Mike Carey - The Devil You Know

“I think he’s dead.”

“Don’t be stupid, Jon. He just fainted.”

“Yeah, but did you hear that crack when his head hit the ground?”

“That wasn’t his head. It was a metallic sound. It was something in his pocket.”

“Tin whistle. Look. It’s bent into an L shape.”

Oh no. No fucking way. A cold gust of sorrow and remorse brought me the rest of the way up into full consciousness. My whistle. My sword and my shield through all the half-arsed vicissitudes of life. It was the same as a million others, and it was absolutely unique. And all that was left of it now was the jagged pain in my side where the broken end of it was digging into my third rib.

I opened my eyes halfway and found myself staring up into a wide range of startled, suspicious, and resentful faces. Cheryl’s was right in the middle of them, and although she looked relieved to see me conscious again, I could tell from the hard set of her mouth that her membership in the Felix Castor fan club had lapsed forever. That was two body blows inside of twenty seconds.

A silver hip flask was pressed into my hand. Feeling numb and cold and strangely removed from myself, I took a swig without checking what it was and found myself coughing noisily on some raw but excellent bourbon. A lot of it went down the front of my coat, but the rest of it did the trick. I turned to see who it was I had to thank; Rich Clitheroe was looking down at me with a surreptitious eyebrow flash of sympathy and solidarity. I handed the flask back to him with a nod, flashing back to his secret stash of Lucozade in the traveling fridge down in the strong room. Well, “Be Prepared” is the Boy Scouts’ marching song, and some things just stay with you. But that wasn’t the phrase he’d used in any case; it was something like that, only different.

In case of emergency . . .

Domino nudged domino nudged domino, and everything fell into a pattern that had been there all along, unseen. I sat up, feeling an odd sense of weightlessness. I was like a thrown ball at the top of its arc, when it’s stopped rising but hasn’t begun to fall—freed from gravity, freed from the necessity of choice. Cheryl helped me to my feet, and our gazes met, furiously accusing on her side, God only knew what on mine. There was no sign of the ghost now. The summons I’d sent out to her would have broken when I lost consciousness, and there was nothing to keep her in this confusing, exposed, overbright space.

“I’m sorry,” I told Cheryl, leaning in close so that nobody else could hear.

She didn’t bend. “I bet you always are, afterward. I bet it even works sometimes.”

“I hope it will work with Sylvie,” I murmured. “I owe her the biggest apology of all.”

Other voices were breaking in now, and other hands were taking hold of me. Jeffrey Peele was saying, “I can’t, I can’t, I can’t,” and Alice was interjecting comments like “It’s all right” and “You’re fine now” without any noticeable effect. Someone else—a woman—was asking whether she should call the police, and one of the ushers—the barge pole this time—muscled in between me and Cheryl to suggest that I might want to go out into the street and get some fresh air. His nose wrinkled, no doubt smelling the booze.

I let myself be shepherded away toward the door with his hand gripping my collar, but then I stopped again before he could get any real momentum going. I turned back, found Rich in the crowd. He stared at me, a little startled, as I made the universally recognizable gesture that meant he should phone me. I pointed to Jeffrey, meaning that Jeffrey had my phone number.

Rich hesitated for a moment—probably trying to work out what the hell I was trying to say—then nodded. The thickset usher loomed up on my other side, hooked one hand under my arm, and I was off, my feet barely touching the floor as I went.

It was probably just as well. I get all emotional at weddings.

YOU’RE LOADING UP YOUR SIX-GUNS, AREN’T YOU?” Pen said, standing in the doorway of my room. A chill wind was blowing around the plastic sheeting she’d nailed across the splintered, gap-toothed window frame, like a reminder that winter was on its way. I didn’t need reminding, and I didn’t appreciate it much.

“Yeah,” I said tersely. “I think it’s going to be a bad one.”

I was rummaging through the top shelf in my wardrobe, looking for a spare whistle. There should have been at least one there—older than the little beauty I’d just destroyed, and brassy rather than black in color, but in the same key and with something of the same feel to hand and mouth. I was damned if I could see it, though. The best I could come up with was a cone-bore flute. I’d almost forgotten my brief flirtation with that well-mannered instrument. It hadn’t done the job for me at all—something about the tone, maybe, or the tapering body. It shouldn’t have made that big a difference, because tin whistles have a conical bore, too, but every pattern I tried to weave on it got screwed up and thrown out somewhere along the line. Still, it was better than nothing by some small but measurable margin.

“Maybe you should get some help, then,” Pen suggested. “John Gittings?”

“Never again.”

“Pac-Man?”

“Still in jail. He doesn’t get out until next October.”

“Me?”

I turned to stare at her. “Usual strictures apply,” I said, sounding colder than I meant to; and then, more gently, “I don’t have any idea how this is going to come out, Pen. But I do know it will leave you with dirty hands—by your definition and probably even by mine.”

Pen looked very unhappy, but she didn’t try to argue anymore. I slipped a couple of new batteries into the Walkman, wrapped the flex around the two tiny speakers, and stuffed the whole bundle into my pocket. Then I reached into the back of the wardrobe and took down a single silver handcuff that was hanging on a hook there. Pen blanched when she saw it.

“You weren’t kidding, were you?” she asked bleakly.

“It’ll probably be fine,” I lied. “When you take out car insurance, it doesn’t mean you’re planning to drive off a cliff.”

“Are you?”

“Am I what?”

“Planning to drive off a cliff.”

“No. I’m looking to push someone else off. The insurance is in case he keeps hold of me on the way down.”

I headed for the door, which she was still blocking. She hugged me briefly but fiercely. “Rafi had another message for you,” she muttered, her voice not quite level.

“Rafi?”

“All right. Asmodeus, then.”

“Go on.”

“Ajulutsikael. He said it’s not personal with her—it’s the very opposite of personal. But it’s not just because they’re making her do it, either. What was it he said?” Pen frowned, delving into her memory. “‘She hates a proud man more than a humble one. A strong man more than a weak one. A master more than a slave.’”

“He should write fortune cookies,” I said and kissed her on the cheek. “He’s about as much fucking use.”

She stood aside and let me pass.

This was going to be complicated. There were so many things that had to fall right, and the first one might not fall at all. In which case all my preparations were going to be unnecessary, the ghost’s unfinished business was going to stay unfinished, and I was probably going to be dead in short order—either succubus fodder or just organic landfill.

But I preferred to look on the bright side. I was going to make a hell of a noise on the way down.

Rich had called at nine, having come home from the reception, taken a shower, and thought long and hard about whether he was going to call me at all.