The Devil Dances (4 page)

“They?”

“Humans.”

“You do know you’re half-human?”

Vivian turned to stare over the rather unkempt grounds of the apartment complex. There was a blue dumpster overflowing with trash and some crows bouncing around the mess, picking through the debris. She rubbed her shoulders and looked troubled. “I don’t always feel human. Do you?”

I smirked as I passed her my cigarette. “I felt pretty human last night when I was inside you. And David.”

“That was fun,” she agreed as she sucked most of my cigarette down all in one inhalation. It actually impressed me.

Her brow creased.

“What’s wrong?”

She shrugged. “I guess I’m just wondering if that’s it. You and me. You, me, and David. You, me, David, and his friends.” Again she shrugged. “I’m graduating next year. David’s graduating in another year. Guess that means everything ends soon. Did you know that David is talking about opening a practice down in Miami?”

“We’ll find someone new,” I assured her. “There’s this club down in Philly called The Scene where the couples closer to my age group hang out. Sophisticated married types, so no more of that college scene stuff for you, missy.” I smiled as I leaned forward to peck her on the nose. “I’ll let you pick this time.”

“Letting me graduate, huh?”

“We can get one of those big, hairy, construction types you like so much.”

She grinned as she returned the cigarette. Then a thought occurred to me, and I blurted it out before I really thought about it. “The ones at The Scene like to hook up with other married couples, so why not marry me?”

She looked at me with upraised eyebrows like I was crazy. “Nick, are you really suggesting we get married so we find a better breed of swinger?”

I thought about that as I smoked. “Nah. I just want to marry you, Vivian.”

“For real?”

“Yes,” I answered as I stared at the burning ember of the cigarette between my fingers. I had never been more sure of anything in my life. “For real.”

“Sure you want to be married to The Whore of Babylon?” she asked, referring to the name that various and sundry people and other-creatures had called her over the years. It was not a badge of honor. “She can’t be trusted, you know. Everyone says so.”

“Have you noticed the things the other-creatures call me?”

“Good point.” She sat looking out of the windshield for some time. The sun was sinking low and the occasional flare of a firefly sparked against the glass. Finally, her shoulders sagged. “I don’t know, Nick. I really don’t know.”

I tried not to let her answer bother me too much. “What we have… it’s not enough?”

“It’s not that.” She shrugged but didn’t look at me. “I love you, Nick. And you’re so fucking sexy I can’t control myself around you. But I just don’t see myself as married. My mom was married.
Humans
get married. We…” She shrugged again.

It wasn’t a perfect answer, but it was better than the alternative, that I wasn’t good enough, sexy or not. “Compromise, then. We move in together. Give it a year. If we’re still hot on each other by this time next year, we get married.”

She relaxed visibly. “We get
almost
married?”

“We could get a little house on the edge of town,” I said, hoping to entice her. “I have enough saved up for it. Then we wouldn’t have to worry about Morgana anymore. We could be together all the time. I could really apprentice you in the Craft. I mean, if that’s what you want.”

I shut up. My heart was thudding in my throat and I was starting to feel like a teenage boy trying to cop a feel but afraid of pissing off my date. I had never experienced a fear like this before. If I pushed Vivian too far and lost her, I wasn’t sure how I would cope with that.

She turned and scooted into my lap. She coiled her arms around my neck and kissed me softly and completely. Before long, she was moving her hips against me, and not long after that, I had her jeans off and was pressing her into the seat of the car while she moaned and writhed against me, kissing my face all over, and racing her fingers through my spiky blond hair.

Her own personal brand of magick sparked between us, and soon all the fireflies outside the car were shining so brightly I had to squint under the power of their blazing illumination. They sparked as they collided with the windshield, burning out, dying. It only lasted until she climaxed against me and brought me with a lunge and a few deeply muttered words against her mouth. I emptied myself deep inside her. I gave her my lust, my love, my heart. She devoured me shamelessly.

After that, we snuggled together like two lost children, still connected. I liked these moments when she let me hold and comfort her like some little girl who had lost her way. I liked the way her body felt pressed against mine, the way her head fit just under my chin. Honestly? I loved everything about Vivian. Her white skin and mahogany hair. Her candy apple scent. Her brainy, witchy ways, and how she could turn them on and off on a whim. Sometimes she was this fiery femme fatale, and I half expected her to show up in my bedroom in a leather corset with a bullwhip; at other times, she was soft and pure and innocent like a little girl who needed me to protect her, to fight her battles for her. She was the first girl who turned me on, drove me crazy, and left me wanting more, and more, and more…

She gave me her innocent little-girl eyes, that look that could melt the iceberg of my heart. “Do you mean all that, Nick? Would you really almost marry me, if you could? You’re not playing me?” Suddenly, there were tears in her eyes.

“Vivian,” I said, cupping her face in my hand like a precious jewel and rubbing the pad of my thumb over her full cherry lips, “I would be honored to almost marry you.”

We had it arranged so Morgana and I each worked half a day during the week, she from six to noon, and I from noon to midnight. But we still managed one full day off work on the weekends. Unless something unexpected came up, I took Saturdays off, and she Sundays. Sunday was pretty rough. I worked from six in the morning to closing, with an hour at noon and another in the evening as a break. Not enough time to run down a lead. So looking into the death of my young friend wasn’t an option until the following Monday rolled around.

I got up with the birds—and with Morgana, who was, disgustingly, the most perky morning person I had ever known. While she went to sit out on the balcony and do her early-morning stretching exercises and sun worship, I stumbled around the kitchen, dressed only in the ragged navy robe I’d bought at Wal-Mart three years ago, making morning tea.

