I moved towards the stairs, shifting to avoid turning my back on any of these sonsofbitches. ‘You heard the lady,’ I said. ‘Come on, McClennan.’ Gil was baffled but he wasn’t stupid. He stayed with me as I shuffled round to the foot of the stairs and put my foot on the bottom step.
‘Give them some ground!’ Rosie bellowed, and the myrmidons fell back as one man.
‘Did I ever tell you I loved you?’ I muttered to Rosie.
‘Often and often,’ she chuckled. ‘But don’t ask me to kiss you with these lips, Felix. It would be a crime against nature.’
Gil was staring at us in a kind of existential horror, his eyes wide. Then the penny dropped, visibly. ‘How did you break the wards?’ he whispered.
‘I didn’t,’ Rosie whispered. ‘I went under them. There were no wards on the floor.’
At the top of the stairs we paused. I looked to the right of the door and found what I expected to find: a locked junction box. I let go of Rosie and took the fire axe to it, breaking off the lock with three clumsy strokes. Inside were two red buttons. The one on the left was labelled LOCK and the one on the right RELEASE.
‘Any idea where you’ll go from here?’ I asked Rosie.
She shrugged, and an uncharacteristically wicked grin played across Jenna-Jane’s features. ‘I haven’t had a tumble in five hundred years,’ she said. ‘I think I might remind myself what the sins of the flesh are actually like.’
‘When that gets old,’ I said, ‘drop by and say hello.’
‘Certainly, Felix,’ she agreed. ‘Perhaps even before.’
I hit RELEASE. There was a prolonged, ragged-edged
chunk-chunk-chunk
sound as hundreds of cell doors opened in near but not perfect simultaneity.
Rosie slipped away. Through my death-sense I felt her go, but even if I hadn’t, I would have known it was the real Jenna-Jane I was now looking at as her face twisted into an expression of naked, almost berserk hatred.
‘Castor!’ she choked.
‘I think you said three days’ probation, J-J,’ I reminded her. I held up thumb and forefinger, almost touching. ‘I came this close to making the grade.’
I slammed the great steel door shut and threw the bolt.
19
We held our council of war at the Walthamstow Gaumont. Nicky wasn’t exactly thrilled to host, but he was still feeling sheepish about missing the boat with the anagrams in Asmodeus’ summonings, so I had a little leverage to work with.
He let us in off the street, giving the bundle in my arms - Juliet, now wrapped in my greatcoat and still more or less out of her head - a curious look.
Gil McClennan shivered as he stepped over the threshold. The change in temperature from the warmth of the air outside was sudden and marked.
‘Place is as cold as a tomb,’ he muttered.
‘Well, shit!’ Nicky sneered. ‘Here I’ve been looking for a good analogy all this time, and it was right there in front of my face.’
Gil’s face went through some interesting changes as he realised belatedly that he was talking to a dead man. ‘No offence,’ he offered at last.
‘None taken,’ said Nicky. ‘To be offended, I’d have to give a fuck. Go on upstairs. Joan of Arc is already up there waiting for you.’
Trudie was pacing the floor of the projection room, wearing two jackets against the cold. Her arm was in a sling, her shoulder swathed in bulky bandages. She looked almost as pale as Nicky, but without his excuse of having been four years dead. In her free hand she carried a bright orange Sainsbury’s bag.
‘Castor!’ She hurried over to us as we entered, then recoiled slightly when she realised what it was I was carrying. Her gaze went from Juliet’s face to mine. ‘I seem to have missed a lot,’ she said. ‘Can you bring me up to speed?’
Nicky cleared the table and we sat ourselves around it: a coalition of the willing, if that term includes people who’ve tried out all the other options and ended up painted into a corner. Juliet was on the other side of the room, lying on a camp bed under the projector. The mattress smelled of mildew and was unpleasantly damp, but it was the best we could do.
Asmodeus’ note - item one on an agenda of one - sat in the centre of the table. It was short and to the point.
Castor
You and your demon bitch are invited to my farewell party. In case you need an incentive - they’re alive, and they stay alive until you come. After that, it depends on how it plays.
Peckham. That little upstairs room you fitted out for me, remember? We had such good times there, it seemed like the only possible place to say goodbye.
A
‘You’ve got nothing,’ Nicky pointed out. ‘Sorry. Thought I might as well start by stating the obvious. You’ve bumped into him twice, and both times you barely survived. You go in there now - with him actually waiting for you - and he’ll kill you, sure as eggs is eggs.’
