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Chloe found the pounding music of the nightclub grating, but free drinks were free drinks. She had just closed a case, and Lucifer had been especially impressed by her “detectiving” and so he declared that she wouldn’t have to pay for her drinks tonight (so long as she joined him at Lux). Normally, she would have turned him down, but it had been a tough case, and she definitely could use a drink. So, here she sat, nursing a martini and doing her best to ignore the music and dancing.
That’s why she was the first one to spot him.
Chloe’s head was turned away from the stage and dance floor where Lucifer was leading the crowd in a rendition of “Mr. Crowley” that he somehow made work on piano and singing in the style of Frank Sinatra. It was honestly a captivating performance, so Chloe didn’t blame everyone for paying close attention, but she wasn’t in the mood to be entertained by Lucifer’s Luciferness, and so she was habitually scanning the room instead. It was lucky timing that Chloe was looking in the direction of the elevator when it opened.
The man who stepped through would have looked perfectly at home on the streets outside the building, which caused him to stand out like a sore thumb in a penthouse nightclub. A ratty grey coat was draped over his frame with a matching sock cap that covered his head and was so oversized that it even covered part of his face, so that only one of his eyes was visible. He was hunched over and moved with a palsied step that made Chloe worry that he would fall over without the large walking stick that he clutched tightly.
This was clearly a homeless man who had somehow wandered past the bouncers to make his way into the club. Chloe felt bad for the man because he likely didn’t even know where he was, but she did not want to see the reaction he might get from the people at the bar who expected a more…sophisticated crowd. Especially Maze, if she decided that throwing him out was a great excuse for violence.
So, Chloe abandoned her drink and moved to intercept the man. “Excuse me, sir,” she said gently, “can I help you?”
“Yes…yes,” he said, “you are a helper.” His voice was thready and came out a bit slurred. If he were anyone else at the bar, Chloe might have assumed that the slur came from him being drunk. But she didn’t smell any alcohol on his breath and knew there were a lot of mental conditions that could produce a slur like that. Maybe a stroke?
“Do you know where you are?” Chloe kept her voice as gentle as possible and tried to angle her body to both keep him from entering the club and block the line of sight from the bar…and Maze.
“I’m at the light,” the man responded. “Everyone says to go to the light.”
Chloe laid a hand on the man’s arm to lead him back to the elevator. “Why don’t I help you find a place to sleep tonight?” She had contacts with a few nearby homeless shelters that might be able to help.
“What do you think you’re doing?” said a voice from behind her.
Chloe turned and slumped slightly. Maze. So, Chloe had failed to keep her out of it.
“It’s okay, Maze, I’ve got this,” Chloe said.
Maze simply waved a hand at her and glared at the old man. “At Lux, we have a strict ‘only I can have weapons’ policy. Hand over the spear.”
Chloe frowned and looked at the walking stick. Sure, it was a bit pointy at the top, but calling it a spear was a bit much. She was about to say something, but the old man spoke first.
“Oh... you would not part an old man from his walking stick?” His face blossomed into a dopey smile as he said it.
Maze’s glare intensified. “Lord of the Rings? Really?”
The man let out a deep booming laugh and straightened. Only now did Chloe realize just how tall he was. He stood head and shoulders above her, easily. The coat, which seemed so ill-fitting before, fell naturally around his new posture and highlighted his thick barrel chest.
“My dear Hellion, I see a lot of myself in Gandalf.” Gone was the threadiness and slur from his voice. Instead, every word he spoke had a deep, resonant quality, as if it were echoing around that large chest before being released from his mouth. The slur had been replaced by a smooth and clear diction that held a trace of an accent that Chloe could not place. It had some similarities with Lucifer’s British accent, but there was something different about it.
Chloe reeled back slightly in surprise at the transformation, but Maze didn’t react at all, and Chloe realized that the man had called her by name. She probably knew him.
“Very funny, Wise-Ass,” Maze said. “Now, gimme!” Maze extended a hand and made a “come here” gesture.
The man chuckled some more, but did not hand over his walking stick. Instead, he reached inside his coat and produced a bottle filled with a brown liquid.
Maze accepted the bottle with a toothy smile and said in a gruff voice, “Your toll is paid, Hat-Wearer.” She cracked the bottle open and took a swig. “I salute the mead bearer; to wish you harm would be in error.” She paused, then said more softly, “Sleip is well, to this you swear? He serves well as your wayfarer?”
“Downstairs, in the parking garage,” the man said. “ He’s not fond of…this.” With the last word, the man waved his hand at the club.
Maze stepped forward and rose to the tips of her toes. The man bent down to meet her halfway and allowed a kiss on his cheek, which he returned on the top of her head.
