Susan picked up her whiskey glass, but she didn’t drink from it. She turned it in her hands and stared into the shallows of the half-finished drink.
“This woman…” she said. “It’s the woman you were talking about before you went away? The killer?”
Warily, I nodded.
“Who did she kill?”
“Most recently, a middle-aged gay guy who was looking for a bit of rough trade. Before that”—I picked my words with care—“a lot of people, but mostly people who’d hurt her. Or people she thought might hurt her. She’s ill. Killing is one of the symptoms of her illness.”
Susan put the glass to her lips and emptied it. She made a sour face. “I’m not good at this,” she said. I was surprised I hadn’t noticed the slur in her voice at the door. “I don’t even like the taste. I think I’m going to get sick before I get drunk.”
“Susan—” I began.
She shook her head impatiently. “Play your tune. I want this to be over. I don’t want it in my life anymore.”
I nodded. For the third time tonight, I unshipped my whistle and held it in my hands, ready to play. My mind was fogged by exhaustion, though, and although I knew the notes I had to play—the notes of a summoning that would have Juliet’s name written all over it—I couldn’t get my mind into the place where it needed to be. I felt like someone trying to fit his eye to the lens of a telescope, and screwing up the angle so that all he could see was the magnified reflection of the blood vessels inside his own eyeball.
I played a note, more or less at random, hoping my sixth sense would kick in and the music would start to flow. It didn’t. Nothing at all came into my mind, not even a note that would connect to this one in a way that made sense.
I lowered the whistle and stared at it, blinking my eyes back into focus. It was strange, and it was frightening. I’d had good days and bad days, but I’d never had my knack desert me quite so suddenly and completely. All I wanted to do was the summoning. It was the easiest part of an exorcism: It made a path, a line of least resistance for the spirit you were looking for to move through. It was usually easiest if you were close to the spirit, harder the farther away you got, but the only reason it wouldn’t work at all, wouldn’t even stay in my head long enough to suggest the beginnings of a tune, was if—
“She’s already here,” I said. “Isn’t she?”
“She’s upstairs,” Susan muttered, pointing. “In our bedroom. Or it was our bedroom. I don’t know what it is now.” Slowly, deliberately, but still spilling a little on the table, she poured herself another drink.
I walked past her, wanting to offer some kind of solace but not sure what form it ought to take. Bad friend Felix was on the prowl again. Good news wasn’t on the agenda.
The main bedroom was dead ahead. Juliet was sitting on the windowsill, legs hugged to her chest, both feet off the ground. In a way, it was a curiously little-girlish pose. Doug Hunter was tied to the bed by an ad hoc but formidable assemblage of rope and old leather belts. He seemed calm enough, but it was a bleak, frazzled calm: the calm of someone who’d already tested himself—or herself, arguably—against the ropes extensively and lost every time. Myriam Kale looked out at me from behind those bland, pale blue eyes and smiled asymmetrically.
I stopped in the doorway. “Permission to approach,” I said.
Juliet gave me what, in a human woman, would have been an old-fashioned look. “You can come in, Castor,” she said. “I’m not going to attack you. I’m not going to hold it against you that you were right—or at least not to that extent.”
I walked in, skirting the bed, and stood beside Juliet, looking out through the window. Under the streetlamp opposite, a dark form waited with its head bowed, endlessly patient—waiting for a banquet that would make up for a century of starvation.
“So how’d you get home?” I asked Juliet, knowing that the one thing I wouldn’t get out of her would be the truth. “Transatlantic cable? Fishing coracle? Back of a whale? What?”
“The scenic route,” she said. “It’s another one of those things that you wouldn’t understand.”
“Right, right.” I was too tired to rise to the bait. “I’ve been talking to that friend of yours some more. You know, the one from the old neighborhood.” I nodded at the window, but she didn’t bother to look.
“I smelled him,” she said. “You should be more careful around demons, Castor. It’s only safe so long as they need you.”
“Now you tell me.” I turned to look at the figure on the bed. Doug Hunter grinned and thrust his hips toward me in a suggestive mime. “So how’s Myriam?” I asked.
“She’s falling apart. She always does, apparently. She begged them not to bring her back after the last time, but they did anyway. But this time they gave her a man’s body because they thought it might help her control the urges.”
“They being…?”
Juliet shrugged, shook her head. “She’s not rational for very long at a time now. That’s more or less all I got. She talks about Lesley, mainly. Lesley Lathwell. And to him some of the time. She tells him that she loves him. That she’ll kill him. That she wants him to kill her. She talks about something called inscription a lot, too. She doesn’t want it, she won’t accept it, she didn’t mean to miss it. And then she cries. Or swears. Or bites her tongue and spits blood over the sheets.”
“Back in the remand wing,” I said, “they had Doug on antipsychotics. A mild prescription to keep him stabilized. I don’t suppose you brought any out with you?” Juliet looked at me. “No. I know. Not the way your mind works. And I never thought to mention it to you when you were flinging me around the diner. Pity. It actually would have been a better line than ‘I’ll hunt you down and kill you like a dog.’ That seemed to upset you.”
“Can we get some more of the medicine from a doctor?”
