The Naming of the Beasts

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.

The cell door was closed but not locked. She turned the handle and wrenched it open. Doing that set off three canisters of OPG that Jenna-Jane’s suspiciously experienced munitions team had set immediately inside the door, all of them more or less at head height. Juliet got a lungful of the stuff before she even knew what it was.

OPG is a leaner, meaner version of the Tabun nerve gas invented by Gerhard Schrader back in the 1930s – the first of the ever-popular cyanophosphides. There’s a UN resolution specifically outlawing its use, but only in a battlefield context. Used therapeutically, in minuscule doses, it reverses some of the effects of senile dementia. That loophole allows institutions like the Charles Stanger and the MOU to stock it in industrial quantities and call it medicine.

Juliet suddenly found that her arms and legs didn’t want to do what they were told. Spastic tremors tore through her when she tried to move, and the muscles of her throat constricted as suddenly as a door slamming closed.

Demons are built differently from people though, for all that we come from the same stock. Juliet was fighting to bring her limbs back under her conscious control when the cell door immediately behind her also opened, and three men wearing masks and full hazmat suits cut loose at her with specially adapted automatic rifles firing silver-plated hollow-point ammunition.

The white metal ripped through Juliet like fistfuls of oblivion. She was probably already finished at that point, but she leaned into the impacts and managed to fall forward rather than back, her arms thrown out in a blind, flailing sweep. She barely connected, but then again she barely had to. Two of Jenna-Jane’s three sharpshooters died suddenly and messily as Juliet’s razor-sharp fingernails punctured the wire-weave plastic of their decontamination suits and the airborne poison touched their skin.

But the silver had done its work, finishing what the gas had started. Juliet was down, and she wasn’t moving. A second squad – including Gil himself – came up the corridor, no doubt with huge reluctance given what they’d just seen happen to their comrades, but once they ascertained that Juliet was out for the count, they bound her hands and feet with steel and silver bands, lifted her onto a stretcher trolley and wheeled her out. By the time they got her into the unmarked MOU acquisitions vehicle – a Bedford van fitted with soundproofing and top-of-the-rage restraint gear – the air filters were already being turned on inside the Stanger, kick-starting the laborious process of putting the neurotoxic genie back in its bottle.

They took Juliet back to the MOU, and down into the basement. The door had closed in Gil’s face. He’d done his job, and Jenna-Jane was keen to oversee the rest of the operation by herself. This was, after all, where she excelled: at the porous interface between scientific inquiry and legalised torture. It seems to be a happening place these days.

I sat and digested these facts in silence after Gil had finished speaking. Something in his face told me there was still some bad shit to come, but this was bad enough to be going on with. And in the meantime it was probably a good idea to clear the air by asking the obvious question.

‘Why are you doing this, McClennan?’ I demanded. ‘You hate my guts. It doesn’t make sense that you’d come riding to my rescue – or that you’d stab Jenna-Jane in the back, which would put you way out of position for kissing her arse.’

Gil’s mouth set in a tight line. ‘You’re right, Castor,’ he said. ‘I do hate your guts. But you saved my people down in that swimming pool, and you probably saved me too. I felt like I owed you something. And I also felt like maybe I’d enlisted in the wrong war. We’ve got two women out there, in the hands of that thing, and we’re not doing one damn thing about it.’

‘Nothing we can do,’ I pointed out, ‘until he shows his hand.’

Gil shook his head grimly. ‘Well, that was kind of the clinching argument,’ he muttered. ‘He already has, Castor. He left a note.’

The words didn’t sink in for a second. When they did, I still thought I must have misunderstood. ‘He what?’ I echoed stupidly.

‘He left a note, at your landlady’s house. It was addressed to you, but Gentle found it. She gave it to the professor, and the professor opened it and read it. Then she put it back in the envelope and stuck it in her pocket. Nobody has any idea what it says, but we’ve been forbidden to talk to the police or anyone else outside the MOU until this is all resolved. By that time we could have two more corpses on our hands.’

I was staring down at my fists, which I suddenly realised were clenched – so tightly that the knuckles showed white.

‘Fuck,’ I said hollowly.

‘The place is a fortress,’ Gil warned me. ‘Dicks and DeJong haven’t reported back yet, but she’s called the agency she uses and ordered a top-up. The building is swarming with them.’

‘Doesn’t matter,’ I said. ‘I’ve got to see that note. And I’ve got to get Juliet out of there.’

‘I’m not interested in saving the demon,’ Gil said, ‘but I’ll help you get your hands on the note if you feel like trusting me. At the very least, I can get you in through the door. And I still see bringing Asmodeus down as job number one, so if you’re aiming to do that, I’m in.’

I met his gaze. ‘I’d appreciate the help,’ I said. ‘McClennan, we got off on the wrong foot . . .’