“Danke schön, Allfather,” Maze said. “I shall return soon. This hall, you will not bother.” She then entered the elevator and left the club.
Chloe wasn’t sure if she should be more shocked by Maze’s tender affection for the man or her sudden bout of poetry. She gathered her thoughts and focused on the part that was the easiest to ask about. “Sleip?”
“Her brother, Sleipnir,” the man said. “He is my…chauffeur.” The last word had a hint of a French accent to it, as though the man had learned it from that language rather than English. “He has sensitive ears, so nightclubs are not a pleasant place for him.”
“I didn’t know Maze had a brother,” Chloe said.
“She has three,” he said. “Though I’ve heard that she doesn’t much like speaking of them outside of her family. She’s a very private woman.”
“You seem to know them pretty well,” Chloe pointed out.
The man laughed again. “I cheat. I’m practically a part of the family. I’ve known her since before she was Mazikeen.”
Chloe frowned. “That isn’t her real name.”
“It’s the name she prefers,” he said. “While she was fond of her old name in her youth, she’s since tired of some of the implications it brings and asked us not to use it anymore. At least not directly.”
Chloe nodded. She was no stranger to the concept of deadnames and wouldn’t press Maze for hers. Maze had never struck Chloe as being trans, but perhaps she had simply completed her transition a long time ago or had some other reason for wishing to get rid of her name.
“I’m surprised that she has such a…tender side to her,” Chloe said.
“Mazikeen is a woman of duality, of dark and light,” he said. “She prefers to show only the dark to those she does not like or trust. Earn her trust, and you’ll see the light more.”
Chloe rolled her eyes. “She’s made no secret of the fact that she doesn’t like me. She acts like I’m here to corrupt Lucifer or something.”
“She can be fairly defensive of her father,” the man said. “For all his bravado, Luki’s a sensitive soul. She gets the light from him.”
“Luki?” Chloe asked.
“Hmmm,” the man said. “How much do you know about the linguistic shift between Classical Latin and Ecclesiastical Latin?”
Chloe was taken aback by the non-sequitur. “Uh…not much.”
“So, nothing at all,” the man said with a smirk. “That is fine, most people haven’t studied Latin. Classical Latin was Latin as spoken in the Late Roman Republic and Early Roman Empire. It was different from the Latin of 500 years prior, when Rome was first founded, and different from the Latin of 500 years later, when the Western Empire fell.”
“The Latin near the end of the Empire was called ‘Vulgar Latin,’ and it eventually evolved into the Romance Languages: Spanish, Portuguese, Romanian, French, Italian, and so on. As time went on, the Catholic Church decided that they really wanted to focus on Latin rather than the younger languages it was evolving into. So, they reconstructed Classical Latin as best they could. The process wasn’t perfect, but it was much closer to Latin than the Romance Languages being spoken at that point.”
Chloe eyed the man carefully. “Are you a Linguistics professor or something?”
“I have been known as a cunning linguist at times,” the man said. Then he smiled fondly. “My wife says that I’m quite the delight. For both my efforts to spread my knowledge of tongue and pen, and what I can personally do with them.”
Chloe narrowed her eyes at the man. He was more subtle than Lucifer, but was nearly as free with double entendres. At least he was implying that he was active with his wife instead of being willing to sleep with anyone like Lucifer.
The man chuckled a bit at her frustration. “In any case, the pronunciation of Ecclesiastical Latin took on some features of more modern Italian. One of the more prominent pronunciation shifts that Ecclesiastical Latin obtained is that Cs in Classical Latin were pronounced with a velar plosive—a ‘K sound’—while Italian pronounces them with a sibilant—an ‘S sound.’”
Chloe stared blankly at the man.
“Lucifer is the Ecclesiastical pronunciation. The Classical version is closer to ‘Lukifer.’ So, a potential nickname of ‘Luci’ from the Ecclesiastical version becomes ‘Luki’ from the Classical version.” He rubbed his chin. “Though…there are other linguistic shifts that have rendered the ‘oo’ closer to an ‘oh’ in some accents.”
Chloe blinked a few times as she caught up to the man’s explanation. “Maze is Lucifer’s daughter? I thought they were about the same age.”
“He’s aged quite gracefully,” the man said, “he’s still a young man in many ways.”
They both looked at the piano where Lucifer was attempting to play with a man and a woman on his lap. He was failing in a manner that seemed almost perfect for bringing his two companions closer and closer to kissing.
The man shook his head. “Some men never lose their boyishness. I think that’s why he and my son bonded so well. My son is similar, in his own way. It helped when I took Luki in.”
“Took him in?”
“After his father cast him out,” the man clarified.
