The Devil You Know (10 page)

She liked being on top, I learned, and she liked controlling my rhythm. I didn’t mind being her wingman. It was a nice change from the women I’d known in the past, the women who needed everything but a damned manual to follow along. Afterward, she touched me all over and asked me if female daemons were different from human women in some way. I told her I didn’t really know. That led to questions about daemon anatomy, which led to questions about my parentage. I’d planned to put off telling her about my mom and dad until I knew she wanted a relationship with me, but she was curious, as any person might be. And I felt I owed her that, at least.

“My mom was born right here in Blackwater,” I told her, holding her against me. “Her name was Mina Wodehouse.”

Vivian knew the Wodehouse name. They had been living here in Blackwater as long as the Kings and Rinkleys—a point of contention with those families, I knew. I told her the Wodehouses were one of the founding families who came over on the Mayflower, and that my mother’s family had always had a weird history. Both the Wodehouses and Bergers had been regarded as witches and conjurers and were barely tolerated by the Plymouth colony. That had encouraged them to migrate further west and settle here while witches, and normal women, were being hanged en masse in Salem. It had probably saved my bloodline from extinction.

“And your father?” she asked. She lay clasping me, one hand brushing over the blond hairs of my chest.

I hesitated then. There was no easy way to explain this, so I just told her. I told her everything I knew about
him
. Then I waited. I could hear the blood washing in my ears. I could feel my heartbeat and hers. I wondered if she would run screaming into the night as any sensible human being would do. But she surprised me.

“Have you . . . met your father?” She said it softly, as if afraid she might conjure something malevolent out of the dark if she spoke too loudly.

“He’s visited me a few times. But we don’t get along.”

“Your mother . . . did she know?”

“No. He seduced her young and married her. He used the name Englebrecht. I suppose it was a joke to him. Englebrecht means ‘angel-breaker’ in German.” Vivian waited, so I forced myself on. “He stayed with her until she was impregnated with me, then he disappeared. The pregnancy was so unusual that my mother began to research it, and him. She sought mediums and psychics, and there were a good many witches in her own family, as you can imagine. When she finally learned who—and what—he was, she put all kinds of wards around the house to keep him out. She was so afraid my father would return to take me away from her.”

She looked uncomfortable. “Did he?”

“He returned several times, but I don’t recall those times clearly. My mother later told me she would look out a window and see him playing with me in the backyard, pushing me on the swings, that type of thing. After a while, she was so afraid she took us to New York, to stay with her sister there. My mother hoped that the anonymity of the city would help hide us. But he found us. I supposed you can’t hide from the Devil.” I thought about that day, the day my life changed, though so much of it was a blur to my child’s mind. “I was four years old when he came calling. He was livid that we had tried to run away from him. He broke all the charms. That was the day he took my mother away. I never saw her again.” I paused. “You see, it was she he wanted all along, not me.”

Vivian watched me carefully. “Is your mother dead?”

“I don’t know. I don’t think so. I think he just took her, to keep her with him.”

“But not you.”

“No,” I answered, perhaps bitterly. “Not me.”

I was a selfish person, I knew. I hated my father, not because he was the Father of All Evil, but because of what he had done to my family. “He let me grow up alone. My aunt tried to raise me, she did the best she could, but she had a weak heart and she died very young. After that, I sort of drifted through foster homes until I was eighteen. By then, I’d been in trouble with the law so many times you could have wrapped your next birthday gift in my rap sheet. I knew all the cops who worked the precinct by name.”

She smiled then, but only a little.

“One of the cops suggested I join the force. He said that way I could spend the same amount of time downtown and be paid for it. So I joined the Police Academy.”

She rested her head on my shoulder. She ran her fingertips lightly over my chest. “Why didn’t you stay in New York? Why come back here?”

I thought about telling her the rest, but I wasn’t ready to talk about Peter. Not yet. I wasn’t ready to talk about that night, though I remembered it vividly. I never had such a strong memory before, or since. The leering way the shadows looked, the sour smell of the place where Peter had died.

Peter and I had been doing a routine search for possession in a project in downtown Brooklyn. He went downstairs and I went up. It was our usual pattern. But then something happened. Peter didn’t respond to his radio. I knew something was wrong long before I sensed any danger. I knew Peter had been overcome. I just didn’t understand why I hadn’t heard any struggles or gunshots, the usual indicators.

I rushed to the basement. And that was when I found them, the group of occultists. They were holding some kind of ceremony and Peter had either interrupted it or they had been waiting for him. I never really learned the truth. They had bound and gagged Peter. Their butchery had been fast and efficient, almost surgical, maybe even painless. I don’t know. I don’t want to know. In the short ten minutes we’d been separated, the occultists had removed all of Peter’s reproductive organs, his liver, and his kidneys. They had divided those organs into pieces for their ceremony and had begun ritually consuming them. They were working on his stomach and intestines, working their way up his body, when I found them.

They immediately scattered but I chose not to pursue them. I stayed with Peter instead and called the paramedics. He was still alive when they arrived, though he died en route to the hospital of his wounds. I never learned the truth of why it had happened, or what the people in the basement were trying to do, though I knew my father was behind it somehow. He had to be. Maybe it was a test and I had failed. Maybe it was just plain malice. I just don’t know.

“I just wanted to return home, I guess,” I told Vivian. That sounded sensible and normal. “And by then, I was very good friends with Morgana. We’d talked about opening an occult shop together.”

Naturally, Vivian wanted to know who Morgana was. Or rather, who she was to me.

I told her. “My spiritual adviser. My friend. And a damned good witch. Though we met by accident. I busted her for possession down in New York. Morgana is a very good herbalist, though she sometimes requires a little something . . . illegal.” I showed her the case of opium cigarettes I keep in my tableside drawer. “Morgana makes them. They’re excellent for visions.”

