking back into the bedroom to give her some privacy. A while later, she emerges and heads over to an armoire, which she opens up, pulling out a fur robe and securing it around her waist. “Very nice fur,” she observes. “I think I’ll keep this for what that bastard put me through.”

“Fair enough,” I say. She turns around to find my face two inches from hers and starts a bit. “Now, who was this other man? It’s rather important, so don’t be stingy with the details.”

“Nobody that I recognized,” she tells me. “It was hard to see him in the dark, but he was big, really big, and broad. He had brown hair, curly, and these amazing green eyes. Those I remember. I think he was handsome, too, but the fact that he was obviously insane, and the fact that he wanted the priest to tie me up and leave me, did nothing for me.”

“Did Father White call him by name?” I ask.

“No. He never even looked the man in the face. It was like he was scared of him.”

“How did he address Father White?”

“Not like that. He called him ‘my son.’ Like Father White would talk to you.”

“I’m a writer,” I say. “I use lies to tell the truth. Father White, as the leader of this religion, is rather less artful about the whole thing and skips the part with the truth. We would have nothing to say to one another.”

“No need to get angry, I wasn’t implying anything,” she tells me. “Although, you are pretty cute when you’re irritated.”

“And you are entirely unskilled at seduction, even when you’re being honest. Besides,” and I think briefly of Oak, who is at least a hundred years old, “I tend to prefer older women.”

“Excuse me for being grateful.”

I step back, give a gallant half-bow, and say, “You are quite excused, and on that note, we should excuse ourselves, as we are undoubtedly not welcome in this house. Shall we go, Miss…?”

The girl turns her nose up at my clear insincerity, but still tells me her name. “Mary.”

I stop cold halfway through coming up from the bow and stare at her. “What?”

“Mary,” she repeats herself, still looking miffed. “Is there something wrong with it? Not pretty enough, maybe?”

“Not that at all,” I murmur, only one part in ten of my mind focusing on the room and the girl in front of me. Like the pieces of a puzzle that stubbornly refused to make any kind of spatial sense and suddenly assembles itself seemingly of its own accord, fact after fact all fall into place within my head to form a complete picture of what, precisely, must be going on. I can almost see my muse’s satisfied smile as she pours herself a cup of tea back at my home, the liquid in the cup reflecting the faintly flashing light in her eyes.

There is only one thing this all hinges on. Today is Saturday. Tomorrow is Sunday. I never keep track of the date; being a creature of habit does not change with the months. I look at Mary and say, “One more question before we leave. What is tomorrow?”

She returns my gaze incredulously. “You don’t know?”

“I told you that I’m a writer,” I tell her evenly. “Dates are immaterial to me.”

“Fine. Tomorrow is the thirteenth of April. Why?”

I shrug. “Not really that important. I just have something to do on the thirteenth and forgot whether it was this Sunday or the next.”

Mary does not contest the fabrication, as she obviously just wants to get out of the mansion without further incident. “Odd time to remember, but fine. Can we please leave?”

“Of course. Where does the good priest keep his sheets?”

She looks at me in confusion. “There are sheets on that bed, right there.”

“You may have no compunctions about using them, but I prefer to make clean escapes,” I tell her only half-jokingly.

It takes her a second to get it, at which point she makes a face at me and says, “That wardrobe, there. He pulled those out of it last night.”

I open the wardrobe in question and find it full of fresh sheets. I immediately select several, pull out a concealed dagger, and start shredding them into long strips. “Come here and start knotting them together.”

“We’re going to use a rope made of sheets to get down to the ground?” she asks disbelievingly. “Are you insane?”

“Rather than take a merry jaunt back through the house, yes. That butler should be up by now, and I’m sure the staff will be conducting a search for me. This is the last place they will look, for fear of disturbing the good priest, so we make our exit through that window. Simple.”

Mary sighs and does as I tell her, quickly and expertly cinching the strips of cloth together into a passable rope. I keep cutting and ask, “How did you come by your profession?”

She stops knotting cloth for a moment in surprise and then resumes, asking me, “You mean, how did I become a prostitute?”

“Well, in all fairness, you became a prostitute the second you sold sexual favors for coin. I should have asked why.”

I feel rather than see another sour look, and she says, “If you have to know, it’s because I don’t have anywhere else to go and it makes better money than any other job I could get.”

“You have no parents?”

“None that I would want to go back to.”

“I see. That’s a shame.”

“Yes, it’s all very sad. I don’t see why you’re asking and being nice to me when you don’t like me or what I do. If you’re trying to get on my good side, I already told you that you’re pretty cute.”

I finish slicing up the sheet and put my dagger away. “I’m not trying to get on anyone’s side. I’m a writer; I ask questions.”

“Really. Well, then, why are you a writer? Are you just naturally curious?”

“‘Curiosity is only vanity,’” I quote to her. “‘Most frequently we wish not to know, but to talk. We would not take a sea voyage for the sole pleasure of seeing without hope of ever telling.’”

“So writing is a way of expressing your curiosity.”

“No,” I tell her, taking the sheet-rope she has finished and securing it to one of the posts of Father White’s bed. “Writing is a way of asking questions without being curious about the answers. Shall we, Miss Mary?”

She nods and gives me a brave smile in spite of herself. I open the window, toss the rope out of it, and am down on the ground below in less than ten seconds. Mary follows me, proceeding rather more cautiously. “Jump and I’ll catch you,” I call to her. She climbs a bit further down and then drops the last five feet. I easily catch her and set her on her feet.

