Mike Carey - The Naming of the Beasts

‘I don’t know,’ she admitted. She seemed to pull herself together. ‘We should leave. I startled the Gader’el, and interrupted its feeding. If it comes back again, it will be bolder.’

‘Why should it come back?’ I asked.

Juliet smiled a bleak, humourless smile. ‘Because you’re scared of me, Castor. Why else?’

On the pavement outside she made to walk away, but I reached out and caught her shoulder. It was a symbolic thing: light and slender as she was, she was as strong as ever, and she could have broken my grip without trying. She half-turned, waiting for me to speak.

‘Go home,’ I said. ‘Promise me you’ll go home.’

Silence.

‘Juliet, you can’t hunt tonight. I can’t let you.’

‘You can’t stop me,’ she said with dead finality.

‘I know,’ I acknowledged. ‘So give me a break, and don’t make me die trying. Go home to Sue. Have a quiet night in. Remind yourself what you’ve got to lose.’

‘Fuck you, Castor.’

‘Again?’ I made my tone astonished and outraged. ‘Are you insatiable, woman?’

In spite of herself, she laughed. But the feeble joke was a challenge too, and the word ‘woman’ gave her the benefit of the doubt.

‘I’ll go home,’ she agreed. ‘But tomorrow . . .’

‘Tomorrow we’ll figure something out.’

She nodded without conviction. Then she turned her back and walked away from me down the Strand. A staggering cluster of drunks on the opposite side of the street shouted out some sort of sleazy invitation to her, and I tensed, ready to intervene if necessary. But Juliet didn’t even seem to see them. Head down and shoulders squared, she marched on into the hot, breathless night.

Back in Turnpike Lane, paranoia still sitting like a monkey on my back, I reconnoitred thoroughly before approaching Pen’s door. Asmodeus had promised to leave me until last, but I knew exactly how much his word was worth.

I didn’t see or sense any sign of the demon’s presence, or any clue that he’d been there while I was away. In another way though, I felt myself surrounded and crowded by him. What he was doing wasn’t random – I knew that much. Behind the casual malevolence there was something much more calculating and purposeful, and much more threatening.

I let myself in quietly. I heard voices from downstairs, Pen’s basement sanctum, which surprised me, but only until I heard the laugh track. She’d fallen asleep in front of a repeat of some ancient sitcom, snoring away on the sofa while Reg Varney and Michael Robbins traded accusations of sexual dysfunction without ever using the word ‘penis’. I sat down next to her and stared at the screen while the flaccid shenanigans played themselves out. In a way it helped me to think, if only because thinking distracted me from On the Buses .

There was a way through this maze. It just meant figuring out where Asmodeus was going so I could get there first. Of course, I also had to get myself a secret weapon to use when I got there, because a tin whistle wasn’t going to do the job. It hadn’t even been enough to beat the Gader’el, which Juliet had dismissed as an animal.

The trouble was that you couldn’t get close enough to the Gader’el to perform an exorcism. I had its pattern clear in my mind now, but I knew damn well that as soon as I started to play, it would be on me hard enough and fast enough to knock the tune right out of my head. Close enough to play meant close enough to be attacked.

Inspiration came out of nowhere. No, it came out of thinking about Trudie, and the way she’d bootstrapped her own MO to create the meta-map of Asmodeus’ movements. The trick was seeing through the metaphor to the thing itself: distinguishing how your power actually worked from the interface you’d developed for it. It could be done. It could be done without risk even.

That solved Jenna-Jane’s problem. Now what about mine?

‘Fix.’ Pen stirred on the sofa beside me, rubbing her eyes. ‘What time is it?’

I didn’t bother to check my watch. ‘Later than you think,’ I said. ‘Like always. How was your day?’

She blinked and shook her head, restoring some shape to the incendiary mop of her hair. ‘Wonderful,’ she said, her voice husky and slurred with sleep. ‘Like one of your days. Alcohol, self-hatred, more alcohol and daytime TV.’

‘I don’t watch that much TV,’ I pointed out. ‘What do you hate yourself for?’

‘Just the obvious.’ She sat up, still groggy but gradually coming awake. ‘I can’t do this, Fix. I can’t sit here and wait for you to sort it out. I’m going to start looking for Rafi again tomorrow.’

‘You won’t find Rafi;’ I reminded her, my voice hard, ‘you’ll find Asmodeus.’

‘I don’t care. This isn’t any way to live.’

She was right. We were under siege, and it was affecting both of us in our different ways. The sense of pressure – the feeling of being stalked – was throwing me off my stride, so that I just kept running from one thing to the next instead of stopping to think about where I was going. Worse, I was letting Jenna-Jane set the agenda, when I should have been using her as she was using me: bouncing off her thick, impervious hide in the direction I most needed to go.

That was going to change.

Right now I was going to get some sleep. And in the morning, which was only two and a half hours away . . .

In the morning I was taking back the initiative.

‘Felix! Welcome back. Come and give us the benefit of your expertise.’

Jenna-Jane’s voice was courtesy itself: no snide cracks about broken alarm clocks, no sarcastic sallies of the ‘So good of you to join us’ variety. Then again, Gil McClennan, at her elbow, radiated enough resentment and disapproval to make anything she felt like doing in that line redundant.

I’d knocked on J-J’s door, found the office empty, then followed the sound of voices to the map room. Everyone was there, sitting or standing at the edges of the room, around the circumference of the sprawling map-sheets: Jenna-Jane and Gil, obviously, Trudie, with Etheridge hovering at her shoulder like Tinkerbell to her Peter Pan, Samir Devani, looking like he might have gone to bed even later than me, and a man and two women I hadn’t seen before – presumably exorcists on loan from other work teams.

‘Sorry I’m late,’ I said insincerely. ‘Keep talking. I’ll get up to speed.’

There was an awkward silence. ‘Actually,’ Trudie said, after glancing briefly but curiously at the flat brown-paper-wrapped package I held under my left arm, ‘I think we’d better recap, because this is important. Gil, would you mind telling Castor what you found?’

McClennan gave a show of impatience, but Jenna-Jane made an open-handed gesture, giving him the floor. He couldn’t very well say no after that.

‘I started off by looking at the clusters,’ he said, pointing to the map. ‘The points with the densest concentration of lines. One right where you live, Castor, in Turnpike Lane. One over here in Wembley – Pax says that’s Juliet Salazar, who helped you break up Asmodeus’ game last time he tried to get free, so maybe he’s out to settle old scores there too. Another cluster down here in south London. Peckham Rye.’

‘The Ice-Maker’s,’ I confirmed. ‘That’s where he was until he escaped.’

‘Right. And then a few more in the centre of the city, here, here and here.’ He pointed to King’s Cross, Holborn, Waterloo. ‘Maybe these are just hubs – not places he’s visiting, but places he has to go through to get to where he’s going. You’d expect to find some stuff like that.’ Gil paused, staring across at me. ‘You with me so far?’