The Devil You Know

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.

Juliet’s hand closed on my shoulder, her nails puncturing the skin. She squeezed, and I howled in pain—without, of course, making the slightest sound. My eyes snapped open again. I was staring at her left ankle, which was still encircled by the silver chain.

She was trying to haul me to my feet, her claws hooked into my shoulder right next to my throat. I fought back not against her strength—I couldn’t have resisted that for a second—but against the weakest link, which happened to be me. The flesh of my shoulder strained and then tore, and I screamed again—with the volume turned down to zero, but I’m sure it was music to Damjohn’s ears all the same. My right hand, which isn’t my strongest, groped and scrabbled on the floor for a moment or two, finding nothing except the sad remains of my flute. Then something cold and hard touched the heel of my hand, and my fingers closed around it. The handle of the bolt cutters.

Juliet bent from the waist and took hold again, her hands this time closing on either side of my head. Pinpricks of pain at temple, cheek, chin told me where her claws were embedded. I shut it out, shut her out, although ghost images of her still danced obscene tangos in my brain.