They were still in the dim back room of the restaurant; it was late and the owner hovered from the edges like he wanted to start putting chairs on top of tables. Forty-three and a half turned to Forty-three, the ex-president from Texas, who hadn’t yet recovered from her stated intention to fight the devil. “So where do I find this joker, anyway?”

“Uh. Don’t know,” Forty-three said. “He always sort of…finds me.”

“Do you say his name three times or something?” Forty-two offered.

Forty-four, the ex-president from Chicago, rose from his seat at the table, put down a large tip for the waiter. “You can play all the Yellowstone Beth Dutton foolishness you want to, Madame Secretary, but I am going home. Maybe if I’m lucky my wife will be there at some point in the near future. Try not to get killed. I hope it will be a good long time before I have to attend another state funeral.”

“I’ll go with you,” Forty-six said, seeming to shrink away as the two men left.

“And then there were three,” said Madame Secretary, who had been given the honorary code name Forty-three and a half.

Forty-three appeared deep in thought as uncomfortable silence fogged the room. “He often makes his appearance when I’m alone, and in a moral quandary. As I am often in a moral quandary these days, the odds are better that he’ll pop in. You could be hiding somewhere…”

Forty three-and a half stood taller. “I am not hiding in a closet ready to jump out when the devil pays you a visit.”

“Not since that last time you tried it on me,” her husband said, and she gave him the hairy eyeball.

“I have a plan,” Forty-three and a half said, and the two remaining ex-presidents huddled closer to listen.

—–

He’d had a lousy night, and it was raining, and all Lucifer was looking forward to when his black car pulled up to his mansion was several fingers of scotch in a cut-glass tumbler in front of a roaring fire, but the look on his nephew’s face when he arrived stopped him cold. The boy told him about the text he’d received from a reliable source. “A debate? She wants to debate? Me?”

His nephew nodded. “That’s what he said.”

Lucifer laughed so hard he coughed up sulfuric ash. “I will decimate her. That is, if I choose to be a party to this madness.”

“There was more,” the boy said, passing over his phone.

Lucifer read: “If you don’t meet me, I have some information my friend the Russian president might be interested in knowing.”

The devil cursed under his breath. He never should have been a party to that deal with Putin. It left him in the man’s debt, a situation he always tried to avoid. Plus, with those dead shark eyes and his immense body count and vocabulary of untraceable poisons, the guy was scary as hell. And Lucifer knew a few things about hell. “Fine,” he sighed, waving a hand. “The two of you can iron out the details.”

—-

“Jesus, that was one long Uber ride,” Forty-three and a half said to her husband and the man from Texas, when they’d finally come upon him at the coordinates she’d been given. “Where is this place?”

Lucifer was perched on a rock at the edge of a small meadow surrounded by trees and bordered by two highways. A young man in an ill-fitting black suit stood beside him. “You, Madame Secretary, a student of politics and history, don’t recognize the Weehauken Plain?”

She shrugged. “Aaron Burr and Alexander Hamilton. An obvious choice for a duel, but there’s not much that’s subtle about you.”

“It’s my art,” Lucifer said. “Do we have a moderator, or are we going at this Lincoln versus Douglas style?”

“Moderators are for squids,” she said, glaring at him. “I thought you would have familiarized yourself with the terms of the debate.”

“Yes, yes,” he sighed. “A conversation in questions, our seconds will serve as judges and witnesses, no mention of a certain White House intern, blah blah blah.”

Her glare hardened into ice.

“Then we’ll begin,” he said, sweeping his arm across the open space. “Ladies first.”

And the battle was on. They parried with some basic college debate team exchanges about good versus evil, the definition of suffering, the difference between free will and temptation—testing each other’s strengths, probing for weaknesses.

“Do you like anything about humanity?” Forty-three and a half asked. “Let’s get a basic benchmark on the table.”

“I find humanity amusing. Especially when they get trapped in their own webs of deceit. Which you should know a few things about, Mrs. Clinton.”

“Look at her eyes,” Forty-two said to his successor under his breath. “I know that look. She’s moving in for the kill.”

Then she said, “Do you believe in redemption? If so, what would redemption look like for someone who has already turned away from you? And if not, why do you think redemption is not possible?”

