She blanched when she saw me, and almost dropped the gun. ‘Oh shit!’ she exclaimed. ‘Oh, Castor!’ I held out my hand, and she put the shotgun into it without a word. Probably just as well. The conversation was likely to be pretty one-sided in any case.
Asmodeus had rolled over on top of Juliet. He drove her face hard into the pavement and lurched to his feet. He turned to face me, his agonised features rippling like water.
‘Now . . .’ he snarled.
‘Fifteen hundred nails,’ I’d said. Actually, they were tiny metal discs, which sounds a lot less dramatic, but that doesn’t lessen what Moulson did. Inch by inch, he had waterproofed the house of his own flesh against the bad weather coming from Hell, and when it was all over the house was still standing. Fifteen hundred surgically precise incisions. Fifteen hundred grinding ordeals as he forced the metal deep enough for it to stay. He said it had taken most of a day.
A shotgun doesn’t score quite as high on accuracy, but it’s a fuck of a lot faster.
I fired the first barrel.
Glass. Glass ground up as fine as birdshot. It was such a light load that at twenty yards or so it probably wouldn’t even sting. But this was six feet.
Asmodeus’ jacket and shirt were flecked, ripped, stripped away by the multiple, stinging impacts. The demon flinched, drawing in a harsh, astonished breath, and then he bellowed in agony as our purpose-built payload started to work on him.
Asmodeus stared at his hands with a sort of numb fascination. Blood from a dozen lacerations welled out onto his palms, between his fingers, down over his wrists.
‘Fuck,’ he said distantly.
With terrible deliberation, he focused his will on his raised hand, trying to exert the same authority over that tortured flesh that he had enjoyed by right of conquest from the night when he moved in right up until now.
The flesh didn’t obey. Didn’t even answer. Asmodeus started towards me. Anger and consternation crossed his face, but what finally stood out there was fear.
‘When you die,’ he grated hoarsely. ‘When you die, Castor . . .’
That was as far as he got. He fell a few feet away from me, twitching. I followed him maybe a second later, unable to hold myself upright any more. I was staring directly into his eyes, so I saw when they filmed over, and then cleared again.
‘Fix . . .’ Rafi whispered.
The street was alive with noise suddenly, as black cars and vans and at least one eight-wheeled truck rolled into the small cul-de-sac and screeched to a precipitous halt that left the asphalt streaked with burned-rubber spoor. Doors slammed open, men and woman in black stealth gear jumped down and deployed themselves in blunt wedge formations, looking in all directions for an enemy who wasn’t there.
Thomas Gwillam stepped out of one of the cars and surveyed the carnage. His cold, appraising gaze started up high, at the broken window, and ended with the bodies on the pavement, lingering on Rafi before finally coming to rest on me.
‘I came as soon as you called,’ he said. ‘But of course you didn’t call until you could be sure I’d arrive late. I warned you against false pride, Castor. What good is back-up that arrives when the battle’s over?’
He had a point. Astutely, I lost consciousness before I could be made to admit that. Glad to be out of it, to tell you the truth. My jaw was starting to sting like a bastard.
21
There’s a lot to be said for fainting dead away at the awkward moment when the action is over and done with and the cleaning up has to start. Other people can bear your wounded body from the field and take care of all the messy stuff, while you cavort with pastel-coloured bunny rabbits in a magic garden where marshmallows and bottles of single malt whisky hang like fruit among the trees.
In this case though, the ancillary staff weren’t up to the job. Gwillam and his people were only interested in Rafi, and apart from them the only one who was even capable of standing on her own two feet was Trudie Pax. The first thing she did – since she knew a thing or two about clinical shock – was to slap me awake again.
That was something of a blow, to be honest. I would have preferred to wake up in a hospital bed, with all my missing parts sewn back into place and a gentle novocaine high percolating through my body. Instead I found myself still on the pavement, aching in every limb, joint and organ, and with some sort of agonising neural fireworks display going off in what was left of the lower part of my face.
Trudie had torn off my shirt and wadded it up under my chin to staunch the worst of the bleeding. That was as much as she could do, right then. She’d called 999 and an ambulance was on its way; in the meantime, there were a lot of other people to check in on.
Rafi seemed to be alive. At least, Gwillam reported, he had a pulse, although it was weak and irregular. The wound in his chest had all but stopped bleeding, so Trudie saw no point trying to pack it. The shotgun wounds were too many and too small for her to do anything about them.
Juliet didn’t have a pulse and she wasn’t breathing, but when Trudie muttered a blessing over her, she sat up and swore in some guttural language whose inhuman consonants made Trudie’s eyes water. Leaving Gwillam conferring with his chiefs of staff, the three of us went into the building together to get the final count and find out whether we’d won or lost that night.
Gil seemed the least damaged of all of us, but he was only stirring into consciousness when we arrived on the second-floor landing. He climbed groggily to his feet, only to sit back down again hurriedly. The left side of his face was a single bruise, the eye swollen shut. He stared in fascinated horror at my bemonstered face, then made a thumb-up, thumb-down gesture: a question.
I shrugged: jury still out.
Juliet led the way because Juliet could find them by smell alone. She went into a room next to the one where we’d kept Rafi confined after we took him from the Stanger, less than two months before. The only piece of furniture in the room was a tall free-standing wardrobe. Juliet tried the doors, found them locked.
I offered the stock of the shotgun, but Juliet broke the lock with her bare hands and threw the door open.
Pen and Sue were standing side by side in the wardrobe, their hands and legs tied, kept on their feet by crude nooses slung around the clothes rail above their heads. If they’d fallen asleep or stumbled, they would have hanged themselves.
They hadn’t been touched. Not a wound, not a bruise. Even now, that’s the part I find hardest to understand. Asmodeus needed them alive because he needed to be sure that Juliet would come to him. But he wanted her angry, and what would drive her more berserk than the broken body of her lover, waved in her face?
It’s possible that he’d promised himself their degradation and death after all this was over, that he put it off as an epicure might put off a fine meal, sharpening the pleasure by prolonging the anticipation. But that kind of logic only gets you so far with a demon; mostly they just take what they want when they want it, and in this case our reactions – meaning mine and Juliet’s – would have been a big part of the fun for him.
So I’m wondering, crazy as it sounds, whether it might have been Rafi who spared them rather than Asmodeus. Maybe he saved his strength for one final rebellion, and fought down the demon’s hands whenever they tried to consummate that part of the plan.
The bottom line is that I don’t know. And there’s nobody I can ask.
