Up Jumps the Devil (17 page)

Then he smelled disinfectant atop disease, and remembered.

In a hospital. In Dayton, Ohio. He'd been shot.

He should have healed by now, but he hadn't. Not the way he used to, the way he should.

His night-ready eyes discovered Jenna Steele asleep across two chairs, nearby. Moonlight fell across her shoulders and chest, and he saw that she had made herself comfortable under a thin blanket. Shirt unbuttoned, bra hanging from an IV pole.

The Devil looked at her with an affectionate glow in his eye. The public rarely saw her like this. They wanted her badly behaved, mean, and selfish, and that's what the cameras fed them. The public didn't need to know that in her tiny private life, she was … nice. Something between a lover and a big sister.

They didn't understand her, he thought, any better than they understood him.

Most people speculated that Jenna Steele and John Scratch were just pretending to be in love. A media affair, cooked up in committee and scripted by writers. These people were right about the committee and the writers, but they were wrong about Jenna Steele. Jenna loved John for real. She dreaded the day the studio would suggest it was time for them to break up, which they would, if people stopped following them online and on the news.

John Scratch did
not
love Jenna Steele.

When the Devil felt love, he felt it the way the winter woods feels summer coming. After ages of moving among these small, short-lived creatures, he still couldn't focus on them with a full heart. They weren't substantial enough. And they didn't last.

They weren't Arden.

The best he could manage, the closest he could come to really loving a mortal, was an inflated puppy love, a quick-burning affection.

The Devil enjoyed the schizophrenic mix of Jenna's secret, gentle side and her public bad-girl avatar. He liked the way she turned to butter whenever he growled deep in his chest. His affection for her was very real.

Which made what he had to do more painful.

JENNA STEELE AWAKENED
on her makeshift bed. She saw the Devil sitting up, looking at her.

“Listen,” he said.

“You should go to sleep,” she said.

“We can't see each other anymore.”

“Shhhhhhh,” she began, stroking his arm, then snatched her hand away.

“What?”

He gave her a long, sympathetic look. He began to hope she would take it well, behave with dignity.

He decided to just sit quietly and wait. He wouldn't tell her he was in love with someone else.

Jenna's eyes flashed. She lurched forward with a sob and yanked all the tubes out of his arm.

“Son of a bitch!”
she rasped.

Her hand darted under the sheets and ripped out his catheter.

The Devil's eyes bulged.

She seemed to remember something. Yanked her phone out of her hip pocket, keyed “video,” and set it on the counter, facing the bed.

Then she did something guaranteed to keep fans glued to her Web site.

She took a little handgun out of her purse and shot him—
BANG!
—in the belly.

It was awful, but a lot of multimedia fans said it was awful in a
beautiful
way.

The video was fuzzy and dark, but that only made it more dramatic. The phone rested on its side, so Jenna Steele (fashionably edgy in a tiny black skirt, black athletic leggings, and schoolgirl shoes, blouse unbuttoned, bra abandoned) seemed to defy gravity as she fled the room, swallowed by the bright square of the door.

Then came the unsettling last minute of the clip, where the camera autofocused until the figure on the bed became visible.

John Scratch, with his glowing eyes.

They watched him spit blood and chuckle, and then make a pained face.

They read his lips when he shouted “Nurse!” and almost exploded with coughing.

They could
not
read his mind, which was thinking that when girls who are mean in public are privately, secretly
nice
, the nice part is secretly bullshit.

New Jersey, 1777

THE WAR WOULD BE OVER
by midnight.

America would be over. The British were coming, and they would crush her. The Devil didn't see any way around it.

The wind came howling up the Assunpink Creek. It moaned like a ghost through the streets of Trenton, and burst across the Continental troops so hard they couldn't help but take it personally.

The Devil pulled his cloak up higher.

They had crossed the Delaware and taken Trenton. Huzzah!

They were heroes. Huzzah!

They were going to be the shortest-lived heroes in history.

Because they hadn't fought the whole British army, here, the day after Christmas. They'd only captured a lot of badly surprised Hessians. Now the main force was coming. They would come through Trenton and across the creek, and drive them into the river.

The moon, nearly full, cast a blue halo. That meant ice in the air. The muddy roads would freeze. They could move up more cannon then, but they'd have to move fast.

The Devil turned, and trudged up the street toward General Washington's headquarters.

THEY HAD MET
just weeks earlier, in Pennsylvania. There was this rebellious new country being formed, and so much of it seemed to depend on this one man.

Washington.

It was like Roman times, with Julius or Augustus or Constantine, guys with heroic faces who said heroic things, and inspired others to do the same. Washington would have made a fantastic Roman.

Except he was getting his ass kicked, retreating from Long Island, White Plains, and Fort Washington. Congress and the country began to wonder if their general wasn't too timid. The Devil wondered, too. He had followed the Continental Army when it fled New York, and eventually caught up with the general in the woods.

Washington dismounted to have a pee on the western flank of an oak, and the Devil leaned against the opposite side.

“You need help,” said the Devil.

Washington peered around the tree.

“Knew you'd show up sooner or later,” he said. “Begone!”

“A little help,” said the Devil, “wouldn't necessarily cost you your soul.”