Windows open and there are angry shouts from the mansion. Mary looks at me, clearly excited, and says, “They’re really angry. You were right after all.”

“Of course,” I tell her smoothly.

We are half a mile away by the time the staff make it to the front door.

---

VIII

Mary obviously lodges a protest when we get into a carriage and I tell the driver to head to the police station.

She looks at me as though I’m about to murder her and says, “Are you going to have me arrested? Is that it?”

“Not at all,” I say. “You’ve given me valuable information relevant to a case that I’m working on at the moment. I need to find my partner, Peter, and tell him about this, immediately. I also intend to have Father White charged with kidnapping and rape.”

Her eyes widen and she asks, “Really? You know that’s not what happened.”

“You consented believing that would be paid. Prostitution is illegal, but rape is even moreso, and it will be much easier to stick a rape charge to him than try to get you out of a prostitution charge. Besides, the kidnapping segues nicely into rape.”

Mary gives a small, high-pitched giggle and then falls completely silent for a moment, taking it all in. “I appreciate it, I suppose. Life is hard enough without being arrested.”

“We do what we must,” I say. “And on a more selfish note, if I wanted to put my own dignity up for auction I would like to be able to do it legally.”

She rolls her eyes at that and we remain silent for the rest of the ride to the police station, which is short. We arrive, I pay the driver, and we get out, walking hurriedly up the stone steps.

I am immediately recognized and I say that Mary is with me as a witness, so we are immediately led back to Peter’s office, where he sits behind his desk, looking tired and forlorn, staring at the ceiling. When we enter, he starts and asks, “What are you doing here? It’s your day off, isn’t it?”

“Some things take priority for me,” I tell him. I motion for Mary to be seated and then begin to pace back and forth like a caged tiger. “I decided to pay the leader of the followers of the One God, Father White, a visit. His butler was uncooperative, so I let myself in, went to his room, and found that he wasn’t at home. I did find this young woman, however, by the name of Mary, bound and gagged in his lavatory. She tells me that he grabbed her off of the street last night, brought her back to his mansion, inflicted unspeakable acts upon her person without her consent, and then left her there when he went out the following morning with an accomplice. That accomplice,” and at this I stop pacing, step up to Peter’s desk, and slam my hands down on it, “is our murderer.’

Peter eyes the various knickknacks on his desk that were toppled over or disturbed by my theatrics, then ignores them in favor of my revelation. “Really. You were able to identify this man, Miss Mary?”

“No,” Mary says. “I gave a description of him, but Father White never called him by his name.”

Peter looks back at me. “Was the description enough for you to identify him?”

“We’re dealing with a changeling or one with the power of illusion, remember? That appearance could be one of dozens he can manufacture. No, I came to this revelation when Mary told me her name and what tomorrow’s date is.”

My satyr partner motions for me to continue. “And?”

“Tomorrow is the thirteenth,” I say. “By my calculations, though the holiday hasn’t been celebrated since the Second Coming, it will be Easter Sunday in about thirteen hours.”

“What does this tell you?”

“Mary, here, is representative of Mary Magdalene, the prostitute that gave up her sinful ways and followed Jesus.” I give a quick glance over my shoulder at the girl. She catches it and acts appropriately miffed at the idea of being a whore. “It was a popular idea that Jesus had at one point had a relationship with Magdalene, an idea that most mainstream followers of the religion denied.”

“Fine,” Peter says. “But this girl isn’t Mary Magdalene, and Father White is certainly not Jesus Christ.”

“You remember the heart,” I tell him. “Taken out of Thomas’s chest. It’s all about the symbolism. On Holy Thursday, the day when Jesus had the Last Supper, twelve followers, or apostles, of the religion of the One God were killed. We found six on Thursday in the First Church and six on Friday in a different one, but I’m sure that they were all summoned and killed on the same night, just in different places. Twelve apostles, just like Jesus had, dead. Today is Holy Saturday. Jesus made thirteen out of the group of twelve, and was their leader; Father White makes thirteen and is the leader, though, as you said, he’s no Jesus Christ.

“I should say he made thirteen instead, because I’m sure that while we were running around investigating the six dead we found in the other church, our perpetrator killed Father White, completing his rite. That was yesterday, Good Friday, when Jesus died on the crucifix. Before killing Father White, the perpetrator had him rape Mary, symbolic of the forbidden act of Jesus having intercourse with a prostitute – high blasphemy, as it were. Today is Holy Saturday, where nothing in particular happened on the secular plane; Jesus descended into Hell and then rose back out. Tomorrow, on Easter Sunday, our murderer will reap the rewards… and there won’t be any Doubting Thomas around to see them.”

Peter’s expression is hovering somewhere between incredulous disbelief and shocked awe. “Rite? Rewards?”

“Jesus returned from the dead on Easter Sunday,” I remind Peter. “The idea of resurrection does not necessarily have to apply to coming back from death. It is merely returning from one state to another.”

“So the perpetrator is looking to resurrect himself, in the symbolic sense, from his current state to a previous one? What state could he be wanting to return to?”

“Think,” I say. “We are dealing with a changeling or someone with power over illusions. All of the victims – the twelve apostles and, of course, Father White – either thought they knew this person, or, as is more likely in Father White’s case, thought he was a messenger or representative from God telling them that their faith was not in vain and they only needed to follow certain instructions to become ascendant. The perpetrator also obviously hates this religion, and quite possibly the one that came before it upon which it is based. All of these things point to one kind of individual.”

Both Peter and Mary expectantly lean closer to me. “Tell me, then,” Peter says. “What are we dealing with?”

