In which we learn why Francis does not like cake.
Don't get Francis wrong; he liked cake. He tended to eat a pretty high carb diet-tons of pasta, bread, potatoes, and bring on the sweets. The archangel metabolism just came standard with the Barnam package. But like all things that are good and holy (genocide, family values, and guns, just to name a few), even cake can be sullied so horribly that it loses all merit and becomes a shadow of the pastry it once was.
The 1960s were the worst decade in American history according to Francis, and he'll tell you he knows; he was there for all of them. Drugs, besides alcohol, never held any appeal for him, making him feel like he was losing control. And then there was that whole anti-war movement. Don't even get him started on the peace and love politics of the 60s. It was a horrible time to be a Barnam, and the only thing Francis hated more than a demon was a hippie. Hell, he didn't even like the music.
But really, all of those things aside, it was 1966 that ruined the decade for him. Francis had been chasing a mark all the way across the country, and he was going to be damned if he didn't stick a knife in that teme's heart.
Now that teme? She wasn't the worst person in the world. Yeah, she had scared a few people shitless in her time, but really, fear wasn't her cup of tea. Lucille's true love was baking, and god, this woman made cakes like you couldn't even dream of-fluffy and light or deep and chocolaty. It was kind of hard though, to bake when she had a Barnam half-way up her ass, so by the time she got to San Francisco, she was in severe cake-withdrawal.
Francis didn't particularly want to go to San Francisco. If you took all of the cities in the world and ranked them by how much Francis hated them, San Francisco would consistently make the top ten, and in the 60s, even more so. But there was no way he was going to let some flower-toting, gun-hating, war-protesting hippies keep him from violently dismembering a sweet, cake-loving young woman. So Francis chased Lucille all the way to San Francisco, and while the smell of patchouli threw him off for a bit, it didn't take him too long to track her down.
What Francis didn't know was that Lucille, in her time in San Francisco, had found herself a boy-thing. They weren't really dating, but they were living together and having quite a bit of sex. Now, Lucille's boy0thing didn't take too kindly to Francis breaking down the door on their apartment and promptly hit him over the head with a lamp.
When he woke, he could smell chocolate cake, and he felt groggy. Now, the boy-thing wasn't the only thing Francis didn't know about. The other thing was that that was not actually cake he smelled; it was the smell of brownies. Special brownies. Lucille's boy-thing had hog-tied Francis with some skill, and his thrashing around in the living room was enough noise that Lucille had to come in and check on him. She was holding the pan of brownies, just wearing a pink apron and a matching pair of pink oven mitts, her long black hair falling in her face.
Now, like I said before, Lucille really was a sweet little teme; one might even have called her naïve. But she thought that these brownies would be the perfect thing to get Francis out of her hair (and like many hippies, she had a lot of hair). She had to shove the brownie down his throat, and while this put in her in danger of losing a finger, in her mind, if it could help a Barnam understand peace and love, it would be worth it.
This moment epitomized why Francis hated drugs. To this day, he will not admit that he spent a good six hours, stuffing his face with cake in a demon's kitchen. It was very good cake. However, while Lucille felt that cake and some weed might have been enough to fix racial tensions, this was not that case.
As soon as Francis started coming down from his high and started feeling more like himself, he wasted no time at all sticking a knife in her gut. He finished his cake as she lay on the ground, writhing in terrible pain, her stomach acid eating away at her internal organs. That was the last piece of cake he ever ate.
It tends to leave a bad taste in his mouth now.