‘Yeah, we did. Because you killed my uncle and ruined the lives of some people I really care about.’

‘Actually, I more or less stood out of the way and let him kill himself. If we both come out of this alive, maybe we should have another pint and I can tell you all about it.’

Gil thought about this. ‘I’d sooner you told me how you pulled that shit off at Super-Self.’

‘All yours. With diagrams.’

‘You’re on, Castor.’ He grinned faintly, but sobered again immediately. ‘It’s a fuck of a big if, though, isn’t it?’

At the MOU, the street doors had been locked. Gil pressed the buzzer and then hammered on the glass for attention, while I waited a few feet away, pressed flat against the wall in what I hoped was the security camera’s blind spot. If the lens was a fish-eye, whoever was on the front desk was looking straight at me now and wondering what the fuck I thought I was up to.

Our luck seemed to be holding though – at least for now. The guard on the front desk, standing in for Mr Dicks, left his post and came to the door, where Gil pressed his ID against the glass for his inspection. There was a rattle and a click as the door was unlocked from inside, and Gil walked on past the guy. He was carrying a plastic carrier bag, which the security guard didn’t bother to inspect.

I came out of hiding and jammed the door open with my foot as he swung it to again. He stared at me in amazement, too surprised even to be alarmed. He was just starting to reach for his baton when Gil clocked him on the back of the head with a champagne bottle, the only thing his carrier bag contained. We hadn’t ordered the Moët, but the nice young stockbrokers at the next table hadn’t objected to us taking away the empty.

The bottle turned out to be a one-shot weapon, snapping clean at the neck, but it did the job. The guard staggered and fell forward into my arms. I dragged him out through the door, dumped him up against the wall, then went back inside and locked him out.

So far so good.

The inner door was locked against us too, but the security window, now unguarded, was our way in. Gil clambered across the counter and buzzed me through, then joined me on the other side.

He hooked a thumb back towards the guard post. ‘There’s a weapons locker in there,’ he said.

‘Guns?’ I gave him a pained stare.

‘Sidewinders. Tasers, maybe. Doesn’t hurt to take a look.’

‘Does if the locker’s fitted with an alarm,’ I pointed out. ‘I’ve got something better in mind, but I’ll need a minute or two to set it up. Come on.’

He hesitated a second longer, then shrugged and followed me. I led the way around to the right, towards the steel door and Jenna-Jane’s basement Gulag. But I stopped before we got there, at the door with the keypad lock. Rosie Crucis’s door.

‘Keep your eyes peeled,’ I told Gil, and I tapped in the code that Nathan had given me: 1086. I tried the door, but it didn’t give.

‘What the fuck?’ I growled.

‘Let me try,’ Gil said. He tapped in the same code, then a few more with less and less conviction. ‘No good,’ he muttered. ‘They’ve done a security reset. It was probably when they kitted out the lab for your succubus this morning. If you want to go to ground, I can get the new code from Nathan.’

‘No time,’ I said. ‘And the longer we hang around here, the more likely I am to be spotted. Looks like that weapons locker may be the lesser of two evils.’

We jog-trotted back to the security post, and I was looking around for something to prise open the door of the locker when I spotted something even better: a fire axe in a glass-fronted cabinet high up on the wall next to the door.

I looked at Gil. ‘Ready?’ I asked.

‘Go for it,’ he said.

I smashed the front of the cabinet with my elbow, and the shrieking jangle of the fire alarm broke the silence like an auditory smack in the face.

We ran with that clamour in our ears. Halfway down the corridor, Gil stopped dead and held out his hand for the axe. I handed it over before I even saw what he was looking at. There was a fuse box on the wall. It was locked, but only with a piddling little Ajax padlock. The first blow of the axe snapped the hasp clean off, and it was the work of a moment to flick the main switch off, plunging the corridor into darkness. Maybe this was over-finessing slightly, but when I took the axe back I used the blunt end to hammer the switch flat. Anyone trying to turn the lights back on was going to have a mountain to climb.

The darkness wasn’t absolute. Dull red emergency lights low down on the walls had come on when we triggered the fire alarm, but had only become visible now that the main lights had been extinguished. With their help we found our way back to Rosie’s door.

I hefted the axe and swung it at the lock again and again, smashing the jamb around it into jagged splinters until the door finally sagged open.

Rosie was already on her feet as I went in, and backing away from the door, but she seemed to know me even in the dark. She relaxed and came towards me, then just as suddenly tensed again and stopped dead as Gil entered behind me. She was wearing a female body today – blonde and petite and barely out of her teens – so there must have been at least one changing of the guard since I’d last seen her.

‘It’s all right, Rosie,’ I said, half-shouting to be heard over the siren. ‘He’s with me.’

‘Felix!’ she exclaimed, ‘What’s happening?’

