There was still one star low on the horizon by the time the ambulance and police arrived at the bend of the road outside East Glacier. An old, yellow star that refused to blend into the morning light.

Bill Duffy, one of the patrolmen on the scene that morning, could see it twinkling even as he wrote down his report. The girl was gone, which might probably be for the best—even if she hadn't been killed on impact, he didn't think she would have lived past an hour or more even in the ICU.

Poor kid though. He had passed out from shock, but they'd managed to bring him around enough to answer a few questions. His name was Jonas Scott, but the kid spoke to them like nothing at all mattered.

They were just about to wrap things up here, get everything cleared away, when a long, black car rolled up right up behind the flares they had set up around the curve. Duffy could have put it down to just rubber necking, but the car just sat there. It was so dark it looked like a piece of the sky itself—a night without stars. The windows were tinted, so you couldn't even tell if anyone was in there. And then the guy stepped out.

He was tall, and somehow, Duffy could swear he recognized him. Maybe he was famous. He looked like a movie star with a face that seemed almost eerily perfect, except for a funny scar that ran from below his nose to his jaw in an ugly, deep line. The man from the black car took in a deep breath and smiled, and that scar looked even worse for it.

"Help you, sir?" Duffy called. The man shook his head, looking off towards that final twinkling star. Mercury? Wormwood? Duffy had never known its name.

"Just browsing," the man said, and gave a little wink that was just so...off.

"Yeah, well there's nothing to see here, pal. You should probably move along."

"Oh, no, no." And even though Duffy knew he should be really telling this guy off, the way he talked, gentle and oiled, he still took the card the man gave him.

"Lawyer, huh?" Duffy said. "Figures."

But it was the weirdest thing. The weirdest thing about that card. Later, he would remember taking it, remember reading "Injury Claim Law" at the bottom, but he couldn't remember the name on the card. Or the name of the firm. And he'd just...weirdest thing was, he'd thrown it away. Something you never did at a time like this.

But at the time, the man in the pinstriped suit with his ugly scar just stood by the flares, and in the sputtering red light his face took on a dark tone. Like he enjoyed being so close to such suffering.

"He's close, I think. Very close."

"Sorry?" Duffy said. He was just putting down the last details in his report.

"I was wondering if I could speak to Jonas."

Duffy started. How had the man known who the victims were? Duffy hadn't said anything, and the guy hadn't spoken to anyone else since he stepped out of the car.

"Sorry, pal. Unless you're family, I need to ask you to step back into your car."

"Oh, but we're all one big happy family, don't you think?" The man stepped around him just like that. “Jonas?” He moved as if Duffy wasn't there at all, stepped over to the open ambulance door and hopped up onto the back step in an eerie, fluid movement.

"Hey, the hell you think you're doing buddy?" the paramedic shouted, and before there was any more noise from these creatures, before there was any more hubbub and the need to explain, the man put his finger to his lips, and everyone was still.

"That's much better," he said.

The paramedic froze, staring at the side of the suit's face. There was something there that just...drew him in.

Suddenly, all he could think of was the fact that his paycheck wasn't coming for another few days, that he had started out doing this job wanting to help people, and now...every drunk call, every battery call, every call that ended up with him face to face with the worst in people just...well, it weighed him down.

After meeting the man in the pinstriped suit, he would slowly drift away from his job. Not physically, of course, but mentally. And soon, people would start to die. Not in any way that could really be tied back to him (of course), and not in a way he himself would ever be able to admit (of course). But, nevertheless, that moment when he should be thinking of another's life, of what he needed to do to save another's life would become...blurry, hazy, and he would start to make those slips more and more often.

However, in this moment, beside the man in the pinstriped suit, all the paramedic knew was that it had gotten uncomfortably hot, and the man in the pinstriped suit looked so...cool, and above it all. The devil of course is not in the grand schemes of things, but in the details.

"Hello there, Jonas," the man in the pinstriped suit said. "Can he hear me? You may speak."

The paramedic found he could, just like that, right after the man said he could.

"He's been slipping in and out," he replied. "Mostly from shock."

"Oh, that won't do. That won't do at all. Come on, Jonas. Come around now. Come back to us." The man in the pinstriped suit gently touched the poor kid's forehead with only the tips of his fingers attached to a hand that was strangely smooth like polished granite. Jonas' eyes went wide the moment it happened, and he let out a scream muffled by the gauze packed in his mouth.

"There we are. That's better."

No one moved. Both Duffy and the paramedic were perfectly still in the faint blush of dawn.

