Mike Carey - Thicker Than Water

‘So who did you . . . ?’ I let the question linger, because I had no idea how to finish it.

‘It was a long time ago, Castor,’ Juliet said coldly. ‘I don’t remember.’ She hung up on me.

Nothing to do now but wait. And watch the show.

It took them close on two hours, but under the circumstances I think that was pretty impressive. Then again, the cross-London cop-demon-and-priest six-legged race is never going to become an Olympic event, so I don’t have anything to base a comparison on.

Now that I’d put my head back together again at least partially after the botched exorcism, I’d come to the realisation that I wasn’t completely helpless. Whistle in hand, I stood at the window and played — the first part of the exorcism ritual, the summoning: drawing the demon in towards me again and again, and then letting it off the hook at the last moment.

It was draining, and in the long run it wasn’t going to get me anywhere. It did tie up some of the monster’s psychic resources, though, so that the riot police mostly woke up from their trance, wiped the blood off their hands and retreated at a stumbling, undignified run. Only a few remained: presumably those in whom the demon had been able to embed itself most deeply and most quickly. Maybe they were guys who already had a tendency towards self-harm, or at any rate a fetish thing about wounds and pain.

Inside the flats of the estate, though, nothing moved. There was no general exodus: no chorus of screams as people woke up to the full horror of what they’d done during the night. The demon’s hold was unbreakable there because he had too much of a head start on me. Some of them were never going to wake up at all.

The sky off to the left, behind Guy’s Hospital, had started to lighten just a little but then stalled: the sun stayed stubbornly below the horizon and the zenith was as black as a lecher’s heart. Maybe sunrise had been cancelled.

Then a commotion below me told me that the riot police were back. Only a small contingent of them, coming in from the north in a packed huddle that was vaguely reminiscent of the ancient Roman ‘tortoise’ manoeuvre.

There was a stirring on the barricades and behind the windows. The demon gathered itself — a single entity looking out through a thousand eyes. I put the whistle to my lips and played again, but I was weak and spacey from lack of sleep and my fingers kept fumbling on the stops. I’m not sure if I made any difference at all.

Missiles started to sail down and crash onto the concrete around the tight cluster of Kevlar-clad cops. A couple of bottles and something bigger and heavier found their mark, hitting raised riot shields with thunderous reports that echoed through the eerie silence enveloping the rest of the estate. One of the bottles was a Molotov cocktail, and spilled flame spread across the topmost shields in neon traceries.

One of the riot cops who’d stayed behind when the rest had left appeared now from somewhere and sprinted across towards his colleagues. I thought — and they probably thought, too — that he was trying to rejoin them: but then his hand came up with something jagged clutched in it and he uttered a scream that was more like a torture victim’s dying agonies than like a battle cry. A rubber bullet felled him at about ten yards out from the tortoise: his legs shot out from under him and he went down hard. He lay twitching, trying to rise, his hands fluttering like dying birds.

More bricks and bottles came down, but the tortoise headed on, straight towards me — then passed out of my sight under the walkways directly beneath my window. I had to judge what was happening now from the percussive sounds that came up to my ears. More screams, and a couple more rounds discharged. The smashing and rending of something heavy being moved.

Then the tortoise retreated the way it had come, moving at the same sluggish pace as before because of the need to keep the shields locked together.

Like I said, my mind wasn’t working all that well by this point. It took me a while to realise what payload the tortoise had delivered. I went out of the bedroom, up the stairs, and eased my way cautiously through Kenny’s boarded-up door out into the hallway.

The stairwell below me was in heaving commotion. Presumably the cops had lost their hold on the third-floor walkways and the blood-crazed trancers had ventured north to reclaim the territory. Now they were wishing they hadn’t, because Juliet was passing through them in much the same way that a scythe passes through corn.

I didn’t go down to join them: moving as slowly and clumsily as I was now, I could only have got in the way and most likely ended up with a bottle broken over my head or a knife in my ribs. But I played the summoning again, drawing some of the demon’s attention my way in the hope that it might have to loosen its hold momentarily on its possessed servants.

The mismatched threesome came fully into view now, Coldwood coming first with Matt right behind him casting terrified glances to left and right; Juliet bringing up the rear and polishing off a last few attackers without haste or passion: she saved her passion for other things. One man stabbed her in the shoulder: she grasped his arm in an unbreakable grip, removed the blade from her own flesh and gave it back to him, hilt-first. He slumped against the wall, blood gouting from his broken nose. I was amazed — and grateful — that she hadn’t killed him. One of the hardest lessons for Ajulutsikael to learn, when she made the decision to live among men and so became Juliet, was to pull her punches.

‘In here,’ I shouted. Gary looked up and saw me. A few moments later, he and Matt were making their way up the last few steps. I led the way into Kenny’s flat and down to his gutted living room.

‘That was bloody blue murder,’ Gary complained. I ignored him and looked at Matt. He’d sustained a certain amount of damage in getting to this point — a bruised cheek, and a jagged cut on the back of one hand — but clearly he hadn’t been seriously wounded.

Yet.

‘Why am I here?’ he asked me, looking around in something like terror. ‘Why have you brought me here, Felix? Is this where—?’

‘This is where he lived,’ I said. ‘Yeah. Sit down, Matt. Pull up a broken-off bit of furniture and park your arse on it, because you’re not getting out of here until you’ve heard the truth.’

Juliet entered the room, rubbing her hands together.

‘It’s worse than I would have expected,’ she said.

I shrugged. ‘Well, you’d know,’ I said.

‘Get to the point,’ Coldwood suggested. He was leaning against the wall just next to the door, arms folded. His lip was thickened and his voice was slightly slurred, but he too seemed to have got away lightly. Juliet’s flawless white skin, by contrast, was criss-crossed with new wounds, none of which would last: she healed fast, and she would have deliberately put herself between the others and the worst of the violence.

‘The point,’ I said. ‘Right. Matt, you didn’t sit down yet.’

‘I don’t want to sit down,’ Matt said. ‘Not in this place.’ He looked around him with a mixture of fear and hatred.

‘Fine,’ I said. ‘Then stand. Okay, we’ll start with the obvious. You have a son. Or at least you did have one. He’s dead now. And there — right there — is our fucking problem.’

Matt made a strangled noise and staggered backwards, one step and then a second. Slowly he sank down onto his knees. Probably it sounds as though I was being unnecessarily brutal: but there was so much worse to come, there seemed no point in beating about the bush with the relatively straightforward stuff.

‘Oh God!’ Matt whimpered. ‘Oh God!’