‘We are, sweetheart,’ I told her. ‘Listen, how would you like to see the back of this place?’

Her eyes widened. ‘More than anything,’ she said. ‘More than anything I’ve wanted since I died.’

‘How tired are you feeling?’

Rosie smiled wickedly. ‘Less than you’d ever imagine, my sweeting. And a lot less than I’ve been seeming.’

I nodded. I’d always half-suspected that she was piling on the agony for her own nefarious reasons, but I’d never asked because any answer she gave would be bound to be picked up by Jenna-Jane’s ubiquitous spy-mikes. ‘I’m going to set you free, but I need you to stick around and watch my back for a few minutes,’ I told her. ‘Just until this racket dies down. Deal?’

Rosie gave a single, forceful nod. I turned to Gil. ‘Take out the wards,’ I said. ‘You know where they are.’

They were everywhere, of course, just as they had been in Rosie’s old quarters. Jenna-Jane had wanted to make absolutely certain that the errant spirit stayed in this room, no matter how many of her flesh-and-blood vehicles came and went through the door. The frame of the door itself was stiff with pass-nots of every shape, size and variety, but there were more of them painted on the walls, mixed into the plaster, set into the tiles of the false ceiling, and probably set in the cement floor. The aim of the exercise was to block every exit.

Gil didn’t waste time with niceties. The sound of the fire alarm covered all sins, so he just took the top hinge off the door with a few more strokes of the axe, dodging it as its own weight tore it free from the bottom hinge and it toppled sideways into the room. Then he started in on the wood of the jamb.

‘There’s a demon in the building,’ I said. ‘A succubus. I’m going to find her and set her free. Be my angel, Rosie. Ride shotgun for me.’

‘Thank you, Felix,’ Rosie said. ‘I’m yours until you’re done, I promise. And I won’t leave without saying goodbye.’

She leaned forward suddenly, the tips of her fingers caressing my cheeks, and kissed me lightly on the lips. Then she went limp, slumping against me. I lowered the insensate body gently to the ground. Rosie had left the room, though not, I fervently hoped, the building.

‘Good enough?’ McClennan demanded, standing back from his work and lowering the axe. I just pointed to the unconscious student on the floor: she was all the answer that was necessary. Gil frowned. ‘Is she going to be all right in here? She’s an innocent bystander.’

‘There isn’t really a fire, McClennan,’ I reminded him. ‘She’ll be fine.’

‘Then let’s go get them.’

In the dark, with the shrilling of the alarm in our ears, the MOU had turned into a daunting assault course. It was almost like meeting the fear-beast again. As we threaded the maze of corridors, I had to fight down a sense of urgency that was threatening to ramp its way all the way up to pure panic. The dim floor-level lighting meant that the only thing I could see clearly were my own feet. At head height, slabs and wedges and sheets of shadow slid over each other, disguising intersections and turning blank walls into doorways.

Gil knew his way better than I did, and I let him take the lead. It felt like we were heading in the right direction, and then I knew we were, because my death-sense woke and stirred at the prickly feel of the things ahead of us and below us. For me it was a noise that rode under and over and through the alarm’s cacophony, untouched by it, the sound of an orchestra tuning up in a key that didn’t have a name. It was good news, in a way. The massive steel door had to be open, otherwise the wards imprinted onto it would have acted like psychic soundproofing, and I wouldn’t be getting such a clear fix.

But we met the first of Jenna’s rent-a-cops before we got to the door. There were three of them, and we just turned a corner and came face-to-face with them. They had their sidewinder batons ready in their hands, and they were big in the same way that Dicks and adult male silverback gorillas are big. Gil flashed his ID again, but they didn’t as much as glance at it. They grabbed us and slammed us against the wall of the corridor, two of the three holding their truncheons across our throats.

‘Call it in,’ rasped the man holding onto me. He was an ugly bastard, with squared-off hair in a US Marine Corps style which probably conferred high status in the circles in which he moved. To me it had haunting echoes of Kryten from Red Dwarf.

The third man – the one who had his hands free – took out his radio and put it to his ear. ‘We’ve got two men,’ he shouted. ‘Ground floor. Yeah, exactly. West side. They’re the ones we saw on the cameras.’

He ducked his head, covering his ear as he listened to the reply. Then without warning he dropped the radio and staggered slightly as though he he’d been about to lose his footing and had to shift his balance to stay upright.

‘What did she say?’ the square-headed guy demanded.

The third man bent, very deliberately, and picked up the fallen radio. He straightened, still without saying a word, and brought his hand round in a sweeping arc. The radio impacted on the left temple of Gil’s captor with enough force to break the casing wide open. The guy dropped like a stone.

‘What the fuck are you . . . ?’ Squarehead spluttered.

