The Devil Dances Read Online Free PDF Page A

bathroom mirror this morning. My blond hair was tousled—not in that sexy, sleepy way you hear about in romance novels, but like I’d been tossing and turning all night—and there were dark, unhealthy crescents under my storm grey eyes. I looked like some nasty James Bond villain. Before I was going anywhere today, I needed a shower, shave, and my monthly haircut. I wondered idly if Freddie, down at the barber shop on the corner, had an opening in his schedule this morning.
    With V8 in hand, Morgana came around and slapped me on the ass before picking up her reading glasses and glancing over the newspaper I’d pulled apart on the counter. “Rough night?”
    “I didn’t get much sleep.”
    “You were talking in your sleep.” She would know, seeing how we shared a bed.
    “Was I? What was I saying?”
    “I don’t know, Nick. It wasn’t English.”
    “Spanish?” That was the only other language I knew fluently from working my beat down in New York. I’d covered a lot of Spanish Harlem back in the day.
    She shook her head. “It wasn’t a human language.”
    That gave me a start. “Not Divine?” That was the language of the angels.
    “I can’t say. I don’t think I’ve ever heard Divine spoken. What does it sound like?”
    “Nails on a chalkboard, mostly.”
    “Yeah, okay. You were speaking Divine.”
    I set my mug of tea down with a clunk on the counter. “Well, that’s just fucking great.”
    Morgana waited patiently for me to elaborate, but I wasn’t feeling much into explanations this morning. Speaking Divine, a language I’d never been trained to use, but was using anyway, wasn’t exactly a
problem
so much as a
symptom
, one my father had warned me about some time ago. He’d said that the closer I came to learning what my cardinal sin was—the sin that defined me as the Man of Sin, and the Inheritor of my father’s place in Hell—the stronger my power would become. The stronger my power was, the closer I was to Ascension. You can see where this is going.
    Morgana put a hand on my shoulder and rubbed it with her customary concern. “You all right, Nick?”
    I straightened up and gave her my cheekiest smile. “Right as rain.” I even took her hand and kissed the knuckles in a courtly way.
    She didn’t look convinced, but at least she didn’t ask me why I’d gotten up with the birds this morning when I wasn’t due to take the shop until noon, or why I was leaving the apartment in such a sour mood.

    Mary Jo Pearl lived down in what Blackwater old-timers called “Old Town,” which was at the end of town directly opposite the newer developments. Originally chock full of old, Victorian homes with decorative ginger breading, front porch swings, and old coach houses, a particularly vicious fire in the late 1950’s had wiped out many of the buildings. Those homes were replaced by more modern (and generically ugly) saltboxes sporting shaker shingles and now out-of-date aluminum siding, but there was still plenty of charm to the old place.
    I drove down snaky Willow Drive, which ran right through the heart of Old Town, glancing over the disjointed mix of architecture, the banners across the street announcing fairs or parades—Old Town was huge on Norman Rockwell-style parades in the summer—and front yards full of sugared-up kids and hyperactive dogs protectively tucked behind chain link fences.
    The middle class lived here, with a smattering of lower class to make it just a little less shiny, so the streets weren’t as clean or oft-repaired as they were in the developments, and the Dodge seemed to find every pothole. Scattered across lawns were screened trampolines, small summer bouncy houses, and those ugly plastic playhouses that turned grungy in the elements. It was August, so there were kids everywhere, riding over the cracked sidewalks on bikes and bouncing basketballs haphazardly into the streets.
    It was twenty miles an hour in the ‘burbs, but the guy in the big blue Escalade in