The Devil You Know (9 page)

At a quarter to eleven, Vivian stepped into the shop. I looked up from the Chinese menu I was perusing, not very enthusiastically, and spotted her standing by the door. She was wearing a long, untucked chambray shirt and a short tartan skirt, black stockings and penny loafers. She looked childish and vulnerable, and the moment I spotted her, my whole world shrank down to just Vivian.

My heart quickened and I became aware of a gnawing ache in the vicinity of my groin. It had been a rotten day and I had a ridiculous notion. I wanted to go to her and steal her away. I wanted to hold her against me until I was warm and comforted again. I wanted her beneath me, writhing ecstatically on my sheets.

I had thought that the days of separation had built up a false fantasy of Vivian. Her skin could not be so white and flawless, her hair so rose red. Her eyes were not at all like aquamarines. Yet when I saw her, I knew my memory of her was sharp and clear and focused. I knew all these things were real. It was all I could do to keep from trembling at the sight of her. “Vivian?” I said, coming out from behind the counter. “Is everything all right?”

She shook her head. Her eyes were filling with fearful tears. “Nick, it’s Malach.”

I closed the shop up early and escorted Vivian upstairs. She started to shake then, and I led her to the sofa so she could sit down. She sat on the end of the cushion and said, “He’s been following me, Nick. I only just got away tonight because I remembered what you said. There was a Jehovah’s Witness hall nearby. I ducked under the eaves and just sat in the entranceway until he got tired and went away. I didn’t even know if it would work. He had a gun . . . ” She looked at me directly then. She looked so young. “What does he want with me?”

I told her the truth. “I think he wants to kill you.”

She stared down at the floor between her feet. “What can I do to stop him?”

I brushed a few strands of her hair off her face. The touch of her skin was electric to me. “You can fight him, or you can run away from him. Right now, I would suggest running, until you learn to fight. Until you’re strong. If you can find a holy place to live, it will help. Even Malach can’t spill blood on holy ground.”

“Like a monastery?”

“Any holy place will do. Even one that’s been de-consecrated at some point. A church that’s been renovated into apartments, for instance. Something like that.” I closed my eyes as her fear and power seeped into me. Just being this close made me ache to hold her, to be inside of her. “Let me make some tea. Then we’ll talk about it.”

I got up and moved to the kitchen area. I started filling the kettle, keeping my back to Vivian, but before it was even half-full, I sensed her closing in. I shut the tap off and turned to find her standing there, staring up at me in that girlish way she had. I don’t even think she knew what she was doing to me. She was a daemon. Her power was elemental and sexual. You cannot get more basic than sexual power. It is the root of every living thing.

Vivian said, her voice trembling, “Ever since that night, the night we met, I’ve been thinking about you, Nick.” She frowned and stared down at her raggedly chewed fingernails. “I dream about you constantly. I daydream about you at work. I can’t seem to think straight anymore. What’s happening to me?” She looked ashamed, disconcerted.

I leaned against the counter and said, “It’s because you’re like me.”

“A daemon.”

“Yes.”

“Are there many? Of us, I mean.”

“I really don’t know,” I told her. “You’re the first I’ve encountered in a decade. No, I don’t think there are many.”

She looked up at me from beneath her furrowed brows. “Are we . . . normal?”

“In what way?”

“I mean . . . are we like humans? Do we function like human beings?”

“Yes and no. Mostly yes.”

“We don’t do anything weird?”

“Such as?”

“I don’t know. Shapeshift. Drink blood.”

I smirked at her sincerity. “No. Not to my knowledge. Except on the full moon.”

She looked horrified.

“I’m joking,” I said.

She let her breath out in relief. “So I could live normally? I could have a family?”

“I really don’t know, Vivian,” I said in all honesty. I had no idea if we were “normal” in any biological sense. I slept. I ate. I had never been sick, but that might have just been me, not me being a daemon. I could be injured on both a physical and spiritual level. But I had never fathered a child, though there had been ample opportunities for that. Perhaps we daemons could not. There was no one for me to ask these questions of. I had been on my own since I was four years old. I had had to learn everything the hard way.

Vivian took a deep breath and let it out, like she’d come to a momentous decision. “Could we be together tonight?” she asked, then paused. She looked up at me curiously, nervously. She was terrified, I realized, terrified I would send her away. And so horny she couldn’t hold still. “I’ve never been with another daemon . . . one of my own . . . species.”

I smiled at that. I thought of some prosaic things to say. But what came out of my mouth was, “I’ve wanted you since the first day I saw you, Vivian. So yes, we can be together. If it’s what you want.”

She brightened considerably. She leaned into me and I captured her face. I stroked my thumbs along her cheeks. I leaned down—I was too tall and she too short—and slanted my mouth against hers. I’d meant it to be a soft, exploratory kiss. The first kiss. I’d wanted to be gentle with her. I didn’t want to spook her. But the moment I tasted all that soft wetness inside her mouth her body responded like it had been made only for me. She gripped me at the hips and jerked me against her. Her aggression both surprised and thrilled me. I cupped the back of her head to hold her in place while I slid my tongue deep inside her mouth. I kissed her hard, a bruising kiss. I fucked her mouth with my tongue. I slid my hands up her sides, under her arms, and finally palmed the soft mounds of her breasts through the thin shirt. I wondered if I was going too fast, frightening her, but she gripped my ass, urging me on.