‘We do have this,’ Trudie said. ‘It got broken when I went crazy back at the MOU, but it might still be usable.’ She put the Sainsbury’s bag on the table and shoved it across towards me. I knew what it was, so I didn’t bother to open it. It made a grating rattle as I took it and put it down by my side.
‘Incendiary grenades?’ Nicky asked sardonically. ‘White phosphorus? Depleted-uranium shells?’
‘Something along those lines,’ I allowed.
‘Unless it’s an A-bomb, he’ll still kill you.’
I nodded. ‘I wouldn’t bet against it,’ I agreed. ‘But let’s not kid ourselves, Nicky. Killing us isn’t the cake, it’s just the icing. Maybe not even that. Asmodeus has worked really hard on this, and we know now that he could have walked into Pen’s house and ripped my head off any time he wanted to. The wards barely tickled him.’
‘Then what?’ Gil demanded. ‘If there’s a big picture, I’m not seeing it. This is all about revenge, surely? Ginny whatever-her-name-was - she helped out with the ritual that brought him to Earth in the first place, so he started out by killing her. Ditko performed the ritual, so he took out the last surviving member of Ditko’s family. With you, he gets the hat trick.’
‘Yeah,’ I agreed. ‘But no. I already made that mistake once - thinking this was all about me. That was why I was so slow off the mark in figuring out what those summonings were. He hates me, yeah, but he didn’t go for me. Not really. He went for Juliet.’ Juliet didn’t stir at the mention of her name.
‘She helped you put him back in the bottle the last time he got free,’ Trudie said slowly. ‘But so did a lot of other people.’ She glanced across at Nicky, who shrugged irritably.
‘I just provide a service,’ he said.
‘The effect of the wards was to confuse and enrage her,’ Trudie went on. ‘Isn’t that what you said?’
I thought about that. ‘It made her more volatile,’ I said. ‘Less in control of her actions. She did seem a little confused, at times, but mostly what she seemed was off the leash, all her responses quicker, more extreme, less considered.’
‘Removing at a stroke the effect of two years’ socialisation on Earth, and maybe a couple of millennia of experience down in Hell,’ Trudie concluded.
‘Yeah. More or less.’
‘Then that’s the clue, isn’t it?’ She tapped the note with an extended finger. ‘He specifically tells you to bring her, because it’s her that he needs. He wants her to do something for him, and he doesn’t want her to be able to think too much about it.’
‘What kind of something?’ Gil demanded. ‘She’s just a venus fly trap. She draws people in and eats them. Are you saying Asmodeus wants to arrange a hit? He can hit anyone he wants to.’
‘You’re coming at this from the wrong end,’ Nicky told us. ‘Unsurprisingly. You should be asking yourself what he wants and then trying to figure out from that how he could use Juliet to get it.’
‘He wants to be free,’ I said. ‘He wants to get out of Rafi’s flesh and go home.’
‘And he thinks he’s done it,’ Trudie pointed out. ‘He says in the note that this is his farewell party. So he’s found some way of—’
‘Wait.’ Nicky was waving his hands in a rewind gesture. ‘Go back, Castor. What did you say?’
‘He wants to go home.’
‘No. You said he wants to get out of Ditko’s flesh. Right?’
‘Same thing, Nicky?’
‘No,’ he said emphatically. ‘It’s not. It’s not the same thing at all. Tell me how the succubus works. I’ve read about it, but I’ve never seen it. You saw it, didn’t you? On that boat.’
He meant the
Mercedes
, the floating home of Lucasz Damjohn, whoremaster, where Juliet had been summoned to kill me and had turned on her handlers instead. That seemed like a long time ago now, and actually I hadn’t seen all that much because I’d kept my eyes closed for most of it.
‘You know what she does,’ I hedged.
‘I know what the books say. In real life, how does it work?’
I cast my mind back, with some reluctance, to the events of that night, and to the other night, even earlier, when Juliet had come close to devouring me. ‘She turns you on,’ I said, tersely, inadequately. ‘She makes you aroused - very, very aroused. Then she eats you.’
‘Seriously? I mean, bones crack, blood spills, meat is chewed?’