“Simple,” I reply. “A fallen angel.”

---

IX

There is a flurry of activity as squads of policemen are dispatched to investigate every church of the religion of the One God in the city, a daunting task that is nonetheless necessitated by the gravity of the current situation. Precisely what the fallen angel intends to do with the power he is gathering I cannot say, but it bodes ill for all of us.

Normally the police would have no jurisdiction in this case any longer, but by technicality the fallen angel is no deity. He is a relic of a lost faith that no longer has any followers, and so cannot defend his actions with their blood or belief.

Peter is in charge of the dispatching, receiving reports, and keeping track of which churches have been searched and where. Mary and I are entirely forgotten in the bustle; now that I have done my part and figured out precisely what is going on with this case, I am, in the police’s eyes, no longer necessary.

I need closure. I need to see which fallen angel is behind this, and why.

“We should step outside for a bit of fresh air,” I say nonchalantly to Mary. “They’re not likely to find anything within an appreciable amount of time, and it’s getting stuffy in here.”

“What if they need me to testify against Father White?”

“There won’t be any court case held against a dead man. I just wanted to establish your innocence in this matter while avoiding your being prosecuted for prostitution. If you walk out that door right now they’ll take no notice.”

She shrugs. “All right. Let’s do that, then.”

We leave Peter’s office. Right now the satyr is in the middle of the police station, barking orders and receiving updates. I catch his eye and tell him, “We’re going to step outside for a little bit.”

“Whatever you like,” he tells me. As far as he is concerned, I could be telling him that Mary and I were going to go have sex on his desk and it would all be the same to him. Right now he has the one goal of finding Father White’s body, and, by extension, the perpetrator.

Mary and I leave, and waiting outside is my muse. She gives the prostitute a quick, somewhat suspicious once-over and then asks me, “Who is this? Your latest conquest?”

I roll my eyes at her. “This is Mary, a somewhat amateurish whore.”

“Charmed.”

Mary gives me a look that could kill and says, “And who is she?”

“This is my personal muse, a somewhat amateurish busybody.”

My muse echoes Mary’s look and says, “Don’t. Don’t do it.”

“Don’t do what?” I ask with faux innocence.

“I know you. You become more insulting when you’re nursing an obsession. It’s this case, isn’t it? You’re not willing to sit back and let the police handle it.”

“You do know me,” I sigh. “You’re right. I want to know precisely why this fallen angel has gone to such lengths to profane this religion and his old one, and what he hopes to gain. The possibilities are more than intriguing, they’re positively alluring. Just think of all the reasons he could be doing this!”

“They are wonderfully myriad,” my muse says, sarcasm coloring her words. Her mouth compresses into a thin line and her eyes become wide and pleading before she next implores me, “Please. Please don’t go.”

I stop and consider the situation from my muse’s perspective. The cornerstone of her existence, of her entire world, is looking to get himself killed by a fallen angel because he is too curious to let anything go, and as his muse she is incapable of doing anything to stop him. Suddenly her demand does not seem quite so irascible and irrational as it did a moment ago.

“I need to do this,” I tell her, picking my words carefully. “Does the protagonist ever wait to attack the villain until the cavalry comes charging in? No, and that is why the cavalry is perennially late. I can’t simply leave this to the police. It’s not in my nature, and besides… I have something of a personal stake in the matter as well. You know what I mean.”

My muse stares at me defiantly for a long moment before her expression seems to crumple and she explodes. “Fine, fine! Go ahead and get yourself killed. I won’t care! I’ll cease to exist, after all, so it’s not like that I have anything to lose!”

She turns on her heel and flees. I don’t bother to try calling for her to come back – not that she would be able to refuse, but I know that she would hate it and be even more humiliated than she is already.

“What was the matter with her?” Mary asks.

“She’s simply suffering from the human condition,” I reply.

“What’s that?”

“The fear of death. It is humankind’s single greatest motivator in this world. Everyone seeks immortality in some way, shape, or form, whether that is by passing down their heritage through progeny or being immortalized for their words or deeds. It is worse for her, because not only will she only ever be remembered as my muse, her death will come at the same moment mine does. They say you can always choose how you will die; that is not true for her.”

“Hmm.” Mary stares at the ground for a moment before looking at me and asking, almost hesitantly, “Can I ask one more favor of you?”

“What is it?”

“Can you walk me home?”

---

X

Mary’s home is not too far from the police station – a tall, some what ramshackle condominium. I can see through some of its windows that its other occupants seem to share Mary’s profession, and that some of them work rather shamelessly from home, even when it is barely past noon. I shrug and continue up the steps to the entrance of the building, where I open the door for her and motion for her to enter. “It has been good working with you. Good luck in your future endeavors… whatever they might be.”

She asks me, “Do you want to come in and have some tea? It’s the least I can do after everything you’ve done for me.”

“If it’s all the same to you, I’d rather not. I want to get back on this case as soon as possible. Good day.”

I turn and start to walk away, then stop cold as Mary says, “What if I told you I knew where your fallen angel was lairing?”

“What?”

“Your quarry. I can lead you to him.”

I whirl around and look at the girl. She seems entirely different from before, as though she has suddenly grown by one or two years. Her lips seem fuller, her body more shapely. Her formerly mousy brown hair is now silky and hangs in tresses about her face, framing eyes that are startling in their loveliness.

This is unnatural.

“Really,” I say. “Tell me, then.”

“I insist,” she says, “that you come inside for some tea first. It is the very least I can do to repatriate your kindness.”

