The Devil You Know

When everything was silent again, I straightened up. Rosa’s one eye was staring up into mine, imploring, terrified. Slowly, without turning to look at Juliet, I started to untie Rosa’s gag. It wasn’t easy. Someone had gone to town on the knots, and I couldn’t get my fingertips between them. It didn’t help that I was so rigid with tension that I could barely make my hands move at all—or that the wound in my shoulder was sending irregular pulses of agony down my left arm, making my fingers spasm every few seconds.

The skin on my back was crawling, anticipating Juliet’s touch. I was expecting every second for her to take hold of me and turn me around, and since her tastes were catholic with a small “c” and polymorphously perverse, I was hoping to leave Rosa in a position to run while I was being devoured.

No such luck.

“Face me,” Juliet murmured.

With huge reluctance, I turned. She was standing exactly where Damjohn had been sprawled. The bodies of Gabe, Arnold, and the other two bully boys still lay where they’d fallen, but of Damjohn himself there was no sign.

“You set me free,” she said, her tone glacially cold.

I gestured toward the sigil on my chest, shrugged in mimed apology. My heart was tripping and stammering like a telegraph machine. She stared at the daubed pentagram as if she’d forgotten it until that moment. Then she drew her hand across in front of me—a single horizontal slash in the air—and McClennan’s chains of compulsion fell from me as if they’d never existed. I knew that at once, because suddenly I could hear my own harsh breathing.

“To bind and to loose,” Juliet said, and her face twisted now in almost physical disgust, “these are games that men play. And you dare to play them with me.”

I couldn’t think of anything to say to that. All I could do was shrug again. Her power over me was undiminished, and it was still hard to think around the searing fact of her nakedness. She turned her attention to Rosa, who was staring at her in hypnotized terror. The gag was still in her mouth; I was only about halfway through untying it. She made an urgent sound around it, pleading with me or with Juliet or with God.

“What’s your purpose with this woman?” Juliet asked after a heavy silence.

I forced myself to speak. My voice came out as an unlovely croak. “I was going to untie her and then take her to visit her sister.”

Juliet considered this, her face a hard mask.

“The other bound one? Under the ground?”

“Yeah, her,” I agreed. “I wanted them to see each other again. Maybe say good-bye to each other. I was thinking that that would probably—”

Juliet’s snarl cut across my words. “I said that binding and loosing are men’s games. I didn’t say I was ignorant as to the rules of them. Do you think I’m a child, mortal man? Flesh puppet, would you patronize me?”

She was walking toward me as she spoke, one slow step at a time. Now she was right in front of me, and I was a rabbit in the headlight stare of her eyes. I bowed my head; just like before, I had to force myself. On one level, all I wanted to do was to look at her until I died of thirst or exhaustion or an overlabored heart.

Juliet leaned forward, brought her face up close to mine. “My mark is on you,” she growled in her throat. “I can whistle for your body or for your soul, and you’ll bring them to me and beg me to take them. You wear my chain, which can’t be broken.”

Without looking up, without meeting her gaze, I nodded. I stayed like that for a long time: three or four minutes, at least. The silence was unbroken, and her perfume was dissipating. When I couldn’t smell it anymore, when the last hint of it had faded from my lungs, I allowed myself a quick glance from under lowered lids. She was gone.

I exhaled shakily, only then realizing how long it had been since I’d drawn a proper breath. Finding that I could move again despite the extensive damage reports coming in from my neck, my back, my shoulder, my face, I turned to Rosa and made a second attempt at removing her gag.

It took another five minutes. When it was off at last and she was able to spit out the saliva-drenched wad of cloth that had been in her mouth, she let loose with what I’d guess was every swear word she knew. Fortunately for my modesty, I don’t speak a word of Russian. She might just as well have been saying her prayers.

I released her hands, which had been tied behind her back with blue nylon washing-line string, and her legs, which were attached to the front legs of the chair by about a hundred turns of duct tape. Her body was so racked with cramps that she could only stand with my help. Slowly, patiently, I walked her back and forth across the cabin as her circulation returned. Every few seconds, she let out a moan or a sob or another curse, and after a while, she had to sit down and rest her protesting muscles. I watched her in silence. I didn’t have a clue what to say to her. But after a while, she looked up at me with a frown that was frankly suspicious.