Derek Bellman was a sports star with the kind of looks that grace Calvin Klein ads, and a temperamental personality. But it was just as much his pop singer girlfriend, Veronica, who kept him in the papers as his behavior on the sports field. She had model looks — dead-eyed and anorexic — and was the darling of the tabloids.

They were staying at the Hilton while they househunted in London's more fashionable areas, according to the gossip columnists.

We checked in, Lucifer and I. As well as being a really decent guy, he had contacts up the wazoo. One phone call, the mention of a date some ten years ago to the concierge (followed up with the phrase "I'm calling it in") and we had the second swankiest room in the joint.

Guess who had the first?

We made short work of the minibar and discussed our next move. The floor was littered with papers, journals, fanzines and — have mercy on us! — Veronica's debut album. We also had camera, camcorder and binoculars. Surveillance, you dig.
As far as bugging equipment was concerned, it was strictly drinking glass against the wall.

"This" — I jabbed my finger at her picture — "is Lilith?" I was still having trouble with it. She didn't look like the kind of girl a guy like Lucifer would end up getting kicked out of Heaven over.

"Sort of. She was born Veronica Mary Phillips and — in her mortal form — she's twenty-three. Since she rose to fame, she's been a vessel for Lilith."

"So what does Lilith actually look like?"

"She's different for every man. Who's your ideal?"

I named an actress who'd been popular a few decades ago.

"Then that's who she'd look like to you. To me .... " He shrugged and his eyes moistened. "She was everything I'd always wanted. She changes through the years according to fashion and vanity and the politics of sexuality."

This was getting academic, and I'd had enough of that kind of thing with the Prof. I butted in with the one question that struck me as pertinent. "Why take over this Veronica girl, then? Why not let herself be whatever anyone wants?"

"The risk of anachronism. Your heartthrob's in her fifties now, but you'd still see her as she was in her heyday, dolled up in the style and fashion of the time. Once you got over your schoolboy crush, you'd become suspicious."

"So how do we prove the truth?"

Lucifer held an empty miniature of Talisker to the light, pondered its emptiness for a while, then said, "I was going to ask you that."

We tailed Derek and Veronica for three days. We had no plan of campaign. Lucifer asked a favor of someone at a Jaguar dealership whose daughter he'd inveigled onto the books of a tiptop literary agent (I'd tried one of her novels once, but there were no shoot-outs or car chases), so we at least drove around in style.

There was no evidence of otherworldly activity, just the fickle pretensions of a couple of rich young things with too much time on their hands.

Until, that is, they went to look at the Thameside penthouse.

Erected in the mid-Eighties as part of the ill-fated Docklands development, and originally intended as office space, it had been redeveloped into apartments. Luxury rabbit hutches with balconies measured in square millimeters, overlooking the gray, unglamorous expanse of the Thames — the kind of pads that get bought as status symbols and are lived in maybe a month out of each year, max.

It was a rainy afternoon, Saint-Saens' Danse Macabre on Radio 3 as we pulled up in the small but oh-so-exclusive car park out back of the apartments. We were decked out in suits (let out to incorporate our wings, courtesy of a Saville Row dude who was like that with ol' Luce) and driving a top of the range marque, so the security man (his little suit and hat had "I couldn't hack it as a cop" written all over them) didn't hassle us.

We gave it five minutes, then followed them inside.

The estate agent, an oily slimeball for whom the Eighties had never ended, started to protest as we walked into the penthouse. I flexed my fingers, made a fist and drew back.

"Please don't," he wheedled.

I grinned and did.

Derek Bellman, all designer jeans and logo'd tee-shirt that made him look like a Big Issue seller with a Gold Card, took a swing. Lucifer blocked it and jabbed. Bellman windmilled backwards, fell over and sat on the floor clutching his nose, blood trickling between his fingers.

"He's normal," Lucifer said.

"That's a relative concept."

"I mean he's mortal. If he'd been possessed, he'd have reacted."

"Like that, you mean?" I asked, pointing to Veronica.

Or, as she was now, Lilith.

Gone the skinny girl who warbled sentimental ballads and pouted on talk shows. In her place, something that was all woman and dangerous with it.

Lilith was everything I'd ever fantasized about and it would have been easy to lose all sense of perspective and be overcome. Be sucked into her. She radiated a soft haze of ever-changing colors, a mesmeric pattern that lulled the mind.

"Oh shit," I heard Lucifer mutter, "I'm getting a woody."

"I don't think I can move," I said.

"You will soon. Straight to her."