by Mike Carey
‘Nice analogy,’ I conceded. ‘Look, I’m not saying that going in mob-handed is a good idea. I was just thinking aloud.’
Jenna-Jane made a dismissive gesture, as if this was all just a matter of fine detail.
‘Still,’ she said, ‘I see no harm in trying. Make a list, Gilbert. Ten lead exorcists, with ten in support. Castor will be one of the leads, as will you.’
She stared at Gil for so long it was impossible to miss the point that he was being dismissed. He stood up but didn’t leave, fighting a visible psychomachia against his strong instinct to roll over and die for the queen.
‘If it doesn’t work,’ he said, ‘that’s twenty of us in the shit.’
‘The larger number spreads the risk,’ said Jenna-Jane, her tone cold and deliberate.
Gil stood his ground for a moment longer. Then he nodded curtly and headed for the door.
When it closed behind him, Jenna-Jane turned back to me with a look on her face that was almost arch. ‘Gilbert doesn’t like you very much, Felix,’ she said. ‘I’ve tried hard to bring him round to my way of thinking, but I’m afraid it’s an uphill struggle.’
‘I killed his favourite uncle,’ I pointed out. ‘Makes it a little hard for us to bond.’
‘Oh, it’s not that,’ Jenna-Jane assured me, sounding surprised at the very idea. ‘It’s much more personal, and much more straightforward. He’s afraid that you might be a better exorcist than him. That thought niggles at him. It throws him off his stride.’
‘Really?’ I demanded. ‘Why me, particularly? Everyone on the team is probably a better exorcist than him.’
Jenna-Jane shook her head admonishingly. ‘You’re wrong,’ she said. ‘He has a lot of raw power. More than anyone else in the family. I tested his cousin Dana, and she was impressive. She worked here for a year, and did a lot of good work for us. She left in the end for personal reasons, after a quarrel with another woman on the team turned into something more ugly. Gilbert is better than Dana, but he’s still not what you might call emotionally stable. In order to manage him, I’ve bonded with him on a very personal level. Now he sees you as a threat to that . . . closeness.’
I stared at her in silence, a smart answer dying on my lips. The thought of being part of a love triangle that had Jenna-Jane as one of its other two vertices made my stomach go through some complicated and unpleasant revolutions.
‘Now,’ she said, moving briskly along, ‘the Ditko situation . . .’
Right, I thought. And the Rafi situation too, while we’re on the subject. I squared my shoulders involuntarily, because I was about to tell J-J some bare-faced lies and I wanted to do it with an upright posture and a lot of eye contact.
‘I think you should send me to Macedonia,’ I said.
Jenna-Jane tilted her head to one side, looking faintly puzzled.
‘Really?’ she said. ‘Why?’
‘Because Rafi Ditko has a brother. Jovan.’ J-J didn’t exclaim in surprise or ask any further questions. She just stared at me, knowing there had to be more. ‘He’s on death row,’ I went on, ‘convicted of murder. If we want to talk to him, we’ve got precisely two days to do it in.’
‘But why should we want to talk to him?’ J-J asked, sounding genuinely puzzled. ‘Ditko only became possessed after he arrived in England. It’s not likely that his brother would know anything that could help us.’
‘I copy you on that, as far as it goes,’ I agreed. ‘I started looking for Rafi’s family in the first place so I could warn them that Asmodeus might be dropping into their lives. But now I’m thinking that it might be worth a trip to meet this guy. Did you know that Asmodeus can’t walk through wards drawn by Pamela Bruckner?’
J-J frowned. ‘No, I didn’t. Bruckner is the vile-tempered little redhead, correct? Ditko’s former girlfriend, as well as yours.’
‘Pen was never my girlfriend,’ I corrected her scrupulously. I let the ‘vile-tempered’ stand, since Pen wouldn’t have taken it as an insult in any case. ‘She’s my landlady. Sometimes. The point is, I’ve seen Asmodeus ignore wards drawn by strangers. They hurt him, but they don’t slow him down all that much. The personal connection seems to make a difference.’
‘So you believe Ditko’s brother might have a similar power over the demon? But if he’s in prison . . .’