“Not without taking Doug to see a doctor. And if we do that, we’re all ending up in Pentonville.”
“I’m not going home,” Myriam Kale said from the bed, speaking out of Doug Hunter’s throat as though from the bottom of a deep pit. Her voice sounded hoarse and agonized. “You can’t make me go home. He’ll come and get me. He’ll take me out of there. He’s my home now. I walked in the quiet night on the side of the road, and I came back, and it was all still there. The blood on the seats. It still smells of it.”
“Then what?” Juliet said. “I thought of calling Coldwood, but I don’t want to get Susan in trouble. If Hunter is found in her house—”
“It’s not just Susan,” I pointed out, fighting the urge to look at my watch. Time was against us. We had to move. But Juliet could only be invited, not coerced. “It’s you, too. You busted Hunter out of jail. You never walked in front of a camera, but there aren’t that many people around who could have done what you did. The only thing that’s saved you so far is that Gary Coldwood is in the hospital, and he’s the one who knows where you live.”
She seemed surprised at this news. “In the hospital? What happened to him?”
“I set him on this thing after someone tried to kill me. I thought maybe he could shake the tree better than I could, but they just trashed his career and broke his legs instead. Juliet, we have to sort this out. Not only Myriam Kale but all of it. Mount Grace, the reincarnation racket, the whole thing.”
“Let me go,” Myriam Kale suggested from the bed, staring at me with wide, insane eyes. “I’ll blow you, mister. I’ll blow you and I’ll swallow. Best you’ve ever had.”
Juliet frowned. “Mount Grace? The crematorium? How is any of this connected to Mount Grace?”
I brought her up to speed as quickly as I could, starting with John’s funeral and covering all the main fixtures since. When I got to Moloch’s part in recent events, she drew back her teeth in a snarl. And when I suggested that she might want to come along with us for a little breaking and entering and wholesale slaughter, she shook her head in somber wonder. “Fight alongside the demon?” she demanded.
“
Essentially, yeah,” I said, trying not to sound defensive. “If you’ve got a rodent problem, you need a terrier. Best estimate, there are around two hundred of these bastards. Could you take them all by yourself?”
“No. The ones in the flesh would be easy meat for me. The ghosts… I don’t believe they’d respond to me in the necessary way.”
“Right. And I could exorcise the ghosts, but it’s murderously hard. I already played that tune once tonight, and it was like taking a beating from a bunch of guys with baseball bats. The chances are that it wouldn’t be enough, not by itself. These guys are tough. Some of them have cheated the grave for a hundred years. I think I could punch their spirits out of the bodies they’ve borrowed, but I seriously doubt I could push them all the way off the mortal plane. They’d still be around, and they’d still be dangerous—they’d be gunning for me, and it’s odds on they’d get me. But Moloch is a specialized predator. He’d be there with his knife and fork to finish the job. See, the three of us together can—”
“Castor, what do we stand to gain from this? Spell it out for me.”
I paused. I’d hoped she might get absorbed in the logistics and not ask any of the really tough questions. “Revenge?” I ventured.
She seemed genuinely surprised. “For Coldwood?”
“Yeah.”
A long pause.
“I don’t think so,” said Juliet. “This isn’t my fight. Less now than before, in fact. Nobody’s paying. Nobody will care when we’re done. Revenge isn’t enough.”
I let out a long breath. “Well, okay… I could appeal to your sense of civic duty, but I hate it when you laugh at me. At my end, it’s become kind of a life-and-death thing. They know I’ve found out about them, and they’re not going to let it drop.” I hesitated. “As for you, what you stand to gain, obviously, is—from a global perspective—when all’s said and done—”
“You get to stay with me,” said Susan from the doorway.
We both turned to stare at her in perfect comedic sync.
“Sue,” Juliet said, the tone softer than the words. “Wait downstairs. This isn’t something that concerns you.”
Susan came in, closed the door behind her, and folded her arms. The expression on her flushed face was one I’d never seen there before. She cast one nervous glance at the bound figure on the bed, then she directed her full attention at Juliet.
“You brought an escaped murderer into my house, Jules,” she said in a tone that had something of a taut string about it. “And I let you do it because I thought you wouldn’t have done it unless you had to. But if it’s just because she’s a woman who kills men and that used to be your—your thing, too, then that’s not good enough. And Felix is right about one thing. If you don’t fix this, you’ll have to go away. I’ll lose you. I’m not going to lose you because of something like this.”
Juliet couldn’t have been more nonplussed if a cavalcade of tap-dancing mice had sung the words at her. She blinked, visibly thinking her way around the situation. “If I have to leave,” she said, “I’ll come back to you. They can’t keep me away.”
The taut string snapped.
“They can send you home!” Susan shouted, advancing with her hands clenched into fists as though she were going to hit Juliet. She was crying again, but she didn’t wipe away the tears on her cheeks or even seem to notice them; she was incandescent enough that I was surprised they didn’t evaporate. “They can trap you and send you back down to hell, no matter how strong you are. You’d be down there in the dark, and you’d have to wait until someone called you back up again. Except that they’d call you as a slave, the way you were before. Or else I’d have to find a way to summon you up myself, and then what? Then you’d be my slave! We’d—we wouldn’t be us anymore. We’d be a stupid, sick joke. It’s got to stop, Jules. You’ve got to stop it, and then you’ve got to explain and say you’re sorry.”
