Vicious Circle

13

Whether I dreamed or not that night, I don’t remember. Sleep was like a lead-lined box that I fell into, and the lid slammed shut over my head. It was as cold as the grave in there, and mercifully quiet.

But at some point in the night, someone must have torn away the sides of the box, because light started to filter in under my eyelids: only a little, at first, but those first splinters broadened into crowbars, prising their way in, twisting me open to a day I didn’t want to have anything to do with. There was a tapping sound, too, as of chisels working their way into the cracks and crevices of my consciousness.

I tried to turn to get away from the light and the intrusive noise, but it seemed to be coming in from all sides. And movement was difficult in any case, because my muscles were cramped and screaming.

I opened my eyes, which felt as though they’d been sealed shut with a silicon gun. I was in a car – Matt’s car, I realised when I saw the pine-tree air-freshener hanging over my head like mistletoe. What the hell was I doing there? I’d parked the car at Pen’s and then Coldwood and his little friends had bushwhacked me and spirited me away to Hendon. And since I’d had a police escort home. . . No, the details wouldn’t coalesce. The fever had been raging by then: I must have crawled back into the car under some vague impression that I still had to drive home, and then fallen asleep at the wheel instead. Good job: if I’d actually got the thing out onto the road, I’d be waking up in a morgue somewhere and finding out first-hand what out-of-body experiences are like.

The tapping came again, louder, from right behind my head. With difficulty, I levered myself around in the seat without turning my neck, which felt like it would snap rather than pivot. Pen was standing beside the car, looking in at me with an expression of puzzled concern on her face.

I unlocked the door and climbed out, almost losing my balance. Pen jumped forward to catch me and keep me upright.

‘Thanks,’ I mumbled. ‘Not feeling too clever, to be honest.’

She winced as the smell of my breath hit her unsuspecting airways: judging by the taste in my mouth, I could sympathise.

‘Fix,’ she admonished me, but a lot more gently than I’d have expected, ‘have you been drinking?’ I could understand the question: I was trying to lock the car and failing to get the key into the lock. Pen took the keys from me and locked it with the beeper on the fob.

‘No,’ I said. ‘No more than usual. This is – something else. I’m coming down with some kind of bug.’

Pen steered me towards the house. ‘What did you do to the car?’ she asked, sounding concerned. ‘And whose is it?’

‘The car?’ I echoed stupidly. My mind was a sprawl of flabby fingers that wouldn’t make a fist. Then I remembered the sideswipe on the Hammersmith flyover. ‘Oh, yeah. That wasn’t me. That was Catholic werewolves.’

There are only five steps up to Pen’s front door. Somehow, they seemed to take a long time to negotiate, and we had a near-disaster at the top when I lost my balance and Pen had to shove me forward into the hall to avoid me going back down again on my arse.

‘I’m calling a doctor,’ Pen muttered as she hauled me into the living room and dumped me without ceremony onto the sofa.

‘I think,’ I said, ‘I just need to lie down. Had a hell of a day yesterday. Got into a fight at White City, then the cops hauled me in to help them with their inquiries.’

‘Jesus, Fix!’ Pen was looking down at me with troubled eyes. ‘What do they think you did?’

‘Murder.’ I stared at the ground, trying to shut out the memory of the crusted spatter of blood and the terse plastic tag – like the tag you’d get from a cloakroom attendant – that marked the place where Abbie Torrington had died. Wasted effort: it wouldn’t go away. ‘They think I murdered someone.’

There was a silence, which seemed to expand like white light until it filled the room. Light-headed, I almost floated away on that white tide back into unconsciousness. I had too much still to do: I fought against my own body, and the room came back into focus. I didn’t think that silent tussle had taken any time at all, but when I raised my head again Pen was gone.

Saturday. Saturday night. Something big went down– something whose shape I could just barely make out through the many and disparate things it had touched. On Saturday, Stephen and Melanie Torrington are beaten and then shot in their own home. They don’t struggle. They don’t run. They just die. Later on, so does Abbie – sacrificial lamb in someone’s Satanist knees-up. Then, after they’ve killed her, someone else walks into the room and breaks up the party with an assault rifle, aiming not at the Satanists – at least, not after the first few exhilarating moments – but at the magic circle where Abbie’s body is still lying. Was that other someone Dennis Peace? Was this where he acquired Abbie’s spirit, assuming he really had it? And if he did, was it a kidnapping or a rescue?

