The Devil You Know

What happened next I can only describe in sound, because that was all that I was aware of. There was a series of heavy impacts, as though a bunch of guys with hammers had hit the far wall on the same command, but slightly out of synch. Ajulutsikael grunted in surprise and pain, and the window shattered. Not just the window, in fact. With a loud, indiscreet crash, a corner of the plywood panel snapped clean away and tumbled out into the street. Yellow light from a streetlamp flooded into the room.

It showed Ajulutsikael in a defensive crouch, hands raised in front of her face. A bottle came whipping through the air toward her, and her right arm came across in a blur of motion. She smashed it out of the air in an explosion of glinting glass and incandescent drops. It didn’t help her. The jagged shards of glass slowed as they fell, turned and leapt back up at her, slicing at her flesh, stinging her like brittle bees. As I stared, trying to process what I was seeing into some kind of sense, a shard from the broken window, a triangular wedge about eight inches long, parted the air like a dart and buried itself in her back.

Spasmodically, only marginally under my conscious control, my head jerked around. The ghost was standing at the head of the stairs, the scarlet veils of her face billowing and rippling like sheets left out to dry in a stiff wind. She didn’t move, and her head was slightly bowed, but she faced Ajulutsikael full-on. Her head turned, and her gaze swept the room from left to right, right to left—and the storm of shattered glass danced in time.

Ajulutsikael had seen her, too. She moved toward the ghost, fingers curved into claws. But the storm of glass moved with her, arced around her, broke on her like a wave, only to bend and recurve almost instantly for another pass. Her clothes hung off her in shreds—her clothes and strips of her flesh. Black streaks of blood crisscrossed her face, and her eyes were wide and mad.

A feral growl began deep in her throat, built to an ear-hurting bellow in which consonants I couldn’t have reproduced even if I hadn’t been gagged by McClennan’s ward smashed against each other like calving icebergs. The ghost trembled and flickered. The glass fragments fell to the floor like prismatic rain.

Discretion is the better part of staying alive. I lurched to my feet, crunched and staggered through broken glass to the door, and fled into the night.

When I was a hundred yards down the street, my feet pumping like pistons, I heard a rending crash from behind me. I risked one glance over my shoulder. Ajulutsikael was out on the street, straddling the saw-edged wreckage of the hardwood door. Then she saw me and came after me at a dead run. With each loping stride, her stiletto heels struck sparks from the cold stones she ran on.

I came out onto Euston Road and tacked left. Traffic was still heavy and fast enough to form a serious blockade, so getting across the road and losing myself in the alleys around Judd Street wasn’t going to be an option. She’d be on me before I found a gap. But up ahead there was a skip truck stopped at a red light, with a loaded skip on board.

I didn’t have time to make a conscious decision. If I had, I might have hesitated—it was chancing everything on one throw of the dice. And if I’d hesitated, she would have punched my heart out through my ribs as I ran.

As it was, I grabbed for a loop of chain that was hanging off the back of the skip and missed it as the light went green and the truck lurched forward. Hearing the rasp of the succubus’s heels behind me, like a knife on a strop, I forced myself into one last spurt of speed and snatched at the chain again. This time, I just managed to snag it as the truck’s gathering momentum made the trailing end of it snake out toward me. Dragged half off my feet, I staggered, righted myself, got one foot back under me, and jumped.

Ajulutsikael jumped, too, and something whipped past my trailing leg before I could pull it in. The sudden chill of its passing was followed instantly by a sudden wash of warmth. She’d drawn blood.

For a moment I was braced by one foot against the back of the truck. Then it slipped, and I was just dangling on the chain like an overlarge air freshener whimsically hung up on the outside of the vehicle instead of in the cab. The chain whipped around on its pivot, unbalanced by my weight, so that I saw the road behind me in quick, dizzying glimpses. Ajulutsikael was still pounding along behind the truck tirelessly, not gaining but keeping pace with it. The next time we hit a light that was against us, I was dead meat.