by Mike Carey
It was never going to dispel the succubus, but I was hoping it would throw her a curveball. It did. A tremor went through her as the rhythm built and hit, and then for a moment or two she froze, some of the terrible strength going out of her sinuous limbs. I used those moments to push my head back, against the pressure of her cupped hand, and get my mouth away from hers.
I gulped in a lungful of air. By contrast with the searing heat that raged through me, it felt like swallowing a bucket full of ice splinters. No time to dwell on the agony, no time to go for a second, deeper breath. Instead I started to whistle, in quick but halting counterpoint to the rhythm I was still beating out with my fingers.
The effect on Juliet was spectacular. Her implausibly perfect face convulsed, her features seeming for a blurred instant to melt and run into some other configuration. She screamed in rage, and it was such a terrible sound that I almost lost the tune. Her grip tightened on me, threatening to crush my chest, but only for a moment. The shrill staccato of the cantrip bit into her, and she let me go, staggering back against the wall.
As Juliet went down in a fetal crouch, I crashed to my knees on the floor. The impact jarred me enough to make the breath hiccup out of me, and although it was only for a moment, the succubus drew strength enough from the brief stammer of silence to recover and straighten up again. I caught the tune at the head of the next bar and quickened the rhythm. She froze in place again, glaring down at me.
That was when a metallic glint from under the bed caught my eye. I scrambled down on all fours and came up holding my whistle. Juliet’s eyes widened. Still whistling through my teeth, I set the mouthpiece of the tin whistle to my lips and came up on one knee in a Jon Anderson battle stance.
We were balanced on the cusp of a catastrophe curve. Freed from her suffocating embrace, I was able to get more range and more volume. But I didn’t dare to stop for an in-breath, and in spite of the chains of the exorcism tightening around her, Juliet was still managing to stay both on her feet and on the mortal plane. She was a demon, not a ghost, and as I’d found to my cost with Rafi, it takes more than “Sing Something Simple” to take one of these bastards out.
She took a step toward me—a step, and then another. Her arms were reaching out for me, and fuzzy flowers of darkness were opening behind my eyes. I was going to run out of oxygen, the music would stop, and then that would be that.
Then, in silent-comedy style, the door flew open, and Pen charged in. She was holding a rifle with a five-pointed sheriff’s star on the stock, which had the disastrous effect of making me laugh. I lost what was left of my wind, and the last breathy note of the cantrip dissolved into a whooping hiccup just as Pen aimed and fired.
She was a lousy shot. The first slug hit me in the shoulder, stinging like hell. The second went wide and blew a tiny, perfect hole in the lower left pane of the window. The third, fourth, and fifth hit the succubus in the stomach, chest, and forehead.
Juliet howled—a long, drawn-out bellow of agony and rage. Then she leaped over my head, and I heard the window smash into fragments, showering me with shards of broken glass and slivers of wood.
That was the last thing I remember, unless the quick fade to black counts as a memory in itself.
Drifting in and out of consciousness, I was vaguely aware of a voice intoning solemnly against my ear. Something about sin, something about light, then back to sin again. It made it hard to get any sleep, but then again, so did the tight band of pain across my chest and the ringing bells of agony in my head. I turned onto my other side, stifling a groan, and sank into the dark again.
The next thing I knew, there was a bright light pressing against my eyelids like a hot poultice and a less than gentle breeze on my face. Opening my gummed-shut eyes with a great act of will, I found myself staring straight up into the hundred-watt bulb of the antique Anglepoise next to my bed. I raised one hand—which was surprisingly hard because it seemed to weigh a lot more than usual—and pushed the lamp aside. When the afterimage faded out, I was looking at the gaping hole in the wall where the window had previously been and the moonless darkness beyond. The succubus had torn out the entire frame as she went through it and had even knocked loose a small section of the brickwork. I like rough sex as much as the next man, but Jesus, there has to be a limit.
I sat up slowly, taking care not to put too much strain on muscles that were already trembling and waving little flags of surrender.
“Good to have you back, Felix,” said a voice from very close by, on my right-hand side. “I hope you feel as bad as you look.”