Fuck. I took a deep, slightly shaky breath. ‘There’s no mess,’ I said. ‘When she took Damjohn, I didn’t see any blood. Any remains.’ Actually, it had been even more remarkable than that. He’d been bleeding from a gut wound before she embraced him. Afterwards, the blood that had been on the deck was gone, without even a stain on the woodwork to show where it had been.
‘So we’re talking about physical consumption,’ Nicky insisted.
‘Yeah. That, and . . . the other kind. Her nutritional needs are pretty complicated, Nicky. She needs the soul as well as the flesh. It’s as though lust is a digestive enzyme for her. It’s the magic ingredient that makes it possible for her to feed on us. On people. Otherwise it’s like what happens when we eat grass: we can’t break down the cell walls, so we can’t get any nourishment from it. We could fill our stomachs . . . and still, you know . . . still starve to death.’
I wound down like a clock, because I’d suddenly seen what he was driving at. I could see that Trudie had too. She was shaking her head in sick amazement.
‘What am I missing?’ Gil asked the room at large.
For a moment or two nobody answered him, because we were all still trying to work out the implications. Then I explained, haltingly, aware as I said it how absurd and unlikely it sounded. Unlikely to the point of impossible. The only thing it had going for it was that no other theory explained everything that Asmodeus had done.
‘That’s insane,’ Gil said, when I’d finished.
‘I think it’s fucking genius,’ Nicky said, shaking his head in wonder. ‘As prison breaks go, it makes digging a tunnel under Rita Hayworth look like nothing at all.’
‘So the succubus is the key to Asmodeus’ plan,’ Trudie summarised. ‘So we work without her, obviously.’ She shrugged her good arm. ‘She’s probably too weak to move in any case. It’s a pity, because she would have been our biggest gun, but we don’t let her get near this thing.’
‘And how . . .’ said Juliet haltingly ‘. . . do you intend . . . to stop me?’
She was on her feet and limping towards us. She let the surgical gown fall from her shoulders. For Juliet, disrobing serves the same purpose that shrugging the hem of his poncho back to show his six-guns does for Clint Eastwood. But this time the magic failed to flow. Looking at the half-healed cuts that criss-crossed her body, I felt no arousal at all, just a sort of numb sadness. You know that feeling you get when you watch a movie you loved as a kid, and you find out it’s nothing special? What I felt then was like that, only raised to the nth power. The true north of my libido was gone, and my disenfranchised dick had nothing to point to.
Juliet reached the table, but staggered when she got there and almost fell to her knees. Clutching its edge in both hands, she glared at me. ‘He took Susan,’ she said. Her voice had a terrible hollowness to it, as though she’d been cored out by the torture runes and was just an empty, walking skin.
There was no point in lying. ‘Yeah,’ I said, ‘he did. Who told you?’
She wiped her sweat-beaded forehead with the back of her hand. ‘The woman,’ she said. ‘The woman who was drawing on me, with knives and paint. She taunted me with that knowledge. Is that woman still alive, Castor? I’d be happy to know that she was still alive.’
I made a could-go-either-way gesture. ‘She might be,’ I said. ‘Jenna-Jane is a tough old bird. Juliet, sit down before you fall down.’
Nicky pushed a vacant chair in behind her, unexpectedly solicitous. Juliet had given him his one and only post-mortem erection, so maybe his feelings were running along the same lines as mine. Juliet sank down, her arms visibly shaking from having supported her weight for those few seconds.
‘Okay,’ I said. ‘You’ll admit that there isn’t a lot you’re good for right now.’
‘We heal quickly.’
‘Quick enough to get up to fighting strength in less than an hour?’ I demanded. ‘Listen, I promised you I’d keep Sue safe.’
‘And you broke that promise.’
‘The day’s not over yet.’
Juliet bared her teeth in a snarl, and however weak her body might have been right then, she spat out the next four words with the full, scary strength of her will.
‘I’m coming with you.’
I was prepared to argue some more, But Nicky spoke up before I could. ‘Why are you even arguing about this?’ he demanded. ‘Asmodeus’ plan depends on her being there, right? He might not even let you in through the door without her. And he’s likely to let her get in real close to him for the same reason. She can be your Trojan Horse.’
Juliet turned her head to stare at Nicky with cold ferocity. She said something in her own demonic tongue that was probably very insulting and - I was willing to bet - physically impossible.
Nicky leaned back from her sudden, unsettling anger and tensed, looking like he was about to bolt. Being dead, he hates physical confrontation. When you’re running on empty, your body doesn’t heal, and every wound is irreversible.