“Lucifer?” Billy asks.
“The Manifestation,” Laurent says.
“He’s dead?” Billy feels an unexpected pang of loss.
“It doesn’t exactly work that way,” Laurent says. “The Adversary isn’t alive or dead as you and I think about it. His manifestation was dispelled last night, though. And if you stick with us, he won’t be contacting you again.”
Billy frowns. He’s not sure why, but he feels bummed by this. It’s not exactly like he lost a friend, but more like he embarrassed himself in front of someone he thought might make a good contact.
He looks at Laurent. “Who the fuck are you?” he asks. “I thought you were the editor of a literary magazine. But you know about all this stuff and somehow you’re involved with Argentium Astrum and—”
Suddenly it clicks. “You’re a warlock,” he says.
Laurent smiles broadly. “Yes!” he exclaims. Billy, for his part, has to restrain a sigh. He’s starting to get sick of warlocks.
“In fact,” Laurent says, “I serve as the Executive Director of Cultural Production for the Northeast Regional Office of the Right-Hand Path, an international organization of witches and warlocks.”
“Wait,” Billy says. “So—is Ollard one of you?”
“Ollard?”
“Timothy Ollard? Guy who wants to burn up the world?”
“Timothy Ollard,” Laurent says, “is someone who you should not even know about. But, to answer your question: No. He is not one of us. He is—well, he is a problem, a problem we are actively engaged with and working on. Let me put it to you this way, Billy. Ollard is a bad guy. And we’re the good guys.”
“The good guys,” Billy repeats.
“Yes!” Laurent says.
For some reason this puts Billy in mind of the Office of Homeland Security, which he actually always thought of as a group of extralegal thugs. He narrows his eyes.
“Last night,” he asks, “did you Tase me?”
Laurent glances down to the floor and presses a knuckle into his upper lip for a long second, apparently contemplating how to phrase the answer.
“You did!” Billy says. “You fucking Tased me!”
“Yes,” Laurent says, looking up with an expression of pity. “I Tased you. If it’s any consolation, I did it with great reservation, a really strong, profound reservation. But the important point is not that. That’s behind us. That’s in the past. The important point is that you’re with us now.”
“It really fucking hurt, you know,” Billy says. “It’s not in the past until I stop fucking hurting.”
Billy glares at Laurent while Laurent maintains a hopeful smile.
“Did you say you had to do cleanup on my friends?” Billy says, eventually.
“Yes.”
“What exactly does that mean?”
“Well,” Laurent says, “surely you understand that we can’t have people running around talking about having witnessed the dispersal of an Adversarial Manifestation. The results would be—a mess. Just a mess. So we had our team psychic—Gloria, we’ll introduce you to her in a bit—we had Gloria go in and make a couple of tweaks to their memories of the event.”
“Tweaks?”
“Yep,” Laurent says, proudly. “Just a couple of tweaks.”
“Without their consent?” Billy says.
A tiny line creases Laurent’s brow. “It’s not the kind of thing for which one typically asks consent,” he says.
“I dunno,” Billy says. “Lucifer asked for my consent before he started messing with my brain.”
“That may be,” Laurent says. “But—”
“So wait a second,” Billy says. “What exactly do my friends think went down last night?”
Laurent gives him a look, as though this entire line of conversation is somewhat distasteful. “You remember you told a joke? About shoes?”
“Who could forget that,” Billy says, in a low and rueful voice.
“Well,” Laurent continues, “in their recollection, you finish the joke, thank the audience, and head backstage. And then the reading ends and everyone heads home.”
Billy’s ears begin to burn with shame. “Elisa doesn’t read?”
“We lost track of her,” Laurent says.
“I don’t return to hanging out with my friends?” Billy says. “I freaking disappear?”
“It’s just a tweak,” Laurent says, a little defensively. “Our aim is minimal effective alteration: M.E.A. It’s not our aim to, you know, write fiction in which you emerge as the star. We’re the good guys.”