The radio man went for his throat, massive hands clamping to his windpipe, and he forgot all about me as he was forced to defend himself. He brought his truncheon up and back, aiming to drive it into the other man’s face, but I jumped forward and wrapped myself around his forearm, twisting it further and further back until the baton dropped from his hand. Then the radio man finished the job, driving the back of Squarehead’s skull against the wall repeatedly until his eyes rolled back in their orbits and he crumpled, sliding down the wall to the ground.

Gil stared at the last man standing, frightened awe showing on his face.

‘What’s the matter?’ I asked him. ‘You’ve never seen a five-hundred-year-old woman wearing a man’s body before?’

‘He’s coarse, but he’s strong,’ Rosie said, examining the radio man’s hairy, muscular hands and flexing his fingers slightly. The cadences of her voice were instantly recognisable despite the harsh basso burr of her vehicle’s vocal apparatus. ‘I like him.’

Jenna-Jane was probably well aware that by giving Rosie a different body to possess and inhabit every week, she was allowing an old ghost to develop a terrifying and dangerous skill-set. Rosie must have worked her way through three or four hundred volunteers in the years since I’d left the MOU. She knew the ins and outs of the human nervous system better than a London cabbie knows the way to Lullington Garth, and like the cabbie she was well past the point where she needed an A to Z.

I didn’t need one either, come to that. From this close, I could have found the entrance to Jenna-Jane’s underworld with a blindfold on and my hands tied behind my back – which was probably how a lot of its current inhabitants had arrived here. I picked up one of the fallen batons in a spirit of waste-not-want-not and led the way down the corridor, Rosie and then Gil falling in beside me.

‘How are you doing this?’ Gil asked Rosie, still staring at her in horrified fascination. ‘How are you holding him when he doesn’t want you there? It’s not like it was with the volunteers. And you seemed to be getting weaker . . .’

‘It’s been a long time since I needed informed consent, my poppet,’ Rosie pointed out with wicked amusement. ‘And the weakness . . . well, a woman in my day learned the value of being underestimated.’

At another time I probably would have laughed at that. Asmodeus wasn’t the only lion who could put on a convincing limp when the need arose.

We came to the door at last. There was a single guard on duty. Rosie dropped him with a devastating haymaker as he was opening his mouth to speak. He ricocheted off the doorframe, went down hard and didn’t move.

Rosie flexed her fingers and gave a harsh, wincing moan.

‘I’ve broken my hand,’ she lamented.

‘It’s someone else’s hand,’ I reminded her. ‘And he had it coming.’

I stepped through onto the steel platform at the head of the stairs leading down into the abyss. It was hard, as it had been the first time around, to cross that threshold, to walk into the screaming turmoil my death-sense was picking up from below, a hundred times more strident and painful than the monotone clamour of the fire alarm. But hard as it was for me, it was a lot harder for Rosie. She stopped dead in the doorway as though there was a solid barrier there, as though the steel door was locked and bolted instead of standing wide open. The wards again, the wards written on the door to keep the dead and the undead from breaking out. It kept them from breaking in too – and an axe wouldn’t be much use against die-stamped steel.

‘I can’t come through here,’ Rosie said.

‘Then watch our backs,’ I suggested. ‘And wait for us.’

‘Don’t be long, Felix.’

‘We’ll either be quick or dead,’ I muttered grimly. ‘Give it ten minutes, Rosie. One way or another, it’ll be over by then.’

She nodded tersely and set her back to the open door, a dragon in the gateway, stopping any reinforcements from the building’s upper floors from crashing our party. Probably most of the rent-a-cops were in the basement already, but every little helps.

We ran down the metal stairs, the din of our booming footsteps drowned out by the general hubbub. Down here the fire alarm’s shrill warning had to struggle to make itself heard in a chorus of bellowing and shrieking voices, metallic booms and echoes, weeping and wailing and – I strongly suspected – gnashing of teeth. The inmates of the basement Gulag seemed to be collectively going crazy.

‘Any idea where she’ll be?’ I yelled to Gil. He couldn’t hear me so I shrugged and gestured to indicate that I didn’t know where to go.

He put his mouth close to my ear to answer. ‘There’s another lab down here. A big one. That’s the room the professor was prepping this morning, so that’s where she’ll be.’

I let him take the lead again as we walked between the squat cement cell blocks. This place was terrifying even when looking down on it from above like the eye of God; when you were in the middle of it, it was indescribable.

As I think I mentioned earlier, to an exorcist every place is soaked in the residue of past emotions like the smells of old cooking. This place was saturated with fear and despair, an effluvium as rich and deep as the leaf mould in an ancient forest. Out of that rich substrate, something even more hysterical and insensate rose like some exotic bloom. I found myself breathing in shallow gulps as though that would somehow keep the emotional tsunami from entering into me.

Another patrol of three men crossed an intersection ahead of us. We flattened ourselves against the wall and they missed us in the dark.