‘I just want to talk to him,’ I repeated. ‘Mostly about Rafi’s childhood. It may come to nothing. Probably will. But at the very least, deepening our understanding of Rafi may help us to bring his consciousness and his reactions to the fore when we meet Asmodeus again. At the moment the bastard seems to have things all his own way. Rafi can’t get any purchase, so he’s led around like a dog.’
I’d said my piece. It was all garbage, of course, and I felt pretty uneasy about that. Not about lying to Jenna-Jane, of course, but about going AWOL at a time when the hunt for the demon might finally be starting to get somewhere. But Rafi had begged me to deliver his message to his father and his brother. I’d already missed the boat as far as Mr Ditko senior was concerned, and this was my last chance to talk to Jovan. I really didn’t have any other option, unless it was to write Jovan a letter, send it first class and hope it beat the hangman.
Jenna-Jane appeared to consider. ‘If you think this could actually be of some value . . .’ she said.
‘I don’t think we can afford to pass up the opportunity,’ I said.
She nodded. ‘I’d need you to fly there and back today,’ she said. ‘You’re wanted here.’
‘It should be a short flight,’ I said. ‘I don’t see there’d be a problem getting a day return.’
Jenna-Jane picked up the phone and dialled, still without sitting down. ‘Hello, Edward,’ she said. ‘Could you please book a flight to Macedonia in the name of Felix Castor. Flying out and returning today. No, I have no idea. If there’s more than one airport, we need the one that’s closest to the capital city. Get him some currency too. And ground transport. Soonest would be best. Thank you.’
She put the phone down. ‘Anything else?’ she asked me.
‘Get your research team looking for a man named Martin Moulson.’
‘Who is he?’
‘I don’t have the slightest idea. But he was possessed by a major demon, and he survived. It was a long time ago, and the name’s pretty much all I’ve got.’
Jenna-Jane wrote down the name and looked at me expectantly. I shrugged. ‘I’m done,’ I said. ‘For now.’
‘In that case, you should go and talk to Ms Pax. Her mapping experiment has borne some fruit.’
As I stood, she favoured me with a warm smile. ‘I value your expertise, Felix. I know we’ve had our differences in the past, but I believe that this time we’ll make the partnership work.’
‘It’s a point of view,’ I said as non-committally as I could manage. As an answer, it was better than sticking two fingers down my throat and hurling on her carpet tiles.
The first thing I saw when I walked out into the corridor was Gil McClennan standing at the far end of it, staring out of the window. He turned as I walked towards him and stared at me hard until I came level with him. I stopped, because he looked as though he wanted to say something, but he just kept on staring.
‘If it pisses you off so much that she thinks this was my idea, then leave me out,’ I suggested. ‘You think I give a fuck? I didn’t come here to upstage you, McClennan. I only want one thing and then I’m out of here.’
‘I don’t want another Etheridge on my conscience,’ he muttered, his voice a little thick. ‘You hate the unit so much, you think everyone here is expendable.’
I couldn’t keep the surprise off my face. Maybe I didn’t try. ‘You thought me and Pax were expendable last night,’ I reminded him. ‘You sent us down those stairs hoping the thing in the pool would fuck us up.’
‘Would fuck you up,’ he corrected me angrily. ‘I tried to keep her out of it.’
That was true, as far as it went. ‘A McClennan with a conscience,�
�� I grunted, shaking my head. ‘Must be a recessive gene or something.’
He telegraphed the punch, so I was able to knock it aside before it connected with my face. He followed up fast though, and my own uppercut glanced off his chin as he closed with me and locked both of his hands around my throat. It wasn’t a smart move, because it didn’t leave him any limbs free for defence, but he held onto me with the strength of blind rage. Two punches to the side of the head didn’t loosen him, and his thumbs were compressing my windpipe agonisingly. Reflexively, I tried to draw breath, and felt my heart race on an adrenalin flood as I failed.
Improvising desperately, I hooked my foot behind his leg and threw my weight forward. We sprawled on the floor of the corridor, with me on top, and then I rolled to the side, finally breaking his grip.