Her mode of speech is entirely changed, too. A great anxiety grips me and I resist the urge to reach to my waist for my smallsword, which I am beginning to regret having left at home. I left my dagger at the police station, too, since I borrowed it from Peter some weeks ago and needed to return it. “All right, then.”

I follow her into the building, up two flights of stairs, and enter her home. It is small and simple, but relatively clean and well-kept. It has only two rooms, a bedroom and a sitting-room that effectively doubles for a kitchen; I assume that each floor has a shared lavatory. Set into the far wall is a large window overlooking the street three stories below.

There is no stove. As Mary closes the door behind us I look at her and ask, “How, precisely, are you going to make me tea without a stove?”

She gives me a knowing smile before taking me by the hand and leading me to a cupboard, which she opens. Before I can react, she withdraws from it a long carving knife, which she brandishes easily in one hand and lays flush against my throat. “I would not worry about the tea if I were you. Please, make yourself comfortable. Sit down.”

Very slowly, I step back until I feel a chair against the backs of my knees. I sit down and say, “Now that you have me here, what do you want?”

“I want you to stay here and behave for the next twelve hours,” she says. “I really do not see any need to kill you if you do that. If you try to escape, though, I may have to take drastic action.”

“I suppose I can be good,” I say, humoring her. “I’m curious, though, as to precisely why you’re collaborating with the fallen angel. What did he promise you?”

“Nothing in particular,” Mary says, putting the knife back in the cupboard. She walks up to me and sits down in my lap, running her forefinger down my jaw. “Let us just say that he had a mutual agreement with me, though we were once mortal enemies. Strife makes for strange bedfellows.”

“I suppose it does that that. Tell me, what is your cohort trying to do?”

Mary clucks at me. “Now, now. That would be telling, and I cannot make it easy for you. You should stop doing your job for a while and just relax.” She takes my hand and presses it against her breast. “I can entertain you. Enjoy yourself, you’ve earned a rest.”

I can feel something working at the edge of my mind, something insinuating, like the smell of musk permeating everything or water trickling through cracks in ice. It is insidious and clouds my thinking, and as Mary moves to start biting playfully at my neck I make no attempt to stop her. I could easily throw her off of me, grab the knife, and threaten my way out, but that suddenly seems silly and irrational.

Then a flash of inspiration hits me, hard enough to take my breath away. I see with perfect clarity that the door to Mary’s home is ajar by the tiniest bit, and peering in is a pair of softly glowing eyes.

I meet their gaze and mouth, Don’t kill her.

“Mm?” Mary asks me. “Did you say something?”

“No,” I tell her.

Mary grins and says, “Good.” She places a tender, almost experimental kiss on my lips and whispers, “You must know some poetry. Recite some for me.”

I let my expression go slack, while I really watch my ally advance silently across the floor towards Mary and myself. I look into Mary’s eyes, which are really not her eyes, and say, “Mary, Mary, quite contrary, how your enterprise soars!”

Her seductive smile flickers for only a moment at my deviation from the rhyme, but she whispers, “Tell me how.”

I grin and say, “With twelve a loss, hung on a cross, and with demons possessing whores.”

My muse grabs Mary from behind, by her hair, and hauls her to her feet before placing a silver knife against her throat. “Move and I guarantee you won’t live to regret it,” she hisses.

“Good timing,” I tell her. “You undoubtedly just saved my life.” She smiles at me and then tosses me my smallsword, which she obviously went back to my home and retrieved.

Mary, but not Mary, spits at me. “Damn you. You could not stay uninvolved, could you?”

“Of course not. Now get out of that young woman’s body before we kill her, and, by extension, you.”

“You would not dare!”

“I think we would. GET OUT!”

There is something like an explosion, and my muse is suddenly holding her knife to the throat of an unconscious, young, mousy-haired girl whose body still has time to mature. On the floor in front of me, staring at me with pure, unadulterated hate, is a man. He is beautiful in the truest sense of the word, his face handsome with aristocratic features and piercing blue eyes, messy brown hair topping his head, his body sculpted perfectly in form. He is entirely naked, and six pairs of black feathered wings burst from his back even as my muse and I look at him. He screams with primal rage and tries to leap at me.

I kick him in the face and he hits the ground again. “Don’t try that again,” my muse advises him.

He lies on the floor, quaking with rage, and I crouch down in front of him. “Hello again,” I say. “Lucifer Morningstar.”

“It simply was not within your capacity to stay uninvolved,” he snarls at me, bloody spittle shooting from his mouth in flecks. “You had to put your nose where it was not wanted. This is personal business and does not concern you!”

“The world is my business. I’m a writer, after all. Besides, as I said to Mary earlier, I have something of a personal stake in the matter as well. Now, why did you possess her and when? Just to get at me?”

“Precisely,” he laughs. “And I possessed her a while ago – when that idiot Father White was having intercourse with her, actually. I simply did not manifest myself until just recently.”

“What did you stand to gain?”

“I was going to distract you until my fool of a partner finished the rite and fulfilled his only function in this sham act of ours. Tell him, when you see him, how badly things would have gone for him and how well I would have double-crossed him if things had not gone wrong at the last minute.”

My eyes narrow. “A partnership.” I look at my muse and say, “You were right after all.” She bats her eyelashes at me and gives me a pert smile. “Who was your partner?”

“Not telling,” Lucifer Morningstar cackles, insanity in his eyes. “And not a partnership. Ventriloquism. A ventriloquist act where the puppet does not know that he is on a string and that he is speaking his master’s words.”

“You can’t have that level of control over your partner.”

