The Devil Dances (6 page)

“And how do you know all
that
?”

“When the shop roof caved in a few years ago from rain, Morgana had a Swartzcopf Amish man named Jacob fix it for us. His farm was failing that year over in Ohio due to the Midwest droughts and he needed the money bad.”

Vivian raised her eyebrows but kept her eyes shut. “Your pagan partner hired an Amish man to fix your roof, and he did it?”

“You’d be surprised what you’ll do when your family’s starving to death.”

She shook her head. “How did she find him? Is there like an Amish directory?”

“Actually, yes. And Jacob has a cell phone.”

“You’re kidding me.”

“Nope. Granted, the Swartzcopf are a deeply private and insular group, one of the most conservative Amish in the world, and they don’t want much to do with us English and our technology, but they’re allowed to have modern conveniences like cell phones, so long as they only use them for business.”

“I like it when you talk like that.”

“Like what?”

“Like a college professor. It makes me wet.”

“Focus. You can be wet later.”

After five minutes of concentrating with nothing happening, Vivian sighed and her freckled shoulders dropped. “So how long are you going to be gone?”

“A few days. A week, at most.”

“And Morgana is letting you go?”

“You’re not concentrating on the tawse.”

“I
can’t
concentrate, Nick.”

“You aren’t trying. And Morgana has a friend coming in to help her.” I didn’t explain to Vivian that the man stepping in was Anton McGinley, Morgana’s sometimes lover and the high priest of the Morristown Coven a few towns over from Blackwater. I liked Anton. He was smart, an academic, and I knew he wouldn’t accidently screw up our inventory. Plus, it would be something of a vacation for the two magickal lovebirds, and I knew that was something that Morgana had been secretly longing after for some time, whether she admitted to it or not. I loved Morgana. She was my partner, my friend, the closest thing to a mentor I had ever had, but I also knew I drove her batshit insane sometimes. A little alone time with Anton was just what she needed.

The tawse had just started to stir when she said, “Will I be okay?”

“How do you mean?”

“I mean… with Malach. Those angels with the chips on their shoulders. They won’t come hunting me while you’re gone?”

I thought about that. It wasn’t the first time I’d considered it. Ever since I’d begun planning for this little road trip, that fear had been haunting me. I could conceivably place a magickal barrier around Vivian’s apartment building, but I couldn’t put one around her specifically, and she would need to leave home at some point. She couldn’t stay in her apartment all week long. That left really only one alternative.

“Vivian,” I asked, “what are you planning next week? Could you take time off college?”

The tawse immediately jiggled and coiled snakelike around my arm. Vivian was on her feet in seconds and throwing herself into my arms like some happy, giggly high school girl. She snagged my unruly hair in two big handfuls that actually hurt, wrapped her legs around my waist, and kissed my mouth so hard she bruised my lips. “Nick, you’re the best boyfriend in the whole world! Have I told you that lately?”

The following day we hit the road.

The drive out to Lancaster—Amish country—would take three hours, according to Google Maps and the GPS on my cell phone. Curiously enough, we had very few Amish around Blackwater, even though the town was a huge tourist trap, particularly during the summer months, when the various Amish colonies would have benefited greatly from living near one of the big vacationing capitals of the northeast. Or maybe that wasn’t so curious, since Blackwater had a reputation for being one of those towns you see in torture porn movies—you know the ones, the kind where the young couple breaks down and has to stay the night, only to discover the town is full of hillbilly psychos. Sometimes I think the Amish understand the supernatural far better than the English do.

We took a series of meandering back roads through a number of ever smaller, ever more desperate-looking towns. It was better than doing all highway driving, in my educated opinion. This being the tourist season, I knew the traffic around Lancaster would be bumper to bumper.

As I drove, Vivian made up stories about each town we came to. This one had all vampires in it, and this one sold meat pies made of the local residents. She, too, had heard all the supernatural tales of the Lehigh Valley region.

“How’s Daisy’s handling?” she finally asked as we passed a sign that read ZION 3 Mi. She sat in the bucket seat beside me, wearing a white sundress, a red sun hat, dark glam glasses, and red slingback sandals. She looked delightfully like a red-haired Marilyn Monroe come back to life. She was sipping a Mountain Dew, trying to keep it from splashing onto her dress as we bounced along the badly paved back roads. We had a cooler of sandwiches on the backseat, some red string candy shoved in one of the cup holders, and Keith Urban in the CD player. It was like any other summer road trip… except I was hunting a murderer.

“The transmission seems to be holding,” I told her.

We were driving her car because, frankly, the Dodge Monaco wasn’t exactly gas efficient. I’m pretty sure there are space shuttles that need less fuel for takeoff. But Vivian had warned me that the transmission seemed to be going on her little, white, second-hand Jeep Cherokee—which she had christened Daisy, after the character played by one of her favorite actresses, Catherine Bach. I hadn’t noticed anything unusual, and I hoped I wouldn’t. We were starting to get into the thick of things, as it were, houses farther and farther apart, and towns looking poorer than ever, and if Daisy failed us, we would be in for a miserably long walk under the brutal August sun to the next town.

