Mike Carey - The Naming of the Beasts

‘And how long do you think she’ll last after that?’

Juliet half-turned to stare at me over her shoulder: a silent query.

‘Come on,’ I said irritably. ‘You kissed me once, two years ago, and I still wake up sweating. She’s shared your bed for sixteen months. If you make her go cold turkey, Juliet, she’ll crash and burn faster than the fucking Hindenburg .’

She scowled. ‘It’s possible,’ she agreed. ‘Or else she might survive, as you did. I’m not reponsible for every man or woman who sniffs my crotch, Castor.’

She seemed to be waiting for me to disagree with her, but I thought there was a certain mileage to be got out of just letting the words hang in the air. It was kind of a resonant image, after all.

‘I didn’t mean that,’ Juliet said, after a strained pause. ‘I don’t equate her with you.’

‘Thanks.’

‘Or with any of those I hunted. What we have is different from that. It’s . . .’ She seemed to grope for words, but she was trying to explain something that was inherently inexplicable – not just for her but for anyone who ever went looking for a quick shag and got more than they bargained for. ‘It’s not a hunt,’ she finished testily.

‘Tell her you’re sorry,’ I suggested.

‘Mind your own business,’ she snapped back.

She headed for the door. I was going to call her back and ask her about Tlallik, or Tlullik, but I chickened out. Juliet may be refreshingly open about sexual matters, but when it comes to her own species she closes up again real fast. Get a finger caught in that door and you could easily lose it, she’d warned me, very explicitly, a very short while ago.

I sat down heavily. Now that she was gone, there was no need for me to keep up appearances.

‘So how did that go?’ Nicky asked. I looked up to see him standing over me. Incongruously, he had a shotgun in his hands.

‘Could have gone better,’ I admitted, hearing a slight tremor in my voice and hoping he didn’t hear it too.

‘I did warn you she was pissed off.’

‘Yeah. You did. Nicky, what is that thing you’re holding?’

‘A homage.’

‘To . . . ?’

‘Someone else’s good idea. You told me the first time Juliet tried to love you to death, your landlady shot her with a air gun filled with rosary beads. I liked that a lot. And we live in a wicked world, so I keep this baby loaded day and night. Twelve ounces in each barrel.’

I shook my head to try to clear it. ‘Jesus! Have you got a licence?’

‘I’m a dead man, Castor. The law doesn’t apply to dead men. Legally, this is a gun without an owner.’

I tried to stand, managed it with only one slight stumble. Nicky didn’t put out a hand to steady me, but I didn’t expect him to. Like I said, he’s very chary of his own flesh, and even more so of his bones. He doesn’t have any way of healing from a wound or an injury any more.

‘Thanks for coming to my rescue, masked man,’ I said, tilting the shotgun’s barrels a little away from me so I didn’t have to look them in the eye.

‘Hey, for Lester Young I’ll go out on a limb. You’re looking a little sick, Castor. Whatever she did to you, she stuck it in deep. You should go home and sleep it off.’

I nodded, knowing that I wouldn’t. ‘Get onto that ward, Nicky,’ I said. ‘I want to know what Tlallik is, and what it does.’

‘I’ll call you,’ Nicky said. He looked up at the screen, where Gabriel Byrne was leading his dysfunctional team to its destruction, trying to steal illusory riches for an illusory employer, conspiracy meeting meta-conspiracy. ‘I guess she’s only reverting to type,’ he mused. ‘Demons are like wolverines: they don’t domesticate all that easily. But if she goes rogue, Castor . . .’

He didn’t have to finish the sentence, and I didn’t offer to finish it for him. My friends were already an endangered species, and going up against Juliet meant I’d have one fewer, win or lose. That was taking the optimistic view, of course, and assuming I survived.

I stayed for the rest of Nicky’s triple bill. It felt like watching home movies.

It must have been getting on for midnight when I left the Gaumont and headed for the Tube. Nicky had broken open a bottle of some Lebanese wine which he swore was as good as a French premier cru, and I’d accounted for most of it, but I felt depressingly sober as I hopped the last train back into London so I could slingshot back out to Turnpike Lane.

The Tube is a good place for me to think, usually. Very few people die on trains, and when you’re moving fast you don’t pick up emotional resonances from the landscape around you. Radio Death wasn’t broadcasting. I was alone with my thoughts. The trouble was, my thoughts were a sea of turbulent shit.

Asmodeus was still out there, and he was hunting. Not just me, but everyone who’d ever meant anything to Rafi at any point in his life. He’d decided to celebrate his independence with a murder spree, starting (I had to hope it was starting) with Ginny Parris, the woman who’d played midwife when he was born again into Rafi’s flesh, and with me, the one who’d welded him in good and tight once he was there.

In a way, it could work in my favour. If I had a plan, I could use myself as bait: bring the demon in close and then spring some kind of trap. But I didn’t have a plan and I had no idea what form that trap might take.

It was maddening. There was a tune out there somewhere that would do the job, I knew that. I’d even heard it once, when Asmodeus himself played it for me in Imelda’s parlour on the night she died. But then he’d done a number on me before I had a chance to get my whistle to my mouth. That space in my memory no longer existed. When I replayed the events of that night, there was just a hole where the tune ought to be, a wound in my mind that wouldn’t heal.

But even if I found the tune, or reconstructed it, how in hell would I ever get to use it? If I summoned Asmodeus or got in close enough for him to be bound by the music, he’d tear me into sticky confetti before I got to the end of the first bar. Maybe with Juliet to run interference for me I’d have a fighting chance, but somehow this didn’t seem like a good time to ask her.

That left Jenna-Jane’s offer. My mind did a handbrake turn and shot off down a side street into places no less dark.

What was eating Juliet? Over the past couple of years she’d perfected her ‘nobody here but us human beings’ act to the point where you could almost forget what she was and mistake her for just another unfeasibly beautiful woman whose very existence impugned your manhood and left you feeling hollow and worthless. But now she was as bad as when she first came up on the express elevator from Hell, maybe worse. She’d sworn never to take another soul, but tonight I’d felt about three heartbeats away from oblivion. And those eyes . . . This wasn’t the Juliet I knew. And I didn’t like the glow-in-the-dark model one bit.

I was meant to be heading home, that was what I was telling myself. But somehow, without ever making an actual decision, I found myself taking the Northern Line and getting out at Archway. Whittington’s Hospital is a short walk back up Highgate Hill, its new frontage looking cool and suave in white and blue.

Visiting hours must have wrapped up long ago, but nobody challenged me as I walked in off the street. Running the gauntlet of the restless dead for the second time in one day, I made my way to the coma ward. Once there though, I was faced with a locked door. Access to the ward was determined by a buzzer and intercom system – or in my case by waiting until an inattentive nurse came out and walked past me, then catching the door again before it swung closed.