Mike Carey - The Naming of the Beasts

She was twisting and writhing on the table. Tight leather restraints at neck and wrist and ankle held her in place, but from shoulder to coccyx her back rose and fell, filled out like a sail on winds of pure agony.

They were painting Asmodeus’ wards onto her body, but Jenna-Jane loves to push the envelope – to extend her researches into different modalities. They were incising the designs into her skin with scalpels too, and something like a Zeiss engine set up directly over the operating table was projecting a light show of overlaid pentagrams directly onto her bare flesh.

The white-coated figures paused in their work and looked up as we entered, startled and affronted, but the projected images still slid over Juliet’s skin, merging and dividing, and the high, inhuman screaming went on. One of them – not Jenna-Jane – came forward to block our path, all bluster and outrage. He was a little man, about forty or so, with the craggy authority of a senior consultant.

‘This is a restricted area!’ he stormed. ‘You have no right to be here!’

‘Are you right-handed or left-handed?’ I asked him.

‘What?’ he blinked. ‘What do you—’

Odds favoured the right. I remembered reading somewhere that a survey in America didn’t find a single southpaw surgeon. I hit his right elbow with the sidewinder, using a figure-of-eight manoeuvre that Gary Coldwood had shown me once, the one that riot cops use when they want to do some real damage. There was an audible crack as the whip-thin wood connected. The little man gave a hoarse, choking cry. He staggered and fell, folding up around his now-useless arm.

‘Anyone else here interested in practising medicine one-handed? ’ I asked politely.

The white coats retreated from the operating table and from their grisly work in a scared gaggle, like snow geese. All but one: Jenna-Jane pulled down her surgical mask, an affectation I hadn’t even noticed until now, and skirted the table to stand right in front of me.

‘Felix,’ she said, more in sorrow than in anger. ‘And Gilbert too. You’ve both gone mad. The succubus has no rights in law; the man you’ve just assaulted most definitely does. You’ll both go to prison for this.’

‘I’m not looking that far ahead, Professor,’ McClennan said glumly. ‘I don’t think either of us is. You can take this as my letter of resignation, by the way.’

‘One of you untie those restraints,’ I called over Jenna-Jane’s shoulder to the gaggle. ‘Now.’

‘The police!’ The man I’d crippled moaned from the floor. ‘Somebody call the police!’

Jenna-Jane shook her head in bewilderment. ‘How can you even imagine you’re going to get away with this?’ she asked, in the same grieving tone. ‘You’re committing professional suicide. There’ll be no coming back, I promise you that.’

‘Swap?’ I said to Gil. I held out the sidewinder. He took it and gave me the fire axe.

‘Untie her,’ I said again to the room at large, ‘and turn that fucking projector off, or people are going to start losing large body parts. If you think I’m kidding, feel free to call my bluff.’

One of the geese hastily bent and flicked a switch low down on the wall. The luminous pentagrams sliding over Juliet’s body faded to nothing over the space of about three seconds. She slumped against the table, her screams dying away to shuddering, panting breaths. Two more geese broke away from their comrades and started to loosen the leather straps that held Juliet down, shooting me wide-eyed looks from time to time as if they were afraid they hadn’t shown willing enough.

Jenna-Jane tried again. ‘Felix, this is the most significant breakthrough we’ve had in ten years of dealing with her kind. The implications are bigger than you can comprehend. ’

‘Don’t worry, J-J,’ I assured her. ‘I think I’ve got the implications pretty much taped.’

Jenna-Jane’s eyes narrowed, and she breathed out heavily through her nose. She made to walk past me, out into the corridor, and I held out my free hand to push her back. She touched my hand with her own, and a jolt of white lightning went through me. Suddenly I was down on the floor of the room, my elbows and knees stinging from where they’d hit the tiles, my head full of ringing after-tones as though somebody had decked me with a glockenspiel.

Jenna-Jane stood over me. The thing in her hand looked like a Stanley knife, black steel overlaid with yellow warning strips. She had it aimed squarely at Gil McClennan’s chest. ‘Please drop the baton, Gilbert,’ she said, ‘and then go and sit next to Felix on the floor. This is an M18 taser. It shoots a shock-charge of fifty thousand volts, and I can assure you that it’s a great deal more pleasant to give than to receive.’

Gil weighed up his chances, which at that range were pretty much non-existent. He let the sidewinder drop to the floor, where it bounced once and then rolled in a half-circle around the fulcrum of its own weighted end, coming to rest a good six or seven feet out of my reach.

Gil sat down.

‘Now, if somebody would be good enough to call a security team,’ Jenna-Jane said in her most schoolmarmish voice, ‘perhaps we can proceed.’

Perhaps she expected a docile chorus of ‘Yes, Professor Mulbridge’ from the gaggle. Instead, the sound that met her pious request was a strangled wail from the white-coated woman who’d been untying Juliet’s wrists. My gaze flicked in that direction, just as everyone else’s did.

Juliet was on her feet. Admittedly she was leaning against the table for support, but her feet were planted firmly on the tiles. Vivid rivulets of blood marked her perfect, pigmentless skin in meandering lines, as though a butcher had marked her up for filleting. She had her hand on the throat of the lady doctor, her arm fully extended so that the other woman had to lean back from the waist. They were staring at each other, the lady doctor in abject terror, Juliet with the pained wonder of someone who’s just scratched their pubes and come up with something small and wriggling.

‘No,’ she said very distinctly. ‘Not you. Where? Where is she?’

Jenna-Jane swung the taser round, but she didn’t have a clear line of fire. The moment that she hesitated was long enough for Gil to kick her legs out from under her.

There was a scramble for the taser. The doctor with the broken arm won it, but I’d gone for the fire axe. I took a wild swipe and knocked the weapon out of his hand with the flat of the axe blade, making him yelp in anguish. The way I was feeling right then, he was lucky he didn’t get the sharp end.

As I lurched to my feet, the echoing tramp of booted feet in the corridor outside announced some late arrivals to the party. The security guards we’d passed among the cell blocks – or maybe a different group altogether – came charging through the door, only to come to a dead halt when they found that I had the axe blade pressed to Jenna-Jane’s throat. I was still shaking violently from the taser zap, and it was all I could do to hold it steady, but I did my best to look like a man you wouldn’t want to cross.

‘Better think about this,’ I advised the rent-a-cops, my voice a little more tremulous than I would have liked. ‘If she dies, who’s going to give you your Christmas bonus?’

‘His name is Castor,’ Jenna-Jane said quickly. ‘Felix Castor. The other man on the floor there is Gilbert McClennan. Radio to someone outside the building and give out those names.’

‘You don’t want to do this, son,’ one of the goons said, holding out his hand for the axe. Son? He was probably younger than me.

‘Actually, Dad,’ I told him, ‘it would make my entire year. I’m aching for a little uncomplicated good news, you know?’