The Devil You Know Read Online Free PDF Page B

me. “Hello, my Lord, have you returned to pay the piper?”
    “I don’t have to pay you for your services, Brownie,” I reminded him. “You live to serve me, remember?”
    “I serve you now. But one day I will serve my Lord’s purposes no longer.” He smiled down at me, a secret smile full of wisdom and sadness, perhaps malice. It’s hard to tell with fauns. “What need have you with me when you will one day have the world at your feet?”
    “The world is overrated. I shall always need my Brownie.”
    “You have a sweet tongue, Little Horn. Perhaps you will lend it to me. I should like to suck it like a honeycomb.” He landed almost soundlessly on his hooves, without even disturbing the bough of the tree he’d been perched in. He glared at me, challenging me to run. Faun 101: It’s very important you never run from a faun after one reveals itself to you. Fauns love a good chase through the woods. It whets their appetite.
    Brownswick is huge and lank. He towers over even me, which is saying a lot. He has thick, muscular elken legs and hooves sharp enough to rip human flesh from bone. I found myself staring at his chest rather than his face, where some Greek pipes hung from a rope of rose vines twined around his neck. His face is young and beautiful, deceptively innocent, the face of a stud on the front cover of a romance novel. The last time I had seen him, he had been in velvet, with short, blunt antlers. Those had grown into an enormous, sprawling rack of sharp, ebony antlers big enough to lift a whole man into the air. More rose vines were entangled in them, with some bees and butterflies flitting about. Very prosaic until you saw the size of his wang. Let’s just say, fauns represent the dark side of nature. Deer found ripped apart in these woods are not always the victim of flesh-eating predators. His fur was darker, courser, and his musk was enough to give me a migraine headache. I was fairly certain he was in full stag.
    I lit a cigarette to cut the smell and to keep him at bay with the smoke. A faun in stag is not the safest thing to be around. They will rut with literally anything . Thankfully, they also hate all things manmade, cigarettes being on the top of their list. See, smoking does have its benefits.
    “The son of perdition seeks the son of the forest.” Brownswick made a tutting noise of disapproval. He pissed against the side of the tree I was leaning on. “Yet you do not visit me in idleness. This makes me sad, my Lord.”
    I shifted away from the faun piss, checking to make certain Brownie hadn’t gotten any on my coat. “I’m wondering if you’ve seen a girl in the forest. I’m looking for her.”
    “Is she beautiful, this maiden you’ve lost?”
    I uncrumpled the map I’d stuck in my coat pocket. On the backside the police department had photocopied a picture of Cassandra Berger for the search party. Underneath the picture were her stats. I showed Brownswick the picture. “She’s five years old. Have you seen her?”
    Brownswick looked the picture over with very little interest, then turned his head and whuffed like a horse at my clothes. He smiled. “My Lord, you have been with a female of your own kind!” he announced with enormous satisfaction. “Will you be rutting with her?”
    Well, that proved what Vivian was, as if I had any doubts. Brownswick would know. I looked up at the faun who was practically looming over me, glaring at me in his usual feral way. His tail twitched, and I wondered what was going through his little faun brain, not that I wanted to know. “I have no idea what I’ll be doing with her, Brownie.”
    “I know.” Brownswick grinned. He had huge, faintly sharp teeth. “I see the future sometimes in the still waters. She will be your Kryptonite, my Lord.”
    “You need to stop eavesdropping on campers, Brownie,” I said. “Your slang is terrible.”
    “That does not make it untrue.”
    “What about the little girl?”
    “The girl is of no