34. Don't Touch Me, I'm Electric

FLOTUS’s hands were gloved in something that had been on the outside of a young goat, once upon a time. People weren’t supposed to do that now. Lila/Lilith didn’t care much about what “people” were supposed to do. The ermine stole underlined that. Today she was going the full Cruella DeVil, which was kinda funny if you were in the know. But the Earthbound weren’t. They didn’t know that the wife of the Most Powerful Man in The World was the first wife of Adam, God’s first and worst gardener. She peeled the gloves off slow, like Gypsy Rose Lee. I wasn’t expecting the bone-crusher that I got, and the smile with the long eye-teeth wasn’t entirely welcome either. Still, there is no accounting for temptation, and that sure was what I felt when I looked at Lila Radziwill. And it should have been tempting, Samael had tasted Lilith’s fruit and not fallen. Maybe I could too. I wanted to be somewhere else, anywhere else. When FLOTUS let go her grip, she traced a long fingernail across the palm of my hand. It burned.

Sondra, Tabitha Vanderbilt and even Sam Sara got the kind of nod women give at a high school reunion to the person who stole their first boyfriend. TV was too nostril-powdered to care, as was Sondra, but I thought Sam Sara was going to pour her drink over FLOTUS’s head. Her carmine lips started moving and I started listening a second or two too late.

‘-abriel, Don’t you think?’

I've read some books a Scotch guy wrote about a policeman called Lazarus who always says the same thing when he hasn’t been listening. I’ve taken a leaf out of his book, ever since.

‘That would depend.’

Sam Sara linked her arm through mine and put her lips to my ear. Her whisper was quiet but urgent,

‘You’re going nowhere with that woman, unless I come along.’

The armoured limousine crawled through the DC traffic. I wondered how two women could be so quiet for so long and how animosity could make silence scarier than a cat-fight. The chauffeur drove us out to Falls Church, though Lilith had given no more instructions after saying ‘drive, Sheba’, as soon as the other secret-servicewoman had shut the passenger side door. No-one was less surprised than me when we turned up at ‘Mr Deeds’ at the mall. Azazel was a picture when Lilith walked in. Yeah, one of Goya’s Black Paintings. He lined up four tumblers on the glass and set about making the house speciality, Clown Cocktails. I guessed he was having one too, because Sheba and the secret-servicewoman riding shotgun were still in the car. Lilith traced a fingertip around the rim of her glass. It started to glow red. Sam Sara didn’t notice at all. Her eyes looked glazed, her gaze fixed on a bottle of Wild Turkey half-way along the top shelf.

‘Neat trick, isn’t it, Gabe?’

It was, but it was also banned. No ethereals, if that even included Lilith by that time, could mess with the Earthbound like that. Turning them off like Coney-Island mechanical clowns. Azazel put as much room between himself and us by going round the opposite side of the bar island and rattling glasses and bottles as though his afterlife depended on it.

‘So you know what’s happening, Gabe? A clever boy like you should have guessed.’

I nodded,

‘You’re going to make your move ‘cause the Big Man is gaga and Mr D doesn’t give a flying fuck.’

She shook her head, ‘That too, but it’s what I’m going to do first that’ll be the fun part.’

‘And what’s that, Lilith?’

‘I’m gonna blow it all up and start over again.’