by Mike Carey
Juliet scowled. ‘Could have raised one of the other powers against me? No, Castor. Not without me noticing. I think . . .’ She gave a sudden shrug. It looked almost involuntary, as though she was shaking off some unwelcome touch. ‘It’s my nature,’ she said, her tone tight. ‘There are limits to how far you can change yourself. I’ve come to the end of an arc, Castor, and I’m swinging back.’
She was staring at me, and I realised suddenly that her eyes were back to their usual black on black. The red fires had died for the time being. But there was no mistaking the rigid tension in her posture: she was fighting her own instincts, guarding the borders of rationality from one second to the next.
‘Go wait in the kitchen,’ I suggested. ‘Shut the door. Turn the radio on. Make yourself a coffee.’
Juliet considered this, nodded and retreated. ‘Decaf!’ I shouted, as the door closed on her.
Sue was sitting on the living-room sofa, the wreckage of the chair scattered across the carpet a few feet away from her like debris from an explosion. The TV set had had its screen staved in too, and was lying on its side in the corner of the room. A ragged hole in the plaster above it showed how it had got there, and roughly how fast it had been travelling.
Sue rose to greet us as we entered, saying hello to me and then shifting her gaze enquiringly to Trudie in a way that invited me to make introductions. I’d been afraid we might find her in shock, but there was a desolate calm about her. She looked like someone who’s finally let go of the last shred of hope, and is just beginning to discover the terrible relief that despair brings.
‘You should pack some things,’ I said. ‘Clothes. Toiletries. Anything you can’t do without. We don’t know how long it will take to sort this.’
‘Sort it?’ Sue gave me a pitying look. ‘You can’t, Felix. You can’t sort it. Whatever she felt for me . . . it’s gone. I don’t even know her.’
‘Me neither,’ I agreed. ‘But it’s happened so suddenly, Sue. Maybe it’s a sickness. Or something that just happens to demons when they get to a certain age. What we’re doing now . . . it’s not forever. It’s damage limitation until we can work out something better.’
Sue wasn’t convinced or consoled, but Trudie stepped in at this point and took her away upstairs to help her through the process of packing. I was left alone in the living room, surveying the destruction. Sue had lived here all her life: with her mother, until her mother died, then alone, and finally with her demon lover. Maybe I should have suggested that Juliet be the one to go, but then when her self-control evaporated again she’d probably head straight back here and reclaim the things that were hers – including Sue. This way was better.
The room stank of her anger, and Sue’s fear. Having a death-sense makes me sensitive to emotional resonances too, and when they’re strong and recent they can be overpowering. My own heart rate started to climb, riding a second-hand adrenalin rush.
I retreated into the hall just as Sue and Trudie came down the stairs. Trudie was carrying a suitcase, Sue a small flight bag.
‘Everything?’ I asked.
Sue nodded, her face expressionless.
‘Go ahead and wait in the cab,’ I said to Trudie. ‘I’ll be right there.’
I watched them down the drive, then tapped lightly on the door of the kitchen. Juliet opened it instantly. I suspected she’d just been standing there, on the other side of the door, waiting for the coast to clear, waiting for the woman she’d lived with for more than a year to depart.
‘She’s gone,’ I said.
Juliet nodded. She already knew that.
‘Would you rather not know where she is?’ I asked her. ‘I was going to take her to Pen’s, but I could find a hotel, if . . .’ I let the sentence hang. If you’re so afraid of losing control that she’d be safer in hiding, was the implication.
‘Let her be among friends,’ Juliet said, her voice a throaty murmur. ‘I won’t . . . I don’t believe I’ll seek her out. The wards at your house are strong. And you’re there, which is some protection – not because of the whistle but because you’re such a slippery little bastard.’
‘Okay,’ I said. On another occasion I would have thanked her for the compliment, but right then didn’t feel like the time. ‘I’m still tied up with this other stuff. With Asmodeus. He’s cooking something up, and I really need to find him before it comes to the boil. You’re sure you won’t . . . ?’
She shook her head emphatically. ‘You don’t need me at your back right now. Half the time I’d be at your throat instead.’