“No trouble driving her?”

“None,” I said, though my right hand kept drifting and searching for a stick shift that wasn’t there. Daisy was an automatic, and the Monaco was old enough to not be.

We clunked over a pothole and I grimaced. “I think maybe after we get that house on the edge of town, we should look into getting a new car as well. Maybe a hybrid.”

She rolled her eyes. “Something reliable, I’m sure.”

“Look here, missy. If we die on the road, I’ll send
you
over to the next town for a tow. A five mile hike in those heels will have you running to buy something reliable.”

“Oooh, threats,” she cooed, pursing her candy apple-red lips. She ticked off points on her fingers. “So we’re getting almost married. We’re getting the house and the reliable car. When do we get the white picket fence and two-point-five kids?”

“We can’t have kids,” I told her, perhaps a little too sharply. To smooth things over, I added, “But maybe we can get a dog. I’ve always wanted a dog.”

“Dogs don’t like me,” Vivian said, sounding sad. “Cats don’t like me either.” She waved away a honey bee that had flown through the open window.

“Bees do,” I pointed out. “And wasps.”

“Great. All the shit that stings.”

“I’ll trade my familiar for yours.”

“Fauns and satyrs? No, thank you. They’re creepy. And they smell like an old rug.” She reached back for the cold roast beef and Swiss cheese sandwiches she’d packed and passed one to me, along with a Dr. Pepper.

“Why does Caleb mean so much to you?” she asked unexpectedly.

I choked on the dryness of the rye bread. “You mean besides the fact that he died in my arms?”

She nodded as she munched her sandwich. “You’ve seen people die, Nick. You’ve even killed a few. You killed Billie with your bare hands. So why is this so important to you?”

I sat in silence for the next two miles, thinking about how to tell her.

“Nick?”

I didn’t know how to begin, so I just started telling her about my years before I joined the NYPD, all the trouble I’d been in as a teen. Before I became a cop, I’d run with some pretty rough gangs, knocked over a convenience store or two, even chopped a car once. I was the kid who snatched purses from old women.

“I wasn’t always in the system. I got fostered out a few times. I hated this one old guy. He got drunk a lot and threw things. I think he touched the girls he took in. There were a lot of nights I didn’t bother going home.” I don’t know why, but that was hard to admit, like I was peeling back a layer of tender, half-healed skin, making a hole in myself that she could see into. “But the streets weren’t much better. You get tired real quick of eating fast food out of garbage cans.”

I saw her swallow hard out of the corner of my eye, but she didn’t interrupt.

“I used to watch the uptown kids and their fancy clothes, the cars they drove. I wanted that, you know? Wanted it so bad, I got desperate. I wanted to take care of myself, have nice things.”

“What did you do?” she asked softly.

I bit my lip as I navigated around yet another pothole in the road. “Stuff I’d rather not go into details about.” But I realized I probably had to, if I wanted to be honest with her. And I wanted to be honest. “I’d always cleaned up nicely—when I cleaned up—and it wasn’t long before I learned that a lot of people were willing to pay well to spend some time with me.”

“So you were like… a male escort?”

“That’s putting it nicely.”

“How old were you?”

“Fourteen. Five years younger than Caleb.”

She thought about that as she chewed on her sandwich. “You told me you didn’t have sex until you were sixteen. That you were a virgin until then.”

“That’s when I
chose
to have sex with someone I actually cared about, someone my own age. Before that, it was mostly older women and just stuff I did for money. For survival.” My hands were sweating around Vivian’s steering wheel and I kept shifting them. I wondered if I’d said too much. I probably shouldn’t have brought it up. It was stupid. I’d actually thought of myself as retaining my virginity until I was sixteen only because it was the first time I’d
wanted
to have sex with someone. “Forget it,” I told her lamely. “Forget I said anything.”

“Nick,” she said in a soft tone of voice as she moved as close to me as the bucket seat would allow. Her hand moved to my knee, not sexual but comforting. “I’ve told you all about me. How I was taken advantage of, how my teacher assaulted me when I was nine years old. We had an affair, for Chrissakes. Do you honestly think I would judge you for doing what you had to do to survive?”

I shrugged. I had never told anyone that, not even Morgana. It wasn’t that I didn’t think she would understand, or care. It’s not like I didn’t trust her. It’s just that when someone knows you’ve dealt with shit like this, they treat you differently, like you’re made of glass. Like you’re weak. I wasn’t weak. Neither was Vivian. We might not be good people, exactly, and we might have made a lot of mistakes along the way, but we weren’t weak. The world had seen to that.

She leaned against me, wrapped her arms around my bicep, and rested her head on my shoulder. Her presence was an enormous comfort there, fitted to my side like that. “I love you, Nick. If I could make all that go away, take it upon myself, I would.”

I smiled and lit a cigarette for us to share. “I know you would, Viv.”

And Morgana had said she was evil.