Mike Carey - The Naming of the Beasts

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?’