‘And parts south,’ I acknowledged. ‘Yeah. You’re probably right. But when it’s done . . . we’ll talk.’
‘Castor.’
I’d got to the door. I paused with my hand on the latch and turned back. She was holding something out to me. By reflex, I took it. A small sheaf of fifty-pound notes, the four I’d given to her two days ago, when I’d paid her to keep watch over Pen.
‘You’re right,’ Juliet said. ‘She’s more than a friend. I don’t want her to be hurt. I need you – I’m employing you – to make sure that doesn’t happen.’
‘I’ll do that without the money,’ I said.
‘Do it with the money. Friendship is hard for me to understand or to believe in right now. Bargains I understand. Say yes.’
‘Yes.’
‘Bind yourself to it.’
‘I bind myself to it. I won’t let her get hurt.’
‘Good then. Go away.’
I hesitated. ‘What will you do?’ I asked.
She made another of those abrupt movements, like a shrug that was close to getting out of control. ‘I don’t know,’ she said. Her voice was cold and flat, with none of its usual thrilling harmonics. ‘I might give up on this experiment. Go home.’
I felt an unnerving shifting in my stomach. It wasn’t pleasant hearing Asmodeus’ words echoed so closely by Juliet.
‘Don’t do that without talking to me first,’ I said.
She shot me a bleak hard stare. ‘Be careful what you wish for,’ she growled.
14
Despite what she’d said the night before about going hunting on her own account, Pen was home when we arrived, and once I’d explained the situation, she rolled with the punch of having a new tenant landed on her.
‘We’ve got lots of empty rooms,’ she said to Sue, taking the little sheaf of fifties from me without comment. ‘Come and find one you like, and we’ll open the windows and air it out a bit.’
She spirited Sue away into the remote fastnesses of the house – the no-man’s-land between her basement and my attic, where she scarcely ever ventured. Like Sue, she was living on in the house where her mother had lived. In fact, she could boast three generations of Bruckners who’d all lived and (with one exception) died on this soil. Maybe that would give the two of them something to talk about.
Judging by the look on Trudie’s face, we had something to talk about too, and I knew what it was before she spoke.
‘That thing is dangerous,’ she said. ‘Probably too dangerous for you to handle yourself. The fact that it’s been playing house with a human being doesn’t change what it is underneath. You should tell Professor Mulbridge about what’s happening here.’
‘Juliet isn’t a thing,’ I said. I helped myself to a large brandy from a bottle on Pen’s sideboard, then realised what I was doing when the glass was halfway to my lips. Tense and frustrated, I set it down again untasted. ‘I count her as a friend.’
Trudie shook her head grimly. ‘Then you’re an idiot,’ she said. ‘Castor, didn’t you learn anything from what happened with Ditko?’
I fought down a surge of anger. Trudie had been a tower of strength out at Royal Oak, but every time I got close to lowering my guard around her her she pulled something like this.
‘Rafi is an old friend who got ram-raided by a demon,’ I said, deadpan. ‘Juliet is a demon I happen to like. I don’t see the analogy.’
Trudie saw the warning in my lo
ok, but she had no intention of backing down. ‘Yes,’ she said, ‘you do. You just don’t want to. If you anthropomorphise these things, you blind-side yourself. You start expecting them to behave like people.’
‘Well, I haven’t given up on you yet,’ I pointed out.
Surprisingly, the sucker punch seemed to hurt her. She affected a laugh but blinked a few times quickly and looked away. I’d been seeing her as Joan of Arc up until then: armoured in righteousness, no time for losers. It was a surprise to find that the armour had weak points.
‘They’re our enemies,’ she said, automatically adjusting the strings around her hands. ‘They torture and they kill and they poison everything they touch. I don’t understand why you don’t see that.’
‘And I don’t understand why you think you already know all the answers,’ I said, but with a lot less heat. ‘Look, the point about Juliet is that she doesn’t always kill when she can, or when she wants to. She didn’t kill me, two years ago. That was what broke the ice between us.’
I could see she wasn’t the slightest bit convinced, and for some reason, now, I wanted to plant the seed of a doubt. ‘Trudie,’ I said, ‘think about this. There’s a difference between Mount Ararat and Noah’s Ark. Have you ever been to Ararat? It’s in Turkey. You can go up there on a day trip, take a picnic. But does that prove that Noah washed up there when the flood waters fell?’
