My first instinct was relief, followed by confusion, followed by indecision over whether to reveal my identity or not. Crouching over an unconscious body in the desert was not how I’d pictured having this conversation.

Tru saved me from having to make a decision straight away by starting to come round, stirring and groaning as if he’d woken up with a severe hangover. I helped him sit up, careful not to offer him my hand in case the event happened again, though I had a strong suspicion it had been a one-time-only occurrence.

His eyes focused on me, narrowed in disapproval and swept on past to land on Lucy. “Oh thank god,” he moaned. “We’re not alone out here.” I noticed his gaze lingered on Lucy more than was usually considered polite.

“There's probably a reason for that,” I cautioned. "Careful what you wish for."

The devil traversed the remaining distance over to us and stopped just a few metres away. His gaze swept over first Tru, then myself, but didn’t show any sign of recognition. “I understood there had been an accident out here,” he said.

Tru swallowed audibly, glancing at me. “Yeah. You could say that. We were…” he trailed off, waiting for me to jump in, but I was too preoccupied with trying to figure out what Lucy’s game was. “…lost,” he finished, after some hesitation.

“I can see that,” he said. “You’re not dressed for the weather. Or at all. You are,” he added, giving me an odd look. A moment later, I sensed his words in my head. Loki? Is that you?

I had to catch myself to keep up a reasonable poker face. What the -? How did you know? And how do you have your powers?

I could ask the same thing about you, he replied. He eyes flicked towards Tru. We need to talk.

No kidding, I said, forcing myself to hold off on further questions for the time being.

“Do you... know each other?” asked Tru, sounding uncertain as he broke the tension.

“Yes,” we replied in unison. He thinks I’m a demon, I clarified to Lucy in private.

Right, he acknowledged, and turned to Rap Boy. “I’m another demon. We work together. Do what I say and no one gets hurt.”

Tru made a deeply unimpressed noise at this news, and went to bury his face in his hands. He stopped short when he caught sight of the glowing rune, however, and pulled back the sleeve of his gown for a better look.

Lucy caught my eye for an instant, before returning his attention to Tru’s hand. “Let me see that,” he said, striding forward and catching the offending arm. “Runes,” he observed. “Of course.”

Considering he was the one who had to live with it, I was interested to note Tru seemed less surprised about the rune incident than I’d been. I supposed it made sense – he probably thought he’d just entered some demonic bargain, and sealing the deal with an occult brand would fit right in. For all he knew, maybe this happened every time I shook hands with someone. The infernal chorus of wails had no doubt gone some way to cementing that perception, too. And come to think of it, I wasn’t convinced I hadn’t accidentally locked one or both of us into some kind of binding contract I didn’t understand. That shouldn’t have been the case, but then, nothing about this was normal.

“If you’re not here to help,” said Tru, “I want to go home.”

“We still need to talk,” Lucy said. “But it makes sense to do it somewhere more comfortable.”

I bade the overcast sky farewell and transported the three of us back to the penthouse, where Tru immediately made a break for the sanctuary of the bathroom.

“Let him go,” said Lucy, to the accompaniment of the door slamming and a fresh shower being run. “Nice place he has here.”

“He’s the rap guy who broke the task manager that one time,” I informed him, making my way over to the nearest sofa. My sofa now.

“The eight-verse assassination job?”

“The same. But you have a lot of explaining to do,” I told him, folding my arms. “How long have you had your powers back for?”

He let out a sharp breath through his nose. “You’re asking the wrong question. It’s not that I ever managed to get them back. More that they were never absent to begin with.”

I shook my head. “The tyrant would never allow that.”

“He doesn’t know.”

I laughed in his face. “Do you really expect me to believe Yahweh would just not notice something like that for six thousand years? He wants you dead. The only reason he doesn’t demote you is because you’re too interconnected. He’d suffer the backlash – oh.”

Capital-G God and the devil. Two sides of the same coin, not that the Judeo-Christian religion would ever admit it. Lucifer wasn’t just an angel fallen from so-called grace; he represented one end of the rope in a divine game of tug-of-war where the world was the playing field and dominance the prize. The problem with tug-of-war was that if you cut the rope while both parties strained on it, everyone went flying. It wasn’t a perfect analogy, but it was my understanding of how that particular relationship operated. Such polarisation for so long without anyone else stepping in to change the dynamic had created a situation where anything anyone did to one affected the other. Or it had just always been that way, I wasn’t sure. It was one of those fuzzy areas.

“I think you’re getting it,” said Lucy, joining me on the sofa. “It didn’t take. Or it did, a bit, but not as much as it should have, and eventually it stopped working at all. I didn’t see why I should enlighten anyone to that fact.”

I shouldn’t have believed him, but I did. There was too much history there not to. Should really have seen something like this coming from someone whose many nicknames included the Father of Lies. I knew better than most that it was all about the quality of the lies, not the quantity.

Still. It was Lucy, and I definitely didn’t have any moral high ground to stand on in comparison. What frustrated me more than the deception itself was what it implied.

“So in all this time, you could have done something – done lots of things – and you didn’t? You’re powerful. You could have steered this away from happening, convinced people Providence was a terrible idea, kept it small and containable while you still had the chance.”