Meanwhile, three miles away at the Scrubs, Saint Michael’s church was invaded by some entity so powerful that just being close to it poisoned the minds and souls of everyone in the goddamn building, sending them off on murderous trajectories that had sliced through the city like so many loops of piano wire through a ripe cheese.

And something else. Something I was missing.

Pen’s voice, low and urgent, was coming from out in the hall. Nobody else’s voice, just hers. I turned and saw her through the doorway, standing at the foot of the stairs, all by herself, talking away fifteen to the dozen. She was on her mobile, of course, but right then it seemed to me that there must be some spectral figure standing next to her, silent and invisible: as though she was reporting in to Heaven, because there was a blaze of light around her head like a halo. But no, that was just the sun streaming in through the skylight over the front door. It was a beautiful day. About time. Way past time. But if the sunlight knew what the fuck it was shining on, would it bother to make the trip?

Pen came back into the room and stood over me, looking irresolute. ‘I’ve got to go, Fix,’ she said. ‘Rafi’s seeing a psychiatrist this morning for a preliminary status hearing. I don’t want him to face that all by himself. I called Dylan and asked him to come and have a look at you, but he’s on call so he can’t. He’s going to send someone else, though – a friend. You just – you just stay here until he comes, all right?’

‘Yeah,’ I mumbled. ‘I’m not going anywhere. I’ll be fine.’

‘Okay.’ She knelt down and gave me a quick, awkward hug. ‘Get better. I’ll give Rafi your love.’

And as she straightened up again, a thought was zigzagging across my brain, trying to find an intact neuron it could connect to. Pen was still talking, but I didn’t hear a word over the ringing in my ears.

Something about Pen? Or about Rafi? I should be there for him. I had been there for him. That was the problem. That was why he was so fucked-up now.

The door slammed, startling me out of a half-doze. I tried to get up, but I didn’t manage it. I opened my mouth to say, ‘I’m coming with you,’ but Pen wasn’t there any more. Of course, that was why the door had slammed. She’d left already.

But that wasn’t the issue, was it? Pen was fine, because she was going to visit Rafi, and Asmodeus – most of Asmodeus – was somewhere else. So what was the problem? Why did I feel like there was something I hadn’t done, that I had to do right then without wasting any more time? And given that feeling of urgency, why was I still half-sitting, half-lying on the couch with my head hanging like a weight from my shoulders, staring at the floor?

This time I managed to get upright, even though the floor was lurching in every direction at once, trying to throw me down again. I groped in my pocket for Matt’s car keys. They weren’t there. Maybe I’d left them in the car. Where had I left the car? I had to see someone. Juliet. I had to see Juliet, and tell her where to find Rafi on a Saturday night.

Out into the hall. Which way now? Had to be either left or right, because there weren’t any other directions. Except I was forgetting down: there was an unreasonable prejudice against down. Down was amazing. Once you’d tried it, it was hard to get up again.

I was stretched out on the stairs, diagonally crucified on dusty carpet that didn’t have a pattern any more because the sun had bleached the threads to a uniform pale gold. It smelled of must and very faintly of tarragon: not the recipe I would have used. I couldn’t even remember deciding to go upstairs, so I levered myself upright, leaned backwards as far as I could and fell down them again. You have to be decisive at times of crisis or people will walk all over you.

Lying on my back in the hallway, I saw the door open and a pair of shiny black shoes advancing towards me, apparently walking on the ceiling. A man’s voice said a single word. Ship? Shit? Shirt? Then a huge face heaved itself into my field of vision like the moon rising in the middle of the day. It was a nice face, but it wasn’t one I knew.

‘Does anything hurt?’ his lips said. A second or so later, the sound broke over me like a sluggish wave. I shook my head infinitesimally.

‘Then is there any part of you that you can’t move?’

That would have made me laugh, if I could have remembered how laughing worked. There wasn’t anything I could move right then. Maybe a finger, if I tried hard enough.

The guy moved on to a lot of inappropriate touching: feeling my neck and my cheeks, pulling my eyelids down so that he could peer into my eyes, finally opening my mouth and looking down my throat with the aid of a flashlight: not a doctor’s flashlight, either – a Mag-Lite about a foot and a half long that he must have found under Pen’s sink or somewhere similarly insalubrious.

‘Fuck you,’ I said. Or tried to say: maybe I didn’t manage it, because he didn’t react in any way or even seem to hear me. He went away and came back again, once or perhaps a couple of times. Then he put a bag down on the carpet next to me and leaned in close again.