Trudie was giving me a blank stare. ‘You think I’m a literalist?’ she asked incredulously. ‘You think I believe every word of the Bible is infallible truth?’
‘No. I just want you to see the difference. Ararat exists, but it doesn’t prove Noah, or the flood. Now we know that Hell exists too. But it doesn’t necessarily follow that you, or Gwillam, or any other Christian soldier, knows what Hell is. Gossip isn’t fact, and when it comes to Hell, the Bible is just the Hello! magazine of the ancient world.’
This was too much for Trudie. She gave a wordless yell of exasperation. ‘Castor, you don’t have to believe the Bible; you just have to believe the evidence of your own eyes. Ajulutsikael may wear a dress and have a nice arse but it was never a baby or a child or a teenage tearaway or anything you’d see as female. It’s nobody’s daughter, nobody’s mother. It’s a woman the way a stick insect is a stick. No, in the way a praying mantis is a leaf. The moment you forget that—’
She stopped dead in the middle of the sentence, looking past me towards the door of the room. I turned involuntarily, following her gaze. Pen was framed in the doorway. Sue had already taken a few steps into the room, but had then stopped dead, brought up short by Trudie’s wall of words. Now she came forward again.
The colour had drained out of her face; even her lips were white. For a moment she had the ivory pallor of Juliet herself. Her fists were clenched at her sides, her body so rigid it looked like it would ring out with an A sharp if you touched it.
‘I’m sorry,’ Trudie faltered. ‘I didn’t mean . . .’
‘A stick insect.’ Sue’s voice was an ugly, grating thing. ‘A praying mantis. What have you . . . What did you ever touch? Who have you . . . loved and cared for and, and, and lain with, you twisted bitch? How dare you stand there and pass . . . pass judgement on my . . . wife?’
On the last word she launched herself at Trudie in a flying leap. Trudie had six inches on her, and had been trained by the excommunicate sergeant majors of the Anathemata to hold her own against men and demons, but she didn’t fight back as Sue went for her, punching and clawing; she just raised her arms to protect her face.
It was a tricky job to disentangle Sue from Trudie without hurting her, but Pen and I managed, taking an arm each and half-lifting her off the floor to take away her leverage. Trudie took a hurried step back, lowering her en garde.
‘I’ll wait outside,’ she said, and then to Sue, ‘I’m sorry. I’m really sorry.’
She fled out of the room and up the stairs. When the street door slammed behind her, we carefully let go of Sue and stepped away from her. Anger and indignation had done her a power of good. She looked more like herself than she had at any time since I’d found her nursing her black eye three days before.
‘I’m fine,’ she said. ‘I’m calm.’ A second later she exploded with another ‘Bitch!’ – which showed us exactly how calm she was, and probably brought her lifetime tally with that word up to two. Pen took her into a consoling embrace.
‘I’ve got to get back out there,’ I said to Pen. I thought of explaining why, but ‘Asmodeus is underground’ wasn’t a revelation that could help her very much. She couldn’t join the hunt, and the thought of Jenna-Jane’s exorcists combing the streets for Rafi would just make her miserable. ‘Back on the case,’ I finished lamely. ‘I’ll come by again later, if I can. Will you be okay here?’
Pen nodded to me over Sue’s head, and I cravenly left them to it.
‘Call Leonidas!’ Pen shouted to me as I was on my way up the stairs to ground level. I turned around and went back down.
‘That’s the guy from 300,’ I pointed out. ‘Gerard Butler.’
‘Something like that, anyway.’
‘Anastasiadis?’
‘Exactly.’
Progress on the journals? Some good news would have been pretty welcome right then. I joined Trudie out on the street and asked her if she’d give me a minute or two to make the call. She still seemed a little shaken up by the storm she’d provoked from Sue.
‘Take as long as you need,’ she said, and walked off to the end of the drive, out of earshot.
Anastasiadis’s secretary spoke only Macedonian, so all I could do was repeat my name until she gave up and put me through.