“It is not a matter of control, it is just a matter of letting him think that he is in charge. Simple, really. Like human beings and all the other mortal creatures – they think they know so much and that they are in charge of their own lives. It is really quite amusing how radically everything shifts when one merely changes one’s perspective.”

“Odd that you should say that. I told a friend of mine that the reason I am a writer is because it makes it easier to see the cracks in reality, where life stops making sense and starts marching to the tune of fiction. I was telling the truth, of course, so perhaps that says something about me.”

“You want to see what we see,” he hisses gleefully. “We could still arrange that. Come over to our side. This world is immaterial; all that matters is getting back to where we once were. You could come with us. At this point, come Easter Sunday, it would be a simple matter to include one more in the scheme.” His eyes glitter. “Call it a triumvirate, an unholy trinity. The symbolism would be much enhanced.”

“No, I think not.” I draw my smallsword and level it at his face. “As you are not technically a deity, the police can investigate your death, Lucifer… but why would they? A fallen angel quite possibly linked to this scheme they’ve been dealing with, killing himself in despair when it fails? I fail to think that it will raise any eyebrows.”

“Yes. Go ahead, then, and get it over with. After spending so long here, I welcome an end, any end that you can give me.”

“First, though, I need to know where I can find your partner.”

“You won’t find him in any of this sham religion’s churches that you have the police searching. There is a much more appropriate place. Think hard and it will come to you.”

I give my muse a shake of my head before I think. The answer, as Lucifer said it would, comes to me a moment later. “A tomb. Jesus was resurrected outside his tomb.”

“Precisely. And the only sepulchers in town are in the cemetery, two miles east of the outskirts of the opposite side of town. It should not be hard to determine which one we are going to use.”

“And, secondly, I want to know why.”

“Of course you do.” Lucifer sighs and looks as though he is gathering his thoughts for a moment. Then he says to me, “Suppose you were the jagged rocks at the bottom of a cliff face. What would you do if anyone who could be dashed on you was carried away to a place with no cliffs?”

I shake my head at him and sheathe my smallsword. “The irony is irresistible.”

“What?”

Before he can say anything else, I grab him bodily by the shoulders, haul him to his feet, and then shove him out of the window. He trips forward and tumbles about in midair for the second it takes him to hit the cobblestones below, head-first. His brains are dashed out of his skull, killing him instantly.

“That,” I say to the empty air.

---

XI

“You don’t think the police will find it suspicious that Lucifer Morningstar ‘committed suicide’ from the very building that Mary lives in, especially after her involvement with this case?” my muse asks me.

“No,” I reply blithely, hailing a carriage. “And even if they did, what could they do about it? Lucifer was obviously in on this scheme, there were no witnesses, and by all forensic accounts he threw himself out of a window. It was obviously a suicide. After all, he could clearly have flown to safety if it was as simple as falling out of a window.”

“Not a third-story window into a street without any thermal updrafts.”

A carriage pulls up and I get in, seat myself, and then look expectantly at my muse. “Are you coming or not?”

She gives a small sigh of exasperation and climbs in after me. “The cemetery,” she says to the driver, who immediately lays on the whip and starts us off at a brisk trot towards our destination, which will still take us the better part of two hours to get to. “I don’t like this. He made it far too easy. Why would he so willingly divulge his partner’s whereabouts to you?”

“He knew he was going to die and be unable to use his partner for the ends he desired. I’m sure that he had arranged things so he would reap all the benefits of these sacrifices instead of sharing it with his partner.”

“But you said that none of the apostles were sacrificed. How can our remaining fallen angel – if that is what he is – draw power from non-sacrifices?”

“The symbolism,” I repeat. “The religion of the One God is a sham. Their faith is based entirely upon reason, directly contradicting the very definition of the word. Thus it is non-faith. What good would a sacrifice do for a non-faith? It’s far more fitting to offer up a non-sacrifice to a non-faith.”

“To burn vegetables on the altar instead of lambs.”

“Exactly. And I think that if you look hard enough, you will be able to trace the roots of causality from these incidents all the way back to the Second Coming.”

My muse stares at the carriage wall above my head for a few minutes, thinking. I entertain myself by wondering at the idea of her becoming a writer and receiving her own muse, and so forth, ad infinitum. It would be interesting, though not at all practical.

“When the faithful were delivered into Heaven,” she finally says, “and the rest of us left here, that destroyed Lucifer Morningstar, didn’t it? All the ones who believed that they would fall into his eternal fire if they failed to follow their god’s precepts were saved, excepting the corrupt ones, who were left here with the rest of us nonbelievers. Hell may have at one point been a real place, but without anyone that believes in going there, it no longer exists.”

“And so it is with every other figure and place associated with the religion,” I fill in for her. “The problem with gods is that there is no objective truth. They are what they are and they do what they do because they are believed to be that way and to do those things; without belief, they are simply nothing. When the God of that religion took his faithful unto his bosom, everything that depended upon their belief failed. He still exists because his followers now exist within him and worship him eternally – a very handy setup – but that is all. Hell, Purgatory, Heaven, all gone. The flights of seraphim and cherubim were orphaned, and left to either die or fend for themselves here on terra firma.”

“Not a particularly just reward for all the services they rendered,” my muse observes.

“No, it is not just. But consider: all the angels and demons and so forth were but manifestations of the faith to which God was central. Now that the faith is contained entirely within him, why should he maintain those manifestations when they are no longer necessary? Like a serpent shedding its skin, he discarded them.”