‘Do you have any recent injuries?’ he asked me. ‘Wounds, I mean? Wounds that might still be open?’

Well, this was covered under doctor-patient privilege, so it was okay to talk. But my teeth were clenched together and they wouldn’t separate. Coming through, coming through, I thought; coherent sentence coming through. But they didn’t fall for the bluff, and nothing at all happened. I managed to roll my eyes in the direction of my shoulder: a minimalist clue, but he seemed to get it. He pulled my coat open, undid the top three buttons on my shirt and peeled it back. He nodded at what he saw there.

‘You’ve got an infection,’ he said, a whistling echo to his voice sounding like a cheap guitar effect. ‘I’m going to—’

His voice became a ribbon in the air, a flick of motion travelling from one end of it to the other like the crack of a whip seen in fascinating slow motion. When it got to the further end, it fell off into absolute silence.

I half-woke with a mouth so dry it felt like it was full of panel pins. I tried to speak, and something cold and wet was pressed to my face. I was able to put my tongue to it and get some moisture. The pain faded a little, and I faded right along with it.

The next thing I was aware of was Colonel Bogie’s march playing on someone’s car horn. Who invented that story about Hitler’s ball? I wondered dreamily. Alternatively, who got in close enough to count?

Then memory poured in on me from all directions at once and I sat up as abruptly as if I was spring-loaded. I was in my own room, lying in my own bed, and the window was open. Alarmingly, dislocatingly, it was evening outside.

‘Fuck!’ I croaked. ‘Fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck!’

I threw off the covers, discovering in the process that I was naked and slick with cold sweat. My fever had broken while I slept, and now I felt weak but relatively clearheaded. Clear-headed enough to remember . . . something. Some revelation that had loomed out of the fog of my malfunctioning brain and caught me in its headlights just before I collapsed. But not cool enough to remember what it was.

Juliet. It was something to do with Juliet, and her plans for tonight. For some reason, I had a feeling – no, a dead, cold conviction – that it wouldn’t be a good idea for her to send her spirit into the stones of Saint Michael’s church. I wasn’t sure why, but I had to be there and I had to stop her.

I found my clothes neatly stacked on the chest of drawers just inside the door, my coat slung over the back of a chair. My mobile was in my pocket, but when I tried to turn it on I realised that it had run out of charge. Occupational hazard for me: I came to the technology late and unconvinced. I turned out every pocket, but there was no sign of Matt’s car keys.

I hauled the clothes back on in the order they came to hand. I needed a shower in the worst way, but there was no time. I stumbled down the stairs, my legs still trembling just a little.

The phone was in the kitchen, and so was a short, stocky man with a sizeable beer gut. He was sitting at the kitchen table, leafing through a very old copy of Cosmo, but he closed it as I came in and stood up. He was wearing a brown corduroy jacket that looked slightly frayed, and National Health glasses that did nothing for his florid, pitted face apart from magnify one of the least impressive parts of it. The top of his head was bald, but tufts of hair clung on around his ears like thin scrub on treacherous scree. I gave him a nod, but I had too much on my mind right then for small talk: I picked up the phone on the kitchen wall. The short man watched me dial.

‘How are you feeling?’ he asked. He had a very faint Scottish accent.

‘I’m fine,’ I said. ‘Can you give me a moment?’

The communal phone at the refuge rang a couple of dozen times without anybody answering. I was about to give it up when someone finally picked up. ‘Hello? This is Emma, who are you?’ A little girl’s voice, with that awkwardly formal telephone manner that some kids pick up from grown-ups without quite knowing how it works.

‘My name’s Castor,’ I said. ‘Can I speak to Juliet? Is she there?’

There was a murmured conversation on the other end of the line. Then: ‘She’s gone out,’ Emma said. ‘You can leave a message if you like.’

‘Thanks. The message is that she should call me.’ I thought that through. No good: I’d be on my way west. ‘Actually,’ I said, ‘the message is that she shouldn’t go to church. I’ll explain why when I see her.’

‘I’ll pass that message on,’ Emma piped.

I hung up, and turned belatedly to acknowledge the little man who was still watching me in silence. ‘Whatever you did to me, it worked,’ I said. ‘Thanks.’

