me from the worst of the impact. I was able to hold the nauseating dread at one remove; watch it writhing in the air like a clutch of tapeworms. Dicks and DeJong weren’t so lucky. The fear-thing had been rudely awakened, and it was pissed off. The two men were down, Dicks on his back and DeJong on his knees, both of them flailing and swatting at the air. It was DeJong who was screaming, although it had turned into a sort of high-pitched mewling sound now, like the protest of a hungry kitten.
Things might have gone pretty badly for me, because right then I was too far gone to move, but the fear- thing didn’t seem inclined to stick around. Perhaps it was because it didn’t have an anchor here. It had made itself a nice nest at Super-Self but it had been evicted, and the peaceful Surrey countryside didn’t have the same appeal. Or maybe it was scared itself, because it had been taken once before and didn’t know whether or not I had another shot left in my locker.
For whatever reason, the sense of panic lifted by slow degrees as the entity took to its metaphysical heels. After a couple of minutes, I was able to get back up on my feet, despite the stiffness in my chest and the fierce pain in my bruised guts.
Dicks and DeJong were slower coming out of it, but then this was their first time on the merry-go-round. I had all the time in the world to pick up DeJong’s gun from where it had fallen. Not knowing how to put the safety back on, I just fired the damn thing into the air until it stopped going
Dicks had the car keys in his pocket. He also had a wallet with a clutch of credit cards and two hundred and some quid in cash. Christmas in July.
I pocketed the cash, threw the cards into the culvert. Since they brought in chip and pin, plastic has never been worth the trouble.
Dicks was already stirring again, and trying to talk as he stared myopically up at me. He must have one hell of a hard head.
I climbed up the bank, wincing with every step. There were two bands of pain, one around my chest and one around my stomach. Moving without setting them off was like keeping two hula hoops on the go in very, very slow motion. The jagged fuzz filling my head didn’t help a bit.
By the time I got to the car, Dicks was at the lip of the ditch and crawling towards me, dragging one leg in a way that didn’t look good at all. I got inside the car and locked the doors.
Automatic. Deadlock on the key fob. No trouble.
Dicks was fumbling with the door handle, bellowing at me through the glass. His eyes were rolling in his head and there was foam or saliva on his lips.
I pulled round in a tight arc and fed him some dust.
18
Jenna-Jane is good at a whole lot of things. One of them is logical deduction; another is thinking on her feet.
She’d already decided from things I’d said earlier that the rumours were all true: that the succubus Ajulutsikael was living on Earth and passing for a human woman. When I took out my mobile and tried to call her, with that one move I put Juliet within her reach – and from then on she was working towards that one goal. It wasn’t that she forgot about Asmodeus; it was just that she rearranged her priorities and relegated him to number two.
This was the story I heard from Gil McClennan in the inelegantly named Mad Bishop and Bear pub on the main concourse at Paddington. We were so hemmed in by other people’s luggage, I felt like a First World War Tommy sitting in a trench between bombardments. The comparison held in other ways too. My ribs felt like broken splints, lacerating my internal organs whenever I moved; my split upper lip had swollen to the size of a ruby grapefruit segment; and half the dirt and unnameable shit from the bottom of that Surrey ditch had come with me when I left it.
‘I don’t get it,’ I told Gil, shifting my weight to see if I could find a position that didn’t hurt so much. ‘I mean, with Asmodeus there’s a clear and present danger. Juliet’s not – fuck! – not going anywhere, is she?’
‘You know that proverb?’ Gil said by way of answer. ‘Give a man a fish, and you feed him for a day. Teach him to fish—’
‘Yeah,’ I said. ‘I know it. How does it apply?’
‘The circles – the ones with Ajulutsikael’s old names on them – they’re something totally new. A weapon that one demon used to attack another. It’s got applications that go way outside this one situation. That was the first thing she saw – that if you got a handle on this, you could have something that would spike any demon, anywhere. Better than silver, better than holy water. She couldn’t pass it up, Castor. And she couldn’t let you get in the way of it.’
Over two untasted pints of London Pride, he filled me in on how the whole thing had gone down.
As soon as I hung up after trying to call Juliet from Pen’s house, Jenna-Jane put her own plans – freshly minted – into action. Transferring her mobile from her handbag to her pocket, she waited a minute or two and then made it ring by thumbing through the menus until she got to the one where you set the ringtone. She did that blind, from memory, which tells you something about the way her mind works.
Then she took the non-existent call and pretended to get all excited about finally turning up a lead on Martin Moulson. In fact, she’d already run Moulson to ground two days earlier, while I was in Macedonia, and sent Gil down to talk to him. Gil had got nothing worth having because Moulson hadn’t let him through the door, but that explained the old man’s references to ‘you people’ and the receptionist’s story of a journalist trying to get an interview.
The next priority was to get my phone away from me, because my phone had Juliet’s number on it. Jenna- Jane had done that with insolent ease by means of the ‘Will you trade your worn-out mobile for this state-of-the-art radio?’ gag, and then while Gentle – who probably wasn’t in on any of this – stalled me with an instant tutorial, she went outside to give Dicks his instructions.
As soon as she waved me off she called the switchboard at the MOU, both to tell DeJong he was needed for back-up and to start the ball rolling for the real order of business, which was trapping Juliet.
This was the most dangerous part of the exercise, and McClennan said she approached it with a meticulous eye for detail. In the weapons lockers at the unit she had plentiful supplies of the semi-legal neurotoxin OPG and a lot of other anti-demon specifics that could be relied on to take Juliet down if she came on them unawares. But Jenna-Jane was canny enough to realise that any demon who’d been in my circle of acquaintance would know better than to walk into the MOU in the first place.
So she laid her trap somewhere else and moved her people in. Then she called Juliet, and kept on calling until she got an answer. She told her the truth, at least for starters, knowing that the truth would do the job better than any lie: Asmodeus has your girlfriend and God only knows what he means to do with her.
Where? Juliet had demanded. Where is he? Where is the monster now?
The last place anyone would think of looking for him, Jenna-Jane told her. He’s gone to ground in his old cell at the Charles Stanger. The staff have evacuated the place. The police have been called, but what can the police do? Castor said I should tell you, because you’re the only one who might stand a chance . . .
Juliet bought it straight out. If she’d been in her right mind, she would have smelled a whole nest of rats, but she wasn’t. For whatever reason, Asmodeus had maddened and confused her and raised the ghosts of her young, reckless self inside her over a period of days or weeks. By this time she didn’t know which way was up. She was acting like a green kid with only a couple of centuries under her belt.
The Stanger had been cleared, as per Jenna-Jane’s orders. Juliet brought her wasp-yellow Maserati Spyder to a screaming, skidding halt in the car park, leaving twin teardrops of burned rubber on the asphalt, and sprinted for the door. It was wide open.
Nobody in the foyer or at the reception desk. Nobody to challenge or question her as she strode along the broad main corridor and through into the annexe where Rafi’s purpose-built cell had been installed. Probably just as well. She was in no mood to listen to reason, and anyone who’d got in her way long enough to ask her who she was visiting would probably have fallen under her stiletto heels a second later.
