Free The Devil You Know by Mike Carey Page A

decade. No, I don’t think there are many.”
    She looked up at me from beneath her furrowed brows. “Are we . . . normal?”
    “In what way?”
    “I mean . . . are we like humans? Do we function like human beings?”
    “Yes and no. Mostly yes.”
    “We don’t do anything weird?”
    “Such as?”
    “I don’t know. Shapeshift. Drink blood.”
    I smirked at her sincerity. “No. Not to my knowledge. Except on the full moon.”
    She looked horrified.
    “I’m joking,” I said.
    She let her breath out in relief. “So I could live normally? I could have a family?”
    “I really don’t know, Vivian,” I said in all honesty. I had no idea if we were “normal” in any biological sense. I slept. I ate. I had never been sick, but that might have just been me, not me being a daemon. I could be injured on both a physical and spiritual level. But I had never fathered a child, though there had been ample opportunities for that. Perhaps we daemons could not. There was no one for me to ask these questions of. I had been on my own since I was four years old. I had had to learn everything the hard way.
    Vivian took a deep breath and let it out, like she’d come to a momentous decision. “Could we be together tonight?” she asked, then paused. She looked up at me curiously, nervously. She was terrified, I realized, terrified I would send her away. And so horny she couldn’t hold still. “I’ve never been with another daemon . . . one of my own . . . species.”
    I smiled at that. I thought of some prosaic things to say. But what came out of my mouth was, “I’ve wanted you since the first day I saw you, Vivian. So yes, we can be together. If it’s what you want.”
    She brightened considerably. She leaned into me and I captured her face. I stroked my thumbs along her cheeks. I leaned down—I was too tall and she too short—and slanted my mouth against hers. I’d meant it to be a soft, exploratory kiss. The first kiss. I’d wanted to be gentle with her. I didn’t want to spook her. But the moment I tasted all that soft wetness inside her mouth her body responded like it had been made only for me. She gripped me at the hips and jerked me against her. Her aggression both surprised and thrilled me. I cupped the back of her head to hold her in place while I slid my tongue deep inside her mouth. I kissed her hard, a bruising kiss. I fucked her mouth with my tongue. I slid my hands up her sides, under her arms, and finally palmed the soft mounds of her breasts through the thin shirt. I wondered if I was going too fast, frightening her, but she gripped my ass, urging me on.
    I tried to stop kissing her, to ask her if this was really what she wanted. She couldn’t be more than twenty years old, a child really. I was forty-four. The situation was ridiculous and inappropriate. But she kept her hands where they were, holding me in place so she could kiss and taste me. “Viv . . . ” I began, but she hushed me, kissed me silent. Her kiss was both tender and demanding, and her mouth tasted like cinnamon, fire.
    She was delicious, all I wanted, everything I had been waiting for. I moved my mouth to her throat and she tilted her head back for me, a long white column against a wash of burning crimson hair. I loved her then, I think. The way she trusted me enough to give me her throat. I worked my way down to the top button of her shirt. Again, I stopped, waiting with my heart thudding in my throat to see if she would protest while the ache inside of me turned into an angry, primal pain.
    For the first time in my life—the only time—I had to make a concentrated effort not to force myself upon another human being. If she turned me away now, I wasn’t sure what would happen. I didn’t even want to consider it.
    She must have known. She must have felt it. She brought her hand to the front of my body and touched me through my jeans. I groaned and bit the side of her pretty neck. Not a hard bite—I did not even break the