Something was scrabbling near my ear, unnoticed in the clamour until I got right up close to it. I turned my head and saw the Judas window of one of the cell doors right beside me. I didn’t have time for this. I was here for one thing and one thing only, and getting distracted could get a lot of people I cared about dead and worse than dead. But something moved me forward in spite of myself, and I pressed my eye to the hole.

The inside of the cell was even darker than it was out here: a single red emergency light in a far corner lit up the room no more brightly than a child’s night light. The cell’s inmate was clawing at the door, and the sound or maybe just the vibration had made it through the metal to me. He was a werewolf, a loup-garou. Wolves weren’t in his genome though, so the word was a misnomer in this case. He looked more like a were-hare, ears hanging down like broken radio masts over his elongated face. A single huge eye rolled in his face; the other eye had been removed, and bare muscle twitched around the empty socket, making it expand and contract in lockstep with its neighbour.

I wanted to back away, but I just stayed there for an endless moment, staring into that sightless eye. Gil shook my shoulder. ‘Come on,’ he yelled. ‘I think it’s clear.’

Like a man coming out of a trance, I took a step back from the door, but I didn’t move to follow him.

‘Come on,’ he said again. ‘Castor, it’s this way.’

‘How do the doors open?’ I asked him.

‘On keypads,’ he said pointing. ‘What’s that got to do with anything? The lab won’t be locked. The professor will be in there now, working on your friend.’

‘But there has to be a failsafe. Some way of opening all the doors in case the building catches fire or something.’

‘I don’t think so. That’s not the way the professor’s mind works.’

I shook my head to clear it, but that just made it hurt more. I knew I had to be right. This place might be a concentration camp, but it was a concentration camp built inside a hospital: the place had to be up to code, at least on the face of it. Somewhere there was a master switch that would open all these doors.

The fire alarm stopped ringing. The abrupt silence was a huge and shocking absence, a vacuum that extinguished all the other screams and yells and moans and bangs the way a wind tunnel sucks the flame from a candle. Soon there was just a single voice screaming, an inhuman ululation of pain and rage and madness.

A moment later the lights came on.

Gil gave me a frantic look, and I nodded, waving him on. In silence now, and more slowly, we rounded the corner of the cell block and found ourselves in yet another wide corridor. Ahead of us stood a pair of locked double doors labelled with NO ADMITTANCE notices that were both large and strident. Gil broke them down with the fire axe and we strode through.

Ten or maybe twenty yards ahead of us, there was one final door. This was where the screaming was coming from. Other sounds from within, voices and footfalls and the clattering of instruments, made it clear that there was a party in progress, and that it hadn’t stopped for the fire drill.

There was a guard on this door too, of course. He shouted out for us to halt, holding his sidewinder out in front of him in an en garde stance. I knocked it aside with a whirling parry, ducked and followed through, driving my own baton into his mouth with explosive force.

The poor sod went down like a sack of potatoes, his jaw in red ruin, and we walked over him into the room. For all I knew, he could have been poor bloody infantry – one of the newbies conscripted by J-J to fill the gaps in her ranks and keep anyone from bugging her while she dismantled Juliet. He might not know the first thing about the people who signed his pay cheque or what was going on a few feet behind him. On the other hand, he presumably wasn’t deaf.

Sometimes it pays to ask the hard questions.

The room we walked into looked more like an operating theatre than anything else. Half a dozen men and women in white coats stood around a very fancy piece of apparatus – a flat surface, eight feet by four, mounted on a series of nested gimbals so that it could be adjusted to any height and any angle. The naked form strapped to it was instantly recognisable as Juliet. Her bone-white skin – right down to the absence of aureoles – and ink-black hair, the catastrophe curves of her impossibly perfect breasts, had haunted my dreams for so long I wasn’t likely to mistake them when I saw them once again in the flesh.

At any other time, seeing Juliet naked would have fused my cerebral hemispheres into unusable slag and left me running on the default systems of animal lust. Now what I felt was very different.

She was twisting and writhing on the table. Tight leather restraints at neck and wrist and ankle held her in place, but from shoulder to coccyx her back rose and fell, filled out like a sail on winds of pure agony.

They were painting Asmodeus’ wards onto her body, but Jenna-Jane loves to push the envelope – to extend her researches into different modalities. They were incising the designs into her skin with scalpels too, and something like a Zeiss engine set up directly over the operating table was projecting a light show of overlaid pentagrams directly onto her bare flesh.

The white-coated figures paused in their work and looked up as we entered, startled and affronted, but the projected images still slid over Juliet’s skin, merging and dividing, and the high, inhuman screaming went on. One of them – not Jenna-Jane – came forward to block our path, all bluster and outrage. He was a little man, about forty or so, with the craggy authority of a senior consultant.

