Mike Carey - The Naming of the Beasts

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.