Mike Carey - Thicker Than Water

And she’d spent longer underground than she thought she had: almost a full year, in fact, which was why there was no change in the weather to warn her. When she got back to the Salisbury, it was to find Mark already dead. The shock and pain of it almost made her release her hold on life right then and there, but she held on by main force, determined to stay in the world long enough to see that Kenny got his come-uppance.

So while Kenny stalked Matt, she stalked Kenny. And when Kenny finally baited his sick, over-elaborate little trap, she was watching from a little way off. She saw Matt keep the rendezvous. She saw him walk away. She saw Kenny cut his own arms, his own face, squeezing out enough blood so that he could write Matt’s name on his windshield. He was crazed, she said, revelling in it. There was no doubt at all that the wound-demon was inside him by this time, influencing his thoughts and actions. It wasn’t responsible for Kenny’s hatred of Matt: that had always been there, for as long as he’d known that Matt was Mark’s father. But it was certainly the demon that made Kenny’s revenge take the shape it did.

Anita watched the parked car for more than an hour. When she was certain that Kenny had passed out from blood loss, she moved in and finished the job with Roman’s Swiss army penknife. It had just come to her, as she stared down at him, that she was never going to have a better chance: that her zombie body was too slow and uncoordinated for her to fight him when he was awake and alert. The temptation had grown in her, and suddenly she’d had the knife in her hand and she was working it backwards and forwards in Kenny’s neck. The wound-demon again, maybe, although God knows she had reason enough on her own account to want Kenny dead. ‘Cutting that bastard’s throat was the best thing I ever did,’ she said, through lips that were now a cyanotic blue. ‘I just wish — I’d done it back when we were all — kids. I wish–’

She shook her head, unable to put the waste and the wistfulness into words.

‘The penknife,’ Coldwood said, ever the consummate cop. ‘The one you used to finish Seddon off. Is there any chance you–’

‘It was in my jacket,’ Anita said. ‘The pocket of my jacket. And the jacket was covered in blood. I couldn’t bear the feel of it on my skin. I took it off and I — I threw it away. I don’t know where.’

‘I do,’ I said to Coldwood. ‘There’s a car park underneath that underpass. I looked over the edge when you first called me to the crime scene, and I saw a jacket there behind some wheelie bins. You probably can’t see it at all from the ground, so it may still be there.’

Coldwood went away to make another phone call, and Anita lapsed into silence. Then another thought occurred to her, and she cast her gaze around until she saw me.

‘Fix,’ she mumbled. ‘I’m sorry I hurt you. I knew — I knew by then what Mark had turned into, and I thought you’d come to send him away. I was so scared, when I first saw you — I wasn’t thinking straight. I wasn’t — myself.’ Her eyes rolled weakly as she saw the ironic sense of the words.

‘Nobody on the Salisbury was, by that time,’ I reminded her. ‘It’s okay, Anita. In a bizarre way you actually helped me. It was while I was in hospital that I saw Mark for the first time, and started fitting the pieces together.’

‘Nita,’ Matt said, his voice cracking, ‘I’m so sorry. I’m so sorry I left you. If you’d told me — if I’d known that you were pregnant–’

Anita stared at him, perplexed. ‘I knew you would have come,’ she murmured. ‘But — I didn’t want to make you come, Matty. Not like that. What would it have meant — if you married me because I blackmailed you? And if you gave up — everything else you wanted — to be with me? You would have — hated me.’

He shook his head in denial or protest, sobbing aloud now. Anita put a hand up to touch his face.

‘Don’t cry,’ she said. ‘I don’t want to see you cry. You ought to bless me. Now that you’ve heard my confession.’

Matt didn’t bless her. I think I understood why he couldn’t do that, even though he knew the words would have comforted her. To say a blessing would have been to turn back into a priest: it was too big a jump from where he was, and in a direction that he simply couldn’t take right then.

He kissed her instead. The lips were rotting, because this was a body two years dead, and they weren’t even hers in the first place. But then, this was a kiss that had been pending for a lot longer than two years: it probably didn’t matter as much as you’d think.

Tired of waiting for me to get the hint on my own, Juliet grabbed my lapels and hauled me away, off the walkway into the ruins of Weston Block. It’s coming to something when I have to take lessons in tact from a pit-spawned monster.

Although, it suddenly struck me, that was a phrase that needed to be scanned.

‘Juliet,’ I said tentatively.

‘Yes, Castor?’

I picked my words carefully. ‘I’ve always had — some fixed ideas about Hell. They seemed to make sense, in terms of the available evidence. It’s kind of a point on a moral compass. It’s where bad people go when they die, and the demons that live there have to be bad too, or they wouldn’t be there in the first place.’

Juliet stared at me, deadpan. ‘Yes. So?’

‘So — how much of that is bullshit?’

There was a silence during which we could hear Coldwood on the floor below us chewing out one of his subordinates. ‘Well, whichever corner is closest to the bloody underpass. Are you seeing wheelie bins? Well, right fucking there, then. Look behind them. I don’t care how much fucking mess there is–’

‘How many demons, Castor,’ Juliet asked me, in a tone of long-suffering patience, ‘have been summoned by how many necromancers and mages and scholars and hobbyists and enthusiastic imbeciles? Down the centuries, from the Middle Ages when the first grimoires were written, to the present day when the grimoires are almost irrelevant because you can raise a hell-hound with an incautious word? How many, would you say?’

I shrugged impatiently. ‘I don’t know. Hundreds? Thousands?’

‘Or tens of thousands. And not one of them has ever discussed these matters with the ones who summoned them.’

‘We don’t know that.’

‘Trust me,’ said Juliet. ‘It’s the truth. Not one of them. I told you a long time ago that there were certain things I wasn’t prepared to discuss with you. I told you this was one of them. It still is.’

‘What, because you’re afraid?’ I demanded, still hurting too much to be circumspect. ‘Because you think I’ll use the information against you in some way?’

‘Not you, perhaps. And not against me. But someone, sometime. Against my kind.’

‘Juliet, you’re working as a fucking exorcist. You’re already a class traitor, so what’s to be coy about?’

She took a sudden step towards me, and the look on her face was so dark that I raised my fists, as if I had a hope in Hell against her if she wanted to take me out. But all she did was grasp my chin in her hand and hold my face in place as she brought her own up close. Mostly that only happens when I’m asleep and dreaming.

‘Do you see a difference between the public execution of a criminal and an act of genocide?’ she asked me, speaking very softly but very distinctly.

‘I’m fort of oppoved to bofe,’ I mumbled, unable to part my jaws.

‘Whereas I’m perfectly happy with the first, but by and large prefer not to abet the second.’ She let go of me, but she was still standing close enough that her achingly beautiful scent filled the air between us. ‘Understand me, Castor. It occurred to me not to allow you — any of you — to walk away with what you’ve learned today. A few more deaths in the course of the riot wouldn’t have raised any eyebrows or merited any special investigation. But I’ve gone native. I know that. I can’t help thinking of you as a friend. Or to put it less sentimentally, having to murder you would make me unhappy.