yellow waters. Her right eye was swollen closed.
‘Got angry?’ I repeated, incredulously. ‘Sue . . . I mean . . . fuck!’
‘It was me,’ Sue said flatly. ‘It was my fault.’
Juliet is a succubus, a demon whose specific modality is sex. That makes her one of the most perfectly adapted predators ever to emerge in any ecosystem. She makes men desire her – using a bag of tools that only starts with her stunning beauty and hypnotic scent – and then, when they’re at the highest pitch of sexual frenzy, vibrating like tuning forks, she devours them, body and soul.
I know all this because I was one of her victims. Gabriel McClennan, a fellow exorcist and part-time necromancer in the pay of an eastern European master-pimp named Lucasz Damjohn, had raised the demon Ajulutsikael and set her on my tail, figuring that a lethally close encounter with a demon would look like an occupational hazard for someone in my line of work. But I survived, against the odds. I managed to talk the succubus out of finishing me off (an experience which bore the same relationship to normal coitus interruptus as an exploding supernova does to a Bic lighter), and then she talked herself into sticking around on Earth. She changed her name to Juliet Salazar, met a nice girl, got married and settled down. A happy ending for everyone except me: part of my soul still has a hard-on for her that doesn’t look like dying down any time soon.
The phrase ‘drop-dead gorgeous’ gets bandied around a lot, with ‘drop-dead’ functioning as an over-intense intensifier. Juliet is drop-dead gorgeous in a very specific and literal sense. The bone-white skin, the black eyes that are almost entirely without whites – these things might seem too odd to be attractive if you met them anywhere else, but as soon as you see Juliet you want her. Her tall, generously curved body becomes the image of the ideal for you, the incarnation of desire. And if you get in close enough to inhale her perfume – her earthy natural musk – then you’re lost.
There was a time, back when she was just starting out in the business, when we used to share a lot of our cases. You could say that I showed her the ropes, or at least taught her some knots that she didn’t already know, but if I’m honest, what I was mainly doing was trying to domesticate a big, scary jungle predator into behaving like a house cat. It was a bumpy process, with a number of very memorable upsets along the way.
As I stared at Sue’s battered face, one of them flashed across my memory with sudden and unsettling vividness.
Juliet and I were mooching our way through a disused factory somewhere out past Gants Hill. It had changed hands at a bankruptcy auction, and the new owners were concerned about the complaints they were getting from residents in the area. People had seen lights and heard noises in the dead of night when it wasn’t Christmas and they weren’t even drunk. So the outfit that had taken possession hired me to give the place a prayer and a sing- song, and I took Juliet in with me because at that point I was still pretending to be her sensei.
We’d been all through the building once and found nothing more suspicious than some obscene graffiti. It was half past one in the morning, nothing was moving, and we were pretty sure that we were in for a quiet night. So we sat down on a lathe, or maybe a steam press, and I started to rummage through my pockets for a hip-flask full of liquid sunshine which by rights ought to be there.
But Juliet caught the edge of a scent that shouldn’t be there, and before I could even get comfortable she was off – across two shop floors and a storage hangar the size of the Hatfield Galleria, out onto the yard and in among some prefab packing sheds at the far end of a desolate asphalt apron where a fleet of a hundred vans had once been parked.
Seven of these sheds were empty. The eighth . . . well, that was empty too, but there was a trapdoor in the floor and Juliet made a beeline straight for it. It was locked, but it didn’t fit all that tightly. She got her fingers in around the edge on one side of the lock plate and started to pull. I went looking for a crowbar, and found one eventually. I also found some stuff I wished I hadn’t, including an inspection pit full of gnawed bones. I had a bit of an inkling now what it was that had been giving the neighbours disturbed nights.
I took the crowbar back to the trapdoor and started to use it to good effect on the opposite side from where Juliet was tugging, but I think she’d have got there without my help. After thirty or forty seconds the wood of the trap gave a series of gunshot-sharp cracks and she lifted two thirds of it free. The rest stayed attached to the hinges.
From the bottom of the lightless well we’d opened came a weak, despairing wail, and then another.
I’d brought a torch with me. I switched it on now and pointed it down into the dark. It lit up a small, terrified face – just for a second, before a hand came up to shield those wide eyes from the sudden, unaccustomed light. I moved the beam to right and left: wherever the spotlight fell, whimpering children ducked and scurried away from it.
We’d stumbled across a
We looked for a ladder or a rope, but found nothing. The kids, meanwhile, cried and shrieked at the bottom of the hole. I shouted a few reassurances down to them, but clearly this was a conditioned reflex: they knew by now that when the trapdoor opened, someone’s number was up.
After a terse parley, we agreed that Juliet would stay at the mouth of the pit and keep guard while I went and found some means of getting down into it. I headed for the door, but I was still a few steps short of it when two unsettlingly tall shapes filled it, blocking my path.
Not one
I eyed their muscular frames to get an inkling of what I’d be up against. They weren’t overly broad at the shoulder, but they were so tall that they easily outmassed me anyway. The one on the left looked unremarkable except that when he grinned – as he did then – his teeth showed as a spiked forest of razor-sharp incisors with not a molar in sight. The other had a face that was a mass of old scar tissue so deep and rucked that I could barely see his eyes. They were both dressed in blue overalls, presumably so that from a distance – or to a trusting or myopic observer – they’d look as though they had some reason to be here.
They came inside and closed the heavy steel door with an echoing clang.
I took a step back, reaching into my coat and unshipping my whistle. Then I changed my mind, let it slide back again and picked up a heavy cast-iron pulley block from a pile of packing cases instead. Werewolves, you’ve got to hate them. They’re mostly old souls because it’s a difficult trick to pull off, and to pry the spirit loose from the animal flesh that it’s shaped and sculpted . . . well, that’s even harder. In fact it’s like pulling buckshot out of a tiger’s hide while the tiger is trying to eat your head. Given the fact that the pair of them were going to be on me inside a second, I was probably going to have better luck with the pulley block than the whistle – a cat in Hell’s chance, say, rather than a snowball’s.
They moved forward in unconscious synchrony, and I swung with the block. I timed it right, catching the scar-faced one off balance as he moved in, but it made no difference: he was too damn fast. His arm flicked out and swatted the thing out of my hand before it could touch him. On the backswing he pounded his closed fist into the side of my head and I staggered back a step, seeing stars. Then I backed away again, quickly, out of instinct, and his extended claws whipped past so close that if I’d been wearing a tie it would have been reduced to comical confetti.
The two of them tensed to leap, and I went for my whistle again because it was all I had left. But then Juliet pushed me firmly aside and strode past. I caught my breath. I had to, because it was so thick with her pheromones it almost choked me. The two
‘Last man standing gets to kiss me on the lips,’ she said. And then, after a charged pause of about half a second, she added, ‘Dealer’s choice.’
The were-thing with the teeth made a clumsy lunge for her on the spot, which just left him open for a scything uppercut from his partner that almost floored him. He got his feet back under him though, and came back spitting and snarling, slamming scarface against the wall and pinning him there with his shoulder. As they wrestled, trying to get a grip with teeth and claws, I found myself stepping forward with my own fists tightly clenched. Juliet’s arm came out and blocked me, without effort.
‘Not you, Castor,’ she said with clinical calm. ‘This one is by invitation only.’
She watched as they took each other apart. I’m not normally squeamish but I looked away before the end, because the
