The door didn't swing. It never did. Lucifer had fixed that hinge himself on the second day, not because it was broken but because he liked the way a door that didn't swing made people hesitate. They pushed. It gave. No drama.
This one pushed. It gave. And the man who walked through brought the smell of old catacombs and older pride.
He was tall in the way vampires sometimes chose to be tall, as if height reminded everyone else of their place beneath him. His hair was dark and slicked back. His suit was black and fit him like it had been sewn onto his body while he stood perfectly still. His eyes moved across the room once, twice, cataloguing. Then they stopped on Lucifer.
The smile came slow. The kind of smile that said I know something you don't. Except he didn't. That was the thing about smiles like that. Most of the time, the person wearing them was wrong.
Lucifer kept drying the glass.
