Mike Carey - The Devil You Know

Gabe had switched to the thinner of the brushes and was painstakingly dabbing at my midriff. An unpleasant tingle was building in my stomach. The two men on either side of me were holding my arms so tightly that they were in danger of cutting off the circulation. Even if I wasn’t still weak and sick from the skull massage I’d got earlier, I could never have fought my way free.

“This is a pretty roundabout way of killing me,” I observed.

“But it has the right look to it,” Damjohn countered. “You’re an exorcist. You bit off a little more than you could comfortably chew. That must happen all the time.”

I wondered briefly about what had happened to my flute. Then I saw it on the floor at Damjohn’s feet, incredibly still intact. He followed my gaze and saw it, too. He snapped his fingers and pointed, and Weasel-Face played fetch.

“This isn’t what you used at the club,” Damjohn mused, turning the instrument over in his hands. “What is it? It’s not a flute.”

“It’s a cone-bore flute,” I said. “Earlier version of the same instrument. When Boehm invented the modern valve system, this went in the dustbin.”

Damjohn looked at me and nodded. “Which is where you’re going,” he acknowledged. “Arnold, I’ll need those bolt cutters, too.”

He pointed to the cutters, which had fallen half under the farther couch. Arnold harkened to his master’s voice again, picked them up, and handed them over. Very deliberately, Damjohn got to his feet and crossed over to me. In the narrow cabin, it only took him three steps. He held the flute up in front of my face, put the blades of the cutters around its midpoint, and squeezed. The wood of the flute splintered and then gave, shattering into fragments, enamel flaking off like red-brown dandruff. Damjohn wiped the flakes off on his sleeve and let both the bolt cutters and the remains of the flute fall to the floor again with a heavy clatter.

“In case you were hoping to pull off a last-minute miracle,” he said.

“Actually, I had it in mind to” I began, but I wasn’t destined to finish that sentence, and I can’t even remember what merry quip was on my lips. Pain flowered in my throat, cut off my breath, left me gasping soundlessly as my knees once again buckled under me.

Gabe backed away from me, rubbing his henna-covered fingertips together.

“Your trouble is that you talk too much, Castor,” he said with a nasty grin. “Or at least you did. But I just took care of that.”

It took a few seconds for the agony to subside. When it had, I spat out a few choice swear words at him, but my jaws were working in stealth mode; not the slightest sound came out of my mouth. I knew then, as I guess I’d known all along, what sigil Gabe had painted on my chest. SILENCE. He’d taken my voice again.

“Now take care of the rest of it,” Damjohn said, standing up. “I have other places to be.”

Gabe pulled himself up to his full height and became almost comically solemn. He began to declaim in barnstorming style—Latin, of course, but the medieval stuff where the word order is all to fuck and you can’t follow a damn word of it. Trying to pick sounds out of the flow, I caught the word pretium , which means “price;” imploramus , which means “buddy, can you spare me a dime;” and damnatio , which is self-explanatory.

It was a summoning, the first I’d ever seen, because I tend to steer clear of black magic on the perfectly reasonable grounds that it’s a pile of arse. Well, 99 percent of it is. Unfortunately, it looked as though Gabe had latched onto at least one spell that did what it said on the box.

His words rolled around the small cabin, raising an echo that seemed somehow displaced, as if it belonged to a vast, cavernous space a long way from chic and cheerful Chelsea. Gabe was looking strained and uncomfortable, sweat running down his pale face as he forced the words out like some kind of human die-stamp machine punching measured indentations into the air we breathed. Looking at the twinges of pain crossing his face, I realized why he’d looked so wrecked when I called on him in his office—and why he’d swallowed those black bombers like they were Smarties. That was a few scant hours after my first close encounter with the demon. He must still have been in the deep pits of a psychic hangover.

Arnold and the two other heavies took the whole procedure in their stride at first, staring at Gabe with a kind of amused contempt. But they got very tense as the temperature climbed a few perceptible degrees. Then, when the pungent smell hit them, they started to sweat. I’d been there, too, and I knew it had sod all to do with the heat. Rosa moaned around her gag, her one visible eye rolling in her head, and even Damjohn lost something of his sangfroid.

I missed Ajulutsikael’s entrance. Demons are like that; you think they’re all about big, showstopping numbers, but they come up on you as softly as the dawn. Maybe the darkness behind Damjohn deepened for a moment, and then again maybe it didn’t. My gaze passed over the place, jerked back, and she was there.

Damjohn moved hastily aside as she stepped forward, and every man in the room drew in his breath with an audible, almost painful catch. Every man except me, that is. I couldn’t make a sound if my life depended on it. Sorry, that should have read “even though.”

What caused that communal swallowing of tonsils was the fact that Juliet was naked—and if that conjures up an image in your mind, forget it. She wasn’t naked like that. Oh, I suppose it was no more sensational a body than Helen of Troy’s, say. On a ship-launching scale, maybe a straight thousand, give or take. But with the raw stench of her pheromones supersaturating the air, she looked like every woman you ever loved or dreamed about loving, miraculously combined, miraculously open and willing, like a solid sign of God’s mercy.

Damjohn’s muscle boys were staring at her slack-jawed. Weasel-Face had a spreading puddle on the floor at his feet. The man to the left of me groaned in despair or spontaneous orgasm, and Rosa made a muffled, balking sound. But they had one advantage over me—Juliet wasn’t looking at them.

Her stare held me like a vice—the kind of vice you give way to in the dark behind a locked door, your hot blood ashamed and quickening. She advanced on me with the unhurried grace of a panther. Just for a minute, that predator’s stalk let me see through the veil of her scent and recognize her for what she was—the top carnivore in an ecosystem that offered no challenge to her, her long legs shaped for the chase, her exquisite curves only adaptive camouflage. There was a very faint music that I’d heard before, like wind chimes.

“Do him slowly,” said McClennan’s voice, strained but clear. “He’s fucking earned it.”

The men on either side of me stepped back in a hurry, and without their support, I crashed down instantly, agonizingly, to my knees. My head swiveled as I fell to keep my eyes locked on hers. I couldn’t look away. I couldn’t even blink. Her terrible perfection flooded my mind, shattered any thoughts except fear and desire into random shards.

“Mortal man,” she growled deep in her throat. “You made me run. Made me bleed. I’ll make this good for you—make you so happy in your agony that your soul will never be free of me.”

Not like wind chimes. Like church bells, incongruously and ridiculously, like church bells ringing at the limit of hearing in an octave so high they must be rimed with permafrost. And now I thought I recognized it.

I closed my eyes. Both of them. It was the hardest thing I’d ever done, like shoving two trucks backward up a ramp. My mind screamed in protest, the animal hindbrain wanting only to feast on the sight of Juliet until she’d done sucking out my marrow. With my eyes closed, a fraction of that mesmeric power was shut off. I listened to the sound, and I turned my head fractionally downward, toward it.