The Devil You Know by Mike Carey Read Free Book Online Page A

who had his hand in the ass-pocket of her jeans, said, “You a real magician?”
    “Criss Angel is a magician. I’m a witch.”
    “A real witch?” The kid challenging me smiled slyly, crookedly. “If you were a real witch you’d know I’d taken something from your shop.”
    “The blue crystal in your back pocket,” I told him. I smiled and narrowed my eyes at him until he shirked. I can do the whole Prince of Darkness thing when I need to. “And if you don’t pay for it, the penis in your pants—which, by the way, you stuff out with a sock—will shrink even more.”
    He paid for it.

    By nine I realized I hadn’t eaten all day. It was something that had a tendency to get away from me when I got busy.
    I’d been like that when I did the beat in Brooklyn. It was usually Peter who reminded me to eat. I swear he could have bought stock in Dunkin’ Donuts. I closed the shop for half an hour and walked down the street to Sonic. I ordered two bacon double cheeseburgers, large fries and a monster Mountain Dew to get me through the rest of the night. All that mountain climbing had given me a bit of an appetite, I had to admit. On the way over I’d given brief thought to dropping in Molly’s Steakhouse, but they didn’t have take-out, and I didn’t think I’d be able to pull that off without looking like a stalker. So I carried my bag of greasy heart attacks down the street, stopped in Dollar General to buy a new pack of peanut M&M’s, then headed back to the shop. Things generally slowed down during suppertime, so I doubted I’d missed any customers.
    I retrieved the books that Morgana had marked for me and settled on a stool behind the counter, my dinner in one hand and some not-so-light reading in the other while a few customers browsed the shop, looking at mood rings and handmade Shawnee beaded necklaces. None looked particularly enthusiastic, there to kill time until their shift started in one of the many twenty-four hour shops down on The Strip, I knew.
    Morgana’s book made for interesting reading. The handmade angel dolls were likely effigies used in sympathetic magic, similar to corn poppets in folk magic, or power objects used in Haitian Vodou. The image was representative. But since they were angels , I couldn’t imagine what they represented aside from actual angels, and the book had nothing to say about that. The idea bothered me. Angels were a uniquely Christian concept not found in those religions. Vodou, mountain conjuring and other pagan religions recognized upper and lower deities. Seldom were they human-shaped or winged.
    And there was one other problem with the dolls. In no Christian religion—no religion at all—could a mortal human being hold dominion over an angel. The only thing that could conjure an angel was another angel, so the whole idea was ludicrous.
    An old man stepped up to the counter and handed me the third tract of the night. He said in a somber voice, obviously used to being heard, “Young man, have you accepted Jesus Christ as your personal Lord and Savior?”
    “I don’t think anything can save me, to be honest,” I said without looking up from the book.
    “You are not beyond salvation. None of us are.”
    “You might be surprised,” I told him, not that he believed me. They never do. If I became a priest and lived in absolute consecrated piety for the rest of my life, I would still die and go to hell. There was no question of that. I knew there was a place set aside just for me.
    The front of the tract he’d given me had a picture of badly drawn angels descending a long ladder from Heaven to the earth. Beneath them lay a small suburban house, presumably the house they were protecting from evil things like me. It was then I decided I had to go back to the Berger house and take a look around those woods.
    After the old man left, I had one last customer before I was ready to close up shop for the night. A young woman stepped in with bright bottle-red hair. I