With a sinking heart, I turned my head. The man sitting at the edge of the bed closed the book he was reading—a Bible, of course; I didn’t need to check the spine—and gave me a watery smile. He was wearing his professional blacks, but he was the sort of man who would have looked better in a suit of armor: like, for argument’s sake, Joan of Arc’s. Maybe that was because his midbrown hair had copper blond highlights in it, and his blue eyes flecks of paler, colder silver. Or maybe it was just the hard, combative set of his broad shoulders, which neatly gave the lie to the half smile on his handsome face. Suffer the little children to come unto me: the rest of you bastards I’ll get to later. He was five years older than me—five years and three months, to be more exact—and he never ever let me forget it. That was the root of his claim to know better than me where my life should be going, and the moral high ground was always his preferred battlefield.
“Hello, Matty,” I said, my voice coming out as an emasculated croak. “How’s the God business?”
“Better than the devil business, apparently,” my brother answered dryly. “Do you know what day it is?”
“What day it—”
“The day of the week, Felix. Where are we in the week?”
“Oh for Christ’s sake!” I protested weakly, but Matt was implacable. “It’s Wednesday night,” I said at last, giving up because my head was hurting and because giving up was easier than arguing about it. “Unbelievably, and appallingly, it is still Wednesday fucking night. I mean, unless I was out for twenty-four hours. Queen Elizabeth is on the throne, Posh and Becks are on the skids, and it’s a rollover week in the National Lottery. Succubi go for the balls, not the brains.”
Matt nodded. “In your case, though,” he said austerely, “it would be easy to aim for the one and hit the other.”
I opened my mouth for an equally smart-arsed rejoinder, but by now, some of the empty windows in my memory were filling up with very unpleasant images. I examined my hands, which were shaking slightly, my forearms, and then (wincing as the movement of my neck made the headache come back full force) my chest. There was no damage that I could see, despite my very vivid memories of being consumed in flames.
“Soul fires,” said Matt. Lucky guess, I told myself, irritated as always by his ability to read my mind. “The succubus’s heat is of the spirit, not the body. You’re bruised all over, there’s a bullet hole in your shoulder, and you’ve got scratches in some very intimate places, but you’re not burned.”
I nodded. It was what the textbooks said, but I’d never met a succubus in the flesh (I remembered Juliet’s flesh with a reminiscent tremor of horror and arousal) or felt that kind of pain before. God knows, it had seemed real enough at the time, like turning on a rotisserie over a barbecue pit while the devil pricked my crisping skin to let out the juices.
The rest of the last twenty-four hours was swimming back into focus now, and none of it looked much better than the fiasco it had ended on. The ghost’s snapshots of life and death and Gabriel McClennan; the intruder at the archive and my forestalled attempt to take a long walk off a short stairwell; a day spent chasing my own tail in various scenic locations in North London; and then an unlikely encounter with a predatory demon who was cruising the lower end of Charing Cross Road looking for a square meal and a bed—not necessarily in that order.
I looked at my watch. Just after three o’clock, which meant I’d been unconscious for m
ore than two hours. I felt a sudden, almost physically painful sense of urgency: a feeling that I had a lot to do, and it was already almost too late to start. In fact, I wasn’t sure if I could even walk, but if you don’t try, you never find out. I threw the covers aside and swung my legs off the bed.
“You’ll need to rest,” Matt said, a slight edge of warning in his voice. “Your system has taken a huge shock. And if you could bring yourself to pray—”
I waved away that suggestion. I was trying to stand, but my body wasn’t cooperating.
“What are you even doing here?” I demanded irritably. “Did the Holy Spirit come and wag its tail at you to tell you there was a soul in danger?”
Matt frowned. “Your landlady called me. When she tried to wake you up and couldn’t get any response, she became afraid. And since she knew that what had fled out of that window was something other than human, she chose to put her faith in an agency that is itself more than human.” I didn’t answer; I was still trying to get my legs under me and my balance straight. I was naked apart from my socks, which somehow is a lot more undignified than being all the way there, and my body was marked all over with shallow cuts that looked as though they could spell out a hidden message in Mandarin Chinese. “You ought to be grateful,” Matt went on. “To her, if not to me. Without the holy water and the blessings I put on you, you’d be sinking into coma by now.”