We came up together, more or less, but I’d had more than enough of this bullshit. I feinted with my right hand and threw a roundhouse punch with my left almost at the same time. It smacked against Gil’s cheek with a meaty sound. A jolt of pain shot from my fist to my elbow, but it did the job: Gil folded and went down again heavily.
I leaned against the corridor wall, getting my breath back. That was painful in itself, because my throat felt as though I’d swallowed a cricket ball. My left hand throbbed painfully, the index finger in particular refusing to bend when I tested it. It was already starting to swell up around the bottom joint.
Gil pulled himself together slowly, levering himself into a sitting position with his back against the corridor wall. The building work had evidently drowned out the sound of our fight, so nobody came out to see what was happening.
‘You . . . bastard,’ Gil panted, his voice slurred. ‘Get out of my . . . fucking . . . life!’
‘I told you,’ I panted back. ‘I’m here for one thing. If you want to see the back of me . . . give me Ditko.’ I lurched away before he could answer. I needed to plunge my hand into some cold water before it swelled up any further. I’d be fuck-all use to anybody if I couldn’t play.
Trudie showed me her map with a proprietary and slightly nervous air. It had changed a lot since the last time I’d seen it: it was marked now by hundreds of short black dashes, clustered together and aligned to form longer lines. The lines swept and swirled across the face of the city like the tracks left by primordial particles in a bubble chamber, the spoor of something both ephemeral and eternal, struck from violence the way sparks are struck from stone.
‘This is where he’s been,’ I said, tracing the nearest lines with my finger.
‘Yes.’
‘But where is he now?’
Trudie’s expression went from anxious midwife to grieving parent. ‘I have no idea. There’s a faint sense when I’m tracing the lines that some are fresher than others. They’re the ones that are easiest to find, the ones that have the strongest attraction. But there’s no . . .’ She hesitated, searching for a word.
‘Gradient?’ I suggested.
‘Exactly. No real gradient, so no way of telling which way he walked along each line or how long he spent in any of these places. It’s just a map of his movements.’
‘Which means it will get less and less useful as he goes to more and more places. Eventually the map would be solid black.’
Trudie eyed me grimly. ‘Thanks, Castor. I only spent twelve hours on this. Don’t spare my feelings.’ Behind her, Etheridge glared at me fiercely, outraged on her behalf.
‘I didn’t say it wasn’t useful now,’ I pointed out. ‘It’s amazing. I never expected you to get this far.’
Trudie seemed as unhappy with praise as she was with criticism. ‘Well, it’s only the first stage,’ she said defensively. ‘We’ve still got to go over the map again and try to figure out where he’s actually spending his time.’
I pointed to one of the densest tangles on the map, and then to another: two places where a great many lines came together, merging into areas of pure shiny black. At the heart of those areas the paper had rucked into hard wrinkles, swollen and saturated with ink. It was like looking at one of Trudie’s cat’s cradles translated onto a flat, static medium - because, of course, that’s what it was.
‘Here,’ I said, ‘and here.’
‘Yeah,’ said Trudie. He’s been to those two places a lot. Both in north London, about seven miles apart. Do you have any idea what’s there?’
‘This one - that’s a couple of miles north of King’s Cross - is where I live. No surprises there - I knew he was staking out Pen’s house. This one over to the west though, that’s more worrying.’
‘Why?’ Trudie stared at me hard, hard enough to let me know that my face was showing too much of what I felt.
‘This is Royal Oak,’ I said. ‘I’ve got a friend who lives out there.’
The penny dropped. ‘Oh my God,’ Trudie murmured.
‘About as far from your God as it’s possible to get, strictly speaking,’ I said grimly.
‘The succubus. The fallen creature you used to work with.’
‘Exactly.’
I weighed my options for a few moments. I’d already said too much in front of Etheridge. Damaged as he was, he still owed his allegiance to Jenna-Jane, and I had to assume he was going to report back to her. I wasn’t ready to trust Trudie either, come to that - at least, not all the way - but probably I needed to tell her at least something about what was going down on the Juliet front. ‘Let’s take the air,’ I suggested, looking pointedly at her alone.
Trudie hesitated, then nodded. Turning to Etheridge, she gave him a notepad and a pen. ‘Start writing down the names of the streets, Victor,’ she told him. ‘When I come back we’ll start checking them out with Google maps.’