From about halfway through this speech, she’d been screaming the words rather than yelling them. Her fists were trembling like tuning forks. Juliet caught them in her hands, pushed them down to Susan’s sides, and then embraced her. Susan slumped in her arms, all the fight abruptly gone from her.
“You’ve got to,” she mumbled almost inaudibly, her head pressed to Juliet’s breast. “Please. For me.”
Juliet stared at me over Susan’s head. She looked unhappy. No, more than that. She looked afraid—and it wasn’t of the Mount Grace ghosts.
“Is that the plan, then?” she demanded, her face a somber deadpan. “We go to the crematorium. We break in. And I keep the three of us alive long enough for you to play your tune and for Moloch to feast?”
I was a bit taken aback by how quickly the tide had turned. I realized, much to my own surprise, that I hadn’t been expecting to win this one. “There’s a little more to it than that,” I said lamely, “but yeah, that’s the basic scheme.”
“It’s absurd. We don’t know their strength or their numbers.”
Juliet kissed Susan gently on the cheek, held on to her for a moment longer, and then set her to one side very firmly. Susan took all this with great stoicism.
I delved into my pocket and brought out my ace in the hole. It was the torn fragment of notepaper that I’d found in John Gittings’s pocket watch. When you looked at it, he really had gone out of his way to make sure I’d have everything I needed. In fact, he’d been shrewder when his brain was disintegrating than he’d been at any time in his life before.
“John was there before us,” I said.
“Isn’t that why he died?”
“Yeah, but he left us some notes. It’s pretty vague on their strengths, but it drops some succulent hints about their weaknesses.”
“And you,” Juliet said, giving me a cold, hard stare. “You said this tune was hard to play—that it drains you. Do you think you’ve got the energy to play it again tonight? Please don’t take this personally, but you look as though you’d have a hard time blowing up a child’s balloon.”
I’d been thinking the same thing, but since I didn’t see any other choice, I shrugged the question off. “I’ll be fine,” I said. “I always am on the night.”
Juliet’s expression didn’t change. “If you can’t do it,” she said, “you’d better tell me now. There’s no point in going into a fight with a plan that can’t work.”
“All right,” I admitted. “Right now I don’t think I could do it. But it’s going to take us at least an hour to get over there. I’m hoping that’ll give me the time I need to get match-fit again.”
She nodded. “We’ll see,” she said with grim promise.
I left the two of them alone for a minute or two to say their goodbyes. When Juliet came down from the bedroom, I shot her a look of inquiry. She walked right past me, her face unreadable but her shoulders hunched in a tension I’d never seen in her. Juliet normally uses her body language to draw people in; it’s second nature to her, because it’s part of the way she feeds. For her to lose control of it, even around the edges, was a surprising and, in some ways, disturbing thing to see.
Moloch smiled as he saw us coming and gave Juliet an ironic bow. “The sister of Baphomet,” he grated. “I’m honored above all of my kindred. Never would I have imagined my lowly station would permit—”
Juliet’s ringing smack knocked him back on his heels, his head thrown sideways by the force of the blow. “You should have stayed in your lowly station,” she snarled, her gaze skewering him. “It’s grotesque to see you crawling on the face of the earth. One word, Moloch. One word more will use up all that’s left of my slender fucking patience.”
A demon’s face isn’t that much harder to read than a human one. I could see in his narrowed eyes and tight smile that he’d already thought of a cool comeback—and that he didn’t quite have the balls to try to deliver it.
“Are we good?” I asked, breaking the tense silence.
They both nodded unconvincingly.
“Then let’s go commit some atrocities.
”
Twenty-four
WHEN YOU’RE CLIMBING A MOUNTAIN, THE FIRST THING you do is set up a base camp. In our case, it was the building site at the bottom of Ropery Street, right next door to the crematorium and facing it across a no-man’s-land of churned mud. Okay, there was also a tall fence separating us from the landscaped grounds, but our line of sight was clear. Clear enough to see the car headlights coming up the curve of the drive in twos and threes, the lights slowing and stopping and then winking out as the drivers headed into the building. The inscription had begun, or else it would begin soon. Either way, we had all our enemies, living and dead, in the same spot. Lucky us.
We stood close to the top of the tower of scaffolding that surrounded the shell of a building yet to be. Moloch and Juliet stared intently into the darkness, which held no secrets from them. For my part, I couldn’t see a blind fucking thing. It was dark of the moon, and the sky above us was a curdled mass of black on black. This high up, the wind was a constant barrage of sucker punches. But the storm was holding off, maybe waiting for a more dramatic moment.
“There are armed men,” Juliet said. “A lot of them. Some of them at the gate, some in front of the doors. More of them are taking up positions on the grounds. They seem to know what they’re doing. Two or three men in a group, each group in line of sight of at least two others.”
“Hired security,” I said. “Probably black market, if they’re carrying guns.”
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