The Devil You Know

another death-defying leap down onto the wooden walkway below. The crowbar was still in my hand, and as an added bonus, I managed to avoid breaking my leg with it.

Scrub came down the gangway at his leisure. He had me trapped in the little dead-end section aft of the Mercedes, where there was nowhere to go but down.

“You little fucker,” he burred deep in his throat. Ninety seconds gone.

I took a few experimental swipes with the crowbar, making the air whistle in a way that I hoped was intimidating. But Scrub just laughed and started to lumber down the walkway toward me. “I wish you’d stuck with the whistle,” he said, smirking horribly. “I was looking forward to jamming it down your fucking throat.”

I backed away, dipping my free hand into my pocket. “Scrub,” I warned him, “I’ve got a secret weapon. Coincidentally, it’s behind you.”

He ignored that and just kept coming toward me. I was hoping that the crowbar might give him a moment’s pause, but he must have been threatened by bigger men than me and had probably eaten them for breakfast. (I really wish some other metaphor had occurred to me.) I brought my hand out of my pocket; the metal arc across my knuckles flashed bright in the light of the streetlamp. Scrub’s eyes went to it—not scared or even wary, but mildly curious.

“It’s silver,” I said. “You know what silver does to your kind. Keep your distance.”

Scrub shrugged massively. One of his huge hands reached out toward me, fingers spread wide. Out of options, I blocked and jabbed at him with the cuff. The metal grazed the skin of his wrist, and he flinched, feeling the pain. He hesitated, then took a step back. I did, too, taking advantage of that moment’s respite to shift my balance. That was when he charged me.

It was like a bull’s charge—no finesse, but lots and lots of momentum. His forearm hit me first, and it was rising, with all his weight behind it. That offhand, almost negligent swipe lifted me off the walkway and threw me ten feet through the air. I came down on my back at the very end of the planking, my head over the water and all the breath slammed out of me in one jarring gasp.

I tensed myself to roll aside, but Scrub was on me before I could move. His foot came down on my chest, pinning me to the ground and sending a jolt of electric pain through my stressed ribs. He glared down at me; one hand fumbled in his jacket pocket and came out with a knife. It would almost have counted as a sword in anybody else’s hands: a thick-bladed dirk with a recurved tip. He bent from the waist, caught a handful of my lapels in his other hand, and hauled me half upright. The edge of the blade touched my cheek.

“I am fucking gonna love this,” Scrub rasped.

One hundred and twenty.

The first blast of music split the night. Actually, “music” is far too generous a word for it; it was a mauling shriek like the sound a dying cat might make. It was a whistle playing three octaves above middle C. Scrub stiffened, a look of wonder and dismay crossing his face. Still with his foot planted on me, he swiveled to look for the source of the sound. But we were alone on the walkway; no piper, pied or otherwise, hove into sight.

The whistle modulated through three slurred discords, dropping from screeching treble to skirling bass. There was no tune, just burst after burst of raw noise hacked into a barely perceptible pattern. It made strange shifts from major to minor, from key to ham-fisted key. It polluted the night with its imperfection.

And it made Scrub let out a startled grunt of protest, like a stuck pig. He cast his head about, triangulating on the sound. Obviously it was coming from behind us—from the empty planking thirty feet or so away, back in the shadows between the Mercedes and her nearest neighbor.

The sound rose in pitch again, and Scrub screamed in pain and rage. He took his foot off my chest, probably just in time to stop my whole rib cage from caving in, and ran back toward the harbor entrance. That meant he was running toward the weird music, which seemed to be as hard for him to do as swimming against a riptide. His headlong pace slowed; he staggered and seemed for a second to be about to fall sideways into the water. Then he saw something on the ground ahead of him and forced himself to take a few steps more, toward it.

I sat up, sucking in an agonizing breath around ribs that seemed to have been reduced to needle-sharp splinters. I watched Scrub try to bend and pick up the thing he’d seen on the floor and fall down instead. I saw him scrabble at the boards and come up holding the Walkman in his huge hand. He stared at it as if he was having trouble making his eyes focus. Then he bellowed like an ox and threw the thing from him. It shattered against the side of the Baroness Thatcher before falling into the waters of the marina, its harsh voice silenced midnote.

