The Devil You Know

Rafi’s tongue snaked out and rasped around the edges of his mouth with a sound like newspapers being chased down the street by a strong wind. I suddenly realized that his lips were dry and cracked, flakes of desiccated skin hanging onto them in a light, irregular frosting. I should have noticed that before; it’s another of the signs I usually keep a watch for, and it confirmed what I’d already noted from Rafi’s smell. It meant I was definitely talking to Asmodeus now, and Rafi wasn’t going to surface again unless the demon allowed him to.

Slowly, absently, he tore a huge gash in his own forearm with his thumbnail. Blood welled up and spattered on the floor of the cell. I ignored it. Asmodeus does that kind of stuff for show, but he always makes good the damage afterward. He’s got a vested interest in keeping Rafi’s body in good working order.

“Too late to do much, anyway,” he murmured, more to himself than to me. “The big picture—that’s set now, more or less. And it’s not like you’re even asking the right questions . . .”

There was a silence. When he spoke again, it was in a different voice—almost liquid, with a fluting modulation that was insidious and unpleasant.

“So you said no. But here’s the thing, Castor. You’re gonna change your mind. I’m nearly certain about that. You see, time is different for my kind, by which I mean it’s slower. Feels to me like I’ve been stuck in here for a thousand years already. Got to do something to keep my edge, you understand? So I tune into things. Things that are on the edge of happening. Things that might might might just slop over the edge of the possible and soil the carpets of the real. I know what I’m talking about. After the final no there comes a yes, and you’ll be getting to that before the night is out. I mean, you’re so agonizingly predictable when it comes to your friends, well”—he ducked his head left, right, left—“I think it’s pretty obvious whose tune you’re gonna end up dancing to.”

I took the whistle out of my pocket and laid it on the floor next to me. Rafi—or the thing that lived inside him—eyed it with cold amusement.

“I don’t dance,” I said. “Don’t ask me.”

He laughed—not a nice sound at all.

“You all dance, Castor. Every bastard one of you. I never met a man, woman, or child yet who made a real fight out of it.” He stretched out his free arm, made his index and middle fingers into the barrel of a gun, aimed them at my feet. “Bang, bang, bang. If I wasn’t serving my time inside this heap of pulp and gristle, I could make you dance. But since I am . . . indisposed, someone else is going to take a shot at it. And this someone else—well, they’re too big for you.”

“You prefer ‘Oh Danny Boy’ or ‘Ye Banks and Braes’?” I asked him, my face set in a cold deadpan.

“Now that’s just crude,” he sniggered. “Give me ‘O Fortuna.’ I like music that sounds like the end of the fucking world. But anyway, coming back to the point—even though it’s not gonna get me anywhere—you should say no to this case, because you don’t have more than a cat in hell’s chance of coming out of it in one piece.”

“You know, I’m always flattered when you put it like that,” I told him. “I shouldn’t take the case? Lawyers and private detectives take cases. The people who use my services generally see me more in the light of a garbage disposal unit.”

Asmodeus dismissed this red herring with a slow, contemptuous shrug.

“Well, if you’ve got the balls to say no and stick to it, then that’s fine—you don’t have a problem. But that’s not where the smart money’s sitting, Castor. And when it comes to the study of human behavior, I’ve got a few years’ lead on you. I started watching when the entire human race only had two balls to share between them—and both of ’em were in my hand. Speaking of which, how’s Pen?”

The sudden shift of subject false-footed me—and he switched to Rafi’s own voice, too, to get as much impact out of it as he could.

“That’s none of your damn business,” I snapped back, which got me a supercilious grin.

“Everything that’s damned is my business,” he leered. “You ought to pick your words more carefully, Castor. Words are the birds that break cover and show your enemy where you’re hiding. Here. Get into practice.”

He picked up one of the cards and skimmed it across to me, so it fell facedown at my feet. I picked it up and turned it over, expecting the ace of spades or maybe the joker, but it was blank on the face side—the spare card they give you in some decks to stand in for the first one you lose.