The Devil You Know by Mike Carey Page B

down in New York. Morgana is a very good herbalist, though she sometimes requires a little something . . . illegal.” I showed her the case of opium cigarettes I keep in my tableside drawer. “Morgana makes them. They’re excellent for visions.”
    “You are very bad,” she said with a smile. She wanted to try one, so I lit it for her. She leaned against me and closed her eyes as she chased the dragon, and I learned that Vivian was a very frustrated ex-smoker.
    “Don’t bother torturing yourself,” I told her. “The cigarettes won’t kill you, believe me. I’ve been chain-smoking since I was nine years old and there’s absolutely nothing wrong with my physiology. I stopped going for checkups in my mid-thirties. The doctors were starting to get suspicious. They were afraid I might be an alien or something. I couldn’t bring myself to explain to them that I was a Lucifer.” I took the smoke from her, sucked in the soothing cold smoke, and blew it out my nose. Then I gave it back to her.
    “I don’t understand,” she said.
    “My father told me, not very long ago, that there is not one Lucifer, but several. Like a royal bloodline. The original was my grandfather. My father inherited the position from him in the Twelfth Century and has held the position for about eight hundred years now. Each of the Lucifers is a Man of Sin, but each has a sin that is unique to him, a signature sin, so to speak. My grandfather’s sin was vanity and pride, and because of it there has been enormous dissidence and disobedience to God on earth. My father’s sin is war. He has generated slaughter and pestilence for nearly a thousand years.”
    She looked at me seriously, her eyes wide. “What’s your sin?”
    “I don’t know. That’s for me to discover. Cigarettes, maybe.”
    She didn’t laugh. She wriggled around a little before settling against me, her head on my shoulder. I could tell that she trusted me, despite all the crazy shit I was heaping upon her. “What happens when you discover your sin, Nick?”
    It took me a moment to answer. “I . . . Ascend. Or Descend, depending on how you look at things. It means I get an all-expense paid trip to hell.”
    She turned and leaned over me, placing her hands on my chest. “You become the Devil.”
    I watched her carefully. She believed me. I realized that. I also realized she was probably scared out of her mind. “Do you want to leave now?” I asked. “I’ll drive you home, if you want. I know none of this is normal . . . ” I reached up and gathered her hair in my hand. It was soft and almost fey. She was such a pretty girl. Perhaps I had revealed too much. She couldn’t want to stay with me. It wasn’t normal. But if she left, I felt like I would die inside. Ridiculous, but true.
    Slowly she shook her head. “I’m not afraid of you, Nick.” She leaned down and kissed me. It was a gentle kiss compared to the violence we had shared earlier. “I’m not normal either,” she said as she climbed on top of me. She leaned down, her long red hair tenting us in together, and kissed my mouth and chin and throat. Her piercings rubbed deliciously against my chest. It made me groan. I slid my hands around her ribs and jerked her against me.
    Of course I was hard again. It goes without saying. I had this magnificently beautiful and perverted redhead sitting on me. It was impossible not to be. She found me and stroked me. I tried to draw her down upon my erection but she held herself apart.
    “Could I be a witch?” she asked, her eyes glimmering. “Could I be strong like you?”
    I smiled at that. I wasn’t feeling very strong at the moment. Quite the opposite.
    “Could you teach me, Nick?”
    “What do you want to learn?”
    She thought about that as she stroked me softly. She could be incredibly tender when she wanted to be. “What kind of things do you think I’d be good at?”
    I said it before I even thought about it. “Sex magic.”
    “Could you teach me sex