Loup-garous are different from regular ghosts—harder or easier, depending on what it is you’re trying to do. On the one hand, the invading spirit has burrowed its way deep into flesh and then resculpted the flesh around itself like a cocoon; so doing a full exorcism can be a bastard. But (and it’s a big but) the flip side of that is that the flesh remembers its original shape. The line of least resistance is to make host and parasite fall out with one another—to set up an interference, so that the borrowed flesh reverts to what it was before the ghost came in and redecorated.

I’d been half convinced that the afternoon I’d spent in Pen’s kitchen, teasing out that tune and getting it down on the Walkman, would be so much wasted time. But I knew I could never take Scrub one-on-one, no matter how many low blows I threw. So if I ever did come up against him, I’d need to have an even more unfair advantage.

The big man lurched to his feet again, but it took him a Herculean effort. His head snapped around, and he looked at me across ten meters of planking with a glare of insane, incendiary hatred.

“Castor,” he growled. “I’ll kill you for this. That’s a promise. When I—”

He stiffened, and a tremor ran through his body like a wave through water. He stared at his arms and groaned. They were writhing, not like limbs but like snakes, like puppy dogs in a sack. He tried to take a step toward me, managed, started work on another. That was as far as he got.

“When I come—back—” Scrub was having to force the words out, his voice bubbling and fluting. He began to melt from the legs up, and he shrank in on himself spectacularly. But he wasn’t melting; that was just the way it looked from where I was sitting on the walkway. What was actually happening was a whole lot more disgusting.

He turned into rats. The whole of that big, solid frame dissolved and separated, tore itself asunder, and a wave of brown, furry bodies struggled out of the folds of his greasy suit to sweep off along the walkway in a filthy tide, heading away from the water. If Scrub’s consciousness had still been animating them and welding them together, they could have eaten me alive, but Scrub—the mind and personality that used that name—was a ghost. When the music punched him out of the flesh that he’d wrapped around himself, the individual little rat minds all kicked back in and took up their own agendas again.

I thought back to the time when I’d unlocked the door of my room and found Scrub sitting on the bed. Now I knew how he’d managed to get in through that barely open window. I gave a reflexive shudder at the thought. When he’d threatened to kill me, it wasn’t just farting in the wind. I hadn’t exorcised him, just broken his concentration and stolen his body out from under him. He could find another body, given time—could and probably would. Loup-garous are like weeds in that way; you think you’ve got rid of them, but they pop up again when you least expect it, kill off your prize geraniums, eat your dog, and crush your skull like an eggshell.

But that was a thought to linger on during some warm summer evening yet to come. Right now I had other things to think about. Picking myself up off the planking, I retraced my steps along the walkway and retrieved the rest of my stuff: the lock picks, the bolt cutters, the cone-bore flute, the whole dodgy tool kit. Then I put my shoes back on, boarded the Mercedes again, and made a beeline for the cabin door.

I gave it the once-over as I hauled out my lock picks. Bog-standard Yale, slightly sexy Chubb. Not the piece of cake that I was hoping for, but far from impossible. I got to work, occasionally looking over my shoulder back toward the harbor entrance to see if anyone was coming down the walkway in my direction. Nothing. I worked undisturbed, got the Yale inside of ten minutes, but then lost time on the Chubb. It was a real fucking boojum, with an impossibly narrow barrel and a double detainer. Bouncing the pick didn’t help at all, so I was reduced to working out the set pins laboriously, one by one, the skin on the back of my neck prickling the whole time. Then it was one pass for each pin, with the minutes ticking by.

When the lock finally clicked and the door gave inward a fraction of an inch, I was taken by surprise and almost fell in with it. Recovering my balance, I stood up and stepped into the dark space inside the cabin.

I stood still for a few moments, listening. Nothing. I didn’t really want to turn a light on, because if Damjohn