The devil, knelt beside her on the floor, waits for her to finish.

If she were in a movie, Emmelia thinks, with a curious sort of distance, she would scream right now.

Instead, she puts her hand over her mouth, bites down on it hard.

"...no," she says, slightly muffled. "No! Not right now," and immediately wishes she'd made the Sign of the Cross or really anything other than yelling at the devil to leave.

"...another time, then."

(There's nothing that looks all that unusual about him, nothing that sounds unearthly. He could easily be a man from down the street, if he weren't so obviously and unmistakably himself.)

He looks up at the icons, at the twisted body in the sketch beside them.

"I'm sorry for your loss."

And then he's gone, as silently and quickly as he came.

She thinks about telling her confessor. But there are visions, and then there are hallucinations brought on by stress and grief, and -- the devil doesn't really go away because you yell at him.

He certainly doesn't kneel in prayer.

Emmelia goes to her classes, mostly. There's no such thing as compassionate leave for "my best friend died," but she's a good enough student to get away with skipping once in a while. She prays, a lot. She cries over the sketchbooks he left her; she tries not to linger on certain pages (the violent, the pornographic), but it's not as if she can bear to tear them out.

There's a heavy overlap between the violent and the pornographic, in the earlier ones, bloody flogging and ecstatic dismemberment, boys impaled or wrapped in thorns, suspended in bliss. They're scattered between studies of faces and models, the little still lifes scratched in mechanical pencil, the occasional parody of Saint Sebastian. (One of the sketchbooks has a post-it note in the front – sorry about all the gay sex, written in his angular chicken scratch.)

In the later ones, months into his treatment, the splashes of red ink disappear, as does the pleasure. There are more gruesome self-portraits – rotting from the inside, surgically mutilated, mouth and eyes sewn, burnt alive, hanging from a cross by ribbons threaded through the gaping holes in his palms ending in neat bows. Some have wings, and some have halos.

Through it all, growing more frequent and more confident and more accurate and kinder in the eyes as time passes, there are sketches of the devil's face.

It's not hard, at least, to keep from lingering on the images of her best friend's inner horrors.

As for the other thing -- she must have seen Z sketching that face. Glanced over his shoulder, forgotten about it. It's not even improbable. She's seen so many of his drawings.

(It's harder than she thought it would be. The images of Z's suffering keep making her cry, but she keeps looking at them, long after she's managed to put all the gay sex into a box under her bed, like poking at an open sore.

She prays for her friend, over and over, lying awake at night, even when all she can think of is his eyes hollow in the searing light of a halo.)

Two weeks later, someone answers.

There's no one, and then there's the devil, sitting at the foot of her bed with his hands clasped.

"I don't suppose this is a better time."

"No!"

"I'm not sure how long this can wait, Emmelia."

She scrambles out of bed, crossing herself.

"Go away -- in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost--!"

"–well, all right."

And he's gone.

Emmelia tells her confessor, this time.

She's pretty sure that he doesn't believe her, which is probably reasonable. He counsels her to pray often, to choose improving media rather than books or movies with disturbing or occult themes, to have frequent recourse to the sacraments, to spend time with her family and friends. He asks her, gently, how she's coping with the death of her friend.

At home, she opens up a text document on her computer, writes the date and time and then an account of what happened. Two days ago I saw the devil. He looked like this -- and a cellphone picture of one of Z's sketches. I told him to leave me alone and made the Sign of the Cross and he vanished. I was in bed but I was wide awake. I've had sleep paralysis and hypnagogic hallucinations and false awakenings and none of them were anything like this. I saw him once before, a couple of weeks ago, and that time I wasn't in bed. He left when I told him to that time, too.

It's not as easy as it should be to follow the priest's advice. She deletes her bookmarks of a couple of dubiously legal fanfiction sites, immediately regrets it, manages to reconstruct the address of one from memory, regrets that too. She looks at Z's drawings just as much, but now she feels guilty about it. She calls her parents and tells them she misses them but she's doing all right. Her abstract algebra professor sends her a concerned email about how much she's skipping class, and she deletes it without reading past the subject line.

It's another thirteen days before she comes back from brushing her teeth to the devil sitting in her desk chair.

"May we please talk."

She should make the Sign of the Cross again, abjure him by the Holy Name to leave.

There are so many stories about saints being tempted by the devil in the semblance of a man. Emmelia can't remember a single one where the saint was wearing pajamas. She's pretty sure it's the pajamas, somehow, which do her in, leaving her wondering for just a moment if he has something to tell her -- something from -- no, she doesn't believe he's in --

"What."

"Thank you."

"I've been asked to come here and speak with you. As a personal favor."

"Have you."

She's backed up against the wall, arms folded protectively over her chest, one hand clutching at her scapular. This conversation is such a stunningly, spectacularly bad idea, and yet here she is having it anyway.

"Yes."

He doesn't react to her, keeps his eyes lowered.

"He'd like you to know that he's – well. In a better place, I suppose."

It's such an obvious ploy, Emmelia actually laughs.

"I don't believe you," she says, fear entirely forgotten. "I command you, by the Holy Name of Jesus, get out of my house and go. the. hell. to. hell."

He reappears, roughly ten seconds later, looking slightly ruffled.

"–excuse me."

She scrambles up to stand on her bed, snatching the crucifix from the wall above it to brandish like she's trying to slay a vampire.

"Go away, go away, go away -- Jesus, Mary, Joseph! -- I, I abjure you...!"

"Oh, for–"

She wraps herself up in a cocoon of blankets, still clutching the crucifix, and falls asleep with the lights on.