I gave a humorless laugh, but it was a straw in the wind. Annoyingly, the church’s armory of waters, oils, and sing-alongs did have some efficacy over ghosts and demons—only sometimes, and only if they were wielded with genuine faith, but Matty had that in spades. I couldn’t deny that he’d probably saved me from much worse damage. After Pen had come riding to my rescue like Davy Crockett and . . .
I put a hand to my shoulder. There was a small, raised welt there with a perfectly circular wound in the center of it. The mark left by Pen’s rifle. Except that it wasn’t a rifle at all. It was a kid’s air gun, and I realized abruptly what it was that it had been loaded with—what it was that had made the succubus fuck and run like a traveling salesman in a bad old joke.
“Rosary beads,” I muttered with mixed admiration and disgust. Rosary beads filed down to the size of BB shot. She’d said she was worried about me—and that Rafi had given her a warning. Evidently it had been a fair bit more circumstantial than the one he’d given to me.
Matt stood up and walked around the bed to stand over me. He looked down at me, his mouth set into a stern line. “Felix,” he said quietly, “you can’t go on like this. You’ve turned a gift from God into a stock-in-trade—and it’s a debased trade at that—one you can’t follow with a clear conscience. Exorcism is the Church’s business, not a game for amateurs or a get-rich-quick scheme.”
“Do I look rich?” I demanded, throwing out my arms to indicate my modest surroundings—more modest than ever, now that they’d been trashed by the demon. “Or were you thinking of the seven-figure deal I’m going to sign for my memoirs?”
Matt didn’t give an inch; he wasn’t capable of it. “You can’t banish ghosts without shriving them,” he pointed out with the same dogged calm. “Otherwise you could be sending innocent souls to Hell. You don’t understand what any of this is about. You’re like a blind man wandering down a busy street and firing a handgun at random into the crowd—except that the harm you’re doing is enormously, incomparably greater.”
With the help of the bedpost I did manage to get on my feet this time, so our faces were only a few inches apart as I gave him my answer, with as much quiet dignity as I could manage given the whole stark-bollock-naked thing.
“Thanks for the sermon, Matty. But you’ll have to bear in mind that I don’t believe in Heaven, or Jesus, or papal infallibility. And all that stuff about fighting the good fight and serving God instead of mammon—well, it’s inspiring, but let’s be honest. Your crowd are no better at poverty than they are at chastity, are they?”
Matt was silent for a moment, but not because my eloquence had struck him dumb. He just wanted to make sure that he didn’t talk back in anger; that would probably be a sin.
“You don’t believe in anything, Felix,” he said at last, composing his face into an absolute deadpan. “And that’s precisely why you shouldn’t have anything to do with the final disposition of human souls. You don’t know where you’re sending them, or by what authority, or how the power that God has placed in your hands works.”
“Whereas you’d like to slot it into a convenient schematic that has unbaptised babies going to Hell,” I shot back. “You’re in a pyramid-selling scheme—the biggest one in history. And maybe a thousand million people bought into it, but that doesn’t make you right.”
“Limbo,” said Matt. “Unbaptised babies go to Limbo. But you knew that.” He turned his back on me and crossed to the gaping window; Matt never did like staring contests. “Nobody in this world can know whether or not they’re right,” he murmured. “We see as through a glass, darkly. We can only do our best. But when the choice is between doing nothing and doing harm, surely nothing is the wiser option?”
I took a step after him, which was almost a serious mistake; I was still weak enough to need the bedpost’s support and solidarity. “The Gospel according to Cool Hand Luke? Sweet, Matty—and low-down. Because the alternative to freelance exorcism isn’t nothing. I mean, what your people do, that’s a sod of a long way from nothing, isn’t it?” I saw his shoulders tense slightly at that. “You think I don’t know that the Church has got its own exorcists? You think I don’t know there’s a recruitment drive on? Sorting out the sheep from the ghosts on behalf of Mother Church—I wouldn’t call that nothing. And the ones who meet your stringent quality standards—well, I assume they get the blessing, the whistle, and the wave. Fuck knows what you do with the others, but I’ve heard some ugly rumors, and it’s obvious you don’t want anyone to see you doing it. At least with me it’s one size fits all. I don’t pretend to be God—or to be on first-name terms with the bastard.”