“Very atypical behavior for an omnipotent and inherently benign deity.”

“Isn’t it? But answer me this: if man was created in this god’s own image, and man is capable of such depths of deceit as to astound the most jaded mind, what does that say about this god?” My muse and I sit in silence for a moment, absorbing that. “Granted, the whole idea of a creation myth is blurry and indistinct, but my point is the same. It makes me think that perhaps Lucifer was not basely jealous as everyone claimed. Maybe he just saw differently. Maybe he saw the truth.” I clap my hands and give a small smile before I add, “Not that it matters, what with his recent and untimely demise.”

My muse rolls her eyes. “You’re simply awful sometimes.”

“Only sometimes? I must be doing something wrong.”

“Suppose, then, that we have established a motive for this partner of Lucifer’s: revenge against his former master. It seems fairly reasonable to me. How does the theme of resurrection fit into this? Revenge would involve killing his god, resurrection implies quite the opposite.”

“That, I don’t know. At this point in time only one person can say precisely what this fallen angel is going to do with the power he is gathering, and that is the man himself. We need to confront him and stop him.”

“But this raises the question of whether we should or not,” my muse argues. “Is what he is doing morally wrong? Should this angel’s former master not be made to answer for his crimes?”

“His former master no longer has any say in the goings-on of our world, is a deity and is outside of any earthly jurisdiction, and what’s more, this angel killed thirteen people for entirely selfish reasons,” I say. “I think our course is clear.”

“Fine. Shouldn’t we summon police aid?”

“I have questions for this fallen angel, questions that a police presence would make difficult to have answered. I’d rather we visit him ourselves. If it comes down to it, we can pretend that he has convinced us of the righteousness of his cause – which is very much what he will try to do – and agree to let him be, then alert Peter and the rest. After all, we have until midnight tonight. Plenty of time.”

She nods her acquiescence and falls silent, lost in her own thoughts. I leave her there, examining my own, for a time before I ask her, “Why did you come back?”

With a start, she withdraws from her reverie and asks, “What?”

“Why did you come back and follow Mary and me to her dwelling? You would have to have gotten to my home, taken my sword, and then returned rather quickly to be able to burst in on us like that.”

“You know I can always find you if I want to,” my muse tells me. “That’s simply how it is. As for your sword… I didn’t trust that prostitute. Perhaps it was wrong of me, or perhaps I was merely jealous, but I wanted you to have your sword.”

I raise an eyebrow at her. “Jealous? Of her? Why?”

“You obviously aren’t as much of a savant as you fancy yourself to be. Why would one woman be jealous of any other woman when there was a man involved?”

This is a surprise to me. “You’re my muse. I never thought that you would see me in that light.”

“How could I not? How could I not see you in such a light when the entirety of my existence depends upon you and your whims? When you are happy and doing what you love to do, then I am happy. When you are unhappy, I want to change that and make you smile again. When you are obsessed with something, I want it dealt with so you can get on with your life. If that is not love, then what is it?”

I lower my gaze to the floor, suddenly feeling unwilling to look her in the eye. “You of all people best know my nature. I am capricious and flighty, I indulge in my own desires and my aforementioned obsessions out of blithe apathy towards the prospect of denying them, and morality is as meaningful to me as is the idea of diction – both are useful to achieve a desired effect, and no more. Had I a middle name, it would undoubtedly be ‘Schadenfreude.’ You should not indulge in any fantasies regarding me.”

“Everything you say is true, and I care for you regardless of all of it. Again, at least to my knowledge, that is love.”

“But this isn’t right! You were made entirely for me, for the express purpose of being my muse. If that involves being in love with me, then how can you say it? It is true, as true as the fact that the sky is blue, but the sky isn’t blue of its own design, it simply is. To say that its blueness represented some intent or feeling of its own would be a sophism.”

“Gods are made entirely based upon the beliefs of their followers, and are entirely dependent upon their faith, but can you deny that they act with minds of their own in ways that suit them? How else do you explain this fallen angel’s former god? Surely the ones who believed in him did not believe that he was capable of such deceit. I may have been born into the world as your muse, but that is not all I am. You may be a writer, but that is certainly not all you are – or were. Explain that.”

I open my mouth to do just that and words fail me. Her argument makes damnable amounts of sense, and logic was never my strong point. I appeal to pathos, not logos. I finally say, “Suppose that you’re right. What would you have us do about it?”

My muse shrugs. “Nothing. I was just explaining why I came back for you and brought you your sword. If anyone is going to do anything about this, it’s going to be you. After all, it’s ultimately your choice.”

I purse my lips and pensively thread my fingers together. “For now, we need to deal with this fallen angel. We’ll touch on this subject again at a later date.” I hesitate and add, “And for what an apology from me is worth, I’m sorry for not having realized all of this earlier.” She clucks at me and gives a quiet laugh.

“Nobody is perfect. Not even gods.”

---

XII

The carriage driver will only take us as far as the outskirts of the city, so we get out, pay him, and walk the rest of the way, which is considerably slower going. By the time the graveyard is in sight, the sun has begun its long decline, and by my estimate it is about four-thirty or five in the afternoon.

My muse walks determinedly beside me, her dagger swinging from its sheath at her side. I give her a reassuring look at we approach the gates of the cemetery, which we find are already opened.

It is a normal cemetery, insofar as I can see, a picture straight out of a horror story, rendered much less frightening by the sun still hanging high. Withered trees reach out with grasping talons and headstones rise up jaggedly from the dead earth. Occasionally a massive stone edifice will rise from the dirt, almost as though it was belched up by the earth: these are the sepulchers of the rich and affluent. The fallen angel we are looking for will be in one of these.