We went to Paddington Basin, which runs right behind St Mary’s. Part of the basin had been drained a few months back, and the council had erected a sculpture of a giant plug and plughole to raise the morale of local residents while their picturesque canal was a plain of stinking mud. This was where we fetched up, sitting out in front of a pavement café that hadn’t opened for lunch yet.
After extorting a promise from Trudie not to pass any of what I was about to say on to Jenna-Jane, I told her about the bizarre glitches in Juliet’s behaviour, including the beating she’d administered to Susan and the threat she’d made to me. I mentioned the ward I’d found in Juliet’s garden, too, but only in passing because it was part of a wider pattern whose meaning seemed to lie elsewhere. Trudie heard me out in silence, then as soon as I’d finished she started in with the questions.
‘Isn’t this creature savage by her very nature?’ she demanded. ‘Why is any of this a surprise?’
‘It’s a surprise because it goes against everything that Juliet has done since she decided to stay on Earth,’ I explained patiently. ‘She knows damn well that she can only live here as long as she manages to stay on the wagon. If she starts to eat people, even just on special occasions, every exorcist in London is going to come looking for her. And good as she is, sooner or later someone is bound to sneak up on her blind side and finish the job.’
Trudie didn’t look convinced. ‘But what would that do?’ she asked with a shrug. ‘It might just send her back to Hell. She’d be free to rise again whenever she wanted.’
I stared her down. ‘Is that what you think exorcism is?’
‘I don’t know, Castor. And neither do you.’
‘But we know that demons avoid it strenuously. Desperately, even. It’s got to be more than a cab ride home.’
There was a silence. A waiter unlocked the front door of the café, obviously thinking we were his first customers of the day. Not being in the mood for coffee, tea, or any other drink that wasn’t at least 30 per cent proof, I got up and moved on. Trudie followed.
‘Can I see the wards you found?’ she asked.
‘I’ve got a photo of it on my phone,’ I said. ‘I’ll send it on to you.’
‘What about you, Castor? What’s your next move?’
‘I’m going to Macedonia t
o meet what’s left of Rafi’s family. How about you?’
‘I’ll work over the map with Victor. See if it gives us any clues to where Asmodeus is hiding.’
‘And then when I come back we’re going to make a second raid on Super-Self.’
Trudie rolled her eyes. ‘That’ll be fun.’
‘Working for Jenna-Jane is like being in the army,’ I said. ‘Every day is a holiday.’
‘Send me those pictures before you go,’ Trudie said.
‘Sure.’ I turned to face her. Might as well have this out now as later. ‘But these are the standard terms and conditions, ’ I told her. ‘We don’t share any of this with either your former or your current employer unless I say we do.’
After the barest moment of hesitation, Trudie nodded. ‘Agreed.’
‘And anything new you come up with, you run it by me before you go to Jenna-Jane.’
Another pause. ‘If you agree to do the same thing,’ Trudie said. ‘Share whatever you find in Macedonia with me. And pass me anything you get from Nicholas Heath.’
That came as something of a shock. ‘How did you know I’d seen Nicky?’ I demanded, tensing involuntarily.
Trudie smiled, a little smugly. ‘I researched you very thoroughly when I worked for the Anathemata,’ she said. ‘You’re too set in your ways, Castor. Got your habits. Your superstitions and foibles. Your prime directives. Heath is one of them.’
‘I’m still alive,’ I reminded her.
‘Yeah,’ she agreed. ‘That’s another.’
11
From Alexander the Great International Airport I went straight to downtown Skopje. The airport was a strip of tarmac and a Coke machine, but the city itself was pretty impressive. Sprawling along both sides of the Vardar River, and standing on the main drag from Belgrade to Athens, it’s always seen a fair bit of passing trade. Admittedly it’s also had its fair share - maybe slightly more - of wars, pogroms, earthquakes, corruption, industrial collapse and apocalyptic mismanagement, but it’s always managed to pick itself up, dust itself off and start all over again. Today it looks like any other medium-sized metropolis, with old and new buildings jostling each other for position on most streets, and a pall of smog closing down the middle distance.