"Now, Jonas, it seems you've run into someone I've been looking for. Not...of course, literally." The man in the pinstriped suit chuckled. "Literally, you ran into that tree there. It’s taken its pound of flesh from you, hasn’t it? But tell me, do you remember if someone came by for your little...oh what was her name." He snapped his fingers a few times, as if the word was on the tip of his tongue. He was smiling, a strange, sickly smile. "It's always so hard to tell you all apart. What was it now? Mary? Mavis? No that can't be it. Help me out here, Jonas. What was her name? The dead girl. Your dead girl. Oh, she's very much dead. Don't need to sugarcoat that, do I? The two of you were on your way back for some of the old in-and-out, and now she's very, very dead. But what was her name?"

Jonas, tied down to the stretcher, his arm and chest wrapped, started to sob, tears welling in his eyes and running down his cheeks to soak into the gauze in his mouth. He let out a muffled sound at last.

"Right, Mae. That's it now. Thank you so much, Jonas." The man in the pinstriped suit patted his shoulder, and Jonas let out another scream. "So, there you were, babes in the woods. You and your Mae and old Mr. Pine Tree over there." He nodded towards the wreckage. "Quite a strange threesome, if I do say so myself. Not really my style. But there you all were, and might have been all night if someone hadn't happened along. But someone did happen along, didn't they?"

Jonas nodded, still weeping.

"That's my boy. Tell the truth and shame the...well, me I suppose. If I ever felt the need for shame, that is." The man in the pinstriped suit leaned forward. "Now, Jonas, I need you to think about him, the one you saw. Think back as much as you can. Old whatever-her-name-is over there, she's leaning on the steering wheel. She's, well, she slipped into the afterparty. You’re very much alive, and of course you must just feel awful about that I'm sure. But here he comes! And what. What do you see?"

Jonas didn't speak, his eyes closed, tears running down his face. The man in the pinstriped suit leaned back. "Ahh. There he is. Thank you, little buddy. Maybe we'll talk soon, won't we?" He gave the boy on the gurney one last, friendly pat, and hopped back out of the back of the ambulance.

They were all quiet, every weak, little human scattered around the accident site like children. As the sun started to rise and drown out the light of his star, the Morningstar sighed. Everything out here in the world was always so foolishly easy. For all these simpering creatures went on and on about keeping the devil down—oh, how much they droned on about loving God—when it came down to it, they feared the devil more. And so Lucifer walked past the trembling highway patrolman, the cowering paramedic, the tow truck driver, and stood beside his car once more.

He'd been out on the country for months now, since this new scheme from Above had been hatched, following the scent of the Angel of Death. From a building collapse in India (and what a mess that had been. He could have spent weeks there, living off the anger and fear and guilt that spun out of that glorious wreck) to a shooting in a park out in Chicago, Lucifer had followed the trail of dead in search of the harvester of souls. Up until now, he had been late, but slowly catching up to his quarry. When he started, he had been a day behind Azrael, then half a day, and now only a few hours separated him from the Angel of Death, and that was close enough.

He closed his eyes, drawing on the memory still fresh in Jonas' mind. He lifted his head to the wind and sniffed, catching the current of air that had carried the black wings of the harvester of souls.

Azrael had come in his true form here, but when he left, he had changed. The wind told Lucifer so. The wind and the long cackles of his own agents in the world, the ever-hungry carrion birds, the spiders and blue bottle flies. Azrael had changed into another shape, a human shape. But where, and into who?

Lucifer ran the image of the Angel of Death over in his mind. Little Jonas would forget he had told the man in the pinstriped suit. He would in fact forget all about the meeting with Azrael, stolen as it was from his mind. But Lucifer turned the stolen memory this way and that, holding it up in his mind as he communed with his creatures. He is close. He whispered to the wind, which now had begun to smell foul, to bring along with it across the high places of Montana, the stink of death, of fear, and disease. Tell me where, and how.

He waited by his car until an old crow, balding and crawling with flies, wheeled out of the sky and hopped down to the road. It bowed its mangy head and croaked a low, gurgling sound.

"You don't say?" Lucifer said to his informant. "Well that is a surprise."

He turned to look at the scene in front of him, and laughed. The officer, the paramedic and the tow truck driver were frozen in fear at the sight of the devil. And as delightful as it would be to spend some time here with them and their sins, Lucifer had important work to do.

"Gentlemen," he said. "As you were.”

He stepped into his car and pulled away from the carnage on the narrow road, high up in the mountains of this nation, supposedly under God.

Bill Duffy shook his head to clear it as he walked over to the ambulance. The poor kid was asleep again, and Duffy was already forgetting most of what had happened from the moment the black car had pulled up to the accident site. It would only be later, alone in his sleep, that he would remember, that any of them would remember, what the devil had shown them in his shadow, and the dreams those memories brought with them would never be sweet, and would last for the rest of their days.