The Devil You Know

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.

I sat up slowly, taking care not to put too much strain on muscles that were already trembling and waving little flags of surrender.

“Good to have you back, Felix,” said a voice from very close by, on my right-hand side. “I hope you feel as bad as you look.”

With a sinking heart, I turned my head. The man sitting at the edge of the bed closed the book he was reading—a Bible, of course; I didn’t need to check the spine—and gave me a watery smile. He was wearing his professional blacks, but he was the sort of man who would have looked better in a suit of armor: like, for argument’s sake, Joan of Arc’s. Maybe that was because his midbrown hair had copper blond highlights in it, and his blue eyes flecks of paler, colder silver. Or maybe it was just the hard, combative set of his broad shoulders, which neatly gave the lie to the half smile on his handsome face. Suffer the little children to come unto me: the rest of you bastards I’ll get to later. He was five years older than me—five years and three months, to be more exact—and he never ever let me forget it. That was the root of his claim to know better than me where my life should be going, and the moral high ground was always his preferred battlefield.

“Hello, Matty,” I said, my voice coming out as an emasculated croak. “How’s the God business?”

“Better than the devil business, apparently,” my brother answered dryly. “Do you know what day it is?”

“What day it—”

“The day of the week, Felix. Where are we in the week?”

“Oh for Christ’s sake!” I protested weakly, but Matt was implacable. “It’s Wednesday night,” I said at last, giving up because my head was hurting and because giving up was easier than arguing about it. “Unbelievably, and appallingly, it is still Wednesday fucking night. I mean, unless I was out for twenty-four hours. Queen Elizabeth is on the throne, Posh and Becks are on the skids, and it’s a rollover week in the National Lottery. Succubi go for the balls, not the brains.”

Matt nodded. “In your case, though,” he said austerely, “it would be easy to aim for the one and hit the other.”

I opened my mouth for an equally smart-arsed rejoinder, but by now, some of the empty windows in my memory were filling up with very unpleasant images. I examined my hands, which were shaking slightly, my forearms, and then (wincing as the movement of my neck made the headache come back full force) my chest. There was no damage that I could see, despite my very vivid memories of being consumed in flames.

“Soul fires,” said Matt. Lucky guess, I told myself, irritated as always by his ability to read my mind. “The succubus’s heat is of the spirit, not the body. You’re bruised all over, there’s a bullet hole in your shoulder, and you’ve got scratches in some very intimate places, but you’re not burned.”

I nodded. It was what the textbooks said, but I’d never met a succubus in the flesh (I remembered Juliet’s flesh with a reminiscent tremor of horror and arousal) or felt that kind of pain before. God knows, it had seemed real enough at the time, like turning on a rotisserie over a barbecue pit while the devil pricked my crisping skin to let out the juices.

The rest of the last twenty-four hours was swimming back into focus now, and none of it looked much better than the fiasco it had ended on. The ghost’s snapshots of life and death and Gabriel McClennan; the intruder at the archive and my forestalled attempt to take a long walk off a short stairwell; a day spent chasing my own tail in various scenic locations in North London; and then an unlikely encounter with a predatory demon who was cruising the lower end of Charing Cross Road looking for a square meal and a bed—not necessarily in that order.

I looked at my watch. Just after three o’clock, which meant I’d been unconscious for more than two hours. I felt a sudden, almost physically painful sense of urgency: a feeling that I had a lot to do, and it was already almost too late to start. In fact, I wasn’t sure if I could even walk, but if you don’t try, you never find out. I threw the covers aside and swung my legs off the bed.

“You’ll need to rest,” Matt said, a slight edge of warning in his voice. “Your system has taken a huge shock. And if you could bring yourself to pray—”

I waved away that suggestion. I was trying to stand, but my body wasn’t cooperating.

“What are you even doing here?” I demanded irritably. “Did the Holy Spirit come and wag its tail at you to tell you there was a soul in danger?”

Matt frowned. “Your landlady called me. When she tried to wake you up and couldn’t get any response, she became afraid. And since she knew that what had fled out of that window was something other than human, she chose to put her faith in an agency that is itself more than human.” I didn’t answer; I was still trying to get my legs under me and my balance straight. I was naked apart from my socks, which somehow is a lot more undignified than being all the way there, and my body was marked all over with shallow cuts that looked as though they could spell out a hidden message in Mandarin Chinese. “You ought to be grateful,” Matt went on. “To her, if not to me. Without the holy water and the blessings I put on you, you’d be sinking into coma by now.”

I gave a humorless laugh, but it was a straw in the wind. Annoyingly, the church’s armory of waters, oils, and sing-alongs did have some efficacy over ghosts and demons—only sometimes, and only if they were wielded with genuine faith, but Matty had that in spades. I couldn’t deny that he’d probably saved me from much worse damage. After Pen had come riding to my rescue like Davy Crockett and . . .

I put a hand to my shoulder. There was a small, raised welt there with a perfectly circular wound in the center of it. The mark left by Pen’s rifle. Except that it wasn’t a rifle at all. It was a kid’s air gun, and I realized abruptly what it was that it had been loaded with—what it was that had made the succubus fuck and run like a traveling salesman in a bad old joke.

“Rosary beads,” I muttered with mixed admiration and disgust. Rosary beads filed down to the size of BB