Lady of Light

Name Part 2

Nina opened the door to Claire's apartment while she was still sleeping with Lucifer in her arms. The cat didn't want to be seen in such a demeaning position and quickly abandoned his sleeping mistress to meet the guest with a cool attitude.

"Claire, it's past nine!"

The drowsy girl pulled the duvet over her head.

"Aileen's house has burned down!"

"What?" Claire was suddenly wide awake.

"Did anyone get hurt?" she asked.

"You can certainly say that! No survivors!"

"No surv... what about Deliar?"

"I don't think he made it either. I don't have his number so I can't check. But the police say that so far they have found thirty-two bodies all burned to the bone! Identification is impossible, without DNA or a dental match."

"How did it happen?"

"That's what the experts want to know. They've never seen anything like it. Whatever could burn, did burn."

"I'll bet that Deliar isn't one of the victims! You'll see, he'll come dashing to class on Monday with that dumb smile of his."

"How can we attend to lectures, Claire? Most of our classmates were at that party!"

Nina actually started to cry and Claire who felt powerless and miserable tried to cheer her up as much as possible. Lucifer offered his contributions by crashing a mug as he tipped it over the edge of the table.

"Drat! I forgot to remove all breakable stuff from the table yesterday!"

Fortunately, his action had brought a laugh to Nina's beautiful face.

"Does he do that often?" she sobbed.

"Yeah, he wants a clean table. If there's something on it, he will make sure to remove it."

Her best friend dried her tears and embraced Lucifer, while Claire thought out loud.

"I still think it was Deliar. All these strange things only started to happen when he came here."

"It might just be a confounder."

"We'll see."

***

But Deliar never appeared. The remains of the victims were buried with grief of the many parents who appeared and Claire was walking around on the graveyard after the funeral, looking at the names. Thirty-two gravestones, twenty-seven were known to Claire as classmates, while the last five were probably Aileen's friends. But none of them bore the name Deliar.

"So in the end I can't find you. Neither alive nor dead," mumbled Claire suspiciously with the howling wind around her.

Her sorrow was not as deep as it would have been if Nina's name had been on the gravestone. In all honesty she felt more relief than sorrow now that it was all over and Deliar was gone. Nina had started to see a psychotherapist and the government had offered Claire the same treatment, but she had refused. The last thing she wanted was to get her brain analyzed by another person. She knew her thoughts were twisted for she felt no remorse for those people she had known most of her life, not even her deceased father. All she cared for was Lucifer and her best friend. Everything else could burn.

What was scraped into the ground? In the end of the line of gravestones there was an empty grave with no stone. But in the soil was written the sentence:

I will burn your flesh and bury the bones deep down to the abyss of Hell

Hell with a capital letter. Was that not the words she had thought Deliar had uttered? Who had written those? Claire looked around her. It felt like a thousand eyes were directed at her, but surely it was just her fancy, there was no one in sight. She scrambled the ground to make the words vanish.