“Nothing’s changed, Loki,” he argued. “I did what I could. It doesn’t help anyone if I act recklessly and get caught. We already know how that ends. Even before Providence, dad was a force to be reckoned with. One person can’t defeat him. Not even me. You need an army for that. And I couldn’t get their support. I lost the marketing war.”

“It’s not how I would have done things,” I muttered.

He grinned. “No. And you wouldn’t have made it past the first century.”

“More like the first week,” I admitted. “But at least I would have tried.”

“Seriously. Do you know me at all? Do you really think I just spent the last few millennia whiling away the hours carrying out chores?”

“Of course not,” I said. “You’d have had some kind of plan.”

“Much more than a plan,” he said. “And there were several. But they failed. Heavy metal was a good try, though.”

I shot him a skeptical look. “People would have found out.”

“People did find out.”

He was going somewhere with this. “What are you saying?”

“I’m saying I made them pay less attention. Normalisation. Influencing the common expectation.” He shrugged. “Everyone knows Lucifer has it in for the chief executive. Of course he has shady plots. That’s what he does every day of the week. That way, when something genuinely dangerous comes along, it’s easier to pass it off as another harmless act of wishful thinking.” He hesitated. “And yes, I nudged it along a bit.”

He was talking about mind control. Lucy couldn’t truly take over another person, only influence and tempt, but I understood his reluctance to admit even that. Not only was it the kind of thing that would lead to an instant demotion – for anyone else, at least - but it was deeply unpopular. People didn’t like to think they could be swayed to behave in certain ways, even though the reality was that it happened constantly. That was what language was, after all – ways of communicating and influencing how each other should perceive and act. Words were the greatest weapon wielded throughout history by individuals and civilisations alike, and yet the average person didn’t even realise they were armed. Lucy just influenced better than most.

“But you broke your cover tonight,” I reflected, frowning.

He leaned forward, elbows on knees, his expression becoming serious. “This is an emergency situation,” he confided. “What happened just now wasn’t meant to occur for another twenty years, and it happened because of a failure from both of us to communicate.” He shrugged. “I should take my own advice more. But it’s done now. No going back, only forward.”

“It’s not my failure,” I objected, feeling defensive. “I know it looks like my doing, but that thing on his hand is not mine.”

“About that. Am I right in thinking that’s the rune for prosperity?”

“Someone’s been paying attention,” I commended him. “Wealth would be more accurate, though.” Some runes possessed a few layers of nuance, but fehu wasn’t one of them.

“That makes sense,” he said, looking a little rueful. “This is my fault. It’s a transference. I had no idea it would come out this way. There were always going to be some differences depending on the carrier, but -”

I held up a hand to stop him, conscious of the golden bangle dangling from my wrist. “Carrier? Did you seed me with something?” I conducted a quick inspection of my body for anything that wasn’t supposed to be there, and came up blank. If there was something there, it wasn’t physical. Of course, it was probably Tru who needed checking now.

“If I say yes, is that going to impact our friendship?”

I stared at him for a few moments and then sighed, massaging the bridge of my nose. Occupational hazard of working with the devil, I supposed. “Given it’s you we’re talking about, I suppose I should be more concerned if you weren’t using everyone around you for some diabolical purpose. Give me the context.”

“I’m rebuilding my army,” he said. “Have been for a while.”

“Huh,” I said. “I don’t see what it has to do with anything that just happened, but alright, I’m impressed. How many recruits have you amassed so far?”

He held up a fist and clenched it a little, but no fingers came up. “None yet.”

“Bold and unorthodox,” I stated, raising an eyebrow. “Sounds like a winning strategy.”

“I did mention it's twenty years too early,” he reminded me. “All my demons were destroyed during the dimensional restructure. It takes time to make new ones. At least ones who are any decent.”

“What makes you think the new batch would be any better than the last?”

“If you’d spent much time around the old lot, you wouldn’t be asking that,” he chided me. “But other than the fact I’m bringing several thousand years’ worth of improvements to the table, different stock. Mortals may be fragile, but they’re smarter and more adaptable than traditional demons, and there are seven billion of them. We use them.”

I didn’t miss the ‘we’ that had snuck in there. Regardless, it was a ludicrous idea. I had no small amount of affection towards mortals – well, some of them – but some of the people Lucy was up against were capable of extinguishing the world with a thought.

My misgivings must have been showing on my face. “As a starting point, obviously,” he clarified. “They won’t be mortal by the time I’m done. That was always the eventual goal anyway.”

“Now, now, Prometheus,” I butted in. “You give fire to mankind, someone’s going to notice. And what you’re talking about is a lot bigger than twirling two sticks together on a hot day.”

“If it wasn’t for me, mankind would still be running around naked in a garden without any fruit in their diet,” he rebutted. “I know what I’m doing.”

“Well, you messed something up, or we wouldn’t be having this conversation,” I pointed out.

From the bathroom, the sound of the shower cut out, dying to a trickle of straggling drops making their way to the drain.

“It’s not wealth,” Lucy said, in a hushed voice. “It’s Greed. Or it was supposed to be. Now I’m not sure what it is. Either way, we’re currently sitting in the infernal hall of the first of my new demon lords.”