A half hour later, she stepped through the sliding glass door and wrinkled her brow at me. I was standing at the counter, drinking Earl Grey, smoking my third cigarette of the day, and nibbling on an Oreo cookie while I scanned the morning newspaper for any news of my dead friend. “Any particular reason you’re up at the crack of dawn, Scratch?”

“I’m trying to change my demonic ways,” I said around a mouthful of cookie. “I want to embrace the light.”

“Now I know why they call you the Prince of Lies,” she said drolly as she reached for the V8 in the fridge.

She, too, wore a robe, just a much nicer one—a silken kimono with ideograms all over it. She didn’t have a wrinkle, mole or spot of acne in her whole face, her hair was a perfectly tame set of soft platinum curls around her face, her crystal blue eyes were bright, and her expression bushy-tail. Another person would have said it was the results of her clean living, strict observation of her vegetarian ways, plenty of exercise, and maybe a dash of plastic surgery. But I knew better. Morgana was just naturally spotless. Even when she worked in her herbal garden out back behind the shop, not one flake of dirt seemed willing to adhere itself to her. Morgana sported a magickal barrier between herself and the rest of the world.

I, on the other hand, looked like something the cat had dragged in and thrown up on. I knew because I’d scared myself when I’d looked in the bathroom mirror this morning. My blond hair was tousled—not in that sexy, sleepy way you hear about in romance novels, but like I’d been tossing and turning all night—and there were dark, unhealthy crescents under my storm grey eyes. I looked like some nasty James Bond villain. Before I was going anywhere today, I needed a shower, shave, and my monthly haircut. I wondered idly if Freddie, down at the barber shop on the corner, had an opening in his schedule this morning.

With V8 in hand, Morgana came around and slapped me on the ass before picking up her reading glasses and glancing over the newspaper I’d pulled apart on the counter. “Rough night?”

“I didn’t get much sleep.”

“You were talking in your sleep.” She would know, seeing how we shared a bed.

“Was I? What was I saying?”

“I don’t know, Nick. It wasn’t English.”

“Spanish?” That was the only other language I knew fluently from working my beat down in New York. I’d covered a lot of Spanish Harlem back in the day.

She shook her head. “It wasn’t a human language.”

That gave me a start. “Not Divine?” That was the language of the angels.

“I can’t say. I don’t think I’ve ever heard Divine spoken. What does it sound like?”

“Nails on a chalkboard, mostly.”

“Yeah, okay. You were speaking Divine.”

I set my mug of tea down with a clunk on the counter. “Well, that’s just fucking great.”

Morgana waited patiently for me to elaborate, but I wasn’t feeling much into explanations this morning. Speaking Divine, a language I’d never been trained to use, but was using anyway, wasn’t exactly a
problem
so much as a
symptom
, one my father had warned me about some time ago. He’d said that the closer I came to learning what my cardinal sin was—the sin that defined me as the Man of Sin, and the Inheritor of my father’s place in Hell—the stronger my power would become. The stronger my power was, the closer I was to Ascension. You can see where this is going.

Morgana put a hand on my shoulder and rubbed it with her customary concern. “You all right, Nick?”

I straightened up and gave her my cheekiest smile. “Right as rain.” I even took her hand and kissed the knuckles in a courtly way.

She didn’t look convinced, but at least she didn’t ask me why I’d gotten up with the birds this morning when I wasn’t due to take the shop until noon, or why I was leaving the apartment in such a sour mood.

Mary Jo Pearl lived down in what Blackwater old-timers called “Old Town,” which was at the end of town directly opposite the newer developments. Originally chock full of old, Victorian homes with decorative ginger breading, front porch swings, and old coach houses, a particularly vicious fire in the late 1950’s had wiped out many of the buildings. Those homes were replaced by more modern (and generically ugly) saltboxes sporting shaker shingles and now out-of-date aluminum siding, but there was still plenty of charm to the old place.

I drove down snaky Willow Drive, which ran right through the heart of Old Town, glancing over the disjointed mix of architecture, the banners across the street announcing fairs or parades—Old Town was huge on Norman Rockwell-style parades in the summer—and front yards full of sugared-up kids and hyperactive dogs protectively tucked behind chain link fences.

The middle class lived here, with a smattering of lower class to make it just a little less shiny, so the streets weren’t as clean or oft-repaired as they were in the developments, and the Dodge seemed to find every pothole. Scattered across lawns were screened trampolines, small summer bouncy houses, and those ugly plastic playhouses that turned grungy in the elements. It was August, so there were kids everywhere, riding over the cracked sidewalks on bikes and bouncing basketballs haphazardly into the streets.

It was twenty miles an hour in the ‘burbs, but the guy in the big blue Escalade in front of me kept revving his motor like he wished he was on the Pocono Raceway forty miles to the east of us. I recognized the driver as Bradley King, Blackwater’s own beer-guzzling, shit-talking resident redneck extraordinaire. He owned the biggest construction company in Blackwater and just figured he owned the town along with it.

After he revved his truck for the fifth time, deliberately squashed a baby squirrel racing across the road, and tossed an empty can of Red Bull out the window, I’d had enough. I narrowed my eyes and gave his monster truck a little
push
. Immediately, steam started to pour out of the radiator as the beast overheated and died in the middle of the road. Bradley swore violently over the country western music pouring from his speakers and open windows, and I swerved the Dodge around his now dead-in-the-water truck just in time to catch his put-upon expression.