Chloe winced. She had heard Lucifer rant about his father plenty of times and had seen the scars on his back. “He’s told me about that,” she said. “It doesn’t sound like it was pleasant.”
“It wasn’t,” the man confirmed. “Luki was lost and alone. Technically mature enough to be on his own, but still so young and naïve. He needed a home. I had a son of roughly the same age, so I offered him mine.”
The man smiled fondly. “I never made him call me father—a word he reserves for the scorn he feels for his maker—but I like to think that I filled the role he needed. In every way that he needs to be, he’s my son.”
“He’s never talked about you,” Chloe said.
“When you’ve lived a life filled with pain, sometimes speaking of the pain is easier than speaking of the happier moments.” The man’s voice was soft and sorrowful.
Chloe hummed in agreement. She’d seen the way some of her fellow officers wallowed in the misery of their jobs and neglected their families as a result. Something she had vowed to avoid ever weighing Trixie down with.
“From the rumors I’ve heard,” the man said. “It sounds as though you might be turning LA into one of those happy moments for him. You give him a purpose and someone to care about.”
“They sometimes call me ‘Truth-Seeker’ despite how easily I lie, and they sometimes call him ‘Lie-Smith’ despite how often he speaks the truth,” the man said. “Do you know why that is?”
Chloe shook her head.
“When I lie, it is to expose the truth,” the man said. “Ultimately, my desire is to spread knowledge and wisdom, and sometimes a lie will set someone on the path to find the truth for themself.”
He nodded in the direction of Lucifer. “When he tells the truth, it is to conceal it. He hides his pain behind flippancy, spinning true statements into falsehoods. He uses the truth to lead others to false conclusions, the same way I use lies to lead others to the truth. But his motivation is what is important. He’s a caring person whose deepest desire is to bring light into the lives of others. But that has brought him so much pain that it scares him, so he hides.”
His one visible eye bored into her. “I know he might seem vain and a bit obsessive, but aiding in police work is quite healthy for him. It is a chance for him to bring that light to people in a controlled way that works. It helps that he has the potential to actually be good at it.”
That single eye winked at her, an exaggerated gesture to make it clear that it was not a simple blink. “And if he was going to obsess over any detective, you aren’t a bad choice. I was quite fond of your work in cinema.”
Chloe sighed and braced herself for yet another person gloating about the fact that they had seen her tits in a movie. However, that’s not what happened.
“I think my favorite was True Lies,” the man said. “An amusing title for an amusing plot and some fun action sequences. I think most viewers were distracted by the bombastic action and wittiness of the leads, but I saw the confidence you brought, even at a young age. Your eyes seemed to be taking everything in, and you didn’t let yourself be intimidated by sharing the screen with one of the biggest action stars of the time. You even got a few fun action scenes yourself.”
The man sighed. “I was expecting to see you turn into a budding action star yourself. A chance like that, to have a successful showing under the wing of an established star, it would have been an excellent tale of the start to a great career.” He shook his head. “Hollywood doesn’t understand what Hot Tub High School cost them.”
Chloe was a bit dumbfounded and didn’t know what to say. A soft “thank you” was the best she could muster.
“Cinema’s loss is LA’s gain,” the man said with a smile. “You’ve turned your career into something meaningful. Something more important than fame and riches. I name thee ‘Shieldmaiden, Protector of the City of Angels.’ When your time with the LAPD eventually ends, and your soul still itches to protect the innocent, speak my name. I will find a place for you.”
Her brows furrowed, and Chloe said, “You haven’t told me your name.”
“You are a detective, and I have given you more than enough clues,” he said. “There’s a magic in this world that allows the wielder to imbue themselves with knowledge after only gazing upon the sacred runes.”
Chloe leveled a flat stare at him.
“Books,” the man said with a laugh. “The written word can be quite magical. Go to the library—or the internet, I suppose. You’re an observant young woman. Use what you’ve observed and find me.”
The man turned back to the elevator. “I should go ensure Mazikeen hasn’t started a stampede or something. Until again we see, Chloe Decker. Be that which you be, the city’s protector.”
Without another word, he slipped into the elevator and left.
Chloe later pressed Lucifer and Maze with questions about who the man was. Maze almost refused to acknowledge that the man existed at all and grudgingly told Chloe that she didn’t deserve to know anything about him and that the man had made a mistake in revealing himself. Lucifer was a bit more enthused and even seemed happy that the two had met and gotten along so well. But, he was tight-lipped about revealing more.
“If he wants you to figure it out yourself, I won’t spoil his fun,” Lucifer said.
“Fine,” Chloe said in response. “I guess I’ll have to use the ‘magic’ of the library.” She made finger quotes around the word “magic.”
Lucifer did not say anything in response, simply giving her a broad, goofy smile.