The Devil You Know

But at least I was thinking again, thinking through the pain and the arousal, like trying to tune into my own voice on a radio through wave after wave of howling static. And because I was thinking, I saw that I had a chance—an outside chance, somewhere between slim and snowball-in-Hell.

My mind was saturated with the succubus’s subliminal scream of love, with the intoxicating, stupefying presence of her, expressed in smell and taste and texture, all urging me onward and inward. That was how she worked.

And as an exorcist, I could use that presence, that vivid, perfect sense of her. That was how I worked.

With my hands free and my whistle to my lips, it would have been easy. Well, it would have been three or four degrees farther away from impossible. With my whistle somewhere on the floor in the shredded remnants of my coat and my mouth locked tight against hers, I had to improvise.

I reached out with my left hand, flailed blindly for a moment, and then found a hard surface: the slatted cover of the rolltop desk. The pain was excruciating, and so was the pleasure, but I did my best to ignore them both. I started to tap out a rhythm.

It wasn’t a full cantrip, but it was the start of one. When I play the pipe, I use pitch and tempo and slur and every damn thing else to turn the endless involutions of what I’m seeing in my mind into something ephemeral floating in the air in front of me. Compared to that, what I was doing now was like trying to make a functioning revolver out of prechewed wood pulp, and then aim and fire it. All I had was the one ingredient to cook with, the one dimension to work in.

It was never going to dispel the succubus, but I was hoping it would throw her a curveball. It did. A tremor went through her as the rhythm built and hit, and then for a moment or two she froze, some of the terrible strength going out of her sinuous limbs. I used those moments to push my head back, against the pressure of her cupped hand, and get my mouth away from hers.

I gulped in a lungful of air. By contrast with the searing heat that raged through me, it felt like swallowing a bucket full of ice splinters. No time to dwell on the agony, no time to go for a second, deeper breath. Instead I started to whistle, in quick but halting counterpoint to the rhythm I was still beating out with my fingers.

The effect on Juliet was spectacular. Her implausibly perfect face convulsed, her features seeming for a blurred instant to melt and run into some other configuration. She screamed in rage, and it was such a terrible sound that I almost lost the tune. Her grip tightened on me, threatening to crush my chest, but only for a moment. The shrill staccato of the cantrip bit into her, and she let me go, staggering back against the wall.

As Juliet went down in a fetal crouch, I crashed to my knees on the floor. The impact jarred me enough to make the breath hiccup out of me, and although it was only for a moment, the succubus drew strength enough from the brief stammer of silence to recover and straighten up again. I caught the tune at the head of the next bar and quickened the rhythm. She froze in place again, glaring down at me.

That was when a metallic glint from under the bed caught my eye. I scrambled down on all fours and came up holding my whistle. Juliet’s eyes widened. Still whistling through my teeth, I set the mouthpiece of the tin whistle to my lips and came up on one knee in a Jon Anderson battle stance.

We were balanced on the cusp of a catastrophe curve. Freed from her suffocating embrace, I was able to get more range and more volume. But I didn’t dare to stop for an in-breath, and in spite of the chains of the exorcism tightening around her, Juliet was still managing to stay both on her feet and on the mortal plane. She was a demon, not a ghost, and as I’d found to my cost with Rafi, it takes more than “Sing Something Simple” to take one of these bastards out.

She took a step toward me—a step, and then another. Her arms were reaching out for me, and fuzzy flowers of darkness were opening behind my eyes. I was going to run out of oxygen, the music would stop, and then that would be that.

Then, in silent-comedy style, the door flew open, and Pen charged in. She was holding a rifle with a five-pointed sheriff’s star on the stock, which had the disastrous effect of making me laugh. I lost what was left of my wind, and the last breathy note of the cantrip dissolved into a whooping hiccup just as Pen aimed and fired.

She was a lousy shot. The first slug hit me in the shoulder, stinging like hell. The second went wide and blew a tiny, perfect hole in the lower left pane of the window. The third, fourth, and fifth hit the succubus in the stomach, chest, and forehead.

Juliet howled—a long, drawn-out bellow of agony and rage. Then she leaped over my head, and I heard the window smash into fragments, showering me with shards of broken glass and slivers of wood.