‘Mr Castor.’ The lawyer sounded tired and dispirited. But then given what day it was, that was hardly surprising. I looked at my watch. Allowing for the time difference, it must have been about three hours since Jovan walked the last mile.
‘Feeling rough?’ I commiserated. ‘You did everything you could, man. Like you said, Jovan’s cards were marked in advance. They probably put the execution on the docket before they fixed up a trial date.’
‘That is why I called you, Mr Castor.’ Anastasiadis’s tone was grim. ‘There was no execution.’
I blinked. ‘What? You mean the pardon came through, after all?’
‘That is not what I mean. Jovan Ditko was murdered last night. Someone broke into Irdrizovo Prison, tearing a gate off its hinges, and killed him in his cell. It was not quick, and it was not clean. There was . . . mutilation. His eyes, in particular . . .’
I didn’t hear the next few sentences, because the momentary paralysis of shock had allowed the phone to slip through my fingers. I had to flail and lunge to retrieve it before it hit the ground. When I got it back to my ear, the lawyer was still describing what had been done to his client before – or perhaps, to take an optimistic view, after – he died. I cut him off in full flow. I could fill in the details without any help from him.
‘Did they catch anyone?’ I demanded. But he’d already answered that: you don’t say someone broke in if you know who the someone is. ‘See anyone?’ I amended.
‘Neither,’ Anastasiadis said. ‘The other prisoners in the block heard – it would have been impossible not to hear – and they screamed for the guards. But the guards feared a riot, which is a very common thing on the night before an execution, so they did not come. He was found when they came in the morning to take him.’
Asmodeus. Asmodeus had travelled a thousand miles to murder Rafi’s last living relative hours before he was due to die in any case. How? How had he done it? When Juliet had flown with me to the United States, the experience had almost destroyed her: it had left her weak and sick and at half-strength for weeks afterwards. Demons are chthonic powers, and too much distance from the ground hits them like a bad dose of flu. For that very reason Juliet had refused to take the flight back to Heathrow. She told me she had other ways of travelling that wouldn’t involve leaving the ground.
‘Mr Castor? You
are still there?’
‘Yeah. I’m still here.’
‘I apologise. I had not meant to burden you with the unpleasant details. But they weigh on my mind. It is hard for me to stop thinking about them. And I wondered – inevitably I wondered, given the things you said to Jovan yesterday – whether this demon you spoke of might have been involved in his death.’
‘We don’t have any way of knowing for sure,’ I said bleakly.
‘But in your own estimation?’
‘Yes. It was Asmodeus.’
The lawyer sighed – a drawn-out sound with a slight tremor in it. ‘I have a translator working on the books,’ he said. ‘You have an email address?’
I gave him Nicky’s and Pen’s, and asked him to send the translation on to both accounts.
‘You are still looking for this thing?’ he asked me.
I didn’t quibble about the choice of words this time. ‘Yeah, I’m still looking for him.’
‘Be careful, Mr Castor. And be lucky. I do not believe that any god holds me in his good graces, but still I will pray for you.’
‘Thanks. I’ll take all the help I can get.’
I slipped the phone into my pocket and rejoined Trudie. She didn’t look any happier. For a moment I considered keeping what I’d just learned to myself, but a deal is a deal. I filled her in as we walked to the Tube station.
‘Macedonia!’ She seemed more amazed at the logistics than disturbed by what Asmodeus had done, but then she’d never met Jovan Ditko, or Rafi for that matter: a lot of this was still theoretical for her.
‘Macedonia,’ I agreed. ‘Some time in the middle of last night. God knows how long it took him to get there, or whether he’s back now.’
‘Maybe that’s why nobody has got a hit yet,’ Trudie mused sombrely. ‘Even if he has got a tunnel under Holborn, we might not get a fix on him if he hasn’t been there recently. We’re probably wasting our time.’
She filled me in on the morning’s activities. Most of the area between Holborn and the river had been searched pretty thoroughly, and McClennan had told his teams to fan out to the east and west. Trudie herself had criss-crossed the backstreets around Kingsway for most of the morning, but the only things that had impinged on her death-sense were the local ghosts and zombies.