Determining which one, exactly, is not as difficult a task as I feared it would be. I thought we would have to explore all of them, but my muse points to one further into the cemetery and says, “That one, I think.”

I gaze at the sepulcher in question, wondering why she would pick out this one in particular, and then note the large, ornate cross rising up from its entrance. We get closer to it and read the inscription.

It is Father White’s.

“This is just too coincidental,” I murmur. “Why would Father White have a sepulcher built for himself far before he is due for the next world? He can’t believe that strongly in being prepared. If he did, he would have been ready when Jesus knocked at his door.”

“You didn’t hear? It was the talk of the town for a while,” my muse tells me. “Supposedly, the good priest ordered this sepulcher to be built, then grandly announced that he would not need it. I think his point was that he would be accepted into his god’s paradise, body and soul, before he would ever die, and that this was showcasing how confident he was in his faith.”

The irony is irresistible, I hear myself saying only a few hours earlier, just before I threw Lucifer Morningstar out of a window. “Pompous fool. Just as well that he’s dead, then. Let’s proceed with due caution.”

“You’re not leaving me behind this time?”

I don’t bother to reply, instead drawing my smallsword and pushing open the stone entrance to the priest’s final resting place. My muse bares her dagger and follows me inside.

The sepulcher is only one room, a fairly large one to house a simple corpse but still singular. Intricate reliefs of Biblical scenes line the walls, hard to make out in the dimness. At the far end of the room, resting on a bier, is Father White. He is still fairly young, with charismatic features and a powerful body. He is also quite dead. His skin is the color of death and his neck has been broken in the same fashion as the other twelve victims.

Behind him is standing the fallen angel we have been seeking.

Six pairs of white wings flex themselves and stretch, their total span easily touching both the walls of the room, which are at least fifteen feet apart. The angel is bare-chested so as not to hamper his impressive appendages and his form is as sculpted and beautiful as any other celestial being’s. He wears the bottom half of a grey robe that is tied tightly about his waist with a rope to keep it in place. In his right hand is a great claymore, easily three feet long and capable of cleaving a man in two.

He steps around the bier and brings his face into the light, and I am struck by recognition.

Piercing green eyes gaze out of a chiseled and handsome face that has become lined with too many frowns and the passing of time. His jaw is square, clean-shaven, and curly brown locks top his head, descending to just above his shoulders. His full lips are compressed into a thin line as he regards me, and the greatest of his wings twitch a bit.

“Michael,” I say. “Archangel Michael, Captain of the Lord, Viceroy of Heaven after Lucifer Morningstar before him.”

He sneers at me. “You remember all my titles,” he says in a voice like thunder, deep and booming. “Meaningless chaff at this point, really. After all, I forsook my status – or, rather, was forsaken by it when the Father turned on his loyal servants.”

“You were right,” my muse observes.

“Of course,” I tell her. “There’s no need to continue in this futile quest,” I tell Michael. “Come along and I’m sure that justice will be more lenient.”

Michael’s eyes go wide and his sword erupts with flames that shoot up and down its blade, dancing wildly and further illuminating the interior of the sepulcher. “Justice? You talk of justice when I have been cast out of Heaven by the very mongrels I was created to protect? You jest well. That much has not changed.”

“Pray tell, what has?” a new, very familiar voice interrupts.

I start and look over my shoulder to see Peter, daggers drawn, standing in the entrance to the sepulcher.

“You? How did you reason out that he would be here?” I demand.

“I commandeered an old copy of the Bible from the library, on a hunch,” Peter tells me triumphantly. “And I read the New Testament. More specifically, I read all four accounts as they pertained to where Jesus was resurrected on Easter Sunday, and I came to the conclusion that the resurrection was centered on and around his tomb. That told me cemetery, so I came here with backup as quickly as I was able. Evidently you drew the same conclusion and got here before us.”

“He was not alone. He was working with the now-late Lucifer Morningstar, who had an unfortunate accident after he told us that Michael would be here.”

Peter blinks and then nods. “I’m sure it was very tragic. We can discuss the details later; for now, Michael, I will ask you to come with us. There is no way you can escape.”

”In due time,” Michael rumbles. “For now, you had another question.”

The satyr nods again. “How is it that this fallen angel knows you?” he asks me. “He speaks as though he is familiar with you.”

Michael gives a booming laugh. “You mean he doesn’t know? You not only gave up the only remaining mantle of your former station, but you sought to hide from your past and start anew?”

I glare at him and say nothing.

“He looks different without his wings, but believe me when I say that you are in the presence of not one fallen angel, but two. Your writer here is no other than the former Archangel Gabriel, Messenger of the Lord, Deliverer of the Annunciation and He Who Sits at God’s Left Hand.”

The shock on Peter’s face is evident. My muse says nothing, this not being anything new to her. My partner stares at me and asks, “Is this true?”

“Quite,” I tell him. “I don’t like it being known. Why do you think nobody ever asks my name? Have you ever done so yourself? Think back. You know me as well as anyone else whose name you possess, but I never introduced myself.”

He gapes at me, dumbfounded. “Then… you are thousands and thousands of years old!”

“It’s simply a matter of living young.”

“That story you told me, about Jesus coming and knocking on your door! It was… it was a lie?”

I give him an apologetic smile. “Didn’t I tell you, Peter, about the concept of an unreliable narrator?”

