Page 47 of Midnight with the Devil

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Great acts require great means of enterprise. —John Milton, Paradise Regained

“You have a problem,” Andras said when Lucien materialized in the location where he had been summoned. They stood in front of an old temple deep in the Amazon rain forest. Roots of ancient trees had broken apart the stone structure built by early humans from a civilization long faded into the obscurity of history. The leafy canopy let sunlight filter down in spirals of light.

“Another one?” Lucien asked. He hadn’t wanted to leave Diana or the barbecue. They had so much left to do after their time in the bathroom. He had plans, wicked ones that had been rudely interrupted by Jerry Gunter. He was tempted to assign a succubus to that man.

“We have a croucher,” Andras declared with some concern as he pointed to the open doorway made of stone. Old deities, ones almost as old as Father, were carved into the stone, but their identities were unclear because years of rain and moss growth had smoothed out the sharper points of the carvings.

“A croucher? Haven’t dealt with one of those since the days of Babylon.” Lucien walked closer but froze when the fine hairs on the back of his neck rose in ancient instinctive warning. If he still had his angel wings, they would’ve been quivering with the need to fly him far away from this place.

“How did you find it? Crouchers don’t usually linger in places anymore, and this one is far from civilization.” Lucien didn’t like this type of demon. It was dangerous, unpredictable, and needed a fair amount of heavenly—or hellish—power to be destroyed.

Andras’s blue eyes were cold. “You’ll see. This way.” He led Lucien around the door, careful not to pass through. The body of a man lay across the stones of a room that no longer had walls. His sightless eyes were wide and still full of terror. His body was cold, but only just, which meant he hadn’t been dead long.

“Who is he?”

“An archaeologist. His team rushed back to the base camp to call in the death and have the medical team returning. We need to neutralize the croucher. We can’t have it taking any more victims.”

Lucien nodded. It was another aspect of his job that people didn’t know about. As the king of hell, he had the thankless task of controlling demons, ones in the wild and those in the minds of men. He didn’t, contrary to popular opinion, unleash demons on the world. No, they escaped on their own, and he had to drag them back to hell. Croucher demons could be quite nasty. They lingered in the shadows of doorways, and any poor human who passed through would be killed. The Babylonians were the first to discover croucher demons and had named themrabisu, or “ones that lie in wait.” Crouchers chose doors as their demonic nests because of the powers that entryways held. In every culture in the world, doorways held significance and therefore required protection from malevolent spirits and demons.

Even humans, with their weak instincts, could feel the presence of crouchers.

“I hate these things,” Lucien said as he approached the door. The hairs on his neck rose sharply with unsettling tingles, like someone had dripped cold water down his head and onto his neck and back.

“Be careful.” Andras stood on the opposite side of the doorway, close to the body of the fallen human. He watched Lucien through the stone frame of the entryway, expecting danger, as he should.

“Brace yourself, Andras. Shit’s about to get ugly.” Even their father hadn’t liked crouchers. He’d warned Cain all those millennia ago that“sin crouches at the door.”

Andras stood in a ready stance, palms up to summon the fires of hell should they be required.

Lucien slowly reached out to the doorframe. The moment his hand would’ve passed through the doorway, a shadow slid from the top-left corner of the frame, coiling and twining like an ever-moving spiderweb made of man’s most ancient nightmares. Whispers of a thousand tongues could be heard, like a dark Tower of Babel, but Lucien heard every word in each foreign tongue.

Kill, destroy, and consume, death to the light…

Even Lucien didn’t want the death of the light. There was no darkness if there was no light.

“Stand and face me,rabisu.” Lucien reached his hand to the coiling shadows. Pain exploded through his body, knocking the breath from his lungs. He released the fire that burned just beneath his skin and let it float out of his hand and into the shadows.

“Fire…” the croucher’s voices whispered in anger.

“Ahh!” Lucien bellowed as the shadows in the doorway expanded around him and he realized his mistake. This wasn’t one croucher, but hundreds, maybe a thousand.

“Andras, get out of here!” Lucien screamed. He could just make out the other fallen angel through the fluttering gaps in the shadows.

“No! You stay, I stay.” Andras grasped the shadows in his hands and unleashed his own fire. The pain pouring through Lucien was like nothing he’d ever felt in his life…except the day he’d fallen.

He blacked out for a brief second, and all he could hear was the rush of wind as he plummeted into darkness.

When he came to, he was lying on his back, every inch of him bruised and battered, and his ears were ringing. The forest was no longer eerily quiet. The mass ofrabisuwere gone, but not dealt with. They would be seeking other doorways, other victims. He’d failed. He shouldn’t have failed. But he had.

“Andras?” he croaked.

He heard coughing as he struggled to sit up, and he caught sight of his friend lying broken and hurt on the opposite side of the door. Andras was worse off than him. He called Andras, but he had no strength to move just yet.

“This way,” someone shouted in the distance.

Fuck, the humans were returning to collect their dead man, and they couldn’t see him and Andras like this.

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