The Naming of the Beasts (50 page)

Juliet put one soft, caressing hand behind Asmodeus’ head, drawing his face in close to hers. Their lips met.

Presumably, on a psychic level, some vast ethereal centrifuge began to turn, slowly at first but with gathering speed and irresistible momentum. Being a man, Rafi was drawn to Juliet. There was nothing he could do to stop it. I’d been there and I knew how it felt: the desire that was so like despair that you poured your heart and soul and lungs and liver and lights into its welcoming emptiness, wanting nothing but to penetrate, to be accepted, to be swallowed up.

Asmodeus, being a demon, would stand out of that vortex, immune to its pull. He would watch Rafi succumb, experiencing the immense satisfaction of a long and complicated chain of events drawing to its inevitable conclusion. He had turned his enemies into the moving parts of a machine which would deliver him from his bondage; there couldn’t be many pleasures more visceral than that.

I heard a whimper come from Rafi’s lips, and I knew who it belonged to. On a different level entirely, I heard the whispering echo of the demon’s laugh.

And then, louder than either, I heard the liquescent, insinuating crunch as Juliet drove her makeshift blade home into Asmodeus’ chest.

His eyes widened and he drew in a shuddering, unsteady breath. He winced, almost in slow motion. It was as though he fought against the recognition of that pain, with all that it implied.

He took a single step back, staring down at his chest. The irregular triangle of glass, like a flattened icicle, protruded from the left side of his body, high up, more or less where you’d expect his heart to be. Blood welled up around it and poured down, saturating his shirt in an instant and spilling out across the fabric with the suddenness of the paint-bucket effect in Photoshop.

If it had been a knife, Asmodeus would have torn it out of his own flesh and cut Juliet’s throat with it. But it wasn’t a knife.

 

Asmodeus screamed.

It was a sound born out of anger as much as pain. He had it all worked out, and we weren’t playing by the rules.

But if having Rafi’s smiling face rammed into his left ventricle was an unpleasant surprise, it wasn’t the coup de grace I was hoping for. His arm came around like a scythe, smashing Juliet to her knees. Then he caught her as she fell with a swivel kick that lifted her into the air.

The wood of the banister exploded into jagged splinters, and Juliet pitched headlong into the stairwell. She fell past me, and there was a liquescent thud as she hit the tiles below.

And then there was one. But this was all about misdirection, and I hadn’t been a kids’ party magician for nothing. If you can make a roomful of six-year-olds watch your left hand while you slip the rabbit into the hat with your right, then a ten-thousand-year-old demon is nothing much. That’s what I told myself, anyway, as I advanced up the last flight of stairs, drawing my whistle and setting it to my lips like a sniper finding the spot weld.

Asmodeus snarled and stepped up to meet me - then stiffened, eyes wide, as Gil hit him from behind with the taser.

 

 

Fifty thousand volts isn’t a lot, when you come to think about it. That’s manufacturer’s spec, too, so you’re probably talking forty-eight thousand and some small change, if anyone bothered to check. A bolt of lightning can get you up into the millions, no trouble.

But Asmodeus was hurting already - in his dignity, as much as anywhere. He was pumping arterial blood, he had a razor-edged smiley face in his heart that was making him feel anything but happy, and his meticulously laid plans were turning into a Whitehall farce. So I’m willing to bet the effect in this case was out of all proportion to what it said on the label.

Again, it might have ended there. He could have folded up into nothing, and left Rafi in charge of a body that was leaking precious fluids faster than they could be replaced.

He didn’t. He grabbed hold of the taser’s conductive wire and hauled hard. Instinctively, Gil tightened his grip on the taser, so he was yanked forward, off balance. Asmodeus’ fist met him halfway, catching Gil at the junction of neck and shoulder, so that he fell to the ground as heavily as a bag of hammers. It had all happened so fast that the echoing boom reached me a second afterwards.

But as the echoes of that unlovely sound died, we both heard something new and worse coming in from the street, sickening the air. It was like the skirling call of an infernal ice cream van, playing at a hundred and some decibels, summoning ghosts and ghouls and damned souls to stop me and buy one.

‘What do you know?’ I said, as I finally reached the upper landing. ‘They’re playing our tune.’

I drove my fist full into Asmodeus’ face. The satisfaction I took from that was tempered by the fact that the face actually belonged to Rafi, but it still felt pretty good, all things considered.

His head snapped back, but he didn’t lose his footing even for a second, and his riposte was swift and terrible. His arm swept round in an elliptical arc, the air cracked like a whip, and the world exploded.

There are two or three seconds here that I can’t account for. The next thing I was aware of was a pressure against my back, and a sensation around my mouth and chin as though someone was drinking from me through a straw of enormously wide bore.

Not knowing if I was standing on my feet or sprawling on my arse, I twitched my limbs in random combinations in the hope of getting good reports. But my eyes were definitely at floor level, and canted at ninety degrees.

The demon flickered in my blurred vision, getting closer and then receding. I steeled myself for the blow that would end everything, shut me down for good, but it didn’t come. I blinked furiously to clear my sight, and saw something I didn’t understand.

Asmodeus was dancing. Or at least that was what it looked like. The light from a street lamp, shining in through a window just off to our left, picked him out like a spotlight.

It was finally zero hour, and everything was kicking in. The bastard was writhing on an invisible cross as big as the world. But would that be big enough?

 

 

Asmodeus staggered, fell, scrambled to his feet. He baulked, and blood spurted between his clenched teeth in a pressurised stream.

His searchlight gaze found me across the width of the landing. His eyes narrowed.

‘Very clever,’ he bubbled. ‘Castor, I love you. I never expected for a moment that you’d make a fight of this.’

He slumped against the wall, his eyelids flickering like those of an epileptic in the grip of a grand mal seizure. He was on the ropes. The very mechanism he’d chosen for his escape - using Juliet’s guaranteed fatal attraction to separate out the human from the the demonic parts of the amalgam he’d become - gave us our window of opportunity. If there was ever a time when Asmodeus’ grip on Rafi’s soul could be prized free, it was now. The demon had done the groundwork for me. All I had to do was to bring it home.

As though God loved me, I found my whistle ready to hand. It had fallen only a few feet away, and it hadn’t broken. I took it in my hands and raised it, my fingers finding the stops by automatic reflex. I pursed my lips.

I couldn’t even feel the mouthpiece where it pressed against my mouth. I tried to blow a note, and red froth sprayed the metal. The tingling, sucking absence in the lower part of my face made sudden, sickening sense, and I moaned aloud.

Reeling like a drunk, Asmodeus wheeled about.

‘But everything’s relative,’ he growled. ‘Isn’t it? You feel like playing me another of your lazy little ’tudes? No?’ He kicked something across the floor at me - something red and wet that looked as though it belonged in the little plastic bag you find up a chicken’s arse and throw away before you cook it. Part of my jawbone; I could tell by the fact that it still had three teeth embedded in it.

‘Then let’s shut that fucking PA up,’ Asmodeus slurred. He crouched low on his haunches and leaped into the stairwell.

There’s a moment in the execution of any plan when you realise that you’re just not as good as you think you are, that you’ve done everything you could and it isn’t enough. You got the angle right, and you gunned the engine like a maniac, but your bike isn’t going to make it to the other side of the canyon.