Michael barks a short, harsh laugh. “Very good, old friend! You’ve had your mortal companions running in their wheels, never aware of who you are! Now, I want you to tell me why. You were cast out of the faith the same as I was. Why did you accept your fate, shed your wings, and take up the guise of a humble writer? Why did you not seek to remedy the situation?”

I shake my head at him. “This is the problem with you, Michael. All you were good for was leading the army of the Lord, keeping people out of the Garden of Eden, and protecting humanity from demons. Now that there is no more army, no more Garden of Eden, and no more demons beyond those that humans dream up of their own accord, you have no purpose left. I, however, am and always have been a messenger above all else. It was just a matter of taking up a different mantle than the one I carried previously in order to continue my calling.”

Michael levels his blazing sword at me, the stabbing point bare inches from my face. Both my muse and Peter instinctively take a step back, but I do not twitch. “Disgraceful! Had I known you had fallen to such depths, I never would have bothered getting the Morningstar to try to keep you away until Easter! You are no threat, not any longer. I was a fool to think that you could interfere.”

“And what precisely did you think I could interfere with?” I ask. “Go ahead, Michael. This is your chance to tell us precisely how you’ve been wronged and what you intend to do about it.”

The fallen angel snorts but takes his opportunity. “I followed the Father through all the many eons of his reign, believing in him, stalwart in my purpose, knowing that one day I would be able to lay down my sword and enjoy eternal paradise with him and all of his faithful. Then, when the moment was finally at hand, I was cast out, along with all the others, to either perish alone or to subsist here, as base creatures of flesh. The so-called religion of that man –” he stabs with his free hand at the corpse on the bier behind him – “is even more laughable than one would think, because it professes a contradictory faith in a benign god that does not even exist! We were all taken in, all of us! But Lucifer Morningstar and I found one another, and in our desperation, we saw a way to use this sham religion to catapult ourselves back into the celestial realm from whence we came, to take our rightful places.”

“You realize,” I tell him, “that Lucifer had every intention of monopolizing all the power you’ve gathered and using it entirely for selfish purposes? He was simply using you as a handy tool.”

“You know me. Why would I ever trust the Morningstar? I knew his plans. It would simply be a matter of killing him before Easter to ensure my success. I always was the better angel.”

“You’re no better than he is.”

“Only because I was made this way! Only because of the Father’s treachery!”

“So you planned to use this sacrilegious butchery you so carefully crafted to catapult yourself back into Heaven, then? How?”

“It was easy enough to convince the followers of this religion, as well as Father White, that I was sent by their god in recognition of their faithfulness. I had them come with me and follow my orders, and then I killed them, made false sacrifices out of them to a false god. I am sure that you have already reasoned out all the symbolism that will make this work, so I will not elaborate. Suffice it to say that the forces in play here will prove more than adequate to cause me to ascend back into Heaven where I belong.”

“What will you do once you are there?”

“Take my revenge, of course, and then take up my position as ruler! I toiled long and hard under him, and for what? Nothing! I doubt he has any power of his own. He used us to do all his work because he himself was incapable! It would be a simple matter to usurp everything he has wrought!” He gazes at me with crazed eyes. “Do you not wish the same? Do you not with for the rectification of this injustice?”

I slowly shake my head. “I am a messenger, Michael. Whatever news I bear, I bear indifferently. I am a writer, and as I told Mary, being a writer is a way of asking questions without being curious about the answers. As long as I have a message to bear and questions to ask, what do I care about anything else that transpires? And beyond that, I am not just the sum of the beliefs that made me. That much is clear. To quote the Father, ‘I am that I am…’ and that is my decision.”

There is a pause, and then Michael gives a long, anguished roar before stepping back, taking his claymore in both hands, and trying to cleave my skull in two. I deftly sidestep the flaming blade, which blows a deep fissure into the stone where I was standing, and cut forward with my smallsword, neatly slitting Michael’s throat. He gurgles and blood froths at his lips before he falls to his knees, crimson streaking down his torso, and then collapses entirely.

The flames wreathing his sword are snuffed out.

---

XIII

Peter comes to me in the aftermath as the sun begins to dip below the horizon. The police have taken away Michael’s body and sealed up Father White’s sepulcher. One of them made a comment that the fallen angel had done them the favor of transporting the priest’s body there and sparing them an unnecessary funeral. I could not agree more.

“It really is true, isn’t it?” he asks.

I shrug at him. “Maybe. This is where you have to stop being a detective, Peter, and start being a writer. Does it make sense for me to be who you think I am? Does it clear things up or just muddle them more? Are you seeing where the cracks start appearing in causality, where life ceases to follow the straight roads and starts creeping sideways down crooked alleyways? It is a wonderful world, full of the unexplainable and the bizarre, the grotesque and the unnatural. We walk down boulevards with gods and drink to the health of demons. In a world like this, how much more of a stretch are you willing to make?”

The satyr gazes at the horizon, not replying for a moment. “I think whoever you once were doesn’t particularly matter at this point. All that matters is who you are now, and that person is a writer, an uncannily good one at that. What you were originally born to be, and how you were shaped by the beliefs and demands of those who imagined you, is not relevant any longer.”

“Would that it had been so with Michael and Lucifer,” I say. “For all their power, they could not escape their roles.”

Peter strokes the tuft of fur that passes for his goatee. “I wonder, though. Is it because you are a messenger and a writer that you are different, and were able to move beyond what you were? Was it beyond their natures to change, and was beyond yours not to?”

I sigh. “Quite possibly. The desire for change, whether in oneself or in one’s surroundings, has no bearing on ability. Michael and Lucifer were more than wi