‘This is a restricted area!’ he stormed. ‘You have no right to be here!’

‘Are you right-handed or left-handed?’ I asked him.

‘What?’ he blinked. ‘What do you—’

Odds favoured the right. I remembered reading somewhere that a survey in America didn’t find a single southpaw surgeon. I hit his right elbow with the sidewinder, using a figure-of-eight manoeuvre that Gary Coldwood had shown me once, the one that riot cops use when they want to do some real damage. There was an audible crack as the whip-thin wood connected. The little man gave a hoarse, choking cry. He staggered and fell, folding up around his now-useless arm.

‘Anyone else here interested in practising medicine one-handed? ’ I asked politely.

The white coats retreated from the operating table and from their grisly work in a scared gaggle, like snow geese. All but one: Jenna-Jane pulled down her surgical mask, an affectation I hadn’t even noticed until now, and skirted the table to stand right in front of me.

‘Felix,’ she said, more in sorrow than in anger. ‘And Gilbert too. You’ve both gone mad. The succubus has no rights in law; the man you’ve just assaulted most definitely does. You’ll both go to prison for this.’

‘I’m not looking that far ahead, Professor,’ McClennan said glumly. ‘I don’t think either of us is. You can take this as my letter of resignation, by the way.’

‘One of you untie those restraints,’ I called over Jenna-Jane’s shoulder to the gaggle. ‘Now.’

‘The police!’ The man I’d crippled moaned from the floor. ‘Somebody call the police!’

Jenna-Jane shook her head in bewilderment. ‘How can you even imagine you’re going to get away with this?’ she asked, in the same grieving tone. ‘You’re committing professional suicide. There’ll be no coming back, I promise you that.’

‘Swap?’ I said to Gil. I held out the sidewinder. He took it and gave me the fire axe.

‘Untie her,’ I said again to the room at large, ‘and turn that fucking projector off, or people are going to start losing large body parts. If you think I’m kidding, feel free to call my bluff.’

One of the geese hastily bent and flicked a switch low down on the wall. The luminous pentagrams sliding over Juliet’s body faded to nothing over the space of about three seconds. She slumped against the table, her screams dying away to shuddering, panting breaths. Two more geese broke away from their comrades and started to loosen the leather straps that held Juliet down, shooting me wide-eyed looks from time to time as if they were afraid they hadn’t shown willing enough.

Jenna-Jane tried again. ‘Felix, this is the most significant breakthrough we’ve had in ten years of dealing with her kind. The implications are bigger than you can comprehend. ’

‘Don’t worry, J-J,’ I assured her. ‘I think I’ve got the implications pretty much taped.’

Jenna-Jane’s eyes narrowed, and she breathed out heavily through her nose. She made to walk past me, out into the corridor, and I held out my free hand to push her back. She touched my hand with her own, and a jolt of white lightning went through me. Suddenly I was down on the floor of the room, my elbows and knees stinging from where they’d hit the tiles, my head full of ringing after-tones as though somebody had decked me with a glockenspiel.

Jenna-Jane stood over me. The thing in her hand looked like a Stanley knife, black steel overlaid with yellow warning strips. She had it aimed squarely at Gil McClennan’s chest. ‘Please drop the baton, Gilbert,’ she said, ‘and then go and sit next to Felix on the floor. This is an M18 taser. It shoots a shock-charge of fifty thousand volts, and I can assure you that it’s a great deal more pleasant to give than to receive.’

Gil weighed up his chances, which at that range were pretty much non-existent. He let the sidewinder drop to the floor, where it bounced once and then rolled in a half-circle around the fulcrum of its own weighted end, coming to rest a good six or seven feet out of my reach.

Gil sat down.

‘Now, if somebody would be good enough to call a security team,’ Jenna-Jane said in her most schoolmarmish voice, ‘perhaps we can proceed.’

Perhaps she expected a docile chorus of ‘Yes, Professor Mulbridge’ from the gaggle. Instead, the sound that met her pious request was a strangled wail from the white-coated woman who’d been untying Juliet’s wrists. My gaze flicked in that direction, just as everyone else’s did.

Juliet was on her feet. Admittedly she was leaning against the table for support, but her feet were planted firmly on the tiles. Vivid rivulets of blood marked her perfect, pigmentless skin in meandering lines, as though a butcher had marked her up for filleting. She had her hand on the throat of the lady doctor, her arm fully extended so that the other woman had to lean back from the waist. They were staring at each other, the lady doctor in abject terror, Juliet with the pained wonder of someone who’s just scratched their pubes and come up with something small and wriggling.

‘No,’ she said very distinctly. ‘Not you. Where? Where is she?’

Jenna-Jane swung the taser round, but she didn’t have a clear line of fire. The moment that she hesitated was long enough for Gil to kick her legs out from under her.

