soon as she?s awake.?
?Yeah? Be cheaper to dangle me off a footbridge by my entrails, wouldn?t it? You forget, I did your research for you on this: I know more about how dangerous Ajulutsikael is than you do. Pass me that masking tape.?
I kicked it across the floor to within reach of his hand. He fished it up without thanks.
?A hundred and fifty a night,? I suggested.
?You?re not getting it, are you, Castor? I don?t trust her and I don?t want her around. I take my physical safety pretty seriously. You think I want some psychotic demon whore waking up grouchy in my guest bedroom??
?Do you even have a guest bedroom, Nicky??
?Nope. Good point.?
?Maybe she could pay you in information.?
?About what, Castor??
Inspiration sailed past me like a dust mote in the frigid air, and I caught it on the fly. ?About what comes next,? I said. It was grotesquely manipulative, but I was getting a little tired of the way people kept saying no to me.
Nicky rolled out from under the pump to stare at me with a mixture of definite interest and deep suspicion. ?What was that??
I blew out my cheek, shrugged. ?Well, I mean to say, you?re good at postponing the inevitable, Nicky?nobody better?but you?re gonna drop off the edge sooner or later. Wouldn?t you like to know where you?re likely to fetch up??
He found a roll of paper towel, hauled off a length, and started to wipe his soot-stained fingers on it. He kept his eyes on what he was doing, knowing that his poker face isn?t all that great. ?I?d still be scared she?d rip my balls off and wear them as earrings,? he said sourly.
?Do you have a storeroom with a good strong door and a padlock??
?Yeah. So??
?So she doesn?t need to eat or drink, or use the bathroom. You could just lock her up until I get back.?
There was a long silence as Nicky carried on with his ablutions.
?Yeah,? he said eventually, sounding as casual as he could. ?Okay. On that understanding. You take her down into the basement, lock her up in the film store. You collect her when you?re ready. I don?t have to touch her or go near her in between. Then after she wakes up we have a talk, with you riding shotgun. I get . . . let?s say five questions. With straight answers. And I get to define what a straight answer is. Fair??
I nodded. ?Fair,? I said. ?I?ll go bring her in.? I turned and headed back up the aisle.
?Hey, I read where they found the kid?s body,? Nicky called after me. ?So you were right after all?she really was dead the whole time. Should?ve known better than to call you on a ghost issue. One thing you maybe didn?t know, though, because it?s in a closed file I hacked into while I was in the neighborhood.?
I stopped, stared back down the aisle at him. All the seats had been removed long ago, so neat lines of bolts stretched away from me on all sides like a field sown with scrap iron instead of seeds.
?In
?The neighborhood of Mapstack?the Met?s internal version of the Interpol?s big data exchange system. It?s usually worth a look, just for laughs. These people have no idea how the world works?how the little details connect up. They try to draw links between crimes, but they only work in straight lines so they miss it. They miss everything but fucking
?Abbie Torrington,? I reminded him, derailing that particular paranoid rant before it could get a head of steam up.
Nicky peered out from under the pump, a little truculent at being interrupted. ?The body was disturbed after death. Like, about a minute or so after death, when she could still bleed. Someone scraped the back of her neck hard enough to break the skin.?
I tried that on for size, although my mind was full of so much shit right then that it was hard to bring it into focus. ?You mean, someone drew something
?Like that, yeah. All along the back of her neck and up the left side, stopping just under the chin.?
A second pass with the knife? Take her head off after stabbing her through the heart? Could be. But then the big man with the machine gun comes stomping in, and bodies are hitting the floor on all sides. So maybe there?s no time to finish the job, and all you?re left with is a dotted line that says ?Cut here.?
I shook my head. No. Not like that. One thing you can rely on lunatic satanic cultists to do is to keep their tools sharp. If you?re making a human sacrifice, you don?t just take a bread knife out of the drawer and hope it?s got enough of an edge on it to cut through bone. Your knives are part of a sacrament: so you kiss them and you cuddle them and you stroke them with a whetstone until the edge sings to you.
?Something was pulled
?What sort of something??
?A locket on a chain.?
?Would also work. Have to be yanked off with a lot of force, though.?
I remembered Dennis Peace?s fist smashing through the woodwork on board the
?Yeah,? I said. ?It was.?
I went and got Juliet from the car, chewing this over on the way. It was a sideways leap of logic?or maybe several parallel leaps?but I had a feeling that I knew at least some of what had gone down. Peace goes to the meeting house on a rescue mission. Somehow he?s found out what?s going to take place there, and who?s going to be involved?possibly by beating it out of Melanie Torrington before he killed her. But he arrives too late. Abbie?s already dead.
Too late? Or just in the nick of time?
He aims his gun at the chalk circle on the floor: chews a good third of it to matchwood. Then as the cultists scream and run, or whatever it is they?re doing, he goes in and snatches the locket from around Abbie?s neck.
If he can?t save her body, he can at least save her spirit. But he needs something physical for it to cling to.
I must have been in this game too long, because that all sounded like it made some kind of sense. For an exorcist, used to dealing with things of the spirit as if they were cold, hard facts, there was a naked, inexorable logic to it. Most ghosts have an anchor: they can survive without one, as I?d proved when I cut loose the dead kids at the Charles Stanger clinic and set them free to roam the night. But in the white-hot panic of the moment?the moment of her death?in a strange place, surrounded by strangers, Abbie?s soul would cling to something it knew. Peace was good at his job: he knew either how to identify that something or how to influence it.
The rest was just mechanics, because the decision wouldn?t take a heartbeat. You wouldn?t want your child?s soul to stay in the company of the bastards who?d just killed her. And it was always possible that you might be saving her from something worse.
Because the satanists were still looking for Abbie, even though she was dead. Obviously something hadn?t quite worked out as planned. Something that had been started needed to be finished?and whatever it was, it was a big enough issue that the Catholic Church had brought its big, excommunicated guns in.
That was as far as I could take it right then. I still felt that I was missing something that was right under my nose, and the something was probably the missing link that tied Rafi and Asmodeus and St. Michael?s Church into all this, but I had more immediate fish that needed frying. I carried Juliet down into Nicky?s basement under his directions, and into a cupboard the size of an aircraft hangar. It was full of all kinds of stuff that Nicky has acquired over the years: paintings and sculptures, his precious record collection, and for reasons I?ve never understood (because zombies don?t eat) a vast amount of canned food. Maybe he had some idea of using it for barter after some future holocaust.
He spread a couple of blankets on the floor, one on top of the other, and I put her down on top of them as gently as I could. Nicky stared at her, nonplussed.
?I got no hormones anymore, Castor,? he told me, in a tone that sounded a little tight and nervy. ?Adrenaline, testosterone, dopamine . . . nothing. The relevant organs all stopped pumping.?
?I know. So??
?So how come when I look at her I get a hard-on??
?Magic, I guess. That?s the demonic thing she does.?
He tossed me the keys, then backed away with his hands cupped protectively over his crotch. ?Lock her up,? he muttered, and he turned and left.
I knelt down beside Juliet and lowered my head until my mouth was close to her ear. ?Hang on in there, Jules,? I whispered.
I went out and closed the door. I had to lean my shoulder into it: this cupboard had been the film store, and since old film stock is only slightly less explosive than sweaty gelignite, the walls and door were flame-proof and blast-proof. It was a good place to store Juliet?s physical form until the rest of her came back to it; I?d be getting to work on that as soon as I could.
I found Nicky up in the projection booth, taking a pH reading from his plants. I ignored him and crossed to the plan chest where he keeps his maps and books. Being a