He shrugged – magnanimously, really, considering that I’d just cold-shouldered him after he’d pulled me back from the brink of something. I had to go, but I had to know, too. ‘What was it?’ I asked. ‘What was wrong with me?’

‘Clostridium tetani, mainly,’ he said.

‘Clostridium—?’

‘You had a bad tetanus infection. You should have kept your booster shots up. Tell me, have you been playing with werewolves lately?’

I hesitated for a second, then nodded. ‘Why?’ I demanded.

‘Yes, I thought so.’ He scratched his jaw, looking at me like he wanted to examine me some more and maybe write a monograph on me for The Lancet. ‘It’s something I saw before once – and it struck me so much I tried to read up on it. The wound on your shoulder was made by some kind of caltrop or throwing star. Whoever threw it at you was a loup-garou, and he’d licked the blade first: got it nice and wet with his saliva.

‘You know how the bad guys in spy novels will put a bug on the hero’s car, or on the sole of his shoe or somewhere, and then use it to follow him? Well, this is a kind of no-tech version of that: they can smell the pheromones in their own saliva. For miles, according to one study. They could track you across half of London. Of course, they can also infect you with rabies – or HIV. All in all, you probably got off pretty lightly.’

That explained a lot – and my feelings must have shown on my face, because the little man hastened to reassure me. ‘Oh, don’t you be worrying about it. I shot you full of vancomycin. There’s nothing living inside you now that shouldn’t be there. And the povidone-iodine scrubs I used will kill every last trace of pheromone that’s still on you. You won’t need to be looking over your shoulder. Obviously you should have a blood test at some point to rule out any infections that have a slower progression. But as far as I can tell, you’re okay.’

I was more concerned with the harm that had already been done. This was how the two loup-garous, Po and Zucker, had found me at the Thames Collective, and then again in Kensington Church Street. And on the Hammersmith flyover too, come to that. The bastards must have been riding on my tail for two whole days. Fortunately, for most of that time I’d been chasing my tail, so all they’d got for their trouble was vertigo.

‘Thanks,’ I said again, lamely. ‘I appreciate it.’

He waved the thanks away. ‘I was doing a favour for a friend,’ he said.

‘For Doctor Forster?’

‘Aye, that’s right. He would have come himself, if he could. But his time’s not his own.’

The man’s manner changed – became a little tentative and awkward. ‘This little girl – is there anything I can do to help? Professionally, I mean – as a doctor?’

The question caught me off-balance. ‘What little girl?’

‘When I was working on that cut, you were talking about a little girl. And a bloodstain. I couldn’t make out a lot of it, but it sounded bad.’

Yeah, I thought, with a sinking feeling in my stomach. And it would sound even worse in court. ‘No,’ I said brusquely. ‘You can’t help. Whatever the hell she needs now, it isn’t a doctor.’

He’d come around the table and was standing only a few feet away from me, his brow furrowed with sombre thought. I could tell it wasn’t the answer he’d wanted to hear. He was clearly asking himself if he’d just aided and abetted a child-murderer.

‘Look,’ I said, ‘the girl is – kind of – a client. You know what I do for a living, right?’

‘No. Sorry. I can’t say that I do.’

‘I’m an exorcist. The girl is dead, and I was hired – this sounds crazy, but it’s the truth – to find her ghost.’

The man nodded understandingly, as though that made perfect sense. But then he turned it over in his mind and started finding the rough edges. ‘Hired by whom? Who steals a ghost? Who tries to get one back?’

‘Who steals her? Probably her real father. Who tries to get her back, I don’t know because they gave me a truckload of bullshit. Maybe some fucking lunatic Satanists. But I’m still going to find her, because I think she’s in trouble.’

The little man gave a humourless laugh. ‘Worse trouble than being dead, you mean?’

‘Yeah.’ It felt strange saying it, but I knew it was true. I realised I’d known it for a while now – even before Basquiat had shown me how Abbie had died. ‘Worse trouble than being dead.’

The doctor digested this in unhappy silence. ‘Well, I hope it sorts itself out,’ he said at last, with the look of a man trudging resolutely back into his depth. ‘You should take it easy with that left arm for a little while. While the muscle’s all inflamed like that it’s easier to tear.’

‘I’ll do that,’ I said, and took Matt’s car keys out of the fruit bowl where Pen had left them.

‘You may still be a bit shaky,’ the little man said, frowning in concern. ‘If you feel like you’re having trouble controlling the car, you should pull over and take a cab or something.’

