Mike Carey - The Devil You Know

I thought it was true love. But then the heat grew more intense, went in an instant from blood-warm to blistering, and, opening my eyes, I saw that the two of us were wreathed in red fire that hid the room from my sight.

I WAS IN AGONY. THE TERRIBLE HEAT WAS RUNNING through the rooms of my body like a monster too big to be contained in me, searching for doors and windows by which it could escape, looking to be joined with the greater heat that enveloped me. I tried to pull back from it, but it was as though I was welded into place: crucified on some twisted tree that wound around and around me and held me tight. I couldn’t even scream; my mouth was already open, but something was locked onto it, stifling me so that I couldn’t make a sound as I was devoured.

There are two ways in which pain can take you. Most times, if it’s bad enough, it will just throw your wits out of the window. But if you’re panicking already, then pain can be an anchor to cling to—something you can use to get yourself focused again. That’s how it was with me. The agony of the fire shrilled through me like an alarm bell, waking me out of the trance that the succubus had lulled me into.

That’s what she had to be, of course. Her black-on-black eyes and her natural perfume should have warned me, but I was inside her orbit before I knew what I was dealing with. After that, I was thinking only with my dick and no more capable of rationalizing what was happening to me than I was of dancing the cancan with my legs sewn together.

So I was going to die. And it was going to hurt.

Succubi consume your soul, and they take their time because—well, putting it as delicately as I can, because the orifice that they use for the job doesn’t have any teeth. I could already feel myself weakening, sliding away, and the hell of it was that the feeling was one of febrile, throbbing pleasure. She was killing me, and she was making me enjoy it.

But at least I was thinking again, thinking through the pain and the arousal, like trying to tune into my own voice on a radio through wave after wave of howling static. And because I was thinking, I saw that I had a chance—an outside chance, somewhere between slim and snowball-in-Hell.

My mind was saturated with the succubus’s subliminal scream of love, with the intoxicating, stupefying presence of her, expressed in smell and taste and texture, all urging me onward and inward. That was how she worked.

And as an exorcist, I could use that presence, that vivid, perfect sense of her. That was how I worked.

With my hands free and my whistle to my lips, it would have been easy. Well, it would have been three or four degrees farther away from impossible. With my whistle somewhere on the floor in the shredded remnants of my coat and my mouth locked tight against hers, I had to improvise.

I reached out with my left hand, flailed blindly for a moment, and then found a hard surface: the slatted cover of the rolltop desk. The pain was excruciating, and so was the pleasure, but I did my best to ignore them both. I started to tap out a rhythm.

It wasn’t a full cantrip, but it was the start of one. When I play the pipe, I use pitch and tempo and slur and every damn thing else to turn the endless involutions of what I’m seeing in my mind into something ephemeral floating in the air in front of me. Compared to that, what I was doing now was like trying to make a functioning revolver out of prechewed wood pulp, and then aim and fire it. All I had was the one ingredient to cook with, the one dimension to work in.

It was never going to dispel the succubus, but I was hoping it would throw her a curveball. It did. A tremor went through her as the rhythm built and hit, and then for a moment or two she froze, some of the terrible strength going out of her sinuous limbs. I used those moments to push my head back, against the pressure of her cupped hand, and get my mouth away from hers.

I gulped in a lungful of air. By contrast with the searing heat that raged through me, it felt like swallowing a bucket full of ice splinters. No time to dwell on the agony, no time to go for a second, deeper breath. Instead I started to whistle, in quick but halting counterpoint to the rhythm I was still beating out with my fingers.

The effect on Juliet was spectacular. Her implausibly perfect face convulsed, her features seeming for a blurred instant to melt and run into some other configuration. She screamed in rage, and it was such a terrible sound that I almost lost the tune. Her grip tightened on me, threatening to crush my chest, but only for a moment. The shrill staccato of the cantrip bit into her, and she let me go, staggering back against the wall.

As Juliet went down in a fetal crouch, I crashed to my knees on the floor. The impact jarred me enough to make the breath hiccup out of me, and although it was only for a moment, the succubus drew strength enough from the brief stammer of silence to recover and straighten up again. I caught the tune at the head of the next bar and quickened the rhythm. She froze in place again, glaring down at me.

That was when a metallic glint from under the bed caught my eye. I scrambled down on all fours and came up holding my whistle. Juliet’s eyes widened. Still whistling through my teeth, I set the mouthpiece of the tin whistle to my lips and came up on one knee in a Jon Anderson battle stance.

We were balanced on the cusp of a catastrophe curve. Freed from her suffocating embrace, I was able to get more range and more volume. But I didn’t dare to stop for an in-breath, and in spite of the chains of the exorcism tightening around her, Juliet was still managing to stay both on her feet and on the mortal plane. She was a demon, not a ghost, and as I’d found to my cost with Rafi, it takes more than “Sing Something Simple” to take one of these bastards out.

She took a step toward me—a step, and then another. Her arms were reaching out for me, and fuzzy flowers of darkness were opening behind my eyes. I was going to run out of oxygen, the music would stop, and then that would be that.

Then, in silent-comedy style, the door flew open, and Pen charged in. She was holding a rifle with a five-pointed sheriff’s star on the stock, which had the disastrous effect of making me laugh. I lost what was left of my wind, and the last breathy note of the cantrip dissolved into a whooping hiccup just as Pen aimed and fired.

She was a lousy shot. The first slug hit me in the shoulder, stinging like hell. The second went wide and blew a tiny, perfect hole in the lower left pane of the window. The third, fourth, and fifth hit the succubus in the stomach, chest, and forehead.

Juliet howled—a long, drawn-out bellow of agony and rage. Then she leaped over my head, and I heard the window smash into fragments, showering me with shards of broken glass and slivers of wood.

That was the last thing I remember, unless the quick fade to black counts as a memory in itself.

Drifting in and out of consciousness, I was vaguely aware of a voice intoning solemnly against my ear. Something about sin, something about light, then back to sin again. It made it hard to get any sleep, but then again, so did the tight band of pain across my chest and the ringing bells of agony in my head. I turned onto my other side, stifling a groan, and sank into the dark again.

The next thing I knew, there was a bright light pressing against my eyelids like a hot poultice and a less than gentle breeze on my face. Opening my gummed-shut eyes with a great act of will, I found myself staring straight up into the hundred-watt bulb of the antique Anglepoise next to my bed. I raised one hand—which was surprisingly hard because it seemed to weigh a lot more than usual—and pushed the lamp aside. When the afterimage faded out, I was looking at the gaping hole in the wall where the window had previously been and the moonless darkness beyond. The succubus had torn out the entire frame as she went through it and had even knocked loose a small section of the brickwork. I like rough sex as much as the next man, but Jesus, there has to be a limit.