“It's the Nation's soul I'm concerned with,” said Washington, “and in whose name I decline.”

The Devil waited. Washington was a practical man with a large bladder. A little time to think served him well.

“Of course,” he said, appearing around the tree, buttoning up, “if the Nation is smashed between here and Princeton, the condition of its soul will be moot.”

“Great things grow from imperfect roots,” said the Devil.

Washington rode thoughtfully back to camp, doing what he did best: looking great on his horse.

THE DEVIL KNOCKED
at Washington's door, and stepped inside, out of the wind.

Washington looked over his shoulder. Just a flash of his cobalt eyes.

“Glass of Madeira?” he asked.

The Devil nodded, and Washington poured.

“I haven't decided,” said the general.

“Be more aggressive. We look weak.”

“We
are
weak. Half of our army is in prison ships.”

“Use what you have, attack like a wild animal,” advised the Devil.

“No. I shall employ strategy.”

The Devil almost hit him with a chair.

DOWN BY THE CREEK
, the army huddled, and watched the dark. Watched the empty streets, and listened for boots, for hooves. At headquarters, reports came galloping in: American troops had traded shots with the British, not far up the road. American snipers had fired into the British as they marched in columns, but the British fired back and kept coming. As many as the stars.

With the British less than a mile out, Washington was still frowning over his maps.

“The troops will fall back through Trenton,” he explained.

No shit, thought the Devil. They were already doing that. They could hear the first shots popping between houses.

“They'll fall back across the Assunpink Bridge,” said Washington, “and form up on this side.”

“And then what?”

“We'll let them have it.”

But his eyes and voice were tired. The Devil sensed him wondering what the British would do with him, when he was captured. Hang him, most likely.

Fuck, thought the Devil. Without waiting to be dismissed, he turned and stomped out into the cold. He found his horse and raced toward the creek.

The clouds were low, and lit from behind by the gibbous moon. Muzzle flashes reflected against the clouds and windows. Cannon fire echoed against shops and garden walls.

The British weren't coming. They were here.

THE DEVIL RODE
through waves of fleeing townspeople, and reached the creek just as the fighting began.

American soldiers came tumbling back across the bridge, struggling across the creek. The bridge became a deadly bottleneck, full of screaming and panic.

The Devil dismounted, meaning to shout those men into good order, but suddenly they shaped up. Formed ranks. Quit pushing, even though they were being shot at from behind.

Washington had arrived.

He sat his horse to one side of the bridge, aloof and regal. The Devil saw the effort each man made to touch Washington's boot, or saddle, or horse.

That
, the Devil knew, was why the birth of the new Nation depended so much on this man. Now that they had seen him, had touched him, the Americans would fight better.

The British marched out of the dark, poured out of the Trenton streets.

Bayonets flashed.

Drums pounded, lively.

There were so many!

Even the Devil felt sick.

A few patriots were caught on the far side of the creek. They gave up trying to reach the bridge, and turned to face the enemy. They fired and vanished, swallowed by the red tide. Great sheets of bullets poured across the bridge in all directions and suddenly there was no safe place anywhere. The ground underfoot became slippery with blood.

BATTLE CHANGED
the Devil.

He would not remember scrambling and slipping down to the creek, or fighting his way up the opposite bank, or seizing a cannon at the foot of the bridge. He wouldn't remember coming back across the bridge on all fours, torn and bleeding.

He would vaguely recall seeing Washington on his horse, still just sitting there, as if wanting America to end with dignity, if not victory.

So the Devil fought his way to Washington, that timid bastard, and bit him on the leg.

Washington swore and gave him a kick. The Devil hit the ground, found a musket, and turned his attention elsewhere, sensing, in his battle-fogged brain, that he had accomplished something wonderful and necessary.

THE RED UNIFORMS
began to charge across the bridge.

They were coming across, and no one could stop them.

Still, the patriots stayed in place, shooting, and getting shot. Their eyes witnessed things they would try to forget, if they weren't killed. The moon cast a cold and morbid light on it all, and made it worse, if that were possible. Still they stayed. America might die that night, but it would die fighting.

And then something changed.

“Washington!” the men began to shout, elbowing one another.

Something had gotten into the general.

He surged on his horse to the nearest cannon, and made them point it straight down into the creek, straight down at the struggling red faces of the enemy. And made them fire.

Made other cannon fire, just the same. The commands he gave came in a strained and angry voice, as if it were all he could do not to hurl his very important self down upon the redcoats.

“Give them canister!” he howled.

Canister meant firing a can full of tiny metal balls. It turned the cannon into a giant shotgun. Firing canister was a really nasty thing to do, even in battle. Not a gentlemanly order. But they didn't dare refuse him.

He moved them forward. He made them crowd the upper bank and fire volley after volley, until the creek choked on the dead. The bridge piled high. The battle became a horror show.

But it was an American horror show.

AFTER A TIME
the fire thinned.

The British stopped coming. They had seen battles before, most of them. But they'd never seen men do to other men what those Americans had done to them.

The Devil wouldn't remember anything but flashes and echoes, faint and dreamy.

When soldiers remembered, they would groan in their sleep.