“You are very bad,” she said with a smile. She wanted to try one, so I lit it for her. She leaned against me and closed her eyes as she chased the dragon, and I learned that Vivian was a very frustrated ex-smoker.

“Don’t bother torturing yourself,” I told her. “The cigarettes won’t kill you, believe me. I’ve been chain-smoking since I was nine years old and there’s absolutely nothing wrong with my physiology. I stopped going for checkups in my mid-thirties. The doctors were starting to get suspicious. They were afraid I might be an alien or something. I couldn’t bring myself to explain to them that I was a Lucifer.” I took the smoke from her, sucked in the soothing cold smoke, and blew it out my nose. Then I gave it back to her.

“I don’t understand,” she said.

“My father told me, not very long ago, that there is not one Lucifer, but several. Like a royal bloodline. The original was my grandfather. My father inherited the position from him in the Twelfth Century and has held the position for about eight hundred years now. Each of the Lucifers is a Man of Sin, but each has a sin that is unique to him, a signature sin, so to speak. My grandfather’s sin was vanity and pride, and because of it there has been enormous dissidence and disobedience to God on earth. My father’s sin is war. He has generated slaughter and pestilence for nearly a thousand years.”

She looked at me seriously, her eyes wide. “What’s your sin?”

“I don’t know. That’s for me to discover. Cigarettes, maybe.”

She didn’t laugh. She wriggled around a little before settling against me, her head on my shoulder. I could tell that she trusted me, despite all the crazy shit I was heaping upon her. “What happens when you discover your sin, Nick?”

It took me a moment to answer. “I . . . Ascend. Or Descend, depending on how you look at things. It means I get an all-expense paid trip to hell.”

She turned and leaned over me, placing her hands on my chest. “You become the Devil.”

I watched her carefully. She believed me. I realized that. I also realized she was probably scared out of her mind. “Do you want to leave now?” I asked. “I’ll drive you home, if you want. I know none of this is normal . . . ” I reached up and gathered her hair in my hand. It was soft and almost fey. She was such a pretty girl. Perhaps I had revealed too much. She couldn’t want to stay with me. It wasn’t normal. But if she left, I felt like I would die inside. Ridiculous, but true.

Slowly she shook her head. “I’m not afraid of you, Nick.” She leaned down and kissed me. It was a gentle kiss compared to the violence we had shared earlier. “I’m not normal either,” she said as she climbed on top of me. She leaned down, her long red hair tenting us in together, and kissed my mouth and chin and throat. Her piercings rubbed deliciously against my chest. It made me groan. I slid my hands around her ribs and jerked her against me.

Of course I was hard again. It goes without saying. I had this magnificently beautiful and perverted redhead sitting on me. It was impossible not to be. She found me and stroked me. I tried to draw her down upon my erection but she held herself apart.

“Could I be a witch?” she asked, her eyes glimmering. “Could I be strong like you?”

I smiled at that. I wasn’t feeling very strong at the moment. Quite the opposite.

“Could you teach me, Nick?”

“What do you want to learn?”

She thought about that as she stroked me softly. She could be incredibly tender when she wanted to be. “What kind of things do you think I’d be good at?”

I said it before I even thought about it. “Sex magic.”

“Could you teach me sex magic?”

I rolled her over and pinned her to the mattress. I buried my face in her hair. I told her to lie still and to think only of me. She said that would be no problem at all. She clutched my shoulders with her blood red nails as I took her, slowly at first, then thrusting deep inside her wetness, deeper than anyone had ever gone before. I thrust until she groaned and wrapped her legs around my waist. I imagined our flesh as shining white liquid merging together into one body, into one flesh. I sought that power within myself, that power that was my father and my mother combined—my father the demon, my mother the witch. I imagined it all shining, burning white light, as hot and holy as flames. I opened myself up to it and let Vivian see what a daemon’s power looked like. Vivian groaned, and her head fell back on the pillow. Her eyes widened at the realization that I could share such raw power with her—that I was willing to. Her nails pierced my back. And like the natural witch and daemon she was, she began to feed on that power.

Waking alone the following morning, I immediately discovered two things. 1. My pack of Camels was missing and 2. There was someone rattling around my kitchen. I climbed naked out of bed, took the Tanaka from the second drawer of my bedside table, checked the munitions, and stepped into the kitchen, ready to take a bead on someone if necessary.

I had charms and wards secreted away in various places around the Loft to prevent invasion by other-creatures. But charms don’t keep out human beings. Hey, I might be a witch, but I’m no hippie navel-gazer. And Blackwater might not be New York City, but it wasn’t the Garden of Eden, either. If someone gave me due cause, I’d blow their brains out the back of their head. I needed to repaint this place anyway.

I let out my breath when I saw it was Vivian. She was naked and dressed only in a white chef’s apron, the one from the kitchen drawer at the bottom that I never use because I can’t cook for shit. She was standing at the counter where we’d made love last night—or rather, fucked each other’s brains out. She was mixing together some witchy concoction of eggs and milk with a whisk, the back of the open apron framing her absolutely devastating, heart-shaped ass. It was the kind of ass women envy and men dream about. Constantly.

I leaned in the open doorway and used the muzzle of the Tanaka to rub at my beard as I admired the view. She turned and stared at me. She looked me up and down. Then she arched an eyebrow. “Nice gun.”

“Thanks.” I smiled.

“You’re such a cliché, Nick. Do you want some breakfast?”

“Food in the morning is gross. Where’re my cigarettes?” I said in my best early-morning bear voice.