The Devil You Know by Mike Carey Page A

thing. After a while, she was so afraid she took us to New York, to stay with her sister there. My mother hoped that the anonymity of the city would help hide us. But he found us. I supposed you can’t hide from the Devil.” I thought about that day, the day my life changed, though so much of it was a blur to my child’s mind. “I was four years old when he came calling. He was livid that we had tried to run away from him. He broke all the charms. That was the day he took my mother away. I never saw her again.” I paused. “You see, it was she he wanted all along, not me.”
    Vivian watched me carefully. “Is your mother dead?”
    “I don’t know. I don’t think so. I think he just took her, to keep her with him.”
    “But not you.”
    “No,” I answered, perhaps bitterly. “Not me.”
    I was a selfish person, I knew. I hated my father, not because he was the Father of All Evil, but because of what he had done to my family. “He let me grow up alone. My aunt tried to raise me, she did the best she could, but she had a weak heart and she died very young. After that, I sort of drifted through foster homes until I was eighteen. By then, I’d been in trouble with the law so many times you could have wrapped your next birthday gift in my rap sheet. I knew all the cops who worked the precinct by name.”
    She smiled then, but only a little.
    “One of the cops suggested I join the force. He said that way I could spend the same amount of time downtown and be paid for it. So I joined the Police Academy.”
    She rested her head on my shoulder. She ran her fingertips lightly over my chest. “Why didn’t you stay in New York? Why come back here?”
    I thought about telling her the rest, but I wasn’t ready to talk about Peter. Not yet. I wasn’t ready to talk about that night, though I remembered it vividly. I never had such a strong memory before, or since. The leering way the shadows looked, the sour smell of the place where Peter had died.
    Peter and I had been doing a routine search for possession in a project in downtown Brooklyn. He went downstairs and I went up. It was our usual pattern. But then something happened. Peter didn’t respond to his radio. I knew something was wrong long before I sensed any danger. I knew Peter had been overcome. I just didn’t understand why I hadn’t heard any struggles or gunshots, the usual indicators.
    I rushed to the basement. And that was when I found them, the group of occultists. They were holding some kind of ceremony and Peter had either interrupted it or they had been waiting for him. I never really learned the truth. They had bound and gagged Peter. Their butchery had been fast and efficient, almost surgical, maybe even painless. I don’t know. I don’t want to know. In the short ten minutes we’d been separated, the occultists had removed all of Peter’s reproductive organs, his liver, and his kidneys. They had divided those organs into pieces for their ceremony and had begun ritually consuming them. They were working on his stomach and intestines, working their way up his body, when I found them.
    They immediately scattered but I chose not to pursue them. I stayed with Peter instead and called the paramedics. He was still alive when they arrived, though he died en route to the hospital of his wounds. I never learned the truth of why it had happened, or what the people in the basement were trying to do, though I knew my father was behind it somehow. He had to be. Maybe it was a test and I had failed. Maybe it was just plain malice. I just don’t know.
    “I just wanted to return home, I guess,” I told Vivian. That sounded sensible and normal. “And by then, I was very good friends with Morgana. We’d talked about opening an occult shop together.”
    Naturally, Vivian wanted to know who Morgana was. Or rather, who she was to me.
    I told her. “My spiritual adviser. My friend. And a damned good witch. Though we met by accident. I busted her for possession