Chapter Text
There was a knock on the bookshop door. Aziraphale, who was twenty-three pages into an arcane text and seven sips into a warm cocoa, prepared for a fresh bout of glowering.
It had been a trying day. He had scowled, he had frowned, he had once even worked up the dudgeon to glare at a particularly purchase-minded customer. It was not in his nature; his was a face for the beatific smile, for the radiant beam.[1] But there was something about opening a bookshop that put all sorts of strange ideas in people’s heads about buying the merchandise, so he directed his angelic faculties towards relieving them of these unfortunate notions.
The door swung open.
“Hullo angel--blimey, why’re you glowering like that? Wake up on the wrong side of the cloud?”
Aziraphale’s face slackened, and then fondness stretched it again.
“Oh, Crowley, I wasn’t expecting you for another fortnight--do come in out of the rain.”
Crowley had no umbrella but raindrops typically declined to fall on him.[3] He stalked to the sofa in the back and flung himself down on it. Aziraphale thought he detected something odd, something twitchy in Crowley’s manner. The flinging on the divan was much more controlled than his usual crumple.
“Spot of tea? Or I have more cocoa, if you’d like?”
“Nah, ‘m all right,” the collapsed Crowley said into a pillow.
Aziraphale opened a tin of biscuits, and, finding that it was actually a tin of bookbinding ephemera, located another. It was difficult to ply Crowley with food, but he was remarkably forthcoming if his interlocutor was eating.
“Biscuit, dear?”
Crowley rolled over and, removing his sunglasses, massaged the bridge of his nose.
“So it’s like this, right? Come into my flat, there’s an imp on the worktop helping herself to the bottle of Beaujolais I was going to bring over.”
“Oh good heavens, not another coworker come to check on you?”
“Nope--worse. Imp’s not a demon, see, it’s a being created of pure spite. Think this one was born after a bank took their customer service number off their webpage.”
Aziraphale, who was always directed promptly to a helpful human as soon as he telephoned anywhere, nodded as if in understanding.
“So why is she--the imp--in your kitchen?”
Crowley fixed Aziraphale with a slitted stare.
“Well that’s what I came to ask you about, angel, because apparently my last report was so impressive that downstairs wants to make me Demon of the Decade, and there’s some bloody certification process. News to me, but then of course I didn’t write most of it.”
Aziraphale cast his memory back to the last cycle of quarterly reports. He seemed to recall a great quantity of wine had been consumed and he and Crowley had decided to trade report-writing for the novelty of the thing. He did not seem to recall any of the contents written.
“Well, I’d like to think I’ve a deft pen after all these years,” Aziraphale offered cautiously.
“Apparently I’m ‘overflowing with seductive charm’ and ‘oozing with infernal magnetism,’” Crowley said. The muscles in his face were fighting a battle; they conceded to mirth.
The contents of the report began, hazily, to resurface.
“Oh I’m sure that’s extrapolation,” Aziraphale said, surer than ever that it wasn’t. “But what are you going to do about the imp?”
“I dunno, Aziraphale, you’re the one making me ooze!”
“How long does this Decade Demon certification take?” Aziraphale pressed, ignoring any and all implications lingering about.
Crowley sighed, and something of the snake undulated through his spine as he slouched back into the sofa.
“Dunno, she’s poking around my flat with a clipboard and one of those whatchu-call-its for drawing circles.” Crowley mimed a pair of compasses on top of a stack of mildewed books. “The one lucky thing is, they’re about as smart as wallpaper, imps. Wouldn’t know an angel if one smote ‘em between the eyes.”
“Well,” Aziraphale said, finishing off the last of the tinned biscuits, “Let’s hope it doesn’t come to that.”
The imp had a very long checklist, and Crowley had already racked up some notable infractions.
She was unconcerned--there were promising signs along with the disappointing ones, and it was no skin off her back if Crowley failed to make Demon of the Decade, anyway.[4] No mere award candidate could faze Enmity the Injurious.
She made her way across Crowley’s tidy flat squelch by squelch, stopping now and then to absorb anything that looked like it might make an acceptable snack. The flat was cool and humid, and more architecturally complex on the inside than it was on the outside. Crowley had obviously done a good job insinuating himself among the mortals, which Enmity had noted on her clipboard immediately (DISGUISE - OUTSTANDING). He had silverware and side tables and a shoe brush--all sorts of civilised niceties that a lesser demon would have been too baffled or too proud to employ as camouflage. Unfortunately, the whole place had a pleasant smell of fresh dirt and well-watered greenery. Enmity clucked and made another circle on her sheet of parchment: MIASMAS - POOR.
Crowley himself was nowhere to be found. This was annoying, as Enmity had a 666 part questionnaire to put to him. He’d begged that off with protestations of “important demon business” and a tip of the sunglasses imbued with a significance that went over Enmity’s head. Most things went over Enmity’s head--she was about half a metre tall--but it never got less irritating. She waited, and absorbed a few more stray objects in Crowley’s flat, and touched up each of his plants with a nice sprinkling of grey mould, but he didn’t return.
Enmity made as near a sound like “harrumph” as a malevolent jelly can make and decided to search for Crowley. She resorbed her clipboard and compasses and wobbled to the door, a mite woozy after the confiscated Beaujolais.
Imps cannot find demons by scent or magnetic field disruptions or the fizzing of infernal magic in the air the way other demons can, but they possess peculiar abilities which make the finding of a well-disguised demon amid a metropolis of eight-odd million a bearable task. If feeling spiteful enough, an imp can locate anyone by fixating on their own hatred of the unfortunate quarry.
So Enmity fumed and seethed and let her vague annoyance with Crowley grow into an all-consuming loathing, and the way was suddenly clear: he was in a small bookshop in Soho. She squelched there through the rain at once.
Filled with hatred as she necessarily was, she was prepared to scold him and perhaps to leach acid onto his spiffy sunglasses, but something stopped her as she was about to ooze in through the crack under the window. Crowley was smiling--actually smiling, not a sneer or a leer or a mere semblance of the thing--and chatting animatedly with a man who was looking at Crowley with barely-tempered adoration. Enmity could not imagine looking at Crowley with any feelings that were warmer than the frozen heart of Lucifer, but there was no mistaking the fondness in the mortal at Crowley’s side, who was wafting around doing a bit of dusting that seemed to be worsening the dust situation rather more than not.
Enmity was thrilled, despite herself. Here was a magnificent tempter! Here was the Serpent of Eden, risen from his earthly obscurity! Here was the new Demon of the Decade. For who but a very dastardly demon indeed could make a mortal fall, not into the tempestuous throes of mere lust, but into the far less extricable tangle of love?
She couldn’t wait to deliver the good news.
Footnotes
1Paraphrased from Ode to a Forlorn Angel, by Edward Collopsworth, 1823.[2]
2The angel observed by the poet had just dropped a rare and rather valuable volume into a muddy creek. [return to text ]
3Possibly out of fear. [return to text ]
4It was quite literally not any skin off her back: she was entirely gelatinous, and had the appearance of an aspic that had been cooked by someone with an expansive definition of edibility and a disdain for refrigeration. [return to text ]