‘So what did you find?’ I asked, when it was clear that she wasn’t going to volunteer anything further.
She looked up at me again. A human woman — or man, for that matter — would have looked at the book in order to avoid eye contact, but Juliet was incapable of feeling embarrassment or social awkwardness. She was a stone-cold fact, exquisite and unapologetic, in a world of nuances. So she was looking at the book because something I’d said or something she was thinking had made a connection. To hunger? To caterpillars? To metamorphosis?
‘I can’t discuss this,’ she said.
I took a look at the other people in the room. It was true that there were a lot of eyes on us — or rather, on her. ‘Okay,’ I said, reluctantly. ‘But if I hang around until after the reading, could we–’
‘I don’t mean here and now, Castor. I mean ever. This isn’t a subject that can be raised between us.’ Her stare was cold and stern: she knew me, and she knew how hard it was for me to take no for an answer. She was warning me with her eyes that any subsequent answers would be smackdowns.
But fools rush in, as they say. ‘It kind of already has been,’ I pointed out. ‘Raised, I mean. Can you at least tell me whether you felt this thing?’
‘No.’
‘Or whether you recognised it? Whether it’s something you’ve met before?’
‘No.’
‘But you’re a ghost-breaker,’ I pointed out. ‘This is your living, right? What if I hired you to–’
‘I said no, Castor. I’m not for hire. If you can handle this yourself, do so. If you can’t, don’t come to me for help or try to pick my brains with one of your stacked games of twenty questions. It will cause friction between us. It could even compromise our friendship.’
Before I could think of a question that wouldn’t sound like it was a question, Susan Book crossed the room and joined us. She put a hand on Juliet’s shoulder: Juliet took it in her own, touched it to her lips and then replaced it.
Susan beamed at me. Being with Juliet had made her blossom: turned her from a shy, conflicted little mouse with a self-effacing stammer and a tendency to blame herself for other people’s failings into a woman with confidence and quiet charisma. Sex is magic, and she was tapped into the wellspring. I’d be lying if I said I didn’t envy her that.
But in case the point needed to be made, that unobtrusive little kiss on the back of the hand reminded me that there was a lot more to this relationship now than sex. Susan loved Juliet, wholly and desperately and unquestioningly. And Juliet — felt something too. Something that made her protective and a little possessive and occasionally exasperated when Susan wouldn’t do as she was told or see things as they obviously were. Might as well call that love, too: it had a lot of the hallmarks.
‘Hi, Felix,’ Susan said. ‘Are you going to come along with us to the Martin Amis thing?’
‘And be lectured about how Muslims ought to smack their kids more? Nah,’ I said. ‘No, thanks. You crazy kids go and enjoy yourselves.’
I stood up, trying not to let my consternation and annoyance show on my face. Juliet had warned me once before this — about a year before, if memory served — that certain subjects would always be taboo between us. Heaven and Hell were on the list, and so was God, and so were her own nature and origins. It would be useful to know which of these, if any, were operating here: but Susan’s arrival had made it impossible for me to fish any further.
‘We will,’ Susan said, presumably referring back to my begrudged ‘Have a good time’, or whatever it was I’d said.
Juliet made a sour face. ‘Ideas,’ she said.
‘Nothing wrong with ideas, Jules,’ Susan chided gently.
‘No. But my comfort zone is flesh.’
On which note I said my goodbyes, feeling none too happy.
If Juliet wasn’t going to play ball, I was left with Asmodeus. And Asmodeus was a different proposition altogether.
Bigger, for one thing. Meaner. And living inside my best friend.
Rafi only started playing with black magic after he met me and saw the things I could do. This was during my brief, abortive stint at university, when he was an elegant wastrel and I was a working-class Communist with a chip on my shoulder the size of the Sherman Oak. We vied briefly for Pen’s affections, although Rafi never had any doubt that he’d win in the end. He always did: he was one of the people who life went out of its way to accommodate.
Rafi was never part of the exorcist fraternity: he was just an enthusiastic amateur with a sharper mind than most who mixed and matched necromantic rituals until he put one together that actually worked. But he was never a completer-finisher, either, which was the first part of his downfall. He left out one of the necessary wards, and the magic circle that should have kept Asmodeus safely contained was fatally flawed. The demon — one of the most hard-core bastards in Hell — battered his way out and into Rafi’s soul.
A lot of things could have happened at that point: demonic possession is a fairly new phenomenon, and not all that well documented. What actually happened was that Rafi became delirious and got so hot he actually seemed in danger of catching fire. His girlfriend called me, and I tried to carry out an exorcism.
That was the
For Rafi it was effectively the end of any kind of normal life. A human soul is pretty lightweight when weighed against one of Gehenna’s finest, so Asmodeus would surge up and take the driving seat whenever he felt like it. After a couple of ugly incidents, Rafi was sectioned under the Mental Health Act: there are aspects of the way we live now that the law hasn’t caught up with yet, and this was one of them. Being realists, though, the senior management at the Stanger wrote ‘Schizophrenic’ on the paperwork, while at the same time they lined Rafi’s cell with silver to curb the demon’s worst excesses.
For three years we bumped along and made the best of a bad job: I went along to the Stanger every so often and used my tin whistle to play the demon down so that Rafi got some peace, and Doctor Webb, who ran the place, was happy so long as we kept the money coming.
Happy, that is, until he got a better offer from a former colleague of mine: Jenna-Jane Mulbridge, the director of the Metamorphic Ontology Unit at Queen Mary’s hospital in Paddington. Jenna-Jane was just a ruthless monster back when I worked for her, but for the past couple of years she’s been reinventing herself as a crazed zealot, convinced — just as Father Gwillam is — that humanity is now engaged in a last-ditch, apocalyptic struggle against the forces of darkness. As far as I can tell, she sees her role as broadly similar to Q’s in the James Bond films: humanity’s armourer and engineer, forging the weapons that we’re bound to need when the dead and the undead back us up against the wall and finally come squeaking and gibbering for our throats.
But before she can be Q, she has to be Mengele. She’s turned the Helen Trabitch Wing at Queen Mary’s into a little concentration camp over which she rules with loving, obsessive sadism, and she’s managed to persuade the CEOs of the hospital trust that this still counts as medicine. She’s got an amazing variety of inmates there: werewolves, zombies, the oldest ghost ever raised and some tragic nutcase who thinks he’s a vampire. About the only thing she hasn’t got is a demon, and she’s got her heart set on acquiring Rafi.
About a month back, the cold war between me and J-J got a little hotter, as it periodically does: it looked like she was going to be able to persuade the High Court to overturn a decision made by a local magistrate, which had given Pen power of attorney over Rafi. She was looking to have Rafi transferred from the Stanger to the MOU, with the connivance of Doctor Webb, whose balls she seems to have in her pocket.
But I’ve started a ball collection too, and the aforementioned magistrate is part of it. I got my own court order, immaculately forged, and went in first. Webb and J-J woke up the next morning to a fait accompli. Rafi was gone, having traded the dubious hospitality of the Stanger for the ministering hands of my good friend Imelda Probert — known to most of London’s dead and undead as the Ice-Maker.
It was a spoiler run, and it was desperate improvisation. At the Stanger, Rafi was penned in a silver cell and Webb and his team had a dozen or more ways, ranging from subtle to brutal, of keeping Asmodeus in check when
