Davy snorted. “Aye, so ye’re a man of wealth an’ taste, is that right?”
“Just so.” A moment later, Katie planted the second glass in front of Davy, gave him a brittle smile, and retreated to the opposite end of the bar without pausing to extract credit from the stranger, who nodded and raised his jar: “To your good fortune.”
“Heh.” Davy chugged back a third of his glass. It was unusually bitter, with a slight sulphurous edge to it: “That’s a new barrel.”
“Only the best for my friends.”
Davy sneaked an irritated glance at the stranger. “Right. Ah ken ye want tae talk, ye dinnae need tae take the pish.”
“I’m sorry.” The stranger held his gaze, looking slightly perplexed. “It’s just that I’ve spent too long in America recently. Most of them believe in me. A bit of good old-fashioned scepticism is refreshing once in a while.”
Davy snorted. “Dae Ah look like a god-botherer tae ye? Yer amang civilized folk here, nae free-kirk numpties’d show their noses in a pub.”
“So I see.” The stranger relaxed slightly. “Seen Morag and the boys lately, have you?”
Now a strange thing happened, because as the cold fury took him, and a monstrous roaring filled his ears, and he reached for the stranger’s throat, he seemed to hear Morag’s voice shouting, Davy, don’t! And to his surprise, a moment of timely sanity came crashing down on him, a sense that Devil or no, if he laid hands on this fucker he really would be damned, somehow. It might just have been the hypothalamic implant that the sheriff had added to the list of his parole requirements working its arcane magic on his brain chemistry, but it certainly felt like a drenching, cold-sweat sense of immanence, and not in a good way. So as the raging impulse to glass the cunt died away, Davy found himself contemplating his own raised fists in perplexity, the crude blue tattoos of LOVE and HATE standing out on his knuckles like doorposts framing the prison gateway of his life.
“Who telt ye aboot them,” he demanded hoarsely.
“Cigarette?” The stranger, who had sat perfectly still while Davy wound up to punch his ticket, raised the chiselled eyebrow again.
“Ya bas.” But Davy’s hand went to his pocket automatically, and he found himself passing a filter-tip to the stranger rather than ramming a red-hot ember in his eye.
“Thank you.” The stranger took the unlit cigarette, put it straight between his lips, and inhaled deeply. “Nobody needed to tell me about them,” he continued, slowly dribbling smoke from both nostrils.
Davy slumped defensively on his bar stool. “When ye wis askin’ aboot Morag and the bairns, Ah figured ye wis fuckin’ wi’ ma heid.” But knowing that there was a perfectly reasonable supernatural explanation somehow made it all right. Ye cannae blame Auld Nick for pushin’ yer buttons. Davy reached out for his glass again: “’Scuse me. Ah didnae think ye existed.”
“Feel free to take your time.” The stranger smiled faintly. “I find atheists refreshing, but it does take a little longer than usual to get down to business.”
“Aye, weel, concedin’ for the moment that ye are the deil, Ah dinnae ken whit ye want wi’ the likes o’ me.” Davy cradled his beer protectively.
“Ah’m naebody.” He shivered in the sudden draught as one of the students—leaving—pushed through the curtain, admitting a flurry of late-May snowflakes.
“So? You may be nobody, but your lucky number just came up.” The stranger smiled devilishly. “Did you never think you’d win the Lottery?”
“Aye, weel, if hauf the stories they tell about ye are true, Ah’d rather it wis the ticket, ye ken? Or are ye gonnae say ye’ve been stitched up by the kirk?”
“Something like that.” The Devil nodded sagely. “Look, you’re not stupid, so I’m not going to bullshit you. What it is, is I’m not the only one of me working this circuit. I’ve got a quota to meet, but there aren’t enough politicians and captains of industry to go around, and anyway, they’re boring. All they ever want is money, power, or good, hot, kinky sex without any comebacks from their constituents. Poor folks are so much more creative in their desperation, don’t you think? And so much more likely to believe in the Rules, too.”
“The Rules?” Davy found himself staring at his companion in perplexity. “Nae the Law, right?”
“Do as thou wilt shall be all of the Law,” quoth the Devil, then he paused as if he’d tasted something unpleasant.