I didn’t realize how loud my voice had got until I saw Pen standing in the open doorway—this time holding a tea tray with a single mug on it, and so looking less like Annie Oakley, more like one of Toulouse-Lautrec’s busty waitresses. In the sudden silence, Matt turned to face me, and there was a gleam in his eyes that could almost have been called threatening if my brother hadn’t been above such unworthy emotions.
“One size fits all is what the devil says, Felix,” he said in a tone of mild and sad reproof. “One size only fits all if you’ve got nothing to measure by. But you do have something to measure by. If you remember nothing else, remember dear Katie, God rest her. And your poor friend Rafi. Remember what you did to him. You see how dangerous it is when good intentions—”
The contents of the mug hit Matt full in the face. From the smell of it, it was gunpowder green tea laced with something herbal and potent. It was warm rather than hot, though, and it didn’t do much damage. The tray did; it smacked edge-on into his nose and made him stagger back. He turned to stare at Pen in absolute astonishment. She was standing with the tray gripped tightly in both hands, clearly ready to deal out more retribution as soon as he opened his mouth again.
Two thick trickles of blood were oozing from Matt’s nostrils to combine on his upper lip. He felt the bridge of his nose gingerly with one slightly shaky hand, still staring at Pen. She lowered the tray, suddenly self-conscious as the berserker moment passed. “Sorry, Fix,” she mumbled. “I’ll make you up some more.” She went out of the room, and a moment later, I heard her footsteps stomping heavily down the stairs.
I found that Pen’s act of cathartic violence had purged my own anger at Matt pretty effectively. “You shouldn’t talk about Rafi when she’s around,” I told him. “She was his—” I hesitated. There wasn’t an easy way to describe the way Rafi and Pen had circled each other, the intricacies of their sometime-never mating dance. “She loved him,” I said. “She still does.”
“And does she know what you did to him?” Matt snapped back, cradling his nose. It was already beginning to swell, the skin at the bridge not yet bruised but flushed dark red.
“Pretty much,” I said. “Yeah.”
Matt shot me one last look of exasperation, then followed Pen out of the room.
I got dressed, which was a complicated operation, because every move I made caused another set of muscles to report in unfit for duty. Mournfully consigning the remains of my many-pocketed greatcoat to the wastebasket, I shrugged on an antique trench coat that gave me an entirely misleading air of retro-chic.
I felt sick and sore, but also restless and uneasy. I couldn’t leave it alone, but I couldn’t make it go anywhere useful. Raising a succubus wasn’t an easy thing to do, or a safe one. Okay, it was true that she didn’t need to have been called and bound for any one particular purpose; it could just be coincidence. I tried that idea on for size. The thing that called itself Juliet had picked me at random from the slow-moving river of unaccompanied men that flowed through the West End of an evening. She didn’t know who I was, and she didn’t care.
Yeah, it was possible. Obviously, it was possible. She belonged to a predatory species, and although they lived somewhere else, they were known to use the Earth as a hunting ground. But Asmodeus had warned me—and warned Pen, too, telling her enough so that she could arm herself in advance. You’re going to take this case, and it’s going to kill you. Unless there were even worse horrors waiting in the wings, Juliet had to be what he was talking about—and this attack had to be related in some way to the archive ghost.
I found Pen down in the basement, which was where I expected her to be. She was feeding Arthur and Edgar when I knocked and came in. The birds ate liver, which Pen bought in industrial-size freezer packs and thawed one piece at a time. Her hands were stained red brown with watery blood. She looked around, then nodded her head at a fresh mug of milkless tea that was steaming on the mantelpiece. I picked it up and took a long slug; I knew enough about Pen’s herbal remedies to take it with fervent gratitude.