‘Castor!’ she choked.
‘I think you said three days’ probation, J-J,’ I reminded her. I held up thumb and forefinger, almost touching. ‘I came this close to making the grade.’
I slammed the great steel door shut and threw the bolt.
19
We held our council of war at the Walthamstow Gaumont. Nicky wasn’t exactly thrilled to host, but he was still feeling sheepish about missing the boat with the anagrams in Asmodeus’ summonings, so I had a little leverage to work with.
He let us in off the street, giving the bundle in my arms – Juliet, now wrapped in my greatcoat and still more or less out of her head – a curious look.
Gil McClennan shivered as he stepped over the threshold. The change in temperature from the warmth of the air outside was sudden and marked.
‘Place is as cold as a tomb,’ he muttered.
‘Well, shit!’ Nicky sneered. ‘Here I’ve been looking for a good analogy all this time, and it was right there in front of my face.’
Gil’s face went through some interesting changes as he realised belatedly that he was talking to a dead man. ‘No offence,’ he offered at last.
‘None taken,’ said Nicky. ‘To be offended, I’d have to give a fuck. Go on upstairs. Joan of Arc is already up there waiting for you.’
Trudie was pacing the floor of the projection room, wearing two jackets against the cold. Her arm was in a sling, her shoulder swathed in bulky bandages. She looked almost as pale as Nicky, but without his excuse of having been four years dead. In her free hand she carried a bright orange Sainsbury’s bag.
‘Castor!’ She hurried over to us as we entered, then recoiled slightly when she realised what it was I was carrying. Her gaze went from Juliet’s face to mine. ‘I seem to have missed a lot,’ she said. ‘Can you bring me up to speed?’
Nicky cleared the table and we sat ourselves around it: a coalition of the willing, if that term includes people who’ve tried out all the other options and ended up painted into a corner. Juliet was on the other side of the room, lying on a camp bed under the projector. The mattress smelled of mildew and was unpleasantly damp, but it was the best we could do.
Asmodeus’ note – item one on an agenda of one – sat in the centre of the table. It was short and to the point.
‘You’ve got nothing,’ Nicky pointed out. ‘Sorry. Thought I might as well start by stating the obvious. You’ve bumped into him twice, and both times you barely survived. You go in there now – with him actually waiting for you – and he’ll kill you, sure as eggs is eggs.’
‘We do have this,’ Trudie said. ‘It got broken when I went crazy back at the MOU, but it might still be usable.’ She put the Sainsbury’s bag on the table and shoved it across towards me. I knew what it was, so I didn’t bother to open it. It made a grating rattle as I took it and put it down by my side.
‘Incendiary grenades?’ Nicky asked sardonically. ‘White phosphorus? Depleted-uranium shells?’
‘Something along those lines,’ I allowed.
‘Unless it’s an A-bomb, he’ll still kill you.’
I nodded. ‘I wouldn’t bet against it,’ I agreed. ‘But let’s not kid ourselves, Nicky. Killing us isn’t the cake, it’s just the icing. Maybe not even that. Asmodeus has worked really hard on this, and we know now that he could have walked into Pen’s house and ripped my head off any time he wanted to. The wards barely tickled him.’
‘Then what?’ Gil demanded. ‘If there’s a big picture, I’m not seeing it. This is all about revenge, surely? Ginny whatever-her-name-was – she helped out with the ritual that brought him to Earth in the first place, so he started out by killing her. Ditko performed the ritual, so he took out the last surviving member of Ditko’s family. With you, he gets the hat trick.’
‘Yeah,’ I agreed. ‘But no. I already made that mistake once – thinking this was all about me. That was why I was so slow off the mark in figuring out what those summonings were. He hates me, yeah, but he didn’t go for me. Not really. He went for Juliet.’ Juliet didn’t stir at the mention of her name.
‘She helped you put him back in the bottle the last time he got free,’ Trudie said slowly. ‘But so did a lot of other people.’ She glanced across at Nicky, who shrugged irritably.
‘I just provide a service,’ he said.
‘The effect of the wards was to confuse and enrage her,’ Trudie went on. ‘Isn’t that what you said?’
I thought about that. ‘It made her more volatile,’ I said. ‘Less in control of her actions. She did seem a little confused, at times, but mostly what she seemed was off the leash, all her responses quicker, more extreme, less considered.’
‘Removing at a stroke the effect of two years’ socialisation on Earth, and maybe a couple of millennia of experience down in Hell,’ Trudie concluded.
‘Yeah. More or less.’
‘Then that’s the clue, isn’t it?’ She tapped the note with an extended finger. ‘He specifically tells you to bring her, because it’s her that he needs. He wants her to do something for him, and he doesn’t want her to be able to think too much about it.’
‘What kind of something?’ Gil demanded. ‘She’s just a venus fly trap. She draws people in and eats them. Are you saying Asmodeus wants to arrange a hit? He can hit anyone he wants to.’
‘You’re coming at this from the wrong end,’ Nicky told us. ‘Unsurprisingly. You should be asking yourself what he wants and then trying to figure out from that how he could use Juliet to get it.’
‘He wants to be free,’ I said. ‘He wants to get out of Rafi’s flesh and go home.’
‘And he thinks he’s done it,’ Trudie pointed out. ‘He says in the note that this is his farewell party. So he’s found some way of—’
‘Wait.’ Nicky was waving his hands in a rewind gesture. ‘Go back, Castor. What did you say?’
‘He wants to go home.’
‘No. You said he wants to get out of Ditko’s flesh. Right?’
‘Same thing, Nicky?’
‘No,’ he said emphatically. ‘It’s not. It’s not the same thing at all. Tell me how the succubus works. I’ve read about it, but I’ve never seen it. You saw it, didn’t you? On that boat.’
He meant the
‘You know what she does,’ I hedged.
‘I know what the books say. In real life, how does it work?’
I cast my mind back, with some reluctance, to the events of that night, and to the other night, even earlier, when Juliet had come close to devouring me. ‘She turns you on,’ I said, tersely, inadequately. ‘She makes you aroused – very, very aroused. Then she eats you.’
‘Seriously? I mean, bones crack, blood spills, meat is chewed?’
Fuck. I took a deep, slightly shaky breath. ‘There’s no mess,’ I said. ‘When she took Damjohn, I didn’t see any blood. Any remains.’ Actually, it had been even more remarkable than that. He’d been bleeding from a gut wound before she embraced him. Afterwards, the blood that had been on the deck was gone, without even a stain on the woodwork to show where it had been.