There was a scramble for the taser. The doctor with the broken arm won it, but I’d gone for the fire axe. I took a wild swipe and knocked the weapon out of his hand with the flat of the axe blade, making him yelp in anguish. The way I was feeling right then, he was lucky he didn’t get the sharp end.

As I lurched to my feet, the echoing tramp of booted feet in the corridor outside announced some late arrivals to the party. The security guards we’d passed among the cell blocks – or maybe a different group altogether – came charging through the door, only to come to a dead halt when they found that I had the axe blade pressed to Jenna-Jane’s throat. I was still shaking violently from the taser zap, and it was all I could do to hold it steady, but I did my best to look like a man you wouldn’t want to cross.

‘Better think about this,’ I advised the rent-a-cops, my voice a little more tremulous than I would have liked. ‘If she dies, who’s going to give you your Christmas bonus?’

‘His name is Castor,’ Jenna-Jane said quickly. ‘Felix Castor. The other man on the floor there is Gilbert McClennan. Radio to someone outside the building and give out those names.’

‘You don’t want to do this, son,’ one of the goons said, holding out his hand for the axe. Son? He was probably younger than me.

‘Actually, Dad,’ I told him, ‘it would make my entire year. I’m aching for a little uncomplicated good news, you know?’

The man hesitated. A lot of thoughts were probably going through his mind, and I suspected it wasn’t used to handling that volume of traffic. Axe blades are generally kept blunt, but you don’t have to break skin to snap someone’s throat, especially someone like Jenna-Jane, who was past the first flush of youth. Did I look like the sort of man who’d commit cold-blooded murder in front of a dozen witnesses? Did his desire to make me eat the fire axe offset the trouble he could get into if Jenna-Jane died and the company he worked for had to pay damages to the MOU? How would it play on the ten o’clock news?

I don’t know exactly which argument swung the vote but finally the guy stepped aside. So did the men behind him, but they parted to both sides of the door so that I’d have to have my back to at least one of them as I went through.

‘Over there, numb-nuts,’ I said to the guy in charge, nodding toward the far corner of the room. ‘Go play doctors and nurses with the doctors and nurses.’ I returned my attention to Jenna-Jane. ‘There was a note,’ I said, ‘at the house. A note from Asmodeus. Do you have it on you? Think carefully before you lie to me, J-J, because I’m a desperate man already. You wouldn’t want to send me over the edge.’

‘It’s in my pocket,’ Jenna-Jane said. ‘On the left-hand side. There’s no need for melodrama, Felix. I always intended to show it to you when you came back from Surrey.’

Holding the axe in place one-handed, I dipped into her pocket. There was a slip of paper there, folded into four. I took it out and glanced at it. All I could see were a few words, at random and upside down: ‘only possible place’. It looked like the real deal though. Asmodeus formed his letters in a style that was almost pointillist, from myriads of straight lines no bigger than ink flecks. It would take a lot of effort to forge, and I couldn’t see why she would have bothered. Despite that bland assurance, I was never meant to see this. I stuffed the note into my own pocket.

‘McClennan,’ I said, ‘we’re leaving. Bring Juliet.’

Juliet had been holding the throat of the lady doctor all this time, but she released her grip as Gil approached her. The woman staggered back from Juliet, her hands going to her bruised neck. That meant she backed into Gil, who steadied her with his hands around her shoulders.

‘Take off your coat,’ he told her, ‘and give it to me.’

The woman did as she was told without argument. She’d stared into Juliet’s black-on-black eyes at point-blank range. Juliet’s inner fires were at a low ebb right then, but even so that had to have left her shaken to her psychosexual core. There was no fight left in her.

Gil draped the coat over Juliet’s shoulders, very tentatively, being careful not to touch her. She stared at him with a feral intensity.

‘We have to go,’ he said.

For a few moments she seemed not to have understood, but finally she nodded and pushed herself away from the table. Her legs folded under her immediately and Gil caught her as she fell. His eyes widened. He must have been surprised, as I was when I carried her out of the Mount Grace crematorium, by how little she weighed. But it was more than that. He stared across the room at me, tense and alarmed. ‘She’s like ice,’ he said, ‘and she’s barely breathing.’

I hesitated. I could swap places with McClennan, and have him take charge of the Mexican stand-off while I used my whistle to try to bring Juliet back to herself. I’d done it before with varying degrees of success, so I already knew the tune. But setting off the fire alarm would have alerted the emergency services too. They were probably already on their way, and getting out of the building would be complicated if it was surrounded by a ring of fire engines and police cars.

‘She’s stronger than she looks,’ I said. ‘And she only breathes for show. She’ll make it.’ I turned my attention back to the security guards, who’d all relocated to the corner of the room, behind the operating table. ‘You stay there,’ I said. ‘If you follow us, I’ll play who’s-got-the-guillotine with the good professor here.’