“Interesting.” Lucifer stroked his pointed beard. “The concept of redemption. You might think greed and power are the top reasons a human chooses to join me for a dance, but a shot at redemption is often the greater temptation. They want to be absolved of their failings, like your Forty-third president when he first came to me.”

“Hey,” the man from Texas said. “Just answer the damn question and leave me out of this.”

Lucifer winked at him, then addressed Forty-three and a half. “No, Madame Secretary, I don’t believe what humans think of as redemption is ever truly possible. Nothing that comes so easily doesn’t have a catch, and your kind is enamored of easy answers to difficult questions.”

“That’s often true, I’ll give you that,” she returned. “But I believe there is redemption, for those who authentically want it, anyway. You can’t change the past—woulda, shoulda, coulda, of course—but you can make amends. I’ve made mistakes, who hasn’t, especially a good number of hair styles and that whole basket of deplorables thing, but I strive to learn from them, and come back stronger.” She looked straight at the devil, tapped a finger against her cheek as if thinking. “Haven’t you ever made a mistake? For instance, that fight you picked with God that got you banished you to the underworld. Any regrets there?”

Steam rose from the top of Lucifer’s head. “I regret nothing.”

She smirked. “Interesting. That’s not what I heard from some of your constituents.”

The smell of sulfur and brimstone grew stronger in the small meadow. “My constituents, as you call them, have ironclad NDAs and if they knew what was good for them, they would never reveal—”

“Tell that to my email server,” she said, a twinkle in her eye. “It knows all of your secrets.”

“You—”

“Yes?” she asked, all innocence.

“You can’t—how did you—?”

She shrugged. “It was just me and Mama Google. You made it so easy to find. Next time you load PDFs to your website, check that you exclude them from search.”

“You’re in violation!” he snarled. “Of the rules we agreed to, of your human sense of decency.”

“I guess I lied.” She stood firm, hands on her hips. “What are you gonna do about it?”

“Aw, shit,” Forty-two muttered.

With a roar, Lucifer leapt up from the rock, charging at her, horns first. She dodged. Momentum threw him forward, hooves skidding into the grass. He scrambled around and returned. Laid a glancing blow to the arm she’d thrown up against him, a slash across her cheek. But it didn’t even seem to faze her. “That’s all you got?” she said.

He snorted, and made another charge at her. But this time, she met him with a sweep kick that got him off balance. The second, a hard roundhouse, drove one stiletto heel deep into his hide.

He fell. Twitched a few times. And went still.

“Is… Is he dead?” Forty-three asked.

Forty-two answered. “I’m not sure you can kill the devil, not really.”

“Jesus, look at him!” the man from Texas said. Lucifer was foaming at the mouth. And out of the stillness, his form began to disintegrate, the hair and horns and hooves and tail morphing into something…human.

“Uncle!” The boy ran up, dropped to his knees before the figure. “What did you do to him?”

She sniffed, flicked a bit of dirt from the leg of her pantsuit. “Just delivered a little present from Putin’s chemistry set. Courtesy of my stilettos.”

This human form gasped a couple of times, blinked up into the sunshine. Grimaced. The color in his face was fading, eyes losing light. He turned toward the three members of the Council as if it had taken every last ounce of strength. “I will… I will… grow my powers back… and then… and then…”

And then, he was gone.

——-

“Something’s different about you,” Forty-four said to Forty-three and a half when they met up at the inauguration. “Did you change your hair?”

“Something like that,” she said.

“That’s a hell of a cut on your face.”

“You should see the other guy.”

He glad-handed his way through the ceremony, then made tracks to his security detail and booked a flight to Hawaii.

“I know you didn’t watch it and don’t want to hear about it,” he said, after he’d arrived, after a good long hug from his wife and a fancy cocktail on the beach. “But there was something different about him, up there. If I didn’t know any better, I’d swear he looked humbled. Like someone took the fight out of him.”

“Interesting,” Michelle said. “Hillary texted me just about the same observation. Did she say how she got that cut on her face?”

“Oh, you know our Hillary. Probably picked a bar fight or something.”

They both laughed, and it had a been a long time since either of them had.