I tried to stop kissing her, to ask her if this was really what she wanted. She couldn’t be more than twenty years old, a child really. I was forty-four. The situation was ridiculous and inappropriate. But she kept her hands where they were, holding me in place so she could kiss and taste me. “Viv . . . ” I began, but she hushed me, kissed me silent. Her kiss was both tender and demanding, and her mouth tasted like cinnamon, fire.

She was delicious, all I wanted, everything I had been waiting for. I moved my mouth to her throat and she tilted her head back for me, a long white column against a wash of burning crimson hair. I loved her then, I think. The way she trusted me enough to give me her throat. I worked my way down to the top button of her shirt. Again, I stopped, waiting with my heart thudding in my throat to see if she would protest while the ache inside of me turned into an angry, primal pain.

For the first time in my life—the only time—I had to make a concentrated effort not to force myself upon another human being. If she turned me away now, I wasn’t sure what would happen. I didn’t even want to consider it.

She must have known. She must have felt it. She brought her hand to the front of my body and touched me through my jeans. I groaned and bit the side of her pretty neck. Not a hard bite—I did not even break the surface of her skin—but she whimpered all the same. She tightened her hold on me, controlling my desire, and I growled against her throat and thrust against her involuntarily like some animal in heat. She turned her head and said in the shivery cup of my ear, “I want you, Nick. Tonight. I want you to fuck me.”

“I’d rather love you.”

“First fuck me, then love me.”

Her eyes looked different when I pulled away. Wilder. Older. They were daemon eyes, which are different then human eyes. Daemon eyes see things that human beings cannot. They see beyond the Veil, beyond the edges of the universe. They see the Old Gods, the ones that came before the One God. They look different as a consequence.

I undid Vivian’s blouse, trying not to tear it from her body in my haste. Under the shirt she wore an exquisite black lace bra that made her skin glow like pearl. Something about the contrast of the black lace underwear under all that conservative, studious clothing made me want her even more. It made me want to hold her and protect her and possess her. I told her how beautiful and fuckable she was as I worked first on the shirt and then on the bra. I told her other things, perverse things, things you don’t say to your girlfriend or wife. I talked to her like some common gutter slut, like some fuckthing, but the more I talked, the more excited she became. I’d managed to undo the front closure of the bra. Her nipples were pierced through with tiny silver barbells. I lowered my head to her breast and took one in my mouth, hard, like I meant to hurt her. She grunted and sank her fingernails into my hair. But the angle was all wrong for this kind of pleasure making. I turned and lifted her so she was sitting on the counter in front of me. That put us closer to eye level.

She said things to me then to encourage me, filthy things that nice girls don’t say. Her eyes shone savagely. She wrangled the pullover off me and ran her fingertips over my ribs. Her nails left angry red marks behind. I shivered and ducked my head so I could turn my greedy affections back to her pretty, swollen nipples. I wondered if the piercings hurt. I bit and suckled them until she gasped for breath and opened her legs to me. She gripped my ass, and dragged me against her until my knees hit the front of the cupboards. I groaned at the pressure of my erection pressing into her belly, at the way she commanded me, demanded of me, controlled me. I had never met a girl like Vivian before. She had the most beautiful filthy mouth, the most vicious claws. “Nick,” she hissed in my ear as she undid my jeans, none too gently. “Now, Nick,
now
.”

Under her skirt her bikini underwear was black lace like the bra. I hooked it with my fingers and slid it down just far enough for me to find my way inside of her. The first hard thrust caught Vivian unawares. She arched her back and screamed from the pain of the impact. She was tight and I was big, especially at that moment. My father’s gift to me. The angels have no genitalia at all, but the higher demons are hung like horses. She was wet but I had given her no warning. And anyway, there was no way for someone to prepare themselves for that. I stopped, locked deep inside of her, unable to move, and waited to see if she would reject me, if she would fight me.

Vivian squirmed and grunted and sweated through the pain, trying to acclimate herself to my size. I put a hand between us. There was some blood. She wasn’t a human virgin, I’m sure, but she had been a daemon virgin until that moment. Her mouth worked for a moment, and then she finally said, “Jesus, Nick.”

“Do you want me to stop?”

Vivian looked at me with feral catlike eyes. “No. I want you to fuck me, Nick. I want you to fuck me hard.”

I fucked her hard. It wasn’t lovemaking. It wasn’t even sex. Human beings engage in sex. Animals have a rut. I rutted with Vivian, and all that Brownswick had said in the woods came back to me in that moment. Each impact pushed her shoulders back against the cupboards. Each made her grunt as I opened her up a little more. Things would get better. They would even be good. But for now, there was going to be some pain and blood. I shuddered in the last moments, my face buried in her hair, trying to hold and comfort her even as I hurt her. She felt so warm inside, and her skin was almost feverish to the touch. She whimpered as she came with me, against me, devouring me.

When it was over I withdrew from her, trying not to cause her additional harm. Vivian groaned, and her hands clutched my shoulders in a death grip. She shivered violently at every lurching move. She was tender inside, I knew, and would be for hours to come. She might even come to hate me.

I waited.

Vivian pressed her smile into my throat. “Thank you, Nick,” she told me. “
Now
you can love me.”

After we got into bed, I lay holding Vivian until she was ready again.
Then I let her have her way with me. It seemed only fair.