We backed out of the room, Gil carrying Juliet. She seemed to have lapsed into a sort of waking dream state, muttering to herself and twitching fitfully in his arms.

‘You’re a marvel, Felix,’ Jenna-Jane muttered tightly as we retraced our steps through the cell blocks. ‘You came all this way to rescue a monster that’s lived on human flesh and human souls for millennia. Broke in here, terrorised and assaulted my staff, caused untold damage to my systems. I’ve known for a long time that you were losing your bearings, but this goes beyond anything I could have expected.’

‘Always more sinned against than sinning, J-J,’ I said. ‘But think about Mr Dicks before you throw the first stone. We had a deal, and I stuck to it until you tried to have me killed.’

Jenna-Jane laughed incredulously. ‘Tried to have you killed? Is that what Gilbert told you? It’s nonsense. I admit I wanted to delay you in Surrey. Of course I did. I simply didn’t trust your objectivity when it came to the succubus – and I’d say your present actions provide ample evidence that I was right.’

‘They’re following us,’ Gil muttered.

I glanced back over my shoulder. The myrmidons were advancing from cell door to cell door, corner to corner, staying far enough back to be no immediate threat but clearly waiting for their chance. That might mean there was a flank party somewhere. I slowed down as we approached an intersection, but the ambush I was expecting didn’t materialise.

We could see the metal stairs ahead of us now, and Gil accelerated toward them. The black uniforms came out from behind the stairwell when we were ten strides away from it. At the same time, the ones who’d been tailing us closed up the gap, trapping us neatly.

‘No innocent bystanders here,’ one of the guys in front of us said. He was an unprepossessing specimen, with lank black hair and a drooping Spanish-waiter moustache. He slapped his baton into the flat of his hand with a ringing thwack. ‘Drop the girl and let the professor go. Otherwise I’m letting these men off the leash.’

‘If you do, she dies,’ I said.

The guy smiled unpleasantly. ‘Better get on with it then,’ he suggested. ‘Because we’re not moving. On my mark, gentlemen. Three . . . two . . . one—’

‘Don’t any of you move a muscle!’ Jenna-Jane ground out, her voice deep and carrying. ‘I forbid it! Do you understand? ’

The rent-a-cops fell back a step out of pure reflex, responding to their master’s voice. The leader looked nonplussed. ‘Professor . . .’ he began.

‘The succubus is a valuable medical resource,’ Jenna-Jane snarled caustically. ‘By heaven, I will have the skin off the back of the man who harms her. Now, you will back off and you will allow these men to leave, unharmed. Anyone who disobeys will answer to me. Doubt me not, you whoreson dogs.’

I’d already started to have my suspicions with ‘by heaven’, not to mention the flogging reference. By the time she got to ‘whoreson’, I knew damn well what I was dealing with. This wasn’t Jenna-Jane; this was Rosie Crucis.

I moved towards the stairs, shifting to avoid turning my back on any of these sonsofbitches. ‘You heard the lady,’ I said. ‘Come on, McClennan.’ Gil was baffled but he wasn’t stupid. He stayed with me as I shuffled round to the foot of the stairs and put my foot on the bottom step.

‘Give them some ground!’ Rosie bellowed, and the myrmidons fell back as one man.

‘Did I ever tell you I loved you?’ I muttered to Rosie.

‘Often and often,’ she chuckled. ‘But don’t ask me to kiss you with these lips, Felix. It would be a crime against nature.’

Gil was staring at us in a kind of existential horror, his eyes wide. Then the penny dropped, visibly. ‘How did you break the wards?’ he whispered.

‘I didn’t,’ Rosie whispered. ‘I went under them. There were no wards on the floor.’

At the top of the stairs we paused. I looked to the right of the door and found what I expected to find: a locked junction box. I let go of Rosie and took the fire axe to it, breaking off the lock with three clumsy strokes. Inside were two red buttons. The one on the left was labelled LOCK and the one on the right RELEASE.

‘Any idea where you’ll go from here?’ I asked Rosie.

She shrugged, and an uncharacteristically wicked grin played across Jenna-Jane’s features. ‘I haven’t had a tumble in five hundred years,’ she said. ‘I think I might remind myself what the sins of the flesh are actually like.’

‘When that gets old,’ I said, ‘drop by and say hello.’

‘Certainly, Felix,’ she agreed. ‘Perhaps even before.’

I hit RELEASE. There was a prolonged, ragged-edged chunk-chunk-chunk sound as hundreds of cell doors opened in near but not perfect simultaneity.

Rosie slipped away. Through my death-sense I felt her go, but even if I hadn’t, I would have known it was the real Jenna-Jane I was now looking at as her face twisted into an expression of naked, almost berserk hatred.

‘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.