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that was better —“then what?” Which was a very good question seeing as how I couldn’t do anything with him or to him. I was a watcher, end of function.
    “Watch him,” Tammuz growled.
    “Watch him do what? Count goats?” I muttered under my breath. I’d stalled as long as I could, so I set my course and started winging it toward the desert.
    You might wonder how I could have been so sure of myself when I said Moses was no longer a threat to Satan because he’d flunked the test for being the deliverer. The truth is I took a chance and lied to Satan; I thought just the opposite of what I said. Oh, I know I took a big risk because I’m not a convincing liar and Satan would devour me if he caught me lying to him, but I was highly motivated.
    The truth is I disparaged the idea to Satan that Moses was still in the running to be the deliverer because I desperately did not want to go to the desert to look for him. Nobody did. The desert was the training ground for hell. There’s no other way to describe it. The worst of our kind inhabited the hot, arid sands of the wasteland. The desert devils weren’t anything like the fat and happy—at least by comparison—demons in Egypt who indulged on the spoils of the land.
    No, not at all. The desert rulers were deprived of any of the booty of the earth. Although they were ravenous to gratify their demonic nature on human flesh, like all the rest of the demons, they were assigned, or sentenced, to an empty place with few humans to hunt. Their prey was limited to unsavory life forms that lived under rocks or deep in the scorching sand. If I was discovered soloing it in their territory, there would be a food fight, and I would be the food they were fighting over. Never mind that I was on a mission from Satan. No one would have bothered to ask why I was in the neighborhood.
    So try to imagine my relief when I flew deep into the wilderness only to find no one at home. The spiritual realm was silent. It wasn’t just a case of no demonic chatter going on; it was deadly silent. It was empty. The territorial rulers were out of town, gone, completely gone. There were no telltale signs of demonic activity or presence. How could I be sure? Sometimes you know what is by what is not .
    What was not was the unmistakable odor that emanates from demons. Most humans still haven’t learned how to interpret smell. When demons are anywhere about, the air smells bad because they smell bad. The worse they are, the worse they smell. One time in Egypt during a demonic orgy, the odor got so bad I almost threw up. When I couldn’t stand it anymore, I took off for one of the gardens by the Nile and plopped myself right down in a patch of pansies. I breathed in the fragrance of flowers until I was tipsy. I didn’t even bother to exhale.
    Unless you have personally wallowed in a flower bed, you might not know that the perfume from flowers is an intoxicant. When the others found me, I was rocking back and forth on my tail with a snootful of pansy petals, reminiscing about the good old days before we were thrown out of heaven. Satan was in a dither because I’d left my post. He had me locked in the dungeon until the effects of the pansies wore off and then assigned me to the morning-after crew for the cleanup of the orgy. I’ll spare you the details.
    The only smell in the desert now was, you might say, the desert—rocks, sand, clean air, nothing else. Where were the demons? They had no place to go. Even if there had been a place to go, they would never have dared leave a whole section of ground unoccupied. There would be no excuses with Satan on that one. He was positively paranoid about unoccupied ground. If the principalities were gone, and they most definitely were, what could have happened to cause them to leave? It could only be one thing: something scarier than them. But what?
    I settled down on the side of a sand dune and tried to figure out what to do next. When I heard the bleating of