As far as solicitude went, he was getting just a little bit in my face now. I owed the man plenty, but I’ve never liked lectures, sermons or public-health notices. ‘Don’t worry about it,’ I muttered as I headed for the door. ‘It’s my brother’s car.’

The sky was darkening fast: too fast for spring. It was like a night that should have drained away a long time ago but had clogged the sinkholes of eternity and now was backing up into the daylight. Either that, or I’d just slept for longer than I thought.

The front doors of Saint Michael’s were still locked and bolted, and so was the lych-gate. That slowed me down for all of twenty seconds: the gate was more of a decorative feature than an actual barrier, and – weak as I still was – it offered me plenty of handholds. My landing on the graveyard side of the wall was a little bumpy, though, and I fell forward onto my hands, skinning them slightly.

I circled round through the graveyard until I could see the back door of the vestry up ahead of me. It was standing ajar. I walked out into the open, heading towards it, but was stopped before I’d gone ten steps by a breathless chuckle. I froze, looking around for the source of it.

There was a man propped up against the cemetery’s further wall, his head lolling forward on his chest. He had long, lanky hair and he was wearing a stained mac. He looked like a drunk searching for an impromptu urinal on his way home from the boozer, but a second, slightly less cursory glance more or less ruled that out. The stains on the mac were dark, irregular spatters: the dim light didn’t allow me to be certain, but they looked like blood. The side of his skull was smashed in, and one of his arms was dangling uselessly, like a pendulum, swinging slightly from left to right as he shifted his balance.

A zombie – and one who’d been taking a lot less care with his mortal remains than Nicky did.

Some suspicion that I couldn’t quite explain to myself made me veer in his direction. Maybe I recognised him from somewhere. Maybe I just didn’t want to have him at my back as I went into the church.

‘You okay there, sport?’ I said conversationally as I approached him. I was rummaging around in my pocket for the myrtle twig, but it wasn’t there. I must have left it on the floor at Imelda’s, where she’d probably have treated it like a dead rat: dustpan and brush, no direct contact, sterilise afterwards.

The man lifted his head to stare at me through the one eye he had left. He grinned, too, although it was difficult to see through the tangled thickets of his beard. Yeah. I had him placed now: he was the guy at the mall who’d shot Juliet through the chest and whom she’d then kicked arse-backwards through a plate glass window. Judging by appearances, it hadn’t done him a bit of good.

‘When will it come?’ the man asked me. His voice was low, and it had a horrible liquid undertow to it. He grinned, showing shattered teeth like a bamboo pit-trap. ‘When will it be here?’

‘Tell me what it is, I’ll give you an ETA,’ I offered. ‘What is it you’re waiting for?’

A shudder went through him. ‘The thing that ate me,’ he muttered, his head sagging again. After a long silence he added, as if to himself, ‘Got to finish . . . Got to finish the job. Can’t just . . . eat me and then spit me out.’

Torn between pity and nausea, I turned back toward the church door. That was when he came at me.

He was a big man, and he had the advantage over me in weight. He charged into me like a trolley car, ungainly and not even all that fast but pretty much unstoppable. As I fell he came down on top of me, clawing at me with the fingers of his one good hand, laughing deep in his throat as though the whole thing was a huge joke.

I brought my head up fast, ramming it into the bridge of his nose, and I heard the bone snap with a pulpy sound like rotten wood giving way. No blood flowed: he didn’t have a heart to pump it with, and it probably wasn’t liquid any more in any case.

He got his fingers around my throat and started to squeeze. His head bowed towards me, his mouth working hard as if he wanted to devour me as well as kill me: the sour stench of his decaying flesh hit me, and my head reeled. Starting to panic now, I rolled to the side and swung a fist up into his stomach as hard as I could. He was too heavy to shift, and he didn’t react at all: no functioning nerves, either.

But he only had the one arm that still worked and both my hands were free. Feeling like a bastard, I groped my way up his face even as my vision started to blur, and put his other eye out with my thumb.

He jerked his head away from me, flailing to fend me off now that it was too late. I brought my knees up to my chest and kicked outwards with both legs, sending him flying backwards against a gravestone, where he fell in an untidy heap. He clawed weakly at his face, mewling like an animal. Slow spasms passed through his body, and his legs moved alternately as if he thought he was upright and walking. He reminded me of a toy robot I’d had as a kid: a clockwork one, made in Hong Kong, that kept on striding along until it wound down, even if you kicked it over onto its side, even if it wasn’t going anywhere.

I got up and staggered towards the zombie, resting my weight against the gravestone so I could lean forward and look at him. If the damage was bad enough his ghost would let go its hold on his ruined flesh. But it might take a long time, and in the meantime he was trapped in there: blinded, terrified, his immortal spirit still shackled to his half-pulped brain and trying to make it work.

I didn’t have any choice. I took out my whistle, my hands shaking, and put it to my lips. Our little tussle among the tombstones had given me a reasonably strong sense of his essence, his ‘this-ness’: enough to get me started. The notes tumbled out into the darkening sky, feeble and tentative but enlivened by an unintentional vibrato. The dead man stared up at me with the sightless holes that had been his eyes: his mouth moved, making a string of incoherent sounds that rumbled beneath my playing as if he was trying to sing along. Then he stopped, and whatever spark was still animating him went out for good.

I went to put the whistle away, but then thought better of it. Holding it clutched in my hands, ready to play, I crossed the grass towards the vestry door.

It was hanging on one hinge: without Susan Book to unlock it for her, Juliet must have just kicked it open. I stepped inside, the bitter chill closing over me as though I’d stepped through a hanging curtain, invisible but tangible.

The church was dark. Of course it was: light had a tough time of it in here. I hadn’t brought a torch, but I wasn’t sure how much use it would have been in any case.

The heartbeat was clearly audible now: a slowed-down loop of sound, lapping insinuatingly against my ears like waves against a rock.

I went forward one step at a time: slowly, slowly, letting my feet slide across the floor rather than lifting them, so I didn’t go arse over tip in the dark. The frigid air was absolutely still: the only thing that told me when I’d reached the end of the transept and stepped out into the larger gulf of the nave was a change in the timbre of the echoes my footsteps raised. My arm brushed heavily against something, and there was a reverberating din as the something fell over and unseen objects rolled away across the floor. The table where the votive candles stood. I ignored it and kept on going.

Maybe a dozen steps further on, the tip of my foot touched something on the floor. I knelt down carefully, explored its outlines gingerly. It was a human body, completely unmoving.

I had to put the whistle away now, though I’d been clutching it like a diver clutches his lifeline. I got my hands underneath the body at shoulder and knee, and hefted it up. I suppose I’d expected Juliet to be heavy, because the impression she makes is so strong: because her physicality is denser and more vivid than anyone else’s by an order of magnitude. But then again, her body is made of something other than flesh. In the event, she seemed almost weightless.

As I lifted her, I felt the presence that was living in the stones of the church turn its massive attention towards me. There was no sound: no vibration of any kind in the still air. It acknowledged me without sound, and with a vast, vindictive amusement.

I staggered back the way I’d come, Juliet cradled in my arms. But I lost my way in the dark and walked into a wall. I had to follow the wall along, bumping my shoulder against it every few yards to keep my bearings, until I found the transept going off at right angles. I trod on one of the fallen candles and my foot twisted out from under me so that I almost fell. The building was throwing everything it had at me, trying to keep me inside while the cold worked on me. My teeth were starting to chatter, and my chest hurt as though I was breathing in icicles.

But I made it to the door and staggered back out into the gathering night. It had felt cold on the way in: now it was like stepping out on a sunny day and feeling the warm breeze on your cheek.

I still didn’t feel exactly safe, though: not this close to those spirit-soaked stones. I staggered across the narrow gravel path and laid Juliet down carefully in the deep grass between two graves. I stood there, leaning against one of the gravestones with my head down, breathing raggedly, until the chill left my bones.

Juliet looked different asleep. Still beautiful, but not dangerous. It was a kind of beauty that made me feel hollow and unmanned: as though it was a light shining on my own shabby inadequacy.

‘Shit,’ I muttered bleakly, to the night at large.

I’d finally put it all together, now that it was too late to be of any use. Why I felt like I had recognised that fugitive presence I had sensed the first time I came here – and then again when I’d met it in the poor possessed sods at the Whiteleaf mall. The only surprising thing was that I hadn’t nailed it down sooner when I was talking to Susan Book, because she was clearly as badly infected as anyone else who’d been in church last Saturday.

It was Asmodeus. This was why he’d suddenly let Rafi out from under, and this was where his other foot had come down.

Juliet had just picked a fight with one of the oldest and baddest